finality to his voice that devastated me. He had already made up mind, and there would be nothing that I could say or do to change his mind. “Do they all agree with you? They can’t! Ezra-”
“They support my decision,” Peter cut me off decisively. “All of them are very fond of you, but it can’t work. And since you are ‘mine,’ it’s up to me what we do with you.”
“‘What you do with me?’” I sobbed. “This is my life! Why do you get to decide what is done with me?”
“Your life is my life. That’s how this works.” Swallowing hard, he looked sad but resolute.
“Than isn’t your life mine?” I clenched my fists, trying desperately to find some ground to stand on.
“That’s not how this works,” Peter shook his head. “You are human. You have no standing over us.”
“So you’re all just …”
The room felt like it was spinning, and I rested my hand on the bed to keep from collapsing. He was going to take everything from me. The insistent way my body begged for him, the way my heart longed for Jack, the comfort I gained from Mae and Ezra, and the glorious future I had just mapped out for myself. With his simple, cold words, he was ripping everything away from me.
The ground felt like it was giving way from underneath me, and I had to swallow hard to keep from vomiting.
“Alice, we never meant to hurt you.” He sounded sad, but I could barely see him through my own tears.
Part of me wanted to run through house searching for Jack. I knew he would fight for me, make them change their minds, but I felt too weak. More than that, if Peter didn’t want me, it didn’t even seem worth fighting for.
“You’re killing me,” I murmured.
Then it dawned on me. It did feel like he was literally killing me. Every part of me, physical and otherwise, was writhing in pain. But I knew that inside him there was a hunger that really wanted to kill me. I saw how fierce it had been in Jack’s eyes, and I knew it had to be stronger for Peter.
“Peter, why don’t you just bite me?” I asked breathlessly.
“No,” Peter responded hoarsely. “That’s a horrible idea.”
“No, Peter! Listen!” I walked over to him, willing my heart to beat harder and faster, so the sound would overwhelm him. “I know you want to! You made me leave you once because of how badly you wanted to! You can just bite me, and this will all be over with. I’ll be out of your lives forever, and I won’t even care. I want you to. And what do I even matter to you? I’m just another stupid weak human, and you’ve killed them before.”
“I’m not going to kill you.” He tried to sound disgusted, but the hunger was at the back of his throat. When he looked away from me, I grabbed his arm, and forced him to look down at me.
“Please,” I pleaded.
He was still resisting the idea, so I remembered what had sent Jack over the edge. I bit my lip, hard, and before I could even tell it was bleeding, his eyes had widened. For him, my scent and taste were irresistible.
“You really want this?” Peter murmured huskily. His eyes looked conflicted, both sad and incredibly ravenous. “Do you even understand what you’re asking?”
“I know that I can’t live the rest of my life without you.”
If my mind hadn’t been turned into an absolute mess thanks to it’s intoxication over Peter, I might have been able to come up with a better way for handling things. Even if my body hadn’t been insisting that I was incapable of surviving without Peter, it would still have been devastating. I truly planned on spending forever with Jack, and it did seem unbearable to just forget it all. To go to school, to college, to go about my tedious little life and spend every day getting older, sicker, dying, and trying to forget them. I couldn’t do it, and I didn’t even want to try. It hurt far too much.
“Forgive me,” Peter whispered.
Before I could say anything more, I felt his lips pressed hotly on my neck, and then this sharp pain shot into me, like the prick of a needle. That was very quickly replaced by this wonderful, warm pleasure spreading through me. It felt so intensely marvelous that I couldn’t even imagine ever having felt pain. My body trembled and went limp in his arms, and I heard myself moaning. It was sheer ecstasy. Pleasure rippled through me, and I wanted this moment to last forever.
Faintly, I was becoming aware of how weak I felt. At first, it had just been because the pleasure had struck me so forcefully, but even though it still felt amazing, I could feel my life draining away. Some part of me was aware that I was dying, but there was nothing frightening or bad about it. I felt oddly at peace and blissful, and I let myself succumb to the drowsy, perfection that flooded over me.
My thoughts were dissolving. There were incoherent images of the sun shining over the tops of the building, and Peter’s green eyes, and Jack’s laughter. I thought of my brother, and I hoped he understood. Then there was nothing except the way I felt, buried underneath a warm blanket. My heart had slowed considerably, and my lungs felt empty.
Suddenly, there was a sharp pain of separation, and an intense chill. My mind felt strangely alert. Still incredibly weak, I didn’t even have the strength to open my eyelids, but I could hear the commotion going on around me. Peter wasn’t holding me anymore, but I couldn’t tell where I was. I just knew that his strong arms weren’t around me and his mouth wasn’t pressed to my neck. He had stopped too soon, and I was still alive.
There were banging noises and the sounds of rustling feet. Voices were shouting, and it took a minute for me to able to focus in on them clearly. Jack was shouting at Peter, calling him all sorts of hateful names, and Peter was saying very little in his own defense. Then Ezra’s voice boomed in, and the movement stopped. He had broken up the fight.
“He tried to kill her!” Jack wailed, and I could hear the terrified desperation in his voice.
“But she’s not dead,” Ezra told him soothingly. I felt strong hands touching my face, feeling my pulse and inspecting the damage. I wanted to yell at them, to tell them to leave me here to die, but I barely even had the strength to breathe, let alone speak. “She’s lost a lot of blood.”
“She wanted me to do it,” Peter muttered, and this was followed by a loud smacking sound.
“Jack! Peter!” Ezra roared. “If you want to save her life, then you have to listen to me!”
“I don’t know if I want to save her life,” Peter told them quietly, and Ezra let go of my face so he could rush over to separate the fight. I could hear their bodies slamming against each other, and Jack was growling viciously.
“Peter, you should step out,” Ezra commanded. “And tell Mae that we need type AB positive. We should have some in the cooler downstairs.”
“She’s going to be alright?” Jack whimpered.
“Peter’s right….” I managed breathlessly.
Jack crouched beside me, and I could feel how completely devastated and powerless he felt. He started saying something to me but forcing myself to speak had used up at the last of my energy. Everything around me fell black and silent.
Slowly and somewhat reluctantly, I felt myself rising to the surface. I blinked several times, letting my eyes adjust to the dim light of the bedroom. In truth, I had rather expected to open my eyes and find myself in purgatory.
Instead, I was in the room in the turret, the bedroom that had been mine. There was this weird weakness over me, like I was laying underneath a weighted blanket, and there were still some residuals of the intense pleasure I had experienced when Peter had been feeding on me. I also felt relieved and apprehensive, but I couldn’t understand why. They seemed out of place with everything that had happened, but then I stirred a little and found the source of the emotions.
“Hey,” Jack whispered. He had been sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, but when he saw me waking up, he came over and climbed on the bed next to me. “How are you feeling?”
“Really, really tired,” I mumbled groggily, and when he smiled, I saw there were tears in his eyes. He pushed a strand of hair out of my eyes, and my heart ached at the thought of leaving him. After he brushed the hair from my eyes, his fingers traced down the side of my face, past my jaw line, and then lingering on the residuals of the bite Peter had left on my throat. His expression hardened painfully, so I swallowed and looked away.
“Am I gonna have to go?” I asked.
“You can stay as long as you want.” He moved his hand from my neck, resting it on the covers over my stomach.
“Peter said that I wouldn’t be allowed to see any of you anymore,” I told him thickly. A deep pain welled in my chest at the thought of it, and even without Peter here fogging up mind, suicide didn’t seem like that bad of an
