Bring Me to Life（Time Walkers 1）(13)
“I don’t know.” She was honest. “After I pulsed the only thing I saw was you lying on the ground. I tried to wake you up, but I couldn’t.” She was heading for a major breakdown, and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stop it. Everything came out between ragged sobs. “There were piles of ash everywhere. You were just—” She couldn’t say the word. “I don’t know how I called my uncle. Then the place was crawling with police and questions. I told them there were vampires. I spent three years in and out of the psychiatric ward until I realized if I just agreed with the police’s assessment of what happened, they’d stop saying I was crazy.”
“I didn’t trust you,” he said in an even tone.
Her heart was going to explode. It was beating so fast, and she couldn’t catch her breath. “You did. I killed you. Please, let that be true.”
His burnt sienna eyes went sad as he shook his head. “No. It wasn’t the pulse. You still had a body to bury.”
She couldn’t decide which was worse. Thinking all this time that she’d killed him or finding out that he’d hated her for all this time because he hadn’t trusted her. Then she flew at him, ready to do as much damage as she could.
*
Vincent let her pound on his chest for a moment before he caught her wrists and pinned her down to the bed. This was killing him. He could take the blame for his part in her torment, but he wouldn’t take it all. He’d find a way to help her out the other side of this, and he’d endure whatever punishment she deemed he deserved for his distrust. It wouldn’t lessen the torture he was going to inflict on the vampire responsible, and he knew it had to be Draven. The attack had purpose. They’d lived in a small town that hadn’t had a vampire problem before that night or after.
Bryna struggled to make him let her go. “You fucking jerk! Let me go! Let me go!” Her voice cracked, and she bucked up before she bit him.
Vincent let her go and moved out of the way as she came up swinging. She kneeled in the middle of the bed shaking with rage. Her face was flushed and scary as she looked at him just before she collapsed in a fit of hysterical sobs.
He hesitated for moment, not sure he’d be welcomed before he climbed up on the bed next to her and pulled her into his arms. Her fist thumped against his chest before she curled in against him and sobbed with angry bitterness.
*
Bryna had never cried so hard in her life. She wasn’t sure when she’d actually stopped sobbing and just lay stretched out across Vincent’s lap on the middle of the motel bed. She hadn’t killed him after all. The pulse had probably saved her wretched life, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that either.
She wanted to hate Vincent for not trusting her, she really did, but she couldn’t. If she’d come across him hanging all over another girl and giggly with a beer can in his hands she’d have probably come to the same conclusion he had. Not only that, but he’d come. No matter what he thought about what she’d been doing, he’d fought to the death to get her out of there.
Was she angry with him?
Hell yes!
Was she going to torture him for it?
She shifted on his lap and looked up at his horribly scarred face. His hand still stroked down her hair, and she could see the self-loathing misery in him. She knew it well. It had consumed her life for the last ten years.
No.
She wasn’t going to torture him. They had a week together before he was gone again, and this time she didn’t think she’d get another chance to make things right with him. They’d loved each other deeply, and she couldn’t let it go to waste. She had a lifetime to make up for, and Vincent had given his life for her.
She shifted again and moved off him and to the other side of the bed.
His hand paused in mid stroke before it dropped to his side. His usual liquid voice was gravelly. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t,” she whispered. “We only have a week. I don’t want to make any more mistakes to regret.”
Vincent studied her face before he slowly nodded. “We have a vampire to slay.”
Her face crumpled, but when he reached for her, she jerked back. “I’m…” She stopped herself from apologizing. “I’ll be okay.”
“Will you?” he demanded.
She scooted closer and then hesitantly reached up and traced her index finger along the line on his scarred face. “I have to be. This really great guy gave up his life for me even though he thought I betrayed him. It would be kind of shitty if I screwed up my life after that, don’t you think?”
“Don’t force yourself to accept this. You were scarred just as deeply.” The muscles under his eye twitched. “And I was bastard enough to add to it.”
She winced. “Um, yeah, about that…don’t let it eat you. I didn’t know you—” She didn’t finish saying he hadn’t trusted her. Very softly she said, “I didn’t kill you. That’s what has to matter, right?”
*
A flood of emotion he realized had never really left him rushed to the surface, but he wasn’t sure he had the right to feel it anymore. She’d loved him and believed in him past the end. He’d given her distrust in return. Then he realized what he felt didn’t matter anyway. They could work everything out until they were back to the point right before she’d left him that afternoon, and it still wouldn’t matter. He was dead. She wasn’t. He’d go back to what he was before he’d been sent here. She’d…move on. His face twisted, and he got up from the bed and stalked across the room.
“It does matter, sunshine, more than you can ever know.” He said the words for her benefit alone. It wouldn’t make his existence better. It made it worse. She’d finally get over him and move on with her life. She’d find someone else to love her, someone better, someone who deserved her faith and dedication. She’d probably have a kid or two. He was no more. He’d take what he’d done with her love into Hell with him.
“Vincent?”
He allowed the sound of her voice to soothe him in ways nothing else could before, or since. He turned to look at her.
Her eyes were wide. “Why are you angry?”
He shook his head and willed the anger back as best he could. He forced the sides of his mouth up. “I’m not. How can I be angry when I know the truth?”
She had a lost expression on her face, almost hopeless. “Because we can’t fix this.”
He was back across the room and next to her in a heartbeat. He sat down next to her and grabbed onto her chin so she had to look at him. “You’re going to survive this. I’ll find a way to kill the vampire, and then you’re going to move on with your life. You will find happiness again.”
Her face twisted and she jerked out of his grip. “You have no right to tell me what to do with my life. You’re dead.”
He clenched his teeth. “Yeah, I got that memo, but there is no reason for you to continue on this destructive path.”
“Isn’t there?” she demanded as she stalked along the side of the bed. “From where I’m standing it’s the exact thing I need to be doing. After everything I’ve done I sure as hell won’t find those pearly gates, but I can kill demons. I don’t think your boss is going to throw that away.”
He stared at her in horror and said the first stupid thing that popped into his mouth. “I believed the worst in you.”
“I wasn’t strong enough to get past being enthralled for you,” she countered.
“Goddamn it, Bryna! The objective here is to keep you alive,” he yelled.
She cringed back. Then her back snapped straight. “What’s the point? Without you my life goes to shit.”
“The point is that you’ll be alive!” He dragged a hand through his dark hair.
She knotted her hands into fists. “To what? Whore myself for some grand cause or another?”
Vincent hated the stark reality moments more than he hated white walls with gold trim. “You’re not a whore.”
Her brow shot up. “You’re the one who called it last night.”
He’d take a sucker punch gladly before he had to deal with the truths of her life. And the really screwed-up part was he was feeling guilty because he knew beyond anything her life would have been so much better if he’d lived. “Bryna, don’t, please. I was being a bastard, and I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it.”
“But you did,” she said softly. “And apologizing doesn’t change the things I’ve done or the person I’ve become. I’m sorry.”
No! He wasn’t going to accept this. There had to be a way to get his Bryna back. There just had to be. This couldn’t be where it ended for her, not when she’d been the one to hold on. He was beginning to understand what Felix wanted. There was no Earth Ending Game. Whatever was going to happen with Bryna’s death, the apocalypse wouldn’t be for another few years in her timeline. Felix had picked the point in her life where she was either do or die, and apparently, not even three of the very best had been able to keep her from dying.
He laughed, a low manic sound. Felix was expecting a miracle of love. That somehow, he’d be able to see her again, pull his head out of his ass—which he had—and find some way to give Bryna back her will to live. There was one small problem with this theory. Vincent knew if the situation were reversed, he’d have slit his own throat in an attempt to be with Bryna forever.