Bring Me to Life（Time Walkers 1）(17)
They all became very interested in the ceiling before, one by one, their eyes fell on Bryna. Her eyes went huge, and she leaned back on the bed, nearly causing herself to fall between the gap between the wall and bed. She stabilized and resituated herself before glaring at them. “Wait a second. Hell no! You don’t expect me to kill him, do you?” Pickles-and-peanut-butter not good. This man worried Vincent. She was like a tiny little nothing next to him, and he had dead guy powers she didn’t have. “No way.”
Gregori cleared his throat. “You’ve been the only one able to get a pulse to kill him in any reality.” He gave her a charming grin. “Thanks for that. I think my brothers would have missed me if you hadn’t.”
“Why can’t we go back to that reality, then?” she demanded.
“Because it also sent you to Oblivion with him.”
That didn’t sound at all good. “Oblivion? What’s that?”
Caleb pulled at his scruffy chin and gave an apologetic look. “It’s our version of death. Everything about you stops existing. It’s worse than Hell, or so I’ve been told. It sounds kind of peaceful to me.”
Gregori promptly hit him in the back of the head. “Don’t tell her that.”
Caleb shrugged. “Careful, you might be proving my point.”
Bryna ignored them. She was busy turning over this Oblivion information in her head. She’d used the term before herself, but she hadn’t quite meant exactly what Caleb described. She’d always thought Oblivion was just like sending a being to Hell. And here she naively thought nothing was able to make Vincent any deader than he was. “And this Draven has the ability to pulse? That’s what sends something to Oblivion?”
“Yeah,” Vincent said.
It wasn’t every day she found out she had a more spectacular death than Vincent’s, even if she didn’t remember it. “Then how am I still alive?”
Vincent sat down next to her and looked at the window between Derrick and Caleb. “We call it time walking. We can move backward and forward in time at will, to where we’re needed.”
She made a face at him. “So then history isn’t static? It’s always changing?”
“Kind of,” he said. “Beings who can pulse can also time walk. The other side time walks into the past to change something to be in their favor, and we go after them to change it back to ours. You were never supposed to die. Your death causes a ripple effect that will lead to the end of the world.”
“Just add a little more pressure,” she snapped at him. She didn’t want to hear any of this. It was making her head hurt. For a heartbeat she wondered why Vincent hadn’t gone back and saved himself, but then, why would he if he hadn’t believed there was any reason to go back. Then she pinned Vincent down with a look. “Then go back and save us. If you can walk to anywhere you want to go in time, save us!”
He looked down at the blankets on the bed. “I can’t. If I change what I am, then every demon, every vampire, every everything I’ve ever stopped and killed would come back to cause havoc.”
“But—” She stopped herself. It was selfish to demand he do it when there was the whole existence of the world to worry about. “Then we kill Draven, and I—” Her eyes closed as she willed back what seemed to be a constant flow of tears. “I figure out my life.”
“Bryna,” Vincent started.
“Don’t.” She gave him a wobbly smile. “We get what no one else does, remember? We just have to make that be enough.”
*
Vincent wasn’t going to accept that as the answer. He was missing something. There was a piece of information he didn’t have. Once he found it, he knew he’d be able to give Bryna everything she ever needed. He pulled her into him and ignored the other men in the room. They didn’t and couldn’t understand what he was going through. They’d died before they had a chance to be touched by love. It changed a man in ways he couldn’t begin to describe. Now that he had her in his arms again, he couldn’t see how it was right in any reality for her to not be with him. He’d always felt they were stronger together, and now, it had to be true. If her pulse was able to send Draven into Oblivion, then the key had to lie somewhere in that dynamic. He just needed to figure out the missing part.
He rubbed his hand down her back and tilted her face up to meet his. “We’ll figure this out, Bryna, I promise. I’ll do what I have to do to save you.”
She leaned into him. “I know you will, just don’t get sent to Oblivion. I think I could live knowing you’re a universal hero. Things could get bad if you didn’t exist anymore because of me.”
She did love to make his chest ache. “Hey, not even death kept me away from you.”
She pulled back and snorted at him. “It took you what? Two hundred years to get back to me? Vincent, I don’t have that kind of time to figure things out.”
He poked out his lip in a mock pout. “If it makes you feel any better, Felix hasn’t ever let anyone else go back to save their girlfriend.”
“No. It doesn’t. I don’t know this Felix person, and I really don’t think I like him. If I’ve gone to Oblivion three times, why the hell didn’t he just make me what you are? You can pulse, right?”
“Yeah, but life changes the mechanics of it.”
“How?”
He cringed and look to Derrick for help, but he only shrugged. He’d always been told that, but he’d never thought to ask the how of it. That part didn’t concern him.
“You don’t know?” Her hands fisted in his shirt, and she pulled herself up to eye level with him. “Vincent! This is probably very important and probably the reason I die when I try to kill Draven.” She stopped yelling. Her face scrunched up before she let out a dramatic sigh. “I think I want to go visit my old friends in the psych unit.”
“What?”
She overexaggerated the nodding of her head. “Yeah, this is fucking nuts.” She muttered an apology for swearing and continued, “Even for me. You’re saying a pulse affects the living, the dead, and the undead differently, but you never bothered to ask why?”
“I’m really effective against the undead, thank you.” He puffed out his chest. “Why would I ask questions that don’t concern me?”
“Maybe because what I have is different than what you have?”
His brow furrowed. “I didn’t know you could pulse until Felix told me two days ago.”
“Are you trying to get hurt?” she snarled at him. “This kind of information would be helpful.”
He did his best good-guy grin. “That’s why I brought my friends along to help. I figured one of them might know.”
Bryna swung her head around and looked at them with an arched brow. “Well?”
The ceiling was suddenly interesting again, and she found herself looking up to see if maybe someone was smart enough to write the answer up there. Wait! “How did you contact them?”
He pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to her. “I write on that and my message gets to where it needs to go.”
See? This was why he needed a woman in his death. If that scrap of crumpled, dirty paper was his life line to everything, why the hell didn’t he take care of it? She took it out of his hand and very carefully uncrumpled it.
There were flashing orange letters on it. “I think you forgot to pick up your messages,” she said dryly and read it.
History is changing! The Phobia Demon you killed last week is attacking London again. What the hell are you doing? You’re supposed to save her, goddamn it. Don’t make me come down there!
She read it again, but out loud this time. Oh no. This wasn’t good at all. The only thing she could think that might have changed history would be…she looked up at Vincent with wide eyes and asked in a small voice, “Is this because we had sex?”
Chapter 6
Vincent’s brain did a full twist inside his skull. He was sure of it. He put up a hand toward the other men and snarled, “One comment and I’ll rip out your spines.” He wasn’t sure he could actually do it to his own kind, but he’d done it to the undead before, so he thought he might have a chance to follow through with the promise.
The last thing he needed was for Bryna to think history was changing because he’d loved her. He captured her face and leaned down so they were at eye level. “No. Something is happening here that I’m missing, but…shit.” How was he going to explain this without becoming a bigger bastard than he already was?
“Sex never changed history on you before,” she supplied in her most helpful—and hurt—tone.
He kept his eyes leveled on hers. Damn it. This was so fucked-up. “Right. It’s something else.” Still, part of what was messing with his brain wasn’t Bryna freaking out. She did that easily enough, and he was learning how to work around it. The thing was he couldn’t remember killing a Phobia Demon in London ever. He’d killed one in Paraguay, but Felix was insistent he wasn’t allowed to kill demons unless there was no other choice.