Chapter 21: Chapter 20

“You know what to do, right?” Kates asked as she walked me to the van.

“Lie to the Hunter and tell Shelly that her boyfriend’s going to die if she doesn’t give her blood up to the longest fang.”

Kates sighed, annoyed. “Come on, Davy. This is some serious stuff here.”

Oh, believe me. I knew the gravity of my situation. “I wouldn’t want anyone to end up in a coma. Yeah, I get how serious this is.”

“I know that you’re upset about what happened with Blue, but… things just happened. I didn’t mean for that to happen, but it did and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure your friends are okay.”

Oh gee, thanks for the consideration. “You’re right. I ~am~ more than upset about what you did to Blue. You didn’t mean for it to happen? What’d you mean for, Kates? You have a temper. You don’t think I know that? I should probably be grateful that you didn’t just kill Blue. That would’ve solved your problem, right? She peaked inside you and saw the real you, so you kill her.”

“Shut up!” Kates snarled. “Just… shut up. You don’t know—” ~‘Lucan knows. He knows me. He told me to kill Blue and I couldn’t, but it’s okay. It worked out. He said that no one could make the connection, not until after… he said everything would be alright. I have to trust him. I love him.’~

I watched as Kates calmed herself down. Lies. “Wow, Kates. You take the cake. Is this about you loving this guy or is this about you not being alone?”

She’d been the one to introduce Craig and me. She’d told me to set Craig on fire. She’d been the one who told me that fire wouldn’t kill him, but it’d hurt him. I had wanted to hurt him. I wanted to hurt him still. A stab of nausea surged through me. All my regrets, shadows, the darkest time in my life—and Kates had been right beside me the entire time. She’d been the one to encourage me, but now that I thought about it, she might not have encouraged me in the right way.

I expected blistering rage from Kates. I got patience instead and I blinked, startled, as she relayed almost warmly, “I love him. He’s… he’s going to change things, make things how they’re supposed to be. I know you can’t understand because you don’t know anything about this world and you shouldn’t. It’s a dark world, but Lucan’s going to change things, make things right.”

“So that you can kill vampires again?” I scoffed at the idea. The decree was finalized and it swept over the entire vampire nation. There was no reversing that baby.

“Maybe.”

I saw her belief and couldn’t believe it. She thought that, she ~really~ thought that. I didn’t know some stuff about the vampire world, but I knew enough to know that the decree was set in stone. There’d be a few world wars within the vampire community before that decree was overthrown… unless….

~‘It just means that vampire has too much power. No creature should have that power.’~

I sucked in a choking breath. I suddenly, very suddenly, needed to get to Roane. This was the ‘world at stake’ feeling that I felt the night on the roof with Talia. Something had happened, something very, very wrong had happened and I felt it. I had ignored it. Now things might’ve gone too far to stop it.

“I have to go,” I rushed out and darted to the van. The door was open so I hopped inside and slammed it behind me. I never stopped to look at who drove me. I just needed to get to Roane, but I’d need to go to the dorm first.

Once I hurled myself through the lobby, up the stairs, and down the hall, I burst through the door. I was grateful that I’d been the last out the door and not Emily because I never locked the door. Emily had been too frazzled by her date, she’d forgotten her purse—that meant her phone.

I scrolled through until I found Roane’s number. It took a few rings, but he answered, “Is this Emily?”

“No, it’s me. I lost my phone, but that’s not why I’m calling. I have to see you, now!” Please, please don’t ask for any explanation. I didn’t have time.

Roane hesitated a second and then asked, “Where are you?”

“My dorm room.”

“I’ll send Gregory.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you.” I needed to calm down, but I was bursting at the seams. As I waited, I couldn’t sit still. I paced. I jogged in place. I did jumping jacks. I even rearranged the furniture. Afterwards, I cringed. Emily wouldn’t want the couch by the window.

“Davy? It’s Gregory. Lucas said to knock on your door…”

“Coming!”

Gregory greeted me with a polite nod and I tried to ignore the attention this ~very~ large Viking vampire was attracting. His voice could’ve rumbled through the entire building. Heads popped out from nearly every door, but while some squeaked in fear, a lot squeaked from excitement—the sexual kind.

Vampire. Horny freshman girls. What else needed to be said?

Gregory swept around me in the lobby and held each of the doors open until we got to the car. It was the same black SUV that he’d driven before. “Can’t you drive a car with some color? Why does it always have to be black?”

“Davy?”

“Nothing. Nevermind.” I shrugged it off and slipped inside. From there, it was all foot tapping, knuckle breaking, and counting my breaths again.

I felt like I needed to burst, like something inside of me finally knew something—or felt something was going to happen. I was going to burst from the inside out. I just knew it. Then Gregory pulled the car over and I burst out of the car to sprint inside. I swept past Wren and a whole host of other vampires.

They were all arriving for the war.

I darted up the stairs and spotted Roane’s closed bedroom doors. I threw them open, prepared to unburden my soul, but I braked abruptly. Nothing. Roane wasn’t there. The sheets were in the same place. The window was open and a cool breeze swept in.

“Oh my god! Vampires are so unreliable!” I cried to myself.

Then I heard a soft chuckle behind me and I whirled around—my jaw dropped. There he was, buttoning a black shirt that looked custom-fitted and straight from the dry cleaners. He wore a pair of light blue jeans underneath, which also looked custom fitted and dry-cleaned.

“You’ve got money. I can see that,” I stated as my greeting.

“That’s what you had to say and why you called with your commanding ‘now!’?” Roane drawled as he slipped past only to drop the shirt off his shoulders—oh whoa. I had assumed he’d been buttoning it up, but nope. He’d been unbuttoning it.

“Wha—why—what are you doing?” I quickly turned around. I wanted to look. I shouldn’t. It was bad to look, but I peeked anyway. Roane was all muscles. Perfect, chiseled, hard ridges, muscles up and down and all around. My fingers itched to touch them and my mouth went dry, but I twitched to keep myself back.

“I was out. I had to make sure you and Gregory weren’t followed.”

“That would’ve been bad, huh? If they had followed me…” I trailed off as Roane was in front of me in a flash… in all his shirtless glistening chest gloriousness…. Fans. Vampires should keep fans everywhere they were… for all those hot, passionate, and overheated humans like myself….

“They?” Roane caught my shoulders and jerked me back to him.

I’d been absentmindedly looking for a fan somewhere.

“They?” he barked again.

“They.” I needed to remind myself who ‘they’ were. Oh—“Yes. Your twin brother.” I growled that last bit and shoved Roane back. “You could’ve told me that you had a twin brother. They have Emily and Adam.”

“You met Lucan?” Roane grilled. “You talked to Lucan?”

I nodded. “I met him. I talked to him. I found out that Kates is in love with him, thanks for that heads up and yes—he sent a message for the Immortal. I’m supposed to deliver it because ~apparently~ he can smell you all over me. That’s gross. I really don’t like being sniffed.”

“I’ve almost forgotten what he smells like,” Roane confessed as he moved around me and back into the bedroom. He flicked his wrist out and shut the door on his way. As I turned to watch him, the door shut behind me with a click.

“That’s… how can you forget what your twin smells like? Wouldn’t he smell like you?” I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation.

Roane stopped, stared at me for a moment, and then crossed to his closet. He pulled out a grey shirt, but only held it as he hung his head. “Lucan and I were sired by different Families. That means that we have the same face now. Nothing else remains the same with the two of us. I have different blood than he does.”

“Because you were sired by different Families?”

“Lucan was sired first.” Roane still hadn’t put the shirt on. He only held it and now his hand wrapped tightly around it. He looked at the floor and I heard the suffering in his voice. “He was the louder one of us. Everyone thought he was the leader. When he was sired… I felt it happen. I felt him and then suddenly—I thought he was dead. It was almost two weeks before he came to me. He said that he couldn’t control himself before that and he wanted to make sure he wouldn’t hurt me. I didn’t see much of Lucan after he became a vampire. I lived another year as a human until this man came to me.”

I felt the history swirl around us, like it was another entity in the room.

Roane continued, haunted, “He told me that Lucan had become a problem with the vampires. He was uncontrollable and defying a lot of their rules. He said that I was once his twin brother. They wondered if I could help them with their problem. That’s what they called him. My brother was ‘their problem.’”

I heard his hollow laugh and bit my lip from crying out.

“He turned you into a vampire because of your brother?”

“No. He took me to Lucan—as a human. Lucan was the one who decided I should be a vampire. He missed me. He wanted me beside him. He wanted things to be how they were. The man who had come to me realized what Lucan was about to do. He did it instead. To say Lucan was furious is an understatement. He ripped my Master’s head off.”

“So…” I asked, hesitant, “You didn’t have a Master?” I had no idea what that meant, but I guessed that it meant something.

He cleared his throat. “I joined Lucan for awhile. I became a part of his Family, even though I wasn’t from their bloodline. The rest of the group didn’t like that, but Lucan was their leader. They did what he said and I’d been his twin brother—it still meant something to Lucan and me. We were how we used to be, for a time.”

Inseparable. I heard it before he said it. I felt it from him. Roane wished things were how they used to be.

“As I learned things, I started to change. Lucan didn’t like it at first, but I don’t know—I think his Family were the ones who stepped in.”

“You said Lucan was the ‘louder’ one of you. They thought he was the leader.”

Roane shook his head and sat. His shirt was still fisted in his hands before him. “I’d been the leader when we were human. Lucan was just loud, but he didn’t think things through. He acted for me sometimes. I liked controlling from behind the scenes and it worked for us. We were starting to get back to that and I think his Family didn’t like the idea that one of their own wasn’t the leader anymore. They didn’t like being led by an outsider. Lucan loved it. I took them to new heights. I told you that I’d done the torture with their Family I’d done worse than that. I didn’t know who I was. I felt a separation between me and Lucan. I hated it. I went dark, really dark… as a vampire.”

“Until they kicked you out.”

“Lucan was forced to kick me out…,” Roane closed his eyes. “I found my Family and things changed… for awhile.”

“Was that the last time you saw him, when he kicked you out?”

He shook his head, his jaw clenched. “I wish, but… no. Lucan and I… we still both liked to defy laws, even vampire laws. That was in us from when we were human. We still saw each other until…”

“Lucas,” I whispered, but held back. I wasn’t sure… He was going to say something, but hesitated. And something in me didn’t want to hear it.

He swung his eyes to mine and I couldn’t look away. It was… he was starving. I was starving… something was in the air—I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t… I couldn’t think.

“You called me by my name,” he wrung out. Hoarse.

I nodded with a tight throat. I couldn’t form any words. I couldn’t talk… I had gravitated to him and I stood above him as he sat. I… I didn’t know what to say, how to react. I needed to be by him… it was something in me or maybe it was just me. I could only breathe. That was all I focused on until I felt his hand lift and the back of his finger wiped a tear away from me.

“Davina,” he whispered as he arched upwards, but he didn’t seek my lips. Not yet.

I grasped the side of his face and I was the one to press my lips to his. A part of me knew that I needed him and I wouldn’t ever stop needing him. I just hoped it wasn’t the end of both of us.