He slapped his other hand on the inside of my thigh, running it higher. The fury that filled me was immediate—how dare he touch me!
“I’ll let you in on a secret,” I whispered. “It was a Vampire that gave me that scar, and I’ll tell you something else. I killed him.” The words fell out of my mouth.
“A what?” He seemed to halt for a moment, but then shrugged off what I had said. “Calm down; trust me, we’re going to have some fun.”
As a disobedient, angry tear stained my cheek, his expression changed to astonishment. My tears were blood.
Suddenly unsure of himself, he pulled a sharp knife from his pocket. Using just the one hand to flick it out, he rested the blade against my throat. “Ohhh, you’re something else entirely. I thought I’d had every kind of girl there was to have, but you, you’re different.”
The cold blade dug into my skin, splitting the top layer.
“I said, get your hands off me!” I squeezed out the words through gritted teeth.
He swung the blade to my cheek and bolstered his body against mine, murmuring, “Now, why would I want to do that?”
As he started tugging at my skirt, I answered him. “That Vampire might be dead, but the one standing behind you isn’t.”
He stopped momentarily—that was all the time Jonah gave him.
He was flat on the ground before he had the chance to see who had put him there, his knife clattering as it bounced off the cobbles.
Jonah turned his face back to me, his eyes ablaze.
He kicked Bradley hard in the stomach. I felt no pity for him. Scraping him off the ground, Jonah plunged his fists repeatedly into his face until Bradley’s blood stained his knuckles.
The sight of the red caused something to stir in me, despite the blackness of the night; I could have sworn I saw a shadow move across my vision.
Everything stopped, creating yet another hole in my memory.
I was slumped, palms placed firmly against the brick—steadying myself—when I came back. I twisted around to see Jonah crouched over Bradley’s lifeless body; metallic red splatter incarnadined the cobbles. The gory scene was visible only by the faintest flicker of an old bulb flanking the exit door a few feet away.
“What did you do?” The flaming anger that had swept over me had fizzled out.
I ran over to Bradley’s side. It was a gruesome sight; his face was unrecognizable, swollen and coated entirely in blood.
I stumbled backward and Jonah was immediately at my side.
“Get off me!” As I shoved him, a strange, sweet cinnamon smell met me and I snapped my head to his neck. I grabbed his shirt away from the vein throbbing just above his collarbone, and a lump rose in my throat. A multitude of lacerations scarred his skin. Bite marks. Someone had drunk from Jonah.
“Cessie.” His voice was monotone and calm, as if that might make me the same in return.
Before I had a chance to think, my attention was drawn away from him as I heard something crunching through the trees behind us.
“Jeez! What the freakin’ hell happened here?” Brooke cried. “So that’s why you told me to bring the car around. Why won’t you ever let me have a go?” she snapped at Jonah, taking in the scene.
Dried blood circled her lips as though she’d been snacking messily on some summer berries. Looking from her to Jonah and back again, the obvious dawned on me.
“You drank from him … from Jonah?”
Brooke’s jaw dropped.
“It’s more complicated than you would think,” Jonah said.
“What do we do? She can’t know!” Brooke’s voice filled with alarm. “They’ll come for us! Do something!”
I turned away from the pair; the sound of her fangs cracking into place unnerved me. That was all the warning I needed, and, flinging my stilettos off, I ran.
Before I knew what was happening, my body was elevated off the ground and I was trapped in Jonah’s strong arms. We ripped through the trees, evidently traveling some distance, and finally ended up in a clearing behind a vineyard.
As he came to an abrupt halt, I was sure he smelled my hair as I kicked and threw my arms about.
Eventually placing me down on the ground gently and steadying me on the grass, he said, “I created Brooke.”
His hazel eyes were uncertain.
I was shaking. Removing his leather jacket, he wrapped it around me in response. I shrugged it off, chucking it back to him.
“I made her how she is,” Jonah continued.
“How is that possible? You’re a Second Generation, you can’t create Vampires!”
“I’d drunk from my fair share of female Vampires, so I was strong, fueled by their powers and strength. She was human, and I changed her. I’m no Pureblood. Seems as much as I would never be as powerful as my maker, she would never be as strong as a Second Generation.”
The crosses that he wore around his neck caught the glint of the full moon. Sidestepping the glare, I dug my bare feet into the mud.
“Why would you let her drink from you? Surely she’ll end you?”
“She’s not strong enough. She may be a Vampire, but she’s got nothing on me. I had to break my promise to you tonight to not feed, and for that I’m sorry. But you need to understand, Brooke would have killed that boy if I hadn’t.” He ran his hand through his thick hair, sweeping his eyes from side to side as if he was trapped.
“What are you talking about? Don’t blame her for your greed! You drank from that girl in the club because you wanted to, regardless of how I felt about it!”
I paced away from him, but there was nowhere to go. We were on the fringes of a field backing onto the tall vines, somewhere between nowhere and … well, nowhere.
Reaching for my hand, he pulled me in to him. “Brooke can’t control herself, and she’s hungry. I drank from that girl so Brooke could drink from me. She can’t exist off human blood alone, not in her form. She drinks my blood, she feeds off my strength. If I drink from a human first, she gets what she needs the same way I do. I had to. She’d have tried to drink from that innocent French boy otherwise and he would have died. Do you understand?” His tone was becoming more urgent, like he needed me to grasp it.
“I get it, Jonah, but what I don’t understand is why you would condemn a human being to your existence? What right did you have? Was it to feel important, or did you do it just because you could? They’re right about you; you are black all the way through.”