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  They’d lived this life, this name in this house, for four years already. They wouldn’t be able to pull off their ages for much longer, though, which meant that they were going to have to move very soon. As it was, Jack didn’t really pass for twenty-seven, and he would never make it as thirty.

  “When was the last time you ate?” Ezra asked me but didn’t look up from my passport. It was brand new, and he inspected it for any mistakes. As soon as I’d turned, Ezra had gotten me all the paperwork I might need, including a driver’s license, birth certificate, and passport.

  “Um, yesterday,” I said.

  There was a constant thirst with me, but it wasn’t the same as being thirsty when I was human. My mouth wasn’t parched, and my stomach didn’t feel empty like I was hungry, either. I just felt this need inside me, coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

  The closest feeling I could recall is when I ran too fast in gym, and my muscles would start to ache from the oxygen depilation. It would be this slow, swelling cramp that permeated through me. Except now the relief came from blood, accompanied by frantic lust.

  I managed to have reasonable control over my bloodlust. Both Milo and I had a stronger grasp of that than most vampires, something that bewildered Ezra and Mae. Our relationship to vampires constantly surprised them, and Ezra thought there was something deeper going on than merely my bond with Peter and Jack.

  “Hmm.” Ezra eyed me over. “I don’t want you to get tired just yet. We’ll have to wait until you’re on the flight. Do you think you can handle being around people that much on an empty stomach?”

  “I think so,” I nodded, but I wasn’t as certain as I tried to sound.

  Since I was so newly turned, blood had a very strong effect on me. Eating felt amazing, but after, I’d be very drowsy and out of it. Usually, I’d just pass out and sleep it off for awhile. Eventually, drinking blood should give me more energy instead of knocking me out, but that was awhile off yet.

  On top of that, I had very little experience being around people. I found myself attracted to Jack’s blood, and his pulse is significantly weaker than humans. Their blood smelled stronger, pounded harder, and would be far more enticing. I had shown a lot of self-control so far, but in all honesty, I’d had very little temptation.

  “Good.” Ezra nodded once, then looked at Mae. “Is everything packed then?”

  “Yes.” She bit her lip when she met his gaze, and she didn’t want him to go anymore than Jack wanted me to.

  “Well, then.” He smiled wanly at me. “Are you ready?”

  “Yeah,” I nodded again.

  He put all the papers in the front pocket of his suitcase and grabbed his bags. Up until that point, I think Milo expected Ezra to tell me that I had to stay behind, but when he saw that we were really serious, he balked loudly.

  “You can’t really be going!” Milo flared with agitation, and Mae put her hand on his back, rubbing it to ease him down before he went berserk. “This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard! You’re going to get her killed!”

  “Milo, that’s enough,” Mae said.

  “But… but…” Milo stammered and turned to her for help. “You know this is stupid!”

  “Milo.” Ezra cut him off decisively, and Milo’s face crumpled. “Just say goodbye to your sister before we go.”

  He cried when he hugged me, which didn’t make things easier. He didn’t want me to go, and he didn’t want to be left behind, but there was very little in the way of options. The one time that he had actually met Peter, it hadn’t gone over well, so he wouldn’t be able to do anything to help the cause of rescuing Peter.

  Mae kissed Ezra with tears in her eyes, and once again asked him if there was anything that could get him to stay. He didn’t say anything, but that was as she had expected. Sniffling, she hugged me and made me promise to be safe, to always run at the first sign of trouble, and to call her constantly, whether anything was wrong or not.

  When we left, she had her arm wrapped around Milo, and they stood in the entryway, looking terribly forlorn. Jack hadn’t said anything as we left, and he continued his silence on the car ride to the airport. He took Ezra’s Lexus, and Ezra seemed lost in his own thoughts, trying to figure something out.

  The Minneapolis airport was a bustle of human activity. The cold October air felt good on my skin as we walked from the parking lot to the airport, but everything was already filled with the warm, tantalizing scent of blood.

  My heart sped up a little, and Jack took my hand, squeezing it to reassure me. Once inside, the feeling only got worse, and I tried to think of sad things, like dead bunnies, to keep my appetite under wraps.

  Ezra went to the desk to pick up our tickets while Jack stood with me, waiting in the crowd. Jack was unusually still, but that was for my benefit. I felt everything he felt, so he tried to be calm and soothing so I wouldn’t get agitated or hungry.

  “I’m going to have to go soon,” I said, looking up at him sadly.

  “I know.”

  The crowds around us paused to stare. Before, when I had been out with Jack in public, it drove me crazy the way everyone fawned all over him. Now, I had the same power, and it was incredibly odd having a private moment in front of an audience.

  Jack touched my face, his hand warming my cheek, and I leaned into it. Leaving, even for a short time, would be so painful, but it was the only thing I could do. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do everything to help Peter.

  Gently, he pressed his lips against mine, and his luscious heart beat through my skin. He kept it soft and very PG, because I didn’t want to get out of control in a crowded airport. Still, nothing was sweeter than his kisses, and I couldn’t help but want more.

  “The plane is going to board soon,” Ezra interrupted us, not unkindly. “We need to get through baggage claims and security.”

  Reluctantly, I pulled myself from Jack. His eyes locked on mine, and my heart screamed. It’d just finally dawned on me what I was about to do. Separating myself from Jack to sleep was uncomfortable. Being miles and miles away for I don’t even know how long… that sounded unbearable.

  “I’ll take good care of her,” Ezra promised when Jack seemed unwilling to let me go.

  Ezra took my hand in his, partially to help coax me away from Jack and partially so he could keep tabs on me. This was not the most ideal place for a new vampire’s first big outing, and everyone knew that.

  Jack let go of my hand, and as Ezra carefully guided me through the crowds past the first set of metal detectors, my eyes never left Jack’s. He just stood in the middle of the airport, staring after me, like some tragic music video, and I wondered what exactly I had gotten myself into when I became a vampire.

  - 3 –

  My transformation from human to vampire had been so incredibly brutal that the English language isn’t fit to describe it.

  My body died and ate itself. My organs shifted around, feeling as if my intestines had been replaced with living, moving snakes that squirmed inside of me. I spent hours upon hours vomiting. I was in a constant state of fevered delirium. My body ached on a cellular level. Even touching my hair would cause excruciating pain.

  It wasn’t until I finally drank blood for the first time, cold from a bag, that everything began to take a turn for the better. The pain subsided and was replaced by pleasure.

  All my senses were heightened, and I couldn’t believe how glorious everything really was. There were more colors, tastes, and textures in the spectrum than I ever imagined.

  I felt Jack when he entered the room, and not like before. My heart always knew exactly how far he was from me. The way plants strained for the sun, I strained for him.

  I had changed. My skin was smoother, my hair silkier, my eyes brighter. While I hadn’t exactly been fat before, I had a new elegance to how I looked.

  The change wasn’t as drastic as it had been with Milo, more like I had simply gone through a makeover, but I definitely looked better. And I
had shot up from 5’3” to a whopping 5’5” feet tall.

  Once I was fully conscious, fed, and the pain had gone away, I wanted to fill in the missing gap. The last thing I remembered before surrendering into the transformation was that I had just drank Jack’s blood, and he was about to battle Peter.

  But here we were, in Jack’s room, with him by my side, and we both seemed alright.

  “What happened?” I asked, forcing myself to sit up in his bed.

  “When?” Jack played dumb. He sat at the end of his bed, watching me.

  “How are we both alive?” I asked, and he laughed, completely distracting me.

  His laughter, which had always had power over me, rippled through me. It was almost too miraculous to really comprehend the actual sound.

  “You look totally in awe right now,” Jack smirked at me.

  “I am but… don’t change the subject.” I blinked to focus myself. “How are we alive? Is Peter…”

  Jack’s lips tightened into a thin line at the mention of him. Maybe it wasn’t the sound of his name quite as much as my underlying concern, but he pushed aside his feelings and decided that I deserved an explanation.

  “No. He’s alive.” He let his words hang in the air, and I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t.

  “How? How are you both alive?” I asked.

  “I broke the bond.” The glimmer returned to his eyes and an easy smile spread across his face, enchanting me. “When you drank my blood, whatever tie you had with Peter was severed.”

  That should’ve been obvious. As soon as I thought of Peter, I didn’t have that physical ache for him or that fluttery feeling in my heart. While I had concern for his well-being, the only things I felt physically were a dull bloodlust and a pull towards Jack.

  “So we’re… bonded now?” I spoke cautiously, afraid it was too good to be true.

  After all this time trying to figure a way around it, around Peter, it almost seemed impossible to believe that while I was sleeping, it had happened.

  “What do you think?” Jack smiled crookedly at me. Breathing him in, feeling the way my body felt magnetized to his, I knew we were bonded.

  My first big clue was when Jack had opened his veins in the den, and I had been unable to resist the scent of his blood. It tasted wonderful, and my mouth watered at the thought of it. But no vampires’ blood should be that appealing to humans. People aren’t meant to have bloodlust, but I did, for Jack.

  “So then what happened?” I continued, ignoring the delirious happiness taking over me. My heart sped up and my thirst intensified, but I wanted my curiosity satisfied before I dealt with my other pressing needs.

  “I don’t know.” Jack furrowed his brow, but more out of displeasure over the subject. “I was in the den with you, and Peter went crazy in the other room. I was afraid he would hurt you, so I ran out to find out what happened. He was destroying the house, and Ezra could barely contain him. But he didn’t seem to care about me when I came out.”

  “But why? If he didn’t want to hurt you, why was he so angry?”

  “He felt it break.” He lowered his eyes from mine. “The bond. If you hadn’t been out, you would’ve felt it. And if you hadn’t bonded with me, you’d still be feeling it. Apparently, it’s… incredibly painful.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” He shifted and hesitated before continuing. “Physically, I guess it’s similar to turning, but on a smaller scale. But… something happens emotionally too. And Peter was so riled up from everything else that had been going on.”

  Jack didn’t like talking about the fact that Peter had actually cared for me. He didn’t want to believe it because of how Peter treated me and how much Jack loved me. If he admitted that maybe Peter did truly love me, then what Jack had been doing with me suddenly became a betrayal, and Jack did not see it that way.

  “So where is he now?” I asked.

  “Nobody knows. He’s just gone, for good this time.” Jack shrugged, as if it was of no consequence to him.

  “Good,” I lied and hoped he didn’t notice. Then I swatted his arm, probably harder than I meant to from the surprised grimace on his face.

  “Thanks?”

  “That’s for being the biggest idiot ever! How could you do something so stupid?” I yelled at him, and it was a tough decision not to hit him again. “You were going to kill yourself! If the bond hadn’t been snapped or whatever, you would’ve been murdered!”

  “I didn’t have a choice,” Jack said, and he suppressed a laugh at my mini-outburst. “There was a good chance that I would die no matter what I did. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

  “That’s not an excuse,” I said, but a smile started to curl up at my lips.

  “I just needed to know you were safe. That was the only thing that mattered to me,” he said earnestly and placed his hand on mine.

  Heat instantly spread through me, making my heart flutter. I lunged forward, kissing him and pressing my body against his. He gave into it for a moment, but hunger threatened to completely take control of my body. Just when I was about to let it, he pushed me back from him, and that’s when I got the big sex talk.

  After a few days of getting my bloodlust under control, Ezra thought it would be good if I went about cleaning up what was left of my human life. That meant doing fun things, like going with Jack to my mom’s house so we could have this incredibly intense fight when I said that I was moving in with Jack, again. She tried to convince me to stay, then cried a lot, called me names and told me she loved me.

  When it was all said and done, she stormed off into the night. I packed up my things, and since I felt incredible guilt, I “borrowed” money from Jack to leave her. Maybe she wouldn’t have to work so hard, and at least that would be something.

  Milo called her after I left, as he had been infrequently doing since he moved out. He got to make up all sorts of fancy stories about a boarding school in New York, and that seemed to cheer her up a bit.

  I formally dropped out of high school, which I enjoyed. Milo insisted that we both take our high school equivalency later so we could go to college if we wanted, and I agreed to it, but I didn’t really have any intention of doing it. As far as I was concerned, I could spend the rest of my life as a trophy wife, and that was fine by me.

  There was the issue with my “best friend” Jane, but I didn’t know how to resolve that. When I went to the high school, she saw me and instantly figured out what had happened. I still looked like me, but I was hotter than I had been before, maybe even hotter than her.

  It was during the day, so I was incredibly tired. We exchanged a few heated words, and she ended the conversation with the flippant, “I hope you have a good death.”

  Meanwhile, my life as a vampire was pretty damn awesome. There were missteps of getting the handle on walking, moving, breathing, eating… all the basic skills I had taken for granted before. But I was completely and totally in love with Jack, and I had just started spending the rest of eternity with him.

  What could I possibly have to feel bad about?

  - 4 –

  When the plane started to take off, I thought I might throw up. My fingers squeezed the arms of the seat so tightly that I’d break them if I wasn’t careful. I’d never been on a plane before, and it scared the hell out me.

  This amused Ezra endlessly. He chuckled warmly at my stricken expression as the engines came on, making all sorts of whirring and clicking noises that sounded like death to me. I looked out the window at the dark night around us and imagined the plane crashing into the runway and bursting into flames.

  “First time flier?” A woman across the aisle looked over at us.

  “She’ll be fine,” Ezra cut her off shortly, and I was too busy being terrified to comment on his rudeness. When he looked back at me, he smiled.

  “You could say something comforting,” I suggested in a thin, anxious voice.

  “Why? This is d
istracting you from thinking about other things going on around you,” Ezra said. “It’s less than a three hour flight to New York, and I’d like to wait for you to eat until the next flight.”

  By “other things” he meant the other passengers, who flooded the red-eye with the scent of their blood, and the plane wasn’t even that full. I’d had just eaten yesterday, which meant I wouldn’t need to eat for another five or six days, but I wasn’t great at controlling my hunger.

  “Mmm, sounds great,” I muttered. Unfortunately, he had a point. My current level of fear made it almost impossible to notice my thirst.

  “Really, you should be enjoying this,” he said with a wry smile. “There’s only a small window left where you’ll be able to feel fear like this.”

  “Oh, yeah, this is totally awesome.”

  “Let me give you a little tip.” He leaned in towards me, lowering his voice so it would be inaudible to anyone around us. “Even if the plane does crash, you’ll survive. You’re immortal now.”

  It hadn’t dawned on me yet. I was a vampire, and I wasn’t going to die in a plane crash.

  My fingers relaxed on the arm rest. Still, whenever we hit turbulence, I’d grip onto Ezra for dear life, but he’d just chuckle.

  I tried to enjoy the rest of the flight, but it was dark, and even with my improved vision, there wasn’t much to see out the window. Ezra brought some books on tracking, and he went through them, even though I’m sure he’d read them before. He’d probably read everything ever written.

  “Where are we going anyway?” I asked him quietly. Most other passengers were sleeping, and I didn’t want to wake them.

  “New York City,” Ezra replied without looking up from his book. “And then to Finland.”

  “Finland?” I raised my eyebrow, completely caught off guard by his answer. “Peter’s in Finland?”

  “I believe so.” He flipped a page. “Scandinavia has always been his favorite place to hide out, especially in winter. There’s hardly daylight for months, and the temperatures are usually below freezing.”