My Blood Approves

Chapter 17

When I went to school the next day, Jane looked rather pleased to see me. I’d been standing at my locker, struggling to place my books inside, when she walked past me, smiling in her overly seductive way, and murmured, “Good to have you back, Alice.” Admittedly, it’d only been three days since I’d last been to school, but it had much longer than that since I hung out with her, and I’d barely been active in my own life. At school and at home, I’d been a zombie.

Anytime I wasn’t around my new mysterious vampire friends, I felt like I’d been living a lie, so I mustered just enough energy to get through it.

There was no separation in the two lives, though. They were all part of me and what I was doing. I went to high school, hung out my brother, gossiped with Jane, and in my free time, I hung out with vampires. Nothing about me had really changed, and even as mind boggling as the events of the last month had been, I was still just plain old Alice Bonham, and that’s the way it was going to stay. For a few more years at least.

So when Jane walked past me, I scurried to get my books together, and then bolted after her. She must’ve really missed me, because she actually stopped to wait for me when I called her name. After a few friendly jabs about being missing in action lately, I filled her in as best I could about what had been happening my life lately, conveniently leaving out the stuff about vampires.

At home, I let Milo help me with the Calculus homework, which really seemed completely unnecessary. I would make it my life’s mission to never, ever find a use for that particular information. Milo made something delicious with salmon for supper and enlightened me on his progress (or the lack thereof) with his new crush, Troy. All in all, my life felt like it had hit some kind of stride, and maybe I really could get comfortable with all of this.

Jack text messaged me, saying he’d be over in twenty minutes to pick me up. I got ready, and Milo warned me that I had to be up early for school, and I promised I’d be back before one. That still seemed too late for him, and in reality, six hours of sleep did not sound like enough to me, but I had to find a balance in all of this.

While outside waiting for Jack to pick me up, something startled me. I was waiting outside for Jack. No matter how fast I rushed through getting ready, he was invariably waiting for me outside, or at best, we arrived in front of my building at the same time. But I had been waiting for so long, that I’d actually gotten a little chill and had to pull my sweater around me. I dug out my phone to text him just as a silver Audi slid up in front of me, and my heart twirled nervously.

Even through the dark glass of the car window, I could see Peter’s green eyes burning at me. That incessant pull that had been slowly fading the last few days returned with a vengeance. My body started to shake, but not because I was cold. My heart had started beating in that way that drove Jack mad, and I wondered if Peter felt the same way. Slowly, I opened the car door and got inside, and prepared myself to find out.

“When did you get back?” I asked quietly.

Instead of answering me, Peter just squealed away from the curb, keeping his eyes locked on the road in front of us. His jaw tensed tightly. The car was completely full of the intoxicating smell of him, and for some reason, my mouth actually started to salivate. We had never been in such close quarters before, and it felt like a bad idea. Or a really good one, depending on how I looked at it.

Even as close as I was to him, my heart was tugging on me to move closer, to reach out and brush my hand against his flawless skin, so I clasped my hands together securely.

“I just got back.” He took so long to answer me that I almost forgot what the question was.

The silence felt thick and overwhelming, but I couldn’t think of anything to fill it with. My head was swimming, and I felt the hunger for him rolling over me like a fog. It was burning and frantic, like a rush of adrenaline, only much more intoxicating. By the time we’d get to his house, I’d be delirious with him.

“We need to talk,” Peter murmured huskily, allowing his haunting gaze to settle on me for a moment.

“I know.”

In my mind, I’d been imagining the conversation with him over and over again. Although since I’d kissed Jack, I’d been envisioning it with me rejecting him, instead of persuading him into being with me. Once I was with him, filled with his lust, I couldn’t imagine not being with Peter. Every part of me screamed that I really had been made for him, no matter what my heart insisted when he wasn’t around.

Despite his proclamation that a discussion needed to occur, he said nothing for the remainder of the car ride. I couldn’t even take my eyes off of him, and I barely noticed his lack of attention towards me. The days away from him had made me forget how absolutely breathtaking he was. It would be all too easy to spend the rest of my life just looking at him When we got to his house, the tiniest part of me that wasn’t completely enamored with him felt trepidation at seeing Jack. I had no idea how he would react, but fortunately, he wasn’t around. I imagined that he was off somewhere, but since Peter eclipsed everything for me, I couldn’t feel him anxiously hiding nearby. Mae and Ezra were in the living room, but I barely noticed the tentative way they eyed us up as we walked up the stairs to his room. Peter still hadn’t said anything to me, but I followed one step behind him, like he was leading me on a string.

“I don’t know what they’ve been telling you while I was gone,” Peter told me finally. I had sat down on the edge of his bed, and he stood on the other side of his room, his arms crossed firmly over his chest and refusing to look at me.

“But this cannot work.”

“What?”

I tried to play innocent, but there was already a welling despair inside me.

It seemed ridiculous since I had survived all this time just fine without him.

There had been a constant dull ache inside me, but it was nothing that I couldn’t live with. But when I was with him, the thought of not being with him felt like a fate worse than death.

“It’s not the same as it was before,” he explained quietly. “The way I feel about you, its not right. It’s purely … physical. My body insists that its you, but the rest of me…” He shook his head. “I don’t think I should be around you anymore.”

“Are you banning me from the house?” Being without him, being without everyone, that would be horrendous. I had just come to terms with what was happening, and he was going to take everything away from me.

“I just think that this is an impossible situation.” He looked over at me, his eyes betraying the hurt and want he had for me. “I can’t be with you, and Jack can’t be with you. He’s tried to hide his feelings about you from me, but there is some kind of cross contamination that I can’t get a grasp on. Neither of us can be with you, so having you around would be torture.”

“That isn’t fair!” I jumped to my feet, and already hot tears were slicing down my cheeks. There was a finality to his voice that devastated me. He had already made up mind, and there would be nothing that I could say or do to change his mind. “Do they all agree with you? They can’t! Ezra-”

“They support my decision,” Peter cut me off decisively. “All of them are very fond of you, but it can’t work. And since you are ‘mine,’ it’s up to me what we do with you.”

“‘What you do with me?’” I sobbed. “This is my life! Why do you get to decide what is done with me?”

“Your life is my life. That’s how this works.” Swallowing hard, he looked sad but resolute.

“Than isn’t your life mine?” I clenched my fists, trying desperately to find some ground to stand on.

“That’s not how this works,” Peter shook his head. “You are human. You have no standing over us.”

“So you’re all just …”

The room felt like it was spinning, and I rested my hand on the bed to keep from collapsing. He was going to take everything from me. The insistent way my body begged for him, the way my heart longed for Jack, the comfort I gained from Mae and Ezra, and the glorious future I had just mapped out for myself. With his simple, cold words, he was ripping everything away from me.

The ground felt like it was giving way from underneath me, and I had to swallow hard to keep from vomiting.

“Alice, we never meant to hurt you.” He sounded sad, but I could barely see him through my own tears.

Part of me wanted to run through house searching for Jack. I knew he would fight for me, make them change their minds, but I felt too weak. More than that, if Peter didn’t want me, it didn’t even seem worth fighting for.

“You’re killing me,” I murmured.

Then it dawned on me. It did feel like he was literally killing me. Every part of me, physical and otherwise, was writhing in pain. But I knew that inside him there was a hunger that really wanted to kill me. I saw how fierce it had been in Jack’s eyes, and I knew it had to be stronger for Peter.

“Peter, why don’t you just bite me?” I asked breathlessly.

“No,” Peter responded hoarsely. “That’s a horrible idea.”

“No, Peter! Listen!” I walked over to him, willing my heart to beat harder and faster, so the sound would overwhelm him. “I know you want to! You made me leave you once because of how badly you wanted to! You can just bite me, and this will all be over with. I’ll be out of your lives forever, and I won’t even care. I want you to. And what do I even matter to you? I’m just another stupid weak human, and you’ve killed them before.”

“I’m not going to kill you.” He tried to sound disgusted, but the hunger was at the back of his throat. When he looked away from me, I grabbed his arm, and forced him to look down at me.

“Please,” I pleaded.

He was still resisting the idea, so I remembered what had sent Jack over the edge. I bit my lip, hard, and before I could even tell it was bleeding, his eyes had widened. For him, my scent and taste were irresistible.

“You really want this?” Peter murmured huskily. His eyes looked conflicted, both sad and incredibly ravenous. “Do you even understand what you’re asking?”

“I know that I can’t live the rest of my life without you.”

If my mind hadn’t been turned into an absolute mess thanks to it’s intoxication over Peter, I might have been able to come up with a better way for handling things. Even if my body hadn’t been insisting that I was incapable of surviving without Peter, it would still have been devastating. I truly planned on spending forever with Jack, and it did seem unbearable to just forget it all. To go to school, to college, to go about my tedious little life and spend every day getting older, sicker, dying, and trying to forget them. I couldn’t do it, and I didn’t even want to try. It hurt far too much.

“Forgive me,” Peter whispered.

Before I could say anything more, I felt his lips pressed hotly on my neck, and then this sharp pain shot into me, like the prick of a needle. That was very quickly replaced by this wonderful, warm pleasure spreading through me. It felt so intensely marvelous that I couldn’t even imagine ever having felt pain. My body trembled and went limp in his arms, and I heard myself moaning. It was sheer ecstasy. Pleasure rippled through me, and I wanted this moment to last forever.

Faintly, I was becoming aware of how weak I felt. At first, it had just been because the pleasure had struck me so forcefully, but even though it still felt amazing, I could feel my life draining away. Some part of me was aware that I was dying, but there was nothing frightening or bad about it. I felt oddly at peace and blissful, and I let myself succumb to the drowsy, perfection that flooded over me.

My thoughts were dissolving. There were incoherent images of the sun shining over the tops of the building, and Peter’s green eyes, and Jack’s laughter. I thought of my brother, and I hoped he understood. Then there was nothing except the way I felt, buried underneath a warm blanket. My heart had slowed considerably, and my lungs felt empty.

Suddenly, there was a sharp pain of separation, and an intense chill. My mind felt strangely alert. Still incredibly weak, I didn’t even have the strength to open my eyelids, but I could hear the commotion going on around me. Peter wasn’t holding me anymore, but I couldn’t tell where I was. I just knew that his strong arms weren’t around me and his mouth wasn’t pressed to my neck. He had stopped too soon, and I was still alive.

There were banging noises and the sounds of rustling feet. Voices were shouting, and it took a minute for me to able to focus in on them clearly. Jack was shouting at Peter, calling him all sorts of hateful names, and Peter was saying very little in his own defense. Then Ezra’s voice boomed in, and the movement stopped. He had broken up the fight.

“He tried to kill her!” Jack wailed, and I could hear the terrified desperation in his voice.

“But she’s not dead,” Ezra told him soothingly. I felt strong hands touching my face, feeling my pulse and inspecting the damage. I wanted to yell at them, to tell them to leave me here to die, but I barely even had the strength to breathe, let alone speak. “She’s lost a lot of blood.”

“She wanted me to do it,” Peter muttered, and this was followed by a loud smacking sound.

“Jack! Peter!” Ezra roared. “If you want to save her life, then you have to listen to me!”

“I don’t know if I want to save her life,” Peter told them quietly, and Ezra let go of my face so he could rush over to separate the fight. I could hear their bodies slamming against each other, and Jack was growling viciously.

“Peter, you should step out,” Ezra commanded. “And tell Mae that we need type AB positive. We should have some in the cooler downstairs.”

“She’s going to be alright?” Jack whimpered.

“Peter’s right….” I managed breathlessly.

Jack crouched beside me, and I could feel how completely devastated and powerless he felt. He started saying something to me but forcing myself to speak had used up at the last of my energy. Everything around me fell black and silent.

Slowly and somewhat reluctantly, I felt myself rising to the surface. I blinked several times, letting my eyes adjust to the dim light of the bedroom. In truth, I had rather expected to open my eyes and find myself in purgatory.

Instead, I was in the room in the turret, the bedroom that had been mine. There was this weird weakness over me, like I was laying underneath a weighted blanket, and there were still some residuals of the intense pleasure I had experienced when Peter had been feeding on me. I also felt relieved and apprehensive, but I couldn’t understand why. They seemed out of place with everything that had happened, but then I stirred a little and found the source of the emotions.

“Hey,” Jack whispered. He had been sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, but when he saw me waking up, he came over and climbed on the bed next to me. “How are you feeling?”

“Really, really tired,” I mumbled groggily, and when he smiled, I saw there were tears in his eyes. He pushed a strand of hair out of my eyes, and my heart ached at the thought of leaving him. After he brushed the hair from my eyes, his fingers traced down the side of my face, past my jaw line, and then lingering on the residuals of the bite Peter had left on my throat. His expression hardened painfully, so I swallowed and looked away.

“Am I gonna have to go?” I asked.

“You can stay as long as you want.” He moved his hand from my neck, resting it on the covers over my stomach.

“Peter said that I wouldn’t be allowed to see any of you anymore,” I told him thickly. A deep pain welled in my chest at the thought of it, and even without Peter here fogging up mind, suicide didn’t seem like that bad of an idea.

“No. That’s not going to happen,” Jack said firmly. “I had reluctantly agreed to it temporarily, until we could get things sorted out better. Peter was convinced that he couldn’t be around you, and apparently, that wasn’t far from the truth.” Just mentioning Peter made his voice fill with a deep anger, and I felt a jealous protectiveness radiate from him. “After what happened, we decided that was a horrible decision. So Peter’s gone.”

“What do you mean he’s gone?” I looked at him plaintively, and Jack tried to hide that it hurt him that I was even asking about Peter.

“He’s going to go out on his own for awhile. He’s done it before.” Jack shrugged, like it wasn’t anything for me to concern myself with. “We all just think it would be better for him not to be around you, at least not while you’re still human.”

“So he just won’t see you guys for three or four years?” I was tearing their family apart, and that did little to make me feel better. Admittedly, I wanted to be around Jack and his family more than I wanted to be alive, but not at the cost of ruining their lives.

“No, he won’t see you for three or four years,” he corrected me. “And maybe me too. But trust me, I don’t really have any urge to see him.”

“It’s not his fault,” I insisted quietly. Jack scoffed and looked away from me. “It’s really not. I asked him to do it.”

“He knew better.” He shook his head seriously. “He knows how much…”

Just the thought of me dying made agonized him. “If you had died, I would’ve killed him. It would’ve completely destroyed everything we had here, and he knew that.”

“You can’t kill him over me,” I insisted quietly. “I don’t want to be the cause of your family’s destruction.”

“Well, then don’t do anything stupid like getting yourself killed.” He had meant to sound joking, but it came out more like he was pleading with me. “It’s too late, Alice. You already mean too much to us. Dying doesn’t change that.”

“How am I still alive?” I attempted to change the subject.

“Ezra gave you a blood transfusion with the blood bags we have,” he explained casually.

“He can do that?” I felt a little wide eyed. Blood transfusions probably weren’t the most difficult of procedures, but still, he’d saved my life with one.

“He can do anything.” Brushing it off, he smiled at me. “When you’re around for three-hundred years and you’re life revolves around blood, you pick up a thing or two about it.”

“So what happens now?”

“You need to get some rest, because the blood loss makes you tired and weak. And then I’ll take you home in the morning, so you can go to school.” His blue eyes looked softly at me, and for the first time, I could really feel how much he loved me. It was like a warm, safe blanket wrapped around me, and I tried to ignore the aching pain in my chest that still went out for Peter.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“There’s nothing to thank me for.” Settling more into the bed, he reached out and pulled me over to him. Wrapping his arms securely around me, I rested my head on his chest and listened the slow, faint sound of his heart beat. I felt totally and completely safe with him, and I wanted to stay that way forever.

Nothing between us had really been solved. For now, our best solution was simply to send Peter away, but who knew how long Peter would really be gone for? Until things were in place, I would just have to go about living my life as normally as possible. Going to school because it made my mother and Milo happy, and hanging out with Jane so I didn’t become too dependent on Jack for my happiness (even though I had a feeling that it was already too late for that).

While I still had the chance, I would spend as much time as I could with Milo. But really, it was only a matter of time before everything changed. I snuggled deeper into Jack’s arms and tried not to worry about any of that now.