“He cares, you know he does.”
“Not enough to be with me though, right? It’s okay for him to sleep with Rebecca,” I spat out her name like she was a bit of shell in crab flesh. “But I can’t be with anyone, is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes, Amy, yes,” he shouted, “you knew that when you signed up. You knew what you were in for.”
Confused, I shook my head. “What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He swung and studied my face. His eyebrows drew into a deep frown.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I reiterated when he looked on with lingering doubt.
“That son of a bitch.” He slammed his palm against the steering, three times.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
He hit it so hard I thought he was going to snap the wheel. His rage sent my heart into overdrive. I stared at him, bewildered. We sat in silence for a long moment, staring ahead.
Finally, he said in a quiet voice, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Ethan, you better tell me what you are talking about.”
He took in a deep breath, and I knew what he was going to say wasn’t going to be good.
“Back when it all began, when vampires and humans courted, sometimes some of the humans were inadvertently killed by other vampires. The result of this was revenge killings that would sometimes go on through whole families and would continue to plague our species. So, to keep the peace, it was written into scriptures that when a vampire and a human courted, the vampire should mark their human with a symbol under their ear, so that other vampires would know not to touch her, or him. It was a code of respect. It saved the lives of not only the partners, but also the vampires through retributions. It kept the peace within the species.”
“They branded them?” My voice was hoarse.
He nodded. “Some still do, but it’s usually done by way of a tattoo or hot metal, mixed in with other symbols. Not obvious to humans but a vampire knows it immediately.”
I thought of the girl in the night club and her weird tattoo; and the vampire who’d scanned his eyes over my neck and arms.
Forgive me, I was unable to determine she was spoken for.
“Once a human is marked they commit to that vampire, and no other vampire or human is allowed to touch them. If they do, they pay the price.”
“The price?”
“Death, Amy,” he replied grimly, “for the vampire who’s disrespected the rules, and sometimes for the human too.”
Waves of cold rolled over the nape of my neck and down my spine. Automatically I reached up and trailed my fingers over the sides of my neck—there was no bump, no scar; I wasn’t marked.
“But he didn’t brand me.”
“The concept of owning one’s human, of marking them—not just with a tattoo or symbol,is ingrained within our society, to keep law and order, and must be respected. He’s of the original culture and he regards those rules as the foundation on which to form a stable society. When you willingly slept with him and youformed an emotional connection, or he did to you . . .” He stared out the side window for a long moment, then looked back and said quietly, “It’s hard to break.”
“So, what are you saying? That I’m his possession until he chooses otherwise?”
“Yes.” He rubbed his hand roughly on his jeans like he was easing the sting from thumping the steering wheel. “If you let him go emotionally, he will let you go eventually. He should have told you before you . . .” He waved his hand forward and didn’t finish the sentence.
The words he spoke to me right before we made love echo through my mind, ‘but you don’t know.’
“I don’t know if I can. I . . . if he cares, there’s hope, right?”
He sat silent for a long while, his jaw tight. He stared at the road ahead like it held the answers to my plight. Finally, he shook his head slowly and deliberately and sighed, like he held the world on his shoulders.
“Not every story can have a happy ending, Amy."
If words were bullets, he had shot them.
