“Claire.” Peter’s voice held endless care but also a sharp earnestness. “Okay, Tai, I need you to do a few things for me right now. You up to it?”
“I’ll try, but she just wants me to trust myself, to make us bloodbound, and I can’t. I can’t even try.”
“Tai, listen to me. I need you to get up, go to your kitchen, and open a blood bag. Then I need you to take two sips.”
“I told you I’m not thirsty.” Maybe Peter wasn’t hearing him either. Maybe Tai was the problem. Maybe he had a voice no one could hear.
“You’re in some kind of shock right now. A little blood will help.”
No, it wouldn’t. He shook his head and stayed on the floor.
“You called me for help, and I’m trying to help you. Now get up and go drink two sips.”
That was a fair point. Tai got up and followed Peter’s instructions while the melody he’d created for himself and Claire rang through his heart, too loud and all wrong, transposed to a minor key.
He broke the seal on a blood bag from his fridge and took a long sip. The confusion of grief cleared. He took a slow, testing breath, and his lungs filled, the iron band fallen from around his chest. Two sips, Peter had said. He took another, and he remembered other things he was supposed to do.
“Peter.”
A quiet sigh came over the connection. “Did you do what I said?”
“Yeah. I’m okay.” He returned to the den and scooped up three blankets from the backs of the couch and his favorite chair. He bundled up in the chair and drew his knees to his chest. He let himself shiver. “I’ve got three blankets around me. I remembered.”
“Good, good. You had me worried for a minute.”
“Sorry.”
“Now what’s this about Claire and being bloodbound?”
Tai told him everything, even the intimate moment he’d nearly placed his bite on Claire’s neck, even the times since that he’d wanted to but restrained himself so that she never guessed. Heleft out only the detail of Claire’s vigilantism, ofhowthey’d ended up arguing about becoming bloodbound tonight.
“If I could,” he finished, “I’d have done it by now, but I’ll never let myself do it. She said she understood, Peter. But all this time she’s been waiting for me to be ‘ready.’ She knows I can’t defeat this with willpower, but she still trusts me to bite without hurting her. It doesn’t make sense.”
“And when you said no again tonight…”
“She said it all over again—that I’d be ready someday. And this time, when I said no, she said she needs it, or she can’t be sure I won’t leave her.”
Tai shut his eyes against the truth, but he could still see her, the wound at her collarbone, smudged green eyeshadow, emptiness filling her eyes as he refused to let it go this time, her insistence that he give what he didn’t have.
He opened his eyes. There was no hiding from this. He’d said their relationship wasn’t fixable. He didn’t want it to be true, but he couldn’t see any other way right now.
“I can’t give her what she needs, and my word isn’t enough. I’m not enough.”
“I don’t believe that,” Peter said. “You’ll figure this out, the two of you. You belong together; it’s plain as day.”
“I can’t ask her to ignore her fear, Peter. And I can’t do the one thing she needs to feel safe.”
“You know there are bloodbound bloodfiends, right?”
Tai’s thoughts froze even as his body stood up from the bundle of blankets, let them fall, and stalked to the table where his phone lay. He stared down at it as if he could catch a glimpse of Peter across town, force eye contact, force him to take back what had to be a rumor, a legend.
“No.” Tai shivered. Still needed the blankets, couldn’t move, could only stare at his phone. “No, that isn’t possible.”
“It is. Bloodfiends don’t harm their eternal. They place the bite safely just as any other vampire does.”
“It isn’t possible.”
“Do you crave vampire blood?”
