“It will never go away.”
When his reddened his eyes met hers, her heart plummeted into her stomach with a sickening lurch. It was as if he didn’t see her and was caught in some horror she couldn’t begin to contemplate; she had no idea how to free him.
“Killean?” she whispered. She couldn’t lose him; she just couldn’t.
“It’s everywhere,” he said though he still didn’t seem to see her. “It’s on my hands, on my arms, it’s inside me; it’s stained my soul. It won’t stop flowing.”
“We can stop it.” She turned off the water. She wanted to tell him the blood hadn’t stained his soul, but it obviously had. Clasping his cheeks, she forced his dazed eyes to look at her. “Together, we can do anything, Killean.”
Releasing him, she removed the hand towel from its hanger next to the sink and carefully wiped away the blood to expose the flesh he’d peeled away to reveal the muscle and bone beneath. Tears burned her eyes when she saw the extent of the damage he’d inflicted on himself, but she blinked them away. When she finished, she used another towel to cover his hands and the blood still oozing from his wounds.
“No more blood,” she said as she brushed back a strand of hair curling against the corner of his eye. “Killean?”
She ran her finger down the curve of his cheek and across his scar. His eyes closed, and he turned his cheek into her palm before stepping away.
“I’m fine,” he said abruptly.
Self-hatred coiled in his belly when he realized Simone had once again seen him gripped by the strange hallucinations that seemed to be haunting him.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Simone gazedafter Killean’s back when he stepped around her and left the room. She exited the bathroom as he stopped by the battered TV on its wheeled TV stand. He stared at the carpet like its presence there baffled him.
“Killean, what is going on?” she asked.
His gaze dropped to the towel enveloping his hands. He didn’t want to take it off as he wasn’t sure what seeing his blood would do to him. His mind spun as he tried to recall what had driven him into the bathroom earlier.
One second, he was pacing the room with his appetite mounting, and the next he’d felt something warm trickling across his hands. When he looked at them, he discovered blood seeping down his arms and spilling onto the carpet, but no blood stained the carpet now.
However, he’d been convinced the blood was there, and it had propelled him into the bathroom to scrub it from his flesh.None of it was real. It was all another hallucination.
Killean’s lip curled in self-loathing as he tore away the towel. Blood still seeped from some of his self-inflicted wounds, but they were mostly healed. The sight of his blood didn’t send him spiraling into madness, but then he hadn’t been bleeding when the compulsion to wash the blood away gripped him.
“Killean,talkto me.”
He set the towel on the TV stand and turned to face Simone. Worry creased her brow and shone from her eyes. Her distress beat at him through their bond. Her apprehension only made his self-hatred grow; the last thing he wanted was to upset her.
He’d vowed to be the man she deserved, and he was already failing. He owed her an explanation, but he didn’t know how to explain what was happening to him becausehedidn’t know what was happening to him.
“This is the second time I’ve seen you like this,” Simone said.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” he admitted. “It’s the second time I’ve been certain there was blood on my hands I couldn’t wash away. It’s not there, but when I see it, it feels as real as if itisthere.”
He lifted his hands before him, but all he saw were the wounds he’d inflicted on himself. Lowering his hands, Killean met her gaze. “I’m hallucinating it.”
Simone gulped at his admission. He was a vampire on edge and experiencing hallucinations. So much could go wrong with that scenario, and worst of all, it could go wrong withherKillean. “Why?”
“Because I’ve killed innocents. It’s unnatural to me, and I’m trying to stop, or at least I think that’s why. Many vampires who turn Savage choose it for themselves and embrace it, but the Savages Joseph is creating aren’t choosing for themselves and have a harder time with it. Joseph told me some of the hunters fight becoming a Savage so much they sometimes have to starve and set them free a few times before they give in and embrace their new nature.
“We’ve always assumed the Savages Joseph created remained Savage because after a while they stopped caring about killing innocents and lost their morality. And maybe, for many that is true, but I’m beginning to think that part of what keeps a vampire a Savage is if they try to stop killing, they’re driven nearly mad when they deny their hunger.”
And suddenly, the horrible clarity of at least some of what was happening to him hit her. He was going through this because of what he’d done to rescue her. The Savage part of him, the one that craved the pain of others and having it inflicted on himself, didn’t care about the blood it had spilled to free her. However, the vampire, the Defender, themanwas haunted by the lives of the humans he’d taken and desperate to purge the guilt from his body, but he never could.
She had no idea why his anguish over what he’d done only emerged sometimes, and in this way, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was saving him from being trapped in this hideous pit of self-hatred and self-mutilation. He’d saved her, and she would save him too.
“Are they nearly driven mad because they deny their hunger or their urge to kill?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” Killean admitted as he leaned against the wall. “But both times it happened to me, my hunger was almost out of control.”
