Page 26 of Snowed in with the Vampire Prince

“I thought you wanted to talk later.”

I felt a surge of irritation, but it was all mixed up in my fear. He was acting so weird. Then it clicked.

“Wait a damn second.” I stopped in my tracks. “Are you one of those guys who gets all bouncy with someone and then takes off after? Am I even going to get a dear-John letter from you, or are you just going to leave?”

He rounded on me, a look of outrage on his face. “You have got to be kidding me if you think that’s anything remotely close to what’s going on in my head right now!”

“I have no idea what’s going on inside your head since you shut me out.”

“Oh, you’re one to talk.” He laughed, but it sounded more like broken glass. “You shut me out first.”

“I didn’t do that on purpose,” I retorted, which was only technically true. I hadn’t slammed a wall down over my thoughts on purpose, but I had been plenty grateful when it had happened accidentally.

“Okay, then explain to me what happened,” he demanded, a note of bewilderment creeping into his voice. “Please. I was trying to talk about our future, and you shut down.”

He had promised to love me for an eternity. That’s what happened. He had promised me that, and for a split second, I had almost—almost—believed him.

Then I remembered the stricken, broken expression on my father’s face on the night my mother had left us. Everyone leaves eventually, and I wasn’t going to be one of those suckers who let their heart get torn right out of their chest.

“I think that maybe we’re moving too fast,” I told him, forcing the words out around the hot lump of emotion that had formed in my throat.

The words hung between us, strangely final.

“You think this was a mistake,” Pierce stated. His face was like a mask, and his mind felt like it was behind the door of an impenetrable bank vault.

I wanted to say something to contradict him. But the words wouldn’t come. They were drowned out by the sudden, crushing fear I felt. It would be better to lose him now when this was all so new than to lose him later after I had built a whole life with him. When losing him might have the ability to break me.

But why did it already feel like I was shattering into pieces? Why did it feel like I would never be able to breathe quite right ever again?

“After I get you home, I will leave, then,” Pierce told me, his voice growing colder with each word. His face was like a rigid stone mask and his body had gone utterly, unnaturally, still. “I will leave you be if that’s your wish. The blood bond will always exist between us, but I will close my mind to it. I will trouble you no longer.”

His words were everything I was afraid of. Everyone leaves.

I gazed at him in dumb shock, and I don’t know what was written all over my face except that I felt a numb wash of horror.

As he looked at me, I felt some of the walls around his mind collapse. I felt the hot edges of his pain. The pain I had caused him. His cold expression began to thaw as he studied me. “James…”

“Maybe you should listen to the boy,” said a blond man who stepped out of the snow-coated trees beside us. He had a crossbow aimed right at Pierce’s chest.

He was tall and muscular, with a fan of stubble across his rugged face and piercing blue eyes. He was barefoot, wearing a pair of jeans and nothing else. He was seemingly oblivious to the cold, even though I could see my breath in front of my face. I couldn’t deny that he was very good-looking in a cowboyish sort of way, even though I tried not to notice.

The Alpha wolf in human form, no doubt.

“You need to leave,” Pierce growled, staring the blond man down. “Leave now, and I’ll allow you to walk away with your life. James stays with me.”

Some of the walls between us had fallen. I caught from Pierce’s mind that he was belatedly realizing, and cursing himself for it, that he could smell the others somewhere very nearby, even if he couldn’t see them. They were probably hiding in the trees all around us.

Get ready to run, Pierce told me, whispering the thought into my mind.

If you think I’m leaving you, you’re out of your goddamn mind, I shot back.

I felt his surge of frustration, which told me he heard me just fine. Then, without warning, he leapt into the air, clearly planning to tackle the Alpha to the ground. He was airborne for about a heartbeat before he smashed into an invisible wall about five feet in front of him. The sound it made echoed through the forest, and I felt Pierce’s pain roll over me like a wave of darkness.

“It’s a barrier spell,” the Alpha explained, looking down at Pierce. “A warlock joined our pack a few months ago. He’s been quite useful. We don’t want war with the vampires either. We only want—” He broke off, looking up at me. His expression softened fractionally. “James, right?”

“No!” Pierce yelled, vamp-speeding from one end of his prison to the other, banging on the invisible walls that held him, searching frantically for a weakness in the spell that contained him and finding none. “James, run!”

“If you run, we’ll kill him,” the Alpha told me. It was a simple statement of an ugly fact. “If you care what happens to the vampire, you will cooperate.”

---