Page 61 of Protecting His Vampire Mate

Strangely, I found that I wanted to talk about it with Tobias.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It feels like I’m this totally different person now. I don’t even remember what seemed important to me… before.”

I abruptly felt like I was saying this totally wrong, because it was one of the biggest truths about me now, but one that I had barely even really processed. I hadn’t had time to figure out how to word it. But I wanted to share it with him. I wanted him to know me.

I tried again, adding, “Whoever I was before Giles found me, I feel like I’ve lost that guy. I’m someone different now. I have his memories and he’s still me, sort of, but I’m not him anymore.”

“That makes sense,” Tobias murmured. “And you are someone different now, even if you never wanted to be. You’ve been dealing with this all alone.”

“I wanted to be alone,” I reminded him.

“Right. Well, the wraith is gone now. You destroyed it.”

I shuddered at the memory. It had been an evil creature. It had ruined lives. It had killed whole families. Lisa and her daughter had been lucky to escape. If you could call it that. And the wraith had tried to kill me. It had tried to kill Tobias. And it would have killed the hunters. And probably anyone else who ever moved into the house too.

It had to die. And I didn’t feel bad that it was gone. But the fact that I had destroyed it with my own hands…

It was awful.

“I don’t think I can make a career out of hunting the supernatural, after all,” I admitted. “I—um—I didn’t like it. Killing the wraith, I mean.”

Tobias’s expression grew more tender as he considered me. “It probably doesn’t feel like it now, but you protected everyone who might have ever encountered it in the future. You stopped it from doing the same thing to someone else that it did to Lisa and her husband. You got justice for everyone it had ever hurt.”

I nodded. I knew he was right. But still… I had taken its life—or whatever you wanted to call its existence—away from it. And that felt… ugly. It felt wrong. I hadn’t had a choice in the matter, because otherwise it would have killed the hunters. And Tobias. And maybe even me. I couldn’t regret my actions.

But I still didn’t enjoy it.

And all of my pain and hurt was still right there, right where I had left it. Destroying the creature hadn’t offered me even a shred of solace. Which meant that this wasn’t the way forward for me that I had thought it would be.

“Anyway, the wraith is gone. And the hunters have probably already left town,” Tobias said, his tone deceptively neutral. But I wasn’t fooled. His heartbeat had begun to accelerate. He added, “There’s nothing left here for them to hunt.”

“I gave you my blood in front of them,” I reminded him. “And I used vamp speed. They’ve probably put two and two together and arrived at blood-sucking creature of the night. They might decide to start hunting me now.”

“They were unconscious at the time. They probably didn’t see much.”

I shrugged, not quite wanting to believe that. I wanted to examine why that was even less. “Yeah, probably not. I guess.”

“So, there’s nothing that’s keeping us here anymore,” Tobias prompted, saying the stuff aloud that I hadn’t wanted to be thinking. “You probably won’t be in any danger. Once you leave town, I mean.”

“I know.”

“I made you a promise,” Tobias said, his body going more tense against me. “And I don’t want to have to keep it. But I will never break a promise to you, Bryan. So, if you need to be alone—if you need me to leave—I’ll go. I don’t want to. But I will.”

“I know,” I repeated, my voice growing thicker.

Did I want that? Did I want him to go?

Though I had no idea what it meant for me yet, so much had changed. Believing that I had lost Tobias forever had put a lot of things into perspective for me. For starters, the awful, wonderful, and absolutely gut-wrenching realization that there was no way in hell I could live without him.

Not that I had to run off and go get married to him or anything crazy like that. But the idea of a world without Tobias in it, a reality in which I would never see Tobias again, where he wouldn’t be there to love me, was a bleak enough world that I couldn’t fathom living in it at all.

And then there was the equally powerful realization that Tobias loved me back.

Me, not the idea of me. Not the person I had left behind, not the person I had once been. But me now—the broken, damaged person that I was today. And it wasn’t due to the fact that his magic had shown him I was his one true love. If that’s all it had been, he wouldn’t have been able to love me so unselfishly.

And he did love me in a selfless way. He had proven that, over and over, hadn’t he?

When I had needed to leave, he had told me he would always be there, but then he had let me go. And he had come to protect me when he knew that I was in danger, but he had offered to leave the moment I asked him to. And when he had realized that the blood bond was forming, the very first thing he’d done, without any hesitation at all, was to tell me. He hadn’t tried using it to his advantage. And now, here he was, even after everything—even in the midst of the closeness and intimacy developing between us—giving me an out.

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