Page 46 of Protecting His Vampire Mate

Tobias glanced down at our joined hands and swallowed hard. “You’re not mad?”

I shook my head, though a lump burned in my throat. “I’m not mad at all.”

And I wasn’t. If anything, I found myself awed by what he had just done with his magic. And I also found that, strangely enough, I was completely and utterly unsurprised by it. Of course he had helped Lisa. Because she had needed it. Tobias helped people who needed it. That was just who he was.

It wasn’t lost on me that Tobias could have done that for me, too. And maybe it was hypocritical of me to think it was okay for him to do that for her and not for me, but the circumstances were very different. Lisa hadn’t hurt anyone.

Tobias clearly had it within his power to take my memories away, which would have benefited him greatly. Because without the horror of knowing what I had done, I would have jumped into a life with him so fast it wasn’t even funny. But he hadn’t because he knew I didn’t want him to. He chose my needs over his wants.

That wasn’t lost on me, either.

Tobias swallowed hard. And when I glanced over at him, I found, to my horror, that his eyes were wet. He dragged in a shaky breath that broke around something that sounded far too much like a sob. It was an awful sound.

“Tobias, what the hell?”

“I’m sorry,” he replied thickly, clearly fighting to keep his composure. “I usually just show up and put these things down. I don’t talk to the survivors. Other witches in the coven handle that stuff.” He paused for a long moment, his jaw clenched so hard that a muscle jumped in his cheek. Then he said, “This reminds me of what happened to my parents.”

Oh.

This entire time, Tobias had been the strong one for me. And now, abruptly, it was perfectly clear that he needed me to be strong for him. Not at some nebulous point in the future, but now. If you’d told me a week ago that I’d be right here, I would have said that the best thing I could do was run the other way. But now that we were actually here, I didn’t want to run. In fact, it was hardly even a choice. He needed me. And that was all I needed to know.

“You can tell me.”

“I’ve already dropped way too much of my garbage on you,” Tobias replied, shaking his head. He looked away from me and I saw that his jaw was clenched again, like he was trying not to lose it. He took another deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’ll be fine in a second. Like I said, I don’t usually do this part—talking with survivors. And it just hit me harder than I thought it would.”

This was just more of him covering up the way he actually felt. And if he really needed to do that, I’d let him. But I didn’t want him to feel like he had to hide himself from me.

I gave his hand a light squeeze. “Tell me what happened. Please, trust me.”

He turned back to me and I saw that his eyes were fully wet. He shook his head and snorted. “I don’t know if it’s because it’s the mate bond, or if it’s just you. But you’re the first person in years I’ve wanted to talk about this with. And I do trust you.”

I didn’t say anything. Somehow, I knew that if I did, it would have stopped him. Instead, I waited, with his hand in mine.

“My mom was a healer. And she was one of the best the coven had seen in generations. She was constantly being called away at all hours to work on this person or that. By the time I was old enough to understand what she was doing and why it mattered, it just seemed normal.”

He paused, then shook his head, as if to clear it.

“She died when Poppy and I were twelve years old. She got called away, like any other day. And she tried to heal some kid who had gotten involved in a bad car accident. And he was hurt really badly. She overtaxed her powers. And… it killed her.” He smiled bitterly. “The boy lived, though.”

The mask he always wore slipped and I saw years of grief and pain flash across his face. “Our dad… he didn’t take it well. And then he decided to betray every single one of our coven’s teachings. He wanted to bring her back.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Oh yes.” Tobias gave a hollow-sounding laugh. “But it’s got a terrible cost. You have to trade a life for a life, for starters. And you’re messing with the deepest, most primal powers of the universe—you’re basically playing God—and if you don’t do it properly, if you get it even a little bit wrong, those powers will take you instead. And that’s what happened to him. He found some mundane criminal. He killed the man, but he didn’t do the spell right. And so it took him, too. And it probably would have destroyed anything living in the whole neighborhood—hell, the whole city—if the coven hadn’t stopped it.”

“Tobias…”

“Poppy and I went to go live with our grandparents. They didn’t talk about what happened to our parents. No one in the coven did. No one talked about what my father had done. And I thought that if I was just—I don’t know, good—then I could make up for all of it. That I could make it right, somehow. It sounds really stupid when I say it now.”

“It doesn’t sound stupid,” I told him softly.

It didn’t. It sounded like a kid who had just experienced a loss anyone—even an adult—would have struggled to understand. And he had tried to cope with that by being… well, by being perfect. By being the golden boy. The one who always supported everyone around him, no matter how badly he was hurting. The one who always came when the coven called him to fight all the things that crawled out of the dark.

Knowing that, I felt more of my defenses against him begin to crumble. I let them go. Because I knew he needed me to. The Tobias I had seen before wasn’t the full story. The Tobias beneath the mask was more emotional, more vulnerable. And I loved that side of him, too. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help the way I wanted to go back in time and stop any of that from having ever happened to him.

“Thank you,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say that would come anywhere near capturing the way I really felt. “I know that was hard for you. Thank you for trusting me.”

Tobias nodded. He gave me a sad smile.

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