Page 143 of Light the Fire

Rix, Zane and I took several steps back, giving her more than enough space, all of us muttering curses and shoving our fingers into our hair.

That wasn’t what we meant.

But … of course she would mistake the hungry look in our eyes for a hunger of another kind. For the craving of her blood, not her body, not her affection.

Fuck. How could we have been so stupid?

The purple blade trembled slightly in her hand, catching a ray of morning sunlight and casting a rainbow onto the wall. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she whispered, swallowing again.

Slowly, cautiously, as if approaching an injured animal, I held out my hands and stepped toward her, stopping when she sucked in a breath and lifted the blade. “And we don’t want to hurt you, Angel. Never. Ever. When we said we werehungry,it wasn’t … it wasn’t in an addiction kind of way. We’re hungry for you.”

Her eyes bugged out, and not in a good way.

“I mean, we want your body. Your affection. We want to bury our faces between your legs and hear your cries of pleasure. We don’t want your blood. We’ve gotten through that.” I smiled and offered a small shrug, hoping to convey that we meant her no harm. But she didn’t seem entirely convinced. “We want you but not in the savage kind of way that you saw before.”

Scratching my chest but then wincing when that scratch opened up a few fresh scabs, I bent my head and glanced away. Even though I was out of my fucking mind when the addiction took over and the beast was ruling my consciousness, my subconscious saw the raw fear in her eyes as she stared at us from the water.

She’d cut herself somehow and brought her blood onto the boat. Zane had knocked out Rix and I when we first arrived on the boat, then knocked out himself, and we’d all still been unconscious. We must have just started to rouse, the pain erupting inside of us like angry volcanoes when she arrived. Our screams propelling her forward out of concern.

We didn’t hear her. But we smelled her. The delicious metallic scent of fresh blood. And it was at that moment that I understood what Zane had been trying to keep us from for all of these years. What he’d been loath to tell us.

I was in a cage in my mind, watching in horror, gripping the bars until my knuckles ached as the beast frothed at the mouth, growled and snarled, and tried to tear open the door of the boat cabin.

It had been Rix who’d finally succeeded in opening the door. Then the three of us poured out, only to watch the naked figure of our source swim just beneath the surface.

The beast had wanted to jump in after her, but I screamed at it from my cage to leave her alone.

I sat locked in that cage in my mind for five days, watching as the beast tried to scratch out my eyes from the excruciating agony of the withdrawal. My entire body buzzed like I was crawling with bees, only these bees were made of fire and their stingers were hot pokers. Everything inside of me burned with the intensity of a thousand suns. My skin was being held over an open flame, peeling and crackling, curling and splitting. My eyes were like two burning orbs hotter than the flames of hell, and I wanted to get them out of my skull and relieve the pressure of my swelling, inflamed brain that was pushing on my eyes from behind.

I knew it was all happening, but there was nothing I could do to stop it.

The beast reacted how he saw fit, no matter how much I pleaded with him not to. No matter how much I told him that the fire wasn’t real. That the burning wasn’t real. It was all just a manifestation of the withdrawal. But he ignored me. I wasn’t even sure he could hear me.

On the fifth day, when the beast got weak, I was able to break the lock on my cage and take charge of my consciousness once more.

But I avoided looking at myself in the mirror or my reflection on the water. The bloody, scabbed-over scratches on my arms and legs were enough to suggest how the rest of me must look. I didn’t need to inspect my face.

Besides, I saw my brothers’ faces and chests and the damage their beasts had done. I knew I probably looked exactly the same.

I cast a quick glance at Zane and Rix. They seemed as defeated and worried as I felt. How could we convince her we were not a threat? That we’d banished our beasts, conquered our addiction, that our craving for her was of a different kind. A romantic, affectionate, soul-mate kind. Because we all agreed, she was our fucking soul mate. I didn’t necessarily believe in fate, and certainly not magic. I was a man of science. A man of logic. A man of facts.

Sexual attraction was rooted in our genetic makeup. The need to procreate and continue on our species, on our bloodline remained a primal instinct almost as basic as breathing.

If you found someone attractive with good genes, you became aroused, which ultimately culminated in mating and before the Stratera virus, the creation of human life.

But what I felt for Haina defied everything I thought I knew. Because when I was around her, when her hand was in mine, when our bodies connected, it was pure magic. I could feel it right down to my toes. It was so much deeper than sexual attraction. So much deeper than the animal need to mate.

Haina was my everything. She was steel wrapped in softness, brilliance shrouded in innocence. A tender heart protected by an impenetrable shell made up of years of neglect and cruelty. She owned every square inch of my heart. Without her, I was nothing. And I knew my brothers would say the same thing.

And miraculously, her heart seemed big enough for all of us. For me, Rix, Zane and Zane’s storm cloud. He still didn’t entirely trust her, and we knew that at some point that would become a problem between the two of them, but that was his cross to bear, not mine. I trusted Haina. She’d given me no reason not to, and I was tired of living my life suspicious of everyone, believing that everyone and everything was a potential threat.

That was no way to live.

Not peacefully, anyway.

Spreading my palms, I lifted my head and pinned my eyes on her. God, I loved staring into those vibrant blue orbs. So full of life, love and brilliance. Like deep pools of azure, I would gladly get lost in for eternity.

“Go take a walk. Come back in an hour,” I said softly. “Give us time to clean ourselves up, have some food and just get reoriented with things. Okay? When you return, hopefully, we don’t look as scary as I’m sure we do right now.” My smile was grim because again, her expression didn’t make it seem like she was convinced at all. She seemed like she was preparing to flee, backing away until she knew we couldn’t reach her and then making a run for it into the woods. “Does that sound good?”

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