MICHAEL

I miss my guitar.

That sounded stupid in my head, and it probably was stupid, but my fingers ached to be holding the weight of it. Music always stilled the noise inside me, made everything seem orderly, logical, not so out of control and terrifying. From the first time I'd picked up an instrument I'd realized that those sounds that other people made, famous people ... those could be mine, mine to control, mine to use to speak without words. And that had been more than magic.

It had been survival.

Now, without my guitar, I felt naked, alone, out of control. But it would be deeply risky to go back to the house to retrieve anything, much less something everybody would see as nonessential. Maybe I could get to the music store where I taught lessons; that was farther uptown, away from where the draug were holed up. Didn't matter if it was closed. A vampire didn't have to seriously worry about things like locked doors and steel screens over windows, and entry restrictions didn't apply to stores.

I still couldn't quite reconcile that. I was a vampire.

I know, it wasn't a revelation, exactly .... I had been a vampire for a while now, and before that, I'd been half vampire, half ghost, trapped in my house, put on hold between life and death. But until today, I hadn't felt so ... wrong. So alien.

So not myself.

Naomi, who had taken more interest in me than the others, had warned me this would happen, that I'd start to feel distance between me and the humanity I'd once had; she'd warned me that living as I did, trying to still be what I'd been, would start to hurt me, and hurt the people I cared about.

And she'd been right. I'd proven that, hadn't I? I'd lost control. I'd bitten Eve.

I'd almost killed her.

The shirt they'd given me to wear, to replace the one soaked with foul water and wet with Eve's blood ... the shirt itched. It felt wrong. I ripped it off over my head and threw it on the floor as I paced. When I looked down, my skin was too white, the veins too blue. I looked like living marble, and I felt as cold as that, too.

And inside, I was shaking. My whole world was shaking. It wasn't just the draug, though we all were afraid of them .... I was afraid of me, of what I was, what I was capable of doing to the people I supposedly loved.

Love. Did I even really know what that meant now? Had I ever really known? What the hell was I doing? What was I thinking, risking her life every time I was around her? I'd thought I had it all under control, handled, fixed, and then ... then all my illusions of being in charge of the monster broke.

I paced, and tried not to think about how good that had felt. I hadn't realized how on guard, how tense, how desperately tight my control had been until I'd been forced to let go.

Something went very still inside me, and I paused in my rambling, because Eve was coming.

I heard her walking toward me in the hall, despite the thick carpets; I could smell Eve's skin, the individual and soft perfume of her.

The door opened and closed behind me. Now I could smell the peach-scented shampoo she'd used, and the soap, and the salty hot blood beneath all of that.

I didn't turn around.

"Where's your shirt?" she asked me.

"It itches," I said. "Doesn't matter. I'm not cold." But I was. Room temperature, except when her skin warmed me up. Cold as the dead. "I'm going to go look for something else."

I turned then, but Eve was blocking my path to the door. My heart didn't beat anymore-not often, anyway-but it still felt like a stab straight into it when I looked at her directly. She was standing there, fearless, chin up, with a white bandage on her neck and a scarf trying to disguise the damage I'd done. That was Eve, all over-hurt, and hiding it. The Goth look had always been armor against her terror of the vampires. The retro polka-dot dress, the shoes, all of it was just another form of armor now. Some kind of shield to hold between the real girl and the world.

And me.

"That's it?" she asked me. "Your shirt itches, and you're going to get another one? That's what you're going with in this conversation, here."

I couldn't look her in the eye. Instead, I sat down on a camp bed and sleeping bag-not mine; mine was a shredded pile of fluff. I fiddled with the shirt in my hands, and pulled it over my head again. It wasn't the clothing that was the problem, anyway. It was me that itched all over, remembering ... remembering what it had felt like to utterly surrender myself to hunger. I hadn't stopped myself. I wouldn't have stopped myself. Drinking her blood had been ... bliss. Heaven. As close as I would ever come to it, now.

I'd thought I understood what being a vampire was all about, until that moment of sheer, red pleasure when I'd grabbed Eve and mindlessly fed. It felt like the floor had broken open under me and all my assumptions, and now I was in free fall, grabbing for a life that was moving away from me at light speed.

If it hadn't been for Claire somehow-using the strength of desperation, I guessed-pulling me off just long enough for some sanity to return, I'd have killed the woman I loved.

The woman standing in front of me right now, waiting for my answer.

"I can't do this," I said. The words felt dull gray in my mouth, like a mouthful of lead, and they landed just as heavily on her. I wasn't watching her face-I couldn't-but I had a vivid mental picture of the suffering in her eyes. And the anger. "Let it alone, Eve."

"You mean, let you alone," she said, and crouched down, perfectly balanced on those ridiculous prim retro heels, to stare me in the face. Her eyes were big and dark and, yes, they were haunted and full of pain, pain I had caused, was causing her now. "Michael, it wasn't your fault, but you hurt me, and we have to talk about this before it gets ... inside us. You know what I mean, don't you?"

I did. And it was already inside us. Inside me, anyway, eating away like acid, burning and sizzling and toxic. "Talk about it," I repeated. "You want to talk about it."

She nodded.

"You want to talk about how I grabbed you and threw you down and took something very personal from you while you screamed and tried to fight me off," I said. "How someone else had to stop me, because I was acting like an animal."

She wasn't a fool, my Eve; she knew what I was saying, and she paled almost to the same color she would have had in her Goth makeup. "Michael, you didn't rape me."

"That's exactly what I did," I said. "You know what Shane calls it? Fang rape."

"Shane's got no idea what he's talking about." The words lacked some force, though, and Eve sounded more than a little shaken. "You just-you weren't in control, Michael."

"So that's a valid excuse now for me, when it isn't for any other guy out there who hurts someone?" I wanted to touch her, but I honestly didn't dare. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out, and finally she just closed it. Her eyes filmed over with tears, but she blinked them away. "It's not an excuse and you know it. It can't be, if we're supposed to be together."

"You were hurt. You weren't in your right mind. That matters, Michael."

I reached out and put my hand on her shoulder-vampire speed, not trying to slow it down. We both felt the wrench as she tried to pull away, before she got control of her instinctive reaction.

It proved my point, and she knew it.

"Eve, you flinch when I touch you," I said. "You pull back. You remember what it was like to have me hurting you, holding you down, not knowing if I was ever going to stop or if I was going to kill you when I was done. Of course it matters. It matters to us both."

"I-" The words died in her mouth before she could speak them and she just stared at me. Because of course I was right. I'd seen it, and she knew that.

"Doesn't matter whether it was my fault or not, whether I was in my right mind or just a sick bastard who got off on it," I said. "I'm a vampire, Eve. And this is what we do. We take people's blood. Sometimes they offer it up, and that's nice, that's really convenient, but sometimes we just take what we want. The fact that it's instinct doesn't excuse it. It all comes out the same in the end: with you getting hurt, maybe killed, even though I love you. Just like they tried to tell us from the beginning. We're a tragedy waiting to happen."

"No!" She lunged forward and tried to put her arms around my neck, but I'm a vampire; grabbing me isn't that easy when I don't want to be grabbed. I moved back just enough and before she could register the fact that I'd done it, I was holding her forearms in my hands. Tightly. She flinched and I felt it shiver all the way through her body, but she didn't try to pull away. "Michael, no, don't do this. I just need time, that's all. It just happened last night. Give me a little space to deal with it and I'll be ..."

"Fine?" I let my eyes go slowly red. I let my fangs come down. "Really. You're going to be fine with me, like this."

Now she did pull back. Hard. And I didn't let her go. Her strength was nothing compared to mine, not here, where I had leverage. "You're trying to scare me, and it's not going to work!"

I let go of one of her arms and used a fingernail to cut the scarf away from her neck. The spots of blood on the pale square of bandage made something in me growl, deep inside, and even though I loathed that beast I also knew I couldn't keep it caged up forever. That was why Morganville had hunting licenses, and allowed vampires to hunt on a carefully regulated basis. The beast was why Amelie allowed some measure of violence in Morganville-because without it, we turned toxic. As I'd turned toxic on Eve.

"Stop," she said. Her voice didn't sound so strong now. "Damn it, you jackass, stop it!"

"Isn't that what you told me last night?" I asked her, and I shook her, hard. "Isn't it? Did I stop, Eve? Did I?"

She twisted free and slapped me across the face. It didn't hurt, but the explosion of sudden warmth on my skin from hers made me blink. I let go of her other arm. She rocked back and then, all of a sudden, something stabbed me. Not in the heart, but off to the side, and the sensation of it sliding in was cold and horrible and yet also burning.

Silver.

I looked down. There was a small silver knife buried in my right side to the hilt. The skin was starting to smolder and burn around it.

Eve was breathing hard now, and there were tears rolling down her face, but she looked tough all the same. Unyielding.

"I can stop you," she said. "I can always stop you if I have to, Michael, damn you. I could have put that in your heart because you weren't ready for it, because you'll always be vulnerable to me even if you don't want to be. So we're even. Because I'll always be that way to you, too. That's called trust. It's called love." She grabbed the knife and pulled it swiftly out, and I choked and collapsed sideways on the sleeping bag. God, it hurt. Badly. I shuddered and writhed as the silver's influence continued to punish me, but it wasn't a fatal wound-not even close. She'd picked her spot, and the duration of the blow, very well. And in a weird way, I loved the pain. I needed it.

I deserved it.

"You hear me, Michael? Don't even try to think you're the only badass in this room. I will not let you do that to me again, ever, so you can stop obsessing about how damn powerful you are and how weak I am. I am not weak. Screw you for even thinking it. Get over yourself, your vampire angst, and your power trip."

She pushed up to her feet, staring at me for a moment, then walked away with the silver knife glinting in her hand.

I pulled in just enough breath to gasp, in genuine surprise, "Is it crazy right now to say I love you?"

She didn't even pause. "Given that I just stabbed you? Seems a little weird, yeah."

"I do," I said, and put my head down again. "God, Eve. I do so much it's killing me. I just don't want it to kill you, too."

I watched her walk away, slow and steady steps, a woman totally in control of herself and what she was feeling.

I just didn't know what that was, but I was afraid ... afraid that it wasn't love anymore.

I collapsed on my back and closed my eyes, and tried to heal.

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