“Yes, you are,” Ezra nodded.

I didn’t want to look over at Jack, but I could feel him staring at me. I still had my arm around Milo, and I held onto him tighter, this time for my own support.

My father was a vampire. I’d been born with part of that virus inside me, mutating my blood, so I was drawn to vampires. I’d been made to seek them out, and they sought after me, too.

What if that’s all my connection with Jack had ever been? Or Peter? Some byproduct of a virus I’d gotten before I was born. Maybe I’d never really been bonded to either of them, to anyone.

Mae had told me something once, and I hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but now it played over and over in my head. It’d been when one night when I was still mortal, and Mae had taken me out to cheer me up.

“I’m trying to understand your ancestry, because you and Milo are both so unique. I’m wondering if we’ve been looking at this all wrong. Maybe you weren’t meant for Peter. Maybe you were just meant to be a vampire,” Mae said, looking faraway. “We’re just a means to an end for you.”

“Alice?” Leif asked, leaning forward. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah,” I said numbly, and my mouth didn’t want to work. Nothing did.

“Are you sure?” Milo asked. “All the color drained from your face.”

“No, I’m fine. I just… I had a really long night.” I tried to force a smile, but I knew it fell completely flat. I stood up, relieved that my legs didn’t give out under me. “I need to… I need to get some sleep.”

“Do you need help?” Ezra asked, his brow furrowed with concern.

“Nope.” I shook my head. “No. I’m absolutely…” I trailed off. I didn’t know what I was.

Milo got up and tried to help me, but I refused to let him. He needed to stay and talk to Leif and sort things out. I couldn’t sort anything out anymore. My brain barely worked.

It was after one in the afternoon, and I had yet to sleep. Last night had been the longest night of my life. I remembered feeling my best friend dying, we’d been attacked by vampire hunters, my boyfriend broke up with me, and I found out my dad was a vampire. It was all a bit much.

I staggered upstairs to the bedroom I shared with Jack, but I couldn’t let myself think about him, or wonder where I’d sleep tomorrow. I couldn’t even change out of my clothes. I just collapsed on the bed. As I drifted off, I just kept hearing Mae’s words playing in my head over and over again.

“We’re just a means to an end for you.”

22

Wiping the steam from the mirror, I was surprised by how normal my reflection looked. I felt like I’d been in a train wreck, even after a night’s sleep and a hot shower, but I looked just like I always did.

The breakup hurt even worse. I’d expected it to dull, the way the shock about Leif had, but it didn’t. It throbbed painfully inside me, like a festering wound. I hadn’t cried yet today, but I suspected that last night had completely dried me out of tears for a while.

I couldn’t get Mae out of my head. What if she had been right? What if I’d just been meant to be a vampire? If I’d never been meant for Jack or Peter, had I ever really loved either of them?

I felt like throwing up every time I even thought about the fight with Jack last night, and my life looked like a giant vortex without him. That desperation for him, because of him, that had to happen because I loved him. I really and truly loved him. That couldn’t just be a biological response ingrained in me so I’d become a vampire. Could it?

Not that it mattered anymore how much I loved Jack or not. He’d broken up with me.

“Alice,” Jack opened the bathroom door without knocking.

“Jack!” I yelled. I had a towel wrapped around me, but I hadn’t gotten dressed yet. When he walked in, I jumped and pulled the towel tighter.

“What?” Jack asked, surprised by my attempts at modesty. “It’s not like I haven’t seen you naked before.”

“Yeah, well, you dumped me,” I reminded him. “You don’t get to see me naked anymore.”

“You’re in my bathroom,” he countered.

“You still don’t get to see me naked. Now will you get out so I can get dressed?”

He left the bathroom without further protests, and as soon as he shut the door behind him, I leaned against the bathroom sink and tried to catch my breath. I swallowed hard and told myself I could do this.

“So, Alice, I just…” Jack said from the other side of the bathroom door. “I wanted to talk.”

I got dressed in a hurry because I wasn’t sure how long he would wait. He tended to get impatient, and maybe what he wanted to talk about was something good. Like he realized how unfair he was being last night. Sure, I had lied to him, but it wasn’t that big of a thing.

With my hair still damp, I stepped out of the bathroom. Jack stood by the end of his bed with his arms crossed over his chest, and he didn’t really look at me when I came out.

Being close to him normally filled me with a warm, fluttery feeling. Not like butterflies, either. It happened after I’d turned into a vampire, after we had a blood bond. I could feel him, like a tether attached my heart to his. Without any effort on my part, my body always naturally tilted to his. My blood had become magnetized to him.

But not now. I only felt an ache, a dark cloud growing inside me, overshadowing our bond. A vice gripped my heart, clenching it too tightly for me to feel the invisible tether that held us together.