Just then, a man in a suit walks into the room and towers over the boy. Then smiles. “Use the pain, Hudson. It will make you stronger.”
The child turns to look at the man, and a chill suddenly slides down my spine. The hatred in his gaze should belong to someone much older, and it has my breath catching in my throat. The boy narrows his eyes on his father, and everything goes still—the man, the child, the very air they breathe. And then everything explodes into particles. The table. The chairs. The rug. Everything but the man, whose smile grows wider.
“Fantastic. I’ll tell your mother to get you a puppy tomorrow.” And then he turns and leaves the room, leaving the boy on the hardwood floor, with the carpet disintegrated now, the splinters cutting into his knees.
He could have destroyed his father as easily as the chairs, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He wouldn’t be what his father wanted him to be. A killer.
And then the memory fades away as easily as it came.
Oh my God. “Hudson—”
“Stop,” he tells me so matter-of-factly that I almost start to doubt what I just saw. At least until he says, “I don’t have many childhood memories, at least not ones that a human would understand, so my pickings were fairly slim. But it only seemed fair that I show you something after all the ones that you’ve shown me. I mean, you’ve seen it before, but you don’t remember, so…”
“You showed me this before?” I ask him as I surreptitiously wipe the tears off my cheeks.
He laughs, but there’s no humor in the sound. “I showed you everything before.”
The emptiness in those words echoes inside me, and I close my eyes, unsure of what to say to him. Unsure, even, if I can believe him, though I find myself wanting to. Badly.
“Hudson—”
“You’re exhausted, Grace,” he tells me as he stands up, and I would swear that I felt his hand brush across my hair. “Sleep now.”
There’s so much I want to say to him, words on the tip of my tongue that I suddenly don’t know how to voice. So I do what he says. I close my eyes and let myself drift away.
But right before sleep claims me, I find a way to say at least one of the things that I want to. “You know I don’t want you to die, right?”
Hudson freezes, then sighs wearily. “I know, Grace.”
“But I can’t let Jaxon die, either,” I tell him. “I can’t.”
“I know that, too.”
“Please don’t make me choose.” My eyes are closing, and I’m starting to drift off.
But I still hear him when he says, “I’ll never make you choose, Grace. How could I when I know that you’d never choose me?”
69
To Bite or
Not to Bite
“Oh my God, Grace! Get up!” Macy’s squeals echo through our dorm room before light has even begun to filter through our window.
“Not yet,” I groan, rolling over and burying my head under my pillow for the second time in eight hours. “Still dark.”
I burrow deeper into my blankets, start to fall back into a dream about a little blue-eyed boy and his horse, when Macy shakes me. “I’m serious! You need to get up.”
“Make her go away,” Hudson groans from what sounds like the floor next to my bed.
Macy’s phone rings, and she gives up trying to get me awake while she takes the call.
I peek over the edge of my bed and, sure enough, he’s sprawled on the floor. He, too, buries his head under a pillow—one of my hot-pink pillows, to be exact.
“Don’t judge me,” he complains. “It’s slim pickings in this room.”
I smile. “Yeah, but I’ve got to say, hot pink might just be your color.”
“You know I bite, right?” he growls as he pulls the pillow tight around his head.
“Yes, because I’m so scared you’re going to bite me.” I roll my eyes. “While you’re—you know—in my head.”
He doesn’t answer, and I’m just about to congratulate myself for winning this round when I feel his fangs scraping gently down my neck. They don’t stop until they get to my pulse point, and then they hover there for one second, two.
Unexpected heat races through me at the familiarity of his touch, followed closely by an icy blast of panic—because he’s not Jaxon. “Hey! What are you doing?” I start to push him away, but he’s already gone.
“Showing you that even if I’m in your head, I can still bite you anytime you want me to.”