Bring Me to Life (9 page)

No.

She wasn’t going to torture him. They had a week together before he was gone again, and this time she didn’t think she’d get another chance to make things right with him. They’d loved each other deeply, and she couldn’t let it go to waste. She had a lifetime to make up for, and Vincent had given his life for her.

She shifted again and moved off him and to the other side of the bed.

His hand paused in mid stroke before it dropped to his side. His usual liquid voice was gravelly. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t,” she whispered. “We only have a week. I don’t want to make any more mistakes to regret.”

Vincent studied her face before he slowly nodded. “We have a vampire to slay.”

Her face crumpled, but when he reached for her, she jerked back. “I’m…” She stopped herself from apologizing. “I’ll be okay.”

“Will you?” he demanded.

She scooted closer and then hesitantly reached up and traced her index finger along the line on his scarred face. “I have to be. This really great guy gave up his life for me even though he thought I betrayed him. It would be kind of shitty if I screwed up my life after that, don’t you think?”

“Don’t force yourself to accept this. You were scarred just as deeply.” The muscles under his eye twitched. “And I was bastard enough to add to it.”

She winced. “Um, yeah, about that…don’t let it eat you. I didn’t know you—” She didn’t finish saying he hadn’t trusted her. Very softly she said, “I didn’t kill you. That’s what has to matter, right?”

*

A flood of emotion he realized had never really left him rushed to the surface, but he wasn’t sure he had the right to feel it anymore. She’d loved him and believed in him past the end. He’d given her distrust in return. Then he realized what he felt didn’t matter anyway. They could work everything out until they were back to the point right before she’d left him that afternoon, and it still wouldn’t matter. He was dead. She wasn’t. He’d go back to what he was before he’d been sent here. She’d…move on. His face twisted, and he got up from the bed and stalked across the room.

“It does matter, sunshine, more than you can ever know.” He said the words for her benefit alone. It wouldn’t make his existence better. It made it worse. She’d finally get over him and move on with her life. She’d find someone else to love her, someone better, someone who deserved her faith and dedication. She’d probably have a kid or two. He was no more. He’d take what he’d done with her love into Hell with him.

“Vincent?”

He allowed the sound of her voice to soothe him in ways nothing else could before, or since. He turned to look at her.

Her eyes were wide. “Why are you angry?”

He shook his head and willed the anger back as best he could. He forced the sides of his mouth up. “I’m not. How can I be angry when I know the truth?”

She had a lost expression on her face, almost hopeless. “Because we can’t fix this.”

He was back across the room and next to her in a heartbeat. He sat down next to her and grabbed onto her chin so she had to look at him. “You’re going to survive this. I’ll find a way to kill the vampire, and then you’re going to move on with your life. You will find happiness again.”

Her face twisted and she jerked out of his grip. “You have no right to tell me what to do with my life. You’re dead.”

He clenched his teeth. “Yeah, I got that memo, but there is no reason for you to continue on this destructive path.”

“Isn’t there?” she demanded as she stalked along the side of the bed. “From where I’m standing it’s the exact thing I need to be doing. After everything I’ve done I sure as hell won’t find those pearly gates, but I can kill demons. I don’t think your boss is going to throw that away.”

He stared at her in horror and said the first stupid thing that popped into his mouth. “I believed the worst in you.”

“I wasn’t strong enough to get past being enthralled for you,” she countered.

“Goddamn it, Bryna! The objective here is to keep you alive,” he yelled.

She cringed back. Then her back snapped straight. “What’s the point? Without you my life goes to shit.”

“The point is that you’ll be alive!” He dragged a hand through his dark hair.

She knotted her hands into fists. “To what? Whore myself for some grand cause or another?”

Vincent hated the stark reality moments more than he hated white walls with gold trim. “You’re not a whore.”

Her brow shot up. “You’re the one who called it last night.”

He’d take a sucker punch gladly before he had to deal with the truths of her life. And the really screwed-up part was he was feeling guilty because he knew beyond anything her life would have been so much better if he’d lived. “Bryna, don’t, please. I was being a bastard, and I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it.”

“But you did,” she said softly. “And apologizing doesn’t change the things I’ve done or the person I’ve become. I’m sorry.”

No!
He wasn’t going to accept this. There had to be a way to get his Bryna back. There just had to be. This couldn’t be where it ended for her, not when she’d been the one to hold on. He was beginning to understand what Felix wanted. There was no Earth Ending Game. Whatever was going to happen with Bryna’s death, the apocalypse wouldn’t be for another few years in her timeline. Felix had picked the point in her life where she was either do or die, and apparently, not even three of the very best had been able to keep her from dying.

He laughed, a low manic sound. Felix was expecting a miracle of love. That somehow, he’d be able to see her again, pull his head out of his ass—which he had—and find some way to give Bryna back her will to live. There was one small problem with this theory. Vincent knew if the situation were reversed, he’d have slit his own throat in an attempt to be with Bryna forever.

“Vincent?” Her voice hitched up in panic.

He walked over to her, hooked his arm around her, and crushed her into him. She stiffened and then molded her perfect little body against him. He dropped his head down to rest against hers. There had to be a way to do this without fucking her up more. It was his job to save her life. Goddamn it. If anyone deserved every ounce of his sweat, blood, and tears, it was Bryna. He’d never been in hell. That was a place on Earth and she was entrenched in it. This had to stop.
Fuck the apocalypse! Fuck Felix!
He was going to find a way to thwart the system and give Bryna the life she should have had all along, even if that meant he had to go back in time and prevent her from ever meeting him.

*

“Vincent?” Bryna whispered. He was shaking. The rage in him came off in waves. If his arm went any tighter around her, she’d suffocate. “Vincent,” she whispered again.

A trembling hand stroked down her hair. “I’ll find a way to fix this.”

“You can’t. Let’s just focus on the vampire and use the time we have left to properly say goodbye.” But she didn’t want to say goodbye to him. He was supposed to be with her. She’d forgive him of anything if she could just be with him. Their relationship had never been perfect. There had always been bumps and hiccups, but everything seemed surmountable as long as she had him to anchor her.

“I’m not killing it,” he gritted out.

Whoa.
She pulled back and searched his face. “What do you mean you’re not killing it?”

His jaw flexed as he wiped at his eyes. He gave her one of those penetrating looks that made her feel as if he could see right into her soul.

“The second it’s dead, I’m gone. Felix was clear. You have to live, and that’s not going to happen if I have to go.”

This couldn’t be right. She had no idea what he was talking about. “It?”

“The vampire,” he said between clenched teeth. “Fuck ’em. If the higher-ups cared so damn much about them, they’d have never let you get this far.”

He was doing it again. Whenever something was wrong in her life, he went nuts and did something to get himself in trouble. Only, this time it was more than an afternoon in jail listening to a lecture from Sheriff Riley. She was sure if he didn’t do what they were keeping him for, he’d end up someplace she wouldn’t be able to live with. That was bad and needed to be avoided. “Thank you, Vincent, but you need to think with your brain on this one. This isn’t about us.”

“You’re right,” he bit out. “It’s about you and what those assholes let happen. If they wanted to save your life, they would have sent me back to a point you were still savable.” His tirade faded off as he stared at her. He swallowed hard and looked away from her.

She wrapped her arms around her stomach. Okay. Yeah, she’d already known she wasn’t exactly on a trajectory to live to be eighty-five—or thirty-five at this point. “We can’t let Draven—” Her eyes went huge. Holy hell. She’d been so wrapped up in herself she hadn’t made the correlation earlier. “Draven? He tried to make me go with him last night. He was at the book store.”

*

Vincent scrubbed a hand over his face as he started pacing. That bastard hadn’t killed her the night he died, and he’d let her go last night? True, a vampire didn’t tend to make a public scene, but they had their own ways of finding out who were pivotal players in who controlled the world. He thought about what he’d seen in those files. It wasn’t just Bryna dying, but other defenders. All of the Argent brothers had been pulled out just before they’d went some place not even Felix would be able to harass them. There was that demon who always pulled Bryna into Oblivion right after Draven’s death.

“I can hear you thinking,” she said. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and her brow quirked up in that adorable way she had when she was irritated with him.

A smile touched his mouth. “There is more to this than I can easily see. Draven killed me. Now he’s mixed up in this? What did he say to you?”

She winced and moved a pace back. “He said Wraith was going to kill me.”

He got the disturbed feeling Draven’s warning had been sincere. It didn’t matter what time a vampire came from, they knew him as a bringer of death.

She was starting to get concerned about Vincent’s mental status. Considering where hers was at, that was saying a whole lot. “Vincent, um, you’re shaking the room again.”

“He’s fucking trying to use you to kill me off,” he said in an almost calm tone as the shaking stopped.

She blinked a few times, and then her brow furrowed in confusion. “I don’t get it.”

He laughed. “It makes perfect sense. He thought he was killing me, not some idiot teenager without half a clue about what was happening to him and his girlfriend.”

This was freaky weird. Not that Vincent was freaking out about a vampire she vaguely remembered. Or that he was standing in front of her with a gigantic slash down the center of his face proving that he’d been killed ten years ago. But that she wasn’t feeling nearly as frantic as she had since that night. She knew her new calm was going to last for the exact amount of time she had Vincent with her. Maybe she could use that to springboard her life into something Vincent could be proud of, but he was confusing her again. “Still don’t get it, sorry.”

He started his normal prowl around the room when he was trying to work something out in his head. “This is so fucking rich.” He let out a short bark of a laugh. “He thought he was getting rid of me, and he’s the motherfucker who created me.”

“Okay,” she said as she moved in front of him. “The redhead isn’t getting it.”

He looked down at her; a wide smile curved his sensuous mouth. He captured her face and kissed her—a long, languid kiss that left her buttery, shivery, and wet. She made a sound of indignant protest when he pulled back and started pacing again. “I just have to figure out how you’re tied into end times.”

“Vincent!” she snapped.

He stopped pacing and turned to smile at her. “Sorry, but every few decades a vampire lord crops up who tries to bring about the end of the world, but I think I’ve figured this bastard out before he’s gathered himself an army of the undead. That always makes things more difficult.”

“Decades? Vincent, you’ve been dead for only one decade.” Oh boy. This wasn’t good. How was she going to handle a crazy dead guy who just happened to be the only man in the universe she’d ever be able to love?

“Food,” he said and went over to her backpack and started pulling out her clothes. He made faces as he looked at the items large enough to fit him.

“What are you doing?”

“You need to eat, and you’re not wearing that when I take you to dinner.” His eyes moved over her with a searing heat.

“Whoa,” she pulled back when he went to kiss her again. “Not that I don’t like seeing you acting like, you—but you were just ready to tear something apart.”

“Yes,” he confirmed. “I am. I am going to kill that son of a bitch, just as soon as I figure out how to do it without fucking you up more.”

She sat on the corner of the bed and smiled when he handed her skintight black jeans that rode low on her hips and a T-shirt with holes ripped in just the right places that was so tiny it left almost nothing to the imagination.

“Wear those,” he said with a seductive timbre.

“I’m not sure sex is the best of ideas,” she said, even as she stood up to change her clothes into something she knew turned him on.

“You offered,” he pointed out with an arching of his brow.

She cringed as she turned around to slide off the pair of his old sweat pants she used as a self-soothing tactic and pulled on her jeans. “Well, yeah, but that was before—” No good. Whatever excuse she could come up with was just going to sound bad all around.

“Before it would mean something to you instead of a way not to have to deal with an idiot in bastard mode?” he supplied in a helpful tone.

“Something like that,” she mumbled and turned around to face him. “Vincent, not that I wouldn’t love just one more night with you—”

He pressed a finger to her lips. His face was more serious than she’d expected to see. “But that’s what you get, sunshine. No one else gets that one more time to make love, to say I love you, and that last chance to say goodbye. You might want to deny yourself, but I’m not that noble. I want it and I’ll figure out how to get it.”