When we caught up to him minutes later, it was almost too late.
Trapped between Tristan and a tree, the lone human hunter gasped and struggled to breathe, Tristan's hand at the man's throat cutting off his airway, his rif le forgotten several yards away where he must have dropped it.
Tristan ducked his head, closing the distance between his fangs and the man's throat, smiling in anticipation.
"Tristan, stop!" Dad shouted, forgetting that neither Tristan nor I could be compelled by any older vampire's command due to our mix of Clann and vamp genes.
Tristan ignored him, his fangs burying themselves in the man's neck a half second later.
"Tristan, please," I begged, fear and horror making my own throat tighten up. If he killed this man, he would never forgive himself later. And I would never forgive myself for not stopping it. But how could I stop him? If I tried to yank them apart, Tristan's fangs would rip the man's throat open.
Either my words or the fear behind them made Tristan pause.
Why should I stop? Tristan thought, his fangs still deep within the man's skin. But at least he was no longer gulping down his victim's blood. I'm thirsty, and he's food.
There are other ways to feed, ways that won't hurt anyone. We have more than enough blood for all of us back at the cabin, I answered silently, not wanting to further scare Tristan's victim, who stood paralyzed beneath Tristan's grip. The poor man's eyes were already round with terror because Tristan didn't know how to gaze daze him first to calm him.
But why go all the way back there when this human is right here?
Tristan didn't care about scaring the human, yet he continued to speak to me silently. He hadn't responded to Dad's command to stop, yet he was willing to listen to me. Whether due to my blood, the few memories we now shared because of it, or because some lingering emotion of love had survived the change within him, it seemed our bond was the only thing stopping him from going over the edge.
I had to find a way to use that bond to save him from his instincts. But how?
Because this isn't who you really are, I thought.
But I'm thirsty, his mind snarled at me. And this blood is fresh. How could it be bad?
If only he had all his memories, this would be so much easier to explain. I struggled to find the right words, knowing this human's life depended on what I thought next.
Right now, it seems like what you want. But that's because you don't have all your memories back yet. You will, though, in a few months probably. And when that happens, you'll remember why you would never want to hurt this human or any other. Right now, biting him feels good. But later, the memory of that mistake will haunt you forever. And it's a mistake you can't ever take back once you make it.
That would have been enough of an explanation to make the old Tristan release his captive. But the new Tristan only raised his head a few inches and stared at me over one hunched shoulder, his red lips parted as if even this one small pause in feeding was excruciating to him. Gone was the boy I had loved for so long, replaced by a nearly mindless predator bent on ending someone's life for his own pleasure. He had become everything I feared I might turn into if I made the wrong decisions or lost control for even an instant.
Something rang deep and hollow through me, reverberating off the core of love for Tristan that had always seemed so rock solid inside me and leaving behind a single, long crack. The strange sensation left me shaken inside and out. But I didn't have time to figure it out right now. Something else to deal with some other day.
I had to find some way to convince Tristan not to kill this man. But what? He had no memories of his own to guide him, and obviously the few he'd gotten from my blood weren't helping, either. Neither was trying to reason with him. If not for whatever blood bond we shared, he would have already drained the guy dry. He still could.
And if he killed this human with my dad as a witness, the vampire council would eventually read my dad's memories of it. They would know we had been unable to prevent Tristan from losing control around a human.
I swallowed hard, my pulse beating at the base of my throat hard enough to rock my entire body. Tristan, if you hurt this human, I'll-I'll leave you. It was sheer desperation that made this thought pop into my head, and panic that had me latching on to it as the only threat that might get his attention.
His shoulders jerked up a couple of inches, his shock and hurt knifing through us both. You'd leave me? Over a stranger? But you made me this way!
I nodded and tried to ignore my own pain. This wasn't about me. This was about saving Tristan. You're right, I did turn you. But just because we're different now doesn't mean we have to hurt others. We still have a choice. We don't have to be killers. And if you hurt this human, even if you get away with it, someday when you're back to your old self and remember this moment, it will destroy you. And maybe what we have together, too. You might start to blame me for not finding a way to stop you. You would want me to do whatever it took to keep you from making this mistake.
I could see our future then, how his guilty conscience would tear him apart, how he would grow to hate himself. And me, too, even if he didn't want to, because not only had I turned him but I'd failed to stop him from killing someone.
This moment would destroy us one way or another if I didn't do whatever it took to stop him.
Curiosity kicked in within him. He cocked his head to the side, the human trapped beneath his grip all but forgotten. How are we different now?
You haven't been this way for long. Before last night, you would never have even thought about attacking an innocent person like this.
And before last night, before I became...like this...were we always together?
We were best friends first, years ago as little kids. But I've always loved you. Since the beginning of time, it felt like. I'd give anything to go back in time to when things were so much easier for us.
You're sad. You...don't like me now because I'm different. Different how?
I love you, I thought fiercely, taking a step closer to him. I will always love you. But I do miss the way you used to be. The Tristan I fell in love with, my first best friend, would never hurt someone like this. I purposely remembered the day he'd helped one of my best friends, Michelle, off the high school track at an eighth-grade track meet when shin splints made it nearly impossible for her to walk on her own to the stands after her long-distance run. He hadn't even known her, and it had happened before we'd started dating when his parents were still forbidding him from being friends with me. He hadn't helped Michelle for me. He'd done it because he'd seen a stranger hurting and no one else had stepped up and helped.
He frowned as he watched that memory replay in my mind and tried to adjust his faint concept of himself with that brief glimpse of who he once was. The seconds ticked by, his broad palm still firm beneath his prey's chin as he wrestled with his instincts.
I have no memory of this person you say I used to be, he finally thought. All I remember are moments of the two of us sitting by a stream somewhere and in a mirrored room dancing together. And something about you in a white dress with...wings?
A tear slid down my cheek. I wiped it away as one corner of my lips twitched with the urge to smile. He remembered our dancing together at the Charmers masq ball fundraiser two years ago when we'd first begun to secretly date.
It was a Halloween costume, I silently explained.
Why can't I remember much? His frown deepened as tinges of cold fear trickled from him. I feel like I should be able to remember more, but when I try, it's like getting lost in a fog.
It'll all come back. I promise. I'll help you remember. But until your memory comes back, can you please just trust me and let this man go?
You won't leave me?
I swallowed down the hard lump in my throat and shook my head. We'll figure this out together.
Taking a deep breath, Tristan stepped away from the human, releasing him and moving to my side in a blur even my own eyes struggled to follow. The human started to slump down the bare hardwood tree's trunk in shock. Dad darted forward and caught him before he hit the ground, pulling him to his feet then capturing the man's gaze with his own. Under the thrall of the vampire gaze daze, the man's eyes widened then went blank as Dad began to murmur instructions to him to alter his memory and send him safely home.
If only recovering Tristan's memory could be as easy as making this human forget part of his.
My own knees weak with relief, I slipped an arm around Tristan's waist and slowly led him through the woods back toward the cabin. And tried not to think about how much the sweet, delicious scent of blood on his lips made my stomach clench and my heart race with need.
We spent every waking moment of the next five months training Tristan to control the speed of his ref lexes and movements using tai chi, because it had worked so well for both my dad and me. Dad's theory was that a lot of a f ledgling's control issues came from the fact that our bodies moved even faster than our minds, so instinctual urges to feed kicked in and made us attack before we could even realize what we were doing and make a conscious decision to stop ourselves.
The longer Tristan practiced tai chi, the more I began to see hints of the Tristan I'd loved for so long. His movements became less like a bird's and more f luid, like the human athlete he used to be. As Tristan developed self-control, he also gained something other than his memory loss to focus on, which allowed him to relax and gradually become more independent.
When I wasn't helping Dad train Tristan, I was working on homework. And there was a lot of it. I'd figured Tristan and I could retake our junior year of high school someday after Tristan got his memory back. If we were both going to live forever, what was one year's delay in our education going to matter? But Dad insisted on signing us up for homeschooling via the internet and having me do both Tristan's and my homework so we wouldn't fall behind. Once Tristan's memory returned, the plan was to have him speed-read over everything he'd missed to get caught up.
I think Dad was just trying to keep me busy so I wouldn't worry all the time.
But how could I not? Especially with Tristan's sister, Emily, constantly texting requests for updates on Tristan's progress. At first I thought she was just concerned about her little brother. But lately I'd started to wonder if maybe she wasn't the only one in the Clann who was worried about Tristan.
One early April morning, my cell phone's beep woke me up with an alert for a new text message.
Still half-asleep, I rolled onto my side, grabbed my phone, and cracked one eyelid to read the message before the beeping could wake anyone else.
My mother wants to know when you two will be coming back to Jacksonville.
Why would we return? I texted back.
You have to, Emily's reply read. The Clann needs to be sure he's in control and not a danger to anyone.
I scowled at the screen. As far as I was concerned, we were never going back to Jacksonville. How could we, when Tristan was still more animal than man? I wasn't sure he could even control himself in a crowd full of humans, much less descendants.
Sighing, I propped up on one elbow, looked around and froze.
I was alone in the cabin.
Had Tristan run outside after another hunter? Maybe Dad had been in too much of a hurry chasing after him to wake me? If so, why hadn't I heard anything?
My pulse racing, I jumped to my feet and rushed toward the door. But movement outside the window stopped me. Tristan and Dad were practicing tai chi a few yards from the cabin.
Blowing out a long sigh of relief, I moved closer to the window to watch them, and a sigh of a different kind slipped from my lungs.
In the cold morning air, still predawn gray, Tristan's fiercely determined focus turned each motion into a thing of both beauty and danger, like a fighter in a martial arts movie preparing for a battle. I wrapped my arms around myself and watched him unseen and unheard for once, and in that moment remembered again why I loved him. It wasn't just the way he moved, or the beautiful lines formed by his sculpted body, honed by endless football practices over the years and perfected by vampire blood. It was the look in his eyes, the firm set to his mouth and jaw, that single-minded determination to succeed at whatever he attempted. Just like he always had.
It was a rare glimpse of the old Tristan I knew and loved and had missed every waking day of the past five months.
When he smoothly slid down into a low right lunge in Form 16, I actually shivered. A minute later, as he progressed to Form 18 and his left palm slowly pushed forward as if pressing open an invisible door, my shiver turned into full-on goose bumps down the back of my neck and arms. But this time it wasn't because of the beauty of the moment.
Tristan was about to use magic.
I had time to think Oh, no and rush for the door. By the time I opened it a half second later, a nearby tree had already gone up in a thunderous boom of f lames. The morning's tai chi lesson was definitely over.
Tristan stared at the tree. He glanced down at his hands then up at me, his eyes wide as I ran over to him.
"I... Did I just..." he sputtered.
"It's okay," I said, taking his hands into mine. "You did it with your willpower and that bundle of energy inside you. Can you feel that energy?"
He frowned then slowly nodded.
"Good. Now focus on that energy. Think about keeping it as a tight ball inside you if you can."
"I didn't mean to set the tree on fire. I just...I was ticked off. I got distracted. I was thinking..."
I read his mind. He was thinking that he was tired of not knowing who and what he was. And then his anger had triggered his willpower to kick in and spit out a bit of magic in the form of a fireball.
A fireball that could have easily killed my dad or me if he'd aimed it in a different direction.
I pushed that thought away. "I know. It was an accident. That's why we do the tai chi. It gives you a way to physically get the emotions out without, well, blowing stuff up." I turned toward the tree, took a deep breath, held out my hands, and willed the tree to cool off. The f lames died down then extinguished in a thick cloud of smoke.
"Savannah, the smoke..." Dad muttered. "Others will see it for miles. Can you do anything to disperse it?"
I thought for a moment, nibbling at the inner corner of my mouth. Then I raised my hands and imagined a strong breeze blowing out from my palms toward the smoke.
Tristan hissed and rubbed his arms as wind whispered to life, gathered the smoke, and shredded it into long gray ribbons that trailed off into nothing.
"There." I turned to Tristan with a forced smile. "See? All better. Just try to keep your willpower under control and you'll be okay."
But Tristan was frozen in place, staring with wide, unseeing eyes at the now blackened trees.
"Tristan?"
He didn't blink, didn't move, his mind a million miles away in another place and time when he had last worked with someone to learn how to control his Clann powers.
TRISTAN
Images I didn't understand at first f lashed through my mind, of myself and a big bear of a man with a thick silver beard standing in a yard at night.
Then I recognized him. The answers f lowed to me without my having to struggle for them.
Dad. We were standing in the backyard behind our house.
Okay, Dad said. So here's the basics of casting a spell. Every witch starts off at the beginner level of spell casting by saying a word and using a small hand gesture. This helps you focus and control when the spell is actually cast, until you learn how to discipline your mind. Someday, when you're ready, I'll teach you how to cast a spell even if you're tied up with your mouth taped shut, just by thinking the word and using your willpower. Eventually you'll learn to cast a spell without a word at all, just by thinking about the results you want to create. Like you do when you create fire or ground your energy.
The brief memory was like the strong wind Savannah had just whispered into life, blowing away the mental fog that had filled my head for months now. I remembered. Everything that had been lost to me came back in wave after wave of memory. I remembered Dad training me how to use magic...the vamp council abducting me and handcuffing me to a chair in their underground Paris headquarters to test Savannah's self-control...Mom expecting me to follow in Dad's footsteps to become the next Clann leader and how desperately I had wanted to play pro football someday instead and our endless family arguments about it...Dad's death...Mom's heartache turning into happiness as I finally took the stone throne as Clann leader...the pain that exploded in my chest as Gowin tried to rip out my heart through my back...and then waking up in Savannah's arms with only the memory of her smile to anchor me as everything else faded beneath the fog that had filled my head.
I remembered it all. But it was too much too fast, a thousand different memories and emotions swirling around me like a tornado trying to rip me into pieces. I couldn't breathe, couldn't control it.
I had to get away, get some air, find a way to sort through it all one memory and emotion at a time before I went insane.
