“It’s not me you should be checking on, it’s your brother,” she said, looking back up to the ceiling. Her eyes traced the exposed beams.
“Why? He’s a grown man; what could he possibly need from me?” I questioned, confused. “What happened, Anna?”
She took a breath and blew it out, her lips fluttering with the intensity. It felt like an entire decade had passed before she finally spoke. “How well do you know me, Cabe?”
My heart skipped a beat as my stomach dropped into my ass.
This was not the time to talk about my visions. The answer to that question was loaded with so much information, and I was afraid she wouldn’t like the truth.
The fact that I’d spent the last eleven years falling in love with a version of her I didn’t see now was more than I could bear, but I couldn’t lie to her. I didn’t have it in me. So instead, I went with the truth. “I used to think that I knew you very well.”
“Used to?” she questioned, turning to narrow her eyes at me.
“Yes, used to. Now that you’re here and I’m not seeing you through rose colored glasses, I’m realizing that I might not know you at all.” I was starting to sweat, her gaze never leaving my face. She was searching for lies, not trusting that she’d never find any. Not from me.
“But you know about my foster father?” she questioned.
“Yes,” I bit out. I hated thinking about that bastard. I saw the fucking aftermath, I saw the bruises, the blood, the fucking tears. I saw her shatter before my eyes, and I was forced to watch, for years, as she crumbled. I must have missed the part where she put herself back together with jagged edges and brutality.
“So you know that I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have a reason to be?” She paused as if she were considering how she wanted to articulate her thoughts. “I wouldn’t put myself in this situation unless I had a reason to. And if you know me, you know that my reasoning is completely selfish and one hundred percent for my own gain.”
I smiled. Turned out, I knew her better than I thought. All of that was a lie. “Do you want my honesty, or do you want me to make you feel better?”
“Never fucking lie to me, Cabe,” she snarled, sitting up in the bed and turning her body so that she faced me.
I was so fucking elated at the revelation that I had to force the smile away. I wanted to close the distance between us, to sit on the bed and pull her into my lap, but I held back because she needed to see me as someone that was strong enough to handle her bullshit.
She lived in a glass house, much like Lanier.
She wanted me to believe that she was too fucked up to care about anything but herself, but that wasn’t the truth. I felt it in my bones. She was the girl I saw in those visions; I’d just have to work harder to get her to come out. “Fine, I know that’s not the reason you’re here. You are here because you’re confused and terrified, and you know that if you left, you’d never get all the facts. You’ve accepted what you are, but you want to know how you became something other than Human.”
She thought I was done and got ready to reply, but I cut her off by continuing. “But you’re also here because you feel Lanier. You already know that you two are perfectly matched, even if you don’t want to admit it. All of us can feel your power, and it matches his. Not to mention, your mind is equally jaded…you already know that. And Quint—you have a connection to him because he’s just as crazy as you. Broken, damaged. And me? You’re staying because I see you. I’ve seen you for years, and you know that I am a potential friend, someone you could trust with your secrets and your past. Someone you wouldn’t have to hide from.”
I paused, gathering my thoughts as Annalise shifted but never looked away. “But you’re here, hiding from us in Lanier’s bedroom, because you’re not sure you can believe any of this. It’s all fresh and new and completely out of the fucking blue, but it’s your life and you know that. So you stay. You came to this room because you’re mad, but you didn’t go home, because you still want to know if you can trust us.”
She started to say something, but I cut her off again, “Don’t lie to me again, I’ll know. It turns out that I know you better than I thought.”
With that, I turned around and walked back to the door, pulling it open. “It’s only ten a.m. Get some sleep, and I’ll come wake you in a few hours. Then we can talk about the things you want to know. I understand that what you’re feeling is new and foreign, and I’ll do my best to answer your questions, but please, don’t try and run from me until you know for sure that I’m worth running from.”
I closed the door behind me and walked down the stairs and into the living room where Quint and Lanier sat staring at the TV. They must have been waiting for me, because as soon as I sat down, they both turned in my direction.
“How is she?” Lanier asked, his voice pained and guilty.
I had to rein in the fierce rage building inside of me. I wanted to throttle him for upsetting her. I was this close to showing him who had the real power in our family, but I saw a look in his eye that I’d never seen before: worry.
“What happened out there?” I questioned, glaring at him.
“I—” he started, stopped, shook his head, and started again. “I got fucking fangs, guys. Annalise got them during her Transition, and we forgot about it or simply didn’t question it. I didn’t even remember until she threw me across the field, and I landed on my hands. They were scraped and bleeding when I came back to her, and all of a sudden, she couldn’t focus on anything but the blood. She started to shift immediately. She was unhinged. So I tested my theory.”
“What fucking theory?” Quint questioned, his eyes simmering with rage. Whoa, that was a scary look. His molten eyes flared bright as they zoomed in on Lanier’s face.
Lan looked up at me then, staring into my eyes. Honesty shone within them. “That she wanted to drink my blood.”
Time stopped for a minute, as I wasn’t sure I heard him right.
“She what?” I whispered.
“She wanted to drink your blood?” Quint’s voice was now multilayered as his beast came forward to hear the conversation.
“Yes. And I needed to see if it was just her, or if the same thing would happen to me if she was the one bleeding. So I threw her into the same spot she threw me, and in the process, her fangs bit through her lip, making her bleed.”
He stopped talking as his eyes shifted, a new shade of silver covering the seafoam green. “Lanier!” I shouted, stepping back.
What the fuck?
“I bit her.” He stared at me, silver eyes and fangs on full display. His skin started to change color, shocking the hell out of us. He realized his mistake and shook it off, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I bit her, guys, and then…she bit me. We fed from each other, and it was completely out of our control. It was like a new instinct took over and we were wild fucking animals.”
When he looked up again, his eyes were back to normal, but the agony was still written all over his face. He hated what had happened.
“Vampirism?” Quint questioned to himself. He went into his own head, no doubt reliving his three hundred years to find a moment in time where vampirism made an appearance. He wouldn’t find any, we all knew that. “Vampires don’t exist.”