Forget About Midnight (Alexa O'Brien, Huntress #9)

“Arys, no.” I shook my head, unwilling to allow him to take the blame for my actions.

He held up a hand to silence me. “Our power comes from demons who use sexual manipulation to feed off the life force of others. You know this. It’s not who you are, it’s what you are. Those are not the same things. I’m the one who guaranteed that this would be your life after death. I knew better, and still I did it. Everything you’ve done is because of me.”

I sat there listening to Arys blame himself, wondering how he could possibly accept responsibility for the bodies I’d left behind and the demented encounters with Falon. It wasn’t right. I couldn’t allow it. “Arys, stop. This is not all on you. I did what I did. And I don’t blame you.” The need to touch him was greater than it had ever been. But I was afraid. “I’ve been killing. I did something so horrific with Falon I can’t even… And I handed Briggs over to Shya, which was a reckless mistake, and none of it is your fault.”

Blood tears welled up in his eyes, but he never let them fall. He pressed his palms against his eyes and shook his head. “It is though. I knew I’d be the one to kill you, and instead of letting you go, I did what I could to make sure that would never happen. It was selfish. I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but right now, it’s all I want. Please, stop punishing me with your absence. I can’t take much more.”

The weight of his words was crushing. I’d spent so much effort focusing on the fact that he had killed me and enjoyed it that I hadn’t realized it had damaged him too. “We’ll never stop hurting each other, will we?” I didn’t expect a response. I knew the answer. “I’m terrified that we’ll end up like Lilah and Salem. And God only knows how many others. Lilah is in a goddamn cage right now, put there by her twin because he couldn’t handle the craziness anymore. If we don’t do something, that’s going to be us.”

Lilah and her twin flame were the only other set of twins that I knew of. Perhaps it was time to change that. Arys and I, we needed to know more about where we came from and how we were supposed to function as a unit when the same power that drew us together also pushed us apart.

“We need to know more, Arys,” I said, drawing his gaze back to me. “We need to find others like us.”

He nodded, his expression void of emotion as he struggled to bury his hurt. “Yeah, we do.”

“I’m losing my mind.” It was a whisper. I lacked the strength to proclaim it any louder. “I’m afraid of the things I’ve done, of how they make me feel and how much I want to do them again.”

Arys looked away then, out the living room window at the quiet street front. His voice was hushed. “I’ve done things too.”

A chill stole over me. There was something about his tone that triggered warning bells in my head. It held a note of detached lunacy that I’d heard only in one person’s voice before. Kale’s.

“Arys, what have you done?” I braced for his response, knowing in my heart that it was so bad.

Several long, strained moments passed. His gaze was fixed on the window as if something out there had caught his attention. I saw nothing.

The strange lilt to his voice was even more pronounced when he said, “I killed the Doghead wolf.”

Utter shock. I sat there dumbfounded. Astonished, I could barely form a reply. “But, why?”

“Why do we do any of the things we’ve done?” He shrugged and dragged his gaze back to mine. “I wanted to.”

This was it, the evidence that Arys was losing his mind as bad as I was. The stories were right. Twin flames were driven mad by separation. It had already begun.

“There has to be more to it than that,” I insisted, panic making my voice high and annoying. “Arys, I had to kill a vampire in front of Dayne to atone for that. To set an example for the others that attacks on the wolves would not be tolerated.”

“I know. I’m sorry about that.” He appeared about as sorry as I felt when making bad choices. “It was all about you. Killing the Doghead wolf wasn’t nearly as satisfying, but it was a damn close second.”

The icy hand of horror gripped me. It was all so clear. Arys had sought out a wolf in an attempt to recreate the high from the night he killed me. This was all kinds of awful. Shifter blood was mortal, able to quench the vampire hunger, yet it was potent, stronger than human blood. Vampires had been known to form addictions to it. This was much worse. Arys wasn’t merely hungering for shifter blood. He wanted the high of their death.

If I’d still been mortal, I would have felt faint. Instead I just felt shocked and lost. Dayne could never know about this. He didn’t trust me as it was.

Arys’s confession on top of what Gabriel had told me about Juliet was all too much to take in. My head pounded. What was I supposed to do to fix this? Was that even possible?

“Can you forgive me?” he asked. “For everything I’ve done to you? Can we somehow find peace?”