“Who are you talking about?” I looked over at him.
“Gunnar.” His eyes went to the mirror again, as if saying his name summoned him. “He’s led a pack in the Lapland for the better part of three centuries. They winter up here, and summer in Russia and Siberia.”
“How do you know that he’s still the leader?” I asked.
“It’s been fifty years or more since I saw him last,” Ezra admitted. “But when I was told of Peter’s troubles, Gunnar was mentioned by name.”
“So you knew exactly what you were getting into when we came here?” I narrowed my eyes at him, and he pursed his lips. “Then why are you so freaked out by this? If you knew that’s who were dealing with.”
“I was hoping to avoid him entirely. I thought we’d find Peter and depart, before they knew we’d been here,” he sighed. “And that’s how I know Peter’s on a suicide mission. He was with me the last time we encountered Gunnar.”
I sank back in the seat and finally grasped what frazzled Ezra so much. They outnumbered us, and they were pissed off. We had just very narrowly escaped death.
“How do you kill a vampire?” I breathed.
With my murder becoming increasingly imminent, I wanted to know possible methods for my demise. Ezra once mentioned starvation lasting for months or years led to death, but that seemed unlikely here. I imagined something more instant, more violent.
“Head. Heart.” He shifted uneasily, but the car slowed, meaning his initial panic ebbed. “Our bones are nearly unbreakable, but another vampire could do it rather easily. We’re our only enemy in this world.”
The imagery of my heart getting ripped out was enough to keep me silent for the rest of the car ride back to the hotel. When we parked, Ezra didn’t check behind him for lycan, but I did.
The clerk behind the desk made googley eyes at me when we came in, but I barely even noticed. There were far more important things on my mind. Like how I planned on surviving.
We made our circles wider around the lycan territory, but after three days, we had no choice but to move in closer. Besides that, everything Ezra heard said Peter was imbedded in lycan land. It was all part of his suicide plan, I guess. Hang out around them long enough until they slaughtered him.
Since we saw the lycan, Ezra became hesitant about bringing me with him. His whole plan for getting Peter rested on my ability to convince him, but that wasn’t fool proof. Neither of us were sure how he’d respond to me.
Except… the last kiss we shared, the only time Peter truly kissed me, I felt something different.
Peter tasted Jack on me, he knew Jack had bitten me, but Peter didn’t come back to kill him. Everything inside him, the insistent bond in his blood, screamed that he should kill Jack, but he hadn’t.
Instead, he planned on really letting me go, not because of his own fears or what his body demanded, but because he knew that would be what made me the happiest. The one true kiss we ever shared had been a kiss goodbye. Underneath all of his chemicals and reservations, Peter had to have genuine feelings for me, otherwise he never would’ve let me be with Jack.
That just happened to be when Jack walked in, and he set off an entirely different chain of events than what Peter had in mind.
That’s what kept me coming back out in the woods, even with the full understanding of what we were up against. I thought that Peter might really listen to me, and even if he didn’t, I had to try.
We walked through the woods in silence, but I knew when we got closer to the lycan homeland. Ezra walked faster but made sure his steps matched mine. He looked around more and kept incredibly close to me, so sometimes I was almost tripping over him.
Ezra would risk anything for Peter, but he didn’t feel the same way about me risking everything. In the hotel today before we left, he asked if I wanted to stay behind. I said no, but he continued recommending it until I refused to talk about it anymore.
We were going back to the exact area the lycans had warned us away from, but that had to be where Peter was, assuming that Peter was still alive.
“Shouldn’t we be calling his name or something?” I asked when the silence and the search became too much for me.
Ezra shook his head, and I ducked underneath a low-hanging branch. The one thing I could say for this was that I was getting a lot more nimble and agile. I wasn’t getting as tired out as I used to, and I hadn’t been quite as hungry. If nothing else, this would get me through vampire boot camp.
“I just don’t think we’re doing that much,” I said, keeping my words hushed. “We’re just wandering around the trees. How are we supposed to find Peter? You have this carefully calculated plan of where to look, but when we get here, we don’t even do anything.”
“They can’t know we’re looking.” Ezra was barely loud enough to be heard over the crunch of our boots in the snow.