Page 75 of Crave

“Dude,” I started, but West cut me off with a growl.

“No. I get that they fucked you up. Royally. I’ve tried to be patient. You want to take out my family in your sick quest to go back to them? You can get a goddamn bus ticket for all I care. I’m done.”

They glared, frozen breaths swirling together. Brody shot a look at Cal, who subtly shook his head. And then—

“They’re going to kill my brother,” Topher exploded, shoving West away.

West staggered back, snowflakes swirling eerily down around us as we all gaped.

“Toph—”

Visibly shaking, Topher sagged back against the barn. “Kieran’s the one who took me in after our mom and her boyfriend took off, okay? The shifters holding me at the compound said all along if I ever tried to run, they’d kill him. They knew our home address, knew the bar where he worked. The night I escaped, I called him, told him what happened to me. He didn’t believe me, said I was full of shit. I think… fuck, I think he thought I was high. I told him he had to disappear.”

“I didn’t know.”

They locked eyes for a long moment. Topher’s gaze flitted away.

“If I don’t go back, they kill him, get it? So save me your self-righteous bullshit, boy scout, when we both know you’d do the same goddamn thing if it were one of them in trouble.”

He jerked his chin at me, Brody, Cal and Ethan, silently looking on.

I asked quietly, “Are you sure they have him?”

Topher bent over double and coughed, looking frailer and more haggard than ever. Like we hadn’t been feeding him at all these past two months. No, like he’d been purposefully starving himself as punishment. I met Cal’s eyes across the clearing. His expression was grim.

“By now? Yeah, I’m sure. No way could he have survived on the streets this long.”

“You did,” Lacey pointed out. “And that still doesn’t explain why you’ve got every vampire for hundreds of miles coming after you.”

The wind gusted violently. Topher shivered. West started forward, starting to shrug off his fleece, but Brody put out a hand to stop him.

“Answer the question,” he growled, voice infused with Alpha power. “This ends tonight.”

Topher scraped a hand over his face, the dark circles under his eyes more prominent than ever. “You know what the undeads did to me, how they… used me. They fed from me every night. All those days, weeks and months ran together until I lost track of how many times, how many violations, how many months had passed since I’d last seen sunlight, last felt grass under my feet.”

He stared down at his wrists. Intricate tribal tattoos covered his arms, partially obscuring the black silver burns from a year spent in shackles. But the scars from so many feedings were another story, silver track marks puncturing every visible vein, the silver and enzymes in the vamp blood having prevented him from fully healing.

West’s hands had balled into fists. He caught me staring and looked away.

“I don’t know if it was the hundredth time one of them fed from me or the thousandth, but eventually I began to notice a sort of twitching under my skin anytime one of their kind came near, a sort of headache at the base of my skull.”

“You’re telling us you’ve got a spidey-sense for vamps?” Lacey said sharply.

Brody propped his hands on his hips, pacing the length of the clearing.

I shook my head. “Look, man, we all want to believe you. But you’d think if what you’re describing was possible, we would’ve heard of it by now.”

“Tracers have recovered blood slaves alive,” Cal said quietly. “It’s just that the ones who’ve been held for more than a year rarely make it out mentally intact, at least according to Mom.”

“You think there were others, that the Council’s known about this and been keeping it quiet?”

“Just ask yourself what they stand to gain.”

A shifter who could sense the presence of vamps? The Tracers would be all over that.

Something Brody had said days before stirred in my memory.

The Council wasn’t going to try to rehabilitate Topher at all until we offered to take him in.