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LUCIEN

Even I know what this means for the professor and his bear. I am not completely unfeeling, but there is nothing I can do for them now and nothing to be gained by me staying to witness his last loving goodbyes with his family.

Family.

It has been so long since I had one, I don’t remember what it felt like.

Vampires don’t have families. We have nests. Kin. Blood bonds and primal ties that keep us together. But I learned a long time ago that when vampires exist like that, too close for too long, they become uncontrollable. Their urges merge and amplify and they cannot resist the base instincts that drive them.

My entire existence relies on my ability to resist.

To say no to the desires that scratch the darkest crevices of my insides.

I have to be able to rise above them.

That is how I was able to kill Zephyra – despite the bond between a sire and his child. Centuries of practice enabled me to push my feelings aside – not just my feelings – the throbbing base instinct that tried to stop me even as I held her neck between my fingers.

I killed her.

I killed the one who sired me, and the one I sired.

I killed everyone I ever cared about because I knew it was what I had to do in order to keep this city under my control.

There is only one person I would not be able to kill.

Luna.

As I walk away from Nova and her mates, my thoughts drift to the bookstore. To her blond curls and her wide blue eyes. Her nervousness. The way she almost shimmers with the promise of being more, with the unacknowledged parts of herself that are desperate to bloom from between the cracks in her fragile armor.

She lit up when she talked about shifters. When she was reading over my shoulder, and her warm breath touched my cold skin, she was alive with intrigue. I wanted to grab hold of her in that moment and kiss her until the world dissolved around us. I wanted to ravage her. To show her exactly what it’s like to be desired.

Behind me, Kim does not speak. He simply follows wordlessly as we head toward Miranda’s quarters.

I was going to speak to her this evening about Luna.

Tanner told me something that made me feel… I don’t know what it made me feel. It twisted my insides in a way I haven’t felt before. At first, there was rage. I was enraged that he had seen inside her head. He had entered her in a way I never would.

But then this other feeling crept into the pit of my stomach and lodged itself there.

He told me she was in pain. He sensed that she was sick, that her softness and her smile hid pinpricks of pain, a throbbing ache in her muscles.

He could not tell me why.

I was going to ask Miranda to find out for me, and to make something that could be slipped in to Luna’s coffee to ease her suffering.

I would do anything to ease her suffering.

The thought occurs to me as I push open the door to Miranda’s quarters and observe the scene Sam and Nova left behind.

He would have done anything to save her. He thought nothing of his own safety. Werewolf or not, he dived into the fight with the Solaris and he tore it apart. He didn’t know his bite would be fateful, he knew only that he would willingly give his life if it meant saving hers.

On the floor by the sideboard, upon which there are bottles and potions and tools I have never properly studied, is a large tar-like stain. The demon is gone.

Miranda’s body, its shell, lies in two discarded halves.

There is no blood, no muscle. It is like she was a Miranda suit, made of plastic instead of flesh and bone.