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She nodded her head to where both Simone and Daniel were huddled close together, talking and still smiling at each other.
“When you’re in it, it’s hard to see but obvious for everyone else. I can’t wait to be introduced to whoever your guy is.” She winked at me and let go, sucking on her straw as she moved toward the falls.
Shit.
I thought I had done a good job of masking my emotions over the past few weeks. She had asked me before if I had a boyfriend, but I denied it. I swear Adelaide has always been keen on everything but her work.
“Druella?”
“Hmm.” I spun around, coming face-to-face with none other than Breyer Allsbrook, dressed in black, his eyes tired and his shoulders hunched over.
He didn’t look sixteen anymore. Instead, he seemed to have aged years in the span of a few weeks.
“Breyer, how are you?” was all I could think to say, but how could he be? He’d just lost his parents.
He opened his mouth, then shut it, then began to open it again. “I don’t know how to answer that. I just take it day by day.”
“Of course.”
“Uhh…I…just wanted to say thank you.”
“Thank you?”
He nodded. “That day, I almost lost control.”
“It was understandable. You were in pain.”
“Yeah, but I almost exposed the whole coven. If you hadn’t put me to sleep—”
“Breyer”—I put my hand on his shoulder—“you did nothing wrong. And I barely did anything. You do not need to thank me. In fact, I’m the one who feels sorry that I couldn’t hold the vampires who did it accountable.”
“Don’t worry. I will,” he sneered through his teeth, his fists clenched. “I swear, I’m going to protect my sister, and I’m going to destroy all of those monsters. She’s going to grow up in a better world than we all have had to live through.”
The look of hate in his eyes was chilling.
He was just a kid.
He should have been looking forward to prom and thinking about which university he wanted to study at. Instead, he was swearing to kill all vampires.
“I want to train. At first, I wanted to ask Axel to train me,” he said, then stepped closer. “But I need to be even stronger than him. He lost his wife, son, and brother. I don’t want to lose any more people. If you train me, I swear I’ll learn everything—”
“And when exactly do you think she’ll have time for that?” Tate stepped up beside him, placing his hand on Breyer’s shoulder gently. “I get your passion, Breyer, but you should ask the elders. If we spent our time training you all, we wouldn’t have time to fight.”
“I know, but—”
“Breyer”—Tate squeezed Breyer’s shoulder—“passion is good, but it can’t be selfish. Druella already gives as much as she can. And now you are asking for more. The brother Axel lost, that was her father. Axel’s wife and son? Those were her aunt and cousin. We’ve all lost people, including me, and the people who made us stronger were the elders. No one is so strong that they have lost no one.”
Breyer hung his head. “I hate them. The vampires…I hate them so much that it burns.”
“I know. Come on. I’ll show you a trick to keep that fire down,” Tate whispered, leading Breyer away from me.
“Thank you,” I mouthed to him, and he just nodded as he took him away. I watched them go, still not sure how to wrap my head around it. I’d looked into the Allsbrook family, trying to figure out what happened that day. But I kept running into a wall.
“Is everything okay?” Simone asked as she came up beside me.
“No,” I answered truthfully. “We lost our parents when we were young. If not for pictures, I wouldn’t have even known what they look like. It hurts to think about them, the family I never had, the parents I never had. I can only imagine how much harder it would be if I’d had them, spoken to them, was so used to them only to have them ripped away from me at sixteen. I’d want to set the world on fire, too.”
“It’s not the world, just the vampires,” she replied and took hold of my arm. “And we will think about that tomorrow—well, not tomorrow since that is your real birthday. So we’ll think about it another day. Right now, we party and celebrate your life.”
