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I think it was safe to say, after having been in the world fully human for five years now, I could never go back to my vampire life. It was something I thought about often, especially whenever Desmond brought up turning me into a werewolf again.
Would it be a betrayal to that part of my heritage if I decided to become a wolf and totally abandon my history as a vampire? To this day I was still the only person anyone knew of that had been born a vampire. And I was definitely the only one who had been born as both a vampire and a werewolf.
I had to hope no one else would ever be quite so unlucky as to experience that. Sure, it had had some benefits, and maybe things would be a little easier now that people knew vampires and werewolves were real. But overall, it had been hell.
Yet, it felt so strange to abandon my vampire half. It was as much a part of who I was as the werewolf DNA I still carried. And of course Holden would have gladly bitten me in a heartbeat if I decided I wanted that life back.
I didn’t.
I could never live without the sun again, I knew that much. But I couldn’t bring myself to completely cut off the vampire part. It was like a dead limb still attached to my body, and I couldn’t quite let it go.
Would I be accepted by the vampires if I became a full wolf? I had a hard time imagining they’d treat me the same. Even as a human I had gotten a certain level of scorn from my vampire contemporaries. They were quick to forget I had once been a Tribunal leader and above every single one of them in the hierarchy.
Amazing how things changed when you became human.
I was willing to bet most of the non-supernaturally inclined people I knew, like Mercedes and Tyler, took things like warm sunshine and the color of a sun-dappled flower petal for granted, but damn I would probably never get over it.
About halfway between the hotel and the club, I became aware of someone following me.
It started out as simply a tickle of my overactive paranoia. But it’s only paranoia if you’re wrong, and more often than not, when I thought I was being followed, it was because I was.
The park was busy, New Yorkers hungry to be out and about after a long and especially chilly winter—another point in favor of Los Angeles—so everywhere I looked there were mothers pushing strollers, men and women out for jogs, and tourists getting photos.
The sense something was amiss only came when I glanced over my shoulder to see a man in a dark hoodie walking some distance behind me. He didn’t seem to be in a particular hurry, but he was just off enough I made note of him.
I had a habit of always checking behind myself, and more so now since I’d been pulled through a bathroom wall less than twelve hours ago. Evidently there was no good place in this world to let your guard down.
A half mile of walking later, this time at a faster clip, I looked again and he was still behind me, having increased his own pace to keep up with me.
Well, shit.
I had my gun on me because I wasn’t new to my life, and my knife from the previous evening had been cleaned and put in my boot, but all the same I would have felt a lot better if someone had left a sword lying around somewhere.
There was something about a sword that told people don’t fuck with me in a way a gun didn’t communicate. Maybe it was because carrying a sword around made me look a little unhinged.
As I approached the Greyshot Arch, a low bridge off West Drive, I hoped the choking flow of cyclists and runners would deter him. I hustled along and stopped in the dark sanctuary of the Arch’s shadow, trying to see him as a huge gang of cyclists barrelled past, their tires singing in an organized hum.
The man was no longer on the path.
I waited another few minutes, then the cold and dark started creeping on me, and I exited the other side of the tunnel.
Where naturally the hooded man and four of his previously unseen friends were waiting for me.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“You know, it’s not polite to follow a lady around the park. Or anywhere. Ever,” I said.
“I’ll keep that in mind if I ever happen to meet a lady,” the hoodie-wearing man spat back.
Zing.
It was kind of fun to have someone you had literally never seen before have such a low opinion of you. It meant at some point you’d done something so despicable that a stranger had heard about you and already formed a value judgment.
I was famous!
Plus, I didn’t much care what one random asshole stalker thought about me, so I wasn’t going to go home and cry about having my feelings hurt.
A solo cyclist whizzed by me, reminding me we were in the middle of the busiest path in Central Park on one of the nicest afternoons in six months. Witnesses were absolutely everywhere, so unless these guys wanted to make a really big scene, they would be on their best behavior.
