I'll Never Let Them Hurt You, I Promise #7
Nothing worse than battling a hangover from hell AND your best friend
Kara has been missing for three days. It’s the longest Jason has ever taken her for and the first in a long while that I seriously worry he won’t bring her back.
I spend the whole time going over the night in the alley in my head, analysing anything I could have done differently to stop him from taking her. It doesn’t ease my guilt or anxiety any when I finally admit to myself that there was absolutely nothing I could have done. It wouldn’t have mattered if we’d stayed in to watch a film or if I had just coughed up the few extra quid for the cinema car park. He would have come for her again eventually.
That’s what I sit with for three days and the nights I can manage to stay awake, the stomach turning reality that there was nothing Kara or I could have done to prevent this. There is nothing we should ever have to do to prevent this. He changed her. He stalks the streets, waiting for the opportunity to pull her back into the world he forced her to join in the first place. He is the one who should be taking preventative measures to avoid me because, I swear, the next time I see him, I will-
The lock clicks in the front door and I shoot up from the sofa. I know it isn’t Tae because 1) I refuse to invite him back inside the flat yet and 2) I told him to stay the fuck away from me after he regained consciousness in the alley. It wasn’t his fault either but I need someone I can be angry at right now. The blood bags I’ve left for him outside the door of his basement flat are the most contact we’ve had in three days.
So, when Kara walks into the living room, I don’t even have to look at her before I’ve thrown my arms around her shoulders.
“Oh my God,” I breathe over and over until my unintelligible words are muffled by her neck. I’m not sure how long it takes me to realise she’s not hugging me back. I sniff and pull back only far enough to see her face. “Kara?”
It’s not my best friend that stares back at me with hungry black eyes. She’s in there somewhere, but she’s fighting against the rancid breath and blood-stained mouth. The blood isn’t fresh but it was there long enough that whatever quick wash she tried to get rid of it only removed the most recent layer.
“The bathroom’s free,” I say pointlessly because it’s only us here, but she uses the excuse and silently slips away from me.
Pretty much every time she comes home from one of Jason’s “nights out”, she doesn’t say much for the first half an hour or so. We’ve only ever actually spoken about them once and that took a lot of chocolate and endless episodes of Desperate Housewives to get out of her. Since then, I don’t ask and just give her as much space as she needs to readjust. But this time feels different. She’s never looked so…vacant before.
Kara returns to the living room about thirty minutes later, her hair dripping onto the shoulders of her fluffy dressing gown. She walks right past where I’ve fallen back down onto the sofa, ignoring the snacks and two bottles of wine I set out three nights ago, and rummages around in the fridge. First, she pulls out one blood bag, then another and another until I finally have to say something.
“Hair of the bat?” I call to her, but it’s the wrong joke to make.
Kara locks eyes with me and begins tearing the tops of the blood bags with her teeth, slurping down each one more viciously than the last.
“Kara, slow down, that’s all the blood I can spare right now.” The teasing tone has turned sour in my mouth. I climb over the back of the sofa to physically stop her from ripping into the final bag. “Kara!”
Her teeth clamp around the bag but she doesn’t bite down, only her still exposed fangs gently piercing the plastic. She’s frozen in this position long enough for me to finally, really look at her.
“Did you…cut your hair?” I ask as I raise a hand to touch the uneven, sharp ends still dripping with water. The red hair that usually falls below her shoulders is now tucked behind her ears, the longest strands only just curling around the bottom of them.
Before my fingertips reach her, Kara has thrown herself back into the wall behind her, the bloodbag still clutched in her hands.
“I couldn’t wash it out,” she says. Her voice is rough, like this is the first time she’s spoken in days.
“Wash what?” I ask. She answers by lowering her eyes to my clothes. They’re stained in smears of blood that were not there before Kara came home. I didn’t really pay attention to just how much blood she’d been covered in but, thinking about it now, we’ll probably have to burn her clothes and bleach the bathroom ahead of our monthly deep clean.
Her hunger for the blood confuses me even more now, to think about the amount she must have consumed to drench her clothes like that. Even vampires have a limit, and after three nights of what I can only assume was non-stop feeding…
My eyes fix on the blood bag she is still holding. Kara hears my unspoken question.
“I just don’t want to taste…them anymore.”
“Them? Who?” My voice is strained because even just the images are enough to bubble the acid in my stomach.
“The humans. There were…He brought so many and it wasn’t just me. The others…they played with them. Some of them fed for hours and I couldn’t- The more I fed on, the less they hurt. I was quick, but then they made it a game. Wanted to know how many I could drain in an hour…fifteen minutes…”
“Jesus, Kara.” I want to sound sympathetic but the bile is rising and it’s all I can do to keep standing here, talking about this.
“And now you hate me.”
“What? No, I don’t.”
“I can smell it on you!”
The colour has returned to her cheeks and her voice has lost its dullness. She looks and sounds more like herself again, but I don’t like what she’s saying.
“I can always smell it. Your disgust, your pity. Do you know I can actually taste the bile in your throat like a smell in the air? It’s nauseating. I wish you would just pick one.”
“Pick what?”
“If you hate me or want to help me.”
“Kara, I do not hate you.” I swallow down the burn in my throat.
“You hate what I am. What Tae is. You hate vampires.”
“I’m allowed to hate the thing that killed my best friend.”
Kara throws her hands out in a dramatic gesture before slapping them back down to her sides. The sight would be funny if the blood sloshing in her clenched fist didn’t slice through the silence.
“But, I’m not dead, Serena. I’m right here. My heart might not be beating but I am here, talking to you, drinking your fucking blood because you don’t trust me to hunt on my own.”
I scoff. “Hunt? You want to hunt? Bloody hell, Kara, you sound just like-”
“Them?” Kara takes a step toward me and I instantly take one back. Her eyes flash to the movement of my feet, then back to my face. “I am them, Serena. I’m a vampire and this isn’t something you can save me from.”
“Of course it is.”
“How? Because it happened and I’m trying to learn to live with that.”
“What the hell do you think I’m trying to do?”
“What the fuck do you have to live with?”
“You!” I spit, and that one word rushes all the breath out of me. “Every time I look at you, I have to see what he did to you, what I couldn’t protect you from.” A tear tries to roll down my cheek but I push my glasses up onto my head and angrily scrub at my eyes.
“This isn’t about you,” Kara says so quietly that I have to ask her to repeat herself to be sure of what she said. “This isn’t about you. Nothing happened to you, Serena. You can walk away from this anytime you like.”
“How can you even say that?” I use both my hands to place my glasses back on my nose because I’m not sure if I want to slap her or hug her. “After everything I’ve done for you.”
“What have you done?” She continues to speak over my incredulous spluttering to find words. “All you had to do was let me work through this. I can’t escape what he did to me, so I need to learn to live with it. But, at the very least, I need to be able to come home, shut that door” - she jabs a finger over my shoulder - “and leave it all outside. Instead, I have to hide from a world that can’t see me anymore and a best friend who won’t look at me.”
“I’m learning to deal with this too,” I say as calmly as I can.
“Deal with what?” she practically screams.
“That every single day of my fucking life is another day I have to stop my best friend from killing people, from rotting for eternity in a cell or fucking worse!”
“I don’t want to kill people, Serena.”
“But you have,” I snap. “And you would have killed a hell of a lot more by now if I let you hunt.”
“There are things in this world that you have no idea about.”
My laugh is dry, almost hysterical. “Bloody tell me about it.”
“No,” Kara says, her voice suddenly so calm it’s like I imagined her screaming just minutes ago. “There are other humans like you.”
“Like me?”
“Humans willing to give their blood to us in exchange for protection…and sometimes other things.”
“Why the fuck would I want to know about these blood/sex pacts?”
“They’re not like that. Well, I guess some of them probably are, but not the ones I’m talking about.”
“I don’t give you my blood because I want something from you. I do it for you. For all the humans you’d slaughter if I didn’t.”
“So, it’s about being a martyr?”
My head’s pounding like I’ve been banging it against the wall for hours. “It’s about stopping shitheads from taking advantage of people who don’t know any better. It was hard enough before but vampires have made doing any good in this world fucking impossible!”
“You hate me because I’ve made your job harder?”
I think an actual strangled cry escapes my mouth. “I don’t hate you!”
“Yes, you do. I can literally see it in your eyes right now.”
“Well, yes, I hate you right now because you’re pissing me off. You’re acting just like one of them.”
“Well…That’s my point, isn’t it?”
“Stop it,” I snap, trying to regain any amount of composure. “You’re not the same as them. I won’t let you be.”
“You won’t let me be?”
“No, I won’t. I don’t care who’s offering up their blood out there, you’re not taking it.”
Kara briefly closes her eyes and shakes her head. “You’re not going to live forever, Serena. Stopping me now instead of letting me learn is practically damning me to an eternity of this bloodlust. You have to know that.”
I take a deep breath. “All I am trying to do is teach you how to control it.”
“How can you? You have no idea what it’s like.”
I reach up and pull the ponytail my hair is in tighter to try and ground myself again. “Where is all this coming from?”
“I am tired of you making me feel bad for something that wasn’t my fault. For being something I didn’t ask to become.”
I’m foolish enough to think we’re back on common ground. “Kara, I know-”
“No, you don’t!” Her eyes flash and the blood bag in her hands finally drops to the floor. “But, maybe it’s time you did. Maybe then you’d be too focused on being able to stand your own reflection and I can finally get some peace!”
Kara closes the space between us and reaches up as if she’s going to hug me, but instead she wraps her hands around my throat and yanks me to the side. The fridge rattles when she throws me against it, one of her hands releasing me to pin my wrist, her knee hitching up to do the same on the other side. She’s so fast that I don’t have any time to struggle, to even consider how we arrived here and what this will mean for us once she’s done.
The tips of her fangs are just entering my throat when I whimper, “Please, don’t.”
As quickly as it happened, it’s over. Kara releases me and I crumble to the kitchen floor as she disappears from the room.
My breathing hurts and I’m not sure when it turns into sobs. I pull my legs up to my chest and throw my head between my knees, sucking in long breaths, short breaths, forgetting how to breathe over and over again. Kara doesn’t come back even though I’m sure she’s still in the flat. I stay on the kitchen floor until Tae walks into the living room.
“Shit, Serena!”
He rushes to me and pulls me back up against the fridge with a tight grip on my upper arms. I’m still crying but I just stare at him as his eyes run over my face before getting caught on my bloodstained clothes. His dark brows pull together as he tries to control both his panic and bloodlust.
“What happened?”
I barely feel the words pass my lips. “How did you get in here?”
“The door was unlocked.”
“But we didn’t invite you in.”
His laugh makes me jump. “You have a welcome mat. I guess that’s enough for some kind of supernatural loophole.”
For once, his dark humour doesn’t comfort me because he’s another reminder of how fucked we are. We’ve never had control of this thing and Kara’s just proven we never will. It’s hopeless, so why do I keep trying?
“Get off,” I mumble and shrug pathetically in his stone grip.
“Serena, what happened? I smelled the blood but-”
“Get off me!” I shout in Tae’s face, throwing myself back against the fridge and he finally lets me go. “All of you just stay the fuck away from me!”
“All of who?”
“You! Every single one of you bloodsucking monsters!”
“Serena…”
“Piss off!” I yell, launching myself up from the kitchen floor and grabbing whatever I can before I slam the front door behind me.
Catch up from the beginning…
I’ll Never Let The Hurt You, I Promise #1
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