Eternal [HS]

Chapter Nine

BEING FILLED IN ON EVERY SECRET he's kept from her since she arrived here was the most overwhelming part of the day. Above the attack, the realization, and the subsequent half-hour where Harry dragged the man he saved her from to a secluded corner of the woods miles away from the house, the hours-long conversation they had upon coming inside was the wildest part.

After changing and showering, he poured her a steaming mug of tea and sat her down on the couch opposite to where he sat in his favorite chair to explain the missing pieces of the puzzle she spent the past few days trying to solve.

"We don't need to kill humans to survive," he explained, pushing his hair out of his face. "In fact, it's punishable by death to kill one, but there are some that believe humans only exist for us to hunt and kill, and, unfortunately, y'met a couple of them already."

In every fantasy film and book she consumed about vampires, they were scary, murderous creatures that killed humans to feed, but the picture Harry painted was quite different.

He painted a picture of generally peaceful people that tend to keep to themselves and feed on humans consensually, not violently or murderously. Granted, there are outliers, like the vampires who hunted her down that morning after her shift at the hospital, but the majority are in agreement that humans deserve autonomy. He doesn't even feed from humans directly anymore. Apparently, there's a huge business in dealing out human blood to vampires in every way one could imagine.

She was taking a sip of tea when he said something that threatened to make her eyes bulge out of her head.

"The human we found in the woods fit their MO perfectly. They travel through the gate to your world, pick a target, hunt them for a few days, and bring 'em back here. It's fucked up, but that's why Niall was there to save you. We've been trying to track that group for months, and he finally had them, but he couldn't leave you behind."

She asked the question as if it were the answer to all of the universe's mysteries, "My world?"

Even though it took hours, and even though she asked question after question, he explained everything to her.

When she fell unconscious after the attack Niall saved her from, he carried her all the way across the city, past the hospital, and into an abandoned forest by the train tracks. Placed there for its seclusion by ancient vampires that date back to centuries before Harry was born, the gate connecting the human and vampire realms is so inconspicuous, a passing hiker wouldn't have spared a second glance.

With her body lying limp in his arms, Niall carried her between two trees with a sigil invisible to the human eye carved into the bark, and they stepped into the foreign place she now lives.

"This isn't your world," he said, "that's why it's important that you don't wander off by yourself like you did today."

Her mug of tea is cold now, and the day has withered away into late afternoon as she wakes, wrapped up in a blanket, on the living room couch.

There's a faint spot on the pillow she brought down from her room where she drooled in her sleep, and her face scrunches with disgust at the wet sensation it brings to her cheek. With a glance across the coffee table, she sees that Harry's chair is empty.

She's prepared to flip the pillow onto the clean side and let the crackling warmth of the fire in the hearth sing her to sleep, but the sound of someone walking down the stairs with a pair of keys jingling in their hands piques her interest.

Her head pops up from behind the couch as Harry walks past with his keys hanging from his index finger, swinging them around in slight boredom on his way to the door. He's almost there, about to turn the doorknob, when she makes her presence known.

"Where are you going?"

Carefully tailored dress clothes hug his lean figure. Jo trails her eyes up and down his body, never having seen him dressed up like this before.

His hair is slicked back, a stark difference to the messy head of curls she sees every morning before he leaves, and she can fully see his facial features with it out of his face. The contrast of his dark hair to his emerald green eyes is something that could make any girl swoon, and the suit sits perfectly on him, so much so that she can see the muscles of his back move beneath his dress shirt.

It's like she's seeing him for the first time again.

When she saw him for the first time after waking up in the guest room, there was too much happening for her to notice something as unimportant as attractiveness, but now...

He turns, surprised to see her awake already, and says, "M'going to a dinner party in Westbrook with Niall. The wife of the man who attacked you today will be there. We think he was part of the group that's been after you this whole time, so..."

"So?"

"So, we're gonna get information from her."

The casual mentioning of the person who tried to kill her makes her chest tighten with a sharp sense of anxiety and her heart overflow with dread.

In her dazed, half-asleep state of bliss, she forgot about the incident earlier today for long enough to distract herself with how good Harry looks in his suit for the dinner party tonight. However, with a fresh reminder given, she cannot close her eyes without seeing the image of that man crawling on top of her. Her senses recall him like a phantom pain with his foul-smelling breath, crooning deep voice, and fangs sharper than the dagger he was soon killed with.

Harry looked different at that moment, half-wild with rage and blood splattered across his face. No one would guess on a first impression that the well-dressed gentleman in front of her is capable of such things.

Only a few seconds elapse between what he said and when she next speaks, but it feels like hours as she relives this morning's trauma in blinding flashes of memory. It plays on a torturous loop in her mind while the violent frame by frame recount holds her hostage, and she decides right at this moment that she is done waiting around this house alone like a sitting duck.

If she spends another day alone in this house, drowning in these sour memories, she'll go mad.

"Can you take me with you?"

He stops abruptly as he's fixing his cufflinks and looks up at her through furrowed brows.

"Why? It's going to be a house full of vampires and you'll be the only human guest there."

In other words, she is the dinner in question when he said he was going to a dinner party, but she doubts it'll pose an issue. He said it himself, most vampires believe in human autonomy. The only person there that is a likely threat is the wife he's going to interrogate, but as long as she's with him, everything will be fine. If today taught her anything, it's that she's outmatched in a fight with a vampire unless he's there.

"I can't be alone anymore, Harry, especially after what happened. I know I'm safe inside the house, but not having you around scares me," she says. "I promise I won't get in the way of what you have to do tonight."

It's hard to read him while he decides whether or not to bring her along, but she has an inkling of what the outcome will be. Though he has been stoic and detached from her from the very beginning, it's clear to see that he's becoming more comfortable with her.

And, in turn, he's more expressive in her presence, as if he's been deliberately schooling his face into cool neutrality whenever she's around until recently. It's visible in small things: the way those intense eyes go soft at the possibility of her fear and loneliness, how his hands resume fiddling with his cufflinks to provide something to occupy himself with, and, most importantly, the fact that he actually takes time to debate it instead of shooting it down as he would have before.

She's sitting back on her knees with her arms folded on the back of the couch as she looks at him with her best puppy dog eyes. It always got her parents to give in to her requests when she was a child, so she figures it could help sway him into bringing her along for the night. Getting out of the house and seeing people other than him would be good for her, even if it's only for a few hours.

His mouth turns up at the corners in a smile that he fights to keep at bay.

"Fine, you can come, but you can't be without me or Niall when you're there," he says, then stops to inspect her oversized outfit. "And you'll need something to wear."