To Bleed for Him

Chapter 13: Victim of Choices

"Give her a chance to explain why she's here.

She will interfere with all that we are.

Maybe her fear is a sign she's for real.

Her fear is too late; she is to blame."

- After Forever

Antony paced in the hallway, glad for the thicker curtains that now covered the windows to either side of the front door as they barely shifted in the heavy breeze from his too-quick passing. He wanted nothing more than to burst through that door, hop into his car, and flee into the low sun of the late afternoon, but he couldn't. Never again. He was starting to forget what the sun even looked like.

What am I going to say to her? he wondered when a memory of Torryn's smiling face in the sunlight ghosted through his mind, and he began to pace faster. Tell her the truth? Pretend nothing happened? But Becca had been waiting right outside his door when he'd opened it. There wasn't a doubt in his mind that she'd heard everything. And he'd already decided that he wasn't going to be a scumbag about this, not any more than he already had. She deserved to know what had happened.

And how will she handle it? He hoped she'd understand that he'd just been doing what nature had intended, that he needed more than what she could offer. But if she didn't… "Lord help me," he muttered as the sound of popping gravel reached his ears along with the soft whine of a car's engine, quickly cut off.

She was home.

He hurried into the kitchen, far out of reach of the sunlight that spilled through the door a moment later. His eyes narrowed against it, but they shot wide open when Torryn stepped into the hall. "Torryn!" he exclaimed, rushing forward and just barely managing to stop himself at the edge of the light's long presence upon the floor. He took in the sight of her bruised jaw, the dried blood on her bottom lip, the blood spattered across her arms and her face and her clothes, her…bloodied hunting knife? He wanted to reach for her, to pull her to him, but she only looked at him with hard eyes, dead-center in the rectangle of sunlight.

Was she staying out of reach on purpose?

"Torryn," he said again, more calmly now, "what the hell happened?" His mind flashed to Skylar, the weak, pathetic human she'd gone to meet, and his mood darkened abruptly. He opened his mouth to speak, but faltered when her mother appeared in the doorway behind her, a bulging black duffel bag in either hand. What the…?

"He's an undead?" the woman remarked dryly, eyeing him from the threshold. "That's new."

"Yeah," Torryn responded, her voice empty of emotion but for the barest tremble. "I'm still getting used to it myself." She stayed at the center of the sun stream as her mother took a step deeper into the house, and Antony searched her face desperately, trying to find any hint of emotion, of fear or anger, anything beneath the crusty blood. But there was nothing — not until he met and held her eyes. The silver sheen that he'd only just noticed across her irises shifted to a duller gray, and they suddenly shone with unshed tears.

"Becca!" he called, shifting forward only an inch, his toes at the very edge of the pool of sunlight. "Becca, do you have a second?"

The top step creaked softly, followed by her dainty steps descending the stairs. "What do you need?" she asked as she came to a stop halfway down the stairway, her nose wrinkling at the light that stretched along the floor. Wet blood glistened at him from the back of her hand, resting on the railing.

"Would you do me a favor and show Torryn's mom to one of the open guest rooms?"

Only then did she notice the woman waiting beside the open front door, and she forced a tight-lipped smile. "I let Coral and Slink borrow the other two guest rooms. Is it all right if I take her to your parents' old room?"