"Only shadows," he ruthlessly interrupted. "Glimpses when your guard was down, when that bloody wall you hide behind wasn't blocking me. I have been open with you about all of me, even the worst of me, because I thought you deserved no less, but you don't hold me in the same regard. No, you reserved that for Gregor. You trusted him enough to leave everything at his word. Well, luv, I bow when I am beaten, and Gregor has defeated me in a grand style. He's the one you respect. He's who you trust, so if you're not leaving, I am."
Cold swept over me, and the lump in my throat grew reinforcements. This wasn't a fight. This was something far worse.
"You're leaving me?"
He sat back down on the piano bench. Almost idly, his fingers flicked the keys.
"I can stand many things."
His voice was harsh in its emotionlessness. I recoiled from it. For a second, I was afraid of him.
"Many things," he continued. "I can stand your affection for Tate, much as I despise him. Your repeated jealousies over other women, even when I have given you no cause, for I'd be the same way in your place. I can stand your insistence to participate in dangerous situations that are way over your head, for again, that is also my nature. All of these things ate at me, but for you, I chose to stand them."
Now he stood. That calm, apathetic tone vanished, and his voice rose with each passing word.
"I also chose to stand the things you didn't admit to, like when you secretly wondered if Gregor had made you happier than I had. I could even tolerate the real reason you didn't want to change over, the real reason you clung to your heartbeat. I could stand to know that deep down, there's a part of you that still believes all vampires are evil!"
Roared now. I backed up, never having seen Bones like this. His eyes were electric green, and the emotion in him had him shaking on his feet.
"Don't think I don't know it. Don't think I haven't always known it! And I could bear it, yes, even knowing the other reason for your hesitancy. Underneath your claims of devotion, past your love - and I do think you love me, despite it all - you don't want to change over because you don't think we'll last. You believe we are only temporary, and becoming a vampire is such a permanent thing, isn't it? Yes, I know this. I've known it since I met you, but I've been patient. I told myself that one day, you wouldn't look at me with those guarded eyes. That one day, you'd love me the same way I loved you..."
The piano smashed into the wall across the room. It made a horrible keening noise, like it hurt from being destroyed. My hand pressed to my mouth while the emptiness in my stomach uncurled to fill my whole body.
"I've been a fool."
His simple sentence shattered me more thoroughly than the furniture he'd just demolished. I made a gasp of pain that he ignored.
"But this, this is the one thing I cannot endure - your walking out on me. I would rather have died than seen that note you left me. Would have cheerfully tucked myself in my grave than to see that filthy piece of paper!"
"I didn't walk out on you. I was trying to help, and I told you I was coming back - "
"Nothing you say matters."
It struck me like a slap. He looked at me, no tenderness, love, or forgiveness on his face. It was as if he were a statue. My heart beat faster with fear, desperate fear at everything falling apart.
"Bones, wait..."
"No. Will it change anything? Will it turn back the clock so you won't have left? It won't, so don't bother. You've only ever learned one way. Only one, and I should have remembered that. Perhaps this will finally penetrate into that armor you so relentlessly polish and shine."
He turned on his heel and began to walk away. I stared in stupid transfixion before racing after him, catching him as he approached the now-deserted front entrance.
"Wait! God, let's talk about this. We can work it out, I swear. Y-you can't just go!"
I was sputtering in anguish, tears spilling down my cheeks. They blinded me, but I felt his hand as he reached out and softly touched my face.
"Kitten." His voice was thick with something I couldn't name. "This is the part...where you don't have a choice."
The door slamming behind him knocked me off my feet.
Chapter Eighteen
ANNETTE LET THE SHADE FALL BACK OVER THE window. "It's raining. I told you I could smell it."
I turned my attention to the carton of ice cream in front of me. Pralines and Creme. It was almost empty. Next I'd crack open the Swiss chocolate.
"No fooling you with a bogus weather report."
"We'll watch the movie instead of taking a walk," Annette continued. "I hear it's good."
Good? I couldn't seem to remember what that was. I felt like I was a walking open wound. I couldn't even sleep more than minutes at a time, no matter how exhausted I was, because I was afraid if Bones came back, I might miss an instant with him. The only respite in my current misery was that my mother wasn't here. She was somewhere with Rodney, but for obvious reasons, I didn't know where.
"Crispin needs time," Spade had said after that terrible exchange. "Don't tear off after him. Even I don't know where he is."
So I'd been waiting, dwelling on every awful thing he'd said to me, and worse, how most of it was true. I hadn't meant to keep Bones at a distance. I didn't know why I closed parts of myself off. But more than that, I wished with all of my heart that I hadn't left that morning with Gregor.
And Gregor had been busy. Not content with his role in ruining my relationship, Gregor had been feeding the rumors that without his intervention, I might change myself into a vampire/ghoul hybrid. That's how he'd garnered the two-hundred-plus ghoul army he'd amassed to attack in Bavaria. Gregor had promised the ghouls that once he had me, he'd change me into a vampire. Gregor even had the balls to state that if Mencheres hadn't stolen me away and imprisoned him a dozen years ago, I'd already have been a vampire and wouldn't have risen to such notoriety today.
Yet Gregor had let me go with my pulse intact. Now there were rumbles that I'd influenced him as well. What no one cared to hear was that Gregor hadn't had a choice about changing me. The silver dagger in his back made his decision for him.
Adding to these ghoul/vampire hybrid fears were my high jumps in Paris. Who'd have thought that would have been responsible for so much added paranoia? But since flying was a skill only Master vampires possessed, the fact that I had come close to demonstrating it, even briefly, had people wondering what other powers I could be hiding. It fueled the fears about what would happen if ghoul attributes were added to my repertoire. Would I be invincible? Unkillable? Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and rerotate the spinning of the globe to turn back time? The theories got wilder and crazier.