“He has. Word has just been traveling down that Peter has been getting himself into trouble,” Ezra elaborated. “And I just got a phone call that vampires are seeking revenge on him. So I’m going to try and find him and see if I can’t reason with him.”
“He can handle himself,” Jack sneered at everyone’s concern. “Peter’s killed vampires before, and he’s fought in wars. If there’s one thing Peter knows, it’s how to fight.”
“This is different.” Ezra’s eyes grew sad and faraway. “There’s reason to believe he’s on a suicide mission.”
“Good,” Jack grunted under his breath.
“I’ll go with you.” Abruptly, I stood up and knocked over the chess board. I hadn’t yet gotten a handle on my movements, and I still had the unfortunate habit of knocking things over and tripping a lot. It was so much easier to move, and my mind hadn’t caught up to what my body could do.
“You’ll what?” Jack raised an eyebrow but looked at me evenly, and he didn’t believe that he’d heard me correctly. We hadn’t talked about Peter at all since I had turned, but he had incorrectly assumed that my feelings for Peter almost entirely mirrored his own.
“I’ll go with,” I repeated. I bent down to try and pick up the chess pieces and clean up the mess I had made, but Milo swatted my hands away.
“I’ll do it,” Milo insisted, sounding rather irritated as he pulled glass pawns out of my hand.
“You get busy letting them talk sense into you.”
“Alice,” Jack said simply. His expression remained mostly quizzical, but his breathing had gotten heavier, and he was starting to catch onto the fact that he hadn’t misheard me and this wasn’t a joke.
I stood up, watching Milo dumbly for a minute as he swiftly picked up my mess, and then swallowed hard when I looked up at Ezra and Mae. Mae’s worry only deepened when she thought of me going with Ezra, but he actually looked rather intrigued and pleased by the idea.
Very recently, I had talked to Ezra about Peter briefly. I was afraid that talking about him too much upset Jack somehow, so I let the topic die almost as soon as I brought up. The horrible reality was that part of me did still care for Peter, and not because it was ingrained in me to feel that way. Peter hadn’t done anything wrong in all of this, but he had been ostracized by his family and had gone through a terrible heartbreak because of it - because of me - and that wasn’t something that I took lightly.
“Alice, you don’t need to go with,” Mae shook her head. She cared about Peter, but she didn’t want any of us in harms way, especially Milo and I, who she perceived to be particularly vulnerable.
“I know I wouldn’t be any good in a fight, but maybe I could reason with him. Maybe I could convince him that it didn’t need to get to that point,” I continued nervously. All their eyes were on me, and except for Ezra’s, they were all incredibly disapproving.
Mae turned expectantly to Ezra, waiting for him to shoot me down, and I think that’s the only reason that Jack hadn’t started freaking out yet. They all expected Ezra to thank me for my sentiments but tell me that it was better if I stayed home. Taking a baby vampire into a war zone would be dangerous and irrational, and Ezra was nothing if not cautious and logical.
“She has a point,” Ezra admitted carefully, and that’s when everybody decided to get upset.
Mae touched his arm gently and tried to plead with him that I was far too young to do go anywhere for any reason, let alone on a crusade to save Peter from a suicide mission. Jack jumped to his feet, but he couldn’t seem to decide whether he was angrier with me or Ezra, or maybe Peter. Milo had just finished setting up the chess set, and he smacked me on the arm.
“Ow!” I scowled, rubbing my arm. “What’d you do that for?”
“Because you’re an idiot and I can!” Milo glowered at me. He had always been a rather overprotective younger brother, but he was the mature one, the sensible one, and he never failed to call me out on something completely idiotic.
The thing is that I knew it was idiotic, but as soon as Ezra had said that Peter was in danger, my heart had flipped. If anything bad happened to him, I couldn’t help but feel responsible. If I had just left his family alone, the way he had repeatedly begged me to, then he wouldn’t have gotten hurt and had to run off into the mess that he’s in. Thinking of him being hurt and in trouble made me feel nauseous and scared, and I knew I had to do something to help him.
“Ezra, you can’t seriously be thinking of taking her with you,” Jack said as evenly as he could.
His fists were clenched at his sides, but his eyes were just frightened and distressed. It killed him that I cared anything for Peter, and it would literally kill him if anything happened to me. He wasn’t trying to contain his anger as much as trying to mask his panic over losing me, either to Peter or to death.
“I won’t let anything happen to her, but she might be the best chance I have for talking Peter down from the ledge.” Ezra held his hands palm out towards Jack, trying to calm him, but that would mostly be impossible. “I have to try anything.”
“I am so sick of this!” Jack shouted, exasperated. “I should’ve just killed him when I had the chance!”
“Jack!” Mae chided him. “You don’t mean that! Don’t say things like that!”
Her warm maternal concern only lightly covered her own fear over everything. While she didn’t want anything bad to happen to anyone, she was become increasingly distanced from Peter. He was driving a wedge in the family, and she thought that he might physically harm the most defenseless of her brood, namely Jack, Milo, and me.
“I would love to stay and have this argument with you, but we really need to get on a flight out of here!” Ezra boomed over us all. “Alice, if you’re coming with, you need to pack for the cold.
I’ll go book the flight and get our passports ready.” Ezra turned to walk down the hall to his den, ending the conversation.
“Ezra!” Jack shouted and made a step after him, but Mae stopped him.
“I’ll talk to him,” Mae assured him meekly. “You take care of her.” She nodded towards me but didn’t look directly at anyone, probably because she was trying to keep the tears standing in her eyes instead of falling down her cheeks.
Mae hurried after Ezra, and Jack turned to me. His face was a mixture of rage, terror, jealousy, and underlying everything, love. He looked at me for a moment, trying to think of precisely what he wanted to say to me, and I took a deep breath before he could mount his argument.
“You’re not going to talk me out of this, Jack,” I told him.
I brushed past him so I could run upstairs to my room, to our room really, but both he and Milo followed right on my trail. With my quick, clumsy steps, it was amazing that I didn’t fall down the stairs, and if I had, that would’ve done very little for my case for going with Ezra.
Jack had been sleeping in Ezra’s den downstairs since I had turned, but all his things were still in here.
The closet was full of both our clothes, and my wardrobe had greatly expanded since I had turned. Ezra and Mae had set me up with an expense account and credit cards a few weeks ago, and my new, trimmer vampire body required all new clothes.
I went into the massive walk-in closet, rummaging around for bags. Inexplicably, Jack had hot pink luggage, but I didn’t have time to question it. I pulled the bags out from the underneath the pile of blankets it was hidden under and flipped it open, preparing to fill it with my things. Jack stood in the doorway, and Milo stood behind him, both of them glaring down at me.
“You’re actually packing?” Milo asked, sounding surprised. “You can’t really be considering going with Ezra.”
“He’s right. This is stupid,” Jack agreed. “It’s ridiculous and dangerous, and you don’t even know where you’re going. How can you even pack for that?”
“He said to pack for the cold,” I reminded them both.
I loaded my bag with sweaters and jeans and socks. Vampires didn’t really feel cold, and in fact, we preferred it to heat. But if we were to walk around in a blizzard wearing a tee shirt and shorts, the humans around us would start to question it, so we dressed warmly to fit in.
“Jack, just forbid her from going or something!” Milo said glibly.
“I can’t forbid her from doing anything,” Jack replied tiredly, but he definitely wished he could at times like this. “And if I tried, it would just make her want to do it more.”
I threw a pair of boots in the bag, and then struggled to zip the bag up. Obviously, I was much stronger than the stupid metal zipper, but I hadn’t figured out to use my strength at all. I had been constantly breaking things, and I had yet to figure out the medium between using too much and too little force.
“Here.” Jack came over and knelt on the floor next to me so he could zip up my bag for me.
“Thank you,” I said softly, and looked down at the bag so I wouldn’t look at him.
“Alice, why do you even wanna go?” Jack asked plaintively.
“He didn’t do anything wrong,” I told him quietly, and he rolled his eyes.
“He tried to kill you, Alice!” Jack shouted, and the pain from seeing me almost die sprang fresh in him. That had been one of the most agonizing moments of this life, and it was hard to feel what he felt, the terror and desperation that had he gone through when I had been dying.
“He didn’t mean to,” I insisted, and that was only half a lie.