sink
her dirty fangs into my kid…”
Noah jumped at the sound of flesh hitting flesh and
then growled when he realized the vampire king had just hit his
dad. Cole growled back, and another punch was landed. This time it
was Anthony who let out the groan of pain.
“ Don’t you bring
that little freak near my son ever again, do you hear me?” Cole
said. “In fact, why don’t you keep your vampires at the compound,
and I’ll keep my wolves at the hive? You stay on that side of town.
I’ll stay on this one.”
Noah gasped. How could his dad call Sydney a name
like that? She was the nicest person he knew, and the only kid near
his age that he didn’t have to try to impress. She didn’t care that
he was the alpha’s son.
After the vampire king left, Noah moved out into the
open. “Dad?”
Cole growled and spun around. “How much of that did
you hear?”
He shrugged. How could he know how much he’d heard
or when they’d started arguing? “Is Sydney sick? If she needs
blood, she can have some of mine to get better.”
“ Absolutely not.
I’m sorry, but you can’t play with her anymore. We don’t make
friends with vampires. I should have stopped it when it first
started, but your mom is friends with Charlee, and it just seemed
easier to let it go.”
Was mom not allowed to see Charlee now? He couldn’t
imagine his dad had any power to stop a demon from going wherever
she wanted.
Noah felt the glow come to his
eyes. “That is bullshit ! You can’t stop me from
seeing her!”
Cole’s nostrils flared. “Where did you learn that
word?”
There was a saying that little wolves had big ears,
and the pack hadn’t been editing their vocabulary around him
recently.
Noah shrugged again and mumbled, “You can’t stop me
from seeing her.”
The alpha’s eyes narrowed. “I’m the alpha. I can
make anybody stop seeing anybody.”
But even at seven, Noah knew that to some degree his
dad was all talk. After all, he wouldn’t throw his own son out of
the pack. Not over something like this. And especially not when he
was still a pup, despite all his big talk.
He didn’t see Sydney again after that. He still
thought about her and missed her. He wondered if she thought about
him and missed him. As soon as he was old enough and strong enough,
he would go find her. But that never happened because the following
year he was kidnapped.
As he was taken away by the magic
users, he thought, Bet you wish you’d
just let me hang out with Sydney now, instead of getting too close
to the pack kids.
If he’d been allowed to see her, he wouldn’t have
been playing chicken with the boundaries because he wouldn’t have
cared what the other pack kids thought. He wouldn’t have done
something that might have encouraged Sydney to join in and put her
in danger.
***
Sydney sat in her cell staring at the spot where
Jacob had been. They hadn’t even properly cleaned the cube. She
could still smell him in there. A few careless drops of blood
remained as evidence of what she’d done the day before.
What they made you do.
Not long before, she’d been plotting to kill him.
But it had been different. It had been an escape plan to save her
life. But didn’t doing what they said save her life? When she’d
killed him and then watched the guy in the cube beside her shift
nonchalantly into his wolf form and eat like nothing had happened,
she knew she was truly friendless in here.
She’d been given bagged blood this evening. It
didn’t restore her energy but at least she wasn’t killing someone
today. It was something. If they weren’t going to let her feed from
a human without demanding she finish him, this was better.
Sydney studied the burn marks. Several ran up and
down her arms. In the reflective glass she could see one on her
cheek. Another had hit the side of her neck. A normal vampire would
have healed instantly unless he’d been weakened and starved. Not
Sydney. It hadn’t even started to heal a day