Chapter Thirty-three
So this is what it feels like to be a murderer, I thought, taking a tighter grip of the wheel of Nick's truck, squinting from the low sun. I was nervous, sweaty, shaky, and I wanted to throw up. Oh yeah. I can see why people get off on this.
Beside me in Nick's jeans and cloth coat, Peter watched the passing view as we drove to the bridge, half of Nick's inertia-dampening curse fixed to the bumper. Peter's left hand cradled the defunct statue with DeLavine's blood smear on it. His right hand, looking slightly smaller than Nick's, was holding the handle of the door. I was pretty sure it was nerves since he didn't know the door had a tendency to fly open when you went over a bump.
Nick's truck was old. It rattled when it shook. The shocks were bad but the brakes were excellent. And with the NOS, it could be startlingly fast. Just what every successful thief needs.
Silent, we endured the stop-and-go traffic to get onto the bridge, my attention on Ivy and Jenks behind us as much as on the cars ahead of me jockeying to get on the bridge. It had been Ivy's idea to do this on the bridge. The stiff wind would hamper the Weres' sense of smell, and the bridge itself would prevent a helicopter ambulance and slow things down. But most of all, we needed a stretch of several miles without a shoulder to minimize Were interference after the crash. The five-mile bridge gave us that along with a nice margin to actually run into each other. The goal was the bridge apex, but a mile either way would work.
My eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, but I didn't feel any better seeing Ivy and Jenks in Kisten's Corvette running as a buffer between us and the Weres from the bar. "Put your seat belt on," I said. I thought it was stupid, like dragging the saddle behind you when you went looking for your horse fleeing the burning barn, but I didn't want to get pulled over for failure to wear a belt and have it all come crashing down when the cop realized Nick's newly flash-painted truck was the same one that had fled the scene of a crash yesterday.
The click was loud when Peter fastened his belt. We were going to be run over by a Mack truck. I didn't think it would make a difference if he had on his seat belt or not.
Oh God. What was I doing?
The traffic light finally turned green, and I pulled onto the bridge, headed for St. Ignace on the other side of the straits. I gripped the wheel tighter, stomach knotting. The bridge was a mess. The two northbound lanes were closed off, making traffic two-way on the southbound. Midway down the span there were big machines and powerful lights to turn the coming night to day as the workers tried to meet their pretourist-season deadline. They had missed it. Red cones separated the two lanes, allowing traffic to easily switch to the other side when needed. The bridge was an incredible five miles long, and every foot of it had needed repair.
Peter exhaled as we accelerated to a steady forty miles an hour, the opposing traffic doing the same an unnerving three feet away. Past the vacant northbound lane and thick girders, I could see the islands, gray and smudged from the distance. We were really high up, and I felt a moment of quickly stifled fear. Despite the stories, witches couldn't fly. 'Least not without a staff of charmed redwood that cost more than the Concord.
"Peter?" I said, not liking the silence.
"I'm fine," he said, his grip tensing on the statue. His voice was cross, sounding nothing like Nick. I couldn't help my awkward smile of understanding, remembering Ivy bothering me with the same question. My stomach gave a lurch.
"I wasn't going to ask how you were doing," I said, fiddling with the two charms about my neck. One was for pain that wouldn't cover the hurt caused by being hit, the other was to keep my head from meeting the dash. Peter had refused both.
My eyes lifted to the rearview mirror to see that Ivy and Jenks were still behind us. "Do you want me to turn the lights on?" I asked. It was our agreed upon signal to abort the plan. I wanted him to say yes. I didn't want to do this. The statue didn't matter right now. Peter did. We could find another way.
"No."
The sun was setting past him, and I squinted at him. "Peter..."
"I've heard it all," he said, his voice rough as he kept his stiff position. "Please don't. It comes down to one thing. I'm dying. I've been doing it for a long time, and it hurts. I stopped living three years ago when the medicine and charms quit working and the pain took everything away. There's nothing left of me but hurting. I fought for two years with the thought that I was a coward for wanting to end the pain, but there is nothing left."
I snuck a glance at him, shocking myself when I saw Nick sitting there, his jaw clenched and his brown eyes hard. It sounded like it was a story he had told too many times. As I watched, his shoulders slumped and he let go of the door. "This lingering isn't fair to Audrey," he said. "She deserves someone strong, able to stand beside her and meet her bite for bite in the passion she's aching to show me."
I couldn't let that go without saying something. "And becoming an undead is fair to her?" I said, making his jaw clench again. "Peter, I've seen the undead. That won't be you!"
"I know!" he exclaimed, then softer, "I know, but it's all I've got left to give her."
The whirl of air under the tires rose above the sound of the engine as we went over the first of the grates designed to lighten the bridge's load.
"She knows it won't be me," Peter said, his voice calm. He seemed to want to talk, and I would listen. I owed him that.
He met my gaze and smiled a scared little-boy smile. "She promised me she'll be happy. I used to be able to dance with such passion that it could drive her wild. I want to dance again with her. I will remember her. I will remember the love."
"But you won't feel it," I whispered.
"She'll feel love for the both of us," Peter said firmly, his eyes on the passing bridgework. "And in time, I'll be able to fake it for her."
This was not happening. "Peter - " I reached forward to turn on the lights, and he stopped me with a shaking hand on my wrist.
"Don't," he said. "I'm already dead. You're only helping me move forward."
I could not believe this. I didn't want to believe it. "Peter, there's so much you haven't done. That you might do. There are new medicines every day. I know someone who can help you." Trent could help him, I thought, then cursed myself. What in hell was I thinking?
"I've had all the medicines," Peter said softly. "Legal and otherwise. I've heard the lies, I've believed the promises, but there's nothing left to believe in but death. I'm moved around like a table lamp, Rachel." His voice faltered. "You don't understand because you aren't done living yet. But I'm done, and when you're done...you just know."
The car ahead of me flashed its brake lights and I took my foot off the accelerator. "But a lamp can light a room," I protested, my will weakening.
"Not when the bulb is broken." His elbow was on the windowsill and his head was in his cupped hand. The setting sun became flashes on him as the girders holding the bridge arched up. "Maybe by dying I can be fixed," he said over the rumble of a passing truck. "Maybe I can do some good when I'm dead. I'm not good for anything alive."
I swallowed hard. He wouldn't do anything after he died, unless it met his needs.
"It's going to be okay," Peter said. "I'm not scared of death. I'm scared of dying. Not dying, but how I'm going to die." He laughed, but it was tinged with bitterness. "DeLavine told me that being born and dying are the only two things we do perfectly. There's a hundred percent success rate. I can't do it wrong."
"That sounds funny coming from a dead man," I said, my breath catching when a big truck went past, shaking the grate we were on. This was wrong. This was so wrong.
Peter pulled his elbow from the window and looked at me. "He said how I feel when I die is the one thing I have control over. I can be afraid, or I can go boldly. I want to do it bravely - even if it hurts. I'm tired of hurting, but I can take a little more."
I was starting to shake, though the air from the setting sun coming in was warm and my window was down. His soul would be gone forever. The spark of creativity and compassion - gone.
"Can...can I ask you something?" I ventured. The oncoming traffic had grown thin, and I prayed that they hadn't shut down the southbound lane for some reason. It was probably just Nick driving slow so we would meet somewhere in the middle as planned.
"What?"
His voice was tired and weary, and the sound of lost hope in it knotted my stomach tighter. "When Ivy bit me," I said, darting a glance at him, "some of my aura went to her. She was taking my aura along with my blood. Not my soul, just my aura. The virus needs blood to stay active, but is it more than that?"
His expression was unreadable, and I rushed forward with the rest of it while I still had time. "Maybe the mind needs an aura to protect it," I said. "Maybe the still-living mind needs the illusion of a soul about it, or it will try to get the body to kill itself so that the soul, the mind, and the body will be back in balance."
Peter looked at me from Nick's face, and I saw him for what he was: a frightened man who was stepping into a new world with no safety net, both extremely powerful and tragically fragile, reliant upon someone else to keep his mind and body together after his soul was gone.
He didn't say anything, telling me I was right. My breath quickened and I licked my lips. Vampires take auras as their own to fool their mind that a soul still bathed it. It would explain why Ivy's father risked his own death to provide her mother with his blood and his alone. He bathed her mind in his aura, his soul, in the hopes that she would remember what love was. And perhaps, in the instant of the act, she did.
I finally understood. Exhilarated, I stared at the road ahead, not seeing it. My heart was pounding and I felt light-headed.
"That's why Audrey insists on being my scion," he said softly, "even though it's going to be very hard on her."
I wanted to stop. I wanted to stop right there in the middle of the freaking bridge and figure this out. Peter looked miserable, and I wondered how long he had agonized over remaining as he was and causing her pain, or becoming an undead and causing her a pain of another kind. "Does Ivy know?" I asked. "About the auras?"
He nodded, his eyes lighting briefly upon my stitches. "Of course."