Chapter 4: Will

Chapter 4: Will

With my hand wrapped around her mouth and my arm holding her lest she fell, I moved Alexis away from the window and into the darker corner of the room, where her whimpering sounds would be muted.

“I have crawled through hell and beyond to find you,” I said. “And I am relieved to see that you are not dead. Please don’t scream when I remove my hand. It is me. This is not a dream or some hallucination.”

Alexis nodded. I slowly removed my hand from her mouth, then stepped back so that she would register what was happening. It had not been easy for me to track her down and far harder for me to make my way from Fiddler’s Green to this urban hellscape known as Bangor. I had tried time and again to shift, failing each time worse than the last. The only thing that had worked for me when everything else had failed was my bond with her. I could sense she was alive, but that was all I could do then. It wasn’t until I was certain she was alive and somewhere nearby that my bond strengthened and allowed me to find her. It was as if the bond itself was testing me.

“I saw your mouth froth and your skin turn blue. You had no heartbeat. Before I ran for my life, I checked your vitals. You were dead. How the fuck are you still alive then?” Alexis whispered, holding her shocked face with both hands.

“For the longest time, I was dead, or so I thought. It would surprise you to learn that I woke up in my grave. That part about crawling through hell, wasn’t an understatement. I had to dig myself out and witness my defeat from the perspective of a ghost. I saw that Maurice had taken control of the pack again. I visited Vince, who is the only other person who knows that I am alive. Contacting Maliha failed, as she was not in her apartment. Yes. I went there, thinking you were staying with her after I could not find you in the commune.”

“Do you really think that spouting all that shit is going to change what happened?” Alexis asked, now not so much shocked as she was gripped with rage. Her eyes were seething, and her cheeks had flushed red.

“What are you talking about? I’m not dead, and you’re not dead. Somehow we’re both miraculously in one piece. Does that not make you feel a little bit relieved? I would only imagine that you must have felt some loss or sorrow when I presumably died!” I snapped.

“You do not get to raise your voice at me. Not now, not ever!” Alexis yelled. “Not after what you did. Or perhaps conveniently enough, you don’t remember?”

“What did I do that warrants such hostile treatment?” I asked, utterly confused as to why she was giving me the mother of all cold shoulders. I had been dreading for her life ever since I had woken up, and here she was, out with some strange man, living comfortably in this place, not even a full day after the fiasco that had taken place at Beckett Tower.

“You said her name!” Alexis said, her voice still loud but not as much as before. “You were dying, I was holding you, and you said ‘Ariana!” Not Alexis. Not that you loved me. Not anything else. All you ever fucking uttered was her name. Did you even love me at any point? Or was I just a proxy surrogate knockoff of my grandmother for you all this time? Is that all this was?”

“I can see that you are rattled. Believe me I am just as shaken. But the thing is, I didn’t call out her name in the way you think. You’re wrong about all of that. You didn’t die. I died at least for a short while. You don’t know what happened to me. I was in the afterlife, in the realm of souls. That’s when I said her name. she beckoned me to join her and my forefathers on the plain of spirits. I refused. I told her I could not, not while I had unfinished business back on earth. Not while I still loved Alexis. I came back for you!” I said, hoping beyond hope that she would sense the truth and earnestness in my voice and believe me, for every word I uttered was completely honest and exactly what had happened.

“I don’t buy it,” Alexis said. She was not holding her face any longer. Her arms were crossed defensively in front of her, and she was glaring at me. There was not a shred of mercy in her eyes nor a gleam of relief on her face. My bond had led me to her, but now, my bond was just as cold as the stare she was giving me. I did not expect such cruelty.

“You must be under duress. You have been through much. I can see that. You’re hurt. But please, don’t be this way,” I pleaded, hoping that she would understand.

“Did you know what happened when I came here? A kind woman gave me living quarters for free. Well, I am going to work as a bartender for her, but still, no one did anything like that for me in Fiddler’s Green. A handsome guy behaved with me nicely. Took me out and treated me to dinner, laughter, and a good time. Nothing like that happened in Fiddler’s Green. I was walking with him in the street, and someone gave me a rose, saying I looked lovely. The only shit that has happened to me so far in Bangor has been the shit that I dragged in through my heels when I came here. Vampires. But I was protected by people I barely know. Can you recall how many times that has happened to me in Fiddler’s Green? Zero. I feel like I deserve this after my fucked-up existence in Fiddler’s Green. It only took me all my life to realize that. I deserve love, kindness, respect, and gentleness.”

“I love you,” I said bleakly.

“Your love is dangerous, Will. You shattered me by dying on me, and what was left of the shards of my heart, you stomped on them by saying her name instead of mine, leading me to doubt if you’d ever loved me to begin with. Your love came with the baggage of dealing with your past, your revenge on your enemies, and your grandiose scheme to rid Fiddler’s Green of all evil. It can’t happen, Will. Sometimes you just gotta eliminate yourself from the equation if the odds are not in your favor. You never understood that. Instead, you dragged me with you, made me witness your death, and then…ugh!” she said.

I couldn’t fathom that this was coming from her. Just two or three days ago, we had been fishing on my boat, telling each other that we loved each other and how we’d live a long and happy life together once everything would be fine. Had I known then that the consequences of my actions would be this extreme, I would never have attacked Blair and Maurice, and Ralph.

“Are you rejecting me?” I asked fearfully, not wanting her to answer or wanting to remain suspended in this emotional limbo.

“You died, Will! How was I to reject you when you rejected me first by saying her name and then dying on me? I mourned. I cried and wept and dragged my dying body to another city. I vowed to myself that I’d somehow take revenge for your death. When you died, I felt like I was responsible for it. It was twenty-four hours of going through the emotional wringer for me. And when I return to some semblance of normalcy, you’re asking me if I rejected you?” she said. “I am heartbroken and wounded. For what it’s worth, I think that you’re bullshitting me into thinking that you were on that afterlife plain or whatever it was you said. I think you’re just coming up with excuses.”

“In that case,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I will take my leave. I hope that one day you’ll understand that I was not lying. And when that day comes, I hope that you’ll find your way back to me.”

Alexis scoffed and turned her back to me.

Defense mechanisms came in various shapes and forms. Some lizards spouted an acidic bloodlike liquid from their eyes at their predators in self-defense. Rodents posed dead when an attacker was nearby. A snake would hiss and secrete venom when faced with danger. Wolves became aggressive. I could not blame her for behaving this way. Had I been through a similar situation, I would have done the same. She was hurt. Her brain was not able to compute the events that had happened. I had made the fatal flaw of uttering Ariana’s name. I was to blame for that.

Mostly, I was just glad to see that she was alive and not too physically wounded. She had found a new life less than a day after I had presumably died. A new job, a new place to live, a new person to spend time with. That last made my heart singe with jealousy, but it was not something on the forefront of my mind.

I was the alpha, and it did not suit my stature to grovel and plead.

“Goodbye, Alexis,” I said.

When she did not respond, I took it as my signal to leave. I exited from the window, but before taking one last look at her, thinking that I’d do anything to get her back, to make her see things from my perspective.

Anything.

***

Where was I supposed to go now that I had been rejected by my mate? Which hearth could I call home in this strange new town where I knew nobody and had no penny to my name?

It wasn’t that I was hungry and tired. It was that I was heartbroken, and my current emotional state made it impossible for me to think clearly or to chart a course of action. The woman I needed had told me to leave. And for good reason. For once, I was not going to aggressively defend my stance and lash out in response. I should not have said Ariana’s name.

Though, something stung me deep in my heart as I recalled that Alexis had barely shown any happiness or relief upon seeing me alive and hardly asked any questions as to how I might have been alive.

She had mentioned vampires. Something about dragging them to Bangor with her. If she was in danger, it was my responsibility to make sure that she was well out of danger. At least for now, Maurice was serving as a shoddy Alpha to the pack. As much as this made my blood boil, there was this bittersweet relief in knowing that, as the Alpha, he wouldn’t at least do something outright terrible to the pack members.

Alexis was my only concern for now—her safety and somehow making sure she’d see things from my perspective.

“I thought I heard yelling coming from upstairs,” some woman said, coming up behind me. “Are you the asshole who is responsible for the injuries on that poor girl? If so, I have half a mind to beat the crap out of you.”

“I never hurt a hair on her body,” I said, turning around to see who dared to speak to me this way. It was a woman, heavily tattooed, holding a shotgun in her hands, smoking a cigarette.

“Good. Then you can at least tell me what hell she went through and if she’s the real deal or not. I never saw such a tortured soul in my life. Couldn’t help but offer her a place to live and a job.”

“Then you are a much kinder soul than I ever was,” I said, feeling remorseful for all the times I had been bad to Alexis. I missed her, even though she was just inches away. There was nothing I could say right now that would change her mind about me. Such a combination of words did not exist in the infinite permutations of language. At least not for now. Later, maybe she would understand, and maybe she would soften, but nothing was going to happen right now.

“Who are you, and what business do you have with that girl?” she asked.

“I could ask the same of you,” I replied sternly.

“They call me Izzie. This is my bar. And if you wanna stand here without getting shot, you better explain who you are,” she said, trying to scare me by putting her finger on the trigger. “She already had a hell of a scare from a meth head today.”

“I’m Will. I was…engaged to her before my accident. And what meth head?” I knew even before she said anything else that it wasn’t a meth head she was talking about.

“Some guy who grabbed her throat. I hit him with a crowbar. He was screaming when he ran. His skin was all torn up,” she said.

“Thank you for protecting her,” I said.

“We women look after our own, especially after folk have been bad to ‘em,” Izzie said. “And from the way I see it, she doesn’t want you here. So next time you come here, remember, I have a shotgun, and I love using it.”

I was not concerned with her anymore. As far as I was concerned, she was taking care of Alexis, and I trusted her to continue doing it. She seemed like a responsible woman. What worried me was the vampires. I needed to scout this area and make sure that there were no lurkers here.

“I’m not going to bother you again,” I said. “You take care now.”

“Mmhmm,” Izzie said, still holding her shotgun.

When I was well out of sight of the bar, I turned into an alley, climbed atop a building using the fire exit, and began looking around the immediate vicinity to see if there were any signs of vampires. Or any hostile being, for that matter.

The fact remained that Ralph, Blair, and Maurice knew that Alexis was alive, and they would do anything in their power to kill her to silence her. What they did not know was that she wasn’t entirely defenseless and that I was still alive.

While there was still breath in my body, I would defend that woman.

I perched myself on one of the cozier roofs, trying to figure out why I couldn’t shift into a wolf even when I tried. This had also robbed me of my other abilities to move swiftly, hear intently, and see far away.

Right now, I was as defenseless as an ordinary man.

But even in this state, I could see something moving in the dark. Five figures, all of them traipsing around the roofs. It did not take me long to realize from how they moved that those were not humans. Their shapes, their gait, and their propensity for leaping across long distances only confirmed my suspicions.

The vampires had followed Alexis to Bangor.

And without my abilities, I stood little chance against all of them.

As soon as I realized I needed a weapon, providence provided one for me in the form of a guy standing behind me, holding a handgun to my head.

“You best tell me what the fuck you’re doing on the roof of my building, buster, or I’m going to pop a cap in your skull,” this man said.

Vampires were one thing, but I could take this man on, even with his added advantage of catching me by surprise.

I lunged to the side before he could shoot and grabbed his gun in my hand, yanking it free from his grip.

“What is it with this town and people pointing guns in my face?” I asked, throwing the gun on the floor.

“What do you want?” the man asked, raising his hands above his head. “Money? I don’t have any money.”

“I don’t want your money, my friend. I just need your permission to use your roof. I’m in no mood to fight, as I have had the worst past hours. So, don’t raise the alarm, and don’t reach for your gun. Just understand that I mean you no harm, but there’s someone out there I love very much, and she is in the way of harm. I intend to save her. In order to do that, I need access to this roof. Do you have a family?”

The man nodded.

“Do you love them?”

He nodded again.

“Then you must understand, as a family man, that I would do anything to protect mine. Right now, this means using your roof. I am not going to hurt you,” I said, passing the gun back to the man.

“You could have knocked on the door. I’d have let you in. Don’t go scaring people like that. This ain’t Gotham, and you ain’t Batman,” he said, stowing the gun back in his pants.

“Are we okay?” I asked, now taking notice of the man’s features. He was white-haired, wrinkled, and quite frail.

“Son, I don’t presume things, and I don’t mean to ask, but you look as bad as those junkies down in the streets. Are you okay?”

“Nothing some food and sleep won’t fix,” I said.

The man nodded solemnly, then retraced his steps back to the rooftop entrance. I turned my attention back to the silhouette of the vampires. They were still there, acting maniacally as ever.

When the man returned, he came back with a tray of food, water, and a blanket.

“Best leave before the morning,” the man said.

“Thank you for this,” I said. “There’s something different about your town. Folks are kinder here. Except for shaking guns in my face, that is.”

“Aye, that’s true,” the man said. “You better not be here when I come in the morning.”

I nodded as the man left, holding myself off as best as I could. The minute the door closed, I fell upon the food on the tray like a starving dog, eating every bite without even chewing.

It was only after I’d drunk all the water that I realized how famished and parched I had been. After finishing my food, I diverted my attention back to the vampires on the roof.

They weren’t there anymore.