Equilibrium: MM Gay Shifter Romance (Kingdom of Night Book 3) Read online

  Another gulp. "Things about you."

  "Ah," he said as if that explained everything. "Well, you're under no obligation to defend me. I'm sorry he upset you, though. I should have warned you that his condition has been a bit unstable lately."

  "Well, you might have and I just forgot it," I said dryly.

  "Tilt your head up."

  I followed his instructions as he began to clean up my lip. "Are you going to get in trouble for punching Uncle Ezra?"

  He chuckled. "If I do, it was worth it. No one touches you," he said in a dangerous tone that made me swoon in spite of myself. "No one but me."

  "Yeah, but you're not the Family leader yet."

  "I will be soon enough," he said, dabbing at my split lip. "When I am, things are going to change."

  "How?"

  "This kind of thing won't happen, for one." He squinted, then frowned as he lightly pinched the bridge of my nose between his thumb and index finger. "Brace yourself, this is going to hurt."

  No amount of bracing could have prepared me for the sharp pain when he cracked my nose back into place. I let out a stifled moan and would have collapsed if not for his steadying hand.

  "There," he murmured, undoing the button on his sleeve so he could roll it up to his elbow. "That should set it, but I can already tell it's not going to heal well."

  "What are you doing?" I asked, eying his exposed wrist. Grandpa Hugh's warning flashed through my mind.

  "I can't have you disfigured less than a year before your transition. There's no changing after ascension besides the gradual aging process, you know."

  "You're going to give me your blood again just so my nose won't look different?" I asked in disbelief. "I thought this was kind of a big deal."

  "Blasphemy once is the same as blasphemy thrice," he quipped. "Besides, if your face is blemished it's going to be a reminder of the time that fool undermined my authority every time I look at you."

  "Oh," I said, processing his explanation. It was strange how he could be so different in some ways and yet so similar in others. One moment I was convinced he really was the harbinger of our destruction and the next it felt like he was the same old Prentice who had always defended me. Maybe I was the bipolar one.

  The practiced ease with which he dragged his pocketknife along his wrist helped bring me back to planet earth. Whether Grandpa Hugh was right or not, this was definitely not Prentice as usual.

  "Drink," he ordered.

  My throat became dry at the thought of it. All my life, I had been conditioned that what the vampires did was a foul, vulgar act. Now he was expecting me to freely participate in the bloodletting.

  I must have hesitated too long for his liking because Prentice took a handful of my hair--admittedly in a far gentler manner than Uncle Ezra had--and guided my head down to his wrist. He didn't stop until my lips brushed against the blood trickling from the cut.

  "Drink," he repeated.

  I swallowed the bile rising in my throat and put my mouth to his wound. The blood was hot in contrast to his skin and it tasted familiar in an unpleasant way, like a memory locked away somewhere for good reason. I swallowed a mouthful just to escape the feel of it on my tongue. I had hoped that would be enough, but his hand kept my head firmly in place while he stroked my hair consolingly with his thumb. "That's a good boy. Keep going."

  Tears stung my eyes as I forced myself to swallow another mouthful of blood. It was coursing past my lips faster than I could stomach it. The unnaturalness of the act we were committing weighed heavily on me in a way my feelings for him never had. If there was any great sin or perversion I was guilty of, it was this. As Prentice's blood crept down my throat, I felt it staining me from the inside, like it was seeping into my soul itself.

  When I could take no more, I choked on the taste of it and strained against his hand. He let me up grudgingly and immediately pressed a towel to his bleeding wrist. He offered me another towel, but I barely turned away in time to retch into the sink. Fortunately, nothing but bile came up. I was terrified that he would make me go through it all again.

  "Clean yourself up," he said, offering me the damp towel once again. There was a strange look in his eyes, some grotesque form of satisfaction, as he watched me. If I didn't know better, I'd say there was a hint of lust in his gaze.

  Now I really was hallucinating.

  I wasted no time rubbing the cool wet cloth over my face. No matter how much my reflection begged to differ, I couldn't feel clean enough. The swelling around my nose was already beginning to go down and the edges of the cut on my lip were starting to knit together. Blasphemy sure worked fast.

  "Looking better already," he said proudly. "I couldn't in good conscious leave you in such a pitiful state."

  "Leave me?" I asked fearfully. "Where are you going?"

  As afraid of Prentice as I was, the idea of him leaving me was a thousand times worse. Maybe it was Stockholm Syndrome, or maybe I was just crazy, but Prentice was both the chaos and the order in my world. Without him, I wasn't sure I would even continue to exist.

  "I'm not going anywhere," he said cryptically. "Go to your room and change into some clean clothes before dinner. You're going to want to eat."

  Chapter 6

  ARTHUR

  The meaning of Prentice's ominous words had yet to be revealed when I finally sat down at the dinner table. It was a long oak table that had been in the family for the better part of a millennium, carved from the same tree we had used for kindling during the real witch trials. Granted, most of them were vampires, but killing witches was better press back in those days.

  Dinner went the way it always did when the family got together, although this one was a bit more somber than usual, if that was even possible. Mom was ignoring me, but it was hard to tell if it was because she had really washed her hands of me or because was just being her usual distant self. Uncle Ezra was still sulking but no one had asked about his bandaged nose and he never brought it up. Aunt June, his wife and Emily's mother, was the only one aside from Prentice who seemed to be in a good mood. She kept asking him questions and he answered them happily.

  How was the trip? Was Dr. Burns doing well? She had been meaning to send her a thank-you card for that lovely sweater set. How were the wedding plans going? It was just incredible that Prentice had managed to help so much from afar. What would the Family ever do without him? Hopefully Grandpa Hugh would hand over the reins soon so life could carry on. Another helping of peas, dear?

  I kept to myself and picked idly at my food. Even though I had barely eaten a morsel, I could feel Emily's eyes on me, judging the fact that I was eating at all. Her silence was the most unusual aspect of the entire meal, and the most welcome one. Like her father, she was still sulking over whatever scolding Prentice had given her.

  Sucks to be the whipping boy, doesn't it, Uncle Ezra?

  When I finally dared to look up from my plate, he was glowering at me. It was then that I realized he might be too afraid to retaliate against Prentice, but I was going to be the scapegoat for his humiliation.

  I turned back to shuffling my peas around on my plate with renewed interest.

  "You're not eating Arthur," said Prentice. I looked up again to find that all attention was on me. As much as I had longed for it as a kid, as an adult I knew well enough that the only attention I would ever receive from my family was the kind I was better off without.

  "I'm still kind of sick from the trip," I lied instinctively. The rest of the family was hardly ignorant of what Prentice had done to me at the cabin--I could tell from their faces that they knew and more than approved--but it was family etiquette to pretend like nothing had happened. Everyone always knew how the bruises and cuts had gotten there, but no one wanted to hear about it at the dinner table.

  "Ah," he said knowingly. "In that case, you're excused."

  I thanked him and stood to clear my plate before he could change his mind. I wasted no time dumping my plate into the trash and washing it bef
ore I headed to my room, glancing behind my shoulder to make sure I hadn't been followed.

  My room was the same as I had left it, for the most part. Of course, the electronics were gone and the phone jack had been ripped out of the wall. My mother had been onto my tricks ever since I had used my cell phone to tap into the land line when I was a teenager because I had seen it done it in a movie once.

  I flopped down on my bed and for the first time I noticed how hard the mattress was compared to the one in Prentice's cabin or even the one in my dorm. Maybe all the other beds in the house were crummy, too, but I doubted it. Looking around the room, it was easy to remember why I had never spent any time in it. Mom had always been afraid of letting me keep "secular" books and posters, or music that had been recorded in the last fifty years, out of fear that they might harbor some hidden gay agenda.

  My walls were bare save for a clock that hadn't worked since my father was alive and just about the only things I kept in the room were stuffy old clothes that no longer fit me. I couldn't pick out a single thing about the room that said anything about my personality or even hinted that anyone other than a mannequin had ever lived there. It wasn't at all like my dorm room.

  College was a taste of freedom for most kids, but for me it had been a feast. For the first time in my life, I had been able to explore not only the outside world but myself. When I first enrolled in Freshman year, I hadn't even had a personality of my own. I soon discovered that I was every bit as much of an outcast at school as I was in my family, but at least it was always for a reason. It was because I was the chubby guy or the weird sheltered guy who had never heard of popular books, movies, and music. When I finally did get to experience the things everyone else was talking about, I found that I preferred Zeppelin and Sabbath to ukulele ballads and club pop and the philosophical works of Dostoyevsky and Goethe to romanticized stories about the creatures I had been bred to despise and hunt.

  And then, in the nail that sealed the coffin of my rebellion, I had fallen in love with one of those creatures, challenging the last remaining influence of my family's way of thinking. It wasn't the same type of love I felt for Prentice, of course. It was far subtler and it had crept up on me so gradually that I hadn't even known it was there, but it was just as real and even more freeing in its own way. Truth be told, I still wasn't sure what the true nature of that love was, whether it was just the foolish crush of a sheltered kid with zero life experience or something more, but it marked the end of my innocence nonetheless.

  Remus Black certainly wasn't my soulmate--God knew he had enough of those to contend with--but he was the only friend I'd ever known outside my family. He was also someone I had been destined to kill long before he ever set foot in Prentice's classroom. It was his existence that made it impossible to continue living between worlds, but he was also the only reason I had even been given a taste of the outside world in the first place. The world was nothing if not merciless in its irony.

  Whatever altered role Prentice had planned for me now, I knew it would place me at the crossroads I had been straddling ever since enrolling at the university. Either I would become complicit in the death of the only person who had ever shown me true kindness free of agenda, or our grandfather was right and I would become the undoing of the man I loved and the only one who made life worth living. There was no neutral option. I had only succeeded at prolonging the inevitable decision that awaited me.

  The door creaked open but I laid there, frozen and wishing I had locked it just in case it was Uncle Ezra. Not that a locked door would stop him. I shut my eyes and pretended to be asleep, hoping that whoever it was would go away. They stood there for a long while without saying anything, and the longer I could feel their eyes on me, the more uncertain I became about their motive.

  Familiar footsteps followed the path to my bed and the mattress sank with another person's weight as the door closed softly. A hand stroked my hair fondly, ruling out any of my family members--at least the ones I was directly related to. That left only one person it could be. The stroking continued for a while until he leaned in and I felt cool breath on my neck.

  "Arthur," whispered Prentice, "Are you awake?"

  I don't know why, but I obeyed the voice in my mind urging me to remain still. A moment later, he rolled me onto my back and I fell limp, wondering how long I could keep up the charade.

  He lifted me into his arms with more care than he had shown while I was awake and left my room. I didn't dare open my eyes to see where he was taking me, but I tried to pay attention to the turns he made. Right at the end of the hallway my room was on, then left through the servant's hallway, probably to avoid passing through the main foyer. What plans could he possibly have for me that he would have to keep from the rest of the family?

  When he made another right, my heart sank. He was taking me to the basement. I tried to tell myself it had to be something else, but there were only so many reasons he might be taking me down there, and I doubted it was for an impromptu sparring session in the gym.

  It was only when I recognized the familiar tune of the security code to the isolation room door that I fully acknowledged his intended plans. Letting my guise fall, I dove out of his arms and hit the floor on my knees, determined to use the element of surprise in a doomed last-ditch effort to escape. I didn't even have time to scramble before he caught me by the back of my shirt and dragged me inside the newly opened doors.

  By the time I caught my balance, the doors had sealed us in. "No, please!" I cried, pounding on the thick metal. There was no real hope of escape, but I wasn't going down without a fight.

  "I see there is no end to your deceit," he murmured, almost sadly. "I had hoped you would eat enough at dinner for the drugs to kick in, but you're obstinate as ever. This didn't have to be a traumatic affair."

  "For me or for you?" I railed at him, calling his bluff. "You just wanted me to wake up in here alone so you wouldn't have to suffer me making a 'scene.'"

  "Can you really blame me?" he asked dryly. "Look at yourself. This is hardly how a man behaves."

  "Then I'm not a man! I wish I wasn't!" I cried. "Maybe then everyone in this family wouldn't hate me so fucking much!"

  He took my rage in stride and cut a dark silhouette against the fully white room. It was bright and open yet unimaginably dark and terrible at the same time. The only things in the room were a screened bathroom in the far corner--for the dignity of the warden more than the prisoners, to be sure--and a small mattress dressed only in a single grey sheet.

  "No one hates you," he began coolly. "Least of all me. The others simply don't know what to do with you, but I do."

  "What, throw me in here and leave me so you can run off and have your picturesque wedding and become leader while my mind rots?" I seethed. There was no point in holding back now. Even death was a preferable end to the insanity that awaited me if Prentice had his way. He had seen fit to torture me for two months. I knew I would be in the isolation chamber for at least as long.

  "This is my last resort, Arthur. You've left me no choice," he said, strangely patient. "It's become clear that there is no other way to save your soul, try though I did to spare you the pain."

  "I don't need saving from hell, Prentice," I hissed. My voice was hoarse from straining so much and tears were streaming down my eyes in a way most unbecoming of a man, but I didn't care. "I need saving from you."

  He flinched only slightly, but it was enough to tell that my words had put a chink in his seemingly impenetrable armor. "No amount of cruel words will stop me from fulfilling my responsibility to you. In fact, I'll go against my own word and give you one last chance. Tell me what it is you need for closure, Arthur. It's not too late. All of this can be resolved. All will be forgiven and all you have to do is tell me the greatest desire of your heart. Is that really so hard?"

  He talked like it was really that simple, like he was desperately trying to make the pitiful fool understand that the key to his own prison door was within his
grasp. And he was right, it was a simple matter and I was a fool, but there was nothing he could do to me that was worse than giving him the answer he wanted.

  I shook my head slowly. "You're going to have to leave me in here forever, Prentice. As long as I have even a shred of myself left intact, I'll never tell you."

  His calm facade was stripped away and his eyes burned with rage, but he kept it in check. "As you wish," he said coldly. Without another word, he left and sealed me in my tomb. A moment later, the lights became so bright I could hardly make out the sight of my own hand in front of me. The sound of my own breathing disappeared and no matter what I did or how I moved, it was all met with the dullness of absolute silence.

  For a few moments after he left, I held out hope that he would change his mind and come back. When it became apparent that he wouldn't, I collapsed on the mattress and my shoulders began to heave with the sobs I had been holding in ever since he brought me home.

  When I could hold it in no longer, I let out a scream that ripped through my heart and tore out of my mouth with such force it felt like my throat would start bleeding any moment, but there was no sound. The chamber swallowed it up, just like everything else--everything except the beating of my heart.

  I turned towards the window at the very top of the wall. I couldn't see it or anything else other than white light, but I had been in there enough times to know where it was and I knew he was watching. Tears streamed down my face, but what he couldn't possibly know was that they weren't for myself or my predicament, but for him. For his lost humanity and for everything else he had become. For the boy who used to skip rocks on the pond and talk about how he was going to make a difference in the world, a good one. For the young man who had resisted ascension every bit as fiercely as I had, and for the one who had come out on the other side so unlike the others and so very nearly like himself. For the professor who had once overheard a student talking about having to drop out because her grades had slipped after a family tragedy and not only stayed late to tutor her but anonymously paid off her tuition bill as well. For all the things he was and wasn't and could never be again.