Chapter 75 What I Don't Remember

Chapter 75 What I Don't Remember
JAXON

I can't remember if I hurt her, and that's worse than knowing.

"Jaxon." Jett's voice cuts through the noise of students scattering after the headmaster's announcement. "You've been weird all morning. Weirder than usual."

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine," Jaden says, falling into step beside me, brothers on either side like they always are, like proximity fixes anything. "You've barely said a word since the screen came on."

"A girl died, Jaden. Forgive me for not being chatty."

"Since when did you become the empath? You're usually the heartless and bitchy vampire that didn't give a fuck about anyone or their mama. What happened?"

"A moment of silence please," Jaxon replied.

They exchange one of those looks — the twin-not-twin look they've perfected over nineteen years of sharing a face I don't fully share, because I came out different. Teeth they don't have. A hunger they'll never have to understand.

"Where are you even going?" Jett asks, because I've already peeled off from the path toward the dormitories.

"Arts class. Called dibs on the pottery wheel before break." The lie comes easy. Too easy.

"Since when do you care about pottery?"

"Since always. You just never asked." I don't wait for the follow-up. I walk faster until their voices fade into the general noise of the courtyard.

I don't go to arts class.

I go toward the infirmary, because my head feels like it's splitting down the middle and there's a pulse behind my eyes that isn't mine, hasn't been mine since I was born with this thing living in my blood.

He is stirring again.

I feel it the way you feel weather changing — pressure building behind my ribs, a voice that isn't quite a voice, ancient and patient and hungry in a way that has nothing to do with hunger as anyone else understands it. The Vampire God doesn't speak to me in words. He speaks in want.

Last night, he wanted so badly I couldn't breathe through it.

I press my hand against the infirmary door and stop, forehead against the cold wood, trying to put the pieces of last night in order the way I've tried a hundred times since dawn. The suppression drugs stopped working three days ago. I felt it building. I told myself I could ride it out, the way I've ridden out every wave since I was fourteen and understood what I actually am.

I couldn't ride this one out.

I remember the woods being quiet. I remember thinking that was safer — no one to lose control near.

Everything after that comes in pieces, out of order, like a film someone spliced wrong. A flash of blonde hair. A startled sound. My own hands, doing something, but I can't get the memory to hold still long enough to see what. A heartbeat under my mouth, small and frantic, slowing, stopping — but whose. That's the part that won't resolve. I want it to be the hare. I need it to be the hare. But when I try to look directly at the memory, it slides sideways, the way dreams do when you reach for them.

I don't know what I did in those woods. That's the truth, the one I haven't said out loud to anyone, not even to my own reflection.

I push into the infirmary, and the pulse behind my eyes flares hot the second the door shuts behind me. My vision tilts at the edges. My fangs ache against my gums like they're trying to grow whether I let them or not.

"Jaxon James." The voice is warm, unbothered. A nurse steps out from behind the curtain — blonde, poised, a clipboard against her hip like this is any ordinary check-in. "Come sit."

"I just need something for a headache." My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to.

"Sit," she says again, gentler, and something about the way she says it moves my legs before my brain agrees to it.

She presses two fingers to my wrist, counts something silently, rests her palm against my forehead. Her smile doesn't waver.

"Slight fever," she says. "Headache?"

"A little."

"Mm." She writes something down, unhurried. "Bed rest. Fluids. Nothing serious."

I'm already standing, desperate to be anywhere else, when she says it — quiet, almost fond.

"Jaxon James. I know exactly what you are."

I freeze. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"You're starving," she says, like she's commenting on the weather. "It's radiating off you. And you're terrified — not of what you did, but of not knowing what you did."

That lands somewhere it shouldn't be able to reach. My breath goes short. "How would you know that."

"Because fear like that has a smell too," she says. "And because I've watched a lot of young ones go through exactly what you're going through. The gaps. The not-knowing. It isn't guilt, Jaxon. Guilt is for people who remember." She tilts her head. "You don't remember. There's a difference, even if no one's told you that yet."

The room darkens at the edges before I decide to let it. My fangs drop fully, sharp and undeniable, shadows in the corners bending toward me the way they do when I stop pretending to be smaller than I am.

"Who the fuck are you?" I snap.

She laughs, low and entirely unafraid, which unsettles me more than if she'd flinched.

"No need for that," she says. "We're the same, you and I. And whatever happened in those woods — I don't think it's what you're afraid it is. But you can't think straight starving like this, and you can't remember straight either. Both of those need fixing before you'll ever know the truth. I know you're afraid. Not there's no need to be scared or anything. You can trust me. I am like you."

She rolls up her sleeve without waiting for permission, the pale inside of her wrist exposed, veins faint and blue beneath the skin. I can hear her pulse now, steady, deliberately, unmistakably offered.

"Drink," she says.