Vitality (Vitality Series #1)

Chapter 51 Burning Low pt.2

Time was running low — it was all running low.

Layton looked down at Ava, the beauty at the mercy of his destruction, and he could feel his silence calling; he longed to go back to it where nothing hurt. He felt her head; her skin was burning, and she was delirious. He brought over a bowl of water and sat by her bed, attempting to soothe the fever gripping her life.

When he had run after her screams, he could not believe the way the sound had disarmed him. How when he'd burst into the room hot and bright with fires from the hearth and panic, she jumped around the bed, thrashing her arms, her eyes not in the same room as him — he had almost lost it. How a scream could affect him so after all these years; the sound seemed so different than...

"Am I turning?" he heard her say after a long time, from a long bout of silence, and looked up from his thoughts. His face had been planted in his hands with his elbows resting on the edge of the bed.

"No." He couldn't.

It took a lot more than a bite to turn someone, but it didn't take much to kill them. He wanted neither... but the wound from the attack was taking her quickly...

It was hard to open communication as she stared back at him because he craved distance from her but could not find it. She moved her hand from his to touch her fingers across his cheek. His lids closed slowly, and his mouth came apart.

He thought of the flames he'd set to his painting. Those flames were engulfing them now. They were burning down.

"How did you pierce your ear..." she asked dreamily, her fingertips playing with the dagger hanging from his earlobe with her little rose wrapped around it.

He let his body become partially shadow to show her for a brief second, "It's no easy task. I hold the earring between where I am not fully part of this world and where I am not fully of another. Right where I hold you."

"It's the infection in my shoulder that's making me ill, isn't it? From the attack," she said, as if she was becoming more aware now, and he nodded. Ava swallowed and looked up at the ceiling.

"I've had a doctor here with you through the day, but we need more help than that and what medical science can give us at this point."

She didn't say anything.

"Are you afraid to die?" Layton asked her, quietly curious.

She swallowed again. "It depends on what's waiting for me on the other side."

"I will not turn you."

Her eyes watered.

"You and I are here together, the way we are." His throat mimicked laughter. "Whatever way we are. Remember?"

She swallowed an abrupt sob and tears rolled down her face.

"And you'll make it through this. You want to know how I know?"

She nodded and turned back to him.

"Because you're a fighter, remember? When you can't fight anymore, you keep fighting, right? We do the impossible." He came off his chair to crawl into the bed next to her, nestling into the space between her and the wall, and held her hand tight in his. "I believe in you," he whispered, and she turned into him. "Just hold on."

"I'll hold onto you."

He laughed with a choke. "Do you remember where your strength is?

She nodded and pointed to her head and heart.

He nodded back.

It hadn't been too many hours ago she had brought him to his knees like an earthquake under his feet. When he heard those words muttered through her lips... there's more — it nearly broke him. Almost like the time he'd been broken the most in his life. Until then, he hadn't even believed that.