Blood Feud: Vampire Cohorts Book Five

Chapter Three - Some Bonds Can't Be Broken

A scream jolted me from my sleep. My own scream. A wordless shout for pain and fear to end, even though the agony and dread didn't belong to me in the first place. My heart hammered frantically in my chest, pounding with Conn's terror, and my pulse thundered in my ears without me needing to see what he dreamed. His dread flowed through me with all the ferocity of a high voltage current, holding me immobilised in its grip, just as it had every day since I'd first been revived.

I had plenty of my own nightmares to damage my calm. I'd had more and more of them, ever since Osgar first revived the Celebratio Sanguinem, but increasingly, it was Conn's nightmares that evicted me from sleep. They threw me into the echo of a full-blown panic attack, even though I couldn't see the memories that plagued Leof.

I hated that.

My muscles tensed, as unyielding as iron, even as my terrified screams died on my lips, heralding the latest round in the cycle of horror that constituted my new normal. With panic exerting a vice-like grip on my chest, all rational thought slipped from my mind, and those first few moments after waking took me far away from the bright interior of Fenn's pavilion. They dropped me in a place where only fear remained, and where my body – the racing of my pulse, the burn of my lungs, and the strangled lump in my throat – formed the tortured confines of my world.

My connection to Leof strained my already fractured composure, his distress almost more than I could bear, but I'd never possessed any ability block him out. He was my shield. My only shield. So, I could only experience the trauma along with him; a witness to his pain through a link that neither of us had asked for or controlled.

Unfortunately, I wasn't the only witness to our shared terror.

Fenn burst into the tent from outside, even as I fought back a second scream and whimpered instead. He raced to my side, tugging me into his arms, just as he had done many times in the preceding two weeks. He murmured comforting words that I couldn't hear over the thundering in my ears, but I wished he wouldn't try so hard to hold me together. Waking alone would've embarrassed me enough, and his concern offered me no privacy.

I hated that he saw the cracks that threatened to break my already dented emotional armour. Conn's pain was killing me. It suffocated the life out of me, more and more with every nightmare, and Fenn felt guilty enough already without witnessing the fallout from the crime Tiw had forced him to commit. I wished I could keep it from him, but even when the initial storm eased, the ordeal I shared with Leof didn't release me from its grip.

At least once the trembling started, I knew the worst had passed, but I also knew the shaking could last for hours. Conn didn't calm quickly, not with what haunted him, and as much as I wished I could control my body's physical reaction to his fear, I hadn't found a way to do so. Nothing I tried distracted me. Anyway, even if I'd discovered a way to break the link, I wouldn't have gone through with it. I'd learned my lesson the hard way.

"I'm f-fine. It'll p-pass," I stammered as my body shuddered in the aftermath of Leof's latest assault on my psychic senses.

I wasn't fine, though. Fenn knew it as well as I did, but I didn't want to admit how deeply Leof's mental state affected my own. As if I could mask it. When Fenn brushed tears from my cheeks, I realised was crying again.

"I want to help him," I whispered, desperation in each word. I would have given anything to be there for Leof. "I was supposed to fix this mess."

Fenn didn't give me lies or apologies. He didn't tell me that it would be alright or repeat how sorry he was. He simply held me while I shivered on his bed. There was nothing else he could do for me.

How would I ever survive without Leof, especially if I continued to feel everything he felt? No matter how far I ran, escaping what I'd lost was impossible because Conn remained in my head during every moment of every day. His emotions tortured me every bit as much as his echo had done.