Bring Me to Life by Emma Weylin

never do anything to hurt you. I needed you too much!”
    “I know,” he said, his voice raw. He crouched down at the end of the bed. “I know. I should have known that all along. A vampire’s thrall would have been too powerful for a fifteen-year-old to beat. I’m sorry. I—”
    “Shut up!” she screamed. She scrambled backward until her back was pressed up against the headboard. Her life was one disgusting mess after another since his death. The men, the booze, the drugs, and everything else she’d used to try to destroy herself. Even if she’d gotten the pulse right, he’d have been dead anyway. “You died on me, and you think it’s because I handed you to a vampire!” Her hand slammed down on the night table next to the bed, and she picked up the only thing not nailed down. The alarm clock. She drew it back. Then he was on the bed next to her, confiscating it before she could throw it at him.
    “Give that back, you son of a bitch!”
    “No,” he said in an infuriatingly calm tone as he tossed it onto the other bed. “You’d hurt yourself later for hitting me with it.”
    “How could you think I’d willingly hand you over to a vampire?”
    He sat back on his heels in front of her. His shoulders drooped. “Because I am a bastard. That night was so confusing, and I woke up dead from the ordeal.” He was quiet for a moment. “They were all dead? You killed them?”
    “I don’t know.” She was honest. “After I pulsed the only thing I saw was you lying on the ground. I tried to wake you up, but I couldn’t.” She was heading for a major breakdown, and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stop it. Everything came out between ragged sobs. “There were piles of ash everywhere. You were just—” She couldn’t say the word. “I don’t know how I called my uncle. Then the place was crawling with police and questions. I told them there were vampires. I spent three years in and out of the psychiatric ward until I realized if I just agreed with the police’s assessment of what happened, they’d stop saying I was crazy.”
    “I didn’t trust you,” he said in an even tone.
    Her heart was going to explode. It was beating so fast, and she couldn’t catch her breath. “You did. I killed you. Please, let that be true.”
    His burnt sienna eyes went sad as he shook his head. “No. It wasn’t the pulse. You still had a body to bury.”
    She couldn’t decide which was worse. Thinking all this time that she’d killed him or finding out that he’d hated her for all this time because he hadn’t trusted her. Then she flew at him, ready to do as much damage as she could.
    *
    Vincent let her pound on his chest for a moment before he caught her wrists and pinned her down to the bed. This was killing him. He could take the blame for his part in her torment, but he wouldn’t take it all. He’d find a way to help her out the other side of this, and he’d endure whatever punishment she deemed he deserved for his distrust. It wouldn’t lessen the torture he was going to inflict on the vampire responsible, and he knew it had to be Draven. The attack had purpose. They’d lived in a small town that hadn’t had a vampire problem before that night or after.
    Bryna struggled to make him let her go. “You fucking jerk! Let me go! Let me go!” Her voice cracked, and she bucked up before she bit him.
    Vincent let her go and moved out of the way as she came up swinging. She kneeled in the middle of the bed shaking with rage. Her face was flushed and scary as she looked at him just before she collapsed in a fit of hysterical sobs.
    He hesitated for moment, not sure he’d be welcomed before he climbed up on the bed next to her and pulled her into his arms. Her fist thumped against his chest before she curled in against him and sobbed with angry bitterness.
    *
    Bryna had never cried so hard in her life. She wasn’t sure when she’d actually stopped sobbing and just lay stretched out across Vincent’s lap on