Flutter by Amanda Hocking Page A

rolled his eyes. “I’m so sick
of having that thrown in my face! I did that because I loved you,
Alice!” He immediately regretted saying that and stared off
anywhere but at me.
    “Yeah, cause that’s a healthy way to express love! By
killing another person!” I was purposely pushing his buttons. If
the only chance at a rescue mission was Peter going off without me,
then I had to piss him off enough to leave me.
    “I wasn’t trying to kill you! I was
trying to kill me !” He rubbed his eyes, looking as if he’d said too much and
not knowing how to take it back. “Jack was in the house. I knew he
was tuned in to your heart. When I grabbed you in the kitchen, he
came flying in to save you. I thought if he found me, draining the
life from you, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill me.” Tiredly, he
exhaled. “I knew he was a better match for you than I was, and I
didn’t see any other way out.”
    I was too stunned to say anything. I’d always
suspected Peter hated me. But he loved me so much, he’d been
planning to die for my happiness. My heart thumped dully in my
chest, and I tried to think of something say to him.
    “Stop looking at me like that,” Peter snapped when he
finally met my eyes again. “I don’t know why it’s so shocking that
I wouldn’t want you to die. Do you really think Ezra would be so
willing to sacrifice himself for me if I was such a
psychopath?”
    “Peter, I am so sorry,” I whispered, unable to muster
the full strength of my voice.
    “Stop!” Peter repeated. “Ezra is the one out there!
We need to be worrying about him, not us! Because there isn’t even
an ‘us’ to worry about!”
    “You’re right.” I shook my head, clearing it of any
confused thoughts about Peter.
    It was hard, though. It changed the
way I thought about everything . All the time I had been
messing around with Jack, falling in love with him, the one thing
that had given me the green light was that Peter had tried to kill
me.
    But when I thought about it as his own suicide
attempt, that he had loved me so much he had been willing to give
me up... We had been bound together, and he had truly loved me, but
I had run off with his brother instead.
    Peter didn’t say anything, and neither did I. I’m not
sure if he was really trying to come up with another plan, but I
certainly couldn’t. Part of me was really trying to, but I felt
like all the wind had been knocked out of me.
    The door to the hotel room thudded softly,
interrupting my thoughts. Not a knock exactly, but more like
something falling into it. I looked to Peter, his eyes already
fixed on the door. He moved in front of me, blocking me in case the
lycan announced their entrance.
    When the door slowly swung open, we were greeted by
something almost as bad.
     
     
    - 10 –
     
    Ezra leaned on the doorframe, looking worse than I
could ever imagine him being. His clothes, the same black sweater
and jeans he had worn the night before, were torn and dirty. His
skin was gaunt and pale. He staggered into the room and Peter
rushed to him.
    Bite marks covered his neck and wrists. The lycan
territory was nearly an hour drive away, plenty of time for a
vampire to heal, but his bites were red and swollen. Ezra had been
so drained he didn’t have the strength to heal.
    “He needs to feed,” Peter told me and attempted to
hand Ezra off to me. He hurried to the bathroom to get blood for
Ezra, leaving me alone to struggle with the situation.
    I’d been frozen in shock, but I put my arm around
Ezra and helped him on the bed. His deep brown eyes were glassy.
I’d never seen a vampire look so ill before. It had never even
occurred to me that they could even look like this, especially
Ezra.
    When I sat down next to him on the bed, he collapsed
back on the bed and rested his head on my lap. He gripped my thigh
with a painful desperation, like he needed to hang onto
something.
    “I brought blood,” Peter said when he walked back
into the room. He looked down at