Chapter seventeen: First Hunt
I ran with the wind, feeling it protest against my face due to the speed at which I raced through the cool, dark night.
I was prepared to accept whatever fury she would throw my way, but was hoping against the odds she would forgive me.
Within minutes I arrived at the cemetery, and slowed my pace out of anxious anticipation for what awaited me, and also out of respect for the tenants who would forever reside here; once I had been jealous of them, for I would never share their eternal slumber. I was past that now, my attention focused ahead where I knew Summer would be waiting.
I had chosen her burial plot carefully, so that she was directly under the moonlight.
I approached silently; as I came upon the patch of earth I noticed it had been disturbed, Summer had gotten herself out. I looked around wildly, searching the trees around me. Where is she?
“Summer” I called, but there was no answer. “Summer its Tristan, where are you?” She emerged from behind a tombstone some fifty yards away.
I walked towards her at a normal pace, not sure what she would do if I approached too quickly. I held my hands up in front of me in a surrendering gesture.
“Summer, I know your probably mad at me for what I did, and I will understand if you can’t forgive me” Her face looked angry and confused, her eyebrows were knitted together in a scowl, and her lips were pursed into a thin line.
“Summer?” I questioned, afraid to move any closer, yet wanting to wrap my arms around her. In a hard voice filled with acidic hatred she asked me a question.
“Did you kill her?” Of course that was her first question, it would have been mine.
“Yes!” I said flatly. “She’s gone forever” I sighed with relief to this answer. Her face softened, and her posture seemed to relax.
I cautiously took a step forward, and froze as her eyes shot down, and followed the movement of my foot. Her eyes traced up my body and locked onto my cautious gaze. She smiled and launched herself into my arms, knocking us to the ground in a tangled array of limbs.
“Oh Tristan, I didn’t think I was ever going to see you again” She pressed her lips to mine and kissed me feverishly. I smiled as we broke apart our locked lips.
“I wasn’t sure how you were going to react to what I did to you, I didn’t know if you would forgive me” I admitted, overjoyed that she still wanted me.
“Forgive you for what? This is what I wanted, I just didn’t know how you would react if I asked you, and I also couldn’t think of a way to bring it up” She looked embarrassed, if she could have blushed, she would have, but such a thing wasn’t possible anymore. I thought about her admittance to wanting to be a vampire, and frowned.
“What’s wrong?” She asked worriedly.
“I could have saved you a lot of unnecessary pain if I had changed you sooner. I didn’t know you wanted…” She pressed her fingers to my lips, cutting off the end of my sentence.
“It’s over and done with, no use in torturing yourself for something you couldn’t have possibly seen coming. I’m still here, and that’s all that matters. I look at it as an intervention” I looked at her with a puzzled expression, what was she talking about? “If Lavinia hadn’t shown up and forced your hand, I probably would have been too chicken to ask you for a few more years. You probably wouldn’t have brought up the subject either” She concluded.
