Dissipating Darkness [Klaroline]

Chapter 21: Alyssa Moore

A gunshot rings through the air as I tear into the woman's neck. I see it pierce her heart at the perfect angle. She's dead.

I haphazardly throw her body to the ground and move at vampire speed to my next meal. Grayson Gilbert's wide eyes are unblinking as he looks down at his dead wife, Miranda. I can feel her warm blood running down my chin right before I sink my teeth into Grayson's jugular.

Another gun shot.

Grayson's body convulses as the bullet lodges itself into his heart. I feel the flesh of his throat tearing away as I harshly rip through it with my hands and teeth. As he falls to the floor, his head is barely hanging on by a thread.

"No."

The beast is still visible on my face as I look up at the sharp shooter who's surveying her mistake with tear-filled eyes.

"No! No. Don't leave me here like this! I'm a murderer. I don't deserve to live."

"Are you begging?" I ask.

She nods her head wordlessly. I use vampire speed so that I am behind her; my breath on her neck. She stops breathing.

"Beggars can't be choosers, now can they?"

I silently sit across the room from Liz's bed and watch her chest rise and fall with life. I remember the day she practically begged to die by my own hands. Raising her then-growing child meant less to her than living with her guilty conscience.

If I had known that child would be the love of my long life, I would've killed Liz that night without a second thought. She didn't deserve Caroline then, and she doesn't deserve her now. No one does.

Not even me.

Caroline deserves someone who doesn't have to lie because his truths are too dark; even for him these days. She should be able to have a boyfriend that didn't rip his own mother's heart out, or didn't murder her father in cold blood. She should be with someone that doesn't know what the life force draining out of someone else feels like.

I wish I didn't.

But I do, and although I wish more than anything that I didn't know what someone dying in my arms feels like, that dark, mad part of my being is glad that I do. The beast is lustfully tugging at the bars of its cell; waiting for me to let it loose just to feel it again. I so badly want to let it—

I shake my head slightly as a way of clearing it. I can't keep thinking thoughts like that. I need for everyone to know the truth about me. They need to know that I was a monster before they even knew me, and I'll be a monster when I walk away from them.

When I walk away from Caroline I'll tell her that I'm sorry, and that the light she brings into my world will never be enough. And she'll accept that explanation because she'll hate me. Everyone will.

My hands shake as I stand up from the chair in the corner and walk to the side of the bed that Liz is laying on. She immediately shifts from my presence, and her eyes soon bore into mine; like she knows what's coming for her.

"You're going to kill me, aren't you?"

Time stops around me as her soft words make me remember the night that Caroline had become a vampire; letting her guard down in the process. Much like her daughter, as she lay here on her should-be deathbed, Liz has completely let her guard down, too, and that is a heart breaking thought; even to someone like me.

Liz's eyes search around mine, and as they cloud, I can tell she hasn't found the answer she so desperately sought for.

I see her visibly tremble as I bring the back of my hand up to her cheek and gently caress it.