As She Fades

"I watch the city burn,
These passions slowly smoldering.
A lesson never learned,
Only violence.
Is your world just a broken promise?
Is your love just a drop of rain?
Will we all just burn like fire?
Are you still there?

How long can you stand the pain?
How long will you hide your face?
How long will you be afraid?
Are you afraid?
How long will you play this game?
Will you fight or will you walk away?
How long will you let it burn?
Let it burn.
Let it burn."
- Red

It doesn't smell right, Torryn thought as consciousness slowly seeped back into her. The faint scent of dog assaulted her, mixing with the light smell of a vanilla air freshener, and she wrinkled her nose. This place didn't feel right, either, she realized. Not homey like Antony's house, not loving like Skylar's room, not even oppressively familiar like her former home with her mother.

Cautiously, she opened her eyes, finding a simple white ceiling overhead with the dark brown stain of a long-unhindered leak in the far corner. A table lamp on the nearby nightstand cast what barely counted as light along the surrounding walls, sky blue and decorated with intermittently placed pictures of lilies, roses, and…cats?

What the hell? Panic slithered through her, a snake of ice wriggling through her organs, wrapping its tail around her neck to cut off her breathing. Where am I? What's going on? Oh, God, no. I've been taken again. I've been sold.

She lurched upright, her eyes wildly searching the room, but Lindsey suddenly rushed through the door, bathed in the too-yellow light of the old table lamp. "Calm down," she pleaded, resting a hand gently on Torryn's shoulder, and Torryn didn't struggle as she eased her back down. "You're okay here." Bewildered, Torryn stared up at her, and the girl offered a soft, hesitant smile. "Are you feeling okay? You've been out for a few hours now."

Torryn shifted, nestling into the pile of pillows at her back, and let out a slow sigh, the tension finally leaving her shoulders. "I'm fine, but…how did I get here, exactly? Where's Skylar? Is he all right?" Skylar. The name jarred her, and anger flooded her as her memory returned. "He fucking knocked me out!" She leaped from the bed, glaring at the door as if it would lead her right to the bastard.

"Please, sit down," Lindsey urged, frowning. "I don't think you should be moving around just yet."

But Torryn was already storming past her, raging her way toward the open door — where Madison stepped boldly in front of her from the hallway beyond. "Get your ass back in bed like Lindsey so nicely asked you to, because I won't be anywhere near as nice if you don't listen."

"Get out of the way," Torryn snapped, her vision darkening at the edges as raw rage took hold of her.

Madison crossed her arms. "Why don't you make me?"

"Uh, Madison, remember that her kind was created to fight ours, okay?" Lindsey said worriedly from her spot beside the bed.

"She's only half Progeny," Madison remarked snidely, cocking her hip. "What do I have to be afraid of?"

Torryn glanced back at Lindsey, the blackness leeching from her vision as her interest was piqued. "We were made to…fight werewolves?"

Lindsey's eyes widened. "I, uh…Don't you already know?"

"I don't really know much beyond the basics," Torryn admitted, her cheeks warming. Why hadn't she tried to learn more about herself before? This level of ignorance was ridiculous.

"I thought that this was part of the basics, but…" Lindsey shrugged and perched herself daintily on the edge of the bed, crossing one leg over the other and resting her hands upon her lap. "Progeny serve a dual purpose: feeding and entertainment for the undead — which I'm guessing you were already aware of — as well as serving as their daylight protection from humans, werewolves, and all the other creatures who have never been fond of vampires."

"I've never heard of werewolves or anything else antagonizing vampires so much that they'd need protection."

"Well, it was mainly a problem in the past," Madison pointed out, leaning against the door frame, "before both breeds were driven into obscurity by humans and their damn distrust. Nowadays, they generally just avoid each other and dislike each other from afar."

"Oh." Torryn felt her cheeks warming once more, and she dropped her gaze to the floor in shame. Why had no one told her this before? Why have I never asked?

For a moment, she observed the floorboards, but she soon met Lindsey's eyes. "I'm, uh, I'm sorry I snapped at you guys." She glanced at Madison, whose expression remained pointedly arch, and sat down on the edge of the bed next to Lindsey.

"I understand," Lindsey said, laughing lightly. "Skylar can be a dick sometimes."

"More than sometimes," Madison muttered with a taunting smirk, and Lindsey giggled.

Torryn smiled at both of them. "Where is he, anyway?" Just then, Skylar himself came to stand behind Madison in the hallway, clean-shaven and freshly showered. Gently, concern a faint light behind his bright eyes, he smiled at Torryn.

"Hey. How are you feeling?" But she was already launching herself at him, diving around Madison.

"You asshole!" she screamed, knocking him to the floor with a hard shove. "How could you do that to me? How could you knock me out and not let me save them? How could you knock me out, period?" She clenched her fists, standing over him and more than prepared to kick his teeth in if he so much as breathed in a way that grated on her nerves, but he raised his hands in placation, still lying on the floor.

"It's all right, Torryn. I sent Antony a text from your phone so he could come save us, but we got out before we even needed him. I sent him in to save the Progeny you came for instead."

Her anger cooled, but only slightly, and she glared down at him for a long moment before she could bring herself to offer him a hand. He took hold of it, his grip just as warm and strong as she remembered — and damn me for remembering it! — and she hauled him to his feet with little effort.

"I get why you're mad," he continued, and when she tried to pull her hand from his grip, he held fast to her fingers, "but I was just trying to protect you. You're too stubborn for your own good, even if it is for the sake of the people who need you. You were more likely to get yourself captured than you were to get past all of those vampires and get those Progeny out."

"I can protect myself, you know," she grumbled, dropping her gaze to their entwined fingers. "But yeah, I guess I can see why you decided to handle it that way."

After a brief pause, he chuckled. "I couldn't help but notice that you didn't bring a claymore with you to face the Lord. What was up with that?"

She shrugged, finally pulling her fingers free of his grasp. He let her. "I didn't want to fight him. I wanted to make a deal, to get him to trust me and to see me as something other than threat, so I didn't want to bring a weapon." She looked down at herself, cringing, and her mood soured further. "I feel gross."

"Oh!" Lindsey chirped, springing to her feet. "I'm so sorry! You're more than welcome to use our shower, and I'd be happy to let you borrow some of my clothes. We're almost the same size."

Torryn turned to her, smiling in relief. "Really? That would be fantastic. Thank you so much." A shower would do her good, she thought.

Maybe it would even ease the guilt she felt over failing to face the Lord on her own.

-?-

Skylar sighed as he sank onto the bed in the guest room, staring at the picture of a pink rose in bloom on the wall across from him. He could hear the shower running down the hall, the murmurs of Lindsey and Madison's hushed conversation in the room next door, and he felt oddly alone.

He wondered just how Torryn would react when she returned. Would she still seem so dejected? Would she be mad at him again for taking what he thought was a practical and completely necessary action during the fight at the Lord's? Would she awkwardly tell him that this was all a mistake and hurry from the house like she had last night?

Fear skulked through him, taking an icy grip of his spine, and he jerked upright on the edge of the bed. She knew about what he'd been doing with the Lord now. She knew.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit! How did she feel about it? How was she going to react? She must think I'm a fucking creep, he realized, burying his face in his hands. But really, was she wrong?

He jumped when Torryn's phone began to vibrate on the nightstand, rattling noisily across the wood, and he grabbed it from the table. Antony, he thought darkly as he read the small screen. Without hesitation, he flipped the phone open and put it to his ear. "What the hell do you want?"

"Where the hell is she?" Antony all but screamed, the promise of violence obvious in his tone, and Skylar smirked darkly.

"She's at my house," he answered smugly. "Where she'll be safe."

"I told you to take her home!"

"I did," Skylar said, the smugness in his voice nearly a permeable entity by now, and Antony growled. "I think it's fair of me to want her living away from your kind for now, considering they're, you know, the ones who keep trying to kill her, so I've taken the liberty of getting her out myself."

"You had no right to do that," Antony snarled. "Tell me where you are. I'm coming to get her."

"No," Skylar said shortly, triumphantly.

"You know, I personally drove her car home from the Lord's for her," Antony began, his voice dropping to a low, dark rumble, "and I couldn't help noticing the stench of sex and pathetic human oozing from the upholstery. Is that one sexual encounter what made you think you have a right to make decisions for her?"

Annoyed but smug all at once, Skylar retorted, "How do you know it was only the one encounter?" He could almost hear Antony fuming on the other end of the line, and he smiled cruelly to himself. His eyes darted to Torryn as she entered the room, clad in a white cami and a pair of gray jeans he recognized as Lindsey's, and when she met his gaze, her expression instantly darkened.

"What have you done now?" she asked with a vague gesture to the phone pressed to his ear.

"Let me talk to her," Antony demanded, and Skylar silently damned his vampiric senses as he held the phone out to her. She snatched it from his fingers and said a terse hello, and in the silence that ensued, Skylar could hear Antony's gradually calming voice on the air. With each passing second, Torryn's eyes narrowed further, her lips tightening into a thin line, and Skylar shifted uncomfortably beneath her stern gaze, his smug smirk long gone.

"You will be driving me home," she said, snapping the phone shut without so much as a goodbye to Antony, "and the three of us will be having a chat."

She spun on her heel and swept out of the room, and Skylar stood with an angry sigh. Fuck!

-?-

Torryn crossed the threshold into Antony's home to find Antony himself pacing in the hall, moving so quickly that he was only a blur. She opened her mouth to speak, preparing a tired, lackluster greeting, but the moment Skylar stepped in to stand beside her, the vampire launched himself at the boy, his pupils dilated into eternal blackness and his fangs inches long. She rushed to stand between the two and caught him by the shoulders with a superhuman speed to match his own, and with a hard shove, she sent him staggering back, nearly knocking him entirely off of his feet.

At the edge of her vision, she noticed the group of vampires watching intently from the living room, and she gritted her teeth. "We're going to talk. Upstairs. Now." She started up the stairs, and a couple of men groaned in dismay. She noticed Becca in the hallway below, beside the stairs, but the vampire's expression remained stoic as their eyes met.

"I thought I told you to get out," Antony said tightly from behind her, and Becca said nothing as she disappeared into the kitchen. Torryn wondered what he was talking about, why Becca looked so vacant, but she couldn't bring herself to care as she reached the second floor and threw the door to her bedroom open. She had too many problems of her own to deal with right now to care about the feelings of the scumbag vampire who'd convinced Antony to commit three murders and bang her.

Torryn stepped out of the way of the door, and once the two men had filed obediently past her, she slammed the door shut in their wake. "Do you even remember why I told you both to go fuck yourselves after that battle with Caleb?" she instantly shouted, spinning to face them. "Because you were acting like Goddamn five-year-olds! And what the fuck are you doing right now? That's right! Acting like fucking five-year-olds!" She whipped around, beginning to pace from one end of the room to the other. "God damn it! Is it really too much to ask that you two not try to one-up each other every five seconds? Is it really so freaking hard for you two to avoid lunging at each other every time you make eye contact? You're like children fighting over a Goddamn toy, but that toy is me, and guess what, you idiots! I'm not a fucking toy!"

She rocked to a stop in the middle of the room, sighing in exasperation as she buried her face in her hands. "One of you has taken to excessively feeding from and killing humans, and the other has taken to seeing a powerful vampire for imaginary sexy time with me. I don't know if I should've just made you both date me after our battle against Caleb or if I should've just killed you both to save you from your own stupidity and to save myself some trouble."

When she lifted her head, she found the men eyeing each other, eyes wide and mouths hanging open, each aghast at the other's actions. Like either of them are really any better, she sighed mentally, regarding each of them with a sad stare.

"You need to grow up," she started softly after a pause, "both of you." They looked at her, but only Antony held her gaze. Skylar's guilty eyes dropped to the floor at his feet. "I may do stupid shit, but at least what I do, I do for the sake of others — often for the sake of you idiots. What you guys do, you do out of some twisted sense of entitlement, like I'm a trophy you can win by punching your rival in the trachea hard enough. You think you're protecting me, but you're not. You're only hurting me…and yourselves."

She looked toward the window behind them, longing to see beyond the thick black curtains that covered it, to see something more than the anger and hurt on their stupid, handsome faces. The stars would be beautiful this early in the morning. "I've been thinking about moving back in with my mom," she said absently, picturing the star-littered sky she knew lay outside.

"No," both men burst out at once.

"Stay here. I promise I'll make up for everything I've done," Antony hurried to say, even as Skylar blurted, "You can come stay with me. Lindsey and Madison would love the company, and —" They turned to face one another in unison, each a perfect mirror of the other as hatred furrowed their brows and curled their lips.

"You're a Goddamn creep!" Antony shouted. "Like I'd ever let her stay with someone who only cared about her enough to relive all of the times he'd had sex with her!"

"Oh, and I'm sure letting her live with a murderer like yourself would be so much better!" Skylar cried caustically.

"This is exactly what I'm talking about!" she yelled, the image of the serene night sky long gone as an angry heat surged through her. Their gazes snapped to her, and she saw guilt beginning to swell in Skylar's eyes, though Antony's expression only emptied of emotion. "Stop treating me like I'm not even here," she went on, her voice tight but calm, though she could still feel the fire burning in her chest. "I'm a woman, not your trophy, not your fucktoy, and not your damn property. I'm capable of making my own decisions, and sorry, but they're not always going to benefit one or the other or both of you. And honestly, considering I seem to be the most mature person here right now, I think it's best if I make the decision to stay away from both of you." She crossed her arms and drew herself to her full height, regret tightening her chest before she even verbalized her darker thoughts. You've already done this sort of thing once. You can do it again. "Either you take care of your issues, or it's no longer a matter of whether I date one of you or not. It's a matter of whether I even talk to you again."

They gawked at her in stunned silence, and the lump that had risen in her throat kept her from breaking it. But what would she have said, anyway? What could she possibly have said to make this situation better?

Nothing, she told herself, looking from one pair of wide blue eyes to the other, rimmed with gray-green. They're the only ones who could change anything, and they have no idea how to make it any better.

Finally, she swallowed the ball of emotions that clogged her throat like a merciless phlegm, and she crossed the room to grab her bag of Arena winnings from the other night from where it sat beside her bed. "I need to go see Raphael," she said evenly, refusing to allow even the slightest hint of her true feelings to slip into her voice. "Do whatever you want while I'm gone. Kill each other, for all I care." She wouldn't look at them as she headed toward the door, and they didn't speak when she opened the door and edged into the hall.

But it was probably for the best, because what could they possibly have to say?

I hope you're awake, Raphael, she thought as she made her way down the stairs, attempting to move as casually as possible. I really need an old man's help here.