Give Me Envy, Give Me Malice, Give Me Your Attention

Anna groaned softly as she rose to consciousness once again. Her head was steadily getting worse every time she woke, throbbing painfully and consistently, overlapping her dying heartbeat. She groggily cracked her eyelids open, the faint light magnifying in her now overly-sensitive eyes. As always, Ryan was loyally by her bedside, awaiting her awakening to convince himself that it wasn’t over yet. His eyes were gently shut, but it was clear that he wasn’t sleeping. He wasn’t yet aware of her consciousness, and instead he was doing something that he thought he’d given up on; something that he hadn’t done in a very long time.

He was praying.

She didn’t disturb him, waiting patiently for him to finish. When he eventually opened his eyes a few minutes later, he painted a weak smile on his face for her.

“Hey you,” she whispered, cupping his cheek with one frail hand.

“Hey,” he whispered back, leaning over to gently kiss the corner of her lips. “How’re you feeling?”

“Pretty much like death,” she chuckled darkly.

Ryan failed to find the amusement, and his smile faltered to make way for despair.

“Come on, Ry,” she sighed, only just audible but unable to project her voice any further. “Don’t be like that. I need you to smile for me.”

“Why?” he choked on tears. Anna squeezed her eyes shut before opening them and taking a few moments to let them adjust to his beautiful face.

“Ryan, I’m dying. I know there’s still a chance, but it’s likely that I only have a fortnight left at best. I want the last thing I see to be your smile.”

Ryan heaved in a breath, sucking in as much air as he could.

“How can I smile when I know you’re in so much pain?”

She bit her lip, swallowing several unhelpful replies before the flesh slipped out from between her teeth. There was a tentative knock at the door, and at Ryan’s reply Pete walked into the room holding a glass of a rich, red liquid. It could only be one thing.

“Hey Ari,” he smiled feebly, using a name he’d taken to calling her when he proudly realized that he was the first to suggest it.

Both Anna and Ryan smiled placidly at him as he crossed the room and took a seat on the bed beside Anna’s head.

“Now I know you really don’t want to drink this, but we really have to try to keep your strength up. You’ve been throwing up the mixture, so this is all I can think of. If this doesn’t go down well either, at least we tried. I swear it’s a mix of blood samples from the hospital. There were no casualties.”

Anna nodded, heavy eyelashes already weighing down her eyelids. Seeing that her awareness was gradually slipping, Pete slipped a strong arm around her waist and lifted her up into a sitting position. Ryan cautiously put a hand at the back of her neck to stop her head from drooping.

“Thank you,” she whispered, this time even quieter than previously.

This is how it had been since she fell ill. When she was conscious, it was never for very long. She fought to stay awake longer, but the pain would become too much.

“Okay, you ready?” Pete asked.

She gave a jerk of the head as an affirmative reply, and Pete brought the cool glass to her white lips. She let her jaw drop a fraction, leaving a space between her lips that Pete tipped the blood through. She gulped it down obediently but slowly, focusing so hard on consuming the thick fluid that she barely registered the taste of several blood types mixed together that would normally taste rather dull and strange. It’s kind of like perfumes; on their own, they have different smells that appeal to different people. Mix them together and they don’t particularly smell nice anymore, but every now and then you can get a whiff of one or another. It took about ten minutes for her to down the whole glass, but after she had there didn’t seem to be any signs of regurgitating it. Unfortunately, she was still as exhausted as ever.

“I’m going to go see how Patrick’s going,” Pete smiled sympathetically before leaving the room, taking the empty glass with him.

Ryan looked over at Anna and helped her so that she was lying down again, her head sinking comfortably into the white pillow.

“You alright?” Ryan asked uncertainly.

She managed to croak out a ‘yes’, earning a frown from him. He looked down at the old white bedspread, fingering the lace trim as she closed her eyes.

“It hurts to speak, doesn’t it?” he asked in a murmur.

She didn’t answer.

“It hurts for you to think. I know it does. I can see it in your eyes.”

Still no answer.

“I just wish I could help you,” he whispered. “I wish you could just sleep until we fix this, but I don’t know how haunted your dreams are. I don’t know anything about this, and I’m scared out of my fucking mind.”

He wiped away a tear before it could fall, but when he looked up Anna was unconscious again. He startled in panic before seeing her light, shaky breathing and trying to calm his racing heart.

They still had time. He just had to believe that.

***

“Pat?”

Pete knocked once before allowing himself into his best friend’s study. Patrick’s eyes were bloodshot, flickering from his computer screen to a thick, green-covered book. Even his glasses looked like they were straining to absorb all the words. There was a blue pen balanced behind his ear that he seemed to have forgotten about, a black one also resting between his fingers tapping anxiously against the edge of the book. He was biting his lip, a page of notes he’d taken resting on his lap. He didn’t register that Pete was there until the latter coughed to make his presence known.

“Oh! Pete! Hey.”

“Hey. How’s the research going?”

“Good. Really good. I think I’m onto something.”

“Really?” Pete breathed a quiet sigh of relief. “I’m glad. Anna’s getting weaker and weaker. I just fed her the blood like you told me to, so hopefully that’ll buy us some more time.”

“Good, good…” Patrick mumbled, still preoccupied by the screen in front of him.

There was a lengthened pause before Pete spoke again, feeling kind of awkward and useless.

“And what about you? How are you holding up?”

“What? Yeah, I’m fine, I’m fine. I’m perfect. Fit as a fiddle. Never been better.”

“Patrick, when was the last time you slept?”

Patrick still hadn’t so much as glanced at Pete, just distractedly answering his friend’s questions as he worked.

“Uh, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I don’t have time for sleep. I’ll sleep once I’ve done this.”

“That’s ridiculous. You deserve a break. I could take over the research for you, or Joe or Andy…”

“Pete, no!” Patrick exclaimed, becoming a little frustrated, eyes still glued to the computer. “This is my fault. I caused this, so I’m going to fix it.”

“Trick, no one blames you for this…”

“I do, Pete! I blame myself for this! I need to…” he trailed off.

Pete looked up at him to see him with a slack jaw and wide eyes.

“Patrick? What is it? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

Patrick just blinked as his best friend came over, clicking his fingers right in front of him.

“Shit,” was all Patrick could say.

“What?”

“Move for a second…”

Pete obeyed, allowing Patrick to lean forward to read the screen. Pete tried to read it too, but it was all in Latin and he didn’t understand it.

“Pete… I know what to do. And I know what happened.”

Pete gave him a desperately confused look, begging him to go on.

“I… I didn’t do it. Well, I did, but I wasn’t in control of me…”

“Pat, what…”

“Just… let me try to word this properly,” Patrick pleaded. “It was… Someone had power over my mind. They tricked me into thinking I’d found the cure. I think we both know who that someone is. There’s only one person… vampire… there’s only one who could ever have that amount of mind control. Only one in this section of the world, anyway. And that someone is the one whose garden holds the vital ingredient for the cure to the poison.”

When Patrick dared to look up at Pete a minute later, his friend was shaking in unmistakable rage and fury.

“Calm down, Pete,” Patrick said carefully. “Try to relax. We need you in your right mind to get through this.”

Pete clenched his fists and gritted his teeth, nodding so stiffly it was almost painful.

“Okay…” Patrick said, still cautiously. “Do you have Bella’s number?”

He gave another nod, snapping out of it just a little.

“Yep. I’ll go and call her now and get this sorted. She needs to know what her fucking boyfriend did. I’ll tell her to get whatever she needs from the garden.”

Patrick nodded, writing down the name of the rare plant on a scrap of paper that Pete snatched before storming out of the room, dialing furiously as he did.

For the first time in weeks, Patrick allowed himself to drift into dreamland.

***

“Thank you,” Anna whispered a day later.

Patrick had just injected her with the cure, and almost immediately she fell asleep.

“When she wakes up, she should be feeling a lot better,” Patrick assured the others, peeling off some white plastic gloves and tossing them in the bin.

“Thank you so goddamn much,” Ryan breathed, watching Anna’s sleeping figure adoringly.

“That’s okay,” Patrick smiled. “If I couldn’t do anything, I never would have been able to forgive myself.”

Ten minutes later, Patrick, Andy and Joe had all left the room. Hours passed in complete silence, awaiting the girl’s recovery. As Ryan watched her, he could see a little color return to her pale skin. It looked creamier as opposed to paper-like, and her lips were painted a natural pink. Her brittle hair found its glimmer again, and she looked as normal as a vampire can look. When Ryan glanced over at Pete, he wasn’t watching Anna. His head was instead in his hands as he muttered to himself, too quiet for anyone else to hear. After hours, Ryan began to pick up on the angry and frustrated vibe Pete was spitting, and decided to break the tension in the room.

“Pete, what’s up?”

When Pete looked up, his eyes were a vicious red. Ryan quickly fetched a drink for him that he drank thankfully. When his eyes returned to brown, Ryan attempted conversation again.

“So, you want to explain what this is all about?”

Pete scrunched up his face before breathing out heavily.

“What is there to explain?” he asked, venom coating every syllable. “I’m mad because William fucking Beckett is the same as he always was. Still the same backstabbing, sneaky bastard.”

“He wasn’t always like this,” Ryan said quietly. “Do you remember when we were all human? He wasn’t like this then. He was the opposite then.”

Pete sighed.

“I know. I remember the shy little William Beckett whose life centered on poetry and an acoustic guitar. But he hasn’t been like that for a long while, and personally I don’t think he’s ever going to be like that again.” Another frustrated noise escaped Pete’s lips. “It’s just… when he wanted to help us with this I honestly thought he was beginning to change. I thought maybe Bella had changed him back to the old Bill. I wasn’t supposed to get my hopes up or let my defenses down like that. I just… he used to be my best friend. Well, one of my best friends. Even when he got turned, I didn’t turn my back on him. We were so close, and I thought I knew that he’d never try anything that could hurt me. But he did. You know the story. He completely turned on me. I thought I was safe, just hanging out, and then just like that he went for the jugular.

“And now, just when I was beginning to think that he might become who he used to be, he tries to kill someone else important to me. I’m lucky enough he hasn’t hurt Patrick, Joe or Andy yet. I think it amuses him, interests him, how I’ve managed to maintain human friends. But Anna’s a different concept entirely. She thwarted his control, and he’ll rest at nothing to end her. Especially after this. I just…”

Pete stopped to realize that he was on the verge of tears. Sniffing, he took a deep breath and finished.

“He’s taken almost everything from me. He’s still trying to make me join the Dandies, you know. He won’t give up. I mean, we’ve started leaving the Dandies alone. You know that. We don’t even hunt much anymore. We just try to help with situations like yours. I don’t see why he can’t leave us alone too.”

“I’m so sorry, Pete.”

Both males whipped their heads around to see Anna, now sitting up on her bed, looking healthier than she had in a month.

“Oh Anna!”

Ryan rushed over to her and embraced her, quickly capturing her lips in his. She responded quickly before gliding across the room to where Pete was.

“Why are you sorry?” Pete asked her.

“Because we brought his attention back to you. We brought all of this upon you. I’m sorry.”

“No. Don’t say that. With you two here, we’ve been happier than we have in a long time. If it wasn’t this, Beckett would have found something else. Really, don’t apologize.”

“But still!” she insisted. “I had no idea about all that. You’re such a good friend, and such a good person. You don’t deserve this hurt.”

Pete didn’t say anything other than a thank you as Anna’s arms wrapped around his shoulders in a friendly hug. After they broke apart, he smiled up at her.

“I’m just so glad to see you looking healthy again.”

She smiled again, looking happier than she had even since before she became sick, and made her way back to Ryan to kiss his shoulder affectionately and feel protected in his arms.

However, returned health and answered wishes aside, they all knew that things had gotten a lot more dangerous.

What was to happen next?

Only time could tell.