Page 3 of Knot As It Seems

Yesterday I found a half-eaten pack of the stalest crackers on earth that I choked down, but now I’m hungry enough that I’m about to go and start licking up some of the dried and now molding food my sister’s pack dumped out onto the old carpet.

Shaking, I crawl out of the closet and start turning cans over in the hope that it’s not as bad as I think. I’ve been avoiding this area because it made me too angry, and I was too mad at myself for letting my emotions override my common sense. I should have come here immediately after they left and tried to save everything, should have scooped the ruined food up and put it in the fridge, but I’ve never been so desperate for sustenance that I thought I had to. That’s a mistake I won’t be making again. If I even get the opportunity to.

I still have running water so there’s that at least, but when there’s nothing at all salvageable in the mess those alphas made in my home, I make a conscious decision to give up. I spent all day yesterday looking for anything that mightkeep me going, but my sister had me on rations anyway because I was a drain on her finances, so there was never any extra to squirrel away.

I fucking hate how weak I am. Useless fucking omega.

The only thing that makes the whole situation slightly more tolerable is that I can at least get to my favorite window. Across the room, under a built-in bench, there’s an opening just big enough for me to squeeze in where I can lie down and look through the long, thin window along the ground there. I don’t know why it exists or what our parents were thinking when they put it in here, but it’s at eye level with the forest floor behind the house and lying here like this, closing myself in, I can pretend I’m a part of it. That I’m nothing but a pile of leaves and pinecones, sheltered by the towering evergreen trees, waiting for the sun to break through and warm me.

How long does it take to starve to death for a vampire? Will it be easy to do or will I have to work for it? I guess if I get too bored of waiting, I could always try the front door; the wards would surely finish me off. A painful way to go, but it’s an option.

For something to occupy me, I start blowing hot air on the glass so I can trace designs on it, content to sit here indefinitely. Through the blurry patch of glass, movement next to a tree catches my eye. Too big to be a forest creature, too graceful to be fully human. No, it’s—he’s—like me. I think.

Crouched down to fend off an invisible predator, his head swings back and forth, scanning the area around him. I don’t think he’s a part of the alphas that were just here to ruin me. He looks too wholesome, too good.

His next scan has him noticing me, and why wouldn’t he? With the way my pale hand is still running through the condensation I made on the glass, the movement would catch his eye if he’s alert.

I watch him approach with an innate sense of detachment, hardly straightening his back out as he does, eyes no longer interested in anything around him, only what he’s moving towards. It’s a lot of weight to put on me right now, in my current state.

He’s beautiful. Toasty golden-brown hair curling every which way around his head, scruff on his face that looks interesting, and a strong jawline I can’t quite understand. He’s closer now, close enough that his breath is fogging the glass from the other side of it, and I find my hand tracing the shape of that jaw, wanting to figure it out. Thick neck, broad shoulders, he’s most definitely an alpha, but…I get the sense he hasn’t been one very long. He doesn’t fit the way his body looks, his movements are a little clumsy.

I dare myself to meet his startled gray eyes, just to see if I can do it, and I find myself on the other end of such intense scrutiny that I freeze.

What does he want with me? How did he know I was here?

Maybe I’ll just take a little nap.

A fist striking the window wakes me right up, but all I have energy to do is curl up tighter into myself and tuck my hand under my head for a bit of cushion.

“It’s okay,” I tell him. He probably can’t hear me, but my faint smile might ease him. It’s not like this is his doing.

I close my eyes again and he goes feral, slamming against that glass until the wards kick him back, and I mouth a ‘sorry’ to him without spending any energy to open my eyelids again.

Content to slip into the dream I just know is waiting for me, the dream where it doesn’t hurt anymore, I draw him a small heart on the glass before I go searching for that better place.

Four

I understand virtually nothing about my new body, but I knew enough to listen to my alpha insisting there was still something left for us atherhouse.

I used to come here withherand pretend I had hard edges, pretend I could fit into her world for a few hours at a time, convinced I would be whole when she scraped me off the bottom of her shoe. Now I’m here, knowing for a fact she isn’t, but there’s something even better waiting for me.

If I believed in a pre-ordained fate, I might presume that the whole reason Winslow ever caught my eye in the first place was because a smaller version of her, a less jaded one, existed.

I can’t catch her scent through the glass she’s trapped behind, the one that looks too much like a coffin for my liking, but I just know it’s something big enough to change me. She looks too much like death sleeping like that, and maybe I startled her pounding on the glass in such a way, but my alpha is going berserk. He’s got me feeling like I caught this creature’s last moments of belonging to thisplane, and that’s simply not something I can abide by.

Winslow has this place warded to high hell. I don’t know enough about the wards to know how to dismantle them, and that might be my undoing. I can feel the pressure the running clock is putting on me, telling me that if I can’t get to what I instinctually know ismyomega very quickly, then I’ll lose her forever and there will be no point to continue this farce of a life I’ve fallen into.

I could call my sister and have her connect me to someone in Trash Haven that might be able to help, but that would take too long.

I start scaling everything I can, attempting to open or smash every window and door, and by the end of it I’m shaking, sweating, and spewing my entire day’s food into the bushes because of the wards. Then I spin to growl when the hairs on the back of my neck tell me there’s an intruder.

I don’t know his face, but I know his scent because it was always all overher. Winslow. The woman I could never keep up with, that thought I was such a joke that she went and died shortly after ensuring I left my human-self in my past. Such a joke that she had not only another boyfriend but a whole string of them. Something she called a pack.

I’ve learned about vampires since I’ve become one, spent hours upon hours inhaling every bit of informational literature I could find, but none of it explains the way I’m immediately on the defensive with this stranger, the one I share something toxic with.

“Woah there. Who—ah,fuck. She got you, huh? Look. I’m not here to…you’re guarding the door. Why are you guarding the door? What’s in there? Clement said— but he couldn’t have been right.”

“Can you get me in there? She’s dying. I don’t know why I know that, but she is. If she dies, so help me fucking gods, you are not going to like what happens next. Get me the fuck in there.”