“Hope?”
Hope spun at the sound of her name, eyes lazily searching through the mindless human faces in the bar to find the one with a spark of consciousness left. Hope dropped the body she was working on draining. It hit the floor with a dull, heavy sound. All those blank faces stared back at her, compelled into patiently waiting their turn.
“I thought I made it very clear I didn’t want to be followed,” Hope droned, reaching for the next victim.
“You did.” MG nodded. He pulled his lip back in disgust as Hope bit into the man’s neck sloppily. “... which is why I came alone.”
“Not a smart move,” Hope said. Blood ran down her chin as she spoke. “Because if they didn’t get the message with the first body I left, I have no choice but to leave another.”
She got ready to push away this human, and MG caught him, biting into his own wrist and offering a few drops of his healing blood in one swift movement.
“I think you’ve left enough bodies,” MG said as the human drank. He grabbed the human by the shoulders and compelled them to forget everything and not come back. Hope just watched with her eyebrow arched.
“Congratulations,” she said sarcastically. “You’ve just saved one of a thousand people I’m going to eat.”
“That’s one less murder on your hands when you come back,” MG countered, stepping over a corpse sprawled across the floor.
“Oh, don’t worry about that.” Hope waved a hand through the air. “I’m not coming back. There is no way I’m spending centuries doing the love-lose-grieve-repeat thing. Uh-uh.”
“What about us?” MG asked. “What about your friends? We loved you, and we lost you.”
“So grieve and repeat.” Hope scoffed and turned her head to the side. “Or turn it off like I did. Solves a lot of problems.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Why?” Hope crossed her arms and tossed her ponytail. “Because you’re a ripper? I think that just makes it more fun.”
“You remember why you turned it off, right?” MG tried a new approach.
“Yeah, because Malivore forced my hand and made me kill the love of my life. Thanks for reminding me of that, MG. Replaying the most traumatic moment of my life is really making me want to turn my emotions back on.” Hope rolled her eyes.
“Well, Landon wouldn’t have wanted this for you.”
Hope stood up straighter, almost like MG had reached a soft spot behind her hard exterior.
“Well, Landon’s not here right now.”
“Why?”
“Because I killed him.”
“Wrong.”
“Wh- What do you mean ‘wrong’?” Hope demanded, stalking closer to MG. Something suspiciously like anger was making her heart pound a little harder. “That’s what happened.”
“He’s not here right now, because Malivore consumed him and took over his body.”
“Malivore left his body,” Hope corrected sharply. Definitely anger.
“Malivore would’ve came back. Landon told you that.”
“Landon was wrong.”
“Landon was never wrong.”
Hope looked like MG had actually managed to catch her off balance.
“Landon asked you to,” MG continued.
We both know you have to kill me.
“He asked you so that it wasn’t your choice, so it was his. That was his last gift to you, Hope.”
Do you have any idea what you're asking me to do? Believe me, I do.
MG could tell by her face that he was getting through to her. He kept going. “To carry that guilt for you so you didn’t have to. That was his dying wish, and you threw it all away.”
He was close enough to reach out and touch Hope’s arm.
So he did.
“Landon would’ve hated this life for you. He would still love you, always and forever no matter what, but he would be so disappointed. This was exactly what he didn’t want you to do Hope. Remember?” MG recited her own words from Landon’s first death back to her, “Landon wouldn’t want this. He wanted us to be better. Give him that respect.”
And Hope fell into MG’s arms, much like Rafael fell into hers when she told him those same words years ago, the rest of her emotions flooding in along with the regret.
