fine.”
Tell him the truth, Sam urged. Come on, babe. It’s time.
Quinn wasn’t an idiot, but he just stroked my cheek. “When you’re ready to talk, I’m here,” he said quietly.
“I know.”
He kissed my forehead. As though he’d put a spell on me, my eyes felt suddenly heavy. It wasn’t that late, for me, but it had been a long day. And a lot of sleepless nights.
“You look so tired,” Quinn said. “You’ve been having the nightmares a lot.”
“I’m fine.” But of course now I stifled a yawn.
He wrapped me up in his arms again. “Sleep.”
I didn’t want to sleep, but I allowed my eyes to close, just for a few minutes. “Do you worry about her?” I asked.
“About Holly?” He was silent for a moment, thinking. “Not the same way you worry about Charlie. But I think about her a lot. She was only four when I died, and I’d been a shitty father up to that point. I was barely there. That’s the part I think about.”
I opened my eyes and tilted my head back so I could look at him. His angular features were full of such sadness. He touched my hair, smoothing strands back from my face.
I couldn’t stand the silence. “You keep an eye on her online,” I pointed out. “You know she’s all right.”
He nodded, but his expression didn’t change. “She’s all right in spite of me, not because of me. I threw away my chance to be her dad so I could focus on my career. And I did it with a carelessness that stuns me now.”
I wanted to say something that would make it better, but I understood guilt too well for that. Guilt isn’t necessarily logical, and it doesn’t have a statute of limitations. I still felt guilty that I hadn’t saved Sam from being mauled to death, and I hadn’t known about werewolves at the time. Hell, I hadn’t even lived in the same state. Guilt doesn’t care.
“You know,” Quinn said softly, stroking the skin of my back, “Holly is just about the only proof that I was ever alive. That I was ever a human.”
“That’s not true,” I protested. “You impacted so many lives—”
He stopped me with a quick kiss. “I know that. But the world goes on. People forget; they move on. In another twenty or thirty years, the people who knew me when I was human won’t remember me. None of the criminals I put in jail will still be there, one way or another.”
For maybe the first time, I wondered if Quinn the human had been very different from Quinn the vampire. All this time I’d thought of them as the same person, but that obviously wasn’t how he saw himself. “I’m sorry,” I said awkwardly. “I’m sorry that you died.”
He kissed me again. “The funny thing is, I’m probably a better person as a vampire than I was as a human. That’s at least partly because I met you.” He reached over and carefully brushed away the tear that had started down my cheek. “But Holly . . . she’s a legacy for the human I was. It’s like a gift that she’s given me, only I don’t deserve it. I didn’t earn it, like fathers are supposed to.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just lay there for a long moment, looking at him. This was the most he’d ever said about his daughter. This was more than missing someone you loved. It was years and years of tangled guilt and regret.
And he’d let me see it. I opened my mouth, ready to tell him about the tunnel, about the ghosts in my head, and how much they were damaging me. But I closed it again. It didn’t seem right to bring up my pain as though I were comparing it. As though it were a competition.
Instead, I shifted up to look in his eyes. “In another twenty or thirty years,” I said fiercely, “I will be here, and I won’t be much older than this. And I will need you.”
He gave me a sad smile, just for an instant, and I could practically see the words he was thinking: no you won’t.
I kissed him before he could say it.
Chapter 7
Later, when I couldn’t fight it any longer, I finally fell asleep.
Since Cheyenne, I’d had a wake-up-screaming nightmare nearly every night, although it was a toss-up whether I’d dream of the tunnel or my time in Iraq. But that night, I found myself in