The rest of the party played out to Arran's eyes like a slideshow. He kept himself drunk enough to be loud and obnoxious and keep the party going but sober enough that he could keep an eye on Gavrail at all times. As a result the passage of time stretched and snapped. An entire hour dragged with him painstakingly orchestrating drinking games and topping up everyone's drinks. Then within what felt like the same breath he found himself sitting in the bath giving life advice to a woman he'd never met before. Then he was dancing, then sitting on the grass in a circle, then body shots off of Debayan lying on the bar. More alcohol, more chaos.

This was the most tactical drinking that Arran had ever done.

All night he kept one step behind Gavrail and one ahead of Cree. He couldn't tell if she was trying to get to him or if he couldn't stop looking for her. The whole experience was dizzying and surreal.

The sun came up and Lucella started dropping hints through the crowd that Celyn would be back soon. Between the two off them they convinced people to leave, the numbers of immortals in the house thinning, then dwindling until there was only the two of them left. Neither of them were in any great desire to start cleaning.

Arran tossed Lucella the key to the spare room and said that they would do it in th morning. Left alone in the debris-strewn room Arran reflected that the night had gone remarkably well. There was nothing stopping Gavrail from recruiting people individually but they had ruined his chances at getting a mass conversion, for now that would have to do. Realistically what happened in the states was completely out of his control anyway. He considered talking to Rhona about it, as far as he knew his oldest sister was somewhere in Chicago, but her idea of helping would be to kill them all. That's if she wanted to help at all.

A limited success, but a success nonetheless. And to top it off he'd avoided Cree all night, not to mention his kiss with Naomi. Arran supposed that 18th birthday parties were meant to be memorable and he thought that it would take centuries to forget that night.

Truly and utterly exhausted, he unlocked his bedroom door and stepped inside. He was greeted with a giggle. Cree was stretched out on his sofa in what Arran could only accurately describe as a negligée. The sheer, beige fabric barely covered the top of her long dark legs. Not that it mattered what it covered given that the material was on the thin side of translucent.

"Oh hell." He hadn't meant to say that out loud.

"So charming," said Cree as she stretched and sat up.

"What do you want, Cree?"

It could literally not have been more obvious what she wanted. Werewolves found getting dressed pointless unless they knew they would be in human form for a prolonged period of time, in a wolf camp or community it was rare to see anyone dressed in more than shorts at all. And so Cree purposefully bringing the nightgown she was wearing was a more deliberate statement than if she were completely naked.

"I've hardly seen you since I got here," she stood as she spoke and draped her arms around his neck, "I was thinking I could stay the night and we could catch up."

There was no more ruthless a seducer than a determined ex. As she stroked his cheek, Arran could feel how easy it would be to wind up in bed with her. It would be just like falling. Sex with Cree was familiar but still exciting, the perfect blend of comfortable and enticing. There was a part of him that wanted to show her everything that he had learned from his time spent single. So much off him wanted this for so many reasons, was there even any point in fighting it?

"I've missed you," she whispered in his ear.

That was it, that was the point in fighting it. If she'd really missed him she would have been in contact and now she had the nerve to turn up and act like she cared to try to get him into bed. A hook up he could get behind, but he wasn't about to be manipulated.

"If you missed me you would have fucking called me."

He could feel her muscles tense as her arms were still wrapped around his neck. He didn't pull away, he wanted to make her do it first.

"Arran come on, let me give you your birthday present."

"You know what I actually would have wanted for my birthday, three days ago?" Cree released him and turned away. "A card, a text or something, some kind of acknowledgement. Anything that would have made this seem a lot less seedy."

"What would I have said Arran?"

"Happy birthday, have a great day, felicitations. There are quite a few popular options."

She sat back down on the sofa and rested her head on her hands. Arran's anger flared within him. This was completely unjust. She had left him and she was the one trying to use him now. What made her think that she had any right to be upset?

"I do miss you, I really do but I-"

"Have to fulfil your duty to your people? Have to think of the bigger picture? I've heard it all before Cree and the kicker is that I'm fine with it. You left me. And that's ok, you get to leave. But you don't just get to come back."

She met his eyes with a doleful look. In all the years that he'd known Cree he'd never seen her look so tired and rarely so upset. It was as if she'd aged rapidly in the two months since they'd seen each other last in spite of her immortality.

"I'm going through a pretty rough patch right now," she said quietly.

He wanted to comfort her, no matter how angry he was, caring about Cree was still ingrained within him. Resisting the urge to touch her he sat down next to her and hugged his knees to his chest. Her presence was a mixture of intoxicating and emotionally winding, not looking at her helped clear his head.

"Well I'm sorry to hear that but that doesn't really change anything."

"You don't want me?"

He could feel her eyes on him. Of course he wanted her, he'd spent weeks wanting nothing but her. And here she was in his room wearing a nightgown that may as well have been made out of tissue paper. Moreover, she was upset and seeking his comfort. Maybe if he put her arm around her and listened to her problems, the last few months would magically disappear and they could be happy again. He did genuinely want to make her feel better after all.

But things were different now. He wasn't the same person that he had been when they were together. To go back now just wouldn't work somehow.

"No, I don't want you anymore."

"I've ruined everything," she said. She sounded like she was trying not to cry.

"Come on Cree, you've got more important shit going on. Loyalties to secure, people to command. You said it yourself, your relationship with me has always been secondary to that. You have a destiny."

She had a path to follow that ended in being one of the most powerful women on the planet and he was sending off applications to study English with Politics at human Universities. He couldn't help but feel a little bitter about consoling her. Cree's future wasn't perfect but at least she had one.

"I thought that giving you up would be a massive sacrifice but I didn't realise it would just be the first of many."

"I'm sure it's not that bad."

"No, Arran you don't understand. Everyone is on edge at the moment, there's been this massive shift backwards in terms of what's acceptable. My father's gone into overdrive making sure every little thing I do is what he'd define as traditional. There was this girl that I was starting to like, he found out and suddenly her whole family left the clan they'd been in for generations and moved to Finland. I got an angry lecture about how being with a woman was no better than being with a vampire. I'm having to carve out huge chunks of myself to be in a position where I can take over and I just need something that feels familiar."

As she finished her speech Arran felt her hand on his knee. He could empathise with wanting to return to something comfortable, but at the same time he felt he was being treated less like a partner and more like a therapy dog.

"I'm really sorry about what you're going through, but at the end of the day you knew this going in. And I want to be your friend and be here for you but I have my own life and I'm not going to wait here for you to dump your problems on me, seduce me and then leave."

He pushed her hand off of him and took a breath. He had always been her shoulder to cry on, it gave him a sense of purpose to comfort her but it had to stop.

"Fine," she said with a hard edge to her voice. She stood up and faced him, looking slightly ridiculous in her see-through attire. "You know you're lucky that you're a vampire, you don't have to follow all these rules."

"Are you kidding me? Yeah it's great not being self-governed, all I have to do is abide by laws made by witches hundreds of years ago because if I don't I know that they've got the wolves behind them."

"Oh don't be so-"

"I get that you have a lot of heavy expectations on you ok? I get that the plight of the bisexual werewolf princess is a tragic one. But don't tell me I'm lucky in any way and frankly don't expect me to care right now. Because you always do and that's not how friendship works. You're so self-absorbed that I don't even think that you recognise how you use me. So just fuck off, Cree."

Arran expected a fight but he was gifted with silence. She took off her nightgown slowly and left it on the floor. His eyes didn't follow her as she left through the outside door, presumably how she had gotten in and he closed the blinds blocking the sight of her transforming outside.

His legs felt heavy as he climbed the stairs to his bedroom level and he got into bed fully clothed. The empty space next to him could have easily had Cree in it right now if he'd had been nicer to her. He spread out in an attempt to take up both sides of the bed and despite his pacing heart and the alcohol still in his system, sleep found him incredibly quickly. Dealing with the fallout could wait until later in the morning.

I actually really feel for Cree, she was nearly the protagonist of this book but it would have been a very different story. And that brings us to the end of chapter 4! I hope that you enjoyed Arran's birthday more than he did <3