“
Well, you went to a lot of
trouble kidnapping me: knocking me out, dragging me here. And all
for what?” Lucy brushed some dust and leftover grass from the
graveyard from her sleeve. “I don’t see you killing me, especially
since you had plenty of chances while I was passed out.”
Delia smiled again, her eyes brimming
with excitement.
The bitch has a plan, damn
it…
Delia said, “It occurred to me that if
I killed you, I wouldn’t really get much satisfaction out of it,
vengeance-wise it’d be kind of short lived. I want Gabriel to feel
this for a long time.”
Lucy glared at her. “Just get on with
it already.”
Delia rushed at her, grabbed her by
the throat and slammed Lucy against the wooden door again. She
snarled, baring her teeth. “Patience…”
She let go of Lucy’s throat and pushed
herself away from her. “There is a way,” Delia said with naked
hatred in her cold blue eyes. “A very simple way to make sure you
can never marry Gabriel… and yet keeps blood off my hands,
figuratively speaking.”
Somehow Lucy knew what Delia was going
to say. If she wasn’t going to kill her, and she wasn’t going to
hold her captive—and once she was done Delia wouldn’t have to worry
about Lucy and Gabriel getting married—that left one more
alternative.
“
So you’re going to…”—Lucy
gulped down a huge, ice cold ball of fear—“to…”
“
Make you vampire. Yeah,
that’s the idea.”
Lucy stood there, astonished, her
mouth gaping.
“
I was going to say
disfigure my face.”
Okay,
Lucy thought.
Not my best
guess.
Delia laughed and let Lucy go. “Maybe
later.”
Lucy took off at a dead
sprint as she rushed toward the back of the house. Some annoying
girl was screaming like an idiot. Lucy suddenly realized
she
was the annoying
screaming idiot. Straight ahead she saw another thick wooden door
and she rushed toward it, grabbing the knob and finding it
blessedly unlocked. She yanked it open, rushing into the dark
little room—definitely not an exit!—and pulled the door shut with a
slam. She felt for a latch, but once again she could only feel the
subtle notch for a key—another dead bolt.
Lucy gulped air and then held it. She
listened for Delia’s approach. She had all her weight leveraged up
against the door, but knew she could never hold it against Delia’s
vampiric strength.
Without ceremony, the pitch dark room
filled with light from an overhead light fixture: a large, dusty
crystal chandelier. On the other side of the room, peering at Lucy
from another open door, Delia flashed a most beatific
smile.
“
Silly girl…you can’t
actually think you’re going to get out of this…or away from
me.”
All around the bare room Lucy saw
those creepy markings adorning all the walls. In the bright light
of the chandelier Lucy could see they weren’t just painted on. No,
the symbols were brushed onto the walls with blood, having long ago
dried to a deep, dark crimson.
Delia streaked with blurry speed
across the room and flung Lucy against the wall. “This was... well,
it was fun! But we’ve got more… appetizing business to tend to.”
Her fangs lengthened and glowed in her mouth. “This might hurt a
little.”
Lucy was about to scream bloody
murder, which was actually kind of what was about to happen, but
then her mind clicked onto something she’d completely forgotten
about.
Mr. Winkie,
Lucy thought.
Come to
me.
Immediately she felt the sheath and
harness materialize on her forearm. Delia was leaning in to bite
Lucy’s neck, so she didn’t notice when Lucy felt for the knife,
then pulled it out of the sheath.
Delia’s teeth sank into her throat
with merciless efficiency. The pain and shock of being so
penetrated, and the instant weakening of having your lifeblood rush
from her body, made Lucy shake and moan, the weight of the world
crashing down on her.
But she had the blade in her hand,
thin and light as a feather. Miraculously it was pointed in just
the right direction. With her blood rushing from her into the
vampire’s sucking maw, she thrust up with the last bit of strength
she had and slid the blade into Delia’s belly like she made out of
butter.
Delia screamed and pushed herself away
from Lucy. She staggered back with her hands holding onto the
gushing wound at her core. The blood spilled in splashes on the
hardwood floor.
She laughed, though this time it
sounded raspy with pain. “Silver.” She nodded to the knife still
clutched in Lucy’s hand, Delia’s blood dripping from it. “Nice. But
this wound won’t kill me… it’ll just piss me off! Believe me…” She
staggered back against the nearest wall. “I’ll make you suffer for
this.”
“
I believe you,” Lucy said
breathlessly. She struggled to keep herself standing, her one hand
clutching at her injured neck—the vampire’s teeth had ripped a
chunk out—the other hand holding the knife. The blade and her hand
were drenched in the vampire’s blood. “But it will slow you
down.”
“
Not enough to save you,”
she laughed. “Stupid cow!”
Lucy looked at her hands, dripping
with her blood and the vampire’s blood, and an idea popped into her
head. “You said the markings on the walls protected vampires,
making anything else’s powers useless.” Lucy dropped the knife,
stumbling toward the closest wall marking. She reached out to the
creepy crimson design and swiped her bloody hands over it,
immediately feeling a sizzle and then a flux of power. Suddenly she
knew, right then and there, that the spell (at least in that room)
had been broken. She could feel it.
“
Shit!” Delia spat as her
eyes flashed murderously at Lucy. She lurched forward, forgetting
the painful gash in her stomach, and ran right for Lucy, her eyes
crazed, her fangs dripping with strings of saliva.
Lucy called her power up around her,
the familiar heat flickering in her head. “Delia, stop.”
As if she’d run into an invisible
wall, Delia halted in her tracks; though she was still seething and
trying to reach her arms out to grab at Lucy.
Lucy fell to her knees, suddenly too
weak to stand. She pulled her hand away from her neck wound again
to find it drenched and dripping with even more blood.
I’m dying…
Delia stalked closer, as if she were
trying to pull free of whatever was holding her back.
“
I said stop, super bitch!”
Lucy’s power flashed hot in her mind, and she felt it reach out and
hold Delia back.
But the vampire was
smiling.
“
You’re fading fast. Won’t
be long before all that delicious blood of yours is all over the
floor. And when you pass out…” She clapped her hands together in
exultation and smiled all the more devilishly. “You’re
mine.”
The
psycho-bitch-monster-of-death has a point. Once I pass out—which
I’m already starting to feel—I won’t be able to hold her back at
all.
Lucy shivered as darkness crowded her
peripheral vision.
Either she’ll kill me,
or… or I’ll wake up with fangs.
“
I’m torn,” Delia said,
obviously feeling better, her wound probably almost healed already.
“Should I just turn you and get this over with? Or… I could make
you drink just enough of my blood to heal you, and then I can carve
you up for a while, see how
you
like it!”
While Delia was
monologuing
her ass off
about the ravages she was going to inflict on her, a very simple
thought revealed itself to Lucy. She didn’t know if her little
ability covered it… and even if it did work, would it last after
she’d passed out?
“
Or I could wait until
you’re dead, dead.” Delia twirled with excitement. “With only the
tiniest sparks of life left, and then bring you back
as—”
“
Go to sleep,” Lucy said,
her eyes locked on those of the vampire.
Her monologue abruptly interrupted,
Delia stared at Lucy with slack jawed disbelief.
Lucy breathed in one deep breath,
calling up what was left of her strength, feeling the hot annoyance
burn in her skull. Delia was just about to say something when Lucy
said: “Go—to—sleep—Delia! And don’t wake up again until I tell you
to.”
She gave a snort of laughter, shaking
her head, but then her knees buckled and she fell to the ground,
her arms shaking as she tried to hold herself up from the
floor.
“
No... you...
you can’t
...”
“
Sleep... ” As the word fell
from Lucy’s lips, so fell Delia to the ground. Her frosty cold blue
eyes stared out at Lucy for a few very uncomfortable beats before
they too slid shut, and Delia’s entire body went slack with
sleep.
Hopefully she’ll stay that
way after... after I...
A dark curtain
started to fall over Lucy, only the sound of her own breathing
filled her ears, a frightening cold enveloping her body, making her
numb and scared.
I’m really going to
die…
She felt a tear trickle hot down the
side of her cheek.
This… so… bites!
From the other side of the room came
an earsplitting crash, the sound of splintering wood and metal
being ripped apart. Lucy tried to keep her eyelids open, but they
fell like a curtain as a very large, very scary shape burst through
the wall, roaring like a freaking T-Rex.
Great…
It rushed on all fours toward her. S
omething else that wants to kill me.
Chapter 18
IT WAS THE TASTE that woke
her: sweet and rich and…
to freaking die
for.
It gushed over Lucy’s tongue and down
her throat in greedy draughts. Better than ice cream, better than
chocolate, better than a caramel mocha latte made with whole
milk—even better than the cake her grandmother had baked special
for her birthday.
As if the scrumptious liquid was a
magical cure-all for everything that had ever gone wrong in your
life, or had ever laid a finger on you, Lucy felt the panacea rush
through her veins, warm and pulsating with life, making every
molecule in her body sing with joy, all her pain vanishing as her
heart thrummed in her chest.
Strong arms held her, cradled her as
she drank from—her lips were latched tight to flesh—someone’s
wrist.
“
That’s enough,” a man’s
voice Lucy knew she should recognize said. “Any more and she
might…” He didn’t finish. He pulled his wrist from her grasp,
eliciting a whimper from Lucy’s lips. He gathered her up in his
strong arms and moved them both effortlessly through the ruins of
the room, through the gaping hole in the wall, and out into the
cool night.
~*~
Time flickered by and Lucy now felt
warm all over, the wondrous taste still in her mouth, and
everything that had hurt wasn’t hurting anymore. She realized she
was so warm because she was pressed against Gabriel’s naked chest,
his strong arms wrapped protectively around her. She sighed as she
indulged in the thought that she’d died and gone to heaven, and in
heaven Gabriel was naked, at least from the waist up.
Lucy opened her eyes a little more and
saw they were riding in the back of a car, a sedan with tinted
windows. Delia’s brother, Vin, was driving. Lucy felt the car sway
as Vin zigzagged through traffic, making her hold tighter to
Gabriel’s bare torso. Glancing up to the driver’s seat again, Lucy
suddenly felt a jolt of astonishment. Vin had a white linen
handkerchief wrapped around his wrist. Lucy’s stomach lurched with
revulsion as she realized what had happened.
It hadn’t been some dream, or a trick
of the mind. Vin had fed her his own blood, probably saving her
life… but was she really alive anymore?
“
Am I a vampire now?” Her
stomach did another flip, and her heart started really thumping.
She didn’t care that one of them had saved her life or not,
becoming fangy and dead and—well, she just couldn’t get past the
whole
dead
thing—just wasn’t in her life plan.
Delia’s brother finally spoke, his
voice silky and smooth, and irritatingly calm. “It takes far more
than drinking a little blood to make the change.” He gave her a
wink as he gazed at her through the rear view mirror. His eyes were
the same blue as Delia’s, yet they were not cold as ice. No, they
were liquid blue heat, smoldering as he gazed at her. “So, do not
worry.”
“
You’ll be fine,” Gabriel
said, holding her closer. Lucy took a deep breath and snuggled into
his bare, ever so warm flesh. But then she saw Delia lying in the
front passenger seat beside Vin.
“
What the hell is she doing
here?” Lucy blurted out, an edge of hysteria to her voice. Her
entire body jerked as her eyes snapped open and her heartbeat began
to race again.
“
I think she’s asleep,” Vin
said neutrally.
“
And I so was hoping for
‘she’s dead’ to pop out of your mouth.” All of a sudden Lucy felt
like an ungrateful child, talking to Vin like that. After all, he’d
literally saved her life.