Authors: Melody Johnson
I bucked at him, anger finally incinerating the fear in a hot blast. “You knew that, and you shared your bed with me. You conveniently omitted that protecting me throughout the day meant killing me tonight!”
“You’re being dramatic,” Dominic growled. “Drinking from you won’t kill you. You don’t need the entire cow to make a hamburger, remember? And neither do I, concerning you.”
“Number one, I don’t like being compared to a cow. It’s insulting. And number two, you may not need the entire cow for one hamburger, but the cow ends up dead anyway.”
“We’ve argued over dietary preference in the past, and it’s a conversation I grow weary of discussing,” Dominic said. “Either you trust me, or you don’t. Either you’re my night blood, or you’re not.”
“I’m playing your night blood to uphold my end of our deal, but it’s an act. I’m not really your night blood.”
“Fine, but we’re still within Bex’s coven. You will continue the act until the deal is off, and as my night blood, it’s your responsibility to sustain me until I can obtain a full meal,” he said, and his tone brooked no argument.
“My blood will weaken you,” I reminded him. “Losing more blood will weaken me, and we need to be our strongest to face Nathan tonight.” I narrowed my eyes. “We are still facing Nathan tonight, aren’t we?”
Dominic froze this time, his face still buried in my neck for a moment before he eased back. “Yes, of course. I haven’t forgotten our goals for tonight.” He pressed his thumb to the pulse at my throat and closed his eyes on another growl. “My own thirst, I’m afraid, prevented me from remembering your condition. You lost a lot of blood yesterday, too much for me to expect you to feed me now. Your health takes priority over appearances, and if questioned, even Bex would understand that. Forgive me.”
I tried to ease back, but his hold was still impenetrable. “There’s nothing to forgive,” I lied. “Just get off.”
He growled low in his throat, and I realized how my tone sounded.
More politely, I added, “Please.”
The low, rattling growl in his chest persisted while he spoke. “There are ways to replenish your blood supply after I’ve fed, so your health won’t be jeopardized.”
“Dominic, let me up,” I said reasonably. He moved his fingers down my neck, grazing my shoulder and over my bicep to the sensitive bend in my elbow. I shivered, no longer feeling cold while pressed against his iciness. “Please, don’t do this.”
“You smell differently now. The cinnamon’s still there, but the spice is different. Chai, perhaps.” He breathed in and groaned. “I don’t know which is better.”
Faced with my fear and desire, he didn’t know which he preferred. Who was more sick, the monster or the woman who desired the monster?
Maybe if I changed the topic we could claw our way back from this madness. “You’re naked,” I accused, blurting the first thought that came to mind. Despite our situation, despite the real, physical danger vibrating from him, I blushed.
“Yes,” he growled, and the rattling increased.
Not exactly the effect or topic change I’d hoped for, but I’d started it. May as well follow through. “There was another robe in the bathroom you could have worn.”
“I’m not ashamed of my body. Why should I hide it from you?”
“I’m not ashamed—” I started, but I caught the smirk twisting his lips and cut myself off. I took a deep breath and tried again. “I would have appreciated you wearing the robe.”
Dominic raised his eyebrows. “I would have appreciated you
not
wearing the robe, but you didn’t hear me complaining.”
I opened my mouth and closed it, not sure how the topic had so quickly flown off course. Again.
“Do you wear a robe for Ian Walker when you share a bed?”
He posed the question so abruptly and so devoid of inflection that I answered truthfully and without thinking. “Walker? I’ve never shared a bed with Walker.” I frowned. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
Dominic smiled instantly and unabashedly, like a reflex and unlike any smile I’d ever seen from him before. He was normally so deliberate and calculating, but this smile erupted like a caterpillar from its chrysalis, finally free and unencumbered. Finally in its true form.
He threw his head back and laughed. His bellows shook the entire bed.
I narrowed my eyes. “I must have missed the punch line.”
“That’s all right, my dear, dear Cassidy. I thought it was funny enough for the both of us.” He eased his body off mine and stood. “I’ve always known that Ian Walker was a fool where Bex was concerned, but I never thought him a fool in regards to his relationship with you. This once, it’s very, very nice to be wrong.” He held out a hand to me.
I hesitated.
“Come, now. It’s just a hand.”
“You promise not to bite?” I asked, my tone dripping in sarcasm.
“You’ll need to touch more of me than just my hand to leave this coven, and I dare say you’d prefer to leave sooner rather than later to avoid contact with any of Bex’s vampires before they’ve fed.”
I shook my head. “We can’t leave. We need to share our plan to transform Nathan with Bex and Rene.”
“Before we share anything with them, I have business with Jillian to attend.”
Dominic’s tone on the word ‘business’ shot a thrill of goosebumps down my spine. I couldn’t imagine what further punishment he could inflict that hadn’t already been inflicted by her confinement—besides death—but I was more than happy, just this once, to remain in the dark.
“I’ll return before midnight,” Dominic continued, “but until then, you should stay out of sight. I don’t care how your relationship with Ian Walker is or isn’t progressing, I need you to lie low in the one place safe from all vampires.” He sighed heavily. “Although if the Day Reapers come, no place is safe.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Where exactly is the one safe place against all vampires? And what does my relationship with Walker have to do with it?”
“The safest place from vampires is within Ian Walker’s basement.”
Dominic dropped me off at Walker’s house with strict orders to stay inside and out of sight until he returned. Initially, I’d emphatically agreed. I didn’t want Nathan to catch my scent and track me here—my very presence put the other night bloods in danger—but as the hours passed in seclusion and silence, not one night blood answered my calls, returned my voicemails, or arrived at the house.
For the first time since arriving in Erin, New York, absolutely no one, not even Ronnie, was home in the Walker-Carmichael household.
Three voicemails and five texts in two hours may have been overkill on a normal night, but nothing about tonight was normal. Despite our disagreement, considering everything at stake—lives were at stake—I’d expected Walker to pick up his damn phone. We assumed Nathan was hunting me, but after last night, he might be hunting all of us.
The hall clock chimed eleven when I finally heard footsteps on the front porch. The door’s deadbolt snapped open. I leapt away from the breakfast bar and positioned myself next to the basement steps, tensed to dive into the safe room if need be, but my initial jolt of adrenaline quickly faded to relief before I even saw the person entering the house. Nathan wouldn’t use a key, and vampires couldn’t enter without permission. Whoever it was, the person coming through that door was human and a resident of this house.
I relaxed my guard and stepped toward the door. Maybe they’d have an update on the search for Colin. Maybe they’d know where Walker had disappeared—hell where everyone had disappeared. At the very least, they must know if anyone else had been murdered.
If Nathan had killed more people last night, did I really want to know?
The door swung open, and I froze mid-step.
Ronnie entered the house, but she didn’t look like Ronnie. She had always been too skinny, but now she was gaunt. Her arms and legs were nothing but skin stretched over bones. Her clothes sagged on her emaciated body, several sizes too big on her skeleton-like frame. A low, weak rattle growled from her chest. She was scanning the house in jerky, bird-like twitches of her head, and when her luminous, reflective, nocturnal eyes spotted me, she hissed. Long, pointed fangs gleamed from her snarl.
Ronnie was a vampire.
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
She charged me, moving with inhuman speed but not nearly as lightning-fast as Dominic or Bex or even Rene. I cut to the side, dodging her attack. She shrieked, baring her fangs at me as she whipped back around and charged again. I cut to the other side, but the kitchen counter blocked my momentum. She crashed into my back, knocked me into the counter, and we slammed to the ground in a tangled heap of limbs and boney joints.
She lunged for my throat.
I raised my hands instinctively, turning my face away from her snapping jaws. The moment my hands touched her shoulders, she jerked away and cowered on the kitchen floor.
I stared, first at her and then my hands. I was wearing silver rings on each finger. Dominic and Bex would laugh at the threat of my rings, but not Ronnie. Her shoulders were blistered and blackened from that one brief touch.
I shook my head at her, stunned. Ronnie never left the house. Ever. So how did a vampire enter and transform her? Why hadn’t the safe room, supposedly the best protection against all vampires, protected her?
“What the hell happened, Ronnie?” I asked.
A low growl rattled from Ronnie’s chest. Her wounds weren’t blackened anymore, but they were still blistered and oozing. She was healing—slowly, but healing all the same.
I stood, trying to think of my next move, and Ronnie was suddenly on her feet, too. She knocked me back and cracked my head on one of the breakfast barstools. I hit the ground face first, and this time, I stayed down.
It took a moment for the room to stop spinning, but a moment was all Ronnie needed. Her fangs sank deep into my flesh, like two stabbing knives. I felt the hickey-like pull of her suction at my neck as she drank. Unlike Dominic, whose bite was pure pleasure, or Rene, whose bite was like a dream, Ronnie’s bite was exactly that: fangs ripping into my skin and her greedy, urgent mouth sucking my blood.
I yanked out the silver nitrate from my pocket, aimed it behind me, and hit her with the spray.
She flew back, screaming.
I flipped onto my back, still aiming the spray and ready to hit her with another blast if she so much as twitched in my direction.
She eyed me warily. The skin over her right cheek, neck, and shoulder was pockmarked with boiling blisters. Despite being sprayed, she’d still managed to swallow a few gulps of blood, so her face had plumped, her arms and legs were defined with muscle, and her complexion had pinkened. She still didn’t look like herself, but at least she looked less dead.
I stood carefully, using the barstool for balance as the floor shifted beneath my feet. My head was pounding. I touched my forehead tenderly and winced. I already had a goose egg growing under my hairline.
Ronnie lunged for me again, but I didn’t hesitate this time; I didn’t care if she was Ronnie. She was still a vampire. I hit her with another blast of spray, and she tripped backward blindly. One moment she was recoiling from me, and the next moment, she was falling through the open basement door and tumbling down the steps into the safe room.
I blinked, stunned into inaction by her sudden disappearance. Shaking off my shock, I ran to the top of the basement steps and peered down. Ronnie was at the bottom of the steps inside the safe room, curled on the floor, crying. Half of me, admittedly the stupid half, instinctually wanted to help her—this was Ronnie, for heaven’s sake!—but the other half of me, the half that knew better, knew that she was a vampire. No matter how weak or injured or frail she seemed, her idea of a meal was to rip my throat out.
Ronnie opened her mouth, and between the whimpers and tears and that awful rattling growl, she whispered shakily, “Cassidy?”
The stupid half of me won. I walked down the basement steps to her despite my gut instinct to keep my distance.
I stopped near the bottom, far enough away that she wouldn’t be able to lunge for my throat again. I hoped.
“What happened, Ronnie? Who attacked you?” I asked, trying to soften my voice and squeeze out some answers, but my head was still pounding and spinning.
Ronnie’s sobs burst on a wail. “It hurts!”
I squinted at her as she squirmed on the floor. She couldn’t be injured from falling down a flight of steps—she was a vampire now, after all—but I noticed a thin ripple in the air above her skin, like the heat of a fire, and the noxious stink of burning flesh.
She wasn’t injured from the fall. She was inside the silver walls of the basement safe room, and even without direct contact, the silver was burning her.
“I know it hurts,” I soothed, “but I need you to focus. What happened to you? Who attacked you, Ronnie?”
“I was so thirsty,” she gasped between sobs. “My throat was on fire, and I just wanted to go home.”
Even as a vampire, she doesn’t want to leave the house,
I thought sadly. “Do you remember anything from last night?” I persisted. “Do you remember if you left the house or if a vampire broke in?”
“Everything was different when I woke up. I knew I wasn’t dreaming, but it was like waking into a nightmare. The sounds and smells and flavors—” Ronnie pounded her head into the cement. “Nothing’s right. Everything’s different and nothing makes sense, and the life I remember having is a dream,” Ronnie said, nearly hysterical. The expression on her face was haunting. “I just wanted to go home, but my home was part of the dream, too. And you can’t go back to something in a dream.”
I sighed. “You’re home now, Ronnie.”
“There’s no going back, is there?” she asked, and the despair in her voice was pitiful.
“No,” I whispered. “I don’t think there’s any going back.”
“Hello?” someone bellowed from upstairs. “Anybody home?”
Walker
, I thought. Ronnie must have thought so, too, because she was instantly on her feet, the fastest I’d ever seen her move.
I hit her with another blast of silver spray before she exposed herself. She cowered back against the floor, hissing.