Authors: Melody Johnson
“I know,” I whispered.
“I was never his night blood, but I was his all the same.”
A hiss whizzed over my body. Jillian’s hand whipped up and caught the arrow mid-flight, centimeters before it pierced her chest. She scanned the surrounding woods, and a growl rattled from her chest as her gazed honed on target.
I turned my head to see what she’d seen.
Walker was standing less than a hundred feet away in the thick of the woods beneath a patch of brilliant sunlight. His blond, curly hair glowed like a halo around his head, but his expression was anything but angelic. I’d witnessed his single-minded vendetta against vampires before, just like I’d witnessed him aim his sawed-off shotgun at hostages, but I’d never been the hostage until last night. Until now, I’d never been his target. I felt my heart twitch in my chest, and I struggled to breathe past the pain as the blind hatred in his expression spread from Jillian to me.
Walker aimed the crossbow at Jillian. Protected as he was by sunlight, he was untouchable, and he knew it. Jillian couldn’t give chase. She’d have to retreat toward the river, into the deep woods and shadows, to survive.
“I will be the Master Vampire of New York City,” she said, her voice like ice. She snapped the arrow in half with her fingertips. “But not like this.”
I blinked, and she was gone. I turned my head and scanned the surrounding forest for a blaze of her catching fire or the rustle of her retreat through the shadows, but nothing remained of her presence except for the serene exhale of her absence.
I turned back to Walker. He’d re-aimed the crossbow. Without Jillian for a target, he was aiming at something over my shoulder, but he was staring directly at me. He watched me struggle to breathe, to keep my eyes open and locked on his. He glanced at Bex behind me—still in shadows but surrounded by sunlight, still incoherent with grief—and then he locked eyes with me again. I could see the struggle in his face as his feelings warred with his instinct to kill.
He was aiming at Bex.
Could he aim his crossbow at a grieving, sobbing woman, a woman who had saved his ungrateful ass several times throughout his life, and pull the trigger when she wasn’t looking? He knew that wasn’t self-defense, no matter how he spun the details. Whether he considered Bex a woman or a vampire, whether he considered her living or existing—even I wrestled to distinguish those details—I didn’t have any trouble distinguishing self-defense from murder. And if Walker shot and killed Bex in this moment, that was murder.
Before I could shout in warning to Bex or block Walker’s line of sight, he dropped his aim. I sighed in relief and then coughed from the pain in my chest. I didn’t have a physical wound, only the metaphysical one Dominic had created with his bonds, but physical blood spewed from my mouth. Walker watched me cough and struggle, and the telltale clench and unclench of his jaw tightened his expression. He wanted to help me. He hated seeing me struggle, and he wanted to be the man by my side to help me survive.
He didn’t kill Bex—he’d let the sun do that for him—but he didn’t help me, either. He watched me struggle to breathe and he watched me bleed and tremble on the ground for a long moment, and then he turned his back on me and walked away.
The woods was thick with foliage, so one moment to the next, Walker was there and then he was gone, but I could hear the leaves rustle and branches snap at his retreat. I stared out into the woods long after the sounds of his steps faded, listening to the rhythm of waking birds and their calls and the constant, steady, trickling flow of the nearby stream. The gaping emptiness of what we’d accomplished on full display in the dawn light shamed me to tears. Nothing had gone according to plan. Nothing had ended like it was supposed to have ended.
Bex was still grieving. I could hear her moans and coughing sobs behind me.
Nathan was still protected by the shadow of a large oak, but the shadows were shrinking, lifting under the morning dawn. He would be exposed to the sun in another minute and burst into flames, just like Dominic.
This was never supposed to be the end, not for any of us.
I dug my elbows into the dirt and struggled over the stones, twigs, and blood-soaked earth to crawl next to my brother. He needed someone’s blood to transform. Dominic wasn’t here anymore to uphold his end of our deal, and Bex was as good as gone without any shadows to hide beneath. I was all Nathan had—vampire or not, healing blood or not—but whether this worked or not, we would both die anyway. The chance of holding on to breathe another breath, no matter how infinitesimal, was still a chance and worth the fight.
Nathan was unmoving and unresponsive when I reached him. In repose, he was just as monstrous and unreachable as he had been while tearing through limbs and ripping out hearts. His black hair was a matted mess of knots, grease, blood, and fouler things. His face, tipped to the side and slack with unconsciousness, didn’t resemble anything I knew as my brother. This creature’s face was a scaly gleam of scratches and hunger and ferocity. His brow was jutted in a thick frown, and his teeth, too large and too many for his mouth, protruded from his lips, each tooth a razor, shark-bladed point, except for his fangs, longer than the rest, that curled down like sabers.
His nose, flat and pointed and pinched at the corners, glittered from the diamond pierced though the left nostril. I stared at his nose stud for a long moment, reminding myself of who he was, who we were, and that if this worked, everything we’d sacrificed for this moment wouldn’t have been an empty accomplishment. It would be the very accomplishment I was willing to die to achieve.
In a gesture that was becoming all too familiar, I bared my wrist and lifted it, trembling, to Nathan’s lips. His mouth was slack, so I braced the tender inner flesh of my wrist against the sharp point of his fang and sliced in deep.
Blood poured from my wrist into Nathan’s mouth.
Almost immediately, a low, vibrating rattle growled from Nathan’s chest. I sighed, wondering if I was transforming him or feeding him, and honestly, at this point, wondering if it really mattered. With Jillian on the loose, she would reign over Dominic’s coven, and God only knew the monstrosities she would create while in power. I closed my eyes. Nothing could be worse than the monster she’d created in Nathan.
Exhausted and helpless and nearly hopeless, I collapsed next to him, resting my wrist over his mouth so my blood could drain down his throat.
I’d
be Damned if I didn’t see this through to the end.
The tremors were minute at first—a twitch against my wrist, a tremble that could have been the vibrations of his growl—but they deepened violently into convulsions within a matter of seconds. He was seizing. Or having a stroke. Or maybe his blood was clotting, like Walker had once described, and he was suffocating.
Or maybe—even if the chance was infinitesimal, it was still a chance—maybe he was transforming.
Minutes passed. Nathan’s convulsions didn’t ease, and the blood loss was too much for my body. I drifted into a swirling numbness and felt myself being gently lifted from the ground. Nathan was somehow rising with me; I could still feel his seizing shivers and convulsions next to me, closer to me somehow and yet further away. The sun was a brightening brightness over my vision as I squinted into the full morning rays of sunlight, and I wondered if this was more than sunlight, if we were rising to the final light.
Arms tightened around me as my vision darkened in pulsing, black bursts. The voice was a soft, southern twang, her words like feathers as she spoke.
“Hang on just a little longer, Cassidy. Your strength for his strength. His life for your life, remember? If not for yourself, hang on just a little longer for him.”
Bex’s soft waves of bronze hair glittered like a halo of fire around her head as she looked down on me, her expression serene and encouraging and hopeful. She stood with us in the rays of morning light, gathered us tightly in the strength of her arms and carried us as she took flight through the clear, crisp morning air, not a shadow of protection between her porcelain skin and the sunlight.
The scratchy scent of antiseptic, the ache of an IV in the bend of my elbow, and the steady beep from the machine monitoring my heart were becoming unfortunate familiarities.
Someone was in the room with me, two someones actually: a patient and a visitor. I knew not because of a colored aura surrounding the room or the pump of their heartbeats or the smell of their perspiration or the heat of their focused gazes. I knew because I could hear them with my very human hearing. The steady beep of the patient’s heart monitor was competing with mine, and the visitor was speaking softly.
I was alive.
The grateful relief of simply surviving was becoming overly familiar as well, but each time was like the previous. It didn’t matter if this was the first time opening my eyes after facing death, and it didn’t matter if it was my last, although I’m sure it wouldn’t be considering my proclivity for doom and gloom. I took a deep breath despite the sting of antiseptic and enjoyed the simple pleasure of feeling my lungs expand, knowing I would open my eyes to see another day.
I opened my eyes, but the person looking back at me wasn’t anyone I could have anticipated; my newfound feelings of grateful relief plummeted.
“Special Agent Rowens?” My voice cracked, not entirely from disuse.
“Please, it’s Harold.” He walked to me at a brisk clip, picked up a plastic cup from the bedside table, and tipped the straw toward my lips. “Here, take a sip. I’m sure you’re parched,” he said. “I know I was.”
I licked my lips, but my tongue was dry. I could feel the flakes of cracked skin on my lips from dehydration, so I strained forward, took the straw in my mouth, and drank.
The water was cool, if not entirely fresh, and moistened the sand and hair from the back of my throat enough that I could use my voice and not feel like coughing.
I eased back and cleared my throat. “Thanks.”
Rowens nodded. He set the cup back on the bedside table and sat on the chair nearest my bed.
I eyed him warily, too many emotions constricting my throat to really speak, despite the water. He was still wearing his hospital gown along with a pair of green gym shorts, so he was decent if not technically dressed. The room was cool, even for me with my own gown and wrapped in blankets, but after the exertion of walking and standing, sweat slicked over Rowens’ brow. He wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his left shoulder, shrugging.
He was missing his right arm at the shoulder, and in its place were wads of gauze and padding held by a sling around his neck and upper chest.
He noticed where my gaze had wandered and the corner of his lips tipped in a self-deprecating grin.
“My supervisor wants me to take leave for physical therapy. He knows better than to broach the topic of leaving the field, but I could hear the order loud and clear even if he didn’t voice it. A fucking desk job.” Rowens shuddered. “Rip off both my arms, why don’t they?”
I didn’t know what to say. My empathy for him and guilt for my part in his injury were overwhelming and poignant, but my uncertainty over what he remembered, what Bex had allowed him to remember, choked my response.
He held up a hand, letting me off the hook. “Sorry, I’m not here to grouse. I just wanted to thank you.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Me? The last time we spoke, you were the furthest thing from thanking me.”
“Your tip on Colin was instrumental in his rescue. He might not have survived much longer, and the search party found him relatively quickly, thanks to you.”
I nodded, waiting on the catch. “You’re welcome.”
Rowens’ hand curled into a fist. “And I thought you’d like to know, for everyone’s peace of mind, that Walker was able to track and put down that bear.”
I blinked, hating that I was playing catch-up with the one person capable of exposing everything and endangering all of us. “Bear?” I asked.
“Rabid bear. Not particularly common, apparently, but not unheard of, either.”
“Right. Good,” I said, trying to drum up some necessary enthusiasm. “That’s great to hear. I knew Walker would come through for us.”
“There were other reports that I’d read concerning the deaths of Lydia Bowser, John and Priscilla Dunbar, and William and Douglas McDunnell, that did not support a bear attack,” Rowens leaned forward, his gaze more intense than any other man I’d known, except for maybe Dominic. The focus and intent in his eyes made me hold my breath. “But no one remembers writing those reports.”
I opened my mouth, not wanting to gape at the familiarity of his frustration and at the implication of what that meant for him, but I gaped anyway.
“And the few people who were stupid enough to open their mouths about it decided to take a sudden vacation or leave of absence. I haven’t seen them since, and their phones are either disconnected or they haven’t returned my voicemails.”
I closed my mouth and swallowed. “You’ll have to remember that while you’re taking leave. No work for you while you’re off duty,” I said lightly, trying to feign ignorance of what he was implying.
Rowens shook his head. “My reports reflect that Officer Riley Montgomery and I were attacked by a rabid bear, so I won’t be going anywhere, off duty or otherwise.”
He knows
, I thought, and I could hear my heart racing a double crescendo from the increased beeping on the monitor and the pounding, like punches, pumping inside my chest. I didn’t know if he knew everything—who would come to the true conclusion,
vampires
, after facing the creature that Nathan had been, assuming he remembered—but he knew something. He knew enough.
“Rowens,” I whispered, “There’s some things about this case that you don’t know—”
“No, there isn’t,” he said. “I’m telling you this because you sat across from me in that interrogation room without any real answers to my questions when I knew you had them, and now I know why. So I don’t care what it is I don’t know, I’ll figure it out on my own terms, like I’ve done my whole life, but I’m telling you that whatever it is that you think I don’t know, you don’t know either. You didn’t know anything about this case when you were in my interrogation room, and you
still
don’t know. Got it?”