A grumble erupted from Slade’s chest. Dylan smacked him in the shoulder, quieting him. She scanned over the letters on the scroll, whispering aloud. “Even if you shifted those letters over, it still wouldn’t mean anything.”
“We’re not dealing with newborns. Elders are brilliant. And if they wanted their message hidden really well, they wouldn’t have used a simple cipher. They would’ve probably used what’s called a Vigenère table, which is as complex as you could get.” When Dylan and Slade stared at him quizzically, he sighed. Was he the only one who studied this stuff for fun?
“It’s where you write out the alphabet twenty-six times in different rows. Each alphabet is shifted cyclically to the left compared to the previous. Imagine a giant block of letters. Here,” he said, yanking open the front drawer of what used to be his desk. “I’ll make this easier.” He pulled out his keyboard—what used to be his keyboard, he corrected—then jumpstarted the computer. “Imagine a large square with twenty-six lines through the middle.” When Windows started up, he hopped online, and searched for Vigenère table. He enlarged the image and right-clicked to print. “The entire alphabet would make up the first line. On the second line, directly below the first, the alphabet would be written again, this time starting with B.”
As the printer at the back of his ten-by-ten office came to life, he strolled over and received the paper. “Twenty-six rows of the alphabet, one row for each new line, starting with the next letter over. You take the plaintext, or word you want hidden, and cross-reference it against the keyword letters to get your cipher. To get back to the plaintext you do the reverse. But without the keyword you won’t know what the hell you’re looking for.”
“So we have to know the keyword,” Dylan said, biting her thumbnail.
“Bingo.” He handed Dylan the paper with the Vigenère table and waited for her to examine it.
“And the council thinks you know it.” Slade walked to the only window leading to a perfect view of ReVamp’s back room and peeled apart the blinds. His back went rigid, though he tried to hide it by adjusting the heavy leather trench coat over his shoulders. What was he seeing out there that had him on edge? “Do you have any idea how you could’ve written this? Or why you don’t remember?” Slade spoke over his shoulder, his eyes not releasing from something in the lab.
Ruan shook his head, racking his brain for a spark of memory. “There’s only one explanation . . . I must’ve written it before 1912.”
“What happened in 1912?” Slade asked. “Besides the damn Crimson Bay Massacre everyone is so spooked about, which I don’t understand,” he rambled, thinking aloud, “because what would a bunch of suicidal vamps taking a stand against therian restraints almost a hundred years ago have to do with the death shades and the scrolls?”
Dylan sighed and paced from one side of the room to the other, the printer paper clutched in her grasp. Clearly, Dylan had told Slade nothing about the secrets of Ruan’s past.
“You got the gist all right,” Ruan said, swiping a hand across his jaw. “Vamps refused to feed from mundanes on therian demand. They were massacred in the courtyard of Fort Point for not handing over their humanity to therians on a silver platter. Except something else was going on that night. Someone powerful—probably a vamp—had discovered how to unleash something potent from the Nether Realm for their own benefit and was playing both sides. Knowing what we know now, it was probably the same death shades we’re dealing with. The traitor gave valuable intel about the underground vampire attack that was meant to surprise the therians in the fort. Right before the vamps unleashed full-scale war on the shifters and the death shades being released inside, the place exploded. All souls lost.”
“What’s that got to do with you?”
Ruan waited to see if Dylan would offer up her involvement in his past. When she stared through the blinds, pale as a ghost, revealing nothing, Ruan said, “Dylan found me washed up on the beach behind Fort Point . . . in elite, full-scale uniform . . . with no memory.” At that, Slade’s gaze snapped around, settling on Ruan. Disbelief—or perhaps wonder—shadowed his expression. “I was the only known survivor of the massacre. I’m at least four-hundred years old, yet I can only remember a quarter of my life. And if it weren’t for Dylan, I wouldn’t be here at all.”
God, he wished he could remember what happened to him. Everything before 1912 was a void. A dark, endless abyss from where not a single piece of memory could surface. He didn’t care about losing his life before the massacre—his wife, his home—if he had one. Where there was no memory, no emotion was attached.
“It’s like having permanent amnesia. Everything’s just gone.” Ruan moved to the blind-covered window leading to the lab.
Dylan cleared her throat, jerking Ruan’s attention back around. He watched her pick at the corners of her fingers, then brush her hands up and down her arms like a draft in the room chilled her. She kept her eyes clear of him. Ruan had never had this feeling before, but now it seemed like she knew something about his past that she wasn’t sharing.
Slade wrapped an arm around her middle. Did he notice her odd behavior too? “Ruan, it doesn’t take a genius to know that something from your past is connected to these death shades. That’s why the council wanted you here, deciphering these pages. You have to know something that’ll send these death shades back to the Nether Realm.”
“If I knew how to kill them a hundred years ago, why would I encrypt that information? Don’t you think I would’ve written it in plain English so the rest of my haven would know how to defeat them too? If I faced these things and they are as evil as everyone seems to think they are, why wouldn’t their Achilles’ heel be common knowledge? Why would the answers be hidden from our race so we’d fall at their mercy again, a full century later?”
“Have you thought about the possibility that you hid the information from your race?” Slade’s words dropped heavy and full into the room, expanding into the space until there was no breathable air left for Ruan’s lungs. “Maybe that traitor you mentioned was a part of your haven in a position of power. You think it’s a coincidence that these deaths shades pop up one other time in history and it happens to be the exact incident that wiped your memory? That the only information we have about them is something you wrote right before it happened? No. Something’s not adding up here. Someone has to know what happened to you and why you were the only one to survive the massacre.”
From Slade’s embrace, Dylan heaved, a deep, primal sound of losing her lunch. She heaved again, covering her mouth, scrambling to get her hands on the trash can in the corner. Their gazes tracked Dylan’s hunched over form, watched her auburn curls spilling over the wire rim of the can. When she looked up, wiping her mouth with her sleeve, she bolted from the room, trashcan under arm, leaving the door swinging open behind her.
Ruan started after her. Slade grabbed his arm.
“Don’t,” he said, the rough edge of his voice scratching against Ruan’s ears. “She’s mine, remember? I’ll take care of her. You stay here and try to figure this shit out. Listen, maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with saving the race. Whatever it is might have to do with you, and you personally. A message from the Ruan of 1912 to the Ruan of the present. My gut tells me these scrolls weren’t written for anyone else and my gut’s hardly ever wrong. Now you just have to figure out the reason. Start praying to whatever god you pray to that it’s not your great-grandmother’s long lost cherry-blood cobbler recipe or some shit.”
Slade pointed a firm finger into Ruan’s chest that he batted away like a fly. “That’s the only reason the council would need you for this job and not some other think tank. I suggest you wake up from whatever daydream you’re living in and start realizing that this problem isn’t going to go away simply because you want it to.”
Ruan’s mind skipped to his nightmares. To his fang marks, red and swollen, on Eve’s inner thigh. Slade was right. R
uan’s nightmares had returned and he wasn’t going to stop having them just because he didn’t want to watch Eve be drained by his fangs over and over again. He had to figure out what the hell this all meant. Were the two things connected? Was the imminent danger felt in his nightmares somehow related to what was happening at his haven with these death shades? And with these scrolls in his hand? How did that danger relate to him hurting Eve?
There were millions of logical reasons why Eve shouldn’t be related to the peril relayed in the scrolls, the main being that Eve wasn’t even around during the 1912 massacre. But for some reason Ruan couldn’t explain, his gut warned that his and Slade’s initial instincts were right.
It might’ve been the first time the two actually agreed on something.
Against his will, like a thorn in his side that wouldn’t give him a moment’s peace, Ruan’s thoughts darted to the sweet taste of Eve’s blood coating his lips in his nightmare. How long would he be able to lie next to her without losing control? Her tantalizing fragrance teased him every second of every day. Thoughts of her naked body, perfect and smooth like a porcelain doll hovering over him, pressed beneath him, made his stomach ache with need every second of every night. Would the day ever come when she’d realize he was no good for her? That he was causing her more harm than good?
“I think you know what you need to do,” Slade grumbled. “Figure it out fast, Ruan, before more vamps gets hurt. Do whatever it takes to remember any little detail from your past. Dylan wasn’t lying when she said it spoke Eve’s name.”
Ruan nodded, running his fingers through his hair, pulling it back. His past and his future were about to collide full-force. “Shit.”
Slade turned, striding through the door, slamming it behind him. Only the door didn’t close. It hit the jamb so hard that it rebounded back to its original position against the wall.
Through the open door, Ruan caught sight of something that had pure fury pumping through his veins, throbbing against his skull. Dylan getting sick mid-conversation, Slade, and all traces of the talk about his instincts and the scrolls vanished from Ruan’s mind.
Sitting in the middle of the lab with a ReVamp blood tech at her side, relaxed as could be, her arm stretched out for blood draw, was Eve. The lab tech snapped an empty vial onto the back of a needle and bent lower to puncture the soft flesh of her inner arm. Eve was downright comfortable. Smiling. Like she’d gone through this process a million times before.
Behind his back.
Ruan’s eyes pinched tight, narrowing to slits. His vision blurred red with rage.
Chapter Twelve
“Fear of the unknown can drive you mad. Take comfort in the fact that thousands of vampires have successfully transitioned before you. Take your new drink preferences one stomach pang at a time.”
Newborn Vampire Induction Manual II: New Beginnings
EVE BARELY HAD time to register what was happening.
Ruan burst into ReVamp’s lab, stormed across the room, and shoved the lab tech in the chest. He stood before her, jaw pulsing, hair disheveled, his lips strained white. “What are you doing here?” he ground out. His voice was level, a drone of anger threatening to erupt. “This is the last place I’d expect to find you.”
Busted. But on second thought, she was about to say the exact thing about him. Didn’t he hate this place for what it demanded of her? How many times had he sworn never to come back here? Her gaze shifted to the rubber strap tied just above her elbow, then back to him. “I, uh, please don’t be angry, I just—”
“You just what? Decided to come in behind my back and donate a pint? Get your bag. I’m getting you out of here.” Barely giving her time to snatch her purse off the floor, Ruan put a hand on the small of her back and escorted her toward the door.
Dylan threw up her hands and blocked the exit, eyes pleading. “Ruan, wait, I can explain.”
“I don’t need your explanation.” His jaw clenched, ticking, and his even tone cracked. “I need to get Eve out of here before I hurt someone.”
Eve wiggled her arm out of Ruan’s grasp. “You need to stop being so over-dramatic. You’re not going to hurt anyone.”
Ruan spun around. “Why don’t you tell that to the techie with a death wish holding the needle over there.” He pointed at the lab tech who was standing against the back wall, as far away from the action as possible. “One scent of your blood could have every bloodlusting vamp in the place bursting through the lab doors. This place is designed to house vamps who have trouble controlling their urges, Eve. You think that sucker over there isn’t getting off on your scent right now?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“If he even looks in your direction again I’ll turn his eyes into pincushions.” He pinched his eyes closed and took a deep, jagged breath. As if restraint was the hardest thing for him to hold onto.
The high-pitched clink of a needle being dropped into a porcelain sink echoed through the lab and whipped Ruan’s eyelids back open.
“That’s my boy,” Slade rumbled from behind her. “ ‘Bout time you manned up, Ruan.”
Ruan stepped past Eve, going chest to chest with Slade. “Don’t think just because we’re working together on the scrolls that we have some sort of fucking brotherly bond. I’ll rip out your jugular the same as his if I find you’re involved in this.”
As Slade shook his head and laughed, Dylan chimed in. “Eve’s right, Ruan. Calm down. No one’s going to get hurt tonight. It’s not in you to be that way.”
“You have no idea what’s in me.” Ruan turned his attention to Dylan. “Are you the one who put Eve up to this? You’re the one who asked her here?” When Ruan stepped closer, Slade roped his arm through Dylan’s—a protective gesture Ruan ignored by stepping closer still. “Dylan, how could you ask Eve to come here, knowing how I felt about it? You’ve successfully duplicated her blood and strengthened the race with it. What more do you need from her? From us?”
Ruan just didn’t understand. Even if Eve had never met Dylan, had never been asked to donate blood on behalf of their khiss, she still would’ve come regularly, giving herself as needed for the vampires in Crimson Bay. Ruan would simply have to understand that was the way it was.
The way it would always be.
Eve cupped Ruan’s clenched fist gently. “Ruan, listen to me.” As his gaze set upon hers, she hesitated, waiting for the fire lighting his eyes a bright evergreen to settle to a calm aqua. She stroked his arm, up to his shoulder, and back down to his hand, where she weaved her fingers in his. “Dylan didn’t ask me to come back. I’ve been donating at vampire rehabilitation centers like this one since I was in high school. After we ran away from all of this, I realized I couldn’t stay away from my responsibility and I couldn’t tell you because I didn’t think you’d understand.”
“Responsibility?” Ruan’s voice kicked up a pitch as his hands became fidgety; skimming through his sunshine-gold waves, scratching under his jaw, picking at the lip of his jeans. His paper-thin restraint was disappearing before her eyes. “You play no part in any of this. How can it be your responsibility to feed our race?”
Eve sighed, and let the past roll off her tongue. “When I was young, my mother and I were attacked by a therian in front of our home. It was too late for my mother, but a vampire—a very kind-hearted vampire—stepped in and saved me.” She brushed a hand down Ruan’s cheek. His skin goose-bumped beneath her fingers. “Maybe by my donating, I can somehow reach the vampire who saved me all those years ago. It’s my way of thanking your race.” She shrugged. “Of giving back a piece of myself that wouldn’t be here without the generous act of one.”
“I’m sorry, Eve. No child should have to go through something like that.” As Ruan’s emerald eyes cooled to aqua, he shook his head. “You were exposed to our race so young . . .”
“It’s all I’ve ever known.”
“Wh
y didn’t you tell me? I mean, I just don’t understand how you could do this behind my back.”
“I wasn’t doing it to purposefully hurt you. It was something I had to do.”
“How long . . .” He chewed on his lip. “How long have you been coming here?”
“I’ve just kept up with my regular appointments after work, that’s all. It doesn’t take away from any of our time together and it’s not really for you to decide anyway.”
“You’re giving up a part of you.” He growled low, sounding pained. “Don’t get me wrong, Eve. After hearing what happened to you, I can understand why you’d be drawn to places like this. Places that provide for vamps in need. But I need you to understand that your blood is not just some red ooze that drips out of your veins. It’s your energy, your spirit. The part of you I hunger for day and night. All this time I’ve been torturing myself to keep you pure. Keeping my fangs in check. For what? So you can give yourself freely to every bingeing vamp that strolls in here wanting a fix?” He shook his head and dropped her hand. “God, it pains me to even think about your blood passing someone else’s lips.”
Even though he was standing inches from her, Eve felt the crack between them separate into an abyss. Damn it. She swore to herself when he left the warmth of their bed the other night that she wouldn’t let him put distance between them.
Yet here he was, doing it again. Over something as ridiculous as filling up vials of blood once a week. Why was he holding so tightly to her, shielding her from the vampires she’d come to know as friends? Was he so afraid of losing her to another? Or did it go deeper than that?
Suddenly her path became clear. She knew what she had to do.
“You said you hunger for me, Ruan? Yet you don’t want me donating to anyone else?” She reached behind her, to the lab table that was stocked full of medical supplies. Gripping a surgical knife tight, she held it to the heart of her palm. “And I want nothing more than to be with you . . . no restrictions. No walls between us.”
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