“Physically she’ll be fine. Mentally?” He hunched a shoulder. “The turning is complete, but the healing process will take a few more weeks. You’re a turned vampire. You know she’ll have to get used to her new body, her heightened senses. She’ll get there in her own time. I’ve been party to hundreds of turnings. Humans always adjust. However, the ones I’ve attended where the human going through it did not give their permission always involved ugly waking episodes.”
Reproof flickered in the doctor’s gold eyes. Nathan said nothing, just looked back at Mia, hooked up to all sorts of medical devices. He knew the man judged him. Rightfully so. Isabella may have caused Mia’s misfortune, but he had guilt to bear as well.
He’d waited too long to tell her. It probably would have made little difference, given her reaction. His timing had been a stroke of really bad luck. Had he told her sooner, he would have lost her no doubt, but at least she wouldn’t have encountered Isabella.
Nathan was a master at calculating risks and variables in business dealings, but he sucked in the romantic arena. The most important variable he’d failed to take into consideration was Mia’s spirituality. He’d known she had strong Christian values, but stupidly he’d thought their burgeoning love would get her past the shock and fear of what he was and what he’d done to her.
In the end, the love that had been growing between them, made no difference. Mia saw him as Satan’s spawn now. He’d viewed the heartbreaking reality in her thoughts, which he’d stayed out of until their relationship fired romantically. Another selfish violation.
To her, he was a sick, devious person who ingested blood for a dark, evil purpose. He couldn’t fault her based on everything he’d done to her. He’d used her. That’s what vampires did, but it didn’t make it right. His actions were unforgivable. He’d been living in a fantasy world thinking Mia would ignore his sins once she realized the truth.
“How do I get her through this?” he asked, meaning her upbringing in their ways. He’d lost her trust, therefore he couldn’t imagine her allowing him to teach her about her new body, the world of her new species. Plus as an unmated female of their kind, she would need a protector from feral males. Should she have the misfortune of crossing paths with one, her life would be over. Perhaps not physically, but if one captured her, she’d surely wish to die.
“I don’t know her, but judging from what each of you have said, it would be my guess she wouldn’t let you help her. Maybe Julia, but I doubt it. As I said, I suspect her awakening to the truth to be a vile one. She probably won’t want anything to do with any of our kind.”
Nathan stared at her, knowing in his heart, the man’s comments to be correct. The reality terrified him, but he understood. He too had once hated his kind. For many years in fact.
The beginning of his fledgling life, had been demonically slave-like. His only reason for living had been to please Isabella. He’d been under her power and control in every way. His mind and body had belonged to her. Whether she required sex, his blood or the murder of human lives, he’d only been too happy to give her all she requested. As her fledgling, he’d been powerless to refuse, until she finally mentally released him and he’d been able to regain rational thinking.
For many years afterwards, he’d viewed himself as a sick spawn of hell, until other vampires came into his life and explained the basis of their disease and the unmitigated power a feral held over a fledgling. Logically, he knew Isabella had stolen his choice making abilities, yet even to this day he still condemned himself for the things he’d done.
Mia would certainly condemn him. Be that as it may, he couldn’t lose her. Somehow he had to find a way to make her forgive him. To make her understand what being vampire truly meant.
Nathan heard the door creak open and looked up. Julia and Dimitri entered, glanced at Mia, then him.
“How is she?” Julia asked Dr. La Mond.
“Close to waking.” He shared a warning look between the three of them. “Based on everything you’ve told me, I expect her frame of mind and emotions to be fragile when she remembers. We all have to be very careful what we say to her, but she needs to know the truth. I plan to dose it to her as gently as I can. Basically, I will be doing the talking when she wakes up.”
Julia nodded, her expression grim. “She’s going to be terrified when she learns what she has become.”
“I have everything medically in place I can provide, should her actions warrant them.”
Nathan heard a soft moan. His gaze slashed to the bed and his heart stuttered in his chest as he watched Mia’s eyelids flutter. She sucked in a deep breath, then Nathan watched her glance about the room, taking in all of the occupants as well as her surroundings, the IV pole holding a saline solution bag and a unit of human blood, the beeping unit monitoring her vital signs.
Her new eyes were a brilliant, shiny shade of rich amber, beautiful, but at the moment full of fear and confusion. The shimmering color and enlarged irises were a result of her turning. Her thick, auburn curls were a disaster, matted with blood, but her features were rosy and robust like that of any healthy vampire. The turning had also induced a measure of youth. She had actually `un-aged’ a few years, another result of her turning.
She shared a glare between him and Dr. La Mond. “Where am I?”
Dr. La Mond answered. “Mia, do you remember me? I’m Dr. La Mond.”
She frowned at him then nodded. “Yes.” She looked at Julia and Dimitri standing at the end of her bed, then her gaze honed on him with loathing.
She remembered. His heart sank.
She scrambled upright in the bed. “What you said. What you showed me. I don’t understand any of it. And that horrible woman! What kind of crazy cult are you people into?”
Dr. La Mond supplied the answer. “Mia. I need you to calm down or I’ll have no choice but to give you something that will. Every answer you need will be provided when you’re stable enough to hear it. Okay?”
She stared at the doctor for several minutes, a myriad of troubled emotions skating across her features. Eventually, the rapid beeping of the heart monitor settled down as well as her breathing. “Explain,” she demanded.
“I’ve spoken to Nathan, Julia and Dimitri at length about what happened to you. I understand Nathan explained to you he’s vampire.”
Her eyes narrowed to slits. “That’s nonsense. You know as well as I do there are no such things as vampires, just people who want to play vampire because it’s a weird pulp fiction trend these days.”
He took her hand and offered her a kind, doctorly sort of smile. “I’m sure it seems that way, but you’re wrong. If you want to understand the truth, you’re going to have to divorce from your mind what you believe vampires to be because they are real people, but they aren’t human and they aren’t evil.”
She reached up and fingered the bandage on her neck covering the vicious wound Isabella inflicted. “How can you expect me to believe that? Whether that awful woman thinks she’s a vampire or not, she’s clearly evil. I remember what that she-spawn of Satan did to me.”
The doctor offered her a compassionate smile. “She’s an evil one of our kind and I can’t tell you how sorry I am you encountered her, but she doesn’t represent our race anymore than serial killers represent the whole of the human race.”
She yanked her hand from his. “Are you saying you’re a part of this cult too?”
“Simmer down, Mia, and listen. None of us are a part of an evil cult. If you don’t feel up to this discussion now, we can table it for later.”
She shook her head. “No. I need answers.” She sported a condemning look Nathan’s way, then Julia and Dimitri’s. “They’ve been in short supply of late.”
Julia and Dimitri’s expressions filled with guilt and hurt. Of course he felt a healthy dose of those emotions himself. Nathan realized she felt betrayed by them too for their lies of omission.
Dr. La Mond crossed his arms over his chest. “Vampires are physical beings
. Mammals, a subspecies of humans. We evolved from them. Unfortunately, due to a blood disease which hinders our kind from properly reproducing our own blood cells, we need human blood to aide us in making that happen. The reason is a bit complicated, but basically our two species are so entwined, our people would not exist without yours. My point is this, we are a race of people with a blood disease, not monsters, not evil.”
Mia shook her head, appearing confused. “But you people drink blood. It’s an abomination. A sin.”
The doctor frowned. “I’m not a particularly religious man, but I do believe in God. I suppose it would be wrong for a human to consume blood because there’s no need for them to do so. If you believe in creation, Mia, can you condemn a wolf or lion for killing prey to eat? Our kind must survive, but we don’t kill to do it. We’ve developed evolutionary methods to take what we need from human donors without causing harm and without them ever remembering the incident.”
She gasped and stared at him as if his head had just spun around in a circle. “Survival or not, that’s just plain wrong!”
“Look here.” He pointed to the nearly drained unit of blood on the IV pole. “This is how I survive as well as a great majority of our kind. Some of our people, especially males…” The doctor’s gaze slid toward him, then Dimitri. “…choose to hunt because it’s instinctual. I place no judgement on those who do, but because I’m a doctor who sees not only vampire patients, but humans, ethically I can’t feed from them.”
“What?” She shook her head and glared at him. “I don’t even know where to begin. What sort of doctor are you?”
He gave her an understanding smile. “An OB/GYN for our kind and a plastic surgeon for humans. I’ll explain more in time. For now you need to rest and heal. Point is, you’ll never have to orally ingest blood in your life if you don’t want to.”
“What do you mean, I’ll never have to ingest blood?” Sick horror engulfed her features as she stared at the doctor, then her gaze honed on Nathan.
“I couldn’t let you die, Mia. At the time I had only one option to save you.”
For several moments she just glared at him, then she exploded, screaming the word `No’ over and over again and tried to bolt off the bed. Both he and the doctor grabbed her arms and shoulders, Dimitri her ankles and together they held her down. She fought and cursed them viciously. She didn’t realize it, but she now had vampire strength and even as a newborn female of their kind, mixed with fear and rage, the magnitude of that strength was incredible. It took all three of them to keep her on the bed.
At some point during the fray, Dr. La Mond shouted for some woman named Betty. A nurse he realized, when an older human woman ran inside wearing blue scrubs.
“Get me the sedative I have ordered for her. Now!”
She took off at a run. Minutes later the nurse returned with a hypodermic syringe. She injected the needle into a rubber capped joint on the IV line. Shortly, Mia’s struggles ceased. She sucked in sharp, ragged breaths and her eyelids grew a bit droopy, but obviously her mind still fully functioned based on what she said next.
“I hate you, Nathan. You are a twisted, lying son-of-a-bitch. Get away from me.” Her gaze slashed to Julia. “I thought you were my friend. You’re as bad if not worse than him, because you set me up to be bait for his sick ass. I hate you too. Get out. All of you!” She made a lame attempt to lift her arm, but it fell onto the bed with a little thump. Moments later her head turned to the side and the medicine the nurse gave her took over.
Julia clamped a hand over her mouth and started weeping. Dimitri folded her into his arms and stroked her head. “Oh God, I never imagined this could end so badly. I thought her love for Nathan would prevail.” She pulled away from her husband and faced him. “Nathan, I am so sorry. I tried. I only wanted happiness for you both.”
Dr La Mond said, “It’s not your fault, Julia. It’s no one’s fault except for that feral bitch who caused this. Although she could have been spared this had she not been a part of your world.” His gaze raked over Nathan with disdain, then he walked over to Julia and took her hand. “I promise you, darlin’, I’ll do whatever I can. She’s furious now and feeling seriously betrayed, but maybe I can get through to her. I’ll give it my best. Okay?”
“Bless you, Christian. I know if anyone could help her through this it would be you.”
“Thank you,” Nathan added.
La Mond faced him, his expression fierce. “Don’t thank me yet. Based on her reaction just now I doubt she’ll want anything to do with you anytime soon, if ever. Whether she’s your life-mate or not, I don’t know, but what I do know is this, you could have been honest with her before you hired her and long before you started courting her. On top of that, you knew this feral woman posed a danger to you and everyone around you. Julia is my patient and you placed her in danger. I have very little respect for you. This poor woman…” He glanced at Mia. “…has been thrust into a life she wants no part of because of her association with you. I may not have a life-mate myself, but I suspect many of the reasons you procrastinated with honesty were self-serving.”
He snarled at the man, pissed at his high and mighty attitude. Had Mia not been the main issue here, he would have received far worse.
Dimitri said, “That is unfair, Christian. Nathan came to New Orleans to hide from Isabella. He has a safe house here, yet somehow she found him. That’s not his fault. We arrived at his home long before Nathan came to the city. You know he is like a brother to me. We share our residences whenever necessary. None of us imagined Isabella finding him. Now that she has, it will not matter where Julia and I reside. If she found Nathan, she will find us should she choose to use us as pawns in this game of hers. However, Nathan provided security for Julia and Mia, which was on hand that night. Unfortunately, she enchanted the men. What could anyone do against a feral as old as Isabella?”
Nathan added, “As you said, you have no life-mate. Easy to judge for someone who has nothing to loose by being forthright. You saw how she reacted. When would there have ever been a good time to tell her I was a member of our kind when she views us all as devil worshipers?”
Dimitri said, “He is right. Mia is a Christian woman. She would have never abided the news. None of us understood the depth of her moral compass until now.
We all miscalculated her response to the truth. Julia and I believed she loved Nathan and would accept him as her life-mate. Apparently we calculated incorrectly.”
The doctor was silent, glancing between them all. Finally, he sighed. “You have a point. My nurse, Betty is a human and I know she goes to church occasionally. She or I will stay by her side. However, none of you need to be near her for a good long while. Go home. I’ll keep you updated on her condition, but the information will be scant. I won’t violate patient/physician confidentiality.”
Leaving Mia felt akin to his heart being ripped from his chest, but after her outburst, Nathan knew the doctor’s advice correct. The ride home in the limo was a miserable, dark silence between the three of them.
Chapter 11
When Mia woke, her mind and body felt groggy, weighted. She fluttered her eyes, struggling to open them. A loud, steady beeping sound yanked her memories back to the moments prior to her slide into unconsciousness. She glanced to her left and spotted a heart monitor, then she remembered every horrid thing that had happened to her.
Fear speared through her chest. Her gaze scoured the room for crazy-assed vampires. Thankfully, the ones who had ruined her life were absent, but that nurse who had injected some drug into her IV, which put her out, now sat in a chair to the right of her bed, smiling at her, a book in her hands.
“You’re awake. How are you feeling Ms. Peebles?”
Mia scowled at her. “I guess you’re one too?”
She gave Mia a compassionate look, stood, closed her book and placed it on her seat. “No. I’m human. I realize you’re scared, but let me assure you, you’re in a safe place. No one will harm you while
you’re here.”
Mia wanted to believe that, but she’d been lied to so much, she dared not trust anyone associated with these people who thought themselves vampires.
She thought back to Dr. La Mond’s explanation for why these nutty people drank blood. A disease, he’d said. If he’d been honest, then she had the disease too because she clearly remembered Nathan forcing his wrist to her mouth, Dimitri holding her down. She shuddered, recalling Nathan’s blood pooling in her mouth. She’d swallowed, otherwise she would have choked to death.
If what Dr. La Mond said was true, she wished she’d choked to death.
“I bet you’re thirsty,” the nurse said, and poured some water from one of those generic hospital pitchers into a plastic cup. She extended it toward her. “I’m Betty.”
Mia sat up, took it and drank greedily. Her mouth was so dry, it felt like the eye of a sandstorm. Finished, she handed the glass back to the nurse and studied her. The woman was older, maybe mid-fifties, early sixties. She had a short style of salt and pepper hair and brown eyes that were warm and kind. She seemed centered. However, Mia was nowhere near ready to trust anyone yet.
“Why would you work for a doctor who thinks he’s a vampire?” she demanded.
She chuckled, refilled the water glass and handed it to her. “It’s a little bit of a long story, but I’ll be happy to share it if you want.”
“Share away. Anything that will help me make sense of this crap is welcome.” Mia drank.
Betty nodded. “I’ve been a nurse now for thirty five years. The majority of my career I spent working in nursing homes. I enjoyed taking care of elderly people, but I finally got to a point I just couldn’t stand watching people I’d come to love die. I needed a change.
About twelve years ago, I ran across an ad Dr. La Mond placed for an OB/GYN nurse. I’d never worked in that field and figured it to be a long shot, but applied anyway. During the interview he told me the nature of his practice and explained the illness that plagues their species. I didn’t know what to think at first, then as I thought about it, I realized a disease is a disease. If the people he treated were afflicted with one I’d never heard about, then I was simply uneducated, but willing to learn how to treat these people. So I accepted the job and I’ve never been sorry.”
Forever and a Night Page 14