Amidst all of the regret and sorrow that was flowing through me, I suddenly felt the slightest pang of relief at the thought that at least the others weren’t here to share in this moment. I wouldn’t have been able to stand facing this with everyone here. I had sent them on ahead to begin the journey back to New Orleans while we took Grant to get help. Even though Gabriel had made some major strides in developing his control lately, I had seen the bloodlust building in him at the sight of Grant’s free flowing blood.
The boy, Brandon, seemed to hold it together all right, but I barely knew the child and couldn’t tell whether he could be trusted around a bleeding human yet. In the end, with Cat needing to stay with Gabriel, it was only Lulu and Marshall that I trusted to help me.
“We could turn him,” stated Marshall in a hopeful way as he looked at me.
The sudden idea jolted me out of my solemn contemplation, and I stared back at Marshall wide eyed.
“Are you nuts?”
“No. He wouldn’t die if we turned him.” His face looked hopeful again. My sweet friend Marshall had the kindest heart of all of us, and he was willing to put Grant through that torment? Marshall liked Grant and even considered him a type of friend. Why would he want to do that to him?
“I won’t do that to him.” I gripped Grant’s hand in mine.
“If we don’t, he will die, Anna,” stated Lulu. She met my eyes with another one of her frighteningly serious looks. She again put her fingers to his neck. “We’re losing him. His pulse is slowing. We need to decide now.”
I squeezed Grant’s hand, willing him to return to me. If I turned him, he might still die. The process didn’t always work. Just then, Marshall put his large dark hand on my forearm.
“I know this is hard, Anna, but if you can’t let go of this human, you need to let us help you turn him. If he is going to be with us, you have to give him what he needs to survive. This was bound to happen eventually. If you can’t let him die, then give him the tools he needs to survive with us.”
Tears began to well up in my eyes again at the thought. I choked them down with an effort, but when I spoke it sounded squeaky and small with the remnants of their ghosts haunting my throat. “But he won’t remember me. He won’t remember us. He’ll wake up a vile and barbaric animal who doesn’t know me.”
“If we don’t, he won’t remember anything at all because he’ll be dead,” Marshall said with a brutal honesty.
“You never know what people will remember afterwards,” added Lulu softly.
We stood there in silence for a moment while I thought hard about what to do. In the end, I chose what I knew Grant would want. “Okay, let’s do it.”
Those simple words sparked a seemingly chaotic sequence of movements as the three of us ran in all directions searching for the equipment we would need. We had a purpose now, and we moved with earnest. Lulu put a clean new bandage on the wound on his shoulder as Marshall and I collected as many large syringes as we could find. There was no time to start in IV like we had for Gabriel, so we would have to do this the hard way.
I plunged the needle into my own arm and began to extract my blood. I turned to Lulu who was prepping Marshall to do the same.
“Lulu, about how many of these did we give Gabriel?” My voice was hurried and strained as figures and percentages ran through my brain. If we gave him too much, the infected blood would kill him rather than turn him. If we gave too little, his body would treat it as a transfusion, and it would reject the blood as if it was the wrong blood type, killing him in the process. Lulu looked at the large syringes that we were all now filling with our blood, and she seemed to do some mental calculations of her own.
“About six and a quarter of these,” she answered. “Maybe six and a half.”
“Grant is a little bigger than Gabriel,” said Marshall.
We stopped for a short second and stared at each other in silence before all three of us simultaneously stated that seven was the number. I decided to conveniently not think about the repercussions of this decision. There was no time to quibble.
I filled up three of the syringes, and Marshall and Lulu filled up two each. They were going to need more physical strength than I would for the next unpleasant part of this procedure. Marshall went to the foot of the bed and prepared to hold his legs. Lulu took her place at the head to hold his arms and shoulders down.
I leaped onto the table and straddled his waist, using my weight to hold down his abdomen and pelvis. We had moved the sterile table of syringes right next to the bed so that I might reach down and easily grab one when needed. Lulu ripped off what was left of Grant’s shirt in order to instruct me.
“Now remember, you will have to drive the needle down hard to go through the breast plate, but don’t go any harder than you have to. We need this blood to inject directly into his heart to work at this point.”
I nodded and tried to swallow down the lump in my throat as I raised both of my hands that clasped the syringe over my lover’s body.
“Wait!” The word pierced the empty room. It was Lulu who had yelled it. We looked at her astonished as she felt Grant’s neck again. Then she felt his chest in quick movements. “You need to take more blood out of him,” she said quickly.
“What? Now I know you’re crazy, Lulu. I can’t do that.”
“You have to. You know the change works best if almost all of the old blood is removed before the infected blood is added. He still has too much of his own blood.”
“We’ll let him bleed some more from his wound,” I protested.
“By the time he bleeds out, he’ll die before we can get the blood in him. If you drain most of what’s left quickly, we’ll have more time before his body catches up to the blood loss and begins shutting down his organs. You know the more blood that is in there, the more pain he will feel and the less the chance he will have of surviving.”
“Lulu, I can’t do that!”
Marshall placed his hand gently on my calf for support.
“You’ll hate Lulu and I forever if we do it and he dies. It has to be you. You’ll know when to stop better than us. You’ll have more control.”
I looked down at the unconscious Grant again and held my breath in frustration. I hadn’t fed on anyone in decades, and to do it again on Grant? I felt disgusted and nauseated, but I knew they were right. It had to be me, and I had to do this now before it was too late. I leaned to the opposite side of his body from his still-bleeding wound, closed my eyes tight and bit into his neck as quickly as I could. If I was going to do this, I wanted it be over with quickly.
Blood flowed easily into my mouth and down my throat, quenching it in an all too familiar way as I felt Grant’s heartbeat with every horrible swallow. It was painful and terrible and so mortifyingly satisfying that I hated myself for enjoying the taste of the hot liquid.
It had been so long since I had taken blood from an actual human that I had forgotten how magical it sometimes was to feel their pulse inside your body as you took pull after pull from them. I kept drinking, trying to convince myself this was all to save him. When I felt Grant’s pulse begin that terrible slowing-down rhythm, I regained control of myself and released him. I sat back up quickly and looked to Lulu as she checked his pulse.
“I can’t do anymore. Please say that was enough,” I said, wiping blood from my mouth.
“That will work. Now quickly, before we lose him.”
With no further words from either of them, I plunged the syringe down into his chest in one swift motion. Once it was safely in his heart, I slowly began to push on the plunger, releasing our infected blood directly into his heart. I knew not to inject it all right away for fear his heart would expand too quickly. He would die as a result if I did that.
As soon as a quarter of the blood was inside of him, he began to seize and convulse on the table underneath me. He didn’t wake up but his throat made pained sounds as his body flailed around in reaction to the blood. Marshall held his legs down as hard
as he could, and Lulu gripped his shoulders, pinning him to the table. I struggled to stay on top of him as his pelvis kept bucking and trying to throw me about.
I had to remain as still as possible so that I could continue to ever so slowly inject the blood into his heart. Most of the effort went into maintaining a steady stream of injection without breaking off the needle in his chest as he convulsed up and down on the table. It was like riding a bull while trying to start an IV.
I breathed a sigh of relief when I finally managed to get all of the blood into him and tossed the first syringe to the floor. Grant continued to buck underneath me. I reached over to the table to grab the next one and I realized with horror I had to do that six more times.
Chapter Thirty Four
Grant
Burning and pain seared my body, but I was in darkness and couldn’t make out where the pain was coming from. It felt like fire was licking all over my body, but that could not be. If there was fire, it would have lit up this room, and I would have been able to see where I was.
Wherever I was, it was dark and I was paralyzed. I tried to open my eyes, but my eyelids wouldn’t cooperate. What if I was unconscious in a burning building somewhere right now, and that was why everything burned me but my body was unable to move?
Just then, I felt a sudden kick to my chest like a mule or a horse had kicked me hard, but the pain seemed to linger even after the kick was over. In fact, it got stronger. The burning sensation gathered strength in my chest and spread like a wildfire of pain throughout my entire body. I tried to jerk and move my body in reaction to this, but I was still in response. I had to lie there helpless as the searing shock of it all ravaged my body relentlessly. Another kick to the chest sent a fresh bout of agony. I wailed inside my head as wave after wave crashed against my tortured body.
Oh God! Oh God! Make this all stop! Please make it stop. The pain! The fire! Please make it stop! Oh God!
It was a mercy of epic proportions when I finally passed out from sheer exhaustion. When I felt myself begin to drift away, I didn’t care if it meant I was dying or not, I was just relieved it was going to stop.
My awareness of the room came to me extremely slowly. The first thing I noticed was that I was not dead. I could think and feel my body beneath me. The second thing I noticed was that the burning sensation has ceased, and it was instead replaced by a dry ache in the back of my throat. This ache seemed to throb deeper and deeper the more conscious I became. Next, I took stock of my breathing. It was steady, which further confirmed my assessment that I was indeed alive.
Slowly and very deliberately, I tried to wiggle my fingers and toes. Much to my surprise, they worked. I felt them react to my mental command. I flexed and tensed the larger muscles in my legs and arms, and they too reacted. I slowly and cautiously opened my eyes to better take in my surroundings. They opened as a blurry vision of something dark appeared above me. I blinked a few times, and the sight came into focus. I was staring at a low black ceiling.
I squinted and looked around me a little, and I noticed I was surrounded by matching metal bars. Confused, I took stock of what I was lying on. It was a small mattress comfortably outfitted with sheets, a pillow and blankets. Where was I? For that matter, who was I? I felt I knew who I was, but the answer danced just out of my reach. What was happening to me?
I sluggishly grasped at a bloody bandage and pulled it off my shoulder, feeling no wound to accompany it. My probing touch found only smooth skin beneath. I was now able to take in the large open room that seemed to be lit only by lamps and candles. The windows clued me in to the fact that it was clearly nighttime outside.
“Anna? I think he’s awake,” said a cautious male voice only five feet away from me.
I jumped up in a panic, having realized I was sharing this space with other people, people who might wish me harm. I crouched in what I now realized was a cage and growled menacingly at the source of the voice I had heard. A teenage boy jumped up alarmed at the sight of my aggressive stance and backed away from me. I spat and snarled at him as a group of people entered the room quickly. My movements were outstandingly fast and intense, and I felt alien with new aggression.
They looked at me with an odd mixture of relief and shock that didn’t make sense to me. I stuck to growling and snapping at them from behind my bars. If these people were the ones who had imprisoned me, they must not be kind. Did I know them? Did they know me? A red-headed woman stepped forward to grab the boy and jerk him back behind her in a protective way. The others seemed to hold cautious positions while one blond woman slowly edged her way to the front of the crowd.
They were afraid of me? They were afraid of me. My growl diminished a little when I realized this. The blond woman began to move her slight figure closer and closer to my cage. I backed into the farthest corner from her and my growl deepened the closer she got to me.
“Hush now, Grant,” she crooned at me in a comforting voice. “We are not here to hurt you. Do you remember us?”
Grant? Was that my name? I thought it was. It sounded right. Maybe this woman did know me?
I stopped growling and stood upright cautiously as she slowly closed the gap between us. She put her hand on the door of the cage and gently turned a key that she had had in her hand. The door swung open with a creak. I ignored my initial urge to leap out and run as fast as I could away from this place. Something about this woman was so terribly familiar. The feeling I knew her held me firmly in place and gave me enough security to trust her.
She reached into the cage and grabbed my hand. The gesture was not violent or malevolent. The actual physical touch was quite pleasant, but the reaction it triggered in me reminded me of the kicks in the chest I had remembered earlier. Looking into her enormous blue eyes and feeling the touch of her soft hand forced all of the memories back into my skull with a jolt. I remembered everything. I saw everything. I could feel everything.
I gripped her small hand back, and in one swift movement, I had pulled her to me inside the cage and kissed her deeply and with a passion that matched the dry throbbing in my thirsty mouth. She tensed only for a second before she relaxed into me and kissed me back with a relief I could taste on her tongue. I didn’t want to let her go, so I didn’t. I felt the new strength in my muscles as I held her warm, solid frame to mine.
I wasn’t sure what had happened to me, and I didn’t know why I felt so strange. How we made it back to New Orleans and where the pain had come from was still a mystery to my foggy mind. Miraculously, I knew I was Grant and this was Anna. My Anna. No one could take that from me. Not now, not ever.
About the Author
Olivia Rivard was born and partially raised in Abilene, Texas, a small town about three hours west of Dallas. She moved to the Dallas–Fort Worth area when she was eight years old, where she spent the rest of her formative years reading, writing, painting and sculpting. After a year at UNT, Michelle moved to Florida to attend the Ringling College of Art and Design. In 2004, she graduated from Ringling with a BFA in Illustration and moved back to Texas.
Olivia worked in the art industry professionally for over a decade in various capacities. Her jobs have been both studio and freelance in nature. She has been writing novels for years under the names Olivia Rivard and Michelle Rene, her two favorite alter egos. Olivia lives in Dallas, Texas, with her husband and son.
Love might stand a chance…if they can keep from killing each other.
Hunger
© 2009 Barbara J. Hancock
Holly Spinnaker is a monster. Really. Fangs and all. Never mind the petite figure. Pay no attention to the once-bouncy blonde mane. When Jarvis Winters first encounters…it…he prepares to exterminate freak number one hundred thirty two without a flinch.
Mistake number one: following it back to its lair. Mistake number two: watching and listening to her…it…replay voice mail messages from loving, clueless parents again and again and again. Mistake number three: having an actual conversation with a bloodthirsty
fiend.
“Make them see you as a person.” Holly remembers the advice from a self-defense class her mother made her take her freshmen year. She couldn’t save her own sister, who ended up a pile of ashes at her feet only one month ago. The night they both found out monsters were real. The night her sister embraced the change. And Holly began to fight it.
“Make them see you as a person.” Kind of hard when you aren’t even sure if you are a person anymore.
Warning: This title is not vampire-lite. There is blood. Sometimes sexy. Sometimes, well, not. There are fangs, fights and even a zombie or two. But most of all there’s yearning and burning and aching and angst… It is called Hunger after all.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Hunger:
The man sagged to the ground like every bone in his body had dissolved when the girl let him go. If she hadn’t been less than half the man’s size, Jarvis Winters might have been fooled. He might have thought drugs or alcohol had gotten the better of one of the partiers along Belmont Street. He might have thought a little groping in a back alley had ended with someone passing out.
Jarvis wasn’t fooled.
He’d had the dance club under surveillance for hours. Long enough to stiffen his shoulders and dim his sight. Still, when the waif exited, followed soon after by a gorilla in jeans, he had known. He’d seen this set up before. Little Miss Victim luring a big bad predator to his turn-about-is-fair-play demise. He wasn’t impressed. A killer was a killer. It didn’t matter who they chose to kill—or feed upon—as the case may be.
Winters wanted to wait until she moved on before opening the squeaky door of his ancient Ford Fairlane. It took longer than he expected. His hand was frozen on the door handle as she leaned back against the brick wall for a long moment. At more than a hundred yards away, he couldn’t see the expression on her face. He didn’t need to. He’d seen that satiated look countless times before. Her body would be in an unresponsive swoon. Her face would be slack, way past satisfied. The kind of look every man dreamed his lover would have after a tumble in bed…except, of course, for the fangs.
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