“Drink, Ella. Drink.”
Ella shook her head back and forth slowly, but it was like moving in molasses. Her body felt too slow to do anything but fade away.
“Drink! You’ve got to. This is what has to happen. Let me bring you back.”
His wrist was in her face, pressing against her lips, and for a moment longer she thought she might just refuse. It felt like so much work! But then, as her lips parted ever so slightly, she tasted the first hint of his life’s blood and everything went electric. Never, never had she thought something could taste so good.
The moment she tasted Reagan’s blood, she had known she could never get enough. In milliseconds she went from fading into the realm of death to vibrantly aware, and what she was aware of was the life pouring back into her. It was a new kind of life, a more intense life. Her hands gripped Reagan’s wrist hungrily, her mouth nuzzling into his flesh and drinking like her thirst would never be slated. She could hear Caleb and the Council beginning to laugh and then felt Reagan gently tugging away from her.
“Whoa there, Ella. Careful. I know you’re hungry and we’ll definitely get you something to eat, but that’s about all I can take right now, OK? And you’re going to need to rest.”
“Rest? I don’t think I need rest. I’ve never felt so energetic in my life!”
“I know, love,” Reagan explained patiently, putting his arm around her and beginning to lead her towards the elevator, “that’s the initial response of almost everyone who is turned. It wears off quickly. Your body will try to reject my blood.”
“Why would it want to do a thing like that?”
“I don’t know, exactly. It’s something to do with it being a foreign antigen, but I think it’s more than that. I think it confuses the body. You’re in the process of dying, and then all of the sudden you’re something else. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
Ella nodded her head docilely, already starting to feel the initial exhilaration of her change beginning to wear off. Her body felt like it was folding in on itself, like her insides were clenching and unclenching rhythmically. This must be it, she thought, the process of her body going to war. It didn’t feel all that bad yet, but she could see that it might. On top of that, she was beginning to feel so sleepy! She was perfectly content to allow Reagan to lead her along, so content that she almost forgot where she was. It was only when she heard the lord speak out again that she remembered how serious the danger the two of them had been in up until only moments ago.
Reagan turned to face him, turning Ella right along with him. The lord was looking down on them with what could have been interpreted as a benevolent look, but Ella wasn’t fooled. Even in the haze that was rapidly descending on her, she could sense the potential malice in him. She just wanted out of this place, and to never find herself there again.
“So then the two of you are happy now, yes? Could I assume that is correct?”
“Yes,” Reagan replied haltingly, speaking through clenched teeth, “very happy. Thank you for your mercy, Lord. For your leniency.”
“Yes, yes. Of course. We can always use one more in our rank, can we not?”
“Of course. Now, I don’t wish to take up any more of your time, and I must get her to a safe place to rest.”
“Yes, you must. Only, there was one more thing I wanted to mention. Just a small thing, really, a formality.”
“Sir?”
“It’s only this. I feel that I must issue a warning. This Council does not take kindly to defiance. If I catch wind of any other questionable behavior out of you, out of either of you, you won’t come out of this place so easily. I fear you might not come out of here at all.”
“Sir.”
“And then there is the matter of your sister. Melania, was that her name?”
“Yes,” Reagan’s whole body went rigid again, his anger and pain clear in every taut muscle, “that’s correct.”
“Right. You may want to have a discussion with her. She should know as well. She should know that now your clan is on my radar, and that includes her.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll mention it to her.”
He gave a stiff, brisk bow and then hurried Ella back to the elevator. By the time the doors swept open, she was very close to a total faint. By the time the doors closed, she had abandoned consciousness all together.
* * *
“Reagan? Reagan, where are you?”
Ella’s eyes opened with a snap, going from sleeping to waking in an instant. In the next instance, she went from prone to being on her feet. She moved like lightning, so quickly that the human eye would never have been able to detect it. So it was real, then. It hadn’t been a dream. It would have been easy to convince herself that it was, seeing as the events of the last week of Ella’s life had all been things that could have been on a TV show.
She could easily have woken up and found that she was back in Austin, a librarian with too much time on her hands who had concocted a crazy series of dreams just to add a little spice to her life. She could easily have been that girl, except that she wasn’t. It was real. Reagan was a vampire and now so was she.
She knew what she was, whether it was believable or not. She felt it in her bones, felt it at the very core of herself. She knew what she was, the only problem was that she didn’t know where she was, nor did she know where Reagan had gone. She found it hard to believe that he would have left her on her own so soon after he had turned her, but she was also sure that she was alone.
“Reagan?”
She sniffed the air, then paused. She was in a very dark room, but she found that she could see perfectly. She was also sure that, despite the fact that she was alone, Reagan had been there not long ago. Not only that, but she was sure this was a place he had been many times before. His scent was everywhere, embedded in every particle of the room. She wasn’t in the hotel anymore.
She moved cautiously, opening the door to her room, and found that she was in a massive house. Reagan’s house. It had to be. Everything about it reminded her of him, as if someone had taken his essence and built it into a home. Her home. She felt a wide smile cross her face then as she ran her hand along one wall made entirely out of windows. This was going to be her house, too.
Reagan was now her maker, and they would not be parted again. Her life before seemed very far away from her now. She would not return to her job, would likely not be attending Jen’s wedding. She knew it should have made her feel terrible, and it wasn’t that it didn’t give her a twinge of sadness, but those things just didn’t seem to belong to her now. What belonged to her was Reagan. Reagan and this house.
“Look who's come around. Hello, little pet. That’s what you are, right? My brother’s little pet?”
“Brother?”
“Yes,” the slight, beautiful girl in front of her hissed, “brother. Shows how much you know about him, doesn’t it? Stupid girl. Thinking that you can come in here and take everything away. We have a life here, little pet. A life that doesn’t involve you.”
“Wait a minute. I have heard of you. Melania. You’re Melania.”
Vague, shadowy memories of standing in front of the Council were starting to come back to her, memories that included a warning from the one they called the lord. He had warned Reagan about his sister, had warned him because...because…
“It was you! It was you that put us in that awful place to begin with. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“He wasn’t supposed to be there! He wasn’t supposed to go after you! That wasn’t part of the plan.”
“Well then, what was the plan? They just kill me and everyone move on with their days?”
“Yes, actually. That was exactly the plan. And you fucked it up. Because that’s what you do, isn’t it? You fuck things up. That’s all you’ve been doing since he met you, isn’t it? You’ve been making everything worse. And if the Council won’t fix it, I suppose I can. I’m much stronger than I look, you know. You will be too. Or would be, if you go
t the chance to grow into yourself. It’s almost a pity, isn’t it? Almost.”
What happened next happened very quickly. Ella had been thinking how extraordinarily fast she was only minutes before, but she hadn’t had a clue what fast was. But Melania? Melania was fast. In the time it took Ella to begin to draw a breath, Melania had flown from the stairwell where she had been lingering and had pounced upon Ella, knocking her backwards with a dull thud.
She snarled, baring her teeth and snapping at Ella’s neck. It didn’t matter that Ella was one of them now. That was something Melania couldn’t have cared less about. She was out for revenge, and nothing would do but death.
“He doesn’t belong to you,” she snarled, all the while moving closer to Ella’s jugular, “he never will. He belongs to me, do you hear me?”
It was all Ella could do to keep the girl far enough away from her to keep her from ripping her throat out completely. She was so much stronger than she had been before, but Melania had countless years and an ocean of experience on her. This was a fight she wouldn’t be able to win.
She had only been changed for a matter of days (and that was an assumption; she honestly had no idea how long she had been out), and she was already on the brink of losing the gift of immortality. She only wished that she could have seen Reagan one more time; that she could have told him how much she loved him.
“Melania.”
It was as if her thoughts had summoned him to her, because there he was. His voice cut through the hissing anger of Melania like a knife, brought all of the awful action to a standstill. Melania froze on top of Ella, her head raised and face frozen in an expression of love and hatred in equal measure. She was distracted and Ella, recognizing that it might be the only opportunity she got, used the moment to shove Melania off of her and make her escape. But again, she had underestimated the speed of a seasoned vampire.
Ella didn’t make it more than a few steps before Melania’s arm caught her from behind, her arm closing around her throat tightly. Ella felt the lick of cold steel against the flesh of her throat and realized that Melania had a knife in her hand. She meant to slit her throat, to spill out all of the precious blood that Reagan had bestowed upon her.
“Would you do it, sister? Would you really spill the life out of her and make me watch it?”
“I would! I would do whatever it takes to keep this family together! I would do the things you don’t have the balls for!”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Melania. I don’t want any harm to come to her, and you shouldn’t either. She’s part of the family now.”
“You think that now, but you won’t. After I finish her you won’t. We can go away from this place, Reagan. Just leave the house behind and go explore the world again. Do you remember what fun we used to have? Do you remember the adventures?”
“I do.”
“Then let’s do it again! We’ll leave her, leave Andrea, and just go. I want to go, Reagan. I want to go and I want you to go with me.”
“I can’t do that,” Reagan answered calmly, trying to take such small steps forward that Melania wouldn’t notice, “I have a life here.”
“No, you have her here. Once she’s gone you won’t have anything here at all.”
“No. I won’t have anything period.”
“And what about me? Do I really matter so little? How could you just throw me away like this?”
“But Melania, it isn’t a matter of you or her. Don’t you see that? It doesn’t have to be this way.”
“It does,” she said apologetically, the blade pressing more firmly against Ella’s neck, “for me, it does.”
Reagan nodded his head, only once. Ella could tell by the way Melania began to loosen her grip that she believed her brother had come around to her way of thinking. They would get rid of Ella together, and after that they would ride off together, needing and wanting nobody else in their lives.
That was what Melania believed, right up until the moment when Reagan fell upon her. If she was fast, Reagan was faster. She had hardly gotten the knife back in place before Reagan was ripping her arm away, moving so fiercely that he actually pulled it out of its socket. Still, Melania was not deterred. She came after Ella again, murder in her eyes, her good arm swiping with the knife wildly.
“If I’m going. I’m taking you with me! Do you hear me, you bitch? I’m taking you with me!”
She lunged, plunging the knife into Ella’s shoulder so deep that there was nothing but the hilt to be seen on the outside of her body. Reagan moved quickly behind her, bringing his hands up to her throat. With one swift motion, he snapped her neck and just like that, she dropped.
As quickly as it had begun, the fight was over. There was nothing but the two of them, their heavy breathing, and from somewhere outside the noise of a car peeling away and hauling ass into the night.
“What-?”
“That would be Andrea,” Reagan answered softly, looking down upon the body of his sister with veiled eyes, “making her exit. She always was one to go when things got messy. Now that she’s lost her ally, she wouldn’t want to stay.”
“But Melania. Will she? Recover? How does this work?”
“She will, over time. Over a great deal of time, buried away in the earth of our home. When she comes back she won’t be so strong. My hope is that she will have changed by the time her life regenerates.”
“And if she hasn’t?”
“Then it will have to be the sun for her.”
“I couldn’t ask that of you.”
“I know you couldn’t. And you aren’t. You don’t have to. You’re my world now, Ella. My whole world. And tell me what is worth sacrificing for if not the whole world?”
Reagan took her into his arms then, kissed her softly on the top of the head, the tip of her nose. He kissed her mouth, parting her lips with his tongue, and Ella felt their life forces being traded back and forth. They were linked for eternity now, and Reagan was right. There was nothing in the world more worth fighting for than that.
THE END
Message From The Author:
Thanks so much for reading my first ever vampire romance release, I really hope you enjoyed it. If you did I would love it if you could leave me a rating using the below link.
I hope you liked this and you can check out my other vampire romance releases on my Amazon Page HERE!
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Vampires In Vegas Page 17