Wherever that thousand were, however, they weren’t here.
No one was.
“They aren’t here,” I whispered. I don’t know why I whispered it, but in the silence of the empty hospital halls, I felt conspicuous and out of place. “We should have come during the day. Greta and Meredith won’t be here now that the sun has set.”
“They’re here,” Dominic assured me.
“No one’s here,” I argued. “It’s after dark. They’re probably bunkered down at home, not working.”
“This isn’t work anymore; it’s survival. They’re here.”
I rolled my eyes. “You can’t know that for certain.”
“I do.”
“How?” I challenged. “How are you so sure that Dr. Chunn and Greta would be here of all places, when no one else is? Why not at the precinct or at home or dead?” I forced myself to say. Looking around at the evidence of everyone’s obvious absence and the gore outside, I couldn’t ignore the cold, hard fact that New York City and her citizens had suffered a great loss in the last seven days, and it was more than possible—likely even—that so had I.
Dominic pursed his lips, obviously struggling with whatever he was about to say. I prepared myself, but after a long moment, the words he whispered were not the words I’d expected to hear.
“I know they’re here, because it’s where they’re keeping Nathan.”
I blinked, startled at first by his admission and then suspicious of his wording. I narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean, keeping?”
“Come. See for yourself.” Dominic stepped to take the lead and turned the corner down the last hallway toward the morgue.
I followed, feeling that vise around my chest tighten painfully again. My heart couldn’t beat and my breaths couldn’t quicken, but fear for my brother’s well-being sliced just as deep as it always had. When Dominic paused at the doors to the morgue, his hand hovering at the handle instead of pushing it open, my fear got the best of me; I elbowed past him and attempted to cross the threshold. But I didn’t think of it as a threshold. To me it was just a door, and I’d opened and stepped through doorways my entire life without asking permission or being injured or encumbered.
But that life was seven days past.
I rebounded off the threshold like I’d hit a live wire and landed hard on my back. I blinked, stunned more by my sudden view of the ceiling than by the ache blanketing the front of my body, but it did ache. I’d walked into nothing but air, and the air had smacked me back with the force of a Mack truck.
Dominic’s face swam into focus, blocking my view of the ceiling. “Are you all right?”
“Who taught Dr. Chunn to fortify her morgue into a fallout shelter?” I asked, my voice more a groan than actual words. “Keagan?”
Dominic lifted an eyebrow. “Keagan hasn’t left our fallout shelter in seven days, let alone constructed one for a group of humans.”
“Cassidy? Is that you?”
Nathan. At the sound of his voice—clear and strong and sharp—the aching urgency around my chest loosened minutely. I needed to see him with my own eyes, to touch him and hug him and know that my seven-day absence hadn’t hurt him as much as it had obviously devastated everyone else in this city, but hearing his voice, even disembodied, was better than nothing.
“Nathan, it’s me.” I winced at the guttural sound of my voice and tentatively explored the elongated fangs suddenly crowding my mouth. “Kind of,” I amended.
I took a deep breath, purely out of habit. I didn’t need air and taking in such a large quantity didn’t produce the calming effect it used to—if anything, it produced the very opposite, slamming home the many ways I was no longer still me. I needed to get control over my emotions, or at the very least, practice hiding them like Dominic had taught me. It was bad enough that I looked like microwaved leftovers. I didn’t need extra fangs to improve my appearance. Two were damning enough.
“Why are you loitering in the hall? What do you need, an embossed invitation? Get in here, quick, before the Damned sniff you out.”
Just like that, from one moment to the next, something in the air released, like the vacuum seal of an opened jar. The morgue hadn’t existed at the end of the hallway, not for me—a void I’d have noticed if I hadn’t been so overwrought with worry and urgency over Nathan—but with three thoughtless little words, “Get in here,” the seal unlocked, the void was filled, and I could walk wherever I willed.
And just as suddenly as the morgue had opened to admit me, a barrier of my own contriving prevented me from entering: unadulterated fear.
“I can’t do this,” I whispered. “Nathan can’t see me like this.”
Dominic pulled me to my feet with a steadying hand. We stood, forehead to forehead, and he brushed his knuckles across my cheek. “Yes, you can. He will see you, and he will accept you.”
I shook my head.
“I know exactly what you’re going through, Cassidy. You’re stronger than this fear. You will survive it. Moreover, you and Nathan will survive it together.”
“How do you know what will and won’t survive?” I snapped, unaccountably and irrationally angry with him.
“I know because I lived it. Nearly five hundred years ago, I was a newly turned vampire with human loved ones too.”
His words startled me into silence. For as long as I’d known Dominic, we were two very different creatures, with different morals and priorities and tolerances, but since the very first grudging compromise between us, we’d come together to defeat a common enemy: the rebel vampires. Over time, I’d realized that we had more in common than just enemies, and little by little, those commonalities, combined with Dominic’s irrefutable actions of bravery and sacrifice and loyalty made the truth, no matter how unlikely, undeniable: appearances aside, we were very similar people. Now that we were actually the same creature, you’d think that moments like this, when we shared a common moment, wouldn’t rock me like it used to, but it did.
“You revealed your transformed self to human loved ones too?” I asked, but if the grief and sorrow etching his features was anything to go by, I already knew the answer to that question.
He nodded deeply.
“Your father?” I guessed.
He nodded again. “When he gazed upon me, I was naught but a demon, returned from hell to torment him. I’d known better than to seek him out as the creature I’d become—I’d thought myself a demon at first, too, and wasn’t wholly convinced even at that time that I wasn’t—but in those first few years following my transformation, I couldn’t accept what I’d become, let alone accept everything I’d lost.”
I reached out to hold his hand and stroked my thumb across his knuckles. I knew that feeling all too well, long before I’d ever been transformed.
“Revealing myself was a grave error in judgment. I did it to assuage my own feelings of grief for the life I’d lost, not thinking of my father’s grief, nor how seeing me in such a state would affect him. My Master entranced the memory from his mind, and I never again revealed my existence to another human.” He gave me a weary grin. “Until recently.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I really am, but if your story was meant to convince me that my relationship with Nathan will survive this”—I indicated myself with a sweep of my hand—“it fell short.”
“Your brother is a very different man than my father, separated by five hundred years and awareness of the reality of these circumstances. Nathan will not think you a demon.”
I snorted. “Not in the traditional sense, but I’m not human anymore either.”
“Neither is he.”
That thought gave me pause. Nathan was half-Damned now, but I’d seen him fully-Damned—an eleven-foot-tall, fanged, ferocious monster. At least I was still my general size and shape. I’d retained my memory, and I wasn’t hunting the beating heart in his chest
. I’d never thought the memory of discovering Nathan as one of the Damned would bring me comfort, but I could look in the mirror and know that Nathan had survived worse. I looked terrible, but seeing me like this was nothing compared to seeing him Damned.
“Despite the creature that Nathan has become, you accepted him,” Dominic insisted.
I nodded.
“Give him the chance to accept you.”
I nodded again and stilled the quiver of my non-beating heart. Just because it no longer kept me alive didn’t mean that breaking it wouldn’t kill me.
I stepped past Dominic, crossed the threshold into the morgue to face Nathan squarely, and gaped, fears for myself forgotten.
Nathan looked as whole and hearty as his voice indicated, but Dominic’s word choice, describing him as being “kept” here, was a gross understatement.
Nathan was inside a cage.
And not just any cage, if his pinkened complexion and the noxious steam wafting from his skin was any indication: he was locked inside a silver cage.
I growled, low and deep and menacing in the barrel of my chest, and any attempt to come into this room with my emotions and vampiric features in check was blown to hell on the explosion of my rage.
“Cassidy?” Nathan’s low, suddenly guarded voice brought me back to myself, but only slightly.
“Who did this?” I asked. I suspected that I knew the answer to that question, but the answer was so unacceptable, I needed to hear it out loud.
“Calm down.” His eyes darted to the right. “I’m fine.”
“Like hell,” I spat. “You’re caged, like an animal.”
“I am an animal,” he said, and the matter-of-fact way he said the words was just as infuriating as the words themselves.
“Bullshit,” I snapped. “Who did this?”
“I really am fine. See?” He grabbed the bars with both hands, and after a darting glance to the right again, bent the bars like they were Play-Doh. He stepped through the hole and outside the cage, lifted his arms in the air at me like he was performing a magic trick—ta-da!—jumped back into the cage, and bent the bars back into position with a final, darting glance to the right. He met my gaze and grinned. “I’m fine.”
I stopped growling, shocked. “You’re allowing yourself to be caged?”
His eyes darted to the right again. “Shhh,” he hissed. “Keep your voice down, or they’ll hear you.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Who is ‘they’?”
“If it gives them peace of mind while they run their tests, it’s worth it. If I were them, I’d fear me too.”
Run their tests, he said, and that was admission enough for me. “If I were them, I’d fear me more.”
The high squeal and slap of a swinging door opened, and the subject of our conversation strode into the room. Dr. Susanna Chunn was a petite woman, fine-boned and delicate, but strong enough to balance the five binders, countless manila files, laptop, cell phone, and variety of pens and markers piled in her arms. Her thick, yellow hipster glasses rode low on the tip on her nose as she stared over them at Nathan, eyeing him critically and without fear. Her heartbeat increased slightly and the lilac of her body lotion blended with a natural, nutty scent, but the scent and increased heart rhythm stemmed from excitement. She was enjoying the mystery that Nathan presented. She wasn’t frightened of it.
She wasn’t frightened of him.
I checked myself before my thoughts became too hopeful. She didn’t know he could bend the bars, because if she did, she would run screaming from him, from this hospital, and smack into another Damned, just like the young girl in the café. She didn’t know that he was allowing her to run the tests. She couldn’t see past what he was to the truth of who he was; otherwise, she would see that she didn’t need a cage around Nathan to keep herself safe. She would see that he was on her side, that we were all on the same side.
Until everyone figured that out, we were all just screaming blind.
Greta stepped into the room behind Dr. Chunn, but unlike the good doctor, whose attention was focused solely on science and Nathan, Greta noticed the uncaged threat in the room.
Greta’s eyes locked on me, and she pulled her gun.
I didn’t bother raising my hands. The four-inch talons that had erupted through my fingertips upon seeing Nathan in a cage hadn’t retracted; raising my hands would only look threatening. I smiled instead.
Greta paled, and the high, sharp, whistle of her fear pierced the air.
Fangs, I realized belatedly. They probably weren’t any more reassuring than my talons.
Dominic growled softly and moved to step in front of me. I shook my head, not daring to take my eyes from the barrel of Greta’s gun. If I didn’t do this myself, she would never see me in the vampire I’d become.
Even though I was mostly still me, I couldn’t deny that Greta’s instinct to defend herself was dead-on accurate. The urge to tear her throat out and guzzle her blood was there—I couldn’t deny that as a passing thought. It had merit, especially when the savory flavor of her fear, like wafting grill smoke, made me salivate—but like with any addiction, I could simultaneously crave it and know I’d regret it. Choosing to resist that craving was just that, a choice, and one I’d probably have had more difficulty making had I never previously experienced and overcome addiction. I knew what the bottom of the gutter looked and smelled and felt like. I knew the hell of being completely abandoned by my last loved one and knowing it was all my own fault. No matter how irresistible a craving seemed, I knew it for the illusion it was, and no matter what form it took—pills or blood—I would never make the wrong choice again.
Although, looking at Nathan trapped in that cage, I had to strongly remind myself that he could escape of his own free will if he really wanted to. We were all on the same side: I was just the only one who knew it.
“Hey G,” I said, overlooking the sight of her gun, the smell of her fear, my brother in a cage, and Dr. Chunn’s horror-movie shriek as she whipped around at the sound of my voice and dropped everything in her arms. The binders and laptop crashed to the floor. The loose paper inside her manila files burst into the air and slid across the room in random sweeps, and the half dozen pens in her hand clattered over the mess like sprinkles on a sundae.
Greta didn’t flinch. Her hands were rock-solid. If the silver cage surrounding Nathan was any indication, Greta probably had silver bullets too.
Meredith poked her head through the swinging door. More than anything, even Greta’s gun aimed at my head, the sight of Meredith made me freeze with dread. I wasn’t ready for this. If I hadn’t been ready to face my half-Damned brother, I certainly wasn’t ready to face my full-human, best friend.
“I heard a scream. Is everything al—” She blinked at Greta’s gun. “What are you—” And then she invariably followed Greta’s aim to me and didn’t blink at all. “Oh, God.”
“No, just us,” Dominic rumbled behind me, attempting and failing to bring some levity to the conversation. “But I understand the confusion. Happens all the time.”
I didn’t have the ability to contribute with a witty rejoinder and prove to everyone that everything was fine and under control. It wasn’t—I wasn’t—because Meredith wasn’t. Her confusion and fear and relief and grief bowled me over like a gale force wind. My ears were deafened by the howl of her denial. My skin was shredded from the grate of her terror, and my mouth was flooded by something thick and cloying. It had the consistency of honey but the flavor of acetone: tar, maybe, or wet cement. Whatever it was, it constricted my throat, and when I breathed, all I could smell was cinnamon.
My talons, which I still hadn’t successfully retracted, unwillingly extended another inch.
“Meredith,” Greta said, her voice so calm and careful, I wanted to scream. “Please return to the lab.”
No one moved.
“It�
��s me,” I said, finally breaking the horrible, flesh-eating silence. “I know it doesn’t look like it, but I’m telling you, it’s me. I survived, and I’m here to help.”
I might have been more convicting if my last few words hadn’t ended on a growl. It came rumbling up my throat of its own accord, like a growling stomach, never minding that friends don’t growl at each other.
I tried to mask the noise by clearing my throat.
“What should I tell Rowens?” Meredith asked, and it took me a confused moment to realize that she was speaking to Greta.
“Tell him,” Greta eyed me up and down. Whatever she saw made her sigh. “Tell him Susanna needed her notes.”
“My notes are on the floor,” Dr. Chunn whispered.
“Her other notes,” Greta snapped. “And Susanna will stay here for now. Until I need my notes.”
“Right,” Meredith said. She ducked out of the room without a second glance, and the dead muscle in my chest throbbed. All of Meredith’s aching emotions remained in the room, flaying me even worse in her absence.
It killed me not to go after her, but no one would see that as anything but an attack. I turned away from the swinging door to face Greta and her gun instead. “Sorry I missed all your meetings this past week. Want to catch me up?” I asked, striving for normal and failing miserably.
Greta narrowed her eyes. “Have you seen the streets? Take a look around; it’s pretty evident what happened.”
I crossed my arms. “I know what happened. I want to know what you’re going to do about it. What’s the plan? What’s our next move?”
“‘Our’ move?” Greta shook her head. “You bailed on me, DiRocco. Whatever plan I have is my own.”
“That’s bull, and you know it. You wanted me to bail. ‘Get out of the city,’ you said. ‘Get Meredith, Rowens, and Dr. Chunn as far away from ground zero as you can.’” I shook my head. “As if.”
“You disobeyed a direct order.”
“I’m not one of your officers, G. I don’t take orders.”
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