by Sierra Dean
“No,” I said.
“Does that mean you’re ready to show me what you promised?”
I nodded, choking back a new surge of bile burning the lining of my throat. “I’m ready.”
“Good girl.”
“But not here.”
He glanced over my shoulder to the suspended form of the vampire, then smiled at me. “I suppose that’s a reasonable request.”
Back in his dining room I found myself staring at the seat I’d occupied during dinner. The tablecloth was still rumpled from where I’d placed my hands, and the chair had been knocked over when I fell out of it. It remained on its side on the Persian rug.
“Let’s see what you’ve got.” He sat in his own chair and placed a small black fob on the table. It looked like a car starter, with a big red button in the middle, but I knew what it really was. He was showing me the remote detonator for my collar. Reminding me what was at stake if I tried anything funny.
“I need blood.”
He snorted. “Nonsense.”
“I need blood,” I insisted. “Maybe if you hadn’t broken my arm, I would have been fine, but it takes a lot out of a girl to rebuild bones in under twenty-four hours.”
He stared at me, his gaze raking over my face, trying to read my intentions from there. I don’t know what he saw, because I was all out of emotions, and my face had to be as blank as the rest of me right then.
Maybe it was the lack he found to be a relief. I wasn’t angry; there was no maliciousness in my eyes. There was nothing.
I felt nothing.
Fingers were snapped, and a glass of blood was soon produced. I wondered how it was his people were able to bring the exact right thing without him ever asking for it, but I suspected we were being monitored constantly. Some eye or ear in the sky was keeping tabs on The Doctor and all his pet projects.
I drank the blood without coming up for air, wishing I could shatter the glass and lick it clean as Holden had done with the bag. That might come across as threatening though.
The pain in my arm dulled, giving me a break from the near-constant, stabbing ache making me want to gnaw it off. I felt lightheaded with the power from the blood, stronger than I had in days. I wasn’t strong by any means, but I no longer felt like a human orderly could best me.
I licked my lips, and they were full and soft. I wasn’t on the verge of falling apart anymore.
He hadn’t been lying when he said he knew how much blood a vampire needed to get by. I hadn’t been given a full pint, not like the day before. He’d given me a top-up, a little boost. It was enough for me to feel good, but not enough for him to have to worry.
If I’d been a vampire, that is.
The thing about my metabolism was it wasn’t the same as a vampire’s. I needed to eat more often than they did, but I didn’t need to eat as much. I could make do with less blood because I’d learned to run on less. Whereas a vampire might half-drain a human in one feeding, I could go a full day on one donor baggie. On a good day, anyway.
The starvation and constant healing meant my normal amount wasn’t enough to build my strength up again.
But the boost had helped. It had helped more than he could possibly understand.
“Show me what you can do.”
I stepped closer so my knees bumped his. “You’ve watched a wolf shift, right?”
“Many times.”
I’d half feared my inner wolf had abandoned me. I’d been a terrible partner to share a body with recently, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d buried herself in an act of self-preservation. Disconnected from my psyche and vanished forever.
When she heard me cry wolf though, she was there, ears perked, attention focused on the man who’d caged us. She was going to like what I had planned.
“Always during the full moon?”
“Yes. I’ve attempted on numerous occasions to force the shift when the moon wasn’t full, but I’ve only succeeded on the day before or after. Never mid-month.”
“How long until the next full moon?” I asked, knowing full well when it was.
“Ten days.”
I leaned close, my movements those of a seductress, though it wasn’t my sexuality that appealed to him. I wanted to bait him with the promise of a show, though, and wanted to keep him slightly off balance.
As I pressed one palm flat on his chest, he smiled up at me, totally unconcerned. His arrogance fueled a flame lit deep within me, coaxed it up until all I felt was the blistering white-hot taste of my own rage.
Now I was feeling something.
My wolf paced, waiting for the word. I projected a thought of what I wanted, showed her the perfect mental image of it, and just as I’d suspected, she was thrilled.
Yes, she said. Oh yesyesyes.
“I’m going to show you a trick,” I whispered. “Are you ready for it?”
Yes, the wolf answered, though my question hadn’t been for her.
“Show me,” he said eagerly.
I took all the hatred, all the rage and agony built up inside me, and I channeled it into my wolf. She resisted at first, trying to fight the discomfort, but then she remembered our goal, what I’d promised her we could do, and she swelled through me, an impossibly large energy, too big to be contained.
The bones of my hand cracked, but compared to everything else I’d been through, I was numb to it. Shifting was natural. It was right, and it was what my body was designed to do. My nails grew and became claws, slicing away the fine, expensive material of his shirt.
At first he was fascinated, watching my hand shift while the rest of me stayed human. I hadn’t been lying; I knew it was something he’d want to see. But he should have kept me at a distance.
He should never have believed he was invincible.
My claws continued to grow, and without his shirt in the way, they pierced flesh. As my bones moved into a new arrangement and my skin covered with fur, he realized for the first time I wasn’t stopping.
Ribbons of his skin peeled away under my claws, and he tried to push away, but I hooked my ankle behind the leg of his chair, keeping him held in place. I kept right on digging, burrowing my nails into his chest until his breastbone gave way with a soft, pliant crunch.
I withdrew my hand, a bizarre mix of human fingers and wolf claws and fur, and kicked his chair out of reach of the small fob he’d placed on the table.
“Should have kept it in your pocket.” I tipped his chair backwards so he fell to the floor.
I moved around the fallen chair to where he lay on the concrete and stepped over him to straddle his torso. His chest looked like a flower in full bloom, shiny red petals with scraps of white in the middle. His hands fluttered like tiny birds around the new opening in his body, a hole where one should not be.
My clawed hand couldn’t move the same way a human hand could, so when I sat on his stomach, my knees tight against his sides, it was my human hand I stuck inside him. Even with a broken arm keeping my gestures limited, I burrowed deep in him, my pain forgotten with a new purpose flowing through me.
His hummingbird hands went still as I wormed my fingers past the broken gristle where his sternum had once been.
“How about we try an experiment, you and I?”
My hand wrapped around his heart, and it pulsed against my hand in a steady rhythm. Ba-bump ba-bump ba—
I squeezed, and for a moment his heart went still, then I loosened my grip and it beat again, more hurriedly than before.
“Do you know what your heart looks like, Doctor? Do you know how long it takes you to heal?” My voice cracked, going high-pitched and crazy.
I registered a click, and my brain told me the sound was familiar, but I was too far gone to think. I leaned close so my face was right near his, and his creepy little grin was nowhere to be found.
“I bet you don’t regenerate either.”
“Ma’am,” a voice bellowed, muffled but alarmingly close. “Step back, and put your hands where I can see
them.”
Ignore it, the wolf cajoled. Finish him.
I squeezed, and he let out a bubbling moan, a thin foam of blood seeping from his lips.
“Ma’am, put your hands up, or I will shoot.”
Shoot?
I looked up and was staring down the barrel of a rifle, the matte-black gun aimed right at my head.
Security, I thought, my chance to finish the job vanishing before my eyes. I took a good look at the man holding the gun, his blue-black Kevlar armor and the helmet he wore. Then I saw the eight other men in identical uniforms standing around the room, their guns leveled on me. One turned away from me, sending a signal into the hall with his fingers, but I saw the back of his armor.
Big yellow letters against the dark blue material.
FBI.
“What the fuck?” I asked, and the shock went right through me into The Doctor before I slumped off him, unconscious.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Heaven looked like a hospital room.
Or maybe that was a sure sign I was in hell.
I was dressed in a thin blue hospital gown, and my broken arm was propped over my stomach with a new, proper sling holding it in place. My good hand had returned to normal, no sign of hair or claws, just chipped nails in bad need of some polish.
The overhead lights were dimmed but still bright enough to make me uncomfortable.
Several tubes were connected to the crook of my elbow and the back of my hand, tethering me to a bank of whirring, beeping machines beside my bed.
The first sign I wasn’t dead was the headache I became almost instantly aware of. That coupled with the resurgence of nausea made me certain I hadn’t been introduced to Saint Peter and the pearly gates.
“Bloody hell,” I grumbled. My whole body felt like one giant bruise. It didn’t hold a candle to the pain of the previous week, but I wasn’t about to get up and run a marathon. Or hug anyone. I think a hug might have killed me.
One of the needles I’d been stuck with was feeding me blood, which wasn’t quite the same thing as feeding me blood, but it seemed to be helping. The aches and pains aside, my skin had some color back—as much as I was ever going to have anyway—and I couldn’t see the outlines of my bones anymore.
But, still, I was in a hospital, and there was no way that was a good thing. I’d never been to a hospital as a patient before because the risk of my blood showing up as abnormal was too high.
The blue curtain surrounding my bed rattled on its metal hoops and was pushed partially aside. At the sight of a nurse I recoiled, growling, “Get away from me.”
She stopped, color draining from her face until she was almost as pale as I was. “You’re awake.”
“Sorry to put a damper on whatever psycho tests you wanted to run.” I started to tug out my tubes, apparently finding the one attached to my heart rate monitor first. One of the machines screamed at me, and before I had a chance to get anything else pulled free, three more nurses and a doctor were around me, the curtain pushed all the way back.
I stopped what I was doing and stared past them. Open hallways, other beds with patients in them, but no sign of locked doors or cells. The doctor who leaned over me was a doctor. He wore a white lab coat and had a stethoscope around his neck. In the pocket of his coat were several pens, ones he didn’t seem concerned about having in grabbing distance.
“Where am I?” I tried to swat away their meddling hands, but I was overwhelmed. I only had one functional hand, and between the lot of them they had ten. Unfair advantage.
“Ms. McQueen, my name is Dr. Bernal. You’re at a military compound about an hour south of Sacramento. Can you tell me the last thing you remember?”
“Guns.”
“Can you be more specific?”
One of the nurses reattached the heart rate monitor, and the screaming machine got a hold of itself.
“I was trying to rip someone’s heart out, and the guy with the gun stopped me. I think they were FBI? My collar—” My good hand flew up to my neck, groping for the black plastic time bomb I’d been wearing. All I felt was skin, smooth and unadorned.
I might never wear a necklace again.
“We were able to remove the device without much difficulty. It was about a ten-thousand volt charge rigged to zap you.”
“Fuck, shit, bitch, cunt, asshole, fucker.” Once I was done, I laughed. I laughed loudly and for far longer than any sane woman should have, especially since I hadn’t said anything funny, and neither had he. “Did I kill him?” I asked, once I stopped cackling.
“No. If anything the shock to his heart restored it after you’d squeezed it.” He checked my lines, flicking a bag of fluid to ensure it was still dripping. “I’m sorry.”
I was sorry. Why should he be sorry I hadn’t murdered someone?
“Do you know what he did to me?”
The doctor stopped toying with my equipment and turned to the nurses. “You can go. I’ve got this under control. Tell the agents she’s awake, please.”
Before speaking again, he pulled my blanket up higher and placed a hand on my knee. I jerked away. I wasn’t trying to be rude, and it wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate the kindness of his gesture, but I suspected it was going to be a very long time before I felt okay letting a stranger put their hands on me.
The sympathy and pity in his expression told me everything. “It’s going to take us quite awhile before we’re able to go through Dr. Kesteral’s files. Possibly years, and that’s if the FBI is willing to put even half the time and effort into it as they should. But to answer your question, yes, I do know what he did to you. Your file was new, but it was…extensive.” Dr. Bernal tried to smile—I think he wanted me to feel better—but his lips only managed a grimace. “I’m very sorry, Ms. McQueen.”
“So you’ve read his notes.”
“Yes.”
“And you know what I am?”
He looked confused. “Of course.”
“But you’re not…surprised.”
This time he did smile. “Ah. You think because I’m human I should be running from the room in a panic, waving my arms and screaming to the masses about monsters. Is that it?”
The way he phrased it made me feel guilty for thinking it, but… “Yes.”
“Your kind isn’t nearly as clever as you’ve led yourselves to believe. You think after thousands of years coexisting with vampires we haven’t figured it out?” He lifted his hand as if he was going to touch me again, then thought better of it, putting both hands in his pockets. “There will be plenty of time to discuss it, and perhaps the agents might be better able to answer some questions, but I don’t want you talking to them for long. You need rest.”
He started pulling the curtain closed, but a question came to me that couldn’t wait. “Dr. Bernal?”
“Yes?”
“Were there other survivors?”
He stopped tugging on the curtain. “At the time of the infiltration there were twenty-two other captives on-site. We were able to retrieve eighteen. Six wolves, ten vampires and two CUOs.”
“CUOs?”
“Creatures of unknown origin.”
The curtain was almost closed when I asked, “One of the vampires…was his name Holden?”
“Your friend is fine. He’s being a rather distracting pain in the ass and has been asking for you since we brought him in, but aside from some weakness and other symptoms associated with vampire starvation, he’s doing well.”
“Maxime?” My voice was small.
The doctor became quiet. “No. I’m sorry. Now please, try and get some rest.”
He left before I could ask about my father.
I lay still, staring up at the stained ceiling tiles and counting the beats of my own heart as they echoed on the ECG. They were slow, but that was normal for me.
After I’d counted to a hundred, the curtain rattled again. A man in a nondescript black suit came in. He was a little taller than me, and Latino, his black hair short
on the sides in a severe buzz cut. He couldn’t have screamed government employee any louder unless he had mirrored aviators on and drove a black SUV.
“Good evening, Ms. McQueen. My name is Special Agent LaRoy. Sorry to bother you while you’re recovering, but my partner and I were hoping to ask you a few questions if we could.”
“Is your first name Special Agent?” I asked.
“No, ma’am.”
“Tell me your first name, and I’ll answer your questions. You’ll have to forgive me for not wanting to talk to anyone who uses a title instead of a name, considering The Doctor and all.”
“Of course.” He smiled, and it was a nice smile, one that warmed his face and made his eyes twinkle. As far as G-men went, this guy seemed okay. “My first name is Emilio.”
“Hi, Emilio. My name is Secret.”
“A pleasure, ma’am.” The curtain rattled and was pushed back. “I believe you know my partner? Special Agent Tyler Nowakowski.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
It was nice to know I could still be surprised.
It was also a good thing the collar had been removed. “Jesus fucking Christ, are you fucking shitting me?”
Emilio coughed into his hand to cover his laughter and clapped Tyler once on the back. “I’ll give you two a minute, go get us some coffee before we start the interview, okay?”
He didn’t wait for our response, just vanished into the hospital.
“Tyler?”
“Hi, Secret.” He looked different. I was used to seeing him in dress pants and button-down shirts, but in his FBI suit he appeared less beaten down. The stubble normally coloring his jaw was gone in favor of a clean-shaven face. This was the Tyler I’d gone on a blind date with years ago. This was Tyler the way I’d imagined he’d been before he met me.
“Special Agent Tyler?” That was more of a mouthful than Detective Tyler. It might take some getting used to.