Crave

  “I guess you weren’t my brain misfiring after all,” she told him. “Or some past life of mine.”

  She knew him so well. Or at least she’d felt that way until he took her hostage. Nothing she’d seen—no, not seen—nothing she’d experienced while she was Gabriel had prepared her for that.

  But he’d been captured and held prisoner for his blood, Shay reminded herself. That would change anyone.

  She studied Gabriel’s face. Who was he really? The man who had threatened to kill her? The man who had mourned and savored his last sight of the sun? The little boy who had saved his friend? Could he be all those things? Evil and good?

  “Live,” she told Gabriel. “That’s what matters right now. Just live, okay?”

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  CONSCIOUSNESS SLOWLY RETURNED TO GABRIEL, and he knew it was sunset. It was the only way he could mark the passage of time since his capture. When another day broke, he sank into his death sleep. When another day ended, he awoke.

  His arms and legs felt as heavy as granite. He wished the chains that bound him allowed him to change position. But if they were that loose, he’d free himself. And weak as he was, he would escape that man—

  Martin.

  His mind was flooded with memories of the previous night—it was the previous night, wasn’t it? The girl, his captors, the knife, the escape, the searing pain in his throat and veins and heart. Gabriel’s eyes snapped open. The first thing he saw was the human girl, sleeping on the bed above him. He tried to sit up, but realized that his limbs were still mostly paralyzed. That’s why I thought I was back in that room, chained fast, he realized.

  The girl’s eyes opened, as if she’d felt his gaze, even in her sleep. They stared at each other in silence, then the girl looked at her watch. “Almost seven. I’ve been asleep all day. And you, you’ve been out about fifteen hours,” the girl said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Okay,” he answered. Her name came to him again—Shay. He didn’t care. She was an object he needed, nothing more. An object that saved my life. Gabriel shoved the thought down.

  The girl stood and walked into the bathroom. She returned holding a bag of blood. “Is it okay if I …” She gestured to the spot on the floor next to him.

  Gabriel nodded, glad to feel that the muscles in his neck were getting easier to move. The girl sat down cross-legged beside him. “Are you hungry again?” She held up the blood. He was hungry. His body ached for blood, but not the cold, sterile stuff encased in plastic. He wanted hers, warm and sweet and salty. The smell of it was overpowering.

  She must have felt his desire in the intensity of his gaze. “Don’t you remember what happened last time?” she asked. “You tried to drink from me, and you dropped like a rock. I’m sick. My blood must be poisonous to you. And even if it wasn’t, you’d just have to deal. I’m here until I’ve gotten you back on your feet, but that doesn’t include you feeding from me.”

  Poisonous. How could that be, when she smelled so enticing? But as he stared at her throat, soft and creamy white, he saw the marks. Puncture wounds. The memory was vivid. His mouth on her skin, his teeth sinking into the soft flesh of her throat. And then—

  “Vampire blood. You had vampire blood.” He knew the taste, the feel of it. He’d experienced the effects before, once, during the blood ritual. But that time, he’d only had to drink a small amount. The pain to his heart had been more emotional than physical.

  When he’d drunk from the girl, though, he had drunk deeply and greedily. Drunk too much. She was right; it had been like an injection of poison in his heart. “But you’re human. I can smell it,” he said.

  Her brow furrowed. “Is vampire blood bad?”

  “Deadly. To another vampire.” Gabriel forced his eyes away from her throat. “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re hungry. Drink, and I’ll explain.” She held out the blood bag, but his arm and hand shook too badly for him to take it. The girl scooted around behind him and lifted his head into her lap. She pierced the bag and the smell of it intensified, though it was still nothing compared to hers. She cradled his head in one arm and held the blood to his lips with the other.

  Gabriel sucked on the small hole, drawing the blood into his mouth. He couldn’t drink without her arm supporting him, but he hated it. It made him feel like a little boy, helpless and vulnerable.

  Why was she here, nursing him? He’d taken her hostage. Tried to feed from her. There had been nothing to hold her here once he’d lost consciousness. Any normal girl would’ve run away, would’ve brought the police, would’ve destroyed him. And this girl had obviously left—she’d had to, to get the blood. And then she’d come back to give it to him. Why?

  He let the questions slide away for the moment, giving himself over to feeding. The scent of her, so close, surrounded him. If he closed his eyes, he could pretend that it was her blood sliding down his throat, her intoxicating presence filling him. Blood from a bag didn’t bring the emotions that blood directly from a Giver did. The feelings were distant, vague. He’d always wondered if that was because part of the experience of feeding was missing. The smell, the warmth, the heartbeat.

  He felt Shay’s heart beating against his back. Pounding, really. Gabriel had the sensation of possessing two hearts in his body. As he lay cradled against her chest, the two hearts slowly came to beat in synch.

  As soon as he drank the last of the blood, Gabriel shoved himself away from her, from the intimacy of her heart beating with his. She stood up without comment. “There’s more if you need it,” she said, throwing the empty bag in the trash.

  He was still hungry. He’d been kept half-starved for so long. But he shook his head. “You said you would explain.”

  “About my blood.”

  “Yes.”

  She sat down in the room’s only chair. There was probably seven feet between them, but she didn’t move the chair closer. He was glad. The smell of her sharpened his hunger. He had the feeling that even if he’d drunk a dozen bags of blood, he’d still crave her.

  “It’s your own blood. My blood is yours,” she said. “I’ve been getting transfusions of your blood for the last two weeks.”

  So that’s what his captor had been doing with the blood he took. “Why?”

  “I’m sick, like I said. Pretty much dying.” She wrung her hands. “But I didn’t know—I thought it was regular blood, just treated with something. I should’ve asked more questions, but I felt so good that I didn’t even care. I swear, Gabriel, I didn’t know what they’d done to you until last night, until I saw you. I thought you were just a figment of my imagination.”

  “My blood.” Her answer only created more questions. His captor—Martin—had spoken to him sometimes, in that chilly voice of his. Always about immortality and strength, about isolating the unique protein composition that made a vampire’s blood so powerful. About how it would change the world, ensure his place in the history books. Never about a sick girl. “It was for you?”

  “I’ve gotten blood transfusions practically my whole life. I have a blood disorder—a weird, impossible-to-diagnose disease. My doctor, who is also my stepfather, he was the one who …” She swallowed hard, and his eyes followed the motion of her throat.

  “The one who kept me chained to a table and took my blood by force,” Gabriel finished for her, his anger blazing up for a moment as he remembered it.

  “Yes. He must have thought your … your kind of blood might cure me.” She pressed the heels of her hands against her forehead. “Although I don’t understand that at all. Who even believes vampires exist? And Martin is a scientist, a famous one. How would he have come up with that as a possible cure? It’s crazy.”

  “Not so crazy.” Gabriel felt his mouth twitch, wanting to smile at her words. He stopped himself.

  “Well, no, obviously …” Her voice trailed off as she looked at him.

  “Somehow he knew of our existence, your doctor,” Gabriel said. “He came searc
hing for one of us, he and your mother.”

  “Searching? How?” Her eyebrows knit together, her blue eyes clouded with confusion. “When?”

  “I don’t know when they started. They posted on every vampire-related website they could find. I saw one,” Gabriel answered. “I’ve been curious about others of my kind, and I look at them sometimes, even though as far as I can tell, all the sites are created by pathetic humans who long to be something other than what they are.”

  If she heard the bitterness in his voice, she didn’t comment on it. “So then why did you take Martin seriously?” she asked. “And my mom?”

  “First, they weren’t pretending to be vampires. Second, they knew details about … someone I loved. A member of my family. I didn’t understand how that was possible, and I had to know. So I agreed to meet them,” Gabriel explained.

  He’d been so stupid. So arrogant. He’d seen firsthand what humans were capable of, and still he’d walked into a trap. “They were prepared,” he continued. “They knew what my vulnerabilities were. The man—the doctor—injected me with an infusion of hawthorn. It’s only a plant, but it paralyzes us, my kind. It left me awake, aware of what was happening … but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t lift a finger to fight him. I saw everything he was doing; I felt everything—” He struggled to keep his voice under control. He wasn’t going to show this human how he’d suffered. “The effects lasted long enough for them to abduct me. Once he had me chained down, he began drawing blood, and that kept me weak.”

  “But how did they know all that—about the hawthorn, about your family?” she asked.

  “You tell me,” Gabriel replied.

  She recoiled at the accusation in his tone. But she was his captors’ daughter. Even if she’d come back here and saved him, he couldn’t believe she knew nothing.

  “You were surprised to see me on that table,” he went on. “But you knew my name. I’ve never told it to a human. Your parents never bothered to ask.” He’d managed to roll onto his side to face her, trying to show his anger, but it was all he could manage. He hated how powerless he felt.

  “I have no idea how they knew about you, I swear,” she said.“I was shocked to see you chained to that table, more than I’ve ever been in my life. But that’s … it’s because I thought you were … imaginary.”

  Gabriel just stared at her. This girl confounded him.

  She opened her hands in an expression of helplessness. “Okay, I know this is hard to believe, but with every transfusion of your blood—what I later realized was your blood—I had a vision of you. Like a dream, but always about you and your life. That’s how I knew your name. I heard Sam and Ernst and Millie say it.”

  Gabriel felt as if he’d been attacked again, as if she’d stabbed him with the syringe of hawthorn just like that so-called doctor had. Sam? Ernst?

  “You know everything!” he exploded, dragging his weakened body up as far as he could, leaning against the bed. “Just like your mother did, and that—”

  “No!” she cut him off. “I don’t! I didn’t know anything until I saw your family in my visions. That’s how I found out about them. But I never told my mom or Martin. I thought it was just some weird side effect of the drugs Martin put into that blood.”

  “If I could move, I would kill you,” he growled. “And your doctor would be next.”

  Her hand flew to her throat, and for one second she looked afraid. Then she laughed, as bitter a sound as anything he could make. “Don’t worry, I’ll be dead soon enough even without your help.”

  Gabriel felt his anger drain away. What was the use of it, when he could barely move and she wasn’t frightened by his threats?

  “You can believe me or not; I don’t care,” she said. “But I’ve been inside you, living parts of your life with you. That’s what my visions were.”

  “Bullshit.” It was the fantastical excuse of a child.

  “I saw you when you said good-bye to the sun,” she insisted. “You tried to memorize every color of the sky.”

  “That could apply to many of my kind,” Gabriel scoffed. “And even your myths about us claim, correctly, that we’ll die in the sunlight.” But his chest tightened. Had she somehow truly been able to invade his thoughts, his deepest emotions?

  She leaned forward in her chair. He noticed that her face had paled a bit, and there were tiny beads of sweat along her hairline. “You were nineteen, almost twenty.” She could have guessed that by looking at me, Gabriel thought. “You weren’t sure if blood would be enough to take the place of the sun.” That was it. That was it exactly. “You talked to Sam about whether or not you were ready. He thought you might be feeling pressure from Ernst.”

  Sam. Ernst. He hated those names coming from her mouth. She knew about the ones closest to his heart. What else did she know? What else had she seen? Gabriel felt as if she’d stripped off his clothes and made him stand in front of her naked. He turned his face away from her.

  “I’d hate it if someone knew about me like that,” she said, her tone softening. “But being with you has been the most amazing experience I’ve ever had. I got to run. Run! Running in your body was …” she paused, seeming to search for the right word, “… exhilarating. And your strength stayed with me. For a while, at least. After every transfusion, I could do things I’d never done before. Run in my own body, swim to a place hardly anyone had ever been, kiss a guy. I’d never even kissed anyone before. I was always just the Sick Girl, not a girl girl. Your blood did more than just keep me alive. It gave me a life.”

  She pressed her hands over her face. “I know you don’t care. But you deserve to know that you changed my life.”

  “And that’s why you came back,” Gabriel said.

  “That’s why I came back, even after what you did to me last night,” Shay agreed. “You’ve been keeping me alive. Chained up in that room. It wouldn’t have been right to let you die.”

  Honorable. She was honorable. And he’d treated her as if she was a pawn. I did what I did to escape, Gabriel told himself.

  That’s not all, though, he had to admit. Gabriel had taken her hostage because he wanted vengeance. He wanted his captors to suffer the same way he had. He wanted them to feel his hatred, his contempt for them.

  The doctor didn’t care about Shay; that much was obvious. But the woman, Shay’s mother … she cared. She would come after her daughter, and Martin would come after his prize. His vampire. So Shay, hostage, would lure them to him, when he was strong, when he was ready, when he was surrounded by his family. It was a good plan. He would use her to extract his revenge on them. It’s not as if he were treating her worse than he’d been treated. Not even close. And when he had what he wanted, he’d let her go.

  Let her go. As if she couldn’t walk out of this room right now. She was here of her own free will, and even so, he still planned to use her. It’s necessary, he thought. He couldn’t let himself get weak and sentimental. She was a human. Humans thought nothing of killing his kind.

  She saved me, a small part of Gabriel protested. He ignored it. She was a human and he was treating her better than she deserved.

  “I’ll stay until you’re strong enough to take care of yourself,” Shay added. She stood up and walked over to the dresser. “I wish I had medicine with me. My head is pounding.”

  There was perspiration above her upper lip now, and her hands shook. Gabriel studied her thin form. This was more than a headache. “Do you need my blood?” he asked. She’d said it was what had been keeping her alive. Could it be true?

  “No.”

  “You said you’d be dead soon.”

  She turned to face him. “Probably,” she admitted. “Without your blood, I’d be dead already, I guess. But that still doesn’t make it right.”

  Gabriel released his eye teeth, ignoring her sharp little intake of breath. He nicked a vein in his wrist and held his arm out to her in a silent invitation. It was the right thing to do, for him to give it, even if it had been wro
ng for her parents to take it from him.

  Besides, he needed her alive.

  She stood motionless for a moment, staring at the blood hungrily. Then she stepped over and knelt beside him. Slowly, she lowered her mouth to his wrist.

  The sensation was like nothing he’d ever felt before. As she suckled, he could feel his blood transferring from his body to hers. It was like the blood was a hot, red current connecting them to each other. He gasped, overwhelmed by the power of the experience. It had been so long since he’d felt anything this intensely, so long since he’d allowed himself to. After what had happened to Sam, he hadn’t wanted to feel anything ever again.

  It had been Gabriel’s desire to feel more, to experience more, that had led him out into the world. Sam, his brother, had come with him, of course. Sam would still be here if Gabriel hadn’t—

  Gabriel squeezed his eyes shut, allowing the sensation of Shay feeding to block out all thought. He didn’t open them until he felt her mouth move away, breaking their connection. Her lips were stained by the blood, his blood. He had a wild urge to lean over and lick the blood away. His own vampire blood was poison to him, but it would almost be worth it.

  “You’ve got—” Gabriel gestured to his mouth.

  The girl blinked, slowly, as if she’d been drugged. “Oh.” She reached up and wiped his blood away.

  “What did you see?” he asked. There was a residual expression of horror on her face. She didn’t answer. “Shay, what did you see?” He’d used her name without intending to. It made it harder to see her as just an object of use. But that was impossible now, anyway. What he’d experienced when she drank from him—those feelings weren’t possible with an object.

  “You were hunting,” Shay said. Her voice had a tremor in it. “With Sam. You felt like an animal, ragged and dirty, with no home to go back to. Sam wanted to find a place to hide from the sun, but you said you had to get Ernst first. You and Sam, you’d … attacked a family in a farm. You drank from the mother and her son until they were unconscious. But then you looked for Ernst, and he—”