“Are you ready, Kitten?”
Asked against my skin as his tongue probed my pulse. Finding the best place to bite.
“Yes…wait!”
That instant’s pressure of his fangs ceased. I took in a deep breath.
“No live meals, even if you think the person has it coming. Give me bagged blood. I don’t want to wake up with a face full of someone’s artery.”
Bones pulled back to look at me, stroking the nape of my neck. “It’s already taken care of. Don’t fret. You’ll wake up and I’ll be there and everything will be fine.”
I slid my arms around his neck, glad it was him who would be bringing me to the grave and back instead of anyone else.
“Bones.”
“Yes?”
“Make me a vampire.”
Certain things I knew I’d always remember. The look in his eye when he lowered his head. That slow, deep piercing of his fangs into me. His hand pressing me closer while the other one curled around mine, lacing our fingers together. That rush of blood spilling into his mouth from a bite far deeper than I’d ever received. The flush of warmth sweeping over me. My heart, beating so fast at first, then gradually, inexorably slowing. Growing sporadic as the life and that warmth began to ebb from me.
My thoughts became chaotic. The buzzing’s not as loud now. Can’t see much anymore. Funny, there were lights a moment ago, thousands of tiny little specks. Pretty. Where’d they go? Colder. Where’d that wind come from?
What was that? Something’s pulling me. Where am I now? Can’t talk. Am I moving? Can’t see. Why can’t I see? Why can’t I move? Where am I? Where am I? WHERE AM I?
What? I can barely hear you…yes! Yes, it’s me, I’m here! I can see you now. I’ll be right there, I’m coming. Wait, don’t go away. Come back! Stop, please, I haven’t seen you for so long.
No, take me back! I need to see them one more time…
I was in hell.
The fire that ravaged me burned with a ferocity that told me the stuff we had on earth was just a tame impostor. This fire was pitiless, and it was everywhere. Burning me without killing me. Tormenting me with unspeakable agony. I couldn’t scream, though I didn’t even know if I had a mouth anymore. The only thing I could focus on was the pain. No more stop stop hurts HURTS HURTS!
And then—something cool washed over me, slowly extinguishing the flames. With all the desperation of the damned, I strained for more of it, since at last the pain began to lessen. More, oh God, it still hurts, please give me more, more, oh please, need more, a little more…
Sound again, like a drumbeat. Light. Voices over that sluggish, banging drum. So many different smells.
I opened my eyes and saw not a flaming lake of fire but plain concrete walls. It took a second to recognize the people staring at me, then cognition hit. That’s right, I was at Bones’s house, and he’d turned me into a vampire. I wasn’t in hell, I was changed into a vampire, and everything was okay, because the pain was gone. I could see, hear, feel, smell, taste, oh God, taste—
Something delicious was in my mouth. Oh, yes, that was good. So good.
The last lagging bit of reality clicked into place. Holy shit, I had someone in my arms. I hadn’t been drinking a bag of blood, but a person. My mouth was pressed to their neck and blood dripped from my fangs—fuck me, I had fangs!—and there was no pulse under my lips.
“Jesus!” I shouted, shoving the person away with a rush of horror. “I told Bones no people! Where is he?”
I looked around for Bones, sickened that he’d let me kill someone, but Spade’s expression stopped me. He looked almost dazed.
“You just threw Crispin to the floor.”
I looked down. The corpse I’d flung away from me pushed himself into a sitting position and stared up at me with disbelieving brown eyes. A full, untouched bag of blood was in Bones’s hand.
That’s when I became aware of my second problem.
“Uh, guys…” I began hesitantly. “Why do I still have a heartbeat?”
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE STEADY DRUMBEAT I’D HEARD BEFORE was coming from my own chest. For a second, I was confused. Didn’t it work? Those two new fangs jabbing me in the lip seemed to indicate otherwise, but why was my heart still beating?
“Is it going to stop soon or something?”
Had they forgotten to tell me an important detail? Like, “Oh, you’ll hear some thump thumps for the first few minutes, but then it’ll quit.” And from the expressions aimed at me, this wasn’t normal.
“Anytime one of you wants to answer me, that’d be great.”
“Don’t you want the blood?” Spade blurted.
I gave the purplish bag in Bones’s hand a cursory glance. “Not really.”
Bones got to his feet. He looked at me in the strangest way, then he ripped the end of the blood bag with his teeth and held it out to me.
“Drink.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Just take a swig out of the bag!” Bones demanded.
Making a face, I put my mouth around the torn edge and took a tentative sip.
Yuck! Like a mouthful of old pennies. I spat it out. “What were you giving me before? That stuff was excellent, but this is crap.”
Spade actually whitened. Bones took the bag back and drained it in with a few powerful swallows.
“Not a thing wrong with it,” he pronounced. Then he took a knife from his pants and sliced open my arm without warning.
“Ouch! What was that for?”
I clutched my injured arm, but almost at once, the pain turned into only an itching tingle. Bones pulled my hand back, revealing red-stained but unbroken skin underneath. There wasn’t a wound anymore. My forearm had healed completely.
In spite of everything, I began to grin. “That’ll save me a world of grief in a fight.”
“Are you aware that you’re not breathing?” Bones asked.
He was right. I wasn’t—and I hadn’t even noticed! How can you miss that you’re no longer sucking in air? When you don’t need to anymore, that’s when!
“Her heartbeat,” Mencheres said, speaking the first time since I’d opened my eyes. “Is slowing down.”
I looked at my chest, as if that could tell me anything. Sure enough, what had started out as an even pace of buh-bump, buh-bumps was winding down to a sluggish buh…buh-bump……buh with longer intervals in between. It felt…well, it felt goddamned weird, is what it did. Like listening to it, I should be panicked or something.
“That’s a good thing, right? Maybe it just needed a minute to realize its services were no longer needed.”
Bones put an arm around me. “Kitten, how do you feel?”
“Fine. Good, actually. You know, you smell great. Really, really, nnnghghh.”
When I came to, it was with more of that wonderful taste in my mouth. This time, however, I was being restrained, with one arm around my waist and the other under my neck. Since I could still see Bones and Spade, it had to be Mencheres who held me.
“What happened?” I asked.
“You bit me,” Bones said.
“Huh?”
Spade nodded in confirmation. I was aghast. “I’m sorry, I don’t even remember doing that…” Then I trailed off, inhaling near Mencheres’s arm. That smell. Mmmm.
The next thing I knew, Mencheres’s wrist was in my mouth and I was shaking it from side to side like a shark. When I realized what I was doing, I spat it out.
“Will somebody tell me what the hell is wrong with me?”
Even as I shouted it, I couldn’t quit licking my lips. That taste. It was so perfect. God, nothing had ever tasted half this good before!
“You feed on undead blood.”
Mencheres made the pronouncement with his usual impenetrable aplomb. Bones arched a brow. Then he came closer, drawing blood from his wrist with a fang and waving it under my nose.
“You want this?”
I lunged forward with a compulsion that I didn’t even h
ave time to think about. Mencheres flicked his free hand, and an invisible wall suddenly smacked me in the face.
“Stay still.”
I didn’t have a choice—I was frozen in midcrouch, with my knees bent, my hands extended, and my mouth open in a rapacious snarl. What was worse was that I didn’t care.
“Give me that.”
I knew it was my voice, but I didn’t recognize the savage sound of it. That pain began to return, the awful one that felt like I was burning from the inside out.
“Give it to me!”
Mencheres let me go. I noticed that only when I saw him standing next to Bones, who retrieved another red-filled bag from a cooler and ripped the end open again. This time, Bones smeared the blood directly on my lips.
“Do you want this?” he asked, holding the bag under my mouth.
I licked the blood from my lips. “No.” An angry growl.
The three men exchanged a glance. Then Bones let out a sigh. “Right, then. We’ll try it another way.”
He swallowed the contents of the bag. I watched the muscles in his throat work the whole time, mesmerized. When he finally came closer, that pain had reached a boiling point, and I had tears running down my face.
“Please. It burns, it burns!”
Bones laid his wrist against my mouth. Later I’d know I tore savagely at it, but at that moment, all I was aware of was the cooling relief from the pain. That wonderful taste running down my throat. How my entire body seemed to sigh with a bliss that felt very close to orgasm.
“You know this is unheard of,” Spade was saying. His voice sounded far away. I was still shuddering in delicious rapture from sucking the last few trickles out of Bones’s wrist.
“First time for everything,” Bones replied. “Just goes to show that when you think you know everything, you don’t. Listen. Her heart’s stopped now.”
That caught my attention. Well, that and his wrist ran dry, which maybe contributed to my noticing my surroundings again.
“Do you think it’ll stay stopped?”
They all looked at each other. Finally, with a shrug, Bones removed another blood bag from the cooler and answered me before he drank it.
“Reckon we’ll find out.”
The small, reinforced basement room was essentially a prison. No windows, only one door, which was locked from the outside. A twin bed against the far wall. Several books, both new and well used. Pen and paper. And, of course, the cooler.
It was filled with blood bags and, to my surprise, bottles of water. Bones explained those would help keep me hydrated while my metabolism went haywire, burning through all the sustenance it received from the blood without sparing any to prevent me from looking, well, dry. I had to drink water for the first week or so. Then, I was told, I only needed to drink a glass a day of any kind of liquid. Gin and tonic topped my list.
The scent of blood was thick in the air. The room was also rich with the scents of Spade, Bones, Mencheres, and others who had been here before us. I was trying to identify all the different smells, but it was hard, considering my limited frame of reference.
Three more times, that overwhelming hunger hit me, and I’d black out only to find myself latched onto Bones like a rampaging leech. Mencheres had let me out of his invisible cement suit after Bones stated that as long as he kept refilling, it didn’t matter how many times I drained him. And since I went flat crazy whenever that need took me, there was no reason for anyone else to get chewed on. I also got the distinct impression that they wanted to keep my unusual diet a secret.
“It figures I couldn’t even do this the normal way,” I said, after licking the last drops from his wrist yet again. A small part of me wondered why I wasn’t embarrassed by my behavior. Helplessly sucking on someone’s vein was the height of dependence, yet I didn’t care. Maybe because I was still riding the euphoria another bellyful of Bones’s blood gave me.
“Do what, luv? Become a vampire? Or bite?”
“I’m biting wrong, too?”
Bones chuckled, brushing the wild mass of my hair out of my face. “You’re biting exactly the way every new vampire bites, which is too hard and messy, but completely normal, and you can’t help what you’re craving. No one’s ever turned a half-breed before. Maybe if they had, the same thing would have happened, then you’d just be eating what you were supposed to eat.”
“Thanks for that.” Lucidity was making its brief pit stop now that my hunger had been appeased. “Quick thinking on your part.”
“Yes, well, comes from practice. Come on, Kitten, let’s get you cleaned up.”
Bones cracked open another bottle of water and poured some of it onto a towel, then wiped my chin and throat with it. It came back red, of course, and he did it twice more until he was satisfied. There weren’t any mirrors, so it’s not like I could have checked for myself, and I liked him performing this task for the simple reason that he was touching me. His hands were so strong, but he handled me with the utmost gentleness. Like anything harsher than a caress would leave permanent damage.
Another scent filled my nose. I breathed in the fragrant smell, surprised to find it was coming from me.
Bones inhaled as well, his eyes filling up with green. Now the air began to be flavored with a heady blend of musk, burnt sugar, and spice—Bones’s scent, sharper and stronger.
“Can you smell how I want you?”
His voice was deeper. Absent of that reassuring undertone he’d been using for the past few hours while I struggled with my uncontrollable hunger.
I took in another deep breath, absorbing the intoxicating mixture of scents swirling together. “Yes.”
My voice was throatier also. Almost a low purr while I felt the fangs that had receded begin to grow once more. Another hunger swept through me. Though it didn’t hurt, it felt just as urgent as the ones before it.
I’d been sitting on the floor—how I got there, don’t ask me, I’d come to there with his wrist in my mouth—when lust took over. I flattened Bones onto the small bed, putting my legs on either side of his hips.
“Wait,” he said, reaching for something on the floor.
I didn’t want to. A surge of pure need made me blind to everything else. I’d ripped off my clothes and made short work of his pants when I cried out in frustration at what I found when my hand clasped around him.
Bones let out an amused grunt. “I did say wait for a reason. You drained me, but don’t fret. Plenty of blood here.”
He pulled another bag of blood out of the cooler, which was conveniently close to the bed, come to notice, and drank it while taking off the last of his clothes. It was a good thing all that liquid flowed to one place, because in the few seconds it took him to do that, my need had turned into a boiling ache.
Bones didn’t bother with foreplay. He sheathed himself inside me as soon as the bag was empty. I let out a cry and moved on top of him. Words began spilling out of my mouth. What they were, I had no idea, but I couldn’t stop saying them. Bones sat up, gripping my hips, sucking my breasts, biting my nipples, and holding me while he began to move faster.
The smell of our lust was all around us, erotically ripe and intense. I felt drugged from it, but at the same time, I’d never felt so alive. Like my entire life before this had occurred while I’d been asleep. Every inch of my skin was hypersensitive, crackling with passion, and humming now with an internal voltage I’d never possessed before. It grew with every new touch, hurtling me toward a pinnacle of pleasure that made our surroundings fall away. There was nothing but this moment, and the orgasm, if such a trivial word could be used to describe what was ripping through me, wasn’t limited to my loins. It erupted all through me.
“Yes,” Bones groaned, moving faster. “So good, luv. Not much time, stay with me, stay with me…”
I had the briefest moment to wonder, where does he think I’ll go? before everything went black.
TWENTY-NINE
ARE YOU READY FOR THIS?”
I nodded. �
��Do it.”
Bones sliced a long upward line along his forearm, splitting open his veins. That scrumptious red liquid filled the seam at once. My mouth watered.
Next, Bones smeared his blood onto his fingers and passed them within inches of my lips. I swallowed hard, fighting down my urge to snatch at his hand and suck his fingers—and then his forearm.
Then, Bones pressed those bloodied fingers into my mouth, teasing me with their unbelievable sweetness. I trembled but didn’t lick or bite down. You can do this, Cat. Don’t give in.
Bones handed me a napkin. “Spit it out, Kitten.”
I did, giving back those drops that had made my mouth physically ache with wanting. If I still could, I’d have been sweating bullets by then.
“Again.”
Bones repeated this tortuous act five more times, me spitting out what my body was howling at me to keep, until at last Bones smiled at me.
“You did it, luv.”
“Well done, Cat,” Spade said.
“It’s more than well done.” Bones kissed my forehead. “Getting control of the thirst inside of three days is extraordinary.”
“What time is it?”
“Round 12:30,” Spade replied.
Less than six hours until dawn. That was the other “side effect” of this transformation. When the sun rose, I conked out. Not just got sleepy, like I’d been accustomed to my whole life, I meant fall down in midsentence out. In a way, that was more concerning to me than my bouts of hunger. If I happened to be in a fight when dawn broke, I’d be toast.
I was working on staying conscious when the sun came up. As of now, I could keep my eyes open a few minutes while my body did an excellent impression of a limp rag. It would go away with time, but I worried about how much time. Right now, I couldn’t even move until noon.
“I want to go out,” I said. “Drive somewhere, stare at every street sign I pass, read road maps until I go blind, and get directions from anyone within twenty yards. Oh, but I’m taking a bath first. That tiny shower in the basement only had cold water.”
Mencheres strode into the room. As soon as I saw his face, I knew something was horribly wrong.
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