by Lora Leigh
“But it is killing you.”
Apart from the poison, I’d been bitten, bruised, and beaten nearly senseless. This roller-coaster ride sure as hell didn’t come with a safety harness.
I nodded. “Yes. It is.”
His jaw tensed. “I don’t want to hurt a civilian, Jill. You’re a civilian.”
“It’s time for this to be over,” Declan said sharply. “You can either help or you can’t. Which is it?”
I could tell he didn’t approve of my blood donation suggestion. It wasn’t on our current to-do list.
Dr. Reynolds glared at Declan, then back at me. “You care about your companion a great deal. I wasn’t sure at first, but it’s true, isn’t it?”
“Her safety is my first priority.”
Dr. Reynolds laughed under his breath. “My wife and I were opposites, too. Two different worlds, but we made it work.”
I wasn’t sure how we’d moved into this area of conversation without any warning. “Whatever Declan and I are to each other isn’t exactly important right now.”
“You care about him.”
“Of course I do.”
“Even though he’s a dhampyr.” He made the word sound more like an accusation than an observation.
I looked at the dhampyr in question. He had his eyebrow slightly raised, his gaze on me, as if waiting for my reply. “I’d be dead if it wasn’t for Declan.”
Not the most romantic of declarations, sure. But it was still true.
Dr. Reynolds pursed his lips. “I met my wife four years ago after I’d decided to accept my confirmed bachelor status. My days were spent with test tubes and chemical formulas. Parachemistry, para-science, it’s an obsession for me. Always has been. But Clara . . . she made me see that there was more to life.” His voice caught. Lawrence moved toward him and squeezed his shoulder.
I swallowed hard. Seeing other people in pain affected me. “She sounds like she was an amazing woman. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“So am I.”
“You said a dhampyr killed her.”
“Yes.” His jaw tightened.
I shivered. “I—I haven’t seen too many monster dhampyrs, but the ones I have seen have been scary as hell. It must have been horrible for you, but I’m sure there was nothing you could have done to save her.”
He removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut. “You’re wrong.”
I was confused. I looked at Lawrence, whose gray eyes flicked to me.
“It wasn’t a monster dhampyr,” he said.
I was surprised. “It wasn’t?”
“Lawrence . . .” Dr. Reynolds began.
Lawrence hissed out a breath. “It’s time you faced this once and for all, as we discussed. Maybe then you can finally move on.”
“I could say the same to you.”
“You lost Clara two years ago. It’s only been six months for me.”
“It’s different.”
I watched them warily. Declan stood like a statue beside me, his hands clasped behind his back like a soldier at ease.
“No, it’s so similar I’m surprised you can’t see it.” Lawrence wrung his hands and looked at me. “My wife is human—a human married to a vampire. Victor’s wife—she was a vampire.”
My mouth fell open. “A vampire?”
Reynolds put his glasses back on. His face was still. It looked as if he’d managed to put a lid on his grief for the moment. “She was already a vampire when I met her. It was difficult for her sometimes to control her hungers, but she maintained herself with class and dignity. Right up until she was murdered.”
“Murdered by a dhampyr,” I said.
“Yes.” Dr. Reynolds’s expression had rapidly turned from raw emotion to absolute ice. “The very dhampyr who stands with us in this room.”
Shock slammed into me by the cold, blunt statement. My gaze shot to Declan. He watched Dr. Reynolds carefully, no outward reaction showing at this accusation.
“You’re saying that I killed your wife,” he said.
“Yes.” The word was a hiss.
I felt the tension in the room rise to a sickening level. I waited for Declan to deny it, to say it was impossible that he’d killed Dr. Reynolds’s wife.
But he didn’t.
Declan didn’t move from where he stood, his expression didn’t change, but his gaze grew more intense. Dr. Reynolds had gotten his full attention. “I don’t kill innocents. I don’t creep up behind them and slit their throats. I face them. They know who I am and why I’m there. That’s when they usually attack.”
The low-level hate I’d sensed previously from Dr. Reynolds now spilled over. I’d assumed he hated dhampyrs in general. I had no idea it was specifically focused on Declan. “I watched from the shadows when you staked her. Yes, she was defending herself. Of course she was. What other choice did she have?”
“To explain who she was. To deal with me on an intelligent level. If she’d done that, I might have given her the benefit of the doubt. I’m sent out after rogue vampires who cause damage and death, not loving wives of scientists. If I slayed her, it means that she was dangerous.”
“You can justify it any way you want to. It doesn’t change what happened.”
Declan hissed a breath out between his clenched teeth. “Jill, we’re out of here. This isn’t a man who wants to help you. Not today anyway.”
He was right. Dr. Reynolds didn’t seem focused on the Nightshade anymore. While what he’d said was chilling and it turned my stomach, I also believed Declan. If he’d killed Clara, he’d done so because she was a serious threat.
I took his hand and he pulled me toward the door. Lawrence stepped back so he wouldn’t come within smelling distance of me.
“You’re not even willing to apologize to me for murdering my wife?” Dr. Reynolds said softly.
Declan froze and looked over his shoulder. He let go of my hand. “You yourself admit that your wife was a vampire. One who found it difficult not to give in to her hungers.”
“And I feel her loss like a hole in my heart every day.”
Declan faltered, just a little. If I hadn’t been watching for it, I would never have seen it. A microscopic sliver of doubt slid behind his gaze, and his forehead furrowed. “To my knowledge, I’ve never killed a vampire that didn’t deserve it. It’s a war out there, one we need to protect humans from. Bad shit happens every day. But if I was the cause of your wife’s death and she didn’t truly deserve it, then yeah, I’m sorry as hell for that.”
Dr. Reynolds stared at him for so long I wasn’t sure if he’d ever speak again. A scattering of emotion played on his face—grief, sadness, doubt, pain.
I knew Declan’s life was one filled with violence. His emotion-repressing serum was actually a bonus in that respect. It kept that part of him, the part deep inside that went past the scars, past the damage, relatively pure and untouched. For all the killing he’d done, that he’d have to do in the future, it hadn’t broken him. For all the horror he’d had to face in his life, Declan’s heart wasn’t dark.
That’s why that glimmer of doubt, of regret, in his otherwise emotionless expression troubled me. Just a couple of days off his original serum last week was enough for him to experience emotion—all kinds of it. Once you experienced something you’d never had to deal with before, was that something you could just forget?
“When Jackson contacted us to meet with you,” I began, “you would have known Declan was with me, that he was protecting me. They’re friends.”
“Yes. I knew.”
My chest felt tight. “So is that what this is? A lie saying you could help me just to get us here so you could drag an apology out of Declan for what happened to your wife?”
It wasn’t that I didn’t empathize with his pain—I did. But the relief I’d felt, the hope I’d allowed myself for my own solution, was fading with every second that passed. I hated being used, no matter what the motivation was.
D
r. Reynolds’s face tensed. “I didn’t lie to you. I had—I have every intention of helping you to the best of my ability. The fact that you’re aligned with the dhampyr who murdered my wife is an unfortunate complication.”
It was difficult to breathe. “So what now?”
“I need to make my peace with what has happened and find a way to move on.” He glanced at Lawrence.
The vampire nodded. “You can do this.”
“My research has always come first. If I would have had to choose between Clara and my work, I would have had a very hard time with that decision. In the end, I think I would have chosen the research over love. She knew this. She accepted how important it was to me. It’s everything. My research is me.”
I watched him, feeling a swell of pity. “Sounds lonely.”
“It can be.”
Declan crossed his arms. “I hope you can put your feelings about me aside, even if it’s only long enough to help Jill.”
“Like I said, my research is everything.” Dr. Reynolds held his hand out to Declan. I was surprised that he seemed so ready to shake the hand of the man he held responsible for slaying his vampire wife.
Declan hesitated only a moment before he grabbed hold of Dr. Reynolds’s hand and shook it. “If there’s anything I can do for you . . .”
“There is. You can help in my research.”
“I can?”
“Yes.” Dr. Reynolds pulled a syringe out from his pocket and plunged it into Declan’s chest. I watched in frozen shock as Declan batted his hand away and immediately ripped the needle out, glaring fiercely at it before casting it to the side.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he snapped.
“Research,” Dr. Reynolds said again, backing up a step.
Declan fell hard to his knees and braced his hands against the ground. It was a tranquilizer. He’d been injected with a tranquilizer.
I’d stopped breathing. “What’s going on? Why are you doing this? Research? What does that mean?”
Lawrence grabbed the back of Declan’s jacket and pulled him up to his feet. Declan’s eyes were already glazed, and he now moved like a rag doll. Lawrence pushed him down into the chair. Around it was the scattering of gray ash—all that was left from the vampire, other than the lingering burning scent.
Dr. Reynolds moved closer to him, his gaze flicking to my stunned expression. “Stay where you are, Jill. Don’t come closer to Lawrence, just in case he’s affected by the Nightshade. We don’t want any accidents here.”
I ignored him and ran toward Declan, but Dr. Reynolds caught my arm. I tried to pull away, but his fingers dug into me painfully. I glared at him. “Explain to me what the fuck you’re doing to Declan. Now!”
“I need him.” There was a steely look of determination in his eyes. “I’ve seen what your blood can do to a vampire, but I don’t know what it will do to a dhampyr.” I noticed with horror that he had the silver gunlike device in his hand again, which he tossed to Lawrence. “And I want to find out.”
Before I could say anything, before I could take a breath or even scream, Lawrence jabbed the needle into Declan’s neck and pulled the trigger.
SIX
Now I screamed. But it was too late to stop this.
A gasp caught in Declan’s throat. His face tensed, and his teeth clenched and then parted as a roar escaped from him.
“No!” I pushed away from Dr. Reynolds with all my strength, then ran directly to Declan and grabbed hold of his arm. The vampire stumbled back from me to keep his distance. Hot tears ran down my cheeks. “Declan, no! Please—”
When he looked at me, I could see the pain in his single gray eye. “Jill . . .”
My name sounded broken, jagged.
His head slumped forward.
“No!” I scrambled to touch him, fumbling to feel for a pulse at his throat, scared to death that there wouldn’t be anything there. Scared to death that my blood had killed him.
It had been a big question up till now and we were about to learn the answer—what did my blood do to a dhampyr?
Declan was half vampire and because of this, he was affected by the scent of the Nightshade inside me—drawn to it. To me. He hid it well, but I knew it troubled him. He’d never drunk blood before, he had no need to. But just because there wasn’t a need didn’t mean his vampire side didn’t still crave it.
For all I knew the Nightshade could kill a dhampyr as easily as a full-blooded vampire. It wasn’t something I’d wanted to put to the test.
But here we were anyway.
His heart was still beating, too erratic and too fast, but it was strong beneath my touch. Fear was still a bitter taste in my mouth. I was afraid that the next moment his heart would stop and he’d be taken from me forever. He was unconscious, either from the pain my blood had caused him or from the tranquilizer, but he was still alive. I wanted to sob with relief, but I couldn’t allow myself the luxury.
I turned to Dr. Reynolds and the look on my face must have showed every bit of the rage I felt. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
He actually took a step back from me, which was a surprise. I wasn’t the scariest thing on the planet, not compared to somebody like Declan, but he reacted as if I might be a threat. “He’s alive.”
“And you’re damn lucky he is.”
“Or what would happen? Would you kill me in revenge?”
My hands clenched into fists at my sides. “Feeling the way I do right now? I just might.”
“Then who would help you with your little problem, Jill? I’m not aware of another person alive in the world who has as much knowledge as I do when it comes to parachemistry.”
“I guess I’d just have to deal. Because if you had killed Declan claiming it was for research when it’s clear to me that it was vengeance, pure and simple”—I swallowed hard—“I would have taken his stake and plunged it into your throat.”
His brows went up. “Violent. You struck me as a nice girl, Jill.”
I glared at him. “Maybe I was once upon a time. Things have changed.”
The phone on the wall started to ring. Keeping a wary eye on me, the doctor went to it and picked it up.
“Reynolds here. Yes . . . just a moment.” He held the phone out to Lawrence. “He says it’s important.”
Eyeing me as he gave me a wide berth, Lawrence went to the phone.
Dr. Reynolds had used a horse-load of tranquilizer on Declan. He was strong—easily the strongest man I’d ever known in my life—but he was completely out of it right now.
I touched his face, stroking his eye patch back into place, since it had shifted a little. I traced down his deepest scar, the one that started on his forehead and ran down past his patch to his jawline. I leaned closer and brushed my lips against it.
Declan protected me ninety-nine percent of the time. I would protect him for the remaining one percent. And if Dr. Reynolds or his loyal vampire assistant wanted to get to him again, they’d have to go through me first. An empty threat normally, but at the moment I felt ready to tear someone’s finger off with my teeth if they so much as pointed it in my direction.
I stroked his forehead. “Declan, please wake up.”
His eyelid fluttered but didn’t open.
“You’re alive,” I told him, just in case he needed the reminder. “My blood didn’t kill you. I’m sure it hurt like hell, though, and I’m sorry for that. As soon as you wake up, we’re getting the fuck out of here.”
“Jill, it’s time we got started,” Dr. Reynolds said.
I glared at him. “With what? Fixing me?”
“No. I need more time to work on a viable serum. You said we could take more samples of your blood to keep in reserve.”
“So we’re here not because you were ready to start helping me, but because you wanted me to help you. After you tried to kill Declan. That makes a ton of sense, you bastard.”
His jaw tightened. “Perhaps my personal feelings got in the way of what I should
be focusing on.”
“Wow, you’re fucking brilliant. No wonder you’re a scientist.” My eyes narrowed. “Can’t really say I’m in much of a mood at the moment to be all that cooperative. All I want to know is if Declan’s going to be okay.”
“If he’s survived this long after being injected with your blood, I don’t see why not.” He looked openly disappointed about that.
“You don’t honestly believe Declan set out to kill your wife just for the hell of it, do you? She must have—”
“Must have what? Deserved it?” he snapped, but then his expression softened again. “I—I don’t know anymore. In a war, sometimes it’s hard to tell which side is right. I myself have had to do many things outsiders might consider evil. But in order to learn, to grow, I had to find a way to—”
His voice broke off with a grunt of pain and he spun around. It took me a second to register with shock that there was now a knife sticking out of his back. He grappled to pull it from his flesh, and it clattered to the ground.
Lawrence stood behind him, his hands fisted at his sides. The look on his face left no question as to what he was feeling.
Rage.
My eyes widened with horror. “What the hell are you doing?”
Lawrence didn’t take his attention off Dr. Reynolds. “I trusted you, you son of a bitch.”
His eyes had turned to black—normally what a hungry vampire’s did. Dark blue veins branched down along the sides of his face to his neck. That was another very bad sign.
The fact that Dr. Reynolds was still on his feet made me think that the knife hadn’t been deep enough to kill him. Blood stained his white coat.
“What are you talking about?” he demanded.
“That phone call? That was somebody I had searching for Susan. They finally figured out where she is.”
“You need to calm down, Lawrence. We need to talk about this.”
“All of this time I’ve trusted you, Victor. You gave me a chance when everyone else wanted to have me staked. You saw that I still could be a help to you, despite what I am. I thought you and my wife—you were the only ones who gave me a chance.” He let out a shaky breath. “And this is what you do to me? To us?”
I was listening, but I didn’t understand. Something had broken in Lawrence; his voice had a pitchy quality that made me think he wasn’t in complete control of his sanity at the moment. Whatever he’d heard on the phone had broken him.
“Lawrence—” Dr. Reynolds began, his voice filled with pain.
“She’s been here all the time, hasn’t she? In the rooms that are off limits to everyone but you. You son of a bitch. You stole her from me and have been using her in your goddamned experiments, haven’t you? Haven’t you?”
He came forward enough to grab the doctor by his coat and shook him hard enough to rattle anyone’s brain.
I crouched next to Declan, holding on to his arm tightly. “Declan, wake up. You have to snap out of this now.”
That feeling of dread I’d had in my gut ever since we arrived at this place—maybe I should have paid attention to it. But I never could have predicted this.
“I knew what you’d do if I told you the truth,” Dr. Reynolds said, his voice strong but now with a naked edge of fear to it. “Lawrence, listen to me, you didn’t know this, but—but Susan was pregnant. She was keeping it a secret from you.”
The rage on Lawrence’s face faded, replaced with shock. “Pregnant?”
“It was your child. A dhampyr was growing inside her.”
“Jesus.”
“She didn’t want you to know—she knew you’d take it badly. She came to me to get an abortion.”
A shiver went down my arms. Abortion was the normal way to deal with a human woman pregnant with a dhampyr. Since most of them turned out to be the monster kind, a birth that only happened when the dhampyr literally clawed its way out of its mother’s womb, which inevitably led to the mother’s horrific death, there really wasn’t much choice. Births of the more human dhampyrs like Declan were the rarity.
“Did you abort the fetus?” Lawrence demanded.
Dr. Reynolds shook his head. “The fetus was to be kept alive, monitored.”
“Another damn experiment.”
“Yes.”
“All this time I’ve been beside myself with worry and she’s been here. The same place I come to every day, working by your side. And you never told me.”
“There was no other way.”
“It’s always about research for you, isn’t it Victor?” His expression twisted into something ugly, and he raked a hand through his red hair. “I have a secret, too, one I’ve kept so it wouldn’t hurt you. Clara wanted to leave you before she was killed. She’d fallen in love with another vampire. She hated that you spent all your time here, working on ways to kill her kind. Our kind. If you hadn’t been such a damn workaholic, then maybe she wouldn’t have ended up on the wrong side of that hunter’s stake.”
“No, it can’t be true.” Dr. Reynolds’s expression filled with sick shock. His lovely vampire wife hadn’t been so lovely after all.
“Where is Susan?” Lawrence shook Dr. Reynolds. “Where? Tell me and maybe this can end well for you.”
There was silence for a few very long moments.
“She’s dead.”