Destined for an Early Grave (24 page)

T
HE 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 have 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.

A
RE 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.

“It’s Gregor, isn’t it?” I said before he could speak. “What did he do?”

Mencheres put his hands on my shoulders. “Cat, your mother has disappeared.”

“No!”

It burst from me along with a sudden spurt of tears. Bones’s arm tightened around my waist.

“How? Was the junkyard attacked?” he asked.

Mencheres shook his head. “Rodney said she disappeared from her room. Her nightclothes were still in her bed.”

He’d snatched her from her sleep. Oh God, Gregor had pulled my mother right out of her dreams to kidnap her.

“He said he’d make me suffer,” I whispered, hearing Gregor’s snarl again from my last dream with him. “I didn’t think he’d go after my mother. How could he if he never drank from her?”

My voice trailed off. Gregor could have. I’d assumed he’d just used the power in his gaze to compel my mother to tell me that he was an old friend the night I met Gregor. But obviously, he’d taken her blood as well.

“I need to talk to Gregor,” I said at once. “Someone has to know how to reach him.”

Mencheres dropped his hands from my shoulders. “You know that’s what he wants. He’ll want to trade, you for her.”

“Then I’ll do it,” I said.

Bones’s grip on me turned to steel. “No, you won’t.”

“What do you expect me to do? Shrug my shoulders and just
hope
Gregor doesn’t kill her? I know you don’t like her, Bones, but she’s my mother. I can’t abandon her!”

“He absolutely will not kill her, Kitten,” Bones replied, his voice hard. “She’s the only advantage he has over you now that you’re a vampire and he can’t dreamsnatch you again.”

Fear, rage, and frustration boiled up in me to form a harsh scent, like burning plastic.
You could go to Gregor, but then Bones could attack once they know where Gregor is. No, Gregor will expect that and have a trap waiting. If Bones brought enough people to get out of a trap, Gregor would know you were double-crossing him and probably kill her out of spite.

“Mencheres!” I exclaimed, grabbing his shirt. “You could go with me. You imprisoned Gregor once, you could do it again! Or better yet, we’ll kill him.”

He shook his head. “I imprisoned him before in secret so as to avoid a war between his allies and mine. If Gregor disappears now, everyone would know Bones or I had a hand in it. Gregor’s allies would surely attack us in revenge.”

I cast around for another alternative. “You could hold Gregor and his men in a vise with just your mind—I’ve seen you do it. Then I get my mother back and we can escape.”

Some of his long black hair spilled over his shoulder from how hard I’d yanked at him, but his gaze was flat—and sad.

“I cannot do that, Cat.”

“Why?” I spat.

“Because Gregor has rights to your mother under our laws,” Mencheres said quietly. “To attack him for taking one of his own people would bring more than Gregor’s allies against us.”

“Gregor doesn’t have any rights to my mother,” I snapped. Then something cold ran over me that had nothing to do with my new temperature.

Yes, he did. Under vampire law, I was Gregor’s wife, which meant anyone belonging to me was his, too. And on top of that, Gregor had bitten my mother, making her his property under vampire law if he chose to claim her as such.

Oh, God. No vampire would violate their laws to help me get my mother back, not even Vlad.

“If the laws are so strict, why haven’t I been forced back to Gregor?” I asked bitterly. “Why am I free, when she isn’t?”

“You haven’t admitted in public to being his wife, for one. Even still, some vampires who believe Gregor have advocated your being forced to return to him, Kitten. But most consider it not their business that you’ve chosen someone else. Attacking Gregor to retrieve your mum would make it their business, however. You know she’d be considered his property one way or the other, so stealing his property opens up the possibility in people’s minds that Mencheres and I might try to steal some of their people without cause, too.”

“Without cause?” My tone was lethal.

Bones gave me a look. “Cause in their eyes, not ours.”

“I can’t just abandon her to Gregor, laws or no laws,” I stated.

He turned me until we faced each other. “Kitten, neither will I, but we must wait. Once Gregor’s dead, your mum will be free. Gregor is expecting you to rush to him with all haste. He won’t be prepared for you to use caution. Will you trust me and wait until the timing is right?”

I bit my lip. The blood filling my mouth reminded me that my fangs were out. Amidst everything else, a wave of hunger swept through me. How could I just wait and hope that Gregor wouldn’t get impatient and send me parts of my mother as motivation to return to him? And yet how I could just rush into the fray without a plan, or backup? My
damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead
strategy hadn’t been working for me lately.

Bones touched my cheek. “I will find him, luv. And I will kill him.
Trust
me.”

I swallowed, feeling a tear slide down my face and knowing it would be colored pink.

“All right.”

Bones kissed me, quick but tender. Then he turned to Mencheres.

“We will announce her change. A formal gathering is best, so her introduction to vampire society can be done under an all-truce, avoiding the danger of an attack.”

“Agreed,” Mencheres said. “I’ll set it up at once.”

“You want to have a party?” I asked, not sure if I was hearing them right.
“That’s
your big idea?”

“There are still ghouls who consider you a threat to their species,” Bones replied. “One in particular, Apollyon, has made the most noise about you. Showing him and the others that you’re a vampire will get rid of that problem. It will also garner goodwill toward us with the other vampires in the community, which we’ll need when Gregor has his unfortunate, gruesome demise.”

Cold and practical.
Those were Bones’s strong suits. If I wanted my mother back alive, they’d better become mine as well.

“Good thinking.” My smile was bitter. “If I’d listened to you more often, my mother probably wouldn’t be in this mess.”

Bones grasped my chin. “Don’t you dare blame yourself. How many people you’ve protected in your very young life is nothing short of remarkable. You place too much pressure on yourself. All the answers don’t have to come from you, Kitten. You’re not alone anymore.”

For all but the two years Bones had been in my life, it felt like I’d been alone. No wonder it was such a hard mind-set for me to break.

“Okay, we’ll have my undead unveiling party. I’ll even suck on a human’s vein in public if that helps, since I assume we’re still keeping my eating habits under wraps.”

Bones shrugged. “I see no reason to alarm anyone over something so trivial, so yes, we’ll be keeping that a secret. But there’s no need to do something so dramatic. You’re clearly a full vampire now. That’s all anyone needs to see.”

“Where will this coming-out party be held?”

“Here. We’ve stayed in this house long enough. We’ll have the gathering here, then depart for another place afterward. And then, soon, we’ll find a way to rescue your mum.”

I was looking forward to that. Right now, slicing through Gregor’s guards sounded more fulfilling than anything else I could imagine.

But what if I couldn’t slice through his guards? I could be as weak as any new vampire now. There hadn’t been time to test my physical strength in the past few days. Only my mental fortitude as I got over the hunger insanity.

“Bones. We need to fight.”

To my profound relief, I discovered my strength had
not
been reduced to that of an average new vampire. In fact, Bones had been stunned in our first fight when I’d taken advantage of his restrained attack and beaten him. He’d gaped in shock at the knife in his chest—steel, not silver—then tossed back his head and laughed before engaging me in a no-holds-barred assault that left me feeling like I’d been dropped off a cliff—and then run over by a train.

My recovery period was now lightning fast in comparison to what it had been as a half-breed, but there was a price to pay for those upgrades. Everything felt more intense. This was great when it came to bedroom activities, but not when it came to brawling. A broken bone or knife wound might heal in seconds, but those seconds hurt with a mind-numbing intensity. Bones explained it was because my body no longer went into shock. No, it just went right from scorching pain into complete healing, assuming I was fast enough to not get any new injuries before the old ones cleared up.

The other thing I discovered was how different it felt to be cut with silver versus another metal. Never before had I realized how strong vampiric aversion was to silver, or how much my being half-human had shielded me from it. When injured by silver, I had all the blasting pain of my nerve endings going into shock, plus an added burning agony that made a steel-inflicted wound feel like bliss in comparison.

I’d have to learn how to control my instinctive reaction to the new, amped-up levels of pain. Right now, they stumbled me and cost me time. Time I couldn’t afford with the looming battle to get my mom back.

Four days passed with no word about my mother. I spent them in constant activity—when I wasn’t immobilized from dawn’s power over me. I found that the more blood I drank from Bones, the more I could force myself to stay awake as the sun crept over the horizon. I was up to being awake for an hour after dawn. Granted, that hour consisted of being in a state of near paralysis, but it was progress, though there was no meter for me to compare my progress to. I wasn’t the world’s only known half-breed, but apparently, I was the only one who’d been turned into a vampire. No one knew how long a typical new vampire’s weakness to dawn would affect me. I could be doing cartwheels at sunrise in a week—or it might take me a year.

The fifth night was my coming-out party. I was in no mood to stand there, smile, and greet a bunch of people who might have been screaming for my head recently, but that’s what I’d be doing. If it prevented more tensions between vampires and ghouls, as well as helping my chances of getting my mother back, I’d do it naked if I had to. Since this was a formal undead gathering, there would be food—all kinds—drinks, dancing, and festivities, while those in power pondered whether or not to slaughter half the people around them.

In other words, like a high-school prom.

I had just finished drying my hair when I heard the downstairs front door slam, then rapid footsteps on the stairs. Bones was back. He’d gone to get me a dress, since for whatever reason, he didn’t feel anything in the house was good enough. He came through the door with a garment bag in hand.

“Just in time,” I said. “I’m about to curl my hair. So, let’s see the dress.”

Bones zipped the bag open to reveal a long black dress, spaghetti-strapped, narrowing to a nonde-fined waist but with crystals embedded in the fabric around the bodice. Those crystals would mold around my breasts, I could tell from the cut, and even in the low light in the room, they sparkled and threw off dazzling colors.

“Beautiful,” I said, then smiled wryly. “Can’t wear a bra with it, though. I’m sure that was accidental on your part.”

He grinned. “Of course.”

It really was a beautiful dress. Simple, gothic, yet sparkly. Very appropriate for a vampire coming-out party.

“This’ll go great with my fangs,” I said, trying for flippancy to cover my nervousness. Even still, I could smell it on me. It was sickly sweet, like an overripe peach. If only there was a way I could cover my tension with the scent of
eau de brass balls
instead.