The emotions coming off her were the hardest. The sheer depth of feeling there, the flickers of love, hate, grief, fury, terror, loneliness... it all collided and jerked my own feelings to and fro, my own fears for Black, anger at Brick, that feeling of powerlessness. The sheer depth of feeling there was overwhelming... like a drug, pulling me deeper into her mind.
I fought that pull.
I fought to stay objective, to keep my own mind and emotions separate. I knew I couldn’t afford to get lost in her, to lose myself, or forget what I was doing here. That was true of any client, but here it was doubly true... here, in this space, I almost became her in order to see inside her mind. There was no way to avoid that.
Still, I read my human clients too; the process wasn’t totally alien to me.
Once I’d more or less regained control, pulling out of her somewhat in the process, I could hear her words again, louder that time.
...never do it again... never do it... never never never do it again... never...
Lily? I spoke in her mind gently. Lily, can you hear me?
Never again, she promised, maybe to herself, maybe to me, maybe to the world. Never again. Never ever ever again... I won’t do it again... I won’t... I won’t...
But she would do it again.
She believed she would, anyway. She believed it with every beat of her heart.
She hoped if she said it often enough, she might somehow change the future, maybe change her past, too. She was trying to rewire her brain, change something inside of herself through sheer force of will. I’d come across such thought patterns before, of course.
They were really more of a prayer than a promise.
What is it you’ll never do? I sent. What is it you don’t like, Lily?
...never never never do it again, never again. I’ll never do it again. I mean it this time... I really really really mean it... I mean it I mean it I mean it I mean it I mean it. I’ll never do it again... never...
Like before, on the plane, she looked at me in that space.
Inside her own mind, her eyes weren’t red. They were a deep, warm brown, like polished wood. Her face was fuller, more pink. Her body looked younger somehow, less hard.
Those eyes pleaded with me.
Kill me, she sent, just like she had before.
The words carried a desperation that hit at my heart.
I knew what she was. I knew, but I couldn’t help feeling for her.
Kill me... please. You seem like a good person. You seem good... not like me. Not like him. Just do it... end this, please. Don’t tell him you’re going to do it, he’ll never allow it. You need to do it... kill me... please...
That desperation tensed my throat.
Maybe for that reason, or maybe for another, I found myself telling her the truth.
I can’t kill you, Lily, I told her. Brick would kill my husband if I did that. And me. And probably other people I care about. I’m sorry, but I don’t know you... I won’t risk the people I love because you want to die. You’ll have to find some other way.
He’ll never let me go.
That grief in her swelled, flooding over me in a thick cloud.
He’ll never let me go... she sent, softer. I heard love in her words that time. Never. He’d never leave me alone if I even whispered it. You don’t know what he’s like. He’d see it as... betrayal. Like he’d betrayed me, if he let it happen.
I bit my lip.
It went against every rule of my profession to encourage a client in their suicidal fantasies.
Then again, Lily wasn’t a client. Should I really be advising a vampire not to kill herself, given that her kind was a threat to me and every other person on the planet? How much worse would Brick be, if he got his girlfriend back?
Then another thought struck me. How much worse would he be if he lost her?
I changed the subject.
What did they do to you there, Lily? I sent. In the lab. What happened to you that changed you so much? I need to know.
There was a silence after I asked the question.
I saw her body once more in my mind’s eye, sitting on that couch, rocking herself gently. She stared at the floor with those deep brown eyes.
For a long-feeling few seconds, that’s all I saw.
Then other things flashed at me.
I saw what Brick told me about... an underground lab. It was cold, like a maze of glass cages and metal doors, filled with stainless steel and white tile and beeping machines. Filled with people in white coats with empty faces.
A clinician’s yell. “She’s awake! Quick! Hold her!”
I almost didn’t recognize her.
I really didn’t recognize her at first.
Lily writhed violently on a padded table, hissing at her captors from where she’d been handcuffed by her wrists and ankles. She looked so completely different from the pale ghost of a girl I’d first seen on the plane––I could only stare at her, wondering who she was.
The Lily in Lily’s memory wasn’t a girl at all... she was a woman.
Well, an adult, female vampire... whatever one calls that.
She growled threats and hissed at her captors, thrashing with every ounce of her strength to free herself from the arms of at least six guards who held her down, who struggled to hold her even with the chains locking her to the padded table. I watched them stick a syringe into her neck, right before she jerked away and broke the glass vial with her forehead. They put another needle in her arm... then a third one in her leg.
I watched her fight them, fingers hooked into claws, fangs extended. Muscles rippled her bare arms as she screamed at them––a hoarse, terrifying scream that held so much rage, defiance and frustration I wanted to scream with her.
She knew who she was. She knew who she was.
And yes, there was something... magnificent about that. About her.
Her blond hair looked thicker, more vibrant, shining under the florescent lights. She wore dark red leather pants, a black tank top, leather armbands and a studded belt. An emerald-green stone hung around her neck; she wore a matching stone on her ring finger.
I watched them take the jewelry off her roughly, along with hoop earrings and a piercing in her navel. I watched her try to claw at them to keep them from taking the ring.
It took them a few times, but they finally got it from her. Her nails, already painted red, were dripping with blood by then, however.
I heard her threaten them, that fury and hatred rippling off her in a broiling wave.
She told them she’d eat their hearts... that she’d hunt their children, their mates.
I watched two of the men yank heeled boots off her feet, struggling to avoid her attempts to kick them even with her ankles cuffed to the bed.
Slowly, slowly... the drugs kicked in...
The image faded.
The girl on the forest green couch blinked at me, her eyes so wide they didn’t look real.
You see? she whispered. That’s how I am. That is how I truly am...
I wasn’t sure how to answer. I wasn’t sure how I felt.
You were amazing... I began carefully.
...I was a monster, she corrected, her words blunt. I am a monster still. In my heart.
There was another silence.
What happened after that? I asked her.
Grief came off her in another dense cloud, grief and a kind of longing. The images I saw that time came in flickers, scraps, pieces of light.
I got a sudden, shockingly visceral, surround-sound image of her and Brick fucking, making love... him laughing as he held her down, right before he bit her, angling into her with a thick groan as she writhed up against him. She laughed with him, a fierce joy in her heart, a knowledge that she owned him, she owned him...
Then, slowly, that vanished.
I saw her in that same glass room, half-conscious with drugs.
She fought to keep her eyes open while they took her blood.
Days had gon
e by, then days after that. They’d taken a lot of her blood, then most of her blood... until she looked on the verge of death. They drained her until she looked like a wasted skeleton... then, right before she would have died, they pumped her full of new blood, blood she’d never had in her veins before... blood that made her sick.
She got sicker and sicker. She started dying again, begging them... until finally they drained most of that bad blood and started feeding her something different through the hanging red bags.
Human blood, the present Lily explained. They went back to feeding me human blood after that. They had no choice. It was that or kill me. Her mental voice grew bitter. They should have killed me.
What had they given you before? I sent.
She only shook her head. She didn’t know.
My blood changed after that. Her mental voice grew more present, sharper than it had been. They said I was different. They said they could begin to teach me after that...
Different how? I sent. How were you different, Lily?
She didn’t answer.
Teach you what, Lily? I asked instead. What did they want to teach you?
She looked at me inside my mind, her brown eyes wide with surprise.
Not to do bad things anymore, she sent.
I didn’t know quite how to answer that, either. At my silence, her words rose into a keening whine, making me wince, then fight with her mind to calm her down.
They promised me! They promised they could fix me... but they never did! They never fixed me... they tried and tried but they never fixed me like they said they would... it’s worse now! I’m the same, but worse... I don’t have him and I just want to die...
I wrapped myself around her mind, blowing warm light over her.
I did it without thinking, like I might have done if she were human... or seer. I felt part of her react to what I’d done, even as another part recoiled, flinching away from that warmth as though it disgusted her, even made her angry. That part of her hated me, wanted to rip out my throat with her teeth. I was useless to that part of her.
Worse than useless... I was an enemy, one of them.
I felt the split there, the warring sides, and something clicked.
Once it had, wonder came over me.
Did it work, Lily? That wonder leeched out of my words, making them firmer, more insistent. Is that what happened? Did they start to turn you human?
I felt her confusion, a kind of refusal to hear my question.
Inside my mind, she shook her head, tears welling in her eyes.
It didn’t feel like a no, though.
They didn’t... She let out a pale gasp in that space. They couldn’t. They couldn’t do it... they promised it would be different. That it wouldn’t hurt anymore... that I’d be better...
Pain expanded off her, a dark, nightmarish cloud that caught in my chest, making it hard to breathe, to even see her. I felt the dread there, the self loathing, the will to die.
When I could see her again, more tears streamed down her face.
They promised me... and now they’re all dead.
Chapter 8
Love is the Hardest Truth
I spent what felt like days in Lily’s mind.
In truth, it was probably only a few hours.
Maybe it wasn’t even that.
In any case, I don’t think I learned much beyond that initial truth I came upon, that somehow, something those scientists did to Lily reversed some portion of her vampire nature, turning her more human.
Since I didn’t really know what made vampires in the first place, not outside of the mythology, that is, I had no idea what that even meant. In Lily’s memories it looked almost like some form of extreme genetic manipulation, utilizing a combination of blood transfusions and manmade DNA-altering viruses. Brick had said essentially the same thing.
I didn’t understand that side of things partly because Lily herself didn’t understand it. She had zero scientific background and also wasn’t seer, so didn’t have our photographic memories. Anyway, she’d been unconscious or drugged for most of it, so didn’t remember enough relevant details to help me piece it together.
Brick refused to believe it.
He paced on the thick green and black rug between me and the stone fireplace, grilling me on everything I’d seen, forcing me to repeat the same details again and again. Fury distorted his handsome face, nearly making him unrecognizable as he paced. That fury grew darker, more murderous, the longer he paced, the more my words grew real to him.
“What do I do?” he barked at me finally, standing in front of me.
He was breathing harder, his long hair mussed, his fangs extended, his body blocking most of my view of the fire and outlined in its yellow glow.
He’d already bitten me... twice... so that he could see everything I’d seen while I’d been inside Lily’s mind. I’d wondered how he hadn’t gotten most of this from biting Lily herself, but, being a vampire, apparently Lily had more control over what he saw. She also apparently hid some truths from Brick deliberately, fearing how he might react.
The big one was that she didn’t want to be a vampire anymore.
She was just human enough now to want to be human.
She remembered being human before. She remembered, and didn’t want to be a vampire. In fact, she’d decided she’d rather be dead.
Brick must have felt that on me when he fed from me, too.
“What do I do?” he repeated, his chest heaving through the tailored dress shirt. “How do I fix her?”
I pressed my lips together, torn between feeling sorry for him and annoyed impatience.
“Which part? You can’t remove her empathy, Brick. She doesn’t want to murder people anymore. She doesn’t want to live forever, murdering people... do you get that?”
“No,” he snarled. “How do I make her like she was?”
I frowned, looking up at him. “I did my part in this, didn’t I?”
“I am asking for your help, goddamn it!”
I flinched at the violence in his voice, then frowned. I was tempted to remind him how little I owed him in that area, then didn’t, sighing as I reverted to my “doctor” voice.
“Can’t you just...” I waved a hand. “You know. Turn her again?”
He clenched a hand in his own hair at his forehead. “I tried that already.”
I frowned more. Of course he had.
I sighed again, combing fingers through my own hair. “Well, I can’t help you with the science part...” I said, shaking my head. “I have no idea what they did to her, Brick. And she seems to think you killed all of the actual scientists, so there’s not much you can do in terms of asking them...” Pausing, I said, “Did you take any of the actual data they left on the project?”
He shook his head, still staring down at the carpet.
Then, seeming to think about my question, he inclined his head impatiently to one side.
“Yes. It was worthless. They were extremely careful about documentation. None of the actual experiments were on the server.” He gave me a murderous look, but it didn’t seem aimed at me. “...We burned the lab,” he said, voice cold. “I only realized later that they did most of the work by hand, as a security precaution.”
I frowned, lifting a hand and letting it fall to my lap. “Well. You’re pretty much fucked, then, Brick. All I can tell you is what Lily herself knows... and what she saw. Neither is enough to really help you. And genetics isn’t really my area.”
“And she really wanted you to kill her?” His voice was stricken. “My beautiful girl wanted to die? She really said those things to you, to not tell me... to end her life in spite of me?”
I stared at him, unable to really deal with the emotion I saw in those red eyes. Still, something in my face must have given him the answer he was looking for.
He broke eye contact.
I watched him as he stared at Lily, that rage and desperation visible on his face, his chest heaving as he looked at
her.
Then, before I could make sense of his expression, he turned.
I watched in disbelief as he stalked over to the fireplace, grabbing the cross hilt of that long sword that stood over the stone hearth. Pulling it off the wall in a single, smooth stroke, he stalked back towards the sofa and chairs.
I stood up, backing away from him.
My heart leapt to my throat as I held up a hand. My mind went to Black.
“Brick!” I said. “I did what you asked! I did everything you asked!”
But he didn’t seem to hear me.
He walked up to Lily instead.
Without a pause, he wound his arm and waist up and to the right, gripping the sword in one white-knuckled hand. That fury and grief shone from his eyes like a living force, turning his irises blood-red. The sword itself barely paused at the apex of that arc when he swung it down... hard... putting most of his weight behind it.
Before I could make so much as a sound...
The sword cut clean through Lily’s neck, severing her head from her body.
I watched, numb, as it fell with a loud-feeling thunk, hitting into the couch’s wooden armrest. Her head tangled in her blond hair, following the direction of the sword as it tumbled off the arm of the couch and then onto the floor.
Blood didn’t spurt, like I would have expected; it welled up and over the stump and bone of her neck and spine until it darkened the top half of her dress. The body hung upright for a long-feeling few seconds before it slumped into the corner of the couch like a broken doll.
I stared down at Lily’s head, at her open eyes, half-covered in tangled blond hair.
Already, those eyes no longer looked like glass tinted with red.
They’d darkened somehow, just from being severed from her vampire heart.
In my mind they were brown... and the look in them was relief.
I knew I must have imagined those things, though.
I was still staring down at her face when Brick threw the sword into the fireplace, using enough force to send up a cloud of sparks like fireflies into the room. A handful of those sparks fell far enough from the hearth to smolder on the carpet.
Brick was already walking away.
Taming the Vampire: Over 25 All New Paranormal Alpha Male Tales of Contemporary, Military, Shifters, Billionaires, Werewolves, Magic, Fae, Witches, Dragons, Demons & More Page 145
