by M. J. Scott
“I’ll take care of it,” Esme said before Dan could respond. I got the feeling she was trying to stop us from arguing.
“Yes, we’re going,” Dan said as though Esme hadn’t spoken. He took a seat next to me, giving me a ‘don’t argue’ look. “Ani and Sam would skin me if I kept you away. You’re still practically a cu-newborn.”
I ignored the fact he’d almost called me a cub. “I’m only going if Rhi’s okay.”
He leaned closer, gearing up to convince me. “You’re going regardless, even if—” His teeth snapped shut when the door to the office opened.
The officer who walked in looked like he’d stepped out of a recruitment poster—if they had recruitment posters for forty-year-olds. The chest of his jacket was a multicolored declaration that he’d seen the world and shot at stuff. Lots of stuff. His pants had razor edged creases that made me even more acutely aware of my scruffy state and the shine on his shoes put Esme’s to shame.
He put the file he was carrying down on the desk and then stood looking at us, his posture screaming command.
He wasn’t an alpha wolf but he was just about the closest thing to it I’d seen in a human. Dan rose from his chair and Esme and I followed suit.
The man nodded acknowledgment. “I’m Colonel Morgan.”
“Sir.” Dan nodded back. “I’m Special Agent Gibson, this is Agent Walsh and Ashley Keenan. Ms. Keenan’s a contractor with the Taskforce.”
“I know who you all are.” His tone was neutral. Too neutral. If I knew anything about undercurrents, I’d say that he wasn’t too happy about having Rhianna or us on his base.
Tough.
“Sir, can you tell me how Rhianna is?” I said. Screw protocol or whatever.
“Ms. Anders is currently resting. The other vampire is with her. My team is still carrying out tests.”
“Can we see her?”
“The Taskforce has requested that I extend you every courtesy. But I want to make sure you all understand the ground rules.”
He could screw his ground rules. I listened with half an ear as he talked on, trying to look like I was paying attention but all I wanted was to see Rhi. Finally he stopped talking containment and approach protocol and procedures and summoned another enlisted guy to escort us down to the hospital wing.
The sting of disinfectant and old blood and all those hospital smells made my stomach lurch as we passed through the entry point after having our identification inspected. Three checkpoints later, each one taking longer than the one before, we were ushered into an elevator and descended down into the bowels of the hospital.
* * *
Marco looked up when we entered the room but Rhi didn’t. Her gaze stayed fastened on the picture hanging on the wall—a vista showing open country leading up to mountains—where the window in most hospital rooms would be. This room had no windows. Just that one small picture.Which might be the closest that Rhi got to the outside world for a very long time.
Her head didn’t move when Marco stood to greet us. His suit was a little rumpled but otherwise his appearance gave no indication that anything was out of the ordinary.
“How is she?” I asked softly. I wasn’t sure if it was the fluorescent lights but Rhi’s face looked shadowed, gray somehow. All vampires are pale, except when they’ve just fed, but they look healthy—energized—even when they’re hungry. Rhi looked ill.
I took her hand and she flinched away, tugging free of my touch, eyes still glued on the picture.
“Rhi? It’s me. Ashley.”
Not even a flicker of recognition.
“Rhi, it’s okay. You’re safe here.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “No.”
I reached for her hand again. “Yes, you are. It’s okay.”
Her eyes flew open, finally looking at me. Fear colored her expression. “Speak softly. They’ll hear you.”
“Who will? It’s okay, sweetie, we’re looking after you. I’m here. And Dan. Do you remember Dan?”
“You can’t stop them.” Her eyes squinched shut again and she curled into a ball. “You can’t stop them.” Her voice was almost a wail, high and eerie.
“Stop who, sweetie?” I looked at Marco hoping he could shed some light on what she was so afraid of. He shrugged. Highly helpful. I tried again. “Rhi? Stop who?”
She didn’t answer, just curled tighter, shivers running through her body. This couldn’t be normal. Sure, being turned had to be a little confusing, I hadn’t exactly handled the knowledge that I was going to be a werewolf gracefully myself but Rhi had been rational before the change. “Why is she so scared?” I asked Marco. “Did the doctors do something to her?”
“Not the doctors,” Rhi whispered. Her eyes half opened and I could see her pupils wide and black. Too wide. She looked stoned.
“Did they give her something?”
“No, cara. They took some samples but nothing else. She had been like this since she woke.”
“This isn’t normal?”
He pursed his lips. “Normal is hard to define. We are not dealing with a normal transition.”
“She’s terrified,” I said.
“She’s been through a lot,” Dan offered. “Maybe she just needs some time.”
“No more time,” Rhi whispered.
My head snapped back to her. “Rhi?”
“No more time,” she crooned. Her eyes were shut. “All out of time.”
“Dan, maybe you should get the doctor.” He nodded and left. I squeezed Rhi’s hand. “Rhi, it’s Ash. Do you remember where you are?”
Blazing blue hit me as she suddenly looked at me. “I’m with the monsters,” she said quite clearly. “Careful. They’ll hear you.” Tears started to run down her face.
I reached for a tissue. “There are no monsters here, Rhi. There’s just us. We’re at the hospital.”
She shook her head, ducking away as I tried to wipe her face. “No,” she said. “There are monsters.” She held out her hands, looked at me beseechingly, “Monsters everywhere. Fangs and claws.”
Her fingers curved inward and I caught her hands before she could hurt herself with hard vamp nails.
“You’re remembering the attack,” I said. “It’s okay now.”
“No. Fangs and claws.” She bared her teeth at me and I flinched at the sight of the two sharp fangs in her mouth.
“Monsters everywhere,” she repeated. “Monsters in me.”
I squeezed her hands, blinking back tears. “You are not a monster.”
“Monsters in me. Blood and fear. Can’t run. Nowhere to run.” Her voice rose a few notches, high and thin.
“Rhi, it’s me. It’s Ashley. You’re safe.” I felt stupid, repeating the obvious but I didn’t know how to reach her. How to get through the layers of fear and stress to the girl I knew was in there somewhere.
Rhi blinked at me then looked down, pale hair falling over her face. It was lank and greasy-looking. I’d never seen Rhi with dirty hair. She was the type of girl who practically carried a flat-iron in her handbag, even as a teenager. Maybe if I could coax her into a shower, she might feel better. She smelled like blood, sweat, fear, and the faint acid smell I associated with vampires. If I could smell all of that on her, she could too. Which had to be confusing as well as unpleasant.
Everything had to be confusing. Everything would be too loud, too bright, too hard. Until she adjusted to her new senses, it would be like being a newborn all over again.
A newborn who could kill a man in seconds.
I eased my grip on her hands, worried I might be hurting her. “Honey, do you want to take a shower?”
She didn’t change position. Didn’t indicate she’d heard me at all. “Blood and fear,” she sing-songed. “So much blood. Sweet and salt. I never knew it was sweet.” She smiled at me suddenly, eyes wide. “Did you know that?”
I swallowed hard, trying not to remember what the blood had felt like running down my throat the first time I’d eaten a freshly killed deer with t
he pack. It had been sweet. Too sweet. Too good. Not like the acid filth of Tate in my mouth. “I know.”
Rhi blinked at me. “You know the monsters.” Her smile vanished. “You’ve got the monsters in your head too.”
She wasn’t really making any sense and I wondered how long the doctor would be. I worried that she was having some sort of breakdown.
“There’s nothing in my head but me.” I summoned a smile. “Nothing in your head but you.”
“No. No, there are monsters. And voices.” She peered at me. “And secrets all hidden away.” Her eyes lit with something I couldn’t name. Curiosity? Glee?
I no longer knew if she was talking about herself or me, but whichever it was, it was creeping me out. I looked back at Marco. “What’s going on?” I mouthed.
“So many dark twisty places.” Rhi’s sing-song tone broke in before Marco could say anything. “They think they have hidden it well. But I can see. A tiny light.”
“See what, Rhi?” I asked. “What do you see?” I glanced over at Marco, wanting reassurance.
Marco came up beside me, staring down at Rhi with pursed lips. Then he shook his head. “I did not think of it before but it’s possible she has some psychic ability now.”
I stared at him. Rhi winding up with vamp powers other than the normal stuff hadn’t crossed my mind.
“Psychic? She’s reading our minds?” I moved backward, I couldn’t help it.
Rhi still crooned to herself, nonsense syllables interspersed with ‘dark’ and ‘blood’ and ‘no’.
“Can’t you do something to help her?” I asked Marco.
“If I try and control her now, it might do more harm than good,” he said. He moved closer to the bed and Rhi’s head twisted toward him.
“Monster. There’s one.” She laughed. “Pretty monsters. They try and fool us. Pretty like secrets. All tucked away. They all want it. No one knows where it is. All ashes and dust. He was clever.”
“Who was clever?” I hoped she was just babbling but if Marco was right, then she might not be.
Rhi looked at me. “Your father,” she said. And then she started screaming.
Chapter Twelve
She didn’t stop until they sedated her. And even when they had her unconscious and strapped back to the bed, the memory of her cries still rang in my ears. I sat there for half a day while the doctors came and went.
Dan dragged me away to sleep eventually but I was back at her bedside as soon as possible. There was a doctor there, pumping something into her IV.
“Can’t you let her wake up?”
He shook his head at me. “We tried a little while ago. She started screaming again. Then she hit one of the nurses.”
I had a vision of a nurse flying across the room to smash against the wall. “Is she okay?”
“He’ll be fine,” the doctor said. “A couple of cracked ribs and bruises. No thanks to her.”
The look he directed at Rhi made me nervous. He didn’t want to help her. He wanted her out of the picture.
“Isn’t keeping her asleep bad for her? New vampires need to feed, don’t they?”
“We’ll put in a nasogastric tube. That will keep her nourished for now.” He met my eyes, had the grace to look slightly sheepish. “Sleeping might be what she needs. Sometimes the mind just needs time.”
I couldn’t see how sleeping would help Rhi. When she woke up she’d still be a vampire. An outcast in her town. Quite likely an outcast in her family as well.
The door opened behind me and I turned.
Marco.
He looked tired. And troubled. I didn’t know what to say to him.
“She is still sleeping?” he asked.
“The doctors are still sedating her.”
“Ah.” He looked down at the floor then back at Rhi.
“Do you think she’ll be okay?”
He started one of his very Italian shrugs and I held up a hand.
“Tell me the truth.”
“The truth is that I do not know. This is not how it is supposed to be.” He came closer to the bed and something close to anger passed across his face. “The change should be a gift. Not a violation. This new thing. It is male.”
Mah-lay. I didn’t know what male meant but his tone made it clear it was bad. Very bad. “Vampires have been changing people forever. You can’t tell me it’s all voluntary.”
“No. But I like to think that we have changed too. We can be better.”
I pictured Maelstrom and Tate and Esteban. “Not everyone agrees with you.”
“Maybe not. But I doubt many would agree with this.” He straightened the blanket at the end of Rhianna’s bed as she moved restlessly despite the drugs.
“Can you tell anything from your bond?”
He sighed. “Her mind is not easy. She is...confused.”
Confused being the polite term for crazy perhaps? I’d seen very little of Rhi in the creature she had become.
I tugged at the blanket covering Rhi, pulling it up over her shoulder. It fell back again almost immediately when she twitched. “Will she become less confused?”
Silence.
“The truth, Marco.”
“She may.”
My heart grabbed onto that ‘may’ like a lifeline. “Then she could be okay?”
“Apart from the mutation she carries? Apart from not being able to live the life most of us live? Perhaps. But I have been a vampire a long time. I have seen many become our kind. Most do not react this way. Even those who did not choose it. They adjust.”
“Rhi’s different. Her virus is different. Maybe her body needs more time.”
“Perhaps. But she also needs to want to adjust.”
“What are you saying?”
Green eyes met mine and they seemed deep and endless. I wanted to look away but I told myself I could trust Marco. He wouldn’t try for my mind. He was on my side.
“Those who take the change this way—those who are it to this extent—”I licked my lips and swallowed against a mouth dry as grave dust. “Yes? Just tell me.”
“Those ones. Most often they choose the sunrise.”
* * *
Choose the sunrise. The words echoed through my head on constant replay. Marco thought Rhianna would kill herself. Would walk out into the sun and let it burn her away rather than live. Would become a pile of stinking acid ash like the vampire outside my office.
Not on my watch.
Not while there was any chance I could get hold of Smith and find a way to fix what had been done to her. Not change her back—I knew that wasn’t possible—but make her a normal noncontagious vampire. So she could feed and be free.
I made them bring her out of the sedation before we left for the Retreat. Just enough so her eyes flickered open slowly.
“Rhi, it’s Ash.” I held my breath, wondering if she’d respond. Or whether we’d get screams or violence.
“Ash?” She sounded tired. “I’m sleepy.”
“You’re in hospital. It’s the medicine.”
“Medicine?”
Shit. She didn’t remember. Well, maybe that was a good thing. I wasn’t going to tell her. “Everything’s fine. They’re taking good care of you.”
“Okay.” Her eyes started to drift close again.
I squeezed her hand before she could fall back asleep. “I have to go away for a while. But I’ll be back. We can talk then.”
She smiled at me. “I dreamed strange things. There was blood.”
Surely it couldn’t hurt to let her think it was all a nightmare just for a little while. “Bad dreams. It’s the medicine. I’ll see you soon, okay?”
“Uh-huh.”
I started to rise but she shot out a hand and grabbed my arm. “Careful,” she said. “There are monsters in the dark. Don’t go into the woods today.”
My pulse sped into overdrive. The woods? Did she mean the Retreat or was she just dreaming? With no way of knowing, I nodded at the doctor. “I’m fine, Rhi. Go back t
o sleep.” The doctor pushed the plunger on the syringe, sending another dose of whatever the heck they used to sedate vampires into her system.
* * *
“Cutting it close, aren’t you?” Ani asked as we reached the front porch of the Retreat’s main building.
I glanced back over my shoulder to where the sun was burning its way down the sky. “Moonrise isn’t for another forty-five minutes.”
“You’re meant to be here at least two hours before, you’re new.” Ani’s eyes narrowed at me.
“Dan’s old.” Old and currently humping our luggage into our guesthouse.
She shook her head, making her red curls bounce around her face, like a pissed off Raggedy Ann doll. “Old won’t help if you leave it too long.”
“I’d be okay with Dan with me.”
“Neither of you will be okay if you suddenly change into wolves while driving a car.” Ani leaned back against the porch post, crossing her arms. She looked at me pointedly as I tried not to flinch. That had happened to Dan and me once, back when he’d been new. In fact it had been the thing that had made me realize I couldn’t be with him and stay human.
That had made me break up with him.
Not my favorite memory. Obviously Ani thought I needed the reminder of how wrong things could go. I sighed. I didn’t want to fight with my Alpha on top of everything else. “Okay, you’re right. I’m sorry. Rough weekend.”
“I heard.” Her eyes were a deep, deep green in the growing twilight. “Are you okay?”
I shrugged. There was no way to answer that question. Not in the time left before the moon came up.
“Go change,” Ani said, smiling at last. “We can talk after.”
* * *
It was pretty much full dark when Dan and I walked toward the stand of woods nearest the buildings. The pull of the moon tingled through me, like being washed in waves of warm, wild energy. But there was a thread of nerves under the anticipation. I hadn’t done this often enough to be blasé.
“Ready?” Dan said as we reached the trees. He smiled at me, and I knew he felt the same thrum of the moon’s invitation.
