Sweet Last Drop

by Melody Johnson

  “You won’t hurt me,” I said. Her words about separated thoughts and actions sparked my inspiration. I didn’t need to spray her with silver to stop her from drinking. Once she swallowed my blood, I could just order her to stop. I raised my wrist closer to her mouth. “Drink.”

  The growling rattle inside her chest heightened. I resisted the instinctive urge to run, but my heart didn’t know that I was trying to help Ronnie. It sprinted, and I think Ronnie could hear its accelerated beat. She shook her head frantically, her eyes glowing, her fangs bared around her thin lips. I could see her will battling her instinct, and God help her, instinct was winning.

  I bared my wrist under her nose. She breathed in the full scent of my pulse, and I saw the moment instinct took over. The fear and recognition in her eyes glazed, replaced by honed focus. She no longer saw me with her eyes but with her entire being, and her being saw me as food.

  Ronnie took my arm in both hands and tore into my wrist with her fangs.

  She wasn’t gentle. Dominic could drink from the neat, double prick of his fang strike, but not Ronnie. Maybe from inexperience or maybe from the mindlessness of thirst, she ripped through veins and muscles like she was eating rather than drinking. She gnawed at my wrist, shaking her head like a dog with a bone. I couldn’t take it. I screamed. She barely took three swallows, and I already felt dizzy.

  “Veronica Carmichael,” I commanded, and my mind instantly connected with hers.

  I could taste the driving, aching burn in the back of her throat, only partially quenched by my sweetly spiced blood. I could hear the thousands of sounds that she could hear, my heartbeat and the expansion and release of my lungs through her ears. I could feel the prickle of silver still heating the exposed skin of her face, neck, and arms, even at this distance from the safe room. When I connected with Dominic’s mind, I could only decipher a muddle of his senses and the vague imprint of his thoughts, but when I connected with Ronnie, I could hear and taste and feel through her as clearly as if I were experiencing the senses myself. Her thirst was my thirst. Her pain was my pain. And beneath it all, within the very foundation of her being, I felt her confusion and fear of becoming the very monster that had been her lifelong nightmare.

  “Stop drinking my blood,” I commanded.

  Instantly, she stopped drinking, but her fangs were still imbedded in my wrist. She turned her head to look at me and inadvertently gouged deeper into my skin.

  I gritted my teeth against the pain and barked more precisely, “Take your fangs out of my wrist gently!”

  She did so, and gently.

  I sighed. It was my fault. I should have been more specific. “Now, without cutting me with your fangs and without drinking any more of my blood,” I said, giving my instructions precisely, no matter how obvious, “Use your tongue to slowly and gently lick into the wound and heal it from the inside out.”

  She slowly and gently licked into the wound and healed it from the inside out, exactly as I requested, but after a few minutes of licking, my blood was still pouring from the wound, pumping liberally into the sink. I grew increasingly light-headed. Her saliva wasn’t clotting or healing my wound.

  “Stop licking. Just stop,” I commanded. She stopped licking, and I settled on a more traditional method. I grabbed the nearest towel and tied it in a knot at my wrist. Only a few moments later, however, and the towel was already a sopping mess.

  I eyed Ronnie wearily. She was waiting, blank-eyed, for my next command, but I could still feel the thirst for more blood burning her throat. Her skin was now a healthy pink, so at least the blood had healed her silver burn. I wondered if the blood had been enough to sate her instinctual urge to hunt and kill, too.

  “I’m going to release your mind, Ronnie, but I need you to give me an honest answer before I do. Now that you’ve fed, will you still try to attack me?”

  “I don’t know. I feel a little more like myself now that I’ve fed, but I’m still hungry. I don’t want to hurt you, but when I smell your blood, what I want doesn’t matter. I’ll feed anyway.”

  I sighed. Well, I’d asked for honesty. If I didn’t find help soon, I’d bleed out, and then it wouldn’t matter whether or not she attacked; I’d already be dead.

  I released her mind.

  Instantly, the rattling growl vibrated from her chest.

  “Oh, for the love of God, Ronnie, control yourself!” I snapped.

  “I’m trying,” Ronnie said, her voice desperate, but her growl swelled the air.

  I shook my head. “I need you to leave and find Bex or Rene. Preferably Rene,” I amended, thinking of the bad blood between Bex and Walker. “Dominic won’t be back until midnight, but Rene will be able to heal me.”

  “Bex?” Ronnie squeaked, shaking her head. “No. You know I can’t leave the house.”

  I stared at her, not believing what I was hearing. “Are you serious? Of course you can leave the house! You just came from outside the house.”

  Ronnie looked at me like I was the one who was insane. “It’s after dark. Vampires are out there.”

  “You’re a vampire!”

  Her face crumpled. She was crying.

  I closed my eyes, trying to focus now that the room was spinning. “Ronnie, please, pull it together. I need you to find a vampire, Rene specifically, and bring him to me. If you don’t do this now, I’m going to bleed out and die.”

  Ronnie sniffled delicately, her face brightening at the thought. “Then I could turn you into a vampire, too. We could be vampires together.”

  “NO!” I swallowed the expletives that came to the forefront of my tongue. She couldn’t even heal my wrist and now she wanted to complete a night blood transformation. I cringed inwardly and said patiently, “Only Masters can turn other vampires. I need you to leave and find Rene. I’m begging you, Ronnie.”

  Finally, blessedly, she nodded. “I’ll try,” she said. She took one last, long, lingering look at my wrist and the blood-spattered sink, and then she left the house, closing and locking the door behind her.

  I pulled a stool from the breakfast bar and sat with my wrist over her kitchen sink. The floor was spinning and loop-de-looping around me. I laid my head in the crook of my elbow and took a deep breath, trying to fight through the light-headedness. After everything that I’d survived—my parents’ death, discovering the existence of vampires, losing Nathan, finding him a monster—I refused to accept that my own compassion for Ronnie would be the mistake that killed me.

  Chapter 16

  The hall clock chimed midnight. I opened my eyes. My head was still on my arm, but my arm was numb. The towel around my wrist was soaked with blood and still dripping into the sink. I lifted my head slowly. The world somersaulted and dipped and spun in a whirling dance. I dropped my head limply back onto the counter before I fell off the stool.

  If I ignored the gore spattered inside Walker’s kitchen sink, his house smelled rather pleasant, like nutmeg and pecans. Ronnie had baked pancakes this morning like she did every morning, and they had probably been her famous banana nut pancakes. Thinking of Ronnie made me sick—not just nauseated, although that was there, too, but deeply sick to my soul—so I closed my eyes and stopped thinking. I just breathed.

  The faint scent of pine drifted into the room, overtaking the lingering smell of nutmeg. My eyes snapped open, but I took care not to lift my head this time. Dominic was somewhere nearby, close enough that I could smell him.

  “Dominic?” I whispered hoarsely. Walker would kill me for extending an invitation to a vampire into his home, but I was desperate. “Dominic, you may enter.”

  Something rammed into the kitchen door, hard enough to rattle its hinges. Normally, after being invited, Dominic simply swept into a room—sometimes I wondered if the invitation was simply perfunctory—but this time, the one time I truly needed him, he couldn’t cross the threshold. He pounded into the door three more times, each more rattling than the last, but the frame didn’t cr
ack, the door didn’t budge, and Dominic didn’t enter.

  “Why can’t you come in?” I wheezed. I could barely hear myself speak, but with Dominic’s fine-tuned senses, he should be able to hear my invitation. I tried to speak a little louder. “You have my permission to enter.”

  My words were answered with silence for a long moment. Dominic bellowed from the other side of the door. “It’s not you whose permission I need!” he shouted. “Where are you in the house?”

  “The kitchen,” I said, dumbfounded. Why wouldn’t my permission grant Dominic access?

  “I can’t sense you!” Dominic said. “I imagined that Bex had exaggerated Ian Walker’s capabilities, but she was right. The house may well be impenetrable. I’ve never encountered anything like it.”

  I sighed. Here I was, dying, and Dominic was admiring Walker’s handiwork. “I need you to penetrate it,” I whispered. “I’m losing a lot of blood.”

  “I know. I can smell it,” Dominic said, and this time, I heard the growl behind his words. “I can’t enter to reach you, so you’ll need to come to me.”

  “You really can’t enter?” I asked numbly.

  The door rattled on its hinges from what I could only imagine was Dominic body-slamming it. He let loose another string of curses that eventually succumbed to another bout of silence.

  “No,” Dominic said finally. His tone bit off the words, so they were clipped and pointed. “I can’t enter.”

  A scab from a very nearly healed wound ripped open, and a flood of clarity and bone-cold anger gushed through it. Walker really did know how to prevent vampires from entering his home. Even though I already knew he was keeping that information from me, knowing it and actually witnessing it were two different kinds of betrayals. Dominic would always be a wedge between us, but Walker’s own actions pounded the wedge deep enough to break us in half.

  Walker was right about one thing: whatever was between us wasn’t enough because something very important simply wasn’t there to keep us together.

  I focused my anger, like fuel, and stood. The world immediately spun off its axis, and I promptly fell to the floor. Hard. Pain blasted through my hip in an electric zing, and my forehead throbbed in time with my pulse.

  The anger was still there, if not my strength, so I crawled. Hand over hand, inch by bloody inch, I struggled to the door. The wound at my wrist was still seeping, the soaked towel smearing blood across the floor. I’d been so worried about making a mess inside Walker’s pristine house, but who was I kidding? Everything was already bloodstained.

  By the time I reached the door, my vision was spotted in black starbursts. I stretched my arm up to grasp the doorknob, but my movements were clumsy, weak, and half blind. I could feel the knob at my fingertips. Its cold, smooth surface was slick in my hand. I strained to turn it, first one way and then the other, but it slipped from my grasp.

  “Cassidy? What’s happening? Are you coming out?” Dominic shouted from outside.

  I slumped against the doorframe. “I’m trying,” I whispered.

  Dominic slammed against the door again, rattling its hinges, but otherwise, still not making much of a dent. It rattled my body against the door as well, and my hand slipped from the knob as I reach for it a second time.

  I clenched my teeth. “You’re not helping.”

  “Until you cross the threshold, I can’t reach you,” Dominic said. I could hear the desperation in his voice.

  The floor and the ceiling whirled in kaleidoscopic somersaults. I blinked, trying to focus my vision, but when I reached up a third time to open the door, I couldn’t feel the knob anymore. I couldn’t feel anything.

  “I can’t do this,” I whispered, more to myself than to Dominic. I would die because I was trapped in a house protected from vampires. I laughed at the irony.

  “Yes, you damn well can,” Dominic thundered. “You are the strongest, most determined person I’ve ever known in my very long life, and in this one moment when your strength matters most, it will not fail you. I want you to take a deep breath and think of why you’re here. Why did you come to Erin, New York?”

  For you, to mend your relationship with Bex. I thought. For Carter, to finish my piece on crime fluctuation. For Walker, just for the pleasure of seeing him.

  There were so many reasons why I’d come here, but the real purpose of my visit made my heart quicken and my breath catch and my temper rise to a boiling swell. I took a deep breath, reached up, locked my hand on the doorknob, and tore the door open with all the anger and angst and uncertain love that made my heart beat.

  Dominic was standing on the porch just outside the door. He’d fed since returning from the city. His face glowed with a youthful blush, and even from my view on the floor, his muscled frame defined his light blue dress shirt quite nicely.

  “I came here to cement my end of our bargain, so you would help me find Nathan. I came here for my brother,” I said, and then my hand slipped from the knob, my vision winked out, and I tumbled headfirst through the doorway onto the porch at Dominic’s feet.

  * * * *

  Dominic caught my body before I hit the ground and cradled me in his arms.

  “Cassidy? Can you hear me? How did you—” I felt him lift my wrist and unwrap the towel from the wound. “Who did this?” he asked, his voice a low, biting growl.

  “It’s not her fault,” I murmured. “I told her to drink.”

  “Her?” he asked. I felt a flame light my wrist and a slippery probe slice into the wound. I knew without seeing that Dominic was licking into my wrist and healing me.

  “Her saliva didn’t heal me like yours always does. She tried, but it only hurt worse.”

  “Who?” Dominic asked.

  “Honestly, it’s not her fault. I encouraged her. She was so weak, and she was still her even though she wasn’t, and I—” I sighed, knowing that I wasn’t making any sense. “I thought she’d be able to heal me afterwards.”

  Dominic sighed heavily. “I will not kill whoever bit you. I’m simply trying to ascertain what happened.”

  “Ronnie,” I whispered.

  Dominic leaned forward. “Rene?” he asked, sounding shocked.

  I shook my head, and I realized that I could see again. His face was inches from mine. His lips were stained a deep red from my blood.

  “Ronnie, not Rene,” I clarified. “She’s Walker’s childhood friend. She lives in his house with the other night bloods and—”

  “Yes, I know who Ronnie is,” Dominic snapped briskly. “I’m shocked Walker hasn’t seriously attempted to kill Bex, considering Ronnie’s transformation. I’d think that would be, what’s the expression,” Dominic said thoughtfully, “his last straw.”

  “Walker doesn’t know. Ronnie was healthy and human this morning. She—”

  Dominic cut his head to the side. “If Ronnie attacked you tonight, she was transformed three to five days ago.”

  “Walker saw her this morning. She was still human three to five hours ago,” I insisted. “And she’s a very weak vampire. The weakest vampire I’ve ever seen. She still moved nearly human slow, and she was able to enter the house uninvited.” I laughed bitterly. “You couldn’t enter with an invitation, but she used her own key to unlock the door.”

  Dominic raised his eyebrows. “She crossed the threshold into Walker’s house?”

  “Yes.”

  “You realize what this means, don’t you?”

  I hesitated. “That Ronnie is a sad excuse for a vampire?”

  “Yes, but that’s not the point. If—”

  “That Walker is going to flip when he finds out?”

  Dominic rolled his eyes. “Yes he will, but that’s still not the point.”

  “It’s going to be a huge point for whoever attacked Ronnie,” I muttered.

  “That’s my point!” Dominic interjected. “If Ronnie was transformed three to five hours ago, before I left you earlier this evening…?”
r />   I nodded.

  “Then she was transformed during the day,” Dominic finished, his voice grim. “And the only creature who can tolerate daylight and transform a night blood into a vampire is a Day Reaper.”

  “A Day Reaper?” I asked, trying to grasp the gravity of the situation. “I thought you said that we had some time before they came. If they came.”

  “We do! Or we should have. The police are still investigating the murders as human crimes. Day Reapers usually don’t interfere unless our existence is at risk of exposure. Officer Riley Montgomery was a witness, but he’s dead. And Agent Harold Rowens—” Dominic cursed. “Rowens hasn’t even regained consciousness to determine what he remembers.”

  And if he remembers? I thought. Rowens didn’t seem the type to easily or willfully forget. Would you kill him for his silence? I wondered.

  “If a Day Reaper is here, does that affect our plan for Nathan?” I asked instead.

  “It’s something to discuss.” Dominic bit into his own wrist and held the wound to my lips.

  I eyed his bleeding wrist warily. “What are you doing?”

  “You need it, and we really don’t have time to argue at the moment. Bex is watching Jillian in my absence. Although I don’t doubt Bex’s abilities, Jillian is my responsibility. We need to return to Bex’s coven, take ownership of Jillian, and discuss our plans to contain Nathan.” He moved his wrist fractionally closer to my mouth. “Drink.”

  I turned my head away, but I was too weak to fight him if he forced me. “You’ve never needed me to drink your blood to heal me before,” I said. “Licking my wounds usually does the trick.”

  “I’ve already healed you. You will live whether or not you drink my blood, but you won’t have the strength to face your brother and wield Jillian against him unless you drink.”

  “I don’t want to be a vampire. I don’t choose that life.”