Sacrifice (Crave (Quality))

by Melinda Metz

  “Well, you can’t believe anything Martin says,” Shay replied.

  “Oh, sweetie, no. We were both so worried about you.”

  “Martin doesn’t give a crap about me,” Shay said flatly. “He never has. He—”

  “How can you say that?” her mother exclaimed. “Martin gave up his entire career to find a cure for you!”

  God, she’s good at denial, Shay thought. I guess she had to be to survive having a terminally ill kid.

  “Mom, come on. Martin saw me as a way to make one of those historic medical contributions he’s always talking about. I was going to be his artificial heart or polio vaccine or whatever. As soon as he figured out a way to use what I was—half human and half vampire.” Shay shook her head. “He was hoping he could come up with a cure for death, not for me.”

  Her mother paled, and she stumbled over to the closest kitchen chair and sat down. She opened her mouth, but no words came out.

  “I know the truth, Mom,” Shay told her. She sat down across the table. “I know that my father was a vampire.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Martin . . . of course Martin is ambitious,” her mother finally said. “And as a doctor, what you are, well, it fascinated him. And he thought the possibilities for using . . . that part of you to help humankind were endless. But he really cares about you, Shay. About both of us. Not just about the glory.”

  Shay couldn’t believe it. Her mother was acting like as long as she didn’t acknowledge what Shay had said, it wouldn’t be true.

  “That’s why he—we—did what we did,” Mom continued. “That’s why we tracked down that vampire. We wanted—”

  “Mom,” Shay interrupted, “are we actually going to sit here and pretend I didn’t just say that I know about my dad?”

  “It’s not something I ever wanted you to find out,” her mother whispered. “And it doesn’t matter. You’re you. You’re Shay. That part of you, it has nothing to do with what you actually are.”

  “It’s everything I am!” Shay protested. “It’s why I’ve been sick all my life.”

  “Okay, that may be true. It is true, at least that’s what Martin and I believe,” her mother said. “But there’s nothing else of your father in you. He never even saw you. Not once. He was never in your life. That’s one thing I’ll always be grateful for.”

  “You didn’t always feel that way,” Shay said. “You loved him once. And he loved you.”

  “I’m sure you want to think that, but this isn’t a fairy tale,” Mom said.

  “Sam loved you, and I know it,” Shay insisted.

  Her words shocked her mother into wide-eyed silence. “I know all about him, Mom. Gabriel told me some of it, but some I just saw. When Martin gave me transfusions of Gabriel’s blood, I had visions of his life, and my father was in his life.”

  Mom frowned. “You have no reason to believe those visions were true.”

  “I saw him with the locket.” Shay pulled it free from her shirt, running her fingers over the sun and moon etched in the front. “He was so excited about giving it to you.” Tears stung Shay’s eyes. “He was excited about me, too. He couldn’t wait to change diapers. He was happy about me coming, Mom. And he was in love with you.”

  “No,” her mother said, shaking her head. “He abandoned us, honey. He said he would marry me, but he never showed up. He wasn’t there when you were born. He did give me the locket, but after that, he just took off. I never heard from him again. Not a letter, not anything.”

  Shay reached out and took one of her mother’s hands in both of hers. “Because he was dead.”

  For a split second Shay saw shock—and sadness—in her mother’s eyes. But that was quickly replaced by doubt.

  “You know what he was,” Mom said. “Dying isn’t . . . It’s not something that happens very easily to them, Shay. I understand why you’d want to believe that he didn’t willingly desert us, but—”

  “His family killed him, because they found out about the two of you, that he loved you, that you were pregnant with his baby.” Shay didn’t explain how they found out. It was too painful. The words would have felt like shards of glass against her throat and tongue.

  And her mom didn’t care anyway. Her eyes looked glazed. Shay had the feeling that Mom wasn’t seeing her or anything in the kitchen. She seemed to have slipped deep into shock. Shay stood up. “Let me get you a glass of water or something.”

  She went to the fridge and poured two glasses of pomegranate juice. That’s what her mother had usually given her whenever she felt especially weak and shaky. She set the glasses down on the table, but her mom didn’t pick hers up. “Mom, drink,” Shay urged.

  Her mother blinked a few times, gave one of her fake “everything’s fine” mother smiles, and took a sip of the juice. “You really believe that?” she asked. “About your . . . about Sam. What his family did?”

  “I saw that, too. I saw them kill him,” Shay replied quietly. She didn’t want to remember this part, but it would be important to Mom. “In the visions it’s as if I’m right there. It’s not like watching a movie. I can feel things, get smells, tastes, emotions. And I saw Sam . . . he wanted to come back to you. He fought hard—”

  A sob escaped her mother’s throat. “I should have had more faith in him. I gave up on him so easily. My friends told me that he’d bolted because of the baby—not that they knew what he really was. They convinced me. I didn’t even look for him.”

  “I wouldn’t have looked for him either,” Shay said. “I’d have thought the same thing. He wouldn’t have been the first guy to bolt when he found out his girlfriend was pregnant.” Her mother had had to deal with so much sorrow in her life. Shay didn’t want her taking on any extra guilt. It wasn’t as if she could have saved Sam anyway. If she’d gone looking for Sam, Ernst would have killed her.

  Shay glanced at the clock. She had little more than half an hour before her death sleep. She had to tell her mother what she was—and soon. But Mom needed at least a few minutes before she got hit with anything else.

  Maybe she’d even be happy, now that she wasn’t consumed by hatred for Sam. Maybe she’d be relieved that she would never have to worry about Shay’s health again. Shay was going to outlive her mother, something neither of them had ever really believed would happen.

  “Was it—Was he in a lot of pain?” her mom asked.

  “I only saw a little bit,” Shay said. There was no reason for her mother to know the details. It wouldn’t change anything, and it would make her feel even worse. “Mom, this is actually a happy thing, in a way. The truth is that he loved us. He never would have wanted you to spend all these years believing he didn’t care about us. He seemed like a pretty amazing person, actually.”

  “You really saw him?”

  Shay nodded.

  “I’m glad. I know you’ve always had questions . . .” Her mother hesitated. “I couldn’t talk about him. For so many reasons.”

  “I get it,” Shay told her. “He broke your heart.”

  “But he didn’t mean to.” Her mother blinked rapidly, fighting tears. “He didn’t mean to.”

  “He didn’t mean to,” Shay agreed, sneaking another look at the clock. She could wait a few more minutes, but then she’d have to tell her mom the truth.

  “Do you want to know how I met him?” Mom asked. This time her smile, though small, wasn’t at all fake.

  “Definitely,” Shay said.

  “I was about your age, or a little older. I was supposed to meet my friend Vivian at the movies, but she was late. She was always late—so annoying. I constantly missed the beginnings of movies because of her.”

  Shay smiled. Her mom suddenly sounded younger.

  “Sam was out front too. Looking at the posters, trying to decide what to see. We started talking—I don’t remember how exactly—and by the time Viv finally showed, we—”

  “Emma, move away from her.”

  Shay jerked her head toward the kitche
n door. Martin stood there, dressed in jogging clothes, face flushed. One of his big hands gripped the door frame so tightly that Shay thought it might splinter.

  “Do it, Emma. Now, please,” Martin said when her mother didn’t move. His voice was flat and calm, but Shay could hear his heart thundering, pounding much too hard and fast to be the result of a jog around the neighborhood. “Can’t you see what she is?”

  “Gabriel transformed me. I’m like him now. Like my dad,” Shay blurted out, not wanting Martin to be the one to tell her mother. “Mom, I’m a vampire.”

  Her mother gasped, but Shay rushed on. “That’s why I look so good. I’m not sick anymore. I won’t ever be sick again. Gabriel saved my life.”

  It was true. Whatever else Gabriel had done, he had given Shay a new life. And he’d risked his own to do it. She could still feel his pain and nausea, his weakness. His helplessness. He’d known he might not survive the blood ritual to transform her, but he’d done it because he loved her. Shay wasn’t sure what to feel about him, but she couldn’t escape that truth. Gabriel loved her.

  She raised her eyes to her mother’s. “Even after what you two did to him, Gabriel saved my life,” she repeated, trying to gauge her mother’s reaction. It was hard. Mom seemed to be feeling a thousand things at once.

  “Emma!” Martin’s voice was like a whip. “That’s not your daughter. Get away from her. I’ll take her to the office until we can figure out what to do with her.”

  “You already know what you’re going to do with me!” Shay snarled, leaping to her feet. “You’re going to chain me up, exactly the way you did Gabriel. I’ll be your test subject—since you didn’t manage to kidnap one when you attacked Gabriel’s family.”

  “What?” her mother cried.

  “Don’t listen to her, she’s not even human,” Martin said.

  “Martin used my cell to track me, and when he found out where I was, he showed up with a bag full of explosives and a dart full of hawthorn,” Shay told her mother, never taking her eyes off Martin. “I was practically dead, but Martin didn’t bother looking for me. He just wanted to get himself another vampire to experiment on.”

  “You knew where Shay was?” Her mom’s forehead wrinkled as she tried to take in this new information. Shay could almost see Mom’s denial falling away, leaving her vulnerable. Shay didn’t believe her mother had married Martin for love, at least not the hearts-and-flowers kind of romantic love. But she had respected him. And she’d truly believed that his top priority was curing Shay, and that made her love him in a way.

  Martin’s mouth curled into a sneer as he stared back at Shay.

  “Martin, answer me! You knew where she was?” Her mother’s voice rose into a shriek.

  Martin didn’t bother to reply. Instead, he pulled a syringe out of his jacket pocket.

  Hawthorn. Shay knew what it was the instant she smelled it.

  Shay’s fangs sprang free. Her hands clenched into fists. “I’m not your sick little patient anymore,” she warned him. She crouched down, preparing to fight.

  “No!” Mom grabbed Shay by the shirt and yanked her backward. Martin took advantage of her split-second loss of balance, charging at Shay with the needle. A drop of hawthorn shone on the tip, glittering like a jewel.

  Shay gasped as the drop fell from the needle onto her skin. Instantly, her communion to Gabriel began to fade, his pain and weakness, his dizziness, his sorrow, his shame, and his love for her slipping away.

  The expected sensation of the needle piercing her flesh didn’t come. Her mother had grabbed Martin’s arms with both hands, knocking the syringe to the floor.

  Shay dropped to her knees, focusing all her will on keeping the communion with Gabriel. She should be glad to lose it, but as it faded, she instinctively fought to keep it. She wasn’t ready to let go. Even after what he’d done, she couldn’t bear the idea of being completely severed from him.

  More than that, something was very wrong with him. She’d been pushing that knowledge away, but now it flooded her, strengthening her resolve to hold on to him. Vaguely, she was aware of the crunching sound as her mother ground the syringe under her foot.

  “She’s not Shay,” Martin said again, reverting to his reasonable doctor voice. “Did you see those fangs? She was going to kill me!”

  “I’d call it self-defense. She was right. You were about to take her to your lab and experiment on her blood until there was nothing left of her,” Shay’s mother yelled.

  “You have to stop thinking of her as human. She’s an animal now, with animal instincts,” Martin shot back.

  “No. She’s my Shay, same as she always was, same as she always will be. And you know what? She’s more compassionate than either of us. She saw how wrong what we had done was. She looked at . . . at Gabriel chained to that table, and even though she knew he was a vampire, she couldn’t leave him there.” Shay’s mother sucked in a shaky breath. “Oh my God, she’s just like her father. He would have done the same thing if he was in that situation.”

  Shay tried to open herself completely to the communion. What was happening to Gabriel? No matter what he’d done to Sam, he was the man who had saved Shay’s life.

  “You’re being dangerously sentimental,” Martin argued. “If she was hungry, and you were the only one around, she’d drain you dry.”

  “And I’d want her to,” Mom snapped. “We’ve been married for more than three years—how can you not know that I’d do anything to keep my daughter alive? Why do you think I married you in the first place? Because I fell madly in love with you?”

  Shay tried to shut out their voices and focus. A faraway sense of anguish . . . that must be Gabriel. Her own emotions were more in the disgust/pity/anger mode right now. Shay took a deep breath and did her best to stem her emotions. Gabriel was in too much pain already. She didn’t want him to pick up anything negative from her.

  God, why did she still feel responsible for him? After everything? She’d gotten him out of Martin’s lab room. She’d saved his life. She’d done enough. Whatever he was going through now was his problem to deal with.

  But she could feel the frailty in his body through the communion, and she found it impossible to ignore. Maybe he felt the same way about the numbness taking over her senses. He’d be able to feel it. Shay was sure of that. Experimentally, she tried to flex her fingers. They responded slowly, trembling with the tiny effort.

  “. . . you thought my research would save Shay, and my money would mean she’d never want for anything,” Martin’s voice filtered slowly into Shay’s mind. “It was a fair trade. She needed my research. You both stood to gain as much as I did.”

  “Well, she doesn’t need you anymore,” Shay’s mother told him. “And neither do I.”

  Martin laughed. “I can freeze your bank account with one phone call,” he said.

  “And with one phone call, I can tell the world what you’ve done,” Mom replied, her voice as cold and steady as Martin’s. “You’re not going to win a Nobel Prize for experimenting on humans.”

  Shay realized that outside the window, the sky had changed from deep black to charcoal. The pressure of the sun was building in her mind; sunrise would come soon. She had to get out of this room and into someplace safe. Still, she let herself savor her mother’s words for a moment, to let Gabriel—and herself—feel the warmth and happiness again. Her mother loved her, no matter what. Mom was on her side.

  She struggled to open her mouth. “Mom,” she tried to say. But her tongue was thick with the hawthorn poisoning. The word came out like a grunt.

  But that was enough for her mother. She looked at Shay, then looked at the window. Immediately she turned back to Martin. “I want you out of here. Now! Or I’ll call the New York Times. Or, even better, your good friend Oprah.”

  “This isn’t over,” Martin growled. But he obeyed, the door slamming shut behind him. Shay’s mother grabbed a kitchen chair and wedged it under the knob.

  “At least you didn�
��t get much hawthorn,” she murmured as she knelt by Shay. “Only skin exposure. The paralysis shouldn’t last too long.” She wrapped her arm around Shay’s waist and hauled her to her feet. Shay tried to speak again, to explain what she needed.

  The words wouldn’t come out clearly, but as she almost always did, Mom understood. “Your death sleep is coming. Don’t worry. I’ll get you into bed and close the shades and curtains.”

  Relief flooded through Shay. She tried to send it on to Gabriel, even though she could barely feel him anymore. She wanted to keep their communion. She didn’t know how she felt about him. He’d killed her father. He’d saved her life. All Shay knew for sure was that she wasn’t willing to let him go, not yet.

  The sun pressed so heavily on her that Shay stumbled on the way upstairs. But Mom held her up, and Shay didn’t feel any sense of panic about the death sleep approaching. Her mother would take care of her. It was incredibly comforting and familiar to have her mom helping her into bed. She’d done it so often when Shay’s body had failed her. Shay wished she could at least say thank you, but she was still having trouble forming intelligible words, and now the sun was draining all her energy.

  Shay lay still and watched through heavy eyelids as Mom lowered the shades, then closed the curtains over them, checking to make sure that no light could leak around the edges. Had she done this for Sam when it was time for his death sleep?

  “You’re safe, baby,” her mother said as she sat down on the edge of Shay’s bed. She brushed Shay’s hair out of her face. “Are you hungry?”

  Shay was too weak to nod, but her gaze automatically went to her mom’s throat. She couldn’t help it. Her body demanded blood.

  Mom just nodded. She stretched out next to Shay and wrapped one arm around Shay’s shoulder. She coaxed Shay’s head down to her throat. “Drink.”

  Shay didn’t try to resist. She was hungry, always hungry. As gently as she could, she began to drink, feeling strength flow into her with her mother’s blood.