“He has the records,” Em said.
“Don’t lie to us, Sis,” I said.
She whipped her arms over her chest. “Fine. But I feel fine. I am fine. And I’m going with you to do whatever it is you have to do to find Uncle Brae.”
“We have something else to do first, Emilia. Dante and River are going to recover my body so the two of you can collect my estate.”
She was silent a moment. Then, “You are absolutely not leaving me out of that!”
“Oh, we are,” I said. “We have to recover his body from St. Louis Cemetery in the middle of the night.”
“I’m just as good with a shovel as you are.”
“You’ll be working.”
“I’ll take the night off.”
“No, you won’t.” My father stood rigid, looking more like an angry dad than like a ghost.
He used his “don’t fuck with me” tone. I remembered it well from childhood.
“Your brother and cousin have to take care of this. We can’t risk you right now in your condition.”
Emilia opened her mouth, but my father held up his hand.
She pressed her lips together.
Even as a ghost, my father still commanded an authoritative presence.
“I can’t believe any of this.” She shook her head.
“I know it’s difficult,” he said. “It was difficult for me to believe as well. But I trusted your mother when she came to me, and it turned out she was right.”
“There’s something I still don’t understand,” I said.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Why the hell Em and River could see you right off. Why not me?”
“Your grandfather didn’t see me right away either.”
Just what I wanted—to be compared to Bill. Bill, whom I didn’t even know anymore.
“This has been hard on him,” my father continued. “He’d already lost his wife and both of his daughters-in-law. Then, within a period of a week, he lost his grandson and both of his sons. Give him a little slack.”
I hadn’t thought of it that way, and I suddenly felt foolish and self-indulgent. I’d made this whole thing about me, about what I’d been through. About what my father and Brae had been through.
I hadn’t given a thought to what Bill had been through.
He wasn’t tortured and violated, yet he’d lived through his own hell.
“Bill had River and me,” Emilia said.
“Yeah, he did,” I agreed. “We had no one while we were imprisoned.”
“I’m hardly comparing the severity of the two,” he said. “Just remember that you are not the only person who has suffered, Dante, and neither am I. Neither is Bill, for that matter. Emilia lost her brother and her father.”
“I’m okay,” she said. “River was great. And Bill took care of both of us.”
Again, I felt like shit. Par for the course these days. I couldn’t seem to find a happy medium between being in love and happy and feeling like my life had been stolen and coming completely unfurled.
Emilia was not one to feel sorry for herself. She never had been. This whole conversation made me feel the size of a rat turd.
I shoved my hair off my forehead, trying to think of something to say that didn’t make me sound like a self-indulgent little piss head. Before I could think of anything, however, my sister spoke.
“When do we go to the cemetery?” she asked.
“You’re not going, Emilia,” my father reiterated.
“The hell I’m not. I’m just as much your child as Dante is.”
“Em,” I said. “We’ve been through this.”
“If you think I’m not strong enough to do this because I’m a woman—”
“Emilia, you know damn well it has nothing to do with the fact that you’re a woman. It has to do with the fact that you’re pregnant.”
“And only women can get pregnant. I see where you’re going with this.”
“This discussion is over,” my father said.
“I’m not your little girl anymore. I no longer have to obey what you say.” She darted her hands to her hips, indignance emanating from her. “Oh, and you’re dead.”
That got a chuckle out of my father. She still had him wrapped around her little finger, just as she always had.
“You are so much like your mother,” he said.
“I never knew her, but I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Believe me. It’s definitely a compliment. None of that changes the fact, though, that you’re not coming with us to exhume my body. It has nothing to do with the fact that you’re a woman. If you weren’t pregnant, I would have no problem with you accompanying us. But I won’t put your life or the life of my grandchild in danger. I love you too much. I don’t want you to suffer your mother’s fate or your aunt’s.”
“Jack told me that vampire pregnancies aren’t nearly as difficult as they were even twenty years ago. There’s no reason why—”
“No.” My father’s voice was stern.
Emilia closed her mouth.
And that was that. Emilia no longer pressed the issue.
“We will tell you everything when we’re done,” I said.
“You damned well better.”
“We should go now,” I said. “We don’t want to keep you from your work.”
“You’re not. It’s a quiet night.” She turned to our father. “Will you come see me again? Will you be here when the baby is born?”
My father’s eyes gave away nothing. “I will be here for as long as I can be.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
Chapter Fourteen
Erin
An invisible cloak of thin ice wrapped around me.
“They wanted me?”
He nodded. “Ever since the other night, when I failed to bring you to them, they’ve been badgering me. Tonight they got tired of waiting. But I won’t sell you out, Erin. You’ve been kind to me.”
“Why do they want me?” I asked, my lips trembling.
“I don’t know. But they’re determined to taste you.”
Although I was still shuddering, my mind whirled. They wanted to taste me. Meaning they probably hadn’t tasted me yet, which meant these were not the vampires who had been feeding on my thigh.
The thought should’ve offered me comfort. Or at least a tiny bit of solace in my mind.
It did not. Not only was there a gang of vampires craving my blood, there was also another vampire who had been feeding on me. One I didn’t know about.
One who could be in this hospital at this very moment.
“I won’t tell them where you are, Erin. But they want you. They will find you eventually. They will follow your scent.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I want you to be careful. They mean business. I never knew them to be violent before—at least not toward me—but something has brought it out in them. They’re no longer satisfied with my blood and the blood of the others under the bridge. They smelled you, and now they want you.”
I cleared my throat. “Let me go check on your lab results. Blood counts don’t take very long.”
My invisible icy cloak squeezed around me as I walked to the lab. I wished with all my heart that Dante was here to comfort me. But I was on duty. I could not fall apart. My patients, including Abe Lincoln, needed me.
“Do you have those blood results that were just sent up?” I asked the technician on duty.
“Just finishing them up. Let’s see… looks like his hemoglobin is… Wow. 6.9. That’s low.”
No surprise to me. “He’s lost a lot of blood. Looks like he’s in for a transfusion. What’s his type?”
The tech glanced down. “B positive.”
My stomach dropped.
B positive.
Same as mine. Same as Lucy’s. Same as all the women who had disappeared from our hospital.
Why was
I not surprised?
I forced my legs to move as I mumbled a quick “thank you” to the technician. Abe Lincoln needed me. More than me, he needed a transfusion before he went into hypovolemic shock. I found Dr. Nice in an exam room with a mother and a feverish child. Once I got the necessary order to administer a transfusion to Abe, I went to the small unit in the ER to get a bag of B positive.
As usual, there wasn’t any. Once again, I’d have to make a trip to the blood bank in the main hospital.
With each step, I remembered the fateful night I’d met Dante. The night he vandalized our blood bank because he was starving.
Starving…
For blood.
Had he just been released from wherever he’d been held captive?
Was that why he’d been so manic, so obsessed?
So much I still didn’t know. So much he wasn’t ready to tell me. To tell anyone.
I had to help him.
I opened the door to the blood bank and eyed the shelves. O neg and O pos. Always a ton of those types. We had everything, including AB neg and pos, the rarest of all.
But no B positive.
I didn’t have time to dawdle. I grabbed a bag of B negative and hurried back to the ER. Once the transfusion was underway, I left Abe to assist on some other minor cases. I checked back on him as often as I could during the next hour. He was resting comfortably, and his pallor was improving.
Then Lucy grabbed me.
“Erin, I need you.”
“What for?”
“There’s a problem with the baby from last night.”
“Bianca?” The half-werewolf baby.
“Yeah. She and her mom are back. She’s spiked another fever, and we can’t get it down.”
“Why are you telling me this? Grab a doctor. I can’t do anything for her.”
“I need you to listen to me. Dr. Nice ordered the same thing as last night. Meds plus the tepid bath. It’s not working.”
“Then tell Dr. Nice. She’ll probably order some blood panels to screen for infection. Start some antibiotics.”
“We’re working on that. But it won’t help. Bianca needs a special kind of treatment.”
“What are you talking about? You know the standard protocol as well as I do.”
“She needs an herbal infusion. It’s common in… God. Erin, I need you to really hear me, okay?”
The wail of a siren interrupted us, and gurneys began appearing.
That was the end of a conversation I didn’t want to have.
I wanted to live in blissful ignorance for a little bit longer.
Bianca would get the treatment she needed. She was a strong and healthy baby. Dr. Nice knew what to do.
Lucy and I both assisted with a heart attack victim. He didn’t make it.
Before I could deal with that loss, five victims of an automobile accident arrived. Two were dead on arrival, and three were transferred to ICU.
Exhaustion weighed on my shoulders. I sighed. Dawn was breaking, and it was almost time to clock out.
Abe. Bianca.
What had happened to them? The ER staff had been inundated.
I did some quick research. Bianca had been transferred to the pediatric unit. Good. She’d get the care she needed there.
But Abe?
Abe was nowhere to be found. He’d checked himself out after his transfusion.
“How could you let this happen?” I said to the receptionist on duty.
“He’s a grown man, Erin. We can’t keep him here against his will. He got up and left.”
“Why wasn’t I notified?”
“You were needed in the ER. All the staff was. You really wanted me to take you off of a life or death case for a homeless man who just wanted to leave?”
“He just had a transfusion. He needed to be monitored.”
“We explained all that to him. He was determined to leave anyway.”
I sighed and muttered a quick apology. I shouldn’t have gone off on her. It had been an exhausting night, and I needed to get out of here.
Apparently I had a gang of vampires stalking me.
But there was one vampire who needed me, who would be waiting for me at home.
I needed to get to him.
Not just for him, but for me.
Chapter Fifteen
Dante
I was hungrier for Erin than I’d been in a while. The last time I’d fed, I hadn’t made love to her. She hadn’t seemed to mind, and now, as I waited, I wondered why.
She’d accepted me as a vampire, accepted my need for her blood. She’d even seemed to accept her own need to feed me.
Still, something was missing.
And I wasn’t sure what that something was.
Plus, I had a lot to tell her, most important of which was that tonight, River and I would be trespassing in a cemetery to exhume my father’s body.
I wasn’t looking forward to her reaction to that piece of news.
My gaze landed on the Vampyre Texts still sitting on her coffee table.
This enigmatic book, which I’d learned at a young age was to be respected and never touched, had quickly become the bane of my existence. The vintage brown leather was distressed with age, its scent a combination of old-style tanning and nostalgic must. As a child, I’d found its fragrance—indeed, just its existence as a fixture in Bill’s house—soothing, comforting.
Now?
The aroma held only questions. Hundreds of unanswered questions that I couldn’t even begin to put into words.
“What secrets do you hold?” I asked aloud. “What has Bill so scared?”
All will soon be revealed.
Her.
Her voice in my head again.
And though everything within me screamed to blot it out, ignore it, hurl it from my mind, this time, I acted differently.
I listened.
I listened to her.
What do you have to teach me? What have I missed?
All will soon be revealed.
No, damn it. I need answers!
You will have answers. But first you must learn to ask the questions.
You told me to ask. You showed me the passage. It said, “ask the queen.” I am asking.
Ask. But ask with specificity. There are questions you do not know exist.
Then tell me. Tell me what I need to know. Tell me without my asking.
Are you ready?
Was I? Ready for what? I’d been hearing from Bill since I returned that he could not teach me because I wasn’t ready. I’d considered it bullshit from the beginning, but now, I knew that he knew something. Something big. Something with potential for destruction.
Something that perhaps she knew as well.
A gladiator duel erupted within my mind.
Evict her. Cast her out. She is evil. You know this. You know what she did to you. Whatever you need, you do not need it from her.
Then—
But Bill won’t tell you. Perhaps she will.
I paced around Erin’s living room, my gaze continuing to be magnetically pulled back to the Texts.
The giant tome that seemed to be pulsing with its own heartbeat.
The book was alive somehow, with information that had been left dormant far too long. The contents seemed almost under pressure. They were pushing to get out, to be known…
Seriously?
I was unhinged.
How could I even be thinking of letting her into my head even more than she already was?
Because I know, Dante. I know the secrets you’re yearning for. Just ask. Ask me.
Demandez a la royne.
No!
She was no queen.
But you said it.
My queen.
My queen.
My queen.
“Because you were torturing me! You let those assholes clamp me, cut me, electrocute me! You threatened to mutilate my body! Anyone would have caved! Anyone would have said, ‘yes, my queen!’”
Not
anyone.
“I kept my strength! I stopped shouting out during the torture. I held it in! I was strong. I am strong!”
You submitted to me. You opened your flesh for me. You fed me your blood.
“To avoid death!”
You called me your queen.
I tugged at my hair again, pacing, my heart pounding. “Anyone would have!” I yelled again. “Anyone!”
Not anyone.
I squeezed my eyes shut, pushing her out of my head.
Not your father.
I stiffened, my taut muscles the only thing keeping me from crumpling to the ground.
Not your father.
I hadn’t talked to my father about what I’d been through. About what he’d been through. It was enough that we each knew what the other must have suffered. How could we discuss it? How could he, my father, admit any weakness to me, his son? And how could I admit to my father how I’d let myself be humiliated and tortured, unable to escape?
I broke you, Dante.
“No. I didn’t scream. I didn’t. I didn’t break.”
My queen, you said.
My queen.
My queen.
My queen.
“No! No! No!”
Just ask. I have the answers you seek, Dante. I broke you once. Submit to me now, and I will show you all you want to know.
No. I could not align myself with her.
You will find the answers no other way. Accept your weakness. I am your queen. You said so yourself. You submitted to save yourself. You are mine.
“No,” I whispered on a sob. “No.”
Just ask, Dante, and all will be revealed.
“No. No. No.”
Yes. Yes. Yes.
This time I fell to the ground and curled into a fetal position. “No. No. No.” My voice barely audible.
My queen.
My queen.
My queen.
Just ask.
So close to answers. So close…
Darkness descended around me, enshrouding me in a black cloak. I was weak. Weak and useless. I’d been a target, and she’d taken me. I’d allowed it.
Weakness. Vulnerability. Dante. The words were all synonymous.
And now I could have the answers I sought.
Show me. Show me what I seek.
My queen.
Unhinged: Blood Bond: Parts 4, 5 & 6 (Volume 2) Page 24
