“No!” Lawrence’s expression shattered, and he shoved the doctor back from him.
“The birth, it—it happened only yesterday. I did everything I could to find a way around it. To try to save her. It was impossible. The other woman we have up on the next floor—the one set to become our next test subject for dhampyr breeding—she tried to help. She held Susan’s hand the whole time until it was . . . too late. The dhampyr was killed immediately; it was too vicious to keep for further testing. I’m so sorry, Lawrence.”
“She died yesterday.” His voice was barely audible.
“Yes.”
Lawrence looked down at the floor before slowly raising his tear-filled black eyes to Dr. Reynolds. “I’m going to kill you.”
He surged forward with inhuman speed. I shrieked as the doctor grabbed hold of my arm and threw me toward the vampire. Lawrence caught me. I felt the strength in his grip; the vampire was strong enough to break me in half.
Lawrence inhaled sharply, and his lips drew back from his sharp teeth. It seemed impossible, but his already black eyes grew even darker, like shiny, soulless buttons.
Dr. Reynolds moved toward the door. “You can’t resist the Nightshade inside of her. Take her. Bite her. Drink her blood. Give in to it.”
My fear ratcheted up another level. “No—” I pushed at the vampire, but his grip on me only grew tighter. “You don’t want to do this.”
I knew from the crazed look in his eyes that if he bit me, he’d tear my throat out. It would kill him and me at the same time.
Lawrence’s upper lip peeled back farther, and a growl sounded in the back of his throat. “It’s so powerful.”
I felt as if my bones were going to snap if I fought him any harder. “Bite me and you die.”
There was barely any human intelligence left in his gaze—he was a grief-filled monster who needed to feed. “I want to die.”
“No—”
“But first I want everyone else to die. Starting with him.” His black-eyed gaze moved over my shoulder.
“Let go of me,” I snapped.
He did what I asked, pushing me so hard I flew backward until my head slammed against the side of the examining table. I crashed to the floor. My vision blurred as the pain swept through me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Declan rise shakily from the chair and reach toward the sharp silver stake at his belt.
“No . . .” I said, but it was too weak for anyone to hear.
Declan flicked a glance at me before training his fierce gaze on the vampire before him. Lawrence wasn’t unarmed. He’d snatched the already bloody knife off the floor, and I saw a silver flash as it arched through the air toward Dr. Reynolds’s throat and the spray of red as it met its mark.
It was like my dream—everything slowed down, and the air thickened. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t scream. The vampire turned his attention toward Declan and surged forward to attack just as I lost consciousness and the world all around me faded to black . . .
SEVEN
The alarm woke me.
When I forced my eyes open, my head screamed with pain. I lay on my side in an awkward position on the floor, staring straight into the glazed eyes of Dr. Reynolds. Blood oozed down his forehead.
Dr. Reynolds was supposed to help save my life. He was my beacon of hope. My beacon of hope was now dead as a doornail.
The ear-piercing alarm made it difficult to think, but I knew I had to get out of here. I pushed myself up to my feet and scanned the room. White walls, gray linoleum floor, empty metal chair, stainless steel examination table to my right.
My heart slammed against my rib cage when I saw Declan lying on the opposite side of the room. He was badly hurt and not moving. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing. There was blood—a lot of it. Stumbling, I ran to his side and fell to my knees next to him.
“Declan, no!” I could barely hear my panicked voice above the sound of the alarm. “Please, please don’t be dead!”
For a long, horrible moment there was no reaction. But then his chest hitched and he opened his gray right eye. He blinked. “Jill—” His deep, raspy voice sounded as weak as I’d ever heard it, and that worried the hell out of me. “You—you need to get out of here. Now. It’s not safe. Get out and run as fast and as far as you can.”
I nodded. “Sounds like a good plan. Come on”—I grabbed hold of his muscled arm—“get up!”
He shook his head, the movement barely noticeable. “Leave me. Save yourself.”
Anger pushed its way forward. “Stop being a bad movie cliché and get on your feet. I’m not going anywhere without you.”
His jaw clenched. “I’m hurt.”
“You’ll heal.”
“I’ll be slow. I’ll try to catch up. Find Jackson. He’ll help you get out of here, and then—”
“No, listen to me, Declan.” I gulped a breath to help give me courage. “We got into this mess together and that’s exactly how we’re getting out.”
He glared at me. “Jill—”
“No.” My throat hurt from shouting over the alarm. “I’m not leaving without you. If you’re going to just give up and die right here, that means I am, too. So if you really want me to live to see another day, then you’re going to have to do the same damn thing. Do you understand me?”
The fire in his gaze, ignited thanks to my stubbornness, faded a bit around the edges.
“Well?” I touched his face, wiping the blood away from a cut on his forehead. “What’ll it be, dhampyr?”
His eye narrowed before he finally answered. “Fine. Help me up.”
“That’s more like it.”
I grabbed his arm and helped him to his feet as much as I could, considering I was a full foot shorter than him. He leaned his nearly six and a half feet of solid muscle against me. His gaze moved toward Dr. Reynolds and the growing pool of blood forming a wet, red halo around the dead man’s head.
“Fuck,” he said under his breath.
“Just what I was thinking.”
“You know what this means.”
“Yeah,” I said, grimly. “It means I’m definitely going to die. But it won’t be here. And it won’t be now.”
One look at Declan confirmed to me that he’d fought with Lawrence and lost. Several deep knife wounds were in the process of healing. I tried not to worry about that, but it was difficult. He wasn’t dead, and for that I was very grateful.
“I’m still feeling the tranq effects,” he growled, straining to be heard over the loud alarm. “That’s going to make this harder. And I don’t have my stake—Lawrence must have taken it.”
“Let’s try to stay positive.”
“You go ahead and do that. I’m going to be a realist.”
“And what does your realist self tell you?”
“It tells me that I’m in rough shape and healing slower than I’d like.” His grip on me tightened. “My phone’s set to vibrate—someone’s calling. Grab it.”
Without thinking twice, I slipped my hand into the inner pocket of Declan’s jacket and took out his cell phone, stabbing at the answer button and holding it to my ear.
“Yeah?”
“Jill? Is that you?”
“Who the fuck is this?”
“It’s Jackson. Glad to hear your voice, too.”
My grip on the phone tightened as I shouted into it. “Where the hell are you?”
“A level down from you, I think. What the fuck happened?”
I hurriedly explained to him about the vampire on the rampage.
“Shit. That explains it. The vampires have been let out of their cells down here. At least a dozen of them, maybe more. You need to get out fast. Is—is Declan dead?”
“No. But he’s wounded.”
There was silence for a moment. “Find the nearest stairwell. Don’t try to use the elevator, it’s been knocked out. If you see a vampire, kill it. Just don’t let them get too close or you won’t have a—”
The line cut out.
>
“Jackson? Are you there? Shit.” I shoved the phone back into Declan’s coat and tried my best not to worry about what just happened to Declan’s vampire-hunting pal. “We have to move. Lawrence must have gone completely batshit crazy because he released everybody from their cages and they’re hungry. We have to get out of here.”
He looked understandably grim. “It’s daylight. They won’t be able to come outside.”
Sunlight didn’t kill vampires. However, it did fry their eyes, making them blind and much easier to kill. Because of this, they much preferred the nightlife. Point for us.
But that was only if we could get outside.
I’d known this felt wrong from the moment we got here. I’d been so greedy to find a solution to my problem that it had blinded me to everything else.
“Come on.” I pulled Declan with me toward the door before I froze. Something Dr. Reynolds said came back to me. “There’s another woman, other than Lawrence’s wife, who’s being kept here for his dhampyr breeding research. She’s in danger. We can’t just leave her here.”
His arm was tense, his expression flat and hard to read. “If we can get to her, then we will. If we can’t, my first priority is to get you out of here in one piece.”
“But Declan—”
“No, Jill. This isn’t up for debate. We’re out of here.”
Faster than I thought he was currently able to move, he pulled me along with him to the door of the office. It was already open, the hinges broken as if Lawrence had taken out some of his rage on them.
Dr. Reynolds had chosen his research over friendship and loyalty. He tried to convince himself he was one of the good guys, but keeping a woman locked away until she gave birth to a monster that ripped her apart—that wasn’t something a good guy would do. I felt Lawrence’s pain, but this wasn’t right. I was just thankful he hadn’t killed me or Declan yet. All we could do was try to get out of here before he found us again and finished what he’d started.
Declan leaned against me as we walked, and that worried me. He was also dripping blood from his more severe wounds. As a dhampyr, he’d heal quickly, but not quickly enough.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Never better.”
Emotionless, yes. But not without the capacity for sarcasm.
We had to keep moving. The underground facility was huge, with mazelike hallways. The debilitated warehouse on the surface was only the proverbial tip of the iceberg to what lay beneath.
The lights flickered in the hallway. Suddenly the blare of the alarm cut out, and the resulting silence seemed as loud and as frightening as the noise had been. I strained my ears, trying to hear beyond the sound of our own steps, but there was nothing.
“It’s not the wounds that are slowing me down like this,” Declan said after a moment, cutting through the eerie silence. “It’s something else.”
“What is it?”
His grip at my waist tightened. “It’s your blood. It didn’t kill me, but it’s messing me up. I feel it.”
Shit. “What does that mean?”
He brought his hand to his temple and rubbed as if he had a headache. “I don’t know. My head’s all cloudy, and I don’t think it’s simply from the tranquilizer.”
I was used to Declan being so strong and capable. Seeing him in this weakened condition scared me even more than I already was. And since my blood caused it, I felt that it was my fault.
My jaw set. “I’d rather not have to carry you up those stairs, but I will if I have to.”
His lips curled. “You don’t give up, do you?”
“I’ll let you know when I do. I’m not quite there yet.” I froze when I saw the outline of someone standing in our path. No, he wasn’t standing; he was moving quickly toward us. It was a vampire, his glossy black eyes almost glowing, the veins throbbing on his pale face. He looked like a monster straight out of one of my nightmares.
He hissed, baring his fangs, and his chest hitched as he inhaled my scent. Declan had told me that vampires didn’t actually need to breathe. They did it more out of habit from having once been human than out of true necessity. I wouldn’t exactly call them undead—they were still a strange and unnatural form of the living—but they were no longer human.
And this particular nonhuman wanted a taste of me. I guess he hadn’t gotten the memo about Jillian Conrad, Nightshade carrier. Tasty death on legs.
The vampire grabbed me and dove for my throat, no conversation, no explanation, just a need to feed. Jackson had said that the vampires were kept near starving so they’d make for better test subjects.
This one wanted blood, my blood. Buckets of it. And he wasn’t taking no for an answer.
EIGHT
Before I felt more than his cool breath on my throat, Declan grabbed the vampire and threw him against the wall. I heard several bones crack with the impact, but he leapt to his feet immediately as if he felt no pain.
He hissed at me. “I . . . need . . . blood.”
“Too bad.” I staggered back as he drew closer again. I’d let the thing bite me so my blood would kill him, but then I’d run the risk that he’d kill me, not to mention that a loss of blood weakened me. I needed my strength.
He didn’t get the chance to bite me. Declan grabbed the vampire’s head and twisted it sharply to the side. There was a sickening crack. He fell to the ground in a heap only inches from my feet, his black eyes staring upward. Cold sweat slipped down my back.
“Is—is he—?” I stammered.
“No. He’d be ash by now if he was dead. It’ll take him a few minutes to recover.”
“Recover from a broken neck?”
“Yeah. So let’s move.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me along the hallway with him.
The fluorescent overhead lighting flickered out completely, plunging us into complete darkness. A couple of seconds later there was a whirring sound as the emergency system came on. There still wasn’t much light, only enough to see the vague outline of where we were going.
We came to the elevator. Even though Jackson said not to use it, I jabbed at the up button anyway, hoping for a miracle. Not surprisingly, nothing happened. The stairway was another fifty feet down the hall. It was so quiet now. All I heard was our breathing, the sound of our feet against the floor, and my heartbeat pounding in my ears.
Fear was useless to me at the moment. It was an emotion that only worked to freeze one in their tracks, like a deer in the headlights. Easy prey to be picked off one at a time.
Paranoia was another thing. That was helpful—a survival instinct that kept me moving, kept me holding tightly on to Declan’s hand as we walked swiftly to our only escape route.
“So this is your life,” I said. “Danger and death around every corner.”
He eyed me. “Enjoying yourself, are you?”
“I can barely contain my glee.”
“And you thought I got all these scars from having a cushy desk job?”
“You might want to consider a change in careers.”
He snorted. “That’s doubtful.”
“No interest in settling down?”
“Only when they lay me down in my coffin. That is, if there’s anything left of me then.”
I grimaced. “That’s a charming thought.”
“This is a regular day’s work for me—maybe a bit more fucked up than normal—but fairly regular. You deserve a safe and happy life where your neck isn’t constantly on the line.”
I met his gaze. “So do you.”
His jaw tightened. “This is my life.”
“Says who?”
“Says me. I know where I belong.”
“Two hundred feet underground with a dozen hungry vampires running amuck.”
His humorless grin returned. “It pays well.”
He could laugh it off—gallows humor, I supposed—but my heart still ached for him. He’d never been given the chance to have a normal life. Being what he was—a dhampyr—left him with few options.
I thought about the Declan in my dream, the untouched one, the unscarred one—the one who hadn’t experienced violent battle like this Declan had. Dream Declan was somebody I could see myself making a life with. He was normal. He was handsome. He was as close to perfect as it got.
But he wasn’t really Declan; he was just some guy who sort of looked like him. And that was enough to give me second thoughts about my previous ideas of perfection.
We reached the stairwell, and I was disturbed by the sounds I could now hear—screams and crashes—they were coming from the level lower than we were.
Declan looked at me. “Probably not a good idea to go down there.”
“That’s where Jackson is—if he’s still alive.”
His expression turned grim. “I need to get you out first. Then I’ll come back for him.”
Fear knifed through my gut. “Like hell you will. You’re hurt.”
“I can’t leave him here.”
“I feel the same way about that woman.”
He eyed me. “The woman you don’t know. That you’ve never met.”
“I don’t care. I have to help her.” I stopped climbing at the next floor, the one above where we’d been. This was where she was being kept—at least, that was the impression I’d gotten. “Come on.”
I pushed open the door. The hallway seemed identical to the floor we’d been on. It felt a bit like a hospital hallway, and it smelled hyperclean, as if it had been recently flushed with antiseptic.
It was dark here and very quiet—too quiet—as if everyone had already escaped. If there had been anyone here to begin with.
I stopped walking and listened hard . . . and heard something. A steady pounding noise. “That might be her.”
“Might be.”
“Worth checking.” I picked up my pace and moved down the hall until I reached the door from which the sound was coming. I pressed my hand up against it. “Is somebody in there?”
The pounding stopped. There was silence for a moment and then, “Help! You have to get me out of here! I’m locked in!”
I tried the handle, but she was absolutely right. I looked at Declan.
He nodded. “Step aside.”
“Stay back,” I told the woman through the door. “We’re going to break the door open.”
Declan kicked the door hard. It only took a few good kicks with Declan’s heavy boot—not to mention his dhampyr strength—before it flew inward.
The woman was dressed in a pink hospital gown, her face pale with fear as she stared out at us with wide eyes. “Who the fuck are you?”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “Now let’s get the hell out of here. We can do the meet and greet later.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.” She looked warily at Declan, and whatever she thought of his fearsome looks made her noticeably cringe. “Where’s Dr. Reynolds?”
“He’s dead.” I said it bluntly, but it made me flash back to what happened in the examining room. I shuddered. “And so are we if we loiter around here for much longer.”
“Dead?” Her voice broke.
“I’m surprised you care. He’s the one who locked you up.”
“No—” She looked confused. “He’s paying me a lot of money to help him with his research. I need the money. My parents—I’m supporting them. I’m all they have.”
I stared at her with surprise. “You agreed to be here? Do you know what kind of experiments he was doing?”
“Reproductive studies. I know I was agreeing to be artificially inseminated. For the money I’m being paid, it’s worth it. I already agreed to give up the child when it’s born.”
I felt sick at hearing her story, knowing what she didn’t know. She might have signed up voluntarily, but it was unlikely that she knew the results—that being artificially inseminated by a vampire would likely leave her torn in at least two very bloody pieces.
“Are you pregnant right now?” I asked cautiously.
She shook her head. “We were going to officially start tomorrow.”
I let out a shaky sigh of relief. “We need to get out of here.”