His taunt hit home. Ian snarled, showing fang. Dire though the situation was, Jules managed a hint of a smile, glad to know he’d scored a hit, glad to know he hadn’t given his maker the satisfaction of flinching.
Ian regained his composure, glancing at Hannah for a moment before meeting Jules’s eyes with an expression of gleeful malice.. “Did you tell your woman all about our lovely night together, Jules? Did you tell her how you begged me to fuck you?”
The hateful memory still lurked in the background of his psyche, but he refused to let Ian win a battle of wills. He met Ian’s eyes with what he hoped was cool aplomb. “Did you tell your fledglings that you couldn’t get anyone, man or woman, to fuck you without force or glamour?”
Ian’s control broke, and he took two furious strides forward before he pulled up. “No!” he said. “No quick death for you. The boys and I are going to take turns riding your woman while you watch. Then, when we’ve fucked her to death, we’ll start on you. My dear mentor taught me far more than I’ve ever showed you, but that will soon change.”
“Sounds like fun,” Hannah said from behind Jules’s back, “but I think I’ll pass.”
Ian laughed at her. Big mistake.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jules saw Hannah’s hand rise up beside his arm. And in that hand was her gun.
The gun went off with a deafening boom, but her aim was off. The bullet slammed into Ian’s shoulder instead of into his head. He roared in pain.
“Get down!” Hannah shouted, and Jules obeyed without thought as Ian’s fledglings charged them.
The one with the bleeding nose was slightly ahead of the rest. The gun boomed again, and the fledgling’s head jerked backward. He fell and didn’t get up. Hannah squeezed off one more shot before she froze. Another fledgling fell, never to rise again.
Ian, his hand clamped to his bleeding shoulder, his face contorted in pain and rage, hit Jules with the full force of his glamour. Jules remained crouched on the floor, unable to move a muscle, while Hannah stood over him in her shooter’s stance, unable to pull the trigger.
The two remaining fledglings looked half insane with hunger, their eyes bulging as drool dripped from their fangs. Ian must have been starving them, and the scent of blood in the air was overpowering.
Ian plucked the gun from Hannah’s nerveless fingers and tossed it over his shoulder into the darkness beyond. He shoved Jules aside with his foot.
“Play with him,” he said to his fledglings, “but don’t kill him. That pleasure will be mine. I’m going to punish the little lady for killing your brothers in arms.”
Ian moved around behind Hannah, pulling her hair away from her throat. He raised his eyebrows when he saw the punctures that Gabriel had left there.
“I see someone has tasted her already.” He looked down at Jules, who lay on his back on the floor, helpless to break the hold of his glamour. Ian clucked his tongue. “Naughty, naughty. But I’ll show her how a real man does it.” He punctuated that statement by grinding his hips against Hannah’s backside. His hands looped around to the button on her jeans, and he pulled his lips away from his fangs.
“No!” Jules shouted as Ian sank his fangs into Hannah’s neck.
The two fledglings came at him, but it was as if they moved in slow motion. The red haze was back, the haze he’d felt in the hotel room when he’d seen what Gabriel had done.
The red haze that shielded his mind from Ian’s glamour.
Jules slammed into Ian and Hannah, the force of the impact knocking Ian loose. With a snarl of unadulterated hatred, Jules flung himself at his maker. Ian was so startled by his inability to control his fledgling that he didn’t even get his hands up. Jules used his knees to pin Ian’s wrists to the floor, then started swinging his fists.
He was barely aware of what he was doing as he landed one punch after another on Ian’s face. Bone crunched with each blow. Blood coated his knuckles. Ian screamed, high and shrill, his body writhing as he tried to get out from under Jules, to no avail.
Jules was still battering his maker’s face when the insane rage began to wear off. Ian was crying and begging for mercy, his face a pulpy mess, as Jules recoiled in horror at what he had done.
Ian’s well-honed survival instincts must have alerted him that Jules’s mind was back, because suddenly, Jules couldn’t move. Dammit, even in his state of pathetic misery, Ian was too powerful a foe!
Ian’s face was so ruined he couldn’t open his eyes, but his hands rose and groped for Jules’s neck. Jules struggled to call the blind rage back and break the glamour, but it stubbornly refused to come on command. Ian’s hands found his neck and started to squeeze. Weakly, at first, but the grip grew stronger as Ian mumbled curses and threats through his broken teeth. Jules couldn’t breathe and realized his maker wanted to knock him out so he could finish healing. Then, no doubt, he would pay Jules back in spades for every punch he had landed.
The sound of a gunshot shattered the air. Ian’s head jerked and a gout of blood spurted from a bullet wound in the side of his skull.
The glamour let up, and Ian’s hands fell away from Jules’s neck. Gasping for breath, Jules looked toward the source of the gunshot.
In the doorway stood Drake, holding Hannah’s gun. Beside him stood Gabriel, two dead fledglings at his feet.
Jules shook his head to clear the remaining fog, his eyes searching the room for Hannah.
His heart nearly stopped when he saw her.
She was lying on the floor on her back. Blood pooled by her head. Lots of blood. Way too much blood, and more of it continued to pour from the ragged tear in her throat.
With an incoherent cry of despair, Jules launched himself across the room to her, clamping his hand over the wound, trying desperately to stanch the flow as he cradled her head in his lap. Her pulse was weak and slow, her body limp.
“Goddammit, no!” he shouted, holding her more tightly against him as the life continued to seep out of her body.
“She’s not going to make it,” Gabriel said, coming to kneel beside her.
“Shut the fuck up!” Jules snarled. “She’s going to make it! She has to!”
But he could feel it as clearly as Gabriel could. She was dying, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
“You have to change her,” Gabriel said.
Jules blinked, wishing Gabriel would go away and leave him alone. If these were to be his last few moments with her …
“Bite her!” Gabriel said, more urgently. “Change her. But hurry up, she isn’t going to last much longer.”
Jules felt as if all his breath were sucked from his lungs at once. Change her? Change Hannah? He looked up and met Gabriel’s eyes. The older vampire was dead serious.
“I can’t do that,” Jules said, despair heavy in his voice.
It was one of Eli’s cardinal rules—there were more than enough vampires in the world already. There was no excuse for making more. He clutched Hannah more tightly, his heart bleeding as heavily as her neck.
Gabriel’s voice was eerily calm, though his eyes pierced Jules with deadly malice. “So you’re going to let the woman you love die because Saint Eli decreed ‘thou shalt not make vampires?’ He turned his head to the side and spat as if the words tasted bad.”You’re a weak-minded fool. And if you let her die, I will take both you and Drake apart limb from limb.”
There was no doubt that Gabriel meant what he said. Obviously, he was more than just “fond” of Hannah. Jules doubted Gabriel could inflict any greater pain than that of losing Hannah, but he glanced up at Drake, hating that he, too, would pay the price if Jules refused.
Drake looked unruffled by the threat. “I’ll stand by whatever decision you make. No matter what.”
Jules let out a shuddering breath. If he changed her, Hannah would hate him forever. She was already uncomfortable with his superior strength and his glamour. How could she tolerate being his fledgling?
I own you, Ian’s voice whispered in his me
mory.
But if he didn’t change her, she would die. She might die anyway—not everyone accepted the psychic lifeline—but how could he not offer her the choice? If she hated him, if he hated himself, if Eli and the Guardians condemned him, that was just the price he’d have to pay.
Jules raised Hannah to a sitting position and covered her still-bleeding wound with his mouth.
It was the first time he’d tasted human blood since he’d become a vampire, and the rush of it was indescribable. No milk to make his stomach revolt, no medicinal-tasting chemicals to preserve the blood, no chill of refrigeration. He moaned in almost sexual pleasure as he drank, and he could see with total clarity how easy it would be to become addicted.
Even more compelling than the physical experience was the psychic one. As soon as he’d swallowed that first sip, he felt as though the psychic walls around his mind crumbled, and he could reach out as he never could before. He felt Hannah’s life force like a physical presence in his mind, becoming weaker and weaker with every sluggish beat of her heart. She was pulling away, fading. He was losing her.
Acting on pure instinct, he reached out to her, straining against the limits of his own body, willing to follow her into the abyss of death rather than give up. He felt a connection, tenuous and shaky.
When Ian had changed him, Jules had grabbed onto that psychic lifeline in a reflexive gesture, no thought involved. Impending death had reduced him to mindless instinct, and Ian had gleefully reeled him in before Jules had any idea what he was giving up to save his own life.
But Hannah knew. Jules felt her hesitation and strained toward her, reaching desperately.
Hold on to me, Hannah, he urged as she started to slip away again. Don’t let go. Please don’t let go. Still, she was fading, and pain knifed through him, body and soul.
Don’t let go, he begged again. I need you. I love you.
The words sent a shock through his system, but there was no denying the truth of them. He loved her, and he was not going to lose her!
Dammit, Hannah! You’re too damn tough to die, so hold on tight and come back to me.
The pull slackened, but she still didn’t come to him. He could feel her uncertainty, her fear. He imagined surrounding her in comforting warmth, drawing her away from the chilling abyss into the heat of his arms. She resisted, and immediately he stopped. He couldn’t draw her away—she had to come to him of her own free will.
Steadying his nerve, feeling like his heart was in his throat even though he couldn’t feel his body, he loosened his grip—not letting go, but letting her feel his surrender, letting her know he wouldn’t keep her against her will. He visualized a strong, thin lifeline anchored immovably in his heart as he let go with his hands, spreading his arms to his sides and laying his head back.
She could follow that line back to him. Or she could slide into the abyss, ripping his heart from his chest and taking it with her.
I love you, he repeated. I’m yours if you want me.
For what seemed like an eternity, they balanced on the brink of the abyss. Jules had surrendered his heart to her, but it would mean nothing if she couldn’t return the gesture, couldn’t give him a little piece of her soul and thereby bind herself to him forever.
Then, suddenly, he was pulling away from the abyss, and Hannah was following. He practically wept with relief. The psychic connection broke, and he was back in his body, in the real world, with Hannah cradled in his arms. He withdrew his fangs and pressed a kiss on the wound, then gathered her in even closer, tucking her head under his chin. A tentative probe confirmed that she’d made the transition, though she was still unconscious.
“She’ll be out for days,” Gabriel said. “The transition—”
“I know,” Jules interrupted. He and his fellow Guardians had rescued enough newly made fledglings to know what to expect. The next few weeks were going to be very difficult for Hannah. He rocked her in his arms, hoping that somewhere deep inside she felt the comfort he was trying so desperately to give her.
“So, what happens now?” Drake asked.
Jules didn’t want to think about that. “There are two more new fledglings in the basement. And another mortal woman, too. She’s badly in need of medical attention.”
Drake and Gabriel exchanged a look. Gabriel sighed heavily.
“Take the fledglings to Eli,” he said. “I very much doubt they were volunteers, not with Ian as their maker. Much as I loathe my father, I know he’s very good with new fledglings.”
“What about the mortal?” Drake asked.
“I’ll take her to the hospital, but I doubt she’s going to make it.”
When Jules closed his eyes and concentrated, he could see what Gabriel meant. The mortal woman’s psychic footprint was very faint, though not as faint as Hannah’s had been. There was at least some chance she would survive.
He glared up at Gabriel. “You’re not going to kill her.” Who he was kidding by issuing orders, he didn’t know, but Gabriel took his tone in stride.
“No, I won’t kill her. I fed last night, remember? Unlike Ian, I’m not a glutton. When I kill, it’s for a reason.” He turned to Drake. “Help me get them out of the basement.”
The two of them left the room, and Jules heard them descending the stairs into the basement. He sat numbly on the cold floor, holding Hannah and trying to absorb the enormity of what he’d just done.
He’d created a fledgling. Never in his wildest dreams would he have imagined he’d do such a thing. He swallowed hard, remembering the taste of her blood in his mouth. The memory was heady, and embarrassingly pleasant, but he didn’t feel any unbearable compulsion to start killing people. Would he have become fatally addicted if she’d refused him and died? But then, he doubted he’d have survived. He’d thought his surrender was figurative, but it hadn’t felt that way.
Drake and Gabriel returned, and Drake came to squat beside Jules. Jules met his solemn eyes. He was probably the only Guardian who wouldn’t condemn him for what he’d done.
“Thank you,” he said, more moved than he wanted to admit by the Killer’s show of solidarity.
Drake nodded in acknowledgment. “I’ll take her to Eli with the others,” Drake said quietly. “He’ll take good care of her, you know that.”
Jules nodded tightly. He didn’t want to, but he loosened his grip on Hannah and let Drake take her from him. They stood up together, and Jules planted one more soft kiss on Hannah’s temple before Drake carried her from the room, leaving him alone with Gabriel.
He’d almost allowed himself to forget the deal he’d made with Gabriel, and what the consequences of breaking that deal would be. He should probably be very, very alarmed right this moment. But somehow he couldn’t seem to feel much of anything except the heaviness of his heart. Perhaps he was in shock.
At the sound of Drake’s car starting, Gabriel frowned and gave Jules a puzzled look.
“He’s leaving without you?”
Jules shrugged. “It’s not like I can go back to Philly after what I just did.”
Gabriel cocked his head. “Why not?”
“Because Eli would kill me.”
Gabriel looked disgusted. “So, you’re going to make Hannah a vampire, and then you’re just going to dump her in Eli’s lap and wash your hands?”
Jules snarled at him. “You’re not in any position to give lectures. And where the hell were you, anyway? Why was Hannah in this house? And why was she alone?”
To his surprise, Gabriel lowered his head and looked vaguely ashamed. “My apologies. Hannah and I were on our way here to try to rescue the mortal, but my mother caught up with us and I had to run for it.” He shook his head. “I should have known Hannah wouldn’t wait for me to come back.”
For the first time, Jules took a really good look at Gabriel. The light of the Coleman lantern bleached a lot of the color out of his skin and hair, but Jules now saw the smudges of what he’d thought was dirt were actually blood. Dried blood, not the blood
of Ian’s fledglings.
“Is she dead?” Jules asked, wondering how Gabriel could have taken out a monster like Camille. He was strong, but she should be stronger.
An eerie light shone in Gabriel’s eyes. “No, she’s not dead. But right now I’m not sure she appreciates the distinction.” He smiled, but it wasn’t a pleasant expression. “I suppose I’m the new Master of Baltimore, though despite my mother’s suspicions, I have no fledglings.” He looked at Jules and curled his lips up to reveal his fangs. “I would have been here sooner, but I had to wait till her fledglings woke up enough to feel what I did to them. I wanted her to hear them scream. And I wanted her to know that sickening, helpless feeling that she could do nothing to stop me.”
Jules took an involuntary step backward from the mad, dangerous creature who stood before him. The creature who’d promised him slow torture if he refused to give up everything he knew about the Guardians.
But Gabriel sheathed his fangs, that insane light fading from his eyes. The sneer turned into something almost like a smile. “Don’t worry. I know you never intended to give me any information. You’re a terrible liar.”
“Then why did you give me Ian?”
A shrug. “Because it pleased me to do so. Of course, I’d intended to make you talk afterward.”
“But you’ve changed your mind?” It sounded too good to be true, but Jules was sure of one thing—he didn’t understand Gabriel worth a damn. Who knew what the freak was thinking, or what he would do?
Gabriel stepped closer and clapped a hand on Jules’s shoulder. Jules managed to suppress the urge to pull away as Gabriel leaned in close.
“I’ve thought of a better way to strike at my father. Besides, Hannah needs you.”
Those words were just a little more proof that Jules didn’t get this guy. “Hannah’s made it very clear she doesn’t need anybody.”
“That’s what she thinks, but she’s wrong. She was wrong even before you made her, and she’s doubly wrong now. If I questioned you as I planned, you’d be broken when I was finished. You’re no good to her broken.”
Jules snorted. “I’m no good to her dead, either, which is what I’d be if I tried to go to her.”