Blood Born: Cora's Choice #2 (2 page)

This is crazy,
a distant part of me screamed.
He bit you. Get out!

I couldn’t move a muscle.

Mr. Thorne didn’t comment on my reaction, but I knew nothing escaped his sharp notice. “The medical team has been taking your lymphocytes every twelve hours,” he said instead, standing so close I could touch him. “Your counts have already gone down by half, and they should be back to normal in another week.”

My brain went blank, wanting the words it thought he said too badly to allow them to register all at once
. If my lymphocytes were going down, it could mean only one thing.

My cancer was going away
.

“
I really am…cured,” I said hoarsely. The hope he had offered me might be real, then, not just some cruel trick to lure me into his power.

I swallowed.
Cured. The word hardly had a meaning. It had been a desperate dream for so many weeks. Since there had been something inside that was going to kill me, I felt like I should know somehow that it was gone. I did feel…different, but the reality was one intangibility replaced by another. My fight against leukemia had been a battle against an invisible opponent, and the evidence of my victory was equally abstract.

“
Survival is not compatible with cancer,” Mr. Thorne said coolly. It was hard for me to think straight with him so close. He had a contained, coiled energy about him, each movement that he took carefully studied, as if there was a danger in what he might do if his attention slipped.

“
Survival. Survival of what? What did you do to me?” I demanded. I needed words to describe what had passed between us, the ecstasy and the pain and the overriding rush that had swallowed everything.

His smile was full of meaning.
“I think you know, Cora.”

My name on his lips was like a caress and a blow all at once.
It was the first time he’d addressed me so informally, and I knew it was because of what he had done—and I had survived.

But
I still didn’t even know his.

A memory stirred in the back of my mind.
Except that perhaps I did….

“Dorian.”
I breathed the name. It suited him.

He simply raised an eyebrow in acknowledgement, hooking an ankle around the nearest chair
and pulling it under him as he sat in one easy motion.

I
shivered and tried to decide if that was an improvement. He was no longer towering over me, but his face was much closer to mine, which only scrambled my scattered wits even more.

The memory of his mouth
on mine came over me.
Oh, God.
One part of me wanted to kiss him again—the other wanted only to escape. But I wasn’t going anywhere as long as I was trapped in the bed.

“Get
me out of this.” I raised my hand with the IV taped to it to indicate the tubes that I was strapped to. “Now.” I heard the hysterical note in my own voice and clamped down on it.

“Of course.”
He captured my hand in his, and I couldn’t stop it from trembling at his touch even as he removed the tape from the back of my hand. My body burned with awareness of him no less than it had the night before, no less than in my dream, when he had led me to my destruction.

Even k
nowing what he was.

“You can’t just go around biting
people with no warning,” I heard myself say. It sounded stupid. I didn’t care.

He pressed slightly where the needle pierced my skin and slid it out in a straight, smooth motion.

“
You knew the risk and the reward,” he said. “Did the details matter with so much at stake?”

Even with my hand still held in his, I sputtered in outrage.
“Details? You didn’t tell me you were a vampire! That was kind of an important
detail
you omitted. Something a girl might like to know. ‘Oh, by the way, this procedure I’ve been talking about? It involves me sinking my teeth into your neck.’”

His chuckle sent ripples down into my
core. “Who believes in vampires anymore? We’ve been turned into a popular trope, a pet monster, a joke.” He looked at me, his pale eyes going straight into my mind, as if he could read the thoughts written there.

Dorian
Thorne carried darkness around him, a shroud even in the light. He was all too real, nothing at all like a joke.

He raised my hand to his mouth.
I stared, mesmerized and powerless, as he brought the mark that the needle had left to his lips, his mouth damp across my flesh. My nerves danced with fire where he touched me, and a tiny groan escaped me, my breath catching and my heartbeat coming fast.

He turned the back of the hand to face me.
The skin was flawless except for a tiny pale mark and a surrounding bruise that faded even as I watched.

Impossible.

“You really did heal me,” I breathed, pulling my hand back. “How?”

“I don’t know.
No one does. After thirty years of research, we are scarcely closer to an answer than we were at the start,” Dorian Thorne said. “But we do know this: The saliva of a vampire is fatal when introduced into the bloodstream of most humans, but those it does not kill, it heals. And changes. Forever.”

C
hanges.
My heart hammered in my chest. I didn’t want to be changed. I wanted my life back, the one the leukemia threatened to steal from me.

“I
’m not a vampire now, am I?” I demanded.

“
Vampires are born, not made,” Dorian Thorne said. “You are something else. No longer fully human, but not a vampire, either.”

I didn’t like that answer, and I wanted to pursue it, but another question, more troubling though less personal, was pressing upon me.
“Why bite people at all, then, if it means they’ll usually die?”

“
Because I die, if I do not. And it is not an easy death or a swift one,” he said.

His
eyes tightened briefly. He opened a drawer and pulled out a large syringe, like the kind used for giving oral medications. At my expression, he said, “For the catheter. You want it out, don’t you?”

I nodded curtly.
“So you’re not actually...you know, undead,” I said, feeling foolish.

He reached down beside the bed and came up with a loop of tubing.
He put the syringe to a port on the tube and pulled out the plunger, sucking a clear liquid into it. My eyes jerked to the ceiling because at the same moment, I felt a pressure inside my bladder release.

“
No, not undead.” He sounded weary. “I am as alive and sensible, in the old meaning of the word, as any human. And you can remove the catheter now,” he added. “Unless you require assistance.”

“
No,” I said quickly. “Not at all.”

I reached under the blanket and slid the catheter free with a tug.
I tore through the wrap that secured the tube to my leg and pushed it all off the side of the bed, adjusting my gown back down again.

I was free.
Or as free as I could be while trapped in a room with a vampire.

“
So why don’t you just drink animal blood? A really rare steak?” I challenged. “Do people just taste better?”

He snorted.
“Animal blood does no more for us than it does for you.”

“
Blood donations?”

“
Cora, we have tried. Over years, centuries, millennia, we have tried. If I could drink blood removed from its host or take the life of a mouse or cow instead of a human, I would. Many of us would.” A frown crossed his face, creasing his forehead for a moment before it relaxed again, leaving no mark. “But it is the interaction between a living, human host and the vampiric enzymes that produce a change in the cells themselves that we need to live.”

“
So you eat people.”

The disgust of it should have been greater.
I was horrified, but it was a muted, intellectual reaction. I knew he very well could have killed me—killed me to save himself, perhaps, and I would have gone eagerly enough to my grave, but I would still be just as dead. And I knew with certainty that he’d killed before, people just like me, people who had given themselves to him, heart and soul, only to be devoured in the end.

“
Not like food,” he said. “More like a vitamin, without which we develop something like scurvy or rickets. I don’t sit down to dine on living victims every night. Not every week or even every month.”

I shuddered.
“That’s really no different from...from buying organs from stolen living donors on the black market.”

His eyes, pale and icy, seemed to open to another world, drawing me in.
“There is a difference, Cora. When a human kills a human, it is murder, and there is no consent asked or given. When a human kills a creature that is not human, or vice versa....”

And he wasn’t human.
He was a too-perfect facsimile of one, too beautiful to bear. I knew how a deep-sea fish felt, enticed into the gaping mouth of an abysmal monster with the glowing lure on the end of its tongue.

“
We aren’t animals,” I breathed.

“
You aren’t. But what if we are?” he asked, leaning closer. “Animals made to need you. It is what I am, not what I choose.”

Dorian
brushed my cheek with a fingertip. I rocked slightly at the touch, my mind ablaze with his madness even as I intellectually rejected everything that he had said. His head angled down towards mine, his mouth so close that I could feel his breath.

He stopped, his lips a hairbreadth from mine.
“And I never take anything that is not offered to me,” his whispered.

Then he pulled back, leaving me dazed and panting, the truth of his words piercing me to the core.
I pushed up, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed and sliding to the floor, trying to cover my agitation as I twitched my nightgown straight.

“
You can’t do that,” I said. “It’s not right. Who could refuse you?” Even if it meant death....

“
Cora, I am telling you how things are, not how I would like things to be,” he said, not moving from his chair. “I want to put an end to all this death.”

A monster with a conscience, then.

Oh, well, that makes it so much better, Cora,
I told myself acidly. The lion that weeps for the lamb.

“
So the screening,” I said.

“
It was very real.” His eyes bored into me with the intensity of his words, the need for me to believe him. “I have poured millions of dollars into my research, attempting to lower the casualties, to identify those who will live. You are the first success.”

“
How could you possibly know that I would be one in one hundred, then?” I demanded. “How could you quote me statistics if you really had no clue?”

“
It was an estimate,” he said, “based on the conversion rate of the general population and the number that we could exclude from consideration. We knew for certain that all those we exclude have no chance of survival. Simple mathematics dictates the likelihood among those that remain.”

“
You accepted me on a guess,” I said. I should have been more outraged. I was angry, still. But overriding that was the fact that I was not only alive but cured. He had offered me a chance and been brutally honest about my odds. He had just hidden...everything else.

And that
everything
was a whopper.

I pressed on.
“And what were the other requirements, other than that I had to be terminally ill and pass the blood test?”

“
That you be female,” he said flatly. “And an adult young enough to withstand the conversion.”

A
n adult female. Oh, God. My unnatural reaction to his every touch, the throbbing need that drove me to comply to every demand.... It wasn’t just me, then, at least not entirely.

“
So it’s...like
that
...for you, too?” I asked.

“
Yes,” he said. “Oh, yes. The hunger that comes upon us is very comprehensive.”

“
Is it like that every time?” I pressed. “With everyone?”

His eyes were shadowed.
“There seems to be a correlation between the likelihood of successful metabolic conversion and the level of arousal.”

Damn.
Damn, damn, damn, damn. I fought the heat rising in my cheeks and retreated to the other side of the bed, away from him and his clinical dissections.

“
So I survived,” I said, turning back around to face him and folding my arms over my breasts. “What now? Do you send me packing off home again, cured but not-quite-human?” The thought of never seeing him again sent a sudden jolt of panic, unexpected and frightening, coursing through me.