Bound by Night (The Moonbound Clan Vampires) (9 page)

“How can you say that?” Nicole scooted closer and groped around in the first-aid box. “You’re painting everyone with the same brush.”

“Humans have been obsessed with slavery since the beginning of time,” he said tiredly. “Any group a majority views as inferior—animals, other humans of different race, sex, or religion—has either been persecuted, hunted, exploited, or turned into workhorses. When you discovered the existence of vampires, no longer human but able to perform as well as humans, we were your guilt-free dream slaves.”

“Maybe.” Nicole’s long, graceful fingers measured out a length of medical tape, and he had a sudden, unbidden image of her using those fingers on sensitive parts of his body. Clearly, blood loss was making him delirious. “But there have always been other humans fighting for human and animal . . . and vampire . . . rights.”

“And what have you done . . .?” He trailed off, a sudden blurring of his vision and a light-headed spinning in his head whisking away his concentration. What had they been talking about? The gauze Riker held to his chest grew sticky and wet. Every breath was like breathing water.

“Dammit.” Nicole leaped across the distance separating them and lifted his palm from the wound. “Riker? I’m going to need you to lie down.”

She sounded so authoritative. So strong. He’d
think it was hot if he didn’t hate her. And if he wasn’t about to bleed to death.

As if his body was in tune with his thoughts, the scent of his own blood became overpowering, and a trickle of warmth began to stream down his torso.

“Know this, human. I will die before I allow myself to be taken.” Suddenly, every breath was a firestorm of pain. He gasped, choked on his own blood. “Looks . . . like that . . . might happen.”

“You’re not going to die.” She didn’t sound very convincing. Hell, she’d probably slit his throat the second he lost consciousness.

He sagged against her, felt her easing him backward. “If poachers find us . . .” He inhaled a raspy breath, trying to find the words to tell her about the tunnel leading to another exit at the back of the cave. Instead, agony ripped him apart.

He felt her hands on his shoulders. “Riker. Stay awake.”

Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen. “I know . . . you hate us.” Desperate to convey his urgency, he searched blindly for her hand. When he found it, he squeezed, and for the briefest moment, he took comfort in the fact that she squeezed back. “But please . . . when you get back . . . let Neriya go.”

The pain took him.

N
ICOLE’S CHEST WAS
tight as Riker went limp and passed out. He’d suffered what appeared to be a deep puncture wound between his fourth and fifth ribs, but it took a lot more than that to put down a vampire. The problem couldn’t be the boric acid; she’d lied about that. Oh, she’d dosed him with it, and it
was
lethal to vampires, but she’d only given him enough to lay him up for a few miserable days.

His medical condition wasn’t her concern, though. Her only concern was getting home alive, and with him incapacitated, she had a shot at it.

She hurried to the cave entrance, pausing in the early-evening shadows thrown by the surrounding trees and rocks. How far would she make it in the dark, especially given her lack of appropriate clothing? Even if she didn’t die of exposure, night was the domain of vampires, and clearly, these woods were crawling with them. If not them, hunters and poachers.

The memory of being chased by the men, some of whom had fangs and other body parts hanging from their belts and necks, sent a chill up her spine.

They’ll only chop
me
up for body parts. If I’m lucky, I’ll be dead when they start. But you? It’ll be a while before they put you down
.

Riker’s matter-of-fact words put a damper on her eagerness to leave. Maybe she should wait until morning.

She cut a tentative glance over her shoulder. Riker lay on the ground, drenched in darkness, a pool of blood spreading around him. Vampires could lose far more blood than humans and still recover, but it usually took massive trauma to lose that much. With the rapid way vampire blood clotted and wounds sealed, even the loss of a limb or a severed artery rarely resulted in death. But Riker wasn’t clotting.

So what? He kidnapped you, threatened to kill you, and . . . saved you from poachers
.

Snort.
He’d saved her from poachers so he could kill her himself after he got what he wanted.

Neriya
.

Who was she? Why did Riker want her so badly that he’d begged Nicole to release her if he died? He’d actually been desperate enough to use the word
please
. She had to wonder how hard that had been for him.

A howl broke in the distance. A wolf, maybe? Another howl joined the first, this one much closer, and Nicole’s heart skipped a beat. Bad enough that she was stuck in the middle of the wilderness with vampires and poachers. Now she had hungry wolves to worry about.

What if the howls weren’t wolves? What if that was how the poachers signaled one another? Yet another howl, this one so close she jumped, rang through
the forest. Oh, God, she wasn’t going to make it even a mile before someone or some
thing
caught her.

Reluctantly, she turned back to Riker. Lying there unconscious and with a trickle of blood streaming from the corner of his mouth, he still managed to strike fear into her heart, but without him, she didn’t stand a chance.

Calling herself all kinds of crazy, she crossed the distance between them and crouched to light another candle. Under the cast of the flickering light, she peeled back the soaked gauze covering Riker’s wound. Blood and air sucked in and bubbled out of the puncture with every labored breath. This was not good, and the situation became a lot more
not good
when she slid her gaze upward. His trachea had cranked hard to the left side of his neck, flanked on either side by distended veins that bulged up from under the skin. Dropping her ear to his chest, she cursed. The diminished breath sounds in his right lung confirmed her suspicions.

Tension pneumothorax.

Her vampire-physiology schooling had included medical classes, and Riker’s signs and symptoms were straight from the basic trauma manual. Under normal circumstances, a vampire could survive, but there was nothing normal about these circumstances, not when Riker’s natural healing ability was being compromised by the acid she’d dosed him with.

Hastily, she rummaged through the first-aid kit, cursing at the contents. She wasn’t a medical doctor, but with her knowledge of vampire anatomy, she figured she could perform a minor operation if she had to.

But not with gauze, dull scissors, and tweezers.

Shoving the first-aid kit aside, she dug into the bag of remaining supplies. Water, protein bars, a pad of sticky notes, more candles, and a blanket that might come in handy later, but they weren’t going to help with Riker’s out-of-control bleeding now.

Which left her with no choice but to handle the boric-acid poisoning.

Closing her eyes, she flipped through mental files pertaining to the development of the antivampire powder—basically, mace for fanged people—and the cure. Although the highly concentrated boric-acid powder was now in use by both private citizens and law enforcement, Nicole had, only days ago, signed off on large-scale production of the antidote for distribution to the public.

She remembered that day clearly, because a few hours later, she’d been informed that dozens of vampires had been executed in the very lab where the antidote had been perfected, supposedly on her orders.

It had been sunny outside. She’d been planning the company Christmas party, even though it was still months away. She’d even made a teeny origami Christmas tree.

And then Chuck had burst into her office to show her the video of the vampires being dosed with boric acid and left to die in writhing agony in their cells.

Nicole had thrown up in the garbage can next to her desk. When she’d finally stopped heaving, she’d gone on a rampage that included firing most of the staff at the Minot lab facility. Then she’d been forced to hire them all back when Chuck shoved a signed execution directive under her nose.

The signature had been hers. It didn’t matter that she swore she hadn’t signed the order. What mattered was that suddenly, she’d had her eyes opened to a reality she hadn’t wanted to face. How many vampire test subjects had suffered in Daedalus labs in order for her company to profit from the weapon she’d used on Riker? How many vampires had died horrible, excruciating deaths?

Nicole had dedicated her life to saving humanity from the vampire scourge. But right now, as she looked at Riker, helpless on the ground, and thought about Lucy, who only wanted candy, not blood, Nicole couldn’t work up any pride in what she’d done.

Riker gasped, spitting blood onto the cave floor, and she shoved her shame into a box to be explored later. She couldn’t be responsible for killing him. Not with a Daedalus weapon, anyway.

So the antidote . . . She bit her lip, her brain working a million miles an hour. A large percentage of the cure contained calcium carbonate as a neutralizing agent. Calcium carbonate was often used in antacids. A frisson of hope shot through her, and she dug through the first-aid kit again, hoping like hell that vampires used Tums.

Nothing.
Dammit.
She stared at the candles while her mind spun like a centrifuge. In the background, Riker’s breathing grew more labored. He had a couple of hours at the most.

One of the candles flickered, spitting a drop of wax down the side of the white pillar.

Ash
.

Son of a bitch, of course!

“Hold on, vampire.” She darted to the cave entrance, hesitating only a second to listen for the poachers before creeping out into the twilight to gather an armful of twigs, sticks, and rotted wood.

She hurried back inside, but her heart sank at the sound of Riker’s uneven respirations filling the cave with an ominous death rattle. He didn’t have much time.

Adrenaline and fear made her hands shake as she used the wood and a candle to start a fire that was no larger than the burning end of a match.

“Come on,” she urged the tiny flame, but it seemed the fire had its own
slow
agenda.

Dammit.
Had this been any other situation, she’d have burned the sticky notes, too. But vampires were so sensitive to chemical vapors that even minute quantities of the chemicals used to process paper could further damage Riker’s already compromised lungs.

Forcing herself to stay positive, she turned to check on Riker just as he hissed in pain, lips peeled back to expose fangs streaked with his own blood. His mouth twisted in a silent snarl, and instinctively, she leaped backward, her heart thundering in her chest.
Jesus
. Even hovering near death he was terrifying.

But he
was
hovering near death, and as he settled down with a low moan, she got her anxiety under control.

He might be a vampire, but right now, he needed help. She inched closer to him, her fingers flexing as if eager to touch him. He’d been gruff with her, threatening, a little rough, even. But he hadn’t harmed her . . . yet. She couldn’t help but wonder why, given that he
seemed hell-bent on blaming her for every wrong done to vampires, including the death of his mate.

And what was up with that, anyway? Why would he blame her family for that incident, when
he
was the one who had driven the blade through Terese’s throat?

Something wasn’t adding up, and Nicole hated secrets, hated unknowns. Even as a child, she’d wanted answers to everything, had loved Nancy Drew and wanted to grow up to be a private detective.

Terese’s death and the slave rebellion changed all of that.

Riker groaned, his big body shuddering. His misery skinned her alive. It didn’t matter what he was or what he’d done. He was hurting, and it was her fault. A strange sensation, one she hadn’t felt in twenty years, coursed through her veins and straight into her heart: true compassion for a vampire.

“Damn you,” she muttered. “I’m sure you’d just as soon eat me as look at me, and here I am feeling sorry for you.”

Very gently, she placed her palm on his sternum, feeling his chest rise and fall in a halting rhythm. His heartbeat was strong, but his skin was chalky and hot. Shifting, she put her fingers to his throat and winced at the bounding pulse. A low, pained moan vibrated all the way up her arm and once again crept into her heart.

She glanced over at the small fire. “I’ll be right back.” She had no idea if he could hear her, or if he even cared that she’d be back, but for some silly reason, she wanted him to know he wasn’t alone.

Cursing herself for a fool who was probably saving the life of her own murderer, she tore open a packet of
alcohol swabs and tossed the contents. The fire hadn’t even come close to burning all the plant matter, but she used a stick to scrape up what little ashen cinders she could get into the little foil packet. Next, she dusted off a flat rock and dumped the warm ash onto it. With another rock, she ground the would-be medicine into a fine powder.