Vicious (29 page)

“Please don’t hurt me. I’m not like them. I don’t want to hurt people anymore. Please say I don’t have to hurt people anymore!”

The boy’s pleas caused Anna to automatically wrap her arms around him protectively while the rest of us looked on with shocked expressions. When Anna lifted the boy’s face so she could see him, the man’s words in the bar about Anna finding the boy with her eyes made sense. He was older than the other children. I would guess his age to be around thirteen or fourteen. He had pitch-black hair and blue eyes that matched Anna’s own blue eyes. This must be what happened to blue-eyed people when they turned. Sincerity flooded his hopeful face, and we all relaxed.

“Don’t worry,” Anna said. “We’ll take you out of here, and you can be with us. What is your name? Do you know your name?”

“Brandon,” he said quietly. “I don’t remember much else before this place though,” he added before looking down at his bare feet.

The only clothing he wore was a pair of tattered black pants. His chest and feet were bare and dirty like the other children had been.

“This is why they led us here,” said Anna, tears filling her eyes.

“What do you mean?”

“They led us here because they went too far. These children. They were trying to make mindless killing machines with these children, but it was too much. How do you direct them? How do you keep them from running rampant? No one would kill a child, except someone who knew how hopeless they were. Someone like us. We could see that there was no hope for them. They lured us here to kill their little monsters because they didn’t have the balls to do it themselves.”

As she hugged and rocked the boy gently in her arms, I spotted another solitary child huddled in the corner of the room. It looked to be a little girl who was about six years old. She sat with her knees up to her forehead and her arms wrapped around her legs. Her face hid behind a curtain of dirty blond hair, and she almost looked to be shivering or maybe crying.

The fact she had not attacked us made me think she might be like the boy. She was so small, her innocence urged me to go to her. I thought maybe, just maybe, we would be able to save two here tonight in the midst of all this horror and death. I wanted so badly to save another one.

Chapter Thirty Three

Anna

It wasn’t until the boy in my arms tensed that I became alarmed and looked around for Grant. We saw him walking quickly towards a little girl who was huddled and shaking in a corner.

“No!”

I looked around to see who had shouted and saw it had been Brandon, the boy I held, who had screamed.

“No! Look out!” he screamed again. He struggled against me with a frantic thrashing.

Grant turned to look back at us, clearly startled by Brandon’s sudden reaction, but it was far too late. I watched helplessly as the tiny girl revealed two black eyes from under her matted hair. She pounced directly onto Grant’s chest, her fangs bared, knocking him to the floor. The tiny thing growled and bit greedily into Grant’s flesh right in front of us. It all happened so incredibly fast that it seemed to be unreal.

She had already ripped a large chunk of flesh out of his shoulder before we got to her, and blood was gushing out of the wound and spreading across the dirty floor. The metallic scent of fresh blood filled the air around us, Grant’s blood. I took off my tank top to bandage the hideous wound. It wasn’t the clean wound that one of us would make, paralyzing in its placement and simplicity. This was a ragged wound, clumsy and brutal.

Grant stared up at me dazed while I applied pressure with my shirt to his shoulder. I could hear his heart pounding with panic, and I knew he was losing too much blood too fast. I turned from him only briefly to see Brandon twist and snap the girl’s tiny neck with one hand.

The following moments blurred together in a haze of blood and movement. I remembered running with vampires all around me and Grant’s blood gushing from him in a terrifying way. There was growling and the sounds of a scuffle. Sometime in the escape, I caught a glimpse of Cat wrestling a black-eyed Gabriel into one of the cars while Lulu, Marshall and I loaded Grant in the other. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. Everything was muted, and I moved like I was swimming in mush. Things didn’t begin to clear until I felt the car screech to a halt.

Lulu kicked in the door to the minor emergency clinic, and we were greeted with darkness and the complete lack of alarm bells. Thank goodness for small towns. This clinic closed at eight, and the employees had gone home long ago.

Marshall carried in Grant’s unconscious body right behind Lulu, and I kept up his quick pace while still holding my tank top to Grant’s shoulder. I was in nothing but my tattered jeans and bra smeared with blood and filth. We made our way quickly to the nearest room, and Marshall deposited his lifeless burden onto the elevated exam table. Lulu quickly pressed her fingers to his neck to check his pulse and then hovered her ear over his mouth to check for signs of breathing. Her silence and the serious look on her face frightened me.

“Is he alive, Lulu?” I asked her with a quiver to my voice that I wasn’t used to.

“Yes, but barely so,” she answered in a flat tone.

“Is he going to live?” asked Marshall, who was now looking at me worried at the foot of the bed.

Lulu looked up from Grant, and gave us a hard look. Those types of looks were always more frightening on her since they crossed her face so seldom.

There was a perceptible pause.

“I don’t think so.”

My breath caught in my throat, and for the first time in decades, I felt an urge to scream. The desperation of it all welled up behind my eyes, and I fought back the sorrow and the intense pressure that threatened to force its way through my defenses. This couldn’t be happening. Why hadn’t he stayed in the van with Lulu like I had asked him?

Amidst all of the regret and sorrow that was flowing through me, I suddenly felt the slightest pang of relief at the thought that at least the others weren’t here to share in this moment. I wouldn’t have been able to stand facing this with everyone here. I had sent them on ahead to begin the journey back to New Orleans while we took Grant to get help. Even though Gabriel had made some major strides in developing his control lately, I had seen the bloodlust building in him at the sight of Grant’s free flowing blood.

The boy, Brandon, seemed to hold it together all right, but I barely knew the child and couldn’t tell whether he could be trusted around a bleeding human yet. In the end, with Cat needing to stay with Gabriel, it was only Lulu and Marshall that I trusted to help me.

“We could turn him,” stated Marshall in a hopeful way as he looked at me.

The sudden idea jolted me out of my solemn contemplation, and I stared back at Marshall wide eyed.

“Are you nuts?”

“No. He wouldn’t die if we turned him.” His face looked hopeful again. My sweet friend Marshall had the kindest heart of all of us, and he was willing to put Grant through that torment? Marshall liked Grant and even considered him a type of friend. Why would he want to do that to him?

“I won’t do that to him.” I gripped Grant’s hand in mine.

“If we don’t, he will die, Anna,” stated Lulu. She met my eyes with another one of her frighteningly serious looks. She again put her fingers to his neck. “We’re losing him. His pulse is slowing. We need to decide now.”

I squeezed Grant’s hand, willing him to return to me. If I turned him, he might still die. The process didn’t always work. Just then, Marshall put his large dark hand on my forearm.

“I know this is hard, Anna, but if you can’t let go of this human, you need to let us help you turn him. If he is going to be with us, you have to give him what he needs to survive. This was bound to happen eventually. If you can’t let him die, then give him the tools he needs to survive with us.”

Tears began to well up in my eyes again at the thought. I choked them down with an effort, but when I spoke it sounded squeaky and small with the remnants of their ghosts haunting my throat. “But he won’t remember me. He won’t remember us. He’ll wake up a vile and barbaric animal who doesn’t know me.”

“If we don’t, he won’t remember anything at all because he’ll be dead,” Marshall said with a brutal honesty.

“You never know what people will remember afterwards,” added Lulu softly.

We stood there in silence for a moment while I thought hard about what to do. In the end, I chose what I knew Grant would want. “Okay, let’s do it.”

Those simple words sparked a seemingly chaotic sequence of movements as the three of us ran in all directions searching for the equipment we would need. We had a purpose now, and we moved with earnest. Lulu put a clean new bandage on the wound on his shoulder as Marshall and I collected as many large syringes as we could find. There was no time to start in IV like we had for Gabriel, so we would have to do this the hard way.

I plunged the needle into my own arm and began to extract my blood. I turned to Lulu who was prepping Marshall to do the same.

“Lulu, about how many of these did we give Gabriel?” My voice was hurried and strained as figures and percentages ran through my brain. If we gave him too much, the infected blood would kill him rather than turn him. If we gave too little, his body would treat it as a transfusion, and it would reject the blood as if it was the wrong blood type, killing him in the process. Lulu looked at the large syringes that we were all now filling with our blood, and she seemed to do some mental calculations of her own.

“About six and a quarter of these,” she answered. “Maybe six and a half.”

“Grant is a little bigger than Gabriel,” said Marshall.

We stopped for a short second and stared at each other in silence before all three of us simultaneously stated that seven was the number. I decided to conveniently not think about the repercussions of this decision. There was no time to quibble.

I filled up three of the syringes, and Marshall and Lulu filled up two each. They were going to need more physical strength than I would for the next unpleasant part of this procedure. Marshall went to the foot of the bed and prepared to hold his legs. Lulu took her place at the head to hold his arms and shoulders down.

I leaped onto the table and straddled his waist, using my weight to hold down his abdomen and pelvis. We had moved the sterile table of syringes right next to the bed so that I might reach down and easily grab one when needed. Lulu ripped off what was left of Grant’s shirt in order to instruct me.

“Now remember, you will have to drive the needle down hard to go through the breast plate, but don’t go any harder than you have to. We need this blood to inject directly into his heart to work at this point.”

I nodded and tried to swallow down the lump in my throat as I raised both of my hands that clasped the syringe over my lover’s body.

“Wait!” The word pierced the empty room. It was Lulu who had yelled it. We looked at her astonished as she felt Grant’s neck again. Then she felt his chest in quick movements. “You need to take more blood out of him,” she said quickly.

“What? Now I know you’re crazy, Lulu. I can’t do that.”

“You have to. You know the change works best if almost all of the old blood is removed before the infected blood is added. He still has too much of his own blood.”

“We’ll let him bleed some more from his wound,” I protested.

“By the time he bleeds out, he’ll die before we can get the blood in him. If you drain most of what’s left quickly, we’ll have more time before his body catches up to the blood loss and begins shutting down his organs. You know the more blood that is in there, the more pain he will feel and the less the chance he will have of surviving.”

“Lulu, I can’t do that!”

Marshall placed his hand gently on my calf for support.

“You’ll hate Lulu and I forever if we do it and he dies. It has to be you. You’ll know when to stop better than us. You’ll have more control.”

I looked down at the unconscious Grant again and held my breath in frustration. I hadn’t fed on anyone in decades, and to do it again on Grant? I felt disgusted and nauseated, but I knew they were right. It had to be me, and I had to do this now before it was too late. I leaned to the opposite side of his body from his still-bleeding wound, closed my eyes tight and bit into his neck as quickly as I could. If I was going to do this, I wanted it be over with quickly.

Blood flowed easily into my mouth and down my throat, quenching it in an all too familiar way as I felt Grant’s heartbeat with every horrible swallow. It was painful and terrible and so mortifyingly satisfying that I hated myself for enjoying the taste of the hot liquid.

It had been so long since I had taken blood from an actual human that I had forgotten how magical it sometimes was to feel their pulse inside your body as you took pull after pull from them. I kept drinking, trying to convince myself this was all to save him. When I felt Grant’s pulse begin that terrible slowing-down rhythm, I regained control of myself and released him. I sat back up quickly and looked to Lulu as she checked his pulse.

“I can’t do anymore. Please say that was enough,” I said, wiping blood from my mouth.

“That will work. Now quickly, before we lose him.”

With no further words from either of them, I plunged the syringe down into his chest in one swift motion. Once it was safely in his heart, I slowly began to push on the plunger, releasing our infected blood directly into his heart. I knew not to inject it all right away for fear his heart would expand too quickly. He would die as a result if I did that.