Ripping my wrist open again with my fangs, I placed it back over her mouth, then shoved my fingers down her throat to open it, allowing my blood to drip into her mouth and slide down her throat whether she wanted it to or not.
Not that she had a choice either way.
I could still sense she was gone, but there was a tiny little spark that I was coaxing back to life, and it started to grow, brighter and brighter, by the second.
“Ahhh,” that was from Pavlov. “You’ve almost got her.”
I would’ve almost had her. He was right. But life never, ever worked the way it was supposed to.
“What the fuck is going on?” Nash slurred his words slightly.
I’d taken a lot from him. Definitely more than I should have, but I knew these two men were strong. They were also Acadia’s best chance at life since their blood was so similar to her own.
I ran out of blood again, and Corbin was right there next to me, offering me his wrist.
I followed the same process that I had with his brother, stopping only when I’d taken just a little too much.
Then once again slit my wrist and started pouring the blood forcefully down her throat all over again.
It was when I was at the last little trickle of blood that her body bucked and bowed like I’d touched her with a live wire.
With one small convulsion, and a shudder of her body, she lay still, and I sat back on my heels.
Corbin and Nash watched me with horror in their eyes.
“You’re giving up?” Corbin cried frantically.
I stopped him before he could go for my throat.
“She’s back.”
Corbin sat back on his heels as well and looked at me like I was crazy.
“She has turned. She may look not any different to you, but I can feel her life force. It’s a pulsing throb at the base of my neck. Her body’s healing even now. Look.”
Nash’s eyes went to the gunshot wound, and breath left his lungs in the next second.
“Our sister’s gonna be a vamp.”
That was Corbin.
I looked up at him.
“And that’s a problem?”
He shook his head.
“No.” He cleared his throat. “I expected it as soon as she started paying attention to you. I didn’t think it’d happen like this, though.”
His eyes were fixated on Acadia’s rapidly healing wound. He didn’t even bother to look up to see my startled surprise at his words.
I felt obligated to share my concerns with them before they got to thinking this was all okay.
“There’s a possibility that she could go mad,” I told the two brothers. “She was young, and though I’m old, that doesn’t mean that this is all in the bag. Vampires have a seventy percent chance of going crazy from the moment they’re turned. She could still go bad and I’d have to kill her.”
The words almost stuck in my throat. The actual act of having to kill her after I’d just found her, brought her into my world, was completely foreign to me.
I could be as ruthless as I needed to be with anyone else in the world… but her.
It was at this point that I looked up to find my inner circle in the room, looking at me but not saying anything.
And it was then that I realized that they knew I wouldn’t be able to do it if the time ever came that she had to be taken. I would protect her, even if the cost was my life. They’d have to fight me to take her from me, and there was a strong possibility that I would take one of them, if not more, down with me if they ever forced the decision on me.
I looked away, trying not to look down at the woman still lying so deathly still on the ground surrounded by her own blood.
Instead, I looked around the room.
“Do we know what happened?” I rasped.
The shakiness in my voice went unnoticed, or if they did notice, they didn’t say anything. Instead, Corbin gave a complete recounting of the events.
“I’ve heard they hit a number of your places in less than five minutes.”
“All?” I asked carefully.
Corbin nodded and stood up, running his bloody fingers through his hair as he did.
“Yes.” He nodded. “All. Plus a few of your inner circle.”
I waited for a response, but it came from a man in the corner of the room, startling me.
“There were supposed to be ten.”
I’d thought he was dead, but now that I had more time to concentrate on my surroundings, I realized that one of the human activists that I thought was dead wasn’t. He was only lying still, likely paralyzed, staring at the rest of the room with a haze of pain and fear clouding his eyes.
I got up, uncaring that I was covered in blood, gore, and who knew what else.
“Tell me what else you know, Mr. Geer.”
His eyes widened.
“You… you…”
I smiled a smile that likely wasn’t very pretty.
“I know your name,” I confirmed. “Yes. I also can find anything I want in your brain, but it’s painful. It requires me killing you after I do it. So, which way do you want to play this?”
He answered quickly. “There were supposed to be ten targets. Your club, your office, your home. Mr. Fox’s office. Mr. Fox’s home.” He cleared his throat. “We go in at the same time. Take out our scheduled targets, go home. Easy.”
The list continued until he’d named off each of my inner circle’s most trusted places, even going as far as to include a home that I thought the world didn’t know about.
Fox’s children lived in that home, and the moment he heard the words out of the activist’s mouth, he was gone.
He appeared back in seconds, this time with two children in tow.
They were adult children, yes, but they were both scared—and bloody.
“What happened?” I asked carefully. Guardedly.
“The home was in cinders,” he said. “They were in the panic room.”
All of our houses, offices, and clubs had panic rooms. Ones that we’d built ourselves so no one would know that we had them. Only the most trusted of us knew where they were.
“Round everyone up and take them to The Cellar,” I said, standing up and gathering Acadia’s dead weight into my arms.
Everyone started to move.
Acadia’s hair fell back in wet, reddened strands like a slick curtain straight toward the floor. Her clothes were bloody and clinging to her curves. Curves I’d just tasted less than an hour ago.
When Abe disappeared, Corbin and Nash finally caught on to how we all had gotten here.
“I think you forgot to tell me that you have other abilities,” Corbin said carefully, eyeing the room as a whole.
I turned my smile on him.
“Oh, we have a lot of things we can do, I’m sure, that you don’t know about,” I drawled. “And I’m going to be blunt here. You can’t have her if you’re a part of the inner sanctum of the police department. You made that decision when you chose her life. So you need to choose. Her or trying to get back your job.”
His head hung.
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” he grunted. “What do you want me to do?”
“Fox,” I said. “Take your brood to The Cellar. Render, please offer Corbin a job among your men. Make sure it’s equal to your own, but put him in charge of all human aspects that we are soon to be facing in the future. It’s more than obvious that his skill set is wasted where he’s at.”