“No, I’ll make the call.”
She turned around and took a receiver off a wall-mounted cradle. As her trembling finger dialed the number he’d given her on a piece of paper the night before, it struck him that she must have memorized the sequence.
And dearest Virgin Scribe, he wished he could go back to the moment when they’d been standing by the box van just before she’d left. He’d insisted she call if she needed help and she had looked up at him as if he were some kind of hero.
“Hello?” she said abruptly. “Ah, Fritz? This is Anne. Darius has been stabbed by—I don’t know what it is, it’s gone… now… I, well, he needs help. He’s been stabbed and I can’t take him to a—so what do I—”
She fell into an mmm-hmm. And followed that with another one. “My address is—oh, you know it already. All right. Thanks, and I hope you—find someone fast. To come here. There’s a lot of blood.”
As she hung up, her eyes returned to Darius, and he realized that he might have been the one who’d been stabbed in the gut… but she was the one who had died.
And it was all his fault.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
As Anne rehung the receiver on its prongs, she realized what was wrong. Well, okay… there were a lot of things that were wrong, but now she remembered one specific inexplicable.
Darius’s back.
When he had taken off his shirt upstairs, and she had put her arms around him… there had been no bandages. And as he had left her room to go see about the noise, there had been nothing marring his smooth skin. No burns. No scars. Not even a blemish or discoloration. Nothing.
As if he hadn’t been lit on fire the night before.
She hadn’t noticed it at the time. And there had been so many other things she had dismissed or been too distracted to track: The deference the butler had paid him. The way Darius had, in fact, never smiled widely or flashed his front teeth. The vague disclosure about what he did for work. And then there had been those other men who had shown up—
And that broken jar with the black inky stuff that had smelled… exactly like Bruce just had. Right before he’d up and disappeared, right in front of her eyes.
What the hell was happening in Caldwell.
“Vampire,” she said weakly.
“It’s not what you think.”
“You’re right, because I thought you were…” As she threw up her hands, she noticed she still had his gun in her palm—and shouldn’t that have shocked her? Well, it didn’t. It was barely a blip on her radar considering everything else. “I thought you were like me.”
“I am.”
“You are not. Not in any way.” She laughed in a bitter fashion. Then closed her eyes. “And you lied to me, too. God, I’m such an idiot—”
“Don’t say that—”
“What do you call a woman who traded in someone like Bruce for… whatever the hell you are? And to think I was worried about a wife and two kids? Jesus. I had no idea the real problem was fucking Dracula.”
As he cursed under his breath and dragged a hand through his hair, she fanned the air in front of her nose. “This stench is the same as what was around the vase I dropped at your house—and that is your house. Isn’t it. Isn’t it!”
Her voice was getting louder, but like she cared about that?
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You’re sorry. You keep something like this from me? I mean…” As her anger crested, she knew she had to get control of herself, and took a deep breath. “Even after what I told you… about how Bruce lied to me—and oh, my God, what the hell did he turn into? What happened here? What—”
At the very moment her thoughts spun out into total incoherence, two men showed up in her kitchen. As in… literally appeared from out of nowhere right in front of her.
No, wait, they’re two vampires, not men, she reminded herself. Never men.
Weaving on her feet, stunned past all comprehension, she decided surely this had to be a dream.
Except it wasn’t. And holy hell, she knew the two—vampires—who were in her kitchen: One was that doctor type, with the bow tie and the white coat and the tortoiseshell glasses. The other was the guy with those tattoos at his temple.
“While you treat him, I’m going to go take care of the neighbors,” the one with the diamond eyes said to the physician. “Their lights are coming on, so they heard something or saw the flash of the lesser being sent back to the Omega. I’ll neutralize them—”
“Don’t you dare kill those people!” Anne hollered hysterically.
“Excuse me?” the man—fucking vampire—shot back.
“My neighbors!”
“Oh, relax.” He gave her a bored look. “I’m just taking their memories so a flank of cops doesn’t show up on your front doorstep and ask you questions you can’t answer. Sound good to you? Great. I’m so glad you approve—now give me that fucking gun before you shoot me by mistake.”
Anne blinked. Looked down. Saw that she had pointed the weapon directly at the vampire. “This cannot be real.”
As the doctor knelt by Darius and opened his bag, a gloved hand reached forward, and she didn’t fight the disarming. Had she really shot Bruce? Had she really been about to shoot—
“What’s happening?” she asked the man. Vampire. Whatever.
When he let out an exasperated exhale, she figured he was going to ignore her. But then he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not permanent for you.”
She thought about what he’d said about the neighbors.
“My memories,” she whispered, “are mine. You have no right to take them.”
“Just talk to him,” the vampire muttered as he nodded at Darius. “He needs to stay conscious and he’ll do anything you tell him to.”
And then the guy disappeared from right in front of her.
In the aftermath of the departure, Anne went over and picked up one of her chairs that had been knocked to the floor. Sitting down, she hung her head and felt Darius stare at her as he was treated. The doctor started talking about operating, but Darius argued with him, the two going back and forth, getting heated.
At least the whole stay-conscious thing seemed to be handling itself.
And finally, she had to look over—
What she saw made… no sense. Or should have made no sense.
Before her very eyes, the stab wound appeared to be knitting itself back together. To the point where she could watch the skin closing, as if in a special effects movie.
In spite of everything else she had seen, the cognitive dissonance caused by this phenomenon was so great that her mind retreated from what was before her eyes. Unfortunately, what it escaped to was just as upsetting: Bruce had been right about one thing, wrong about another. Yes, Darius was worse than he had been, but as shocking as the basis of this newest bunch of lies was, the reason she was so affected by them was because she had fallen in love.
With someone of another species.
Dear God in Heaven above, how was this her life.
* * *
“I’ll be fine,” Darius said as he shoved Havers’s disinfecting efforts away. “I’ll call if I have any issues.”