He glanced across his kitchen at Fritz. His butler was polishing silver at the sink, and had paused in all his elbow grease.
“Sire? Whatever is wrong?”
Blood loss…?
“Ihavetogo.”
Tossing the receiver in the vicinity of the phone, Darius raced out his back door and dived into the shadows. When he closed his eyes, he sent up a prayer unto the Scribe Virgin that he’d actually be able to dematerialize—and the incantation must have worked because in spite of his panic and confusion, he managed to ghost out—
And re-form in the parking lot of the ER where he had first brought his Anne, all those eons ago.
The fact that he came back to his form right under a streetlight wasn’t something he gave a lot of thought to: After nine months of nothing, after nine lonely months of despair and self-blame, after nine months of suffering, he just wanted to see Anne. To hold her. To hear her voice. The black hole of her absence, which he more than deserved, had begun to feel perpetual. But God, he didn’t want the relief like this. Another accident, another dire injury…
Running in through the entrance, he skidded to a halt in front of the reception desk.
“Mr. Wurster?” the woman asked.
When he nodded, she hit a buzzer. “Go through the double doors, follow the trauma signs, she’s in bay one.”
Darius took off again, hoping he could still read once he got through those doors. Fortunately, his literacy stuck with him and the signs were in brilliant red, but more than that, there was the smell of fresh blood. Lots of blood.
He ripped open a glass door—
And there she was.
His Anne.
With a moan of helpless agony, he rushed over to her bedside—as, from out of the corner of his eyes, he saw blood dripping off the table she was on. Jesus, the mattress underneath her was stained red. So were the sheets. There was actually a bucket underneath, one that was filling at an alarming rate.
It reminded him of the ones at induction sites.
Dr. Bluff, that half-breed, was on the other side of her, holding her hand. And as the male started to talk, Darius couldn’t hear anything.
“Anne?” he said in a cracked voice.
Her lids fluttered open, and she turned her head toward him. There was an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose, and she batted at it. When Darius went to remove the thing, the doctor had stuff to say about that, but the two of them ignored him.
She looked like she had aged twenty years. Fifty. And she was white as paper.
“Darius,” she said in a whisper. “You have to take care of her.”
“Who? Take care of who?”
“The baby.” Her eyes started to roll back. “The baby…”
Darius’s hearing phased in and out for a second, everything going dead quiet before coming back.
In slow motion, he turned his head and realized… her belly was swollen. “Young?” he said numbly.
Dr. Bluff cut in. “She’s having your young. I told you over the phone.”
“My young?” Why was everybody speaking in a foreign language? “My…”
Anne grabbed his hand in a powerful grip. “You take care of her. Swear to me. You will watch over her and you will make sure she’s safe. You owe me that—you owe her that.”
“Anne…” As one of his eyes starting twitching so badly it strobed everything, he tried to remember how to speak. “How did this happen?”
Oh, come on. Like he didn’t know? That final night, when he had come to her…
“I should have told you,” she said roughly. “But I didn’t… I couldn’t.”
“You have nothing to apologize for.” Compared to his transgressions? “Shh. Don’t worry. We just need to get you some blood. Right?”
As he looked at the doctor, the male shook his head.
“No blood,” Anne said. “It’ll kill her.”
With dawning horror, Darius glanced down to the bucket. Which was almost half full. “No. No, it won’t. You’ll just get some—”
“It’s her life or the baby’s,” Dr. Bluff said. “That’s—”
The glass door burst open, someone in a white coat and blue scrubs entering in a rush.
“Not now,” Dr. Bluff snapped. “Privacy please.”
As the other physician glanced at Anne, and immediately shook his head sadly as if he’d recognized there was no good outcome to be had, Darius stamped his boot. “Then we do something else. There has to be something else we can do—”
While the glass door shut again, Anne’s eyes watered, tears slipping onto her temples and dropping off into her beautiful dark hair. “I’m dying, Darius. So I can’t take care of—”
“You’re not dying. You’re right here with me.” He glanced over at the doctor again. “She’s here. She’s not…”
“She’s chosen not to have a transfusion,” Dr. Bluff explained. “She’s choosing the young over herself.”
Darius looked back at Anne and started shaking his head. “Have the transfusion—”
“It will kill her—”
“I need you—”
“I can’t kill our baby. I can’t… I won’t.”
Things began to beep fast and alarms started to ring. This time, when medical staff bolted in, Dr. Bluff just put his hand up to stop them from getting close. He didn’t tell them to leave.
“Darius…”
Something about the way Anne said his name cut through the sudden chaos, the smell of all that copper blood disappearing, the humans in their hospital garb becoming invisible.
“Take care of her.” Anne’s eyes were luminous in her graying face. “If you want to make amends with me, that’s how you do it. Watch over our daughter. Make sure she’s safe. Love her enough… for the both of us.”
“No, no, no… Anne, I love you…”
Her eyes stared up at him, luminous, but dimming. “Tell me you didn’t mean to hurt me.”
“I didn’t. I love you, I still do. I just didn’t know how to tell you without having you be afraid of me. Or disgusted.”
“I’ve missed you.”
Pain flared in his chest. “I have missed you every night and all day long—”
She gasped and then her eyes started to roll back. “Oh, God…”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Darius’s mate died seven minutes before his daughter was born via cesarean section, in trauma bay number one of the St. Francis Hospital’s emergency room. It wasn’t until twenty-four minutes after the birth that he got to hold the young, the tiny, wriggly pink thing all swaddled in a soft white and red and blue blanket.
Sitting down with what remained of his beloved, the chair under his butt was hard, but that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
As he cried, his tears landed on the young’s face.
As he cried, the body of his mate grew cold on the treatment table before him.
The medical staff had departed from the bay, and when Dr. Bluff eventually came back, the vampire had the smarts to move slowly and speak softly.
“Do you want to cremate the body?” the male asked.