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“You only bite me when you’re not hungry?”
I remembered the two times I’d fed from him—once, after the Autumn Ball, when we’d been kissing passionately for the first time, and again when we were alone together in one of the high towers of Evernight, lying in each other’s arms. “That was different.”
“Doesn’t have to be.” He took me in his arms and kissed me.
It wasn’t like any of our other kisses. This was rougher, almost demanding. Lucas opened my lips with his and pulled my body against him. I couldn’t push him away; I couldn’t think, couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but kiss him back. I’d missed this so much—the taste of his mouth, the scent of his skin, and the feel of his broad hands.
When he moved down to my throat, kissing me along the line of my jugular, I whispered, “You’re going to make me lose control.”
“That’s the whole idea.”
“Lucas—don’t—”
“If you have to get carried away to bite me, then I’m gonna make you get carried away.” His hand cupped the curve of my breast. “How far do I have to go?”
My instincts took over. I pulled him to the floor, the old wooden boards creaking gently beneath our weight. Lucas lay beneath me, pressing kisses on my forehead and cheeks as I raked my hands through his hair and breathed in the scent of him. I could hear his heart beating faster. I could smell his blood. More animal than human, I arched my body against his, so that I could feel his warmth all over me.
“Come on, Bianca,” he whispered into my ear. “Come on. I know you want to. I want you to.”
Stop, stop, stop. I’ll have to stop in time, I don’t know if I can stop, I don’t want him to let go of me, not ever, I don’t want this to stop—”
I bit down on his shoulder, and blood rushed in.
Yes. This was what I had needed, what I had craved. I heard Lucas groan, and I didn’t know if that was from pain or pleasure. My body quaked as I sucked in harder, swallowing mouthful after mouthful of his blood. It was hot and sweet, purer than anything else in the world. It was life. I could feel my body transforming, gaining strength, as Lucas’s life flowed into me.
My hands pressed his against the floor, and our fingers intertwined. “Bianca,” he whispered, his voice shaky.
I drank even deeper. This was perfection—hunger and satisfaction at once, inseparable. How could anyone want anything else?
“Bianca—”
Stop, stop, stop!
I pulled away just as Lucas’s head lolled to one side. Shocked into sanity, I shifted off him and patted his cheek. “Lucas? Are you okay?”
“Just give me—a sec—”
“Lucas!”
He tried to prop himself up on one elbow but ended up flopping back down beside me. His breaths were coming too quickly, and his skin was now more pallid than mine. Of course, I had become rosy and flushed with the life I’d stolen from the guy I loved.
Guilt descended on me. “Oh, no. I should never have done this.”
“Don’t say that.” His voice was slurred. “We had to—save you.”
I sat up and pressed two fingers to his throat. His heartbeat was steady, if rapid. I hadn’t gone too far, but I could have. I knew the danger even if he didn’t.
“We can’t do this again,” I said, as I cradled his head in my lap. His shoulder oozed a few trickles of blood, but I resisted the urge to lick his skin. “We’re going to find another solution, and soon. Right?”
“Wasn’t too bad.” Lucas’s lopsided smile made my stomach flip-flop in the best possible way. “Kinda nice, actually.”
There was a time when it would have thrilled me to hear him say that. But I knew more about Lucas now, and about his priorities, which meant that I was obligated to warn him: “Remember—if I ever go too far, I could kill you. And because you’ve been bitten by a vampire multiple times, you’d become a vampire yourself.”
Lucas went very still. Although I, too, no longer wanted to become a full vampire, Lucas’s revulsion to the idea was absolute. Death would have been preferable to him.
“Okay,” he said at last. “I’ll see about the hospital blood bank. Or something. But you’re better, right?”
“Yeah.” And now that I had drunk human blood, I felt sure I would be sustained for a while—but not forever. He had risked his life to buy me just a few days’ time. Or did he have other reasons, too? Quietly, I asked, “Do you crave it now? Being bitten? Is this something you wanted for yourself?”
I wouldn’t blame him if it were. Balthazar had drunk my blood a couple of months ago, and I remembered the exhilaration of it. But if Lucas was getting as hooked on my bite as I was on biting him, we were really going to have to work on the self-control.
Lucas thought over the question. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Part of it—most of it—is about taking care of you. And then there’s the fact that it’s one hell of a turn-on.”
Smiling, I brushed a last trickle of blood from his shoulder. “Yeah, there’s that.”
“Every time we do this, I get stronger.” Lucas’s eyes met mine. “I get closer to being—to being what you are. To understanding, maybe. Without having to turn into a vampire myself.”
Each bite gave Lucas a little more vampire strength. His hearing had sharpened and his strength had increased—but he neither healed faster nor craved blood. The mystery of what it meant to be prepared for vampirism but not yet a vampire: That was one way in which we were truly and fully the same.
Well, not the only way.
I bent low and whispered, “I love you, Lucas.”
“Love you, too.” Tiredly he clasped my hand in his, and for a while we simply sat together, wordless, needing nobody else in the world.
Once Lucas felt reasonably steady and the bite mark on his shoulder had stopped bleeding, he put his T-shirt on again and we joined the others. We must have looked rumpled—a couple people snickered, and Dana waggled her eyebrows at us. I didn’t care if they thought we’d sneaked off to have sex. What we felt for each other was too pure to be turned into anything tacky or cheap.
Besides, I felt better than I’d felt in weeks. Lucas seemed a little bleary, and his skin was definitely pale, but he could walk steadily. He put his arm around my shoulders for support initially, but kept it there all during our long ride home.
We’ll be all right, I thought as he rested his head against mine. Taking a deep breath, I could smell the cedar scent of his skin, tinged slightly with the delicious saltiness of blood. It’s going to be okay soon.
After we returned to HQ and stowed our gear, we walked in to see that someone was waiting for us—Eduardo, who leaned against one of the cement pillars. In his hands he held a coffee can. I didn’t think anything of it, except that it was kind of weird to be making coffee so late at night. But the moment Lucas saw it, he stopped in his tracks. “That’s mine,” he said.
“You have an interesting definition of what’s yours.” Edu-ardo tossed the can upward, caught it lazily. The scars on his cheeks looked harsh in the overhead lights. “Because the way I see it, in Black Cross we have a rule. Everything we do is for the good of the group.”
Eduardo then peeled back the plastic lid of the coffee can to reveal a roll of cash.
“Hoarding money,” he said. “How is that for the good of the group?”
Oh, no, I thought. Lucas’s savings. The money he was going to use to get us out of here.
“How is going through my private stuff for the good of the group?” Lucas’s eyes blazed as he stalked up to Eduardo. As his voice got louder, it echoed off the concrete walls. “What, were you going to steal from me?”
Eduardo shook his head. “It’s not stealing if it’s not rightfully yours to begin with. And it isn’t. Money like this should be used for Black Cross purposes. Not to—take your girlfriend out on Saturday nights.”
“Since when do I ever get to take Bianca out? Since when do you guys let us spend more than ten minutes alone together?”
“Free time is something you don’t have. You’re a soldier, Lucas. Have you forgotten that?”
“Hey!” Kate came hurrying toward them, her hair wet from the shower and her blouse buttoned up wrong. Apparently some body had come to fetch her to break it up. A small crowd had gathered—obviously interested but not taking sides. “What’s going on?”
Lucas’s fists were clenched at his sides. “Eduardo’s stealing from me.”
“Lucas is hoarding cash.”
“You went through his stuff? Jesus, Eduardo.” Kate snatched the coffee can of cash from him, and for the first time I saw Eduardo looking really embarrassed. “I don’t expect you to be a father to Lucas, but I also don’t expect you to act like his jealous kid brother.”
“I’m not the one being immature here!”
“Yes, you are,” Kate snapped back. “You know why? You’re both acting like adolescent jackasses, but at least Lucas actually is an adolescent. Is it too much to ask for you to be the adult?”
“Thanks, Mom.” Flushed with vindication, Lucas held out his hand to reclaim what was his.
Kate simply closed the lid. “We can’t allow people to hoard money, Lucas. You know that.”
“It’s mine! We don’t have to give up everything—we never have before—”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t yours.” More quietly, Kate added, “If and when you need it, you come to me. If Black Cross can spare it at that time, I promise, I’ll give it back to you. And I know you wouldn’t want to spend it if Black Cross doesn’t have cash to spare. Right?”
Lucas and I exchanged one despairing glance. There wasn’t anything else we could do or say. Already I knew that Black Cross wasn’t like a job you could quit. It was more like a cult you had to flee.
And the money we needed to escape had just been stolen, which meant we were trapped.
Chapter Six (#ulink_f2d0d5c3-f23d-51b6-b1b7-422cc078a73d)
MAYBE IT WAS THE CRUSHING BLOW OF LOSING our saved money. Maybe it was the exhilaration of having been so close to Lucas after we’d been kept apart so long. Or maybe it was the rush of blood and the sweet relief of being full after weeks of hunger.
Whatever it was that distracted me so much that night kept me from remembering that drinking blood had consequences.
“Bianca?”
Raquel flipped on the small flashlight she kept beside her bed. The beam seemed almost unbearably brilliant, and I rolled away from her. “Turn that thing off, would you?”
“Were you having a bad dream or something? You kept groaning.”
“It wasn’t a nightmare exactly—just kind of overwhelming, you know?” Luckily, Raquel didn’t pry further, and I had a moment to myself to think.
The real reason I’d been groaning was because I was in complete sensory overload. I could hear every footstep or cough along the belt of old subway cars the Black Cross hunters slept in. I could hear water dripping farther down the tunnel and the light, quick scurrying of mice.
I’ll have to remember where to find them later, if I need them—
“Bianca?”
“I wasn’t having a bad dream,” I mumbled, bringing my forearm over my eyes to block out the light. In the long run, drinking blood made me more able to deal with bright light or sunshine. But just after, it seemed almost blindingly bright. “These bunks are really uncomfortable, you know?” I could feel the plastic ridges of the old seats against my back, even through the pallet I lay on.
Any criticism of Black Cross was usually Raquel’s cue to insist that everything was totally great. This time, she simply sighed. “It would be nice to have a real bed again. Dana and I were saying, maybe, we could save up and get a hotel room sometime—oh. That’s what you and Lucas were trying to do, wasn’t it?”
“Basically.” That was close enough to the truth.
“I’m sorry Eduardo got up in Lucas’s stuff. That was really unfair.”
“Lucas worked so hard for that money.”
“It sucks.” Raquel sighed.
I was grateful for proof that Raquel hadn’t chugged the Black Cross Kool-Aid, but mostly I longed for darkness and quiet. “I just want to go back to sleep and forget about it for a while.”
“No point now.” The flashlight stayed on; I could tell, just by the faint glow around the edges of my vision, even through my closed eyelids and the forearm across my face. “They’ll turn the lights on soon. It’s morning.”
I groaned again.
If drinking blood again had affected me powerfully, that was nothing compared to what it had done to Lucas.
“Stop sulking,” Kate said to him as we loaded the transport bus for our afternoon patrol later that day. “Or do you want to argue some more about hoarding cash?”
“I’m not sulking.” Lucas winced as he spoke. The light in the parking garage was dim, but it hurt my eyes—and, I could tell, his, too. “I just don’t feel so hot.”
At first Kate looked skeptical, but then she held her palm to his forehead. The heavy men’s sport watch she wore made her wrist look almost fragile. She frowned. “You feel a little clammy. Is your stomach bothering you?”
“Sorta.”
I sought Lucas’s eyes; when our gazes met, he gave me a small, awkward smile. Obviously we were both thinking the same thing: We should have expected this.
Human bodies simply weren’t meant to endure the demands of vampire power.
Kate paused for a few long seconds, and I wondered if she’d tell him to go on patrol regardless. Most of the time, she acted more like his commander than his mother. But then she shrugged. “Head back to the bunks. Get some rest. Bianca, you go out with Milos’s team. You and Raquel can partner up.”
“Okay,” Lucas said. Although I knew he would hate being stuck at headquarters for an entire day, I thought he sounded sort of happy. Maybe he didn’t get much evidence that Kate really wanted to take care of him, and he liked what little he got.
We went out on patrol in one of the fancier neighborhoods in the city, where the lowest buildings were twenty stories high, and all the facades were cool steel or white stone. Doormen in uniforms stood every thirty feet or so along streets lined with the kind of expensive cars I’d seen Lucas admire in magazines. At first I thought this area seemed too secure to be a big vampire hangout—but then I realized that the elegant surroundings reminded me of the vampires of Evernight. This was the kind of existence those vampires tried to claim; maybe this was the kind of place they’d stake their turf.
“We used to have a base down here,” Milos said as he strolled along the sidewalk with me and Raquel. He sounded almost friendly, which was more weird than encouraging. “Those were the days, man. We had a deal with a couple of the fancy restaurants in the area—they’d give us some of what they had left over at the end of the night. I almost got sick of shrimp bisque. I’d about kill my grandmother for rich food like that now.”
“What happened?” Raquel said, squinting against the summer sunshine.
“Vampires blew our hideout.” Milos’s hand stole toward the place on his belt where he’d tucked his stake. “Normally they don’t come after our main cells—they don’t have the troops. Tons of vampires out there, but they haven’t got enough sense to work together.”
That was offensive, and stupid, too. How had vampires managed to keep Evernight Academy going for more than two hundred years if we didn’t have “enough sense” to cooperate toward longtime goals? The truth, I figured, probably had more to do with fighting among vampire groups. There was no one established vampire society, and that gave a tightly organized force like Black Cross an edge.
Raquel asked Milos, “What was different that time?”
“There was this one vampire—Stigand, he called himself—who got them riled up. Made them band together. That one was dangerous.” A cold smile stole across Milos’s face. He had a different attitude toward danger than most people. “He brought ’em in after us. Killed a lot of good fighters that day and totally ruined our old HQ. Eliza took him out, though—hit him with a spray of gasoline and the flamethrower.” Chuckling, he added, “You should’ve heard him scream.”
Nauseated, I turned my head away from Milos and Raquel. I didn’t know whether I was hiding my disgust or keeping myself from seeing their pleasure in a vampire’s death. At first I wasn’t even looking at what was before my eyes, but then Black Cross training took over, forcing me to evaluate the scene and every person we passed.
Then quickly, I realized that I knew the man across the street. I knew him from my dream the night before.
It came back to me now in more detail: I’d been with Lucas in a movie theater, the kind of dream that’s half a memory—in this case, of our first date. But the theater wasn’t rich and plush any longer. It was run-down and littered, the seat upholstery ripped and the screen empty of any image. I had been looking around wildly for Lucas, and instead I had seen this man, the one with the reddish-brown dreadlocks.
