Bad Blood (Aurora Sky: Vampire Hunter, Vol. 3) (41 page)

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “What secret?”

Daren leaned in, looking side to side as though the walls were listening.

“That you’re vampires,” he whispered.

“We’re not vampires,” I said.

“But…”

“No!” I inhaled sharply. “You should go now.”

“Of course. Whatever you want,” Daren said. He paused at the door. “If you ever need anything, call me.”

19

I sank onto a dining room chair. Despite the blood, I felt like the one who’d been drained.

Giselle still had Dante. Levi had Tommy. Jared was on his way to Anchorage.

And I was a vampire.

I didn’t need Goth-boy to tell me what I’d known and denied since the moment I first drank blood.

There was no antidote. I’d been dead all along.

What Melcher called side effects were really symptoms, ones I recognized in the boot camp textbook: loss of appetite, sensitivity to sun, blood cravings, lethargy followed by bouts of hyper-activity and energy, even sensitivity to garlic.

We’d all found that last one especially amusing at boot camp.

Vampires infected with rabies were hypersensitive to pungent smells, like garlic. Guess what the cafeteria never served? Garlic, onions, or anything else from the genus allium.

Even Dante, with his impressive appetite, ordered his pizza without garlic. I’d seen him pick onions off burgers before.

So it was true. Melcher was building his own vampire army—fighting fire with fire. It had to be.

What happened when his soldiers figured it out? What options did we have? Serve Melcher for the remainder of our unnatural lives or die?

My lips curled back. It brought a whole new meaning to the term “life sentence.”

What about death? It was pretty comical considering I’d already died and been brought back as this. I stretched my arms across the table. Vampire arms. I concentrated on my breathing. It sounded the same as it always did. I placed a hand over my heart, felt the soft, measured thumps.

Everything inside my body felt the same, but was functioning differently. I was immortal… at least until Melcher ordered my damned soul be sent to the great beyond.

I laughed hysterically, peals of laughter that went on and on, bouncing off the walls all around me.

Undead. Dead.

What was the bloody point?

The doorbell rang. I wiped tears from my eyes as I got up to answer it.

Fane stood on the other side of the door, frowning.

“Noel called…” he stopped abruptly, leaned forward and looked into my face. “You seem strange.”

I raised both brows. “You mean not quite human?”

“What do you mean?”

I had a bone to pick with Fane. He’d let me go on about the antidote and turning, all the while knowing I was already undead. Now would be a good time to speak up. I waited for Fane to call me the V word—to say it out loud. But he remained silent. We stared at one another, each of us waiting. Maybe he wanted me to say it.

I had a more pressing question to ask. “Did you get Tommy?”

I rose to the balls of my feet, ready to hug him if only he’d say he came through.

I didn’t want to deal with being undead. I just wanted to run my fingers over Tommy’s soft fur and revel in the fact that Levi hadn’t gotten to him first. After that, I’d handle everything else.

The frown on Fane’s lips froze me in place. “He wasn’t there.”

My heart slowly sank.

“No,” I whispered, tears pooling over my eyes. Not Tommy. I couldn’t let them take him while Dante was held hostage.

I leveled my eyes with Fane’s. “We have to find him.”

Fane stared back at me, and in his eyes I saw the sympathy and kindness I so desperately craved.

“I’d say the pound is the best place to look,” Fane said.

I nodded. “I think so, too.”

“Let’s go.”

Fane drove us to Animal Control in silence. No music, no conversation. He walked by my side past cages, cell after cell of forlorn eyes that followed our movement—some begging, others that had lost all hope. There were three golden retrievers, none of them Tommy Moe, named after the great Olympic gold and silver medalist and resident of Alaska at the time he became the first American male skier to win two medals in a single Winter Games.

Come on, Champ. Where are you? Where did you go?

My throat closed up. The simple act of breathing threatened to choke me.

Fane sat on the edge of his car’s hood in the pound’s parking lot, calling every animal rescue group in Anchorage to ask if anyone had turned in a golden retriever that day. But like Dante, Tommy was MIA, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

“I’ll keep calling,” Fane said on the drive home. “Every day until we find him.”

The tears I’d just blinked away swarmed back over my eyes. “For all we know, Levi took him out of town and set him loose in the woods,” I said, staring out the window.

That sounded like something Levi would do. I remembered the way he taunted me, his mischievous smile, the last question he whispered in my ear: “What do you promise in return?”

Maybe, like Giselle, he decided to keep Tommy hostage in return for something else. Now was not the time to come up with ideas. They only made my skin crawl. But if he kept Tommy, that meant he wasn’t lost in the woods without food or shelter.

“How long have you known this informant who took the dog?” Fane asked.

“I met him today,” I said, frowning.