Hunting the Dark (21 page)

Crap. If I could taste blood, what did that mean? I didn’t want to hurt Jace and maybe I already had and couldn’t remember it. ‘Did I bite you?’

‘Shhh,’ he said, wiggling the knife in my chest as he tried to get a better grip on the hilt. I felt something move inside me, something other than the blade. Something that probably should stay right where it was. The sensation made me want to throw up.

‘Blood,’ I whispered, trying to stay conscious. ‘There’s blood in my mouth. Where did it come from?’

‘You didn’t bite me,’ he said, his voice tight with  . . . I don’t know. Stress? Anger?

Worry?

‘I don’t—’

‘Stop talking,’ he snapped. ‘It’s your blood, not mine.’

That probably wasn’t a good thing. If I was coughing up blood, this really could be The End. The final curtain and all that. I wished Theo was here so that I could say goodbye. It didn’t seem right that he wasn’t with me at the very end. My
second
death. He would want to be here  . . .

And what about Caitlín? ‘Oh God,’ I whispered.

Jace stopped tugging for a moment, and the roiling nausea subsided. ‘What?’

‘My sister  . . .’

He grabbed the knife again. ‘Caitlín? What about her.’ His voice was shaking.

‘Say goodbye to her for me, would you?’

‘Moth, you’re not going to die.’

I ignored him. He was just trying to be kind, which was nice of him and everything – but if I was going to die I needed to make myself clear. This was important and I might not get another chance.

I grabbed a handful of his bloodstained shirt (
my
blood, not his, I reminded myself), dragging him toward me. ‘Tell her I love her. Tell her she’s the best thing in my life. Jace, tell her—’

‘Tell her yourself, freak,’ he grunted as I half throttled him with his own collar. ‘You’ll still be here causing trouble for a long time.’

‘A
verrry
long time,’ I slurred. ‘Eternity.’

His eyes darkened. ‘Yeah. Lucky you.’

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Can’t you leave it in? Hurts so much.’

‘It hurts so much because you’re already healing.’

Oh.
With the knife inside me. Again, not a good thing. Very bad.

‘Shut up and hold still.’

‘But I—’

And then I had to stop speaking because Jace pulled the blade cleanly out of my chest at last, and all I could do was scream.

Somewhere in the darkest corner of my awareness I hear a car engine and feel the rumble of wheels on asphalt, but I keep slipping away and can never quite grab hold of anything.

I figure out enough to realize that I’m lying across the back seat of a car. The sound of the engine is almost comforting. I frown when I realize that I can also hear music playing through tinny speakers. It sounds suspiciously like ‘Carry On My Wayward Son’ by Kansas which places me firmly in Jace’s battered car. He has a healthy sense of irony. And hey, who doesn’t like
Supernatural
? Even vampires watch television.

I squeeze my eyes tightly shut, trying to come to terms with the pain all through my chest and back. It feels as though someone has taken a spoon to my chest in an enthusiastic effort to scoop out my lungs.

Once again, I can’t help thinking that it’s lucky I don’t really need them.

Trying to remember what happened
before
is a challenge I don’t think my brain is quite up to at the moment. Far easier to let Jace fill me in when we stop wherever he’s planning to stop. I want to say something, let him know I am awake and not dead after all, but I just feel so tired. And it’s not like he’s dumb enough to try taking me to a hospital. Maybe he is driving us to Theo’s house.

I drift away on that comforting thought, letting the cool darkness take me down, under, deeper. I listen to the wheels against the road and the sound of cheesy Seventies rock. The last thing I remember is the faint scent of vampire-but-not-vampire. That can’t be right  . . . can it?

Something is very definitely wrong, but now I am swimming in swirling black water that keeps sucking me back down (under, deeper). I can see the surface glittering coal-bright above me, but it might as well be a million miles away  . . .

The first thing I became aware of was pain.

The second thing was the strong smell of disinfectant.

I gulped, half gagging on the scent, trying to wake the hell up. I forced my eyes open, fighting lethargy and fear, but when I finally took in my surroundings there was nothing to give me any clue as to where I was. It was disorienting and terrifying.

What I knew for certain: I was flat on my back on some kind of a low bunk set against the wall. The ceiling glistened white, and I had the impression of a hospital even before I could fully take everything in.
Was
I in the hospital?

Panic began to subside. Right! I was in hospital because I’d been stabbed.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I whispered, to no one in particular. Why would Jace take me there when they wouldn’t be able to treat a vampire? When I had to hide what I was from regular human places.

He wouldn’t. He didn’t. That’s another thing I know for sure. Jace would try to protect me.

Why? Because we’re such good friends now?
I gave myself a mental eye roll for being so ridiculously sappy.

But  . . . he
did
kiss me, I couldn’t help thinking.

He was drunk
, said that annoying inner voice I still couldn’t quite kill off.

So what if he was, I told it, mentally sticking out my tongue. He seemed into it. And he’d only had a
couple
of drinks. OK, three glasses of champagne. But who was counting?

I suddenly brought a hand to my chest, pushing thoughts of Jace as far away as possible. There was the not insignificant matter of the knife wound I’d taken and how I was still ‘alive’ in the first place. Hadn’t I been hit with a silver blade? Thinking back to the pain, I began to wonder about that. It had hurt, sure, but it hadn’t
burned
. Silver would have felt like fire in my chest.

Not that I wasn’t grateful to have another chance. I was beginning to wonder if Theo, upon Making me a vampire, had also turned me part-cat, thanks to all the lives I apparently now had.

I didn’t want to move, so I just lay there and examined my surroundings. There wasn’t much to see: the room was white, white all over and super-clean, with metallic shiny floors that looked freshly polished. A sink and toilet were in the furthest corner, and that made me think that if there had been previous occupants, they must have been human. You know, with regular
human
bodily functions.

Set in the wall directly opposite the bed was a huge rectangular mirror. It looked like the ones that belong in police interrogation rooms, and the icky suspicion that it was likely two-way made me feel exposed and vulnerable. No doubt there was someone on the other side of the glass, checking me out. The brief temptation to give them a one-fingered salute made me feel a little better.

Where am I?
I forced myself to remain calm and simply gather as much information as I could. There had to be a way out of this place.

Who had been driving Jace’s car when I regained consciousness in that haze of pain and confusion? My imagination ran wild, figuring that it was probably some kind of secret government agency. What about those files I’d snatched from Quinn’s house: the Nemesis Project. A list of names. They knew who I was  . . .
what
I was. Were they going to do experiments on me? Sure, I’d watched my fair share of genre TV, but Theo had actually warned me about things like that after I’d first begun to come to terms with the change. He’d told me that there were people in this world who would do anything to prove the existence of vampires and other supernatural creatures. Was that what this was all about? According to Theo, these clandestine people would go to any lengths to achieve  . . .
stuff
. All kinds of shady stuff. I can’t honestly say I’d believed him, which you might laugh at considering my vivid imagination. But when you live your life in a fantasy world – for real, I mean – it becomes very easy to ignore tales of the bogeyman.

I
am
the bogeyman.

Or at least, I’m supposed to be.

I shivered and felt young and scared and so very alone.

My growing fear was interrupted by the sound of voices. Two distinct tones, one male and one female. Whoever the voices belonged to were right outside the door to this room; a room that was feeling more and more like a prison cell.

I dragged myself off the bed and forced myself to stand and face whoever these people were – then promptly fell on my butt.

Great. My legs weren’t working. I sat on the cold floor, trying to gather my strength, wondering if I was going to die – for real – maybe from the earlier blood loss. I should be hungrier than I was, but maybe I was still in shock. Could vampires go into shock?

One of the voices outside the room was raised, and I could hear a note of anger in it. Frowning, I shakily stood again, taking careful steps toward the door.

There was nothing to hold onto there – no handle or locking mechanism of any kind that I could see. It was like something out of
Star Trek
. Only, without the hotness of Zachary Quinto. I banged on the door with the heel of my right hand, ignoring the pain that shot through my arm.

Crap, I was so weak. I needed blood and I had no idea where I could get it from.

The room swirled around me and black sparkles appeared in my vision. I leaned against the door and tried to open it before I passed out. I ran my fingers around the edges, looking for a gap – something to get hold of, but it was a pointless exercise and only wasted precious energy.

The walls were also smooth, made of some kind of material I couldn’t immediately name, but then I made the mistake of touching it.

‘Ah!’ I yanked my hand back and looked more closely at the metallic coating that covered the walls. There were silver flecks when I moved my head so that the light hit at a certain angle.

The room had silver walls.
Silver. Walls.
Or, at the very least, they were painted with something that possessed a high silver content. Who would do something like that? Why? I hated having a thousand questions when I couldn’t even ask
one
of them. Let alone find any answers. It was frustrating. And inconvenient.

I resisted the visceral urge to pound my fists against the wall, knowing that all I’d achieve was silver burns – and possibly even permanent scars. Whoever had brought me here had done so for a reason or I’d be dead already. I had to hold on to that weird sort of hope – terrifying as it was – and wait it out. Wait
them
out. See what they wanted before I lost it and panicked.

I swallowed, realizing how dry my throat was – and how my hunger suddenly spiked. Uh-oh. Delayed blood loss kicking in. I hadn’t fed in  . . . two days? Perhaps more like three. Depending on what time it was now, it could be close to seventy-two hours, which ordinarily would be totally fine. I only needed blood once a week if I was careful, drank lots of coffee and kept myself calm. But I’d been seriously injured by that wound and I was stressed out, exhausted, and close to breaking point. Dad was in hospital; Theo had been shot; Subject Ten was still running around somewhere; everything that had happened with Jace  . . . It was a wonder I wasn’t gnawing off my own arm to kill the hunger that was beginning to rear its head.

I took a deep breath and sat back down on the edge of the bunk. Surely whoever was outside was watching me and could see that I was in a bad way. They’d be here any moment, right?

Minutes ticked by. In my head, anyway. I could imagine the sands of time slipping through a glass, and my stomach growled. Were they going to starve me? Let me get so blood-hungry that I’d lose it? That’s what happened to vampires who didn’t feed – eventually. Theo told me it took a long time, maybe even weeks or months depending on the age of the vampire. But I was young. I wouldn’t last long without true sustenance.

Just as panic began beating its black wings in my chest, the smooth, featureless door
swished
open. I still couldn’t figure out the mechanism, but that’s because I was too busy staring at the woman who had opened it. A tall woman with auburn hair, a no-nonsense expression on her face, and wearing a white lab coat. A very
familiar
woman.

Dr Helena Stark smiled at me as she entered my room. My
cell
.

‘Hello, Marie,’ she said, like this was the most normal freaking thing in the world. ‘It’s good to finally meet you.’

Clearly, I was in some weird, twisted sort of nightmare. What the hell was Dr Stark doing here? What was
I
doing here? What was going on? How did she know my name?

And what about Jace? Was he OK?

I opened my mouth, wondering which of my many questions would pop out first, but Stark beat me to it.

‘I’m sure you have a lot of questions,’ she said, in that annoying, ultra-calm sort of voice that adults use when they’re lying to you.

‘I promise that we’ll be giving you all the information that you need,’ she continued. ‘But first I have to ask
you
a few questions. How you answer will decide where we go from here.’

I narrowed my eyes. Why was I even bothering to listen to this crap? I could easily knock her aside and escape. OK  . . . maybe not ‘easily’, considering the whole falling-down-on-the-floor thing, but I could at least give it my best shot.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ the doctor said, her tone still super-calm. ‘You’re going to try escaping and you think it’ll be easy because I came in here alone, without any security guards. But trust me, Marie – you don’t want to try escaping. I know you don’t understand what’s happening right now, but I am your friend and you would do well to keep that in mind.’