In the distance, I heard police sirens wailing. It seemed very far in the distance, but that was just because my level of consciousness was changing. The adrenaline and panic changed my thirst into something different. I wasn’t blacked out exactly, but I felt like I was fighting underneath water. Stellan laughed, and I felt the weight move off me. His hand went between his legs, and I scrambled to crawl away from him, but that just made him dig my fingers into my inner-thigh. When I saw “dig into” I mean literally dig. His claws and fingers tore through my jeans and flesh into the muscle. I screamed as the searing pain shot through me. I turned around to fight him off, and he jerked his hand back, taking a chunk of my leg with him. He laughed, and then disappeared.
I tried to sit up and look down at my leg, and it was then that I realized what he’d done. The femoral artery runs through the inner thigh, and if severed, a human would bleed out in a very short time.
Unfortunately, it’s not that much different for vampires. In an ordinary situation, my heart would be beating my slower, which would give my body a chance to heal before things got out of hand. But I was scared as hell and my heart was beating to match that. My blood was spilling out all over the ground, and I could feel it.
When I bled as a human, it had never felt like this. It was pressure and pain and weakening.
It was almost like a vacuum, and I could feel my life being sucked out of me with every drop of blood.
“Alice!” Jack appeared at my side. I might’ve noticed him approaching if I wasn’t so focused on the blood. I held my hands over it, trying to stop the flow, but there was a big gouge in my leg.
My hand wouldn’t cover it. The blood just flowed out over it, and it was coming to fast for me to heal. “Oh, hell, Alice.”
“Where’s Milo?” I asked, and my voice sounded weak and soft. Jack put his hand over mine, trying to stop the blood. “Is he okay?”
“Yeah, he’s with Bobby. They’re fine,” Jack bit his lip and looked back over his shoulder.
“The lycan just took off when the cops showed up. We gotta get out of here before they find us.”
After the lycan attack, dealing with the cops didn’t seem like that big of deal. Except that I was bleeding like crazy. They would take me to a hospital, where everything would get very, very complicated, and I couldn’t handle that. The wound itself wasn’t deadly either. Or at least I didn’t think it was.
I tried to remember if vampires could die from blood loss. I knew starvation could kill them, but it had to be a very long time. At any right, but the looks of the puddle growing underneath me, I had lost almost all the blood I had in me.
I was starting to feel it. My insides felt like they were burning and shriveling up. There was this weird painful sense of being deflated. My mind had fogged up so much I couldn’t understand anything Jack was saying to me, and everything I could see had blurred completely into a red haze. I couldn’t feel actual bloodlust because I was too weak. All the strength had seeped out of me, and it was replaced with some of the most intense pain I had ever felt. I started screaming until Jack put his hand over mouth. I could smell and taste my blood on his hand, and my stomach lurched.
The ground seemed to move around me, falling away. A cold wind blew over me, but I could barely feel it. I couldn’t see anything. There was just the pain. I could smell blood, and that frantic animal part of me was barreling in. I tried to move, to fight to get at the blood, my arms wouldn’t work. They were shaking violently, and I wondered dully if I was having a seizure. The world swayed and bowed around me, and I was about ready to kill Jack to get his blood. The pain was so excoriating that I would’ve killed anyone to make it stop.
“Alice, drink.” Jack’s voice in my ear, but I didn’t know what he was talking about. I could smell him, but it wasn’t his blood. It was warm and fresh and pounding quickly. I wanted to drink it, but I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t speak or move.
Then I felt it. Warm skin pressed against my lips, and I felt the pulse of his veins throbbing on my mouth. Without thinking, I sunk my teeth and started drinking. Almost instantly, my strength picked up, and I grabbed onto whoever I was drinking. I pressed them closer to me and drank furtively. My mind flashed onto when I saw Milo biting Jane and how he had looked like an animal, and I knew that I was eating like that, but I didn’t have a choice.
The pain stopped, then pleasure slowly trickled through me. Delirious heat spread through me.
Pleasure exploded all through me, and I drank more deeply. I could feel how kind and loving they were, and there was an acidic aftertaste from the adrenaline. They had been afraid, but they weren’t usually, and they weren’t know. They felt safe with me and they cared about me, even though I was drinking them dry.
Some part of me knew I should stop. I had already drank enough where I would be alright, and it was almost more than a human could spare. But the rest of me refused. I couldn’t stop. It felt too amazing and tasted to wonderful. I needed this, and I couldn’t stop, not until I had it all.
“Alice!” Jack shouted. There was a sharp pain in the back of my head, but I didn’t care, not until that pain started pulling me back. He was pulling me by my hair, trying to get me to let go, but I wouldn’t, and if he pulled too hard, I would end up tearing out the throat. “Alice! Let go!”
“Jack!” Milo wailed. “Make her stop!”
Jack kept pulling on me, and I literally growled at him, like a dog with a bone. Thinking quickly, he wrapped his hand around my throat, squeezing down on it. I couldn’t breathe, but more importantly, I couldn’t swallow. I let go, simply so I could bite Jack and get him to leave me alone, but as soon as I separated, I could think again. I felt dizzy and drunk, but I didn’t feel animal crazy anymore.
Jack didn’t know that though, so he wrapped his arms around me to keep me from going after the blood. The neck had already been pulled away from me. It had been the instant I had stopped biting, and I looked around to see who it was. Milo cradled Bobby in his arms, sobbing, and that’s how I found out.
“Bobby?” I mumbled. The familiar tired haze I got after eating settled in on me. My inner thigh tingled and itched like crazy, meaning it was healing.
“You nearly killed him, Alice!” Milo yelled at me.
“She had to do it, or she would’ve died!” Jack shouted. He was still holding me in his arms, but more gently. He just wanted me near him.
I wiped Bobby’s blood away from my mouth and tried to sit up. We were sitting on black top next to a white building, and when I looked up, I realized it was the Basilica of St. Mary, a massive cathedral a block away from the park. Jack had carried me over here, away from the police, and then tried to fix me up. I felt like passing out, but I was fighting it. We weren’t safe here, not with the lycan after us, and I had to do something.
“I never should’ve let him come with.” Milo stroked Bobby’s hair. I could hear his heart beating, and it was still strong, so I knew I hadn’t killed him, but he had completely passed out. Not to mention the fact that he belonged to Milo, and vampires hated sharing their humans with other vampires.
Even though he loved me, it had to be driving Milo crazy to let me bite him.
“That is why I let him come with,” Jack admitted sourly.
“What?” Milo glared at Jack. “You brought him along to feed her?”
“He saved your sister’s life, didn’t he?” Jack countered.
“I’m sorry,” I apologized weakly. I tried to sit up again, but that was all I had in me. Jack’s arms were strong and warm, and I finally gave into them. Darkness rolled over me, and I passed out.
I awoke on the floor. After everything I’d gone through, I felt surprisingly good. When I opened my eyes, all I could see were the beautiful gold and white ceilings of the cathedral. Bobby was lying next to me, sound asleep himself, and I felt this strange pulling in my heart for him. Not like love or even a crush, but just a connection. He had shared himself with me, and in return, he’d gotten some of me as well.
I had never fed on a human before, and I was surprised to find that I felt anything for him afterwards. I didn’t have time to ponder the details of our relationship, though, because I heard voices talking.
I got my feet, still feeling kind of dazed and drunk. We were in the balcony of the church, surrounded by pews and crosses, and Jack, Milo, Peter, Ezra, and Olivia were standing at the other end.
They had been trying to let us sleep, which was ridiculous. I needed to be awake and strong for this. Their voices were hushed, and I tried to sneak over to them, but I stumbled and bumped into a pew.
“Oh good. She’s awake,” Milo muttered dryly, so apparently he wasn’t ready to forgive me yet.
“What’s going?” I asked when I reached them. They were standing in a circle, making some kind of plan, and I squeezed in between Jack and Ezra. “What are you guys doing here?”
“We called them,” Jack said, and I couldn’t believe that he’d called Peter. Ezra, I understood, but I was pretty sure he hated Peter now more than ever. But here they were, standing in a circle, and Jack wasn’t trying to kill him. “We couldn’t get to the car because of the police, and we didn’t want the lycan to follow us back home anyway.”
“I called Olivia because she’s the only really equipped to deal with them,” Ezra said.
“And I’d do anything for you, sweetheart,” Olivia winked at me, and Jack moved a little bit closer to me. She wore leather pants and a tiny leather vest with nothing underneath it. On top of that, she had donned some kind of crossbow apparatus. The leather satchel on her back was filled to the brim with metal arrows.
She saw me admiring her weaponry and smiled. “Titanium is strong enough to break through a vampire’s sternum and go right through the heart. The old wooden stake would never work, and even this isn’t fool proof, but it’ll at least slow them down.”
“Great,” I sighed, and looked around. It suddenly dawned on me that someone was missing.
“Where’s Jane?” Jack pursed his lips and nobody said anything. “Jack? What happened?”
“The lycan took her with them,” Jack said quietly.
“Oh my god.” I ran my hands through my hair. “This is a fucking nightmare.”
“We’ll get her back,” Peter promised fiercely. His green eyes met mine, and I felt Jack bristle, but he did nothing. “We’ll make the trade, me for her. They can’t deny it.”
“We are not sacrificing you,” Ezra said firmly.