Girl, Immortal (Girl, Vampire Book 3) Page 2

  "He's been out as long as you have," Jackson explains quietly. "He nearly drained himself dry. Thought he could flush the virus out with a transfusion, I guess. God only knows if it worked. It could have been his blood saved you. Could have been the cure. Could have been your own antibodies. It was likely some combination of the three."

  I nod, understanding. With supplies low and no guarantee the cure that worked for me will work for anyone else, they can't afford to test it. Especially if it possibly requires draining one of their best to the brink of death. Maybe once I can get back to the lab...

  "Why hasn't he woken up?" I ask, my stomach tying itself in knots. I smooth wrinkles in the sheets like I can do the same to the tangled anxiety within me.

  "The lack of blood I figure." Jackson shrugs. "His people gave him as much as they could spare from the stores, but with the rationing it was barely enough to keep him alive. Dumbass even made them give the last of the witch blood to you, hoping to strengthen your immunity. And thanks to the virus we can't get him anything fresh."

  He puts a hand on my shoulder, looking a little guilty, and I realize there are tears on my cheeks. I scrub them off quickly, embarrassed.

  "He'll pull through," Jackson insists but his words are uncertain. "He just needs time and blood."

  "Then we'd better get to work," I say, clenching my jaw. "The sooner we kill Niko, the sooner everyone can hunt safely."

  "Already on it," Jackson replies with a devilish grin. "I've put the word out to a few other hunters I know. There isn't exactly a community, but everybody knows a few people, who know a few people. And they're all looking for Niko."

  "If that show at the Baetal compound was anything to go by, Niko doesn't stand a chance," I say, grinning.

  "Well, I wouldn't say that was an average performance for a hunter," Jackson says a little smugly, shrugging. "But yeah, Niko's got a well-deserved reckoning on the way. And once we've got the cure..."

  He trails off, seeing me staring down at Arsen again. He fidgets with something in his pocket, scratches his chin, retreats to the window, peering through the curtains at the cool, empty night beyond.

  "You know," he says quietly, and I glance up at him, highlighted silver by the moon. "He loves you."

  I look away, frowning.

  "Or he thinks he does, anyway," Jackson shrugs. "Loves complicated that way. Everybody sees it a little different, and it only really works if you find someone that sees it the same way you do."

  "I don't generally include lying and using people in my definition of love," I tell him, still staring down at the sheets, remembering his touch, the way he'd held me. "I wasn't anything to him but a cure. Just something to leverage over everyone else to get himself more power. What is it with vampires and the big stupid political power plays?"

  "I know, right?" Jackson scoffs. "It's like a compulsion! Give a guy a couple extra decades of life and suddenly he's Napoleon Fucking Bonaparte."

  "Maybe it's a mortality thing?" I guess, shrugging. "Like, you don't need to eat or worry about money or having kids or a career or anything, which just gives you a ton of free time, and you can only spend so much of that hunting. So you need some dumb drama bullshit to focus on. Like the French aristocracy."

  Jackson laughs, brief and harsh.

  "All vampires are the French bourgeoisie," he chuckles. "I love it."

  Quiet falls between us for a long, still moment. I watch Arsen breath, the steady rise and fall of his chest.

  "Claudette warned me, you know," I say eventually. "That he was a user. I just figured she was bitter. Or projecting."

  Jackson frowns at the window. There's something he isn't telling me, which hangs in the air between us, almost tangible.

  "It's more complicated than you think," he says at last. "He fucked up. Don't get me wrong. But sometimes when people are desperate they do dumb things."

  "He lied to me," I say, giving Jackson a hard look. "Maybe he had a good reason, but he didn't trust me enough to tell me what it was. Whatever it is, it's clearly more important to him than me."

  Jackson sighs and takes off his hat, leaning against the window frame.

  "For what it's worth," he says finally. "I don't think he wanted to hurt you. Seeing you like that . . . it really hit him."

  "So, what?" I ask, tilting my head. "You're on his side now? Big bad vampire hunter?"

  "No," Jackson says quickly. "I still think he's an ass. But he might be a decent ass."

  I snort.

  "I'll make sure to tell him you said that."

  "Don't you dare."

  "I'm sure he'll be very interested to know that you think his ass is decent."

  "Sasha."

  I laugh, however briefly, and try to hang on to a little bit of hope.

  Jackson leaves eventually, but I stay, still hoping that maybe Arsen will wake up. An hour ticks past as I sit near the window, watching him breathe, willing him with every exhalation to open his eyes. A weird, angry impatience rises in me. A kind of desperation that gathers like heat low behind the eyes. Frustration makes me restless. I pick at the arms of the chair. Every second he isn't awake makes the anvil on my heart feel heavier.

  "Wake up," I say at last. The moon is getting low outside the window. "Wake. Up."

  He doesn't move. I stand up too fast. The chair falls over. I press down the anger that wants to seize me. When the virus had me, I learned to be good at that. So I'm calm as I climb over the end of the heavy wooden bedframe and onto the end of the bed.

  "There are some things I need to say to you," I tell him, the springs shifting under me. "Important things. Things I'm probably not going to have the guts to say later. So wake up and listen."

  But he doesn't, of course. I climb over him, until my hair hangs down like a curtain around us both. He goes on breathing, shallow and weak.

  "Get up," I demand. I shake him by the shoulders a little. "Arsen. Get up."

  I shake him harder. Still nothing. My eyes are starting to sting with tears again. If it weren't for those shallow, barely-there breaths, it would be so easy to think he was truly dead.

  "You lied to me," I say, my shoulders shaking. "You used me. I don't care if that's not what you meant. That's how it felt."

  I'm crying, my tears falling onto his face. I could almost think it was him crying them as they track down his cheeks. Good. I want him to cry. I want him to feel like I did. If he could cry for me, at least it meant he felt something.

  "I was—am—was in love with you," I tell him, my hands gripping the sheets in white knuckled fists to either side of his head. "Or I was starting to be anyway. And you made me feel like I was nothing to you. An object. Do you have any idea how that feels?"

  His face is as placid as the moon in sleep, and no number of surrogate tears can change that.

  "Do you have any idea," I ask, gripping his shirt, shaking him. "What it's like to love someone who doesn't even see you as a person?! You made me think I could trust you! And then you took it away, because you couldn't resist fucking bragging about it to your friends! Wake! Up!"

  I slap him. As hard as I'd wanted to slap him when I'd overheard him talking about his ambitions for me. The crack echoes in the empty room. It leaves my hand stinging and welt on his face, but he doesn't even flinch.

  I slip down to lay beside him, feeling stupid and humiliated and guilty. Who fucking slaps a comatose guy? Even a jerk like Arsen? The kind of asshole who deserves some like him, probably.

  "Then you go and do this," I tell him, lying on my side next to him, watching the endless rise and fall of his chest. "What am I supposed to think, Arsen? Wake up. Please, wake up and tell me how I'm supposed to feel. You hurt me. You risked your life for me. You almost died for me. You lied to me."

  I stare at him, willing him with every fiber of my being, every beat of my undead heart, to wake up. He doesn't. I curl up against him, my head on his shoulder, and close my eyes.

  "What's wrong with me?" I ask him softly, the echoes
of the slap still ringing in the corners of the dark room. "Why is it after all of that, I think I still love you?"

  He doesn't have an answer, and neither do I. I get up to close the drapes as the sky begins to turn grey with morning, and then I lie down beside him again and close my eyes. The chirping of crickets is replaced with bird song, but all I hear is his breathing beneath me, and the way it subtly changes as I fall asleep, growing deeper and lower with rest.

  Chapter 2

  I am beside myself.

  Arsen lies on his bed, deathly white and frailer than I’ve ever see, trying to heal from his sacrifice. The sacrifice he made to save me. The sacrifice that now consumed him.

  It’s not just his handsome blond locks or chiseled face or muscled and ripped body that took such command over me. It was because, despite his utterly ruthless nature when he had a goal to achieve, he was at the same time utterly tender to the people he cared about. All vampires called him a prince, and indeed he was.

  Despite his misgivings, Arsen agreed to assign Jackson the role of ambassador to the other vampire clans to inform them exactly what Niko did. That went against all he believed in, but he did it for the good of vampire kind everywhere. That was a huge step out of his comfort zone, but he did it because he trusted me.

  And that he had faith I could come up with a cure when I had failed miserably so many times opened my heart to him. And he trusted me enough to crash into Niko’s den and risk his life so that to that cure.

  Okay. Crazy Demetri had the cure all along, that rat. But he received his reward for that bit of betrayal. The look of surprise on his face when he impaled himself on the stool I held up to defend myself was precious. In a secret part of my emerging vampire heart it was a luscious moment. If I wasn’t half out-of-it by how sick I was, I would have enjoyed his death more.

  And that alone made me shiver because as a human I would relish no one’s death. But I’m not human anymore. I am a predator, and the same gusto Arsen took in defeating us in the Provokar, I took in watching that man die impaled on a stool leg.

  How do I live with my blood thirst? It is difficult.

  So far, I’ve been able to do it by equating donation bags with juice bags, but blood is not juice. At least not fruit juice. It’s human juice, and that right there should raise all sorts of red flags but now it seems as natural to me as sipping on a juice box. It’s sick I tell you, and natural, and I’m so confused my head hurts.

  The only thing that I’m not confused about is Arsen, laying on the bed, fighting for his life. If I need to I will offer my own wrist to his fangs if it will help him. But will that help or hurt? Until I run tests on my blood, I can't be sure if the parasite is flushed, or hiding in my tissues waiting to emerge to cause more suffering.

  Arsen’s lip curl at one side and he shivers and I rush to the bed. The bed barely dips as I sit on the edge and my undead heart stutters as I watch his eyelids flutter.

  This is all my fault, my crazy, stupid fault. I dragged him into danger by asking him to go with me to Niko’s lab and retrieve my research materials. Because I ran without a plan to get away from both Dimitri and Niko and then had to go back to retrieve them. In hindsight, I could come up with a half dozen ways to sneak that information out, and no one needed to get hurt.

  The strange irony is that only by going back and fighting both Niko and Dimitri did I learn that Dimitri, despite his lies, had the cure. He hadn’t made it, but he had the formula, and not that hard to put it together. I half managed in my dilapidated state.

  I should have known that Dimitri wasn’t the idiot that he pretended to be. But I still couldn’t figure out his end game. What did he have to gain from all this? Someone must have promised him something big. I can’t imagine that Claudette had enough to offer to the man to make him risk his life against all vampire kind. But what do I know about bloodsuckers besides being one from my limited experience as one? The politics of the community swirl about my head like a murder of crows cawing and fussing, seeming nonsense and of great import at the same time.

  But nothing of these people were inconsequential and despite having a cure it we have not produced enough for everyone and I’ve got to get on that. But I can’t leave Arsen because I would never forgive myself if something happened to him.

  It’s irrational. The vampire doctor Arsen had on call told me there was nothing I could do for him. Did he, just like a coma patient, know somewhere deep I was next to him?

  I reach for his hand, to hold on to some part of him, and tears flowed from my eyes.

  “Baby,” I say. “Don’t leave me. I just got you. I can’t lose you at the same time.”

  A groan comes from deep within him, unearthly, like a cry from the grave, and I suck in my own cry of distress. I cannot face that this might be the end of the man that I love.

  The man I love.

  It’s a brutal admission because I know that I love him, even through all the crap, and could be about lose him.

  But then with a jerk of his unnaturally strong hand he brings my wrist to his mouth. His mouth opens in a strange rictus, and his fangs descend. Is this a last desperate attempt at life or is he awakening? Either way, I allow it because gazing into his face there is nothing that I will refuse him.

  Even my life at his death.

  Arsen’s slice into my flesh is fire and my blood flows easily into his mouth. His throat works automatically to draw the ichor into his body. The slow primal beat of his heart thrums through my body, and it joins with mine in one rhythm.

  We are one and suspended in a singular moment in time and I understand now. Arsen was never in physical danger. He was giving me a chance to recover before he took back what he gave. We weren’t sharing thought in what anyone would consider telepathy. However, we were joined in a connection. Heart to heart, soul to soul, more intimate than the sharing of bodies. From this moment on we would always know what the other was thinking.

  And the more he took of me, the more he took me into himself and I see the desire and passion of his heart and mind. He has been searching for so long for someone that shared his deep concern for the fabric of life. The women he knew wanted him, but they didn’t want to care, not in the way he did, with anything but sex, or status, or wealth. That was not him. He’d happily live a pauper if it meant he had someone by his side that understood the individual he was.

  His loneliness was consuming black hole that ate at his soul.

  All these years he considered himself a creature out of step with his community, but when he met me, he understood he was a vampire ahead of his time.

  That is why he loved me. The universe crafted our souls of the same thread, and our joining wove warp to woof to create a fabric unique and whole.

  No wonder he went to illegal lengths to win me in the Provokar. If he had lost me, it would have meant more soul-eating, inescapable years alone. And for an immortal that was more than torture. It was a living death.

  “Oh, Arsen,” I breath. My heart beat slows, and I’m dimly aware that he’s taking too much but warmth spreads through me as large as the immensity of his love for me. He can have anything he wants. There are no barriers between us.

  But he jerks my wrist away, ripping more of my skin in his alarm.

  “No, Sasha,” he grates. “I didn’t go through all that to lose you.”

  I don’t want to stop and urge my lover to drink. But he holds my wrist and just licks at the blood, slowly, sensuously, the tip of his tongue making lazy circles that ignite a fire between my legs. Now I shake I want him so badly.

  Or is it blood loss?

  Arsen pulls away the comforter under which he lay. “Slip under the blanket, sweetheart. I want to feel your skin against mine. Let me hold you.”

  Shakily I stand, and strip my clothes, aware that I had to spare these precious seconds not touching him, so that I can get more of him.

  “That’s right, precious,” he whispered. “You are gorgeous, so awesome. I need you, Sasha, here,
by my side.”

  Arsen slid to the side, and I lay next to him. He turned to his side and searched my face, wiping away a tendril of my hair from my forehead.

  “Are you okay?” he asks tenderly. “I think I took too much.”

  “Then give some back,” I say, and he smiles. “We’ll always share like this.” He offers me his wrist, the same one as when I drained him before, but it was different this time as I bit down. He gasped, but it was a sound of pleasure, and he jutted his hip into mine so that the steel of his shaft made an urgent demand.

  Our blood mingles and I taste him and me in the plasma I suck and I expand with wonder at this sharing. Then Arsen pulled is away.

  “Greedy,” he says but his eyes shine with warmth.

  “I’ll always want you. For now. Forever.”

  “Of course,” he says with insufferable vampire arrogance, but then he winked to clue me he was teasing me a little.

  “So, you better get at,” I say brazenly.

  “At what?” he says with innocence.

  “Fucking me until I scream your name.”

  “Is this a contest?” Wickedness seeped through his words and I smiled because I aroused his natural competitive nature. “Will you try to resist screaming my name?”

  “Yes,” I say seductively. “I want you to fuck me so thoroughly that all I can do is scream it.”

  “Oh, Sasha,” he said. “I will make you regret you said that.”

  “I hope so.”

  With a sexy growl, he yanked my arms above my head and settled, his legs spread on either side of me, above me. I see his large cock, hard and weeping precum, pointing strait at me and I try to lift my head so I can lick the tip. Arsen shook his head.

  “Hold on to the headboard,” he commanded. “Don’t you dare take your hands off.”

  “Is that an order,” I say teasingly.

  “Your prince commands it.”

  “I see. So, you must command your women to do the things you want.”