When Dec kidnaps Maya from work, the last thing she wants to do is help him. Then she discovers what he wants her for: develop a cure for the mysterious illness killing the young vampires in his care. Vampires or not, she's unable to abandon them. Her interest in Dec quickly shifts from professional to something more intimate, but as their attraction grows, darker secrets threaten their newfound relationship. Dec has his own reasons for wanting the young vampires cured, and he's not telling...
EXCERPT
She took off in a dead run down the right-hand corridor.
The sound of crying now accompanied the intermittent screams, ripping through the dust motes to make Maya clumsy in her flight. More than once, she stumbled over her own feet, so that by the time she encountered another person and not a disembodied voice shrieking at the top of its lungs, both her palms were bloody and torn, the scrapes she’d received in the alley refreshed from the rough floorboards.
The young girl brushed her aside to try and flee past her, but Maya’s hand shot out and grabbed her arm, desperate to stop her.
“Where is he?” she asked even as the pale teenager slipped from her grasp and kept running.
Maya didn’t need an answer. The door through which the young girl had just exited suddenly exploded into the hall, and a slim body crashed into the opposite wall.
It was male, shirtless, skin pale where blood didn’t streak it with a vicious war paint. Baggy jeans hung from his lean hips, and there were distinct chafing marks around his wrists and upper chest where something had been rubbing tightly against him. They looked like restraint marks; she’d seen them once or twice when she’d done her psych rotations in school, and Maya’s heart ached for the boy as she crouched down to see to his wounds.
Until he lifted his head to stare at her.
He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Dark hair fell across his forehead in a tangled mop, edges jagged as if he’d attempted to cut it himself without a mirror. It didn’t hide his eyes, though. Those gleamed with an unnatural light as they fixed on the hands she had outstretched to him. Her chest tightened, choking her, when his lips parted to allow his tongue to lick at them.
Instead of regular teeth, the boy had fangs. Razor sharp and deadly looking. The analytical part of Maya’s brain automatically compared them to the puncture wounds she’d seen on Katie’s arm, and found them more than commensurate.
A grip of steel shot out and grabbed her wrist, yanking her forward and onto the teenager’s lap. In spite of his frail appearance, his strength was incontestable, painful and unyielding as she felt the fragile bones in her wrist start to give, and she could do nothing as he lifted her palm to his mouth.
First, he inhaled deeply. Then, his tongue darted out and lapped at the beads of blood that tangled with the broken skin of her palm. A gurgle of delight escaped his throat, and Maya cried out as he bit into the fleshy pad below her thumb.
The heavy tread of footsteps thundered into the corridor behind her, but it wasn’t enough to break the seal he had on her hand. When she twisted to see who was approaching, the silvery whisk of metal went flying past her, and the knife with which Dec had left his room suddenly embedded in the boy’s shoulder.
He shrieked in pain, releasing her to grab onto the blade. Strong hands took hold of Maya and pulled her away, but then dumped her unceremoniously off to the side while Dec took her place in front of the boy.
“Danny!” he growled, taking him by the shoulders and pinning him to the wall.
Something inside Maya winced when Danny’s fingers began fumbling with the weapon that was still stuck in him, every shake from the bigger man obviously aggravating the injury. Before she could think otherwise, she was crawling forward and pulling at the strong arms to try and break the hold, fear and confusion forgotten in the face of her need to stop Dec before it was too late.
“You’re killing him!” Maya said.
He didn’t look at her, nor did he loosen his hold. “Not today,” Dec said in a low voice.
“She bleeds,” Danny whined, and there was his tongue again, licking at his lips as if he hadn’t had a drink in months. “Please, Dec, let me have her.”
The faint words were what it took to tear Dec’s eyes from the boy, and he tilted his head to see the smears of blood Maya’s hands were leaving on his forearms. “Damn,” he muttered.
“Dec, please, I’m so hungry...”
She couldn’t move. Every word he uttered shifted an already nightmarish situation into a horror beyond anything she’d envisioned. The blood from Danny’s injury flowed down his chest in skinny rivulets that joined with the other drying streaks. With that much blood loss, he should’ve passed out long ago. What had she stumbled into?
The young girl who’d fled the scene on Maya’s arrival reappeared with a clang, chains that should’ve been too heavy for her to carry bundled in her arms. She dropped them at Dec’s side, and then pulled a small black bag from her pocket to hand it over to him.
“There’s only one more left,” she said apologetically.
He nodded, as if he hadn’t expected to hear otherwise. While he kept one hand firmly planted on Danny’s shoulder, Dec tore the bag open with his teeth, spitting out the plastic as he extracted a filled hypodermic.
“What’re you giving him?” Maya asked, her curiosity automatic.
“A sedative.” He plunged the needle into Danny’s arm, heedless of making it easy for him, but the muscles in his tense jaw twitched when the teenager screamed at the contact.
Danny reacted almost immediately, slumping against the wall as his eyes rolled back into his head. As she watched, his fangs retracted, his jaw hung lax, and he looked again like the teenage boy who’d come crashing through the door.
Pulling the blade with a sickening squelch from the shoulder, Dec tossed it aside before grabbing the chains. It seemed to take only a moment for him to wrap them around Danny’s chest, looping them around his wrists as if they were tissue paper, and when he straightened with the boy now unconscious in his arms, Maya clambered to her feet to follow him down the hallway.
“Which hospital are you taking him to?” she asked, having to walk twice as quickly as she normally would in order to keep up with the pair.
“I’m not.”
“What? But, he’s bleeding. And if you have to sedate him--”
“I know you’re not stupid, Dr. Sheldon. You know he can’t go to the hospital.”
“At least let me bandage that stab wound.”
Stopping before a closed door, Dec turned eyes the color of stormy oceans and almost as violent to gaze at her so intently that Maya shivered. “You’ve done enough damage for one night,” he said, and pushed the door open to step inside.
Hovering in the doorway, she watched as he dropped Danny onto a single bed that was shoved awkwardly against the wall. The room looked as if it had been a bedroom of some sort at one time, but time and neglect had left a layer of dust on the Spartan furniture that made her nose tickle. Were all the rooms like this?
Gradually, Maya became aware of a growing presence behind her, and stole a glance down the hall to see a group of pale faces staring back. Not one of them could’ve been over twenty years old, but more than half had eyes that glowed with the same silver gleam that had radiated from Danny’s. It wasn’t fear she saw in them. It was hunger, and Maya instinctively took a step back.
The solid wall of a powerfully muscled chest prevented her from moving further. Before she could skitter away, Dec’s arm snaked around her waist to pull her flush against him. “I didn’t want to do this.” The velvet baritone of his voice so close to her ear made her shiver. “But you let Danny get a taste of you. I don’t have a choice any more.”
She felt a cool tingle where his mouth trailed down the side of her neck, and the swift memory of the slice of Danny’s teeth into her hand made her start struggling against Dec’s hold.
“Forgive me,” he whispered.
The sharp prick of fangs sinking into her neck tore the scream from Maya’s throat.
