Page 55 of Protecting His Vampire Mate

In a matter of seconds, his skin had taken on an ashen hue. There was sweat beaded across his brow. His eyes were wide and blinking rapidly. And then I smelled the blood. Even as I watched, the front of his shirt began to turn shockingly red.

“Bryan,” he whispered, locking eyes with me, looking almost puzzled. “I think something hit me.”

I realized that unless I did something right now, even with the hunters likely to wake up at any moment, Tobias was going to die.

I dropped to my knees beside him and bit my wrist in order to draw blood. It took me two tries, because I was shaking so badly with my raw panic, and I missed the vein the first time. I didn’t care who saw. The world had narrowed itself down to one awful, impossible truth: Tobias was dying.

My teeth finally broke skin and I winced against the sharp sting of my own fangs. Blood welled up in my mouth. I could have cried with relief.

I held my wrist to his lips, dripping the blood into his mouth.

His eyes slid shut. He had lost consciousness.

For a single excruciating moment that seemed to last an eternity, nothing at all happened.

Was his heart still beating? I couldn’t hear it anymore. Was he breathing? I couldn’t tell if his chest was moving. I was too panicked to focus properly.

“Please, please, please,” I begged him. “Please, just swallow the damn blood.”

And finally, he did. He swallowed what was in his mouth. Then he sucked in a breath that had a strange, gasping rattle to it. His skin was the color of chalk.

“More,” I muttered to myself, practically blind with panic. “He needs more blood.”

Unfortunately, when I tried to give him more, my wrist had already started to heal, which slowed the flow of blood. I bit myself again. I would have bitten myself a hundred times, if that’s what it took.

I held my wrist to his mouth again.

Still not really conscious, he swallowed, a reflex.

His breathing stabilized and the gasping rattle faded. Color began to return to his skin.

When I had decided that he’d had enough of my blood that he would heal quickly enough from his wounds that I wasn’t about to kill him by accident—or so I prayed—I rolled him over and saw that there was a foot-long shard of glass buried in his back, near his heart.

Gritting my teeth and praying to any god who would hear me, I started pulling the glass out of his back. He let out a sharp gasp and his body went rigid. I didn’t know how conscious he was. I hoped not very.

Tears stung in my eyes but I forced myself to keep going.

But I couldn’t stand the idea that I was doing anything to cause him suffering. The only thing that gave me the strength to keep trying was the fact that, even with my blood in his system, if the shard of glass wasn’t removed from his body, he would still die.

At last, realizing that going inch by inch was far worse than just removing it all at once, I ground my teeth together, steeling myself against what I was about to do. Then I placed my other hand on his back to his steady him. Then, moving firmly and decisively, I pulled out the shard of glass.

Tobias let out an agonized gasp, a sound that was nearly a scream. It was the single most awful thing I had ever heard in my entire life.

Hot tears spilled down my cheeks.

The moment the glass was out of his body, I threw it a few feet away, where it landed on the grass, glinting in the pale light of the rising moon.

I tore open the back of his shirt, where the shard had pierced him.

I let out a soft cry of relief. His wound was already closing.

On the ground beside us, Michael and Danny began to stir. Or maybe had already been stirring.

In retrospect, I was extremely lucky that they hadn’t woken up while I was giving Tobias my blood. And so were they. Because if they had lifted a finger to stop me from saving Tobias, I wouldn’t have held back. I would have hurt both of them.

But now, with Tobias healing but still covered in blood, and then the equally bloody shard of glass I’d removed from his body on the grass next to us, it wouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to put two and two together. And if Tobias had gotten up and started walking and talking like nothing had happened, Danny and Michael—who literally hunted creatures like me for a living—were going to know exactly what I was, what I had just done.

Plus, my fangs were still out, I was completely covered in blood, and my lips were no doubt coated ruby red as well. I probably looked like something out of a nightmare. They wouldn’t even ask questions first, no doubt.

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