Page 62 of Taste of Fate

I licked my lips. Moved my tongue around inside my own mouth as if I could lick up any remnants of her. But I had swallowed her blood so greedily, so selfishly, all I had left were memories of how she tasted.

It was nearing dusk and time for me to get up, not that I’d slept a wink since watching Tavi leave.

The hurt on her face played over and over in my mind, cutting me deeply every time. I’d done that to her, to my blood mate I was supposed to cherish and keep safe. I made her feel unwanted, unyearned for like she was just an option, when nothing could be further from the truth. No matter how many times I tried to convince myself that pushing her away was for her own good, it felt like a lie.

My instincts screamed at me to chase her down and find her, make everything better. To apologize and own up to my fuck ups, even when I knew she’d never give me another chance. I wanted her to know the truth, to tell her exactly why I was so unworthy of her as a blood mate, but I feared she would still try to see the good in me despite it.

Kalix never blamed me for what happened twenty years ago. He never wavered in his defense of me for a single moment, despite the fact that I’d objectively ruined his life. Tavi seemed like the kind of person to do that too. People like that never stopped trying to help those around them, not even lost causes like me.

Even though I wanted to come clean about why I was so fucked up, I wouldn’t. Everyone in the clan already knew, so I was surprised she didn’t. Or maybe she did and just never brought it up. Either way, it didn’t matter. There would be no trying to win her over. The best thing to do was leave her alone. I’d played with her feelings enough already.

The pound of a heavy fist at my apartment door jolted me out of my wallowing. That kind of knock could only come from Rhain.

“What?” I demanded, not moving from bed.

“Thorne’s calling an emergency meeting,” he bellowed through the door.

“When?”

“Right fucking now.”

His booted feet stomped away, leaving me to wonder if I could skip the meeting. Emergencies usually meant all hands on deck, but in light of what just happened with Tavi, nothing else felt like it mattered as much.

Her blood would sustain me for the next few days, and then I had a lifetime of choking down vile blood that wasn’t hers just to stay alive. An emergency could wait for me to have a bit of a mourning period, right? Variety was no longer the spice of life. It was the gross shit I would punish myself with.

I managed to get out of bed and dressed decently, then headed for the great room where a dozen clan members stood around the large kitchen island.

“Nice of you to join us, Cyan,” Thorne grouched from the far end. He had an ash tray of two spent darakt cigarettes in front of them, and was already halfway through smoking a third.

I ignored his attitude, because Thorne always had one, and shouldered my way between Des and Laith. “What’d I miss?”

“Sapien is under attack,” Rhain supplied. “Your blood pet got a call from someone she knows and she alerted Thorne.”

“Seeing as we’re the ruling clan and have taken their sacrifice in the Half-Century Selection, we have an obligation to respond.” Thorne almost sounded bored.

Shock and disbelief speared through me. “Under attack from what? Who?”

“From the sounds of it, a horde of drae addicts.” Thorne drew hard on his cigarette, indicating he was more stressed than he was letting on. “But that doesn’t make sense, considering we know how draitrium affects cognitive function and motor skills. Sometimes they act erratic, but most of those on it want to do nothing but lie in the sun all day.”

A collective shudder ran through nearly every vampire in the room. Nothing sounded worse than being touched by the light emitted from the giant ball of gas in the sky we were never meant to see.

“The drae could be mixed with something else,” Des suggested. “Something that amps them up and makes them aggressive.”

“An entire contaminated batch, you think?” Thorne lifted an eyebrow. “Octavia made it sound like the whole compound was overrun with them. That could be anywhere from a dozen to twenty.”

“Fuck, that many?” My thoughts reeled. Aside from Tavi, I didn’t care much for humans, but they didn’t deserve to be slaughtered. And her friend Amy was in that settlement. She was important to Tavi, which meant she was important to me.

“Something else is going on,” Rhain huffed. “If a batch got contaminated, there would be random attacks popping up all over the territory. But a bunch of them swarming one location sounds coordinated. Someone set those addicts on the human compound for a reason.”

“I agree.” Thorne finished his third cigarette. “But we don’t have time to speculate on that now. Make sure we keep one or two alive. We’ll bring them back here to detox and talk. Be fucking sharp, they will be unpredictable. Any questions?”

“When did this happen?” I said.

“Octavia came to me almost an hour ago.”

“An hour? What the fuck? Do we know if there are any humans left to save?”

Thorne narrowed his eyes at me. “Since Blood ‘til Dawn doesn’t partake in draitrium, there wasn’t much we could do until the sun went down, Cyan.”

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