Page 313 of Dragon Slayer

Jake grimaced. “Yeah. Yeah, he carried you back on his horse. Like something out of a goddamn book,” he muttered. “Listen, Adela.” Serious again. Concerned. And his scent – man, and sweat, and metal, and something acrid she couldn’t place and shouldn’t have been able to place – projected a sense of fear. She’d seen him scared before, like he’d been when they faced Ruby Russell in Wyoming. But she’d neversmelledfear before. She could now, and the knowledge cranked her panic up another notch. “Your leg was really fucked up. They couldn’t save it.”

She looked down, wildly, at her bandaged leg. She saw her toes – her donor toes – sticking out the end. She wiggled them, and the movement didn’t hurt. In fact,nothinghurt.

The heartrate monitor went off like a tiny alarm, and it hurt her ears. She ducked away from it, wincing. “What’shappening?”

“They couldn’t save your leg,” Jake said, in a rush, “but Vlad said he could, so he bit you. He turned you, Adela. You’re a vampire now.”

She sucked in a breath. “What–”

The door flew open, and in poured guards in their featureless black garb. God, she was starting to hate those fucking uniforms. The one in the front held a clear riot shield, and they all wore helmets, gleaming black like beetle shells beneath the lights.

Jake gestured toward them viciously. “Get out! What the hell? You’ll spook her!”

Like she wasn’t there. Like she was an animal.

Well, wasn’t she?

The Institute clearly thought so, if they were sending guys with batons in to handle her when her heart monitor went off. No nurses with crash carts here, just a nice ass-beating.

No one had ever accused her of being indecisive.

She ripped out her IV. Blood beaded up on the back of her hand, and before she could question the instinct, she passed her tongue across it. The blood tasted – well, she couldn’t think about that, even if it set off a sequence of snaps and pops in the back of her mind. When she lowered her hand, the pinprick wound seemed like it was already closing. She reached for the bandages on her leg next.

“Hey.” Jake moved around the end of the bed, placing himself between her and the guards. He made an abortive reach for her hands, pausing when she growled at him. “Hey,” urgent now, “you have to calm down.”

“Why, or they’ll knock me out? Lock me up like the fucking basement prince?” She was…so many things. Furious was just one element of it; she chose not to name the other emotions. They glittered, their edges jagged, and trying to lay claim to them would cut her like broken glass. “Where’s Vlad? I want to talk to him.” And something low in her belly tugged. Sheneededto see him.

“We’ll find him later,” Jake soothed. “Just sit tight. Let’s figure this out.”

She lifted her head, and saw that there were more guards, logjammed in the door, spilling out into the hall. Jake was starting to sweat, a sheen building along his temples.

“What do you all think I’m going to do?” she asked.

He swallowed. “We…we don’t know.”

~*~

The alarm didn’t sound anything like war drums, but the sound of it had the same effect on Vlad’s body. A tightening in his stomach, a quickening in his lungs…and then an intense flood of calm. He’d been terrified when, at seventeen, he’d laid siege to his own home city, wresting it back from Vladislav. But he’d been thrilled, too; he’d been born a boy with violence inside him, and having a chance to let it loose was always a blessing. An indulgence, like sex or good wine.

He’d been sitting too long, planning, scheming – things better left to his brother. Now it was time for battle, and he was past ready.

He was seated on the floor of the training room, cross-legged, alone, his sword resting across his thighs.

When the alarm went off, he got smoothly to his feet, and strode down the hall to the main part of the lab, hand steady around the pommel of his sword.

It was chaos.

Techs running away, guards running to, and in the middle of it, hospital gown sliding off one shoulder, freshly-healed leg trailing bandages across the floor, was Sergeant Ramirez.

Adela. That was her name. He’d turned the woman; might as well think of her more intimately.

She had her arms outstretched, feet braced: a defensive stance. There was blood on her hands, and Vlad knew it wasn’t hers. The guards circled, wary, and there was Treadwell, trying to talk down a situation that had been doomed from the first.

There was shouting, and the alarm blaring overhead, red lights strobing along the ceiling as if the noise itself wasn’t enough of a call to arms. But Vlad saw the moment she caught his scent.

She froze, and her head swung toward him, black hair fanning across her shoulders. Her nostrils flared and she showed her teeth, and her eyes went wide.

Slowly, the tension bled out of her face, and she stared at him, open-mouthed. She could feel his blood in her veins, same as he could feel hers. Whether it ever meant anything to either of them – and he guessed it probably wouldn’t, knowing himself, knowing what he did of her – a link existed between them. The unbreakable kind.

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