I stroked his forehead. “Declan, please wake up.”
His eyelid fluttered but didn’t open.
“You’re alive,” I told him, just in case he needed the reminder. “My blood didn’t kill you. I’m sure it hurt like hell, though, and I’m sorry for that. As soon as you wake up, we’re getting the fuck out of here.”
“Jill, it’s time we got started,” Dr. Reynolds said.
I glared at him. “With what? Fixing me?”
“No. I need more time to work on a viable serum. You said we could take more samples of your blood to keep in reserve.”
“So we’re here not because you were ready to start helping me, but because you wanted me to help you. After you tried to kill Declan. That makes a ton of sense, you bastard.”
His jaw tightened. “Perhaps my personal feelings got in the way of what I should be focusing on.”
“Wow, you’re fucking brilliant. No wonder you’re a scientist.” My eyes narrowed. “Can’t really say I’m in much of a mood at the moment to be all that cooperative. All I want to know is if Declan’s going to be okay.”
“If he’s survived this long after being injected with your blood, I don’t see why not.” He looked openly disappointed about that.
“You don’t honestly believe Declan set out to kill your wife just for the hell of it, do you? She must have—”
“Must have what? Deserved it?” he snapped, but then his expression softened again. “I—I don’t know anymore. In a war, sometimes it’s hard to tell which side is right. I myself have had to do many things outsiders might consider evil. But in order to learn, to grow, I had to find a way to—”
His voice broke off with a grunt of pain and he spun around. It took me a second to register with shock that there was now a knife sticking out of his back. He grappled to pull it from his flesh, and it clattered to the ground.
Lawrence stood behind him, his hands fisted at his sides. The look on his face left no question as to what he was feeling.
Rage.
My eyes widened with horror. “What the hell are you doing?”
Lawrence didn’t take his attention off Dr. Reynolds. “I trusted you, you son of a bitch.”
His eyes had turned to black—normally what a hungry vampire’s did. Dark blue veins branched down along the sides of his face to his neck. That was another very bad sign.
The fact that Dr. Reynolds was still on his feet made me think that the knife hadn’t been deep enough to kill him. Blood stained his white coat.
“What are you talking about?” he demanded.
“That phone call? That was somebody I had searching for Susan. They finally figured out where she is.”
“You need to calm down, Lawrence. We need to talk about this.”
“All of this time I’ve trusted you, Victor. You gave me a chance when everyone else wanted to have me staked. You saw that I still could be a help to you, despite what I am. I thought you and my wife—you were the only ones who gave me a chance.” He let out a shaky breath. “And this is what you do to me? To us?”
I was listening, but I didn’t understand. Something had broken in Lawrence; his voice had a pitchy quality that made me think he wasn’t in complete control of his sanity at the moment. Whatever he’d heard on the phone had broken him.
“Lawrence—” Dr. Reynolds began, his voice filled with pain.
“She’s been here all the time, hasn’t she? In the rooms that are off limits to everyone but you. You son of a bitch. You stole her from me and have been using her in your goddamned experiments, haven’t you? Haven’t you?”
He came forward enough to grab the doctor by his coat and shook him hard enough to rattle anyone’s brain.
I crouched next to Declan, holding on to his arm tightly. “Declan, wake up. You have to snap out of this now.”
That feeling of dread I’d had in my gut ever since we arrived at this place—maybe I should have paid attention to it. But I never could have predicted this.
“I knew what you’d do if I told you the truth,” Dr. Reynolds said, his voice strong but now with a naked edge of fear to it. “Lawrence, listen to me, you didn’t know this, but—but Susan was pregnant. She was keeping it a secret from you.”
The rage on Lawrence’s face faded, replaced with shock. “Pregnant?”
“It was your child. A dhampyr was growing inside her.”
“Jesus.”
“She didn’t want you to know—she knew you’d take it badly. She came to me to get an abortion.”
A shiver went down my arms. Abortion was the normal way to deal with a human woman pregnant with a dhampyr. Since most of them turned out to be the monster kind, a birth that only happened when the dhampyr literally clawed its way out of its mother’s womb, which inevitably led to the mother’s horrific death, there really wasn’t much choice. Births of the more human dhampyrs like Declan were the rarity.
“Did you abort the fetus?” Lawrence demanded.
Dr. Reynolds shook his head. “The fetus was to be kept alive, monitored.”
“Another damn experiment.”
“Yes.”
“All this time I’ve been beside myself with worry and she’s been here. The same place I come to every day, working by your side. And you never told me.”
“There was no other way.”
“It’s always about research for you, isn’t it Victor?” His expression twisted into something ugly, and he raked a hand through his red hair. “I have a secret, too, one I’ve kept so it wouldn’t hurt you. Clara wanted to leave you before she was killed. She’d fallen in love with another vampire. She hated that you spent all your time here, working on ways to kill her kind. Our kind. If you hadn’t been such a damn workaholic, then maybe she wouldn’t have ended up on the wrong side of that hunter’s stake.”
“No, it can’t be true.” Dr. Reynolds’s expression filled with sick shock. His lovely vampire wife hadn’t been so lovely after all.
“Where is Susan?” Lawrence shook Dr. Reynolds. “Where? Tell me and maybe this can end well for you.”
There was silence for a few very long moments.
“She’s dead.”
“No!” Lawrence’s expression shattered, and he shoved the doctor back from him.
“The birth, it—it happened only yesterday. I did everything I could to find a way around it. To try to save her. It was impossible. The other woman we have up on the next floor—the one set to become our next test subject for dhampyr breeding—she tried to help. She held Susan’s hand the whole time until it was . . . too late. The dhampyr was killed immediately; it was too vicious to keep for further testing. I’m so sorry, Lawrence.”
“She died yesterday.” His voice was barely audible.
“Yes.”
Lawrence looked down at the floor before slowly raising his tear-filled black eyes to Dr. Reynolds. “I’m going to kill you.”
He surged forward with inhuman speed. I shrieked as the doctor grabbed hold of my arm and threw me toward the vampire. Lawrence caught me. I felt the strength in his grip; the vampire was strong enough to break me in half.
Lawrence inhaled sharply, and his lips drew back from his sharp teeth. It seemed impossible, but his already black eyes grew even darker, like shiny, soulless buttons.
Dr. Reynolds moved toward the door. “You can’t resist the Nightshade inside of her. Take her. Bite her. Drink her blood. Give in to it.”
My fear ratcheted up another level. “No—” I pushed at the vampire, but his grip on me only grew tighter. “You don’t want to do this.”
I knew from the crazed look in his eyes that if he bit me, he’d tear my throat out. It would kill him and me at the same time.
Lawrence’s upper lip peeled back farther, and a growl sounded in the back of his throat. “It’s so powerful.”