Sacrifice (Crave (Quality)) Read online

  Millie snorted. “Wannabe vampire sites.”

  “Usually, that’s all it is,” Gabriel agreed. “But this was different. Well, this one message, anyway. It was about Sam.”

  Millie sucked in a sharp breath, pain and guilt clouding her green eyes. But Ernst didn’t react at all.

  “This person was looking for Sam. Knew his name and his description. All kinds of details about him. I e-mailed back and forth for three hours, trying to figure it out. I thought it must be some kind of hoax.”

  “By who? Nobody knows about Sam but us,” Millie whispered.

  “The human woman,” Ernst said coldly. “The one he betrayed us for.”

  “Yes.” Cold fear seeped into Gabriel’s belly. They were getting too close to Shay’s mother, and he had promised Shay that he wouldn’t let them hurt her mother. Shay had trusted him, but all his promises seemed empty right now. “The woman had known the details.” He wouldn’t say her name. He wouldn’t tell Ernst anything about Emma McGuire. He’d find a way around that truth.

  “We should have taken care of this years ago.” Ernst shook his head. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t know.” He didn’t know. Usually, he told Ernst everything, but when he’d seen Sam’s name in print, read descriptions of Sam’s wiry dark hair, his olive skin, his donkeylike laugh . . . it had felt private. Like getting a glimpse of his friend—his brother—again. And he missed Sam. It was a constant ache in his soul. Ernst wouldn’t have understood that.

  “What happened then?” Ernst went on, all business. “You didn’t tell this woman anything about us, did you?”

  “Of course not,” Gabriel said. “It wasn’t the woman, anyway. It was a man, a doctor. They were married, but . . . something happened to her. I’m not sure.”

  Can he tell I’m lying? Gabriel wondered. It wasn’t possible to lie to his family, not when things were normal. Not when their communion was in place. Family members felt one another’s emotions like their own. But his own communion with his family had been severed when he was captured by Shay’s mother and stepfather.

  Ernst was frowning, as if he didn’t quite buy the story. Gabriel rushed on before his father could think through it any further.

  “Dr. Martin Kuffner, he’s the one who took me. He’s famous. He studies leukemia, or he did. Then he met Shay.” Gabriel’s voice wavered when he said her name, he couldn’t help it. Shay, who he’d held in his arms only yesterday. Shay, who had changed every opinion he held about humans. Shay, who he loved.

  “The girl?” Millie asked.

  Ernst made a sound in his throat. Disgust. Revulsion.

  “Yes. She was sick and no one knew why. Martin married her mother, and he began researching a cure for her blood disease, but of course it wasn’t really a disease. She’s Sam’s daughter. She’s half vampire, half human. It made her weak. Actually, it almost killed her.”

  “It should have died at birth,” Ernst spat. “If I’d had any idea that thing could live, I would’ve hunted down the woman myself.”

  “Modern medicine,” Gabriel replied. It was what Sam had said to him, back when he first found out about Emma’s pregnancy. Modern medicine would keep the baby from dying the way half bloods always died. And it had—it had kept her alive, but always on the brink of death. “Anyway, Martin knew the truth about Shay’s father.”

  “Because the woman couldn’t keep her mouth shut,” Ernst said. “No surprise there.”

  “She only told him—a doctor she thought could save her daughter. She never even told Shay,” Gabriel protested. “The mother was gone by the time I met Shay, and Shay still didn’t know who her dad was. Think about it. This girl just found out what she truly is a few days ago. She needs a place . . .”

  Ernst’s expression had clouded over, and Millie’s eyebrows drew together in confusion. Gabriel let his words trail off. He shouldn’t be defending Shay. They weren’t ready to hear it yet. He couldn’t let them see how attached he was to her, not any more than he already had. He had to stay calm, act rational . . . and keep them from suspecting that he planned to rescue her if he couldn’t find a way to convince them to let her stay.

  I’ve got to get to Shay. He planned to take her out of here if his family wouldn’t accept her. He was willing to leave his home, to anger and betray his father. Just like Sam had done when he’d fallen in love with a human. The realization stunned Gabriel. The thought made him sick. But if that’s what it took to keep Shay safe, that’s what he would do.

  “This Martin, he’s a monster,” Gabriel went on, the words coming quickly. That part was true, and it was easy to let his fury and hatred show. “He’s almost pathologically ambitious. He never cared about Shay’s sick blood, he only wanted to find out what characteristics were vampiric, so he could use them in his science. Create medicines with the blood, isolate what makes us strong, what makes us immortal. It’s the fountain of youth, and he wanted to discover it.”

  Ernst leaned forward, his long fingers steepled in front of him as he listened. “I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “They know everything about blood now, about DNA, about life itself. I should have seen this threat coming.”

  “It’s very recent science,” Millie pointed out. “Barely the blink of an eye to you. You spent centuries in a world where people believed in dragons and demons.”

  “All the more reason to keep them from believing in vampires,” Ernst shot back. “I shouldn’t have let Sam’s woman live.”

  “It’s Martin you have to worry about,” Gabriel said. “He’s obsessed. When Shay’s blood proved useless, he went looking for her father.”

  “And he found you online. What then?” Ernst asked.

  “I agreed to a meeting. I know I shouldn’t have,” Gabriel said before the others could. “I wasn’t thinking. I wanted to find out how he could know about Sam. I didn’t think there was any danger.”

  “And?” Millie asked.

  “And he had hawthorn,” Gabriel said. “He injected it before I even knew he was there.” It wasn’t true, or at least not the whole truth. A human could never have snuck up on him unless he was distracted . . . and he had been, by Shay’s mother. She was talking to him, proving to him that she knew about Sam. And Martin had come from behind while he was focused on Emma.

  “He knew how hawthorn would affect you?” Ernst asked.

  “I guess maybe Sam had told . . . the woman,” Gabriel admitted. “Maybe he didn’t really believe it, who knows? None of us had ever actually experienced hawthorn before. I always thought the danger was a myth myself.”

  “It didn’t kill you,” Millie said.

  “It paralyzed me. I could see everything, hear everything . . . but I couldn’t move.” Gabriel wrapped his arms around himself, a feeling of nausea overtaking him at the memory. “It didn’t dull my senses at all, or my thoughts. I was entirely awake, in the prison of my own body. I had to watch while they dragged me into a van, while they chained me to a lab table. I was a rat to be experimented on. I had to listen to Martin describing his plans for glory while he drained my blood day after day, and I couldn’t so much as spit at him.”

  “The hawthorn must have severed our communion,” Ernst said. “If I’d felt you in such distress, I could have followed your emotions to you. I would have rescued you.”

  “The link was cut immediately,” Gabriel agreed. “As soon as the paralysis set in, I reached for the comfort of my family. But you were gone, all of you.” It had been the worst part, in fact. Since the day he gave up the sun, centuries ago, Gabriel had been able to feel his family’s emotions, to know where they were and that they were with him. The communion was a gift that the blood ritual gave to them . . . and that the hawthorn had taken away.

  “Gabriel, you were gone for almost a month,” Millie said. “Were you—How long did the paralysis from the hawthorn last?”

  “I’m not sure. I tried to count the death sleeps, but at the beginning I was panicked and then I was weak f
rom hunger. I think it was only a matter of days. But he had me chained fast, and he took huge amounts of blood. Even after the paralysis wore off, I couldn’t escape. And I couldn’t feel any of you.”

  “Do you think the communion will ever come back?” Millie asked, turning her eyes to Ernst. He was the oldest of them and the one who’d raised almost all of them. Any question a family member had always went to Ernst.

  “No,” he said.

  It felt like a slap. Even though his family was holding Shay now, Gabriel missed the connection to them. Its absence was a nagging pain.

  “But we can restore it,” Ernst added quickly. “Once broken, it won’t come back on its own. We’ll do a blood ritual, like we did when Tamara joined the family.”

  Gabriel nodded. Tamara had been a vampire already when Richard brought her to them. He loved her, so they all agreed she would join them. And Ernst had devised a ritual to let Tamara join their communion. That’s how easy it is when you fall in love with another vampire, Gabriel thought. If only Sam’s love for Emma had been so simple. Or mine for Shay.

  “I’ll gather the others.” Millie stood up.

  “Not now,” Ernst told her. “Gabriel, you said this Martin would come for the girl. Why?”

  “She’s his test subject,” Gabriel replied. Shay was also his stepdaughter, but he knew Martin didn’t care about that. The way Martin had backhanded her across the face when she’d tried to keep him away from Gabriel had proved it. “He’d been giving her transfusions of my blood, and it made her stronger. He thought it was a breakthrough.”

  “That’s why he drained your blood? But she isn’t a full human. He had no real breakthrough,” Ernst said.

  “He was trying to figure out how the two could work together, vampire and human,” Gabriel replied. “He told me that even for long life, no one would buy a drug that made them need to drink blood. No one would want to actually become a vampire. People would only want the strength and longevity, not the ‘undesirable’ aspects.”

  “He talked to you?” Millie wrinkled her nose.

  “More like talked at me. He was thrilled with his own brilliance, he couldn’t keep it to himself,” Gabriel said. “I never said a single word back.”

  “That thing is in the supply room,” Richard announced, coming into the common room with Luis on his heels. “The door’s locked and we bound its hands.”

  “She’s not a thing,” Gabriel protested before he could stop himself.

  They all looked at him, and he felt a rush of fear. He had to act reasonably if he wanted them to trust him. He had to pretend he wasn’t horrified by everything his brother had just said. Shay, with her hands bound?

  As if you didn’t tie her hands yourself, a voice inside his head whispered. He’d kept Shay prisoner and bound her during the day while he fell into the death sleep. He’d treated her like a thing too. How could he blame his family for doing the same?

  “What are we supposed to do with her?” Luis asked. “It’s dangerous just to have a human here.”

  “She’s here as bait,” Ernst said. “Gabriel planned to use her as a lure for the people who took him. Dr. Martin Kuffner. And that human woman Sam left us for. They’ll come for her, and then we’ll kill them all.”

  “I told you Shay’s mother wasn’t involved,” Gabriel protested.

  “You told us more than one person abducted you,” Ernst countered. “You said they put you in a van, they chained you to a table. Maybe the woman didn’t interact with you, but she was there, my son.”

  Gabriel’s mind was spinning. I’ve got to get to Shay. He had tried to keep her mother out of it, but had he slipped up? He was still so enraged every time he thought about Martin and those weeks held captive in his office that it was hard to think straight. And his own feelings for Shay were overwhelming—the gratitude for saving his life, the love, and now the fear. Was she all right?

  “. . . too risky drawing them here,” Richard was saying. “Gabriel knows where Martin lives. We should go and kill him there instead.”

  “He’s right. What if they bring other humans with them?” Millie asked.

  “No. I’m not going back there,” Gabriel snapped. “Don’t you think Martin would expect that?” Besides, Shay’s mother lived at Martin’s house. He wasn’t going to let his family attack her.

  “We’re safer here anyway,” Ernst said. “We don’t want to give Martin the advantage of fighting on his home turf.”

  “He doesn’t want publicity. He wants to study vampires, and he wants a monopoly on it,” Gabriel said. “He won’t bring anyone else—he doesn’t want anyone else to know.”

  “Well, how long is it going to take?” Luis asked. “We don’t have any human food for the girl.”

  Ernst waved his hand dismissively. “There’s no need to feed her.”

  Millie made a small sound of protest, but she didn’t contradict him. Gabriel swallowed down his anger and tried to make his voice sound reasonable. “You want to starve her and keep her tied up? You’re treating her as badly as Martin treated me.”

  “That seems only fair,” Ernst said.

  “She needs blood at least,” Gabriel insisted. “She’s sick, like I told you. She can’t live without vampire blood.”

  “There’s no sickness, there is only abomination,” Ernst spat. “We’re not going to waste our blood on that creature. We only need her alive long enough to be bait for the trap.”

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  GABRIEL CAN SEE IN THE DARK, Shay thought. My father—Sam—he could too. Why can’t I?

  She stared at the tiny sliver of fluorescent light that marked the bottom of the door. It was all she could see. The rest of the room was nothing but blackness. Why did I have to inherit only the bad parts of being a vampire?

  Shay chewed on her lip, trying to make herself think so that she wouldn’t go crazy with fear. She hadn’t actually spent much time thinking about her father since she’d discovered who he was. She’d been too busy reeling from her new understanding of why she was sick, of why nobody had ever been able to diagnose her illness. Of why she had to live on other people’s blood.

  Well, that and being with Gabriel.

  He’ll come for me. He’ll get me out of here, Shay told herself. But it wasn’t comforting. She couldn’t even imagine what they were doing to Gabriel. Would he be in huge trouble for bringing her here? He had told her how much they hated humans. Humans had massacred their family, a long time ago, back in Greece. Only Gabriel and her father had survived. And Ernst.

  But I’m not human, Shay thought. That was supposed to matter. She was Sam’s daughter, and Sam was part of the family. Gabriel had said that family was the most important thing to Ernst . . . but Gabriel had been just as shocked as she was by Ernst’s reaction to her. Abomination. That’s what he had said. Tamara said the same thing.

  Half vampire, half human. Maybe she was an abomination. But she still felt like herself.

  A loud humming sound startled her, making her heart slam against her rib cage. “Get a grip,” she said out loud. “It’s the heat coming on.” Here in the dark, her hands bound behind her, in the lair of a gang of vampires, it was easy to feel like she was being held in some kind of nightmare world. Things like temperature control didn’t really fit in.

  Shay’s heartbeat wasn’t slowing down. She took a deep breath, but it didn’t help.

  “Self-check,” she whispered. Her stepfather, Martin, had made her do self-checks every few hours back when he was still acting like a responsible doctor instead of like a mad scientist. And he was a good doctor, a famous and well-respected one. Not everything he had told her was a lie. The self-checks were important.

  She couldn’t take her pulse with her hands bound together by duct tape, but the pounding heartbeat told her that her pulse was too fast. Not good. But she didn’t feel dizzy at all, and her extremities weren’t cold. Well, no colder than the rest of her body. She did feel a little nauseous, though, and the
re was a monster headache building behind her eyes.

  The effect of the blood is wearing off, Shay thought. She’d drunk from Gabriel before they stole the Escalade and set off for Tennessee. But she’d only taken a little. They had a long drive and wanted to get started. And she’d thought—they had both thought—that there would be plenty of time for her to have more when they got here.

  They hadn’t planned on Gabriel’s family roughing her up and tossing her in the basement. But it had taken its toll on her, clearly. She didn’t feel exactly weak yet, but she definitely wasn’t as strong as she had been at the beginning of this interminable night.

  What time was it, anyway? They’d arrived around midnight. It had to be at least three in the morning by now. Or maybe the darkness of the room and her terror just made it seem like more time had passed. Maybe upstairs, Gabriel was still explaining it all and once his family heard the whole story, they would let her out and she’d be able to feed from Gabriel.

  I can pretend to write in my journal again, Shay thought desperately. That’s what she had done during the day that Gabriel had tied her up, back when she was his prisoner. Before they’d realized that she was Sam’s child. Before they’d made love.

  Okay. Mind journal. Um . . . hi, I’m Shay and I’m an abomination. She let out a short, hysterical laugh. “Abomination.” That’s what I’ll call my autobiography.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” a voice muttered at the door. The sliver of light grew to a rectangle as the door swung open, and a figure stood silhouetted against it. “They didn’t even turn on the light?”

  Suddenly, the room flooded with fluorescent light that seemed unbearably bright. Shay blinked back the tears of protest that sprang to her eyes.

  “Sorry about that.” It was a woman’s voice. Shay tried to focus on her. Red hair, an elfin face.

  “Millie,” she croaked.

  “Yeah. I’m on guard duty.” Millie stepped into the room and let the door close behind her. She frowned at Shay. “Are you all right? I promised Gabriel I would check on you, not just stand out in the hall.”