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  Suddenly, it all made sense. Why I couldn’t feel my body. Why my neck was bent unnaturally. Bartholomew had snapped my neck, but the blood had healed it. If the leaves were blocking the power of the blood, then that meant... “I’m dying.”

  Hallam swallowed.

  Maybe it was a good thing. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be like the vampires, dependent on drinking blood to stay alive. I had hoped to have more time before the end, but maybe it was for the best that it happened quickly. This way, I wouldn’t have time to change my mind. I did wish I’d seen Jason just one more time, though.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  We were both so quiet that the sound of the front door opening was very loud. It closed, and we heard footsteps.

  “Jason?” I whispered weakly.

  Hallam immediately darted out of the living room to check. I heard his voice. “Jason, thank goodness. We have a little bit of a situation here.” I could hear him explaining what was going on, babbling on and on, but to my ears, the words were starting to run together like one of those weird abstract paintings I’d studied in my freshman art class. I idly contemplated the fact that I was mixing my senses. That words had taken on a visual quality to me, and I wondered if this was the first sign that my brain was deteriorating. I was losing my grip on reality. Would this be what death was like, everything becoming a confusing mesh of sensation that I couldn’t make proper sense of?

  Then Jason’s face loomed in my vision, too large. “What if I give her more blood?” His voice was panicked. “Do you think that will work? Do you think the leaves will block it?”

  “No,” I managed. “No more blood. I don’t want to live if that’s what it means. I don’t want to be one of them.”

  They ignored me.

  Hallam had my arm, was ripping the bandage off, squeezing it, forcing it to bleed. I couldn’t feel a thing.

  Jason had the pocket knife out again, and it glinted dully as he slashed his arm. I thought about how small the knife looked, but yet its serrated edges were like tiny teeth.

  “No,” I said again.

  But then I caught the bright tang of his blood, and I remembered the taste. I wanted it. I narrowed in on his bleeding arm, my body throbbing with desire. I would have reached for it, but I couldn’t move.

  And his arm was on my mouth, and it was flowing into me—vivid, intense, buoyant. It seared into me, lighting me up, healing me. I groaned against him, feeling and motion returning to my arms. I grasped him right away, tugging him against my mouth, unwilling to let him go.

  Jason gasped, either out of pleasure or pain, I couldn’t tell. He wrapped himself around me, and I was engulfed in his arms, his life and energy seeping into my mouth. I drank him, greedily sucking him into me.

  His lips were at my ear, his voice a rumble in his chest. “You’re not going anywhere. I won’t let you.”

  I didn’t want to stop this. Jason’s blood lit me up like a forest fire. Every cell in my body was in flames, burning so brightly. I reveled in it, in the power, the euphoria, the pure perfection of drinking it.

  He murmured my name over and over, clutching me tightly with the arm that I wasn’t drinking from.

  Hallam cleared his throat. “You guys are starting to make me blush.”

  Jason shifted. I felt rather than saw it, because my eyes were slammed closed against everything except the sensation of taking Jason’s blood into me. I didn’t want to stop. I wouldn’t stop. I wanted to drink this forever.

  “Enough?” Jason asked me.

  I kept drinking. There was never going to be enough. I couldn’t be satisfied. This blood was the only thing in the entire universe I cared about.

  He tried to pull his arm away, but I held it fast.

  “Azazel,” Jason said. “Stop.”

  I didn’t.

  It took help from Hallam to pry me off of him. Even when I’d stopped, Hallam had to hold me back to keep me from springing on Jason again, because once I wasn’t drinking, all I could think was that I wanted to be drinking again.

  Jason was white-faced, leaning against the couch, holding his arm at the elbow. Blood was dripping down his forearm, beautiful red rivulets. I wanted to lap them up with my tongue. I struggled, but Hallam had me in a chokehold.

  “Easy,” he was saying. “Calm down.”

  I thought about twisting in Hallam’s arms, raking my hands over his face, getting away from him and leaping on Jason again, latching my mouth against him, getting it inside me again, taking more. Oh, God, I wanted more .

  Jason let his arm flop against his knee. The cut was healing. It was disappearing, his skin growing over it. He wiped the blood against his shirt. “Let her go.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Hallam.

  I was starting to feel a little bit of sanity return to me. And with it, a torrent of shame. “Clean it up. Change your shirt.”

  Jason started to stand up, but I could see the loss of blood had made him lightheaded.

  I started crying. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  * * *

  By the time Jason came back downstairs in different clothes, the leftover blood washed away, he was okay again. Color had returned to his face. I hadn’t hurt him, not really. He healed quickly. But it was still horrible. I’d been monstrous, overtaken by my desires, and I felt horrific.

  Hallam wasn’t holding me back anymore, but he eyed me warily, as if he was afraid I might lunge at Jason like a wild animal.

  Jason just wrapped me in his arms, whispering into my hair, “You’re okay. You’re okay.”

  I pushed out of Jason’s arms. I didn’t deserve his closeness. I’d hurt him. I’d been awful. I felt gross and unclean. Something else lived inside me now. Something I hadn’t wanted, like the power I used to have. The power that had a scaly voice, urging me to take pleasure in suffering, in killing. I’d gotten rid of the power, but there was no way to lose this desire for blood except to die. And I thought that might be preferable to living like this.

  Hallam massaged the bridge of his nose. “The two of you... It’s always something, isn’t it?” He left the living room, telling us, “I’ll let you guys sort it out.”

  I let out a harsh, bitter laugh. “Sort it out? This isn’t sortable.”

  Jason shook his head. “I knew I should have tried those leaves on myself.”

  That was like him. He was always trying to make it his fault. He blamed himself for everything. Well, it wasn’t his fault, and I didn’t feel like trying to reassure him anymore. I sank down on the couch. “You should have let me die.”

  “What?”

  “I wasn’t going to stop. I wanted to drink you dry. I could have killed you.”

  “I don’t even think that’s possible,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  I buried my face in my hands. “I don’t want to live like this. I don’t want to be one of those things, like the people that imprisoned us. You don’t know what they were like. They had no sense that what they were doing was even wrong.”

  He sat down next to me. “You don’t want to be like them, because you’ve convinced yourself that they aren’t people. So you think you aren’t human anymore.”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “You are,” he said. “And they are. You can call them vampires all you want, but that’s just a word masking the truth. The truth is that they’re people, just like the rest of us, and that they’re doing what they have to do to survive. Like everyone does.”

  I looked up at him. “Everyone does not do the kind of things that they do. That I do.”

  “They do. Maybe it’s not imprisoning people or drinking blood, but the whole of the human race does whatever it can to live, and if that means hurting other people, then so be it. After everything we’ve seen and done, I can’t believe you don’t see that.”

  “You’re wrong. People are good.”

  “People made up good,” said Jason. “It’s a way to try to make sense of all the decisions we face on a da
ily basis.”

  “I thought that you were trying not to kill because you were trying to do the right thing.”

  “Sort of,” he said. He stood up and crossed to the window. “Something’s broken in me. I don’t have this thing that the rest of you do.”

  “Thing?”

  “A conscience, I guess.”

  I leapt off the couch. “I’m so sick of this, Jason. I’m so sick of you saying crap like that. It isn’t true. I’ve seen you do things because you knew that you were wrong. I’ve seen you struggle with yourself. You feel guilt. And if you didn’t have a conscience, you wouldn’t. So get over it.” I stalked out of the living room. I went out the front door. Outside the house, I made my way over to the leaves. I’d just chew on a bunch of them and go hide myself somewhere to die. Then I’d be rid of all of this.

  But I didn’t chew the leaves. I held them, trying to work up the courage, and felt angry at Jason.

  Every time I was in an argument with him, I always felt like I thought of the perfect thing to say after I’d left. Right then, I wished I’d told him that the problem with his whiny self was that I needed him right now. I was going through something, and he had to make it all about how he was worried that he was a bad person. I was sick of always being there and telling him he was okay. He needed to grow a pair and accept himself. I’d accepted him. Why wasn’t that enough?

  I dropped the leaves. I couldn’t die yet. I needed to kill Bartholomew first.

  Jason thought this was his fault, and I was blaming myself too, but the truth was, it wasn’t either of us. This was Bartholomew. He’d killed me. He’d made me into one of them. And he was going to pay for that.

  * * *

  Jason was quiet at dinner. I didn’t sit next to him, because I was still mad at him, and I thought he needed to apologize to me. As it was, there were seven adults and two children trying to assemble their own tacos in the dining room. The dining room was big, but with all of us in there, it felt a little crowded.

  I watched him be sulky, and it made me even angrier at him, so I did my best to ignore him. I started talking to Mina about the most girly things I could think of, from makeup to clothes. She and I had been roommates my senior year of high school, and we used to do lots of things together. It was a nice distraction. I realized I’d missed having a friend like her. Now that I thought about it, I spent way too much time steeped in life-threatening situations. I should go shopping or something.

  After dinner, Boone was getting me up to date on his hacking project, and Jude overheard. He was pretty excited and said he’d be willing to help in any way we needed. I wasn’t sure how much help Jude would be. He’d handled a gun before at least. I’d rather have Jason at my back when we went back, but I didn’t think that was going to happen. I wasn’t sure if arming Jude would make him an asset, or if I’d spend all my time trying to protect him.

  Boone still wasn’t inside the vampires’ network, but he said he thought he was close. I told him to keep at it.

  While I was doing all of that, I lost track of Jason. I frittered away the rest of the evening, distracting myself from my thoughts and worries with television. Grace was right. I had some catching up to do.

  When I went to bed, Jason was already lying down with the lights off. I got undressed and into my pajamas as quietly as possible, but when I slid into bed next to him, he woke up anyway.

  He rolled over to face me, propping himself up on one elbow. “I did something that pissed you off.”

  I burrowed into my pillow. This felt so familiar. This room, this bed. Jason and I arguing, avoiding each other, only to end up together at night to go to sleep. This was what the two years of our life had been like after I’d killed the Sons. Before Jason had shot my little brother Chance. Always arguing. Always making some kind of tenuous peace in the darkness of our bed. Was this all our relationship would ever be?

  I remembered agonizing over it back then, wondering why we couldn’t just be happy. I loved Jason. I always had. But being around him always felt like there was a constant bomb going off. Sometimes it was exciting. It made my blood churn and my passion stir. But sometimes it was only exhausting. I’d never been able to quite relax with him. He threw me off-balance.

  Back then, I thought it was a sign that we weren’t meant to be together.

  But no matter how hard I’d tried, we’d always ended up back in each other’s arms. Right at that moment, I was stuck in the same process of rumination. Were we good together? Did we actually make each other happy?

  But I realized it didn’t matter. I was going to die, anyway. Jason had given me more blood, and the clock had reset. One more month. But this would be the last month. Once I’d taken care of the vampires, I’d check out. It would be a relief. All of the worry and violence would be over.

  So I pressed myself against his hard body, and I said, “Let’s not worry about it anymore. We talk too much. We go round and round and nothing ever gets resolved.”

  He ran his fingers over the small of my back, kissed my neck. “I didn’t mind it, you know.”

  I thought we weren’t going to talk. I found his mouth in the dark, tried to kiss away his words.

  He responded eagerly, but when he pulled away he said, “I liked it.”

  “Liked what?” He wasn’t going to let this go, was he?

  “You drinking my blood.”

  I went rigid. Goddamn him. I rolled away. “Let’s go to sleep.”

  He snuggled up against me, spooning me. “Don’t get mad. You told me to get over worrying about my conscience or lack of one. Maybe you need to get over this too.”

  “I hated the way I acted. I was out of control, and it was disgusting. I can’t just ‘get over’ that.”

  His hand caressed my thigh. “I understand that feeling more than you know. You love me even if I do things I think are disgusting. And I love you, even if you think those things about yourself. Isn’t that enough?”

  His words echoed my own thoughts from earlier. But this was different. This was me losing myself, becoming a monster. “Maybe it’s not.”

  He sighed, but he stayed close to me, and his touch was distracting me, making it hard to think.

  “Why did you like it?”

  He drew in an audible breath. “Because of how much you wanted me.”

  I turned onto my back, and because we were so close, it meant I ended up under him, more or less, his dark features hovering over mine. “I don’t think I want to want you like that.”

  He kissed me. “You want to know something fucked up about me?”

  “I don’t know all the fucked-up things about you?”

  He laughed, the sound dark and intimate, sending shivers through me. “I want things obsessively. I want it all, and I want it to be mine, and no one else’s.”

  “I already know that.” It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out. He’d created a town and named it after himself.

  “You remember, when we were locked up, and you asked me about the bruises. The other girls?”

  I stiffened. That kind of stuff wasn’t something we usually discussed in bed, not when we were so close.

  He pulled back too. He wasn’t looking at me anymore but above my head at the wall over the bed. “It turns me on to... mark things, make things mine. Leave evidence, I guess, so that if anyone else tried to take it, they’d see that I’d claimed it already.”

  I swallowed. “You realize you’re calling a woman an ‘it’?”

  Then he was staring into my eyes again. “Yeah.” It was a challenge, as if he was daring me to cringe from him. I’d never known him to lay himself out quite like that, be so vulnerable.

  I didn’t react at all, just held his gaze.

  “I don’t think of you that way. It doesn’t mean I’m not possessive.”

  I only nodded. He was incredibly possessive. Occasionally, he was dangerously so. And as a little thrill coursed through me, I realized that was part of the draw of him. Why I could
n’t ever quite leave him. It was the fact that he was something dangerous, something untamed, and I got a charge from seeing how close I could get without getting mauled. I guessed that was a fucked-up thing about me.

  “It was...” He closed his eyes. “It was perfect. You wanted me so much, and while you were sucking down my blood, you completely and totally belonged to me. And I belonged to you.” His hand tangled in my hair, pulling my head back, creating just a tiny bit of pain.

  The thrill went through me again, the fear tinged with pleasure. Could I control him, or would he destroy me?

  “That’s how I want you, Azazel. I want all of you.”

  His lips were on me then, urgent and demanding. For a second I surrendered, but then I struggled away, gasping. “Take me, then,” I said. “If you can.”

  His grip on me tightened, and he made a half-strangled noise in the back of his throat, as if he’d been waiting for an invitation like that for a long time.

  * * *

  “I got it!” Boone yelled as he ran into the kitchen.

  I looked up from my breakfast, which I was eating with Jude and Mina. “Got what?”

  “Come see,” he said.

  Jude and I trooped up to Boone’s bedroom, where he proudly displayed to us his open laptop. On the screen was the main room. Emma was sitting at the table, reading a book as if nothing had changed.

  “You hacked into the camera system,” I said.

  He grinned. “Yup. And that’s not all. I’ve got building schematics and access to their files as well.” He closed the window that displayed the shots from the camera and opened up another file. “This is a schedule of when they drink the blood. We’ve got about five days until their next dose, so that should mean they’re weaker now, right?”

  “In theory,” I said. “Bartholomew said the blood wore off fast, so maybe they’re fine right up until the last minute.”

  “Well, then we should go at the last minute,” said Boone. He pulled up another file. It looked like blueprints. “According to the schematics, they keep the blood supply here.” He pointed. “So, I think our first move should be to take that out. I’ve been looking up some stuff about explosives, and I think it’s something I could handle.”