Sweet Last Drop Read online

  I stared at the hole of the cave’s mouth as they both disappeared from view. Everything had happened so fast, my mind was still trying to catch up and my body couldn’t do much more than shake in shock. Bex was dead, and Walker had fallen into the cave with the creature. If the fall didn’t kill him this time, the creature would.

  Carefully, I crawled to the cave and peered over its edge, half expecting the creature to fly up and drag me down with him, too. I couldn’t see any more than a few feet into the pitch black of its depths. I waited a moment, bracing myself for the jarring hit of their impact. The cave was unbelievably deep, but as I’d learned firsthand from my fall, thanks to Rene, it only took seconds to hit bottom.

  Those seconds passed in silence.

  I waited another moment before scuttling back from the cave’s opening. They hadn’t hit bottom. I felt relieved for Walker, but God only knew why they hadn’t hit bottom. I wasn’t loitering near the cave’s opening to find out.

  Turning away from the cave, I faced the nightmare behind me. Parts and pieces of Montgomery, Rowens, and Bex littered the ground. Bex’s heart hadn’t landed too far from her body. Its thick, muscled shape gleamed under the light of the moon. The slick, bloody arteries at its head had torn at varying lengths, and one artery in particular dragged along the ground a few inches longer than the rest. I couldn’t pull my eyes from the sight even as I gagged.

  As I stared at the carnage, I fingered the vial of Dominic’s blood on the chain around my neck, and the thought that this wasn’t the end, not for any of us, took root and wouldn’t let go. After everything Bex had just sacrificed for me, saving her, no matter how unlikely, was certainly worth a try.

  I crawled the twenty yards between Bex and me, but when I reached her side and stared alternately at the gaping hole under her sternum and the mound of bloody heart laying still and gleaming next to her, I needed a moment to come to terms with reality. I was about to physically pick up her severed heart into my own hands and stuff it back through the ragged hole in her chest.

  Bex had been terrified at the end. Her face was bathed in blood. Her cheeks, neck, and shoulders were slashed to ribbons from dodging the creature’s claws. The socket of her missing eye was somehow less gruesome now that she couldn’t see at all, but the other eye, still and staring, haunted me.

  This would have been me, torn apart and broken. Nathan would have swallowed another few mouthfuls. I would have been dead, and once I was dead, no one would be able to shove a heart back in my chest and hope for the best. Once I was dead, I stayed dead.

  Vampires could heal catastrophic injuries. I’d seen Dominic heal after being impaled through his chest by another vampire’s claws. I’d witnessed a vampire live through a throat slashing so deep I could see his spine, and I’d watched a vampire walk only minutes after having his aorta severed from his heart.

  Bex was dead now, but she didn’t have to stay that way.

  I picked up Bex’s heart from the ground and held it in my hand. I held her heart literally in my hand. The muscle was heavy and soft and slippery. Blood squished between my fingers as I adjusted my grip. The three arteries jutting from the aorta bobbed like springs at the top of the heart. I gagged, but the nausea was all bluster. I didn’t have anything left in my stomach to throw up.

  I unscrewed the lid from the vial of Dominic’s blood and poured half of it on the severed arteries and the other half on the heart itself, hoping to increase the chance of its healing. The blood singed over the cuts on my knuckles, healing my wounds. Hopefully it would heal Bex’s, too.

  I stared at the heart in my hand, at Dominic’s blood slick over its surface, and the burning scrape of thirst clawed down my throat. I had the immediate, insane urge to lick Dominic’s blood from Bex’s heart.

  Oh Jesus, I thought, feeling my heart rate spike though my ears. Not now.

  Drink! Jillian’s whisper echoed insistently through my mind.

  I wanted to. I’d tasted the heady spice of Bex’s blood, and I knew with unparalleled certainty that Dominic’s blood would taste even better—despite the fact that I’d tasted Dominic’s blood on multiple occasions and hadn’t liked one drop. But Jillian knew otherwise. All I’d need to do was lift Bex’s heart and take one little lick. His blood was right there in my hand, dripping between my fingers in front of my eyes, and no one was here to know if I licked or if I resisted. No one, of course, except for me.

  That was the fine line between temptation and addiction: how I lived my life when no one was looking. My throat was an inferno of thirst, but I’d survived this temptation before in another life, with Percs instead of blood, and I knew that even if the thirst burned my throat to ash, I’d prefer that pain than the consequences of giving into temptation.

  Bex had protected me. She’d given me another chance at life, and I’d be damned if I let anything distract me from trying to do the same for her.

  As gently as I could manage, I shoved the heart back into her chest through the gaping hole under her sternum. I could feel an unyielding cage of bone—ribs, I was assuming—and the soft, slippery, squish of other organs, maybe lungs. I knew the heart rested between the lungs and was angled toward the left, but I hadn’t done particularly well in the anatomy portion of biology. The heart could be upside down, for all I knew. I hadn’t had the stomach for dissection in high school, and biology wasn’t a requirement for journalism majors.

  I laughed to myself, up to my elbow in a corpse’s chest and worrying about heart positioning, at the thought of having to slice into a toad now.

  That I could tell, which wasn’t saying much, the heart was roughly occupying the space in the chest it should. I held it there a moment, wondering if I should try to match the arteries together. The injuries I’d seen Dominic sustain seemed to heal automatically without the help of holding the pieces in place, so I decided against it. Besides, I couldn’t decipher one artery from the other. If I held a vein to an artery, or vice versa, would I encourage the heart to heal incorrectly? I didn’t know enough about anatomy or vampires to guess, so I eased my hand from her chest, hoping the heart would heal itself.

  I waited, staring at the chest wound, her face, the empty hole of her left eye socket, and I held my breath for a sign of life. A flicker of movement. A rattling growl. Vampires didn’t function like humans. She didn’t need to breathe air into her lungs or have her heart beat to live—God knew why she even needed a heart if she didn’t have a circulatory system—but I waited for some spark of animation to show that something was happening, that returning her heart to its position in her chest would allow her to heal and live.

  Nothing happened. She didn’t even twitch.

  I was still kneeling over her—my hands outstretched from my body because they were disgusting, coated up to my elbows in grotesque, bloody gloves, waiting and hoping and trembling, my throat still burning with unquenched thirst—when I smelled it.

  I knew he was behind me because I could feel the steady pant of his breath on my neck, but I hadn’t heard him approach. I hadn’t even known he’d exited the cave until I was suddenly gagging on the pungent, rotting smell of intestines.

  I turned toward him slowly, inch by minute inch, until I faced him.

  The creature didn’t look any worse for having fallen into the cave. The bullet wounds on his shoulders from Walker’s silver shot had already healed, and that I could tell, he hadn’t sustained any new injuries from Walker or Rene or any of the vampires he might have encountered in the cave. I wondered how many hearts he’d eaten before coming back for me.

  I plucked at the thread connecting our minds one more time, hoping to feel a glimmer of the man I loved and respected, the man I was proud to know I’d helped raise, but all I could feel was an inferno of his anger. Decades of growing up together, years of mourning together, and a lifetime of arguing, scheming, and loving my little brother were gone. The anger had incinerated all thought, memory, and emotion from his mind except for on
e motivating drive to slake his thirst.

  He recognized the brush of my mind against his and growled.

  Nathan’s eyes were a pale blue, identical to mine, but this creature’s eyes were jet black. I couldn’t distinguish pupil from iris from sclera. Staring at the diamond stud in his nose and knowing that Nathan was staring back at me didn’t help. Whatever had composed Nathan’s spirit or soul or mind or whatever made a person uniquely him, was gone. The creature stared back at me, not Nathan. The creature had followed me from New York, murdered Lydia, John and Priscilla Dunbar, the McDunnell brothers, and now Montgomery, Rowens, and Bex. Maybe even Walker and Rene.

  I had an inferno of anger inside me, too, always boiling beneath the surface, stoked by my parents’ deaths, Adam’s lost love, and lately, the hopelessness of my career. Now, face to face with a mindless, murdering creature, formerly my caring, sassy little brother, what did I have to lose?

  I tightened my grip on the Bowie knife Walker had given me, lunged forward in a desperate leap, and stabbed the creature in the side, attacking it before it could attack me.

  I hit bone. The jarring vibration hyperextended my elbow, and pain zinged up my arm like lightning.

  The creature let loose a high, growling shriek and swatted me away with a back-handed smack. Like four knives, its claws gouged into my ribs. I hit the ground hard on my back, my scream cut short as the wind knocked out of my lungs.

  The creature was on me before I could breathe again, before I could even blink. Its massive, razor-tipped jaws clamped into my neck, and I felt the powerful vacuum of its extended snout sucking my blood. Black starbursts sprouted over my vision and merged together in a black blanket across the sky and trees and stars overhead. I felt my fists, which reached up in a futile effort to fight, fall limply to the ground. I felt the bone-sharp ache of its teeth gnarl into the meat of my neck and shoulder. I could both hear and feel the vibration of its rattling growl, and through the stink of its sewage breath, I inexplicably, unimaginably, smelled the distinct scent of Christmas pine.

  Dominic, I thought, and a moment later I was ripped from the creature’s jaws. By the freezing cyclone of wind and hair whipping around me, I imagined that I was flying. The clean scent of pine surrounded me. I breathed it deep into my senses, and the weak relief of knowing that I wasn’t alone was almost like coming home.

  The cyclone abruptly stopped with a rustle of leaves. Something probed into my neck, and I felt the familiar heat and unwelcome arousal of my flesh healing. I must have twitched, or maybe fought the emerging feelings—I couldn’t tell which since everything was black and numb—because Dominic’s hold around my body tightened.

  His words moved against my ear in a noiseless whisper. “Keep still. It doesn’t know where we are, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.”

  “Dying,” I whispered back, but nothing uttered from my mouth except for the shape of the word on my lips.

  Dominic must have read my lips or maybe the enhanced acuteness of his hearing could discern my voice better than even me.

  “You?” He scoffed. “No more than usual.”

  “I haven’t come close to dying in weeks,” I argued.

  I felt the silent rumble of his chuckle against my chest. “Seems like just yesterday. Can you open your eyes?”

  I hadn’t realized they were closed. I opened them, and as if through a narrow, dark funnel, I saw Dominic’s face hovering over me. He looked worried despite the nonchalance in his voice. His thick brows were pinched into a frown, his expression severe in its seriousness. Except for the very tips of his fangs that poked from beneath his upper lip, his appearance was deceptively beautiful.

  He’d already fed tonight.

  The planes of his face were ripe with strength and stolen youth, and the solid line of his jawline was a chiseled block. Muscles chorded his neck, and biceps flexed against my back as he held me. Until tonight, he was the strongest living thing I’d ever known—using the term “living” loosely, of course. But now Dominic, formerly the biggest badass of the night, was hiding in a tree from my little brother, a mindless, heart-eating murderer.

  Dominic’s reflective, otherworldly eyes met mine, and he half smiled. The scar on the left side of his lower lip never stretched enough to accommodate a real smile, but I could tell from the worry clouding his eyes that despite the scar, his smile was half-hearted.

  “Nice of you to stay with me,” he murmured.

  I raised one eyebrow. I couldn’t move otherwise, but I could till convey my irritation. “It wasn’t for your benefit.”

  I got the full smile then. His eyes crinkled at their outer corners, his scarred lower lip stretched and lifted lopsidedly, and his fangs flashed their full length in the moonlight. On any other night, I was terrified of those fangs, but after coming face to face with Nathan, Dominic’s fangs simply couldn’t compare.

  “You’re breaking my heart,” Dominic said, the vibration of his words and breath like feathers against my ear. I shivered, not from the chill night air.

  I opened my mouth to say something scathing, but Dominic placed a finger over my lips. His eyes locked on movement in the tree next to us. My heart leapt into my throat. He pointed down, and I looked at the scene beneath us. The creature was flipping out, smashing its claws into surrounding trees, stomping its hind legs on logs and shrubbery, and pounding its fists into the ground. It threw its head back and let loose a thrilling shriek that blew my eardrums and shot goose bumps through my spine.

  I shook my head. “I think it’s pissed at losing me. It followed me all the way from the city, after all.”

  Dominic narrowed his eyes. “Why was it tracking you?”

  Admitting the truth made me nauseated, almost as nauseated as facing the creature itself. “It’s Nathan. The creature is my brother.”

  Dominic sucked in a sharp breath. He looked down at the creature again and shook his head slowly. “No, it can’t be.”

  I frowned. “He is. I stared at him face to face, and I’m telling you, that thing down there, whatever it is, was originally Nathan DiRocco.”

  Dominic stared at the creature a moment longer. It was still screaming and stomping in what was only comparable to a massive hissy fit.

  “How long do you think he’ll continue to freak before he tries tracking me again?”

  Dominic shook his head. “We’ll deal with him later. Where’s Walker?”

  “I, er, I don’t know,” I stuttered, thrown by the subject change and by the very realization that I wasn’t sure if Walker had survived. “The last I saw, he’d fallen into the cave.”

  Dominic’s strange, blue and ice eyes widened. “Fell? As in without any rappelling equipment?”

  I nodded. “With nothing but the creature to break his fall. The creature came back out. Walker didn’t.” I narrowed my eyes on him. “How do you know about rappelling?”

  Dominic waved away my question. “I’ve told you, I know everything.”

  The creature pounded its claws into the tree we were hiding in.

  The tree swayed dangerously. We jerked forward and then suddenly swung backward, and Dominic lost his grip on me. I felt his hands slip from around my waist, and my stomach plummeted. Everything happened so fast, I didn’t have time to do more than think—NO!—and then I was out of reach.

  Dominic was faster than gravity. Before my thoughts could burst into a real scream, he dropped to a lower branch and caught me in his arms. I felt a warm rush of liquid gush from my side as he tightened his grip on my waist, and I remembered the creature’s claws catching my ribs. I trembled from the pain and from enduring it in silence.

  Dominic leaned in close. “You’re injured worse than I first thought. It’s more than just the bite on your neck.”

  I nodded.

  “We need to find Bex’s coven and seek shelter. Now.”

  I swallowed, trying to speak without screaming from the pain. “You don’t know the location of her c
oven? I thought you knew everything.”

  “Cassidy—” Dominic growled, obviously not in the mood to deal with my attitude.

  “It’s the cave.” The tree jerked again from the creature’s beating, and Dominic’s arm tightened around my ribs like a vise. I gasped. “The cave is the entrance to the coven.”

  “Ah,” Dominic murmured, glancing at the cave. “Then I’m sure Walker fell into good hands.”

  I couldn’t focus through the stabbing in my ribs. The pressure of Dominic’s arm was relentless, and without any relief, I felt myself fade. The shadows of the woods and trees and leaves and Dominic all bled together into an inky landscape across my vision until nothing remained but the scraping wheeze of my breathing and the steady pound of my heart. And then even that faded to the demands of darkness.

  * * * *

  “Cassidy, don’t make me command you to open your eyes.”

  The tree’s swaying had stopped, and Dominic’s grip was gentler than a moment before. I breathed a deep inhale of air, and although my side still twinged, the pain was bearable now.

  I opened my eyes.

  We were still in the damn tree, and the creature was still throwing a conniption below us.

  I frowned. “How long was I—”

  “Only a moment. I’ll have to mind your injuries until I can heal them.”

  He sounded shaken. After existing for five hundred year, nothing could shake Dominic, but despite his extended existence, I’d heard the tremor in his voice.

  I knew better than to stare into Dominic’s strangely reflective eyes—he could turn the parts of my mind that controlled my body to putty—but I was breaking all the rules tonight. I stared deep into his eyes now, trying to decipher how he’d done it. If it hadn’t been for his uncanny timing, if he hadn’t arrived just when the creature was about to feast, I would have died tonight.