The blood coating Cade’s tongue and throat was too rich to be human and too sweet to be that of another moroi. Sweet and faintly herbal. A hint of rosemary and sage. A zing of power that rejuvenated him far more than usual.
That was enough to give him pause, even in the depths of a thirst driven by near-death.
What stopped his mindless drinking was the distant thought that only one being might care enough to offer him this in his current state because he sure as hell wouldn’t have been able to hunt it on his own.
Lya.
He snapped back to a conscious mind and pulled away in alarm.
She lay under him, eyes closed and lips curved in a smile even as her heart and lungs heaved in an effort to keep her alive. She’d fought with him, put down Morris when he’d been completely under his sire’s spell, and he’d taken too much. She was dying and didn’t even know it, lost in the glamour she’d only let him use once before. Her lack of response when he called her name confirmed it.
“No! No no no. Lya!”
He couldn’t give her much back. Not only did he need the blood to stay alive himself, but given how much he’d taken, she might turn if he gave too much back. That was strictly forbidden for several good reasons, most of which had good odds of turning out badly for her. Otherwise, he would have risked it anyway.
Cade leaned in again to heal the bite as much as he could—halfway at best, given her elven heritage, but at least it stopped bleeding—then shook her. “Lya!”
Her eyelids fluttered, and then she slipped deeper into the dangerous level of unconsciousness that said he’d taken too much while she was too deeply glamoured.
No. He couldn’t be responsible for killing her. Not her.
But he was low on options. His emergency stash was gone. He vaguely remembered desperately downing the last two bags in the back seat of her car.
His gaze darted around this space as he took in the scent. Her nest. No blood and no one else living here, since she was one of the elf-blooded in exile. Just her. And him, a predator suited perfectly to draining her as dead as he was and not at all to saving her life.
No options.
He had to risk feeding her, at least enough for her to take sustenance.
Cade shifted her up against the pillows and focused on the tenuous link created between them by the glamour he’d laid on her.
“Wake up, Lya.” No response. He leaned harder. “Lydia!”
She groaned. When her eyelids fluttered enough for him to catch her gaze, he snared her in another glamour. It was dangerous, but he had no choice. “Listen to me.”
“Cade?”
“Yes. I need you to drink from me. Just a little.”
She blinked. Blinked again. Frowned. “Can’t.”
“You have to, love, or you’ll die. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to take so much.”
A shudder ran through her, and she grimaced. “Hurts.”
That wasn’t good. That wasn’t good at all. The glamour should have spared her all pain. If she was feeling it, she was on the edge. Sure enough, her already fast pulse quickened under his hand.
“Lya, you didn’t owe me this. Blood for blood, it wasn’t—”
She smiled. “I did.”
“I say you didn’t. Let me feed you. Please. Just a little.”
She winced again. Panted.
Risks be damned. He couldn’t let her die. “Come on, Lya. I won’t give you enough to turn you. I promise. Please.”
“Okay.”
Cade bit deeply into his own wrist and pressed it to her mouth, massaging her throat when she didn’t swallow the first spurt on her own. She groaned when she did and clasped his arm with the urgent need of a fledgling.
He let her take one more swallow then gently pulled away.
Propping her against him, he reached for the glass she’d left on the nightstand next to a bag of jerky, a plate of cookies, and a bag of oranges, and held it to her lips. “This one now, love.”
She turned her head aside. Like a fledgling would. Had he given her too much of his blood? Even those small sips?
“Come on, Lya. Please. You need to replenish your fluids.”
After enough heartbeats to scare him, Lya latched onto the glass and drank deep.
Cade wrestled with the urge to collapse in relief and steadied the glass, tipping it more as she swallowed more, managing to get more of it down her throat than spilled on her chest. When it was half gone, he pulled it away and held a cookie in front of her nose.
No response.
He swapped it for a piece of jerky, hoping her elven side would kick in and the predator in her would waken.
She snapped at that, nearly taking the tips of his fingers with it.
Cade didn’t care. He just prayed to Hekate as he cradled her against him, feeding her jerky a piece at a time with sips of whatever strange water was in the glass in between. By the time water and jerky were both gone, she was steadier. He got up and refilled the cup with tap water, offering her that and the cookies. She took both, slower than she had before, until all that was gone as well.
At the last cookie, she turned her head aside. He dropped it onto the plate and shifted back against the bed’s headboard before drawing her up against his chest and wrapping his arms around her. She might hate him when the sun came up, but he’d do what he could to keep her warm and comfortable until then.
It was the least he owed her after nearly killing her.
***
Dawn startled him in a way he hadn’t experienced in years. No blackout curtains here. He eyed the angle of the sun and relaxed when he determined it wouldn’t hit the bed. Waking up here yesterday had been similar, the unfamiliar light and the warmth of—
Lya.
She slept on, still curled against him. Her color was better, and her pulse was stronger. She was warmer too, almost back to being the spot of sunshine he’d quickly come to love waking up next to. She’d need a lot more protein and fluids, and she’d probably have a hellacious headache when she woke up.
But she’d live.
She might hate him, especially if there were ill effects from the two swallows of blood he’d pressed on her, but at least she’d be alive for it. He hoped.
He should go figure out if she had enough to eat, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave her. Protectiveness filled him as surely as her blood had, and he hoped that was just a factor of how much he’d taken, not that he’d turned her.
Anxiety crested, enough that his heart started beating. Had he turned her?
I didn’t. I couldn’t have turned her. It takes much more than two swallows.
But the only time a moroi drank as deeply as he had was with intent to kill. Or from a trusted pet.
Ah. Physiological response to a prime source of blood.
He’d never taken a blood pet before and didn’t intend Lya to be one, but he’d fed well and the donor was still living, which triggered a set of responses. Just to be sure it really was simple protectiveness of a blood source and not something deeper, he inhaled deeply. She carried some of his scent, but not enough to be his fledgling. He’d never made one, but he’d reeked of Morris’s scent for centuries, even after his sire’s near-death. He knew what would happen, and it hadn’t happened here.
Somewhat reassured, he moved on to debating whether it’d be better for him to be here or gone when she woke up.
The decision was made for him as she gasped in a breath. Her eyelids fluttered before she squeezed them shut and curled tighter into a fetal position. A hard shudder wracked her.
“Cade?” she croaked.
“I’m here.”
“Am I dead?”
He almost laughed then realized it might well be a serious question rather than an expression of the shittiness of dehydration. “No. It might feel like it, but no.”
“You’re still here.”
“It seemed the gentlemanly thing to make sure you woke up.” The thought struck him that maybe she’d meant she wanted him gone. “I could go if you wished.”
“No,” she said quickly. After another quick grimace of pain, she added, “Please stay?”
That warmed him even more than her blood had. She wanted him here? She trusted him not to finish the job?
“Okay. Of course.” He started to settle against her again then paused. “Can I get you something?”
“I wouldn’t say no to a peeled orange and the other pack of jerky in the kitchen pantry. And an ibuprofen or four.”
With a quick kiss to her temple, Cade slipped out of bed and made his way to the kitchen. The ray of sun coming in the patio window didn’t bother him nearly as much as it should have, but he closed all the blinds and curtains anyway. If it hadn’t been for Lya’s gift, he’d still be much closer to his second death, unable to do much more than feed mindlessly. Certainly not be up and about fetching food and medicine.
Small blessings.
He winced at considering Lya’s near-death as a blessing, but for him, it had been. He’d honor it and move on. She hadn’t asked for it, but he found more juice in the fridge and grabbed that as well.
She was still curled up in a ball of misery when he brought it all back to the bedroom.
Cade mentally cursed himself for his lack of control. It hadn’t been completely gone, or she’d be dead. If he didn’t love her as much as he did she certainly would be dead now.
That thought caught him by surprise. Love her. Deeply. Unquestioningly.
Yes, he cared about her, but real love was a new idea, even if the word had been tripping off his tongue for days. It swirled in his brain as he made space for the new provisions, cleared away what she’d finished last night, and then rejoined her in bed.
“I’m sorry, Lya.” The words jumped from him before he could find something more eloquent. “I truly am.”
“Don’t be,” she croaked. Grimacing, she drank some of the juice, and he couldn’t help but watch her bite-marked throat as she did. “Let’s call it even now, hey? Otherwise, we’ll go round and round again trying to figure out who’s at fault or who owes the other. I just want to…exist. With you.” Her cheeks, paled by blood loss, flushed faintly.
“Deal.” He edged closer and extended an arm. As he’d hoped she would, she leaned into him and let him pull her closer. For once, he was the warmer of the two of them.
“Callista will have heard about Morris by now,” she said after a few more mechanical bites of jerky. “My bet is she calls in the next hour. Probably with threats. The question is whether she has any proof it was me who killed Morris. My gun’s unregistered, and I haven’t used that particular one on a bounty before. So even if she brings the Darkwatch in, there’ll be no record of the bullets to compare to. And that assumes Noah missed one on cleanup.”
“You had Noah do cleanup?”
“Maria. I traded a favor, and she sent him.”
“Lya—”
“Don’t worry. We’re not in her debt.”
“We?”
Lya squirmed a little under his arm. “I told her that, in exchange for calling her rather than Callista, I wanted no mention of you being there.”
Cade stared at the top of her head, trying to figure out what had been going on inside it. “Why?”
“Because if you were there, I can’t imply I was the one who trashed your place in an effort to fulfill the bounty. If you’re”—she waved her free hand—“anywhere else, then I went after Morris on an anonymous tip passed along by Maria, who wanted to leverage our arrangement and had no idea of the tie between you and him or him and Callista. Maria and I look smart for maintaining the Détente. You have the source of the bounty eliminated. You’re free to leave town, and I…” She picked at the blanket. “I don’t know what happens to me. I guess Callista will have to arbitrate with Houses Monteague and Desmarais on the terms of my exile.”
As she finished the bag of jerky, Cade sat with that. It was clever. Beyond clever.
Lya had taken a shitty situation and turned it to her advantage—and even more, his—quite neatly. He was truly free for the first time since he’d first set sail centuries ago. He’d still have to watch his back, but he’d just survived his worst nightmare. The memory of being in Morris’s clutches again would haunt him for a while, but he could leave it behind.
The thought that he wasn’t going anywhere without her bubbled to the top of his mind, but he kept it to himself.
His troubles were over. Hers were getting worse. They needed to focus on that for now.
She sighed. “I need more protein. I don’t heal elf-fast, but I’ll recover faster than a human would if I eat like a werewolf for the next few days.”
“Let me make you breakfast then.” He couldn’t fix her exile situation, but at least he could do that.
Lya slanted a look at him. “You can cook? Beyond boiling a bag of blood?”
“Scrambled eggs aren’t difficult.”
Her expression said everything, but when she wavered after getting out of bed and had to catch herself on the wall, she relented. “Okay then, Chef Vampire, I’ll have a triple serving of bacon and eggs, if you please.”
“Coming right up.” He headed for the kitchen when she raised an eyebrow like she’d hit him if he tried to help her there. By the time she made it and dropped heavily into a chair, he had the pans heating and the eggs cracked.
As if pouring them into the pan was a cue, her phone rang. She looked at it, took a deep breath, and answered. “Hi Callista.”
Cade looked up sharply from scrambling eggs, and Lya put the call on speaker.
“What can I do for you?” Lya said.
“Have you taken Cade yet?”
His blood froze and anxiety spiked.
Lya looked like she was feeling about the same as she paled. “I’m actually recovering from the fallout of my first attempt.”
“The client is dead.” Callista’s low, dangerous tone said she knew something was afoot and was more than willing to do violence to discover it. “Would you happen to know anything about that?”
Lya glanced worriedly at him and swallowed. “Dead? That’s a damn shame. I’m out quite a bit on time and supplies. Farand is pissed as well, since I skipped work to try getting this done faster.”
Not a lie but not an answer either.
Silence stretched. “Farand had quite a bit to say about you as well, my dear. Why don’t you come on up to the bar. We need to have words.”