Bite. Part 36

No, he couldn't let the old man call the cops.

"You didn't shoot anyone," Daniel said firmly, holding the man's gaze. He wasn't quite sure what he was doing, but there had to be a way to convince the man it was in his best interests to forget what had happened tonight.

If that didn't work, he just tie the geezer up and leave him for his wife to find in the morning, after Daniel was long gone.

"I didn't shoot anyone," the farmer repeated. His voice was going flat and his eyes took on a faraway sheen.

"There was no one in the barn."

"No one in the barn."

Daniel raised his eyebrows. That was easy.

Too easy.

"It was just a couple of wild dogs bothering your stock. You scared them off."

"I scared off some wild dogs."

Daniel waved his hand in front of the guy's face, but he didn't blink. He'd suspected from his research that vampires had some way of mesmerizing their victims, making them forget. Now he knew for sure. He just didn't know how he'd done it.

As long as he had, though, he might as well take full advantage. "I need to borrow your truck," he said.

The farmer stared off into s.p.a.ce with unfocused eyes. "Keys are under the floor mat."

Excellent. "Go back to the house and go to bed. If your wife is awake, you'll tell her that you scared off the dogs."

"I'll tell her I scared off the dogs."

The old man turned to shuffle back to the house, but Daniel called out to him before he reached the door. "Wait!"

Daniel looked from the old man's slack face, to Deadre's pale one, and back. He figured he had less than two hours of darkness

left. Enough time to get Deadre to Atlanta, where he could help her, before sunrise, but he was going to need all his strength to do

it.

Daniel couldn't feed off Deadre. In her condition, he risked draining her dry and killing her. But she'd said he couldn't go more than a few hours without blood, either, newly made as he was. Already he was feeling light-headed and clammy.

The solution to his problem stood at the barn door in a natty bathrobe and rubber boots. Could he do it? Could he drink the blood of a mortal? A living, breathing man?

The thought repulsed him at first, but he was also curious. Was he mortal or was he a vampire?

He couldn't straddle the fence forever.

He couldn't straddle the fence and build the strength he needed to fight Garth. Not quickly.

His stomach flipped and he realized his heart was beating, fluttering really, in his chest. He looked back at Deadre, her pale, elfin ears and the way her long lashes lay so still over her cheeks.

He forced himself to relax by thinking of her. Doing what he needed to help her.

He began to hear his own pulse in his ears. The blood l.u.s.t beat a rhythm that couldn't be ignored. With his breath coming in short

strokes, his thumbnails lengthening, he turned back to the farmer. He saw fear deep in the man's eyes, behind the veil of the thrall in which he held him, and smiled to ease his dread as he punctured the farmer's jugular and lowered his mouth over the wounds. Daniel moaned, lost in the pleasure as the essence of life poured down his throat, sweet as honey with a coppery tang, and he drank long and deep. Much to his surprise, he liked it.

D RIVING south down I-95 toward Atlanta in the farmer's rattling old pickup truck, Daniel suppressed the urge to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand for the thousandth time. He could still taste blood on his tongue, feel the man's pulse beating beneath his lips. He still reeled from the heady rush of heat suffusing his dead heart, his veins.

He was dead, and yet he felt more wonderfully alive than ever. Taking blood made him strong, invulnerable. Immortal.

It was a high far beyond anything he imagined cocaine or PCP could induce. If it was like that for all vampires, and he a.s.sumed it was, it was a wonder there were any mortals at all left in the world. How easily that kind of trip, that surge of power, could become an addiction.

He had to respect, if grudgingly, the control it must take for the undead to walk the streets night after night, surrounded by ready sources of that magic elixir, and not go on a rampage, drain the city dry.

More control than he had, he feared. If Deadre hadn't stirred as he'd been gulping down the farmer's life force, Daniel didn't know if he could've stopped, or if he would have kept drinking until the man had no more blood to give.

Until he'd killed him.

But she'd moaned, and her hand had twitched. Her eyes had scrunched in pain, and her pain had called him back from the dark edge he'd been teetering on.

Thank G.o.d.

Ow!

He really had to stop doing that.

One of Deadre's hands clenched his pant leg and he glanced down at where she lay curled up on the seat of the truck, her head

resting on his thigh. Her fragile shoulders looked narrower than ever as she hunched them and moaned again. Her eyelids fluttered

again.

Daniel tightened his fingers on the steering wheel. She was going to wake up soon, and when she did, she was going to hurt like h.e.l.l.

She was also going to need blood and lots of it.

Turning his gaze back to the road, he punched the accelerator and sped through the darkness.

By the time he slowed down to cruise by the two-story brick warehouse that had once been his lab, he figured he only had about

forty-five minutes left before the sun rose. If he was wrong about the lab still being relatively intact, he wasn't going to have a chance to find another hidey-hole.

Luckily, he wasn't wrong.

The windows had been boarded up to protect against vandalism, but that would work in his favor. The wood would hold the sunlight at bay, give him more time.

He carried Deadre to the stoop, set her down while he easily shouldered his way through the double dead-bolt locks on the door,

then lifted her against his chest and took her inside.

He felt disconnected from himself, a sort of out-of-body experience as his Nikes crunched over broken gla.s.s and kicked aside a fallen chair. This lab had been his life once. All he cared about. Now the only value that history held for him was its ability to help him help the woman in his arms. To take away her pain and make her whole again.

In the middle of the room, he righted a table and stretched her out on the stainless steel. Her body bowed. She bit her lip and mewled, and he eased her back down.

"Easy, baby. Easy. I'm gonna help you now. Just a few more minutes."

There was no need for lights. His newly acquired night vision allowed him to work in the darkness-it was easier on his eyes, anyway-gathering the supplies he needed and repairing the equipment Garth had damaged. Had it really been eight weeks ago?

It seemed more like a lifetime.

Actually, it had been a lifetime, he supposed. His lifetime.

Sometimes he forgot he was dead now.

As the first pink fingers of dawn crept around the edges of the boards over the broken windows, he stood back and studied his

work: a full liter of synthetic blood in an IV bag, and more cooking.

He had the rubber tubing and large bore IV needle ready, but as he listened to Deadre whimper in the dark, her head thras.h.i.+ng side to side, he realized he couldn't do it. He couldn't pump it into her.

He hadn't gotten anywhere near the point of human testing in his research. Even if he had, that wouldn't have proven the synthetic

blood safe for vampires. The last thing he wanted to do was cause her more pain.

His decision made, he yanked the tourniquet tight around his left arm by holding one end with his right hand and pulling the other with his teeth, then probed the inside bend of his elbow with the needle until he found a vein, and ran the IV wide open.

He watched as the dark liquid flowed down the clear tube. The synthetic blood hit his body with a sizzle that made him jolt, then made him dizzy.

Whoa. Head rush.

Fire poured through his veins. A sweat broke on his forehead. His vision swam. His insides swooped up to his throat, then plummeted to the pit of his abdomen. It wasn't an entirely unpleasant sensation, just...unsettling. Like riding a roller coaster without being quite sure there really was an engineer behind the controls.

Panting, he lowered his head and went with the flow. It was too late to turn back now. As if he'd want to. The liter bag was nearly

empty and every cell of his body felt gorged with life, with oxygen, with energy.

At last he understood why Garth had gone to such lengths to get the formula. It hadn't been for his people, to save them having to take human blood. It hadn't even been about money.