“You need to feed.”
He’s right. When did I last feed?
I shower fast. The water runs red, then pink, then clear. The blood underneath my nails won’t come out. I stop trying. I change into clean clothes, pull my hair back, and drink two blood bags from the warmer in the kitchen. The blood settles into my system and the last edges of the night’s adrenaline recede.
The convoy is still twenty minutes out.
The convoy comesthrough the south gate. Six vehicles in a line. Erik’s wolves driving, all in human form now. The yard floods with headlights, then cuts to dark as the engines stop.
Elena is at the first van before the doors open. Dalton beside her, tablet in hand. Marcellus holds the perimeter. Isabelle has blankets, water, and intake supplies lined up inside the entrance.
I hold the door when the first van opens. The children. Two carried by wolves. One child is walking, her hand locked around the arm of a young man from Erik’s pack. He hasn’t asked her to let go.
The second van opens. The critical woman from the third room comes out first, carried by two of Erik’s wolves. Elena is at the doors before they reach the ground. Dalton already has a line in her arm before they clear the yard.
The woman from the first room comes out behind her under her own power. Her IV site is bandaged. Careful steps across the yard, bare feet on stone. She doesn’t stop at the intake door. She goes through it without breaking stride.
They come through one at a time. Some walking. Some carried. I hold the door. Elena checks vitals, assigns beds, calls out blood types to Dalton. He logs each arrival on his tablet. I help a man to his bed. His legs give halfway there. I catch him.
Clean IV lines replacing the ones I pulled out hours ago. A wing built for vampires and their donors absorbs forty-seven new patients in under an hour.
Simone appears in the wing entrance twenty minutes into the intake.
She’s not in workout clothes. She’s not coming from the training room. She’s dressed and her hair is pulled back and she walks into the medical wing before anyone tells her she can.
Past Elena. Past the staging table. Past the triage line. Straight to a bed near the back wall where a woman is sitting with her hands in her lap, staring at the sheets.
Simone sits on the edge of the bed. Doesn’t speak. Doesn’t touch the woman. Just sits. Close enough to be felt.
The woman turns her head. Simone says something too low for me to catch from across the room. The woman’s face changes. A fraction. The first movement in a face that’s been still since the van doors opened.
The sister I wouldn’t let go to the farm just walked into the aftermath without asking permission.
She’s been on those beds. She’s been where that woman is. I opened the doors. Simone knows what comes after.
I step back from the beds. The wing is running. It’s running better without me in it.
Julian’s in his office. Both body cams are plugged into his workstation, the footage from the facility already pulling onto his screens.
“How fast can you have a presentation ready?” I ask.
“It’s ready now.” He pulls up the display. My footage. My camera. The corridor I walked through. The door I opened. The woman turning her face toward me, timestamped, cataloged.
I play five seconds of my own feed. The first room. The twelve cots. The IV lines. On screen, the room looks smaller than it felt. The camera didn’t capture the smell. It didn’t capture the hum. It captured a frame and a woman’s face, and Julian has organized that face into evidence that vampire lords will watch in conference rooms.
She didn’t consent to being evidence. She consented to being rescued.
“Hold it,” I say. “We’ll figure out distribution in the morning. I want Maximus in that conversation.”
Julian nods. His eyes are bloodshot. His hands are steady.
“Get some rest before dawn takes you,” I say.
“I will.”
He won’t. But the offer matters.
Erik arrives two hours before dawn.
