He could barely stand. How had he left the room without help? The door was still closed.
A loud wheeze sounded from the other side of the room. And here he was.
He was crouched in a corner, arms over his head, hiding his face and panting.
I remained still. His feelings were non-existent. No pain and no worry. A void replaced them. How could that be? Either my power had suddenly vanished, or something horrible had happened to him.
“Alex?” I said in a low tone.
“Run,” he half-whispered, half-hissed in a cavernous voice that didn’t belong to him.
“What’s happening? Do you feel worse? Better?”
He lifted his head, but I couldn’t see his face or sense his intentions. But malice thickened the air.
“Run,” he repeated with more urgency in a disturbing voice. “I can’t hold it.”
“What?”
A tremor started. The world receded, and the seizure took me.
11
QUARANTINE
Alex
The pain didn’t want rivals; it dominated my body so completely that anything else faded.
Chaotic dreams, or maybe hallucinations, tormented me. Irene’s sweet voice came from afar, but it might be a trick of my mind. I wasn’t sure whether she was close. But she’d been.
Darius’s voice rang in my ears. “What have you done?”
I went in and out of consciousness. People talked. His Lordship shouted, but it had to be a nightmare. Why would Lord Mansel be in my flat?
Hands grabbed me. Their touch was a scorching fire on my skin, and I shouted, or tried to.
Faceless people told me I had break-bone fever, but it wasn’t the fever. It was the thirst, which had been much better since… I didn’t remember. My burning body was the problem.
I was rocked right and left. Darius wept and begged people not to take me. He apologised to me for whatever reason. His face was badly bruised.
In one of my few spells of clarity, I found myself in a large room, packed with rows of beds. People groaned, writhed, and vomited blood.
I was in the fever hospital, the place where sick, contagious people were dispatched, never to be seen again. Odette had been barely alive when she’d been sent here. She had never left. They had buried her in a common grave with other dead people without a stone to remember her.
Now and then, a nurse would give me water or maybe soup. But I didn’t want soup. I wanted blood. I wanted to get drunk on it.
There. I’d said it.
I wasn’t ashamed anymore of craving blood. Besides, I hadn’t bitten anyone, had I? Had I?
“You need to drink.” The nurse pressed a glass of cold water to my lips.
The memory of tasting Irene’s blood flooded me. Was it a dream or something real? I wasn’t sure, but the rich, flowery taste of her sweet blood was etched in my brain. Her blood had triggered something in my body—a transformation.
I groaned, wishing to drink her blood again.
Shame returned.
