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“Yeah,” I replied.
She shuddered. “I hate vampires. I hate that Jackson followed in our father’s footsteps and puts his neck on the line every damn night.”
A shiver went down my spine. I exchanged a look with Declan, an unspoken decision not to share the news with her about her brother until we got to safety. There was no time for grief.
She let out a shuddery breath. “What’s your name again?”
I gathered my long black hair, pulling and twisting it to the side to keep it out of my face. “Jill.”
“Good to meet you, Jill.”
I nodded. “Likewise. Now, let’s get the hell out of here, shall we?”
“Good idea.”
We went back to the stairwell and started climbing. We were deeper than I thought. I was in decent shape from being a bit of a gym rat back in my regular life, but this was rough going, especially after being knocked around and fed upon. Declan brought up the rear, but he kept pace with us, which was pretty impressive considering his growing list of injuries.
“Where’s Jackson?” Jennifer asked. “You said he’s here?”
“Yeah,” Declan replied. “Don’t worry about him, right now. Just keep climbing.”
“Doing the best I can,” she grumbled.
I watched her warily. “How far along are you?”
“Six months,” she said, placing a hand on her belly and casting a worried glance at me.
“Six months? Dr. Reynolds made it sound like you’d only been here a couple of weeks, long enough to get to know Stacy.”
“That’s true. They did the procedure on me six months ago but asked me to come in for 24/7 observation last month. I didn’t like it, but they were paying me well enough that I didn’t argue.”
Declan made a sound of disgust and she shot him a look.
“What?” she asked.
“How could you be so stupid?” he growled.
Her expression shadowed. “I needed the money.”
“You could have gone to Jackson. He would have helped you.”
“I wasn’t speaking to him at the time.” She hissed out a breath. “I’m twenty-three now, I’m not thirteen, which is what he always treated me like. I wanted my own life, without my big brother breathing down my neck all the time.”
“So you volunteered your body to a man who experiments in dhampyr births,” he said.
She bit her lip. “I didn’t know.”
“You should have done your research.”
“Yeah, well, thanks for making me feel worse than I did to begin with, Declan. I really appreciate it.”
I had to say, I respected the fact that she wasn’t overly cowed by a talking-down from our resident dhampyr.
We made it to the fifteenth-floor landing, each of us struggling to keep up the pace we needed to put distance between us and whatever was rising up from the sub-twenty levels.
“What’s your story?” Jennifer asked me, as Declan stayed a half flight of stairs behind us just in case anyone tried to join our trio.
“Oh, you know,” I said. “Normal girl, boring life, got on the wrong side of a scientist with a top-secret vampire-killing formula and hooked up with a dhampyr assassin along the way. Same old, same old.”
