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I pushed harder, ran faster. My lacerations were screaming, my head still spinning from the knock I’d taken. But pain meant nothing. Not compared to her life.
I had to get Carlie back. There was no other option.
I could hear the beast ahead of me, breath stuttering and footfalls growing slower. It was wounded, too, and carrying a human. A small human, but still.
That I couldn’t hear her screaming, didn’t hear a cry for help, planted fear deep in my belly. Was some of the spilled blood hers? Had the beast’s teeth pierced something vital? Would I be too late?
“No,”I said, and forced myself to move faster, until the trees and leaves were blurs around me and I could barely feel the trail beneath my feet.
Ahead of me, shadows shifted and moved in the narrow beam of moonlight that managed to penetrate the trees. I saw the beast’s form, dark and hulking, and knew what I needed to do.
I had to stop it. Had to get Carlie free of it, and given the gap between us, I’d have to use my dagger.
I couldn’t miss.
They were sixty feet ahead of me, and I pushed again, narrowed the gap to fifty, to forty, to thirty, until my heart felt like a piston in my chest, my lungs burning nearly as badly as the scratches on my back.
Thirty feet.
I couldn’t wait any longer. I held the dagger by the tip, pulledback, and let it fly. It streamed through the trees like an arrow, straight and true. I heard the punch of contact, the grunt of sensation, and the sound of something heavy hitting the ground.
“Bingo,” I said, and ran toward it.
I reached the small clearing made by its fallen body.
But the beast was gone, along with my dagger.
Carlie lay across a granite bolder, her face and hands and arms smeared with blood. Her small body broken, her skin gray, and dark blood seeping from a rip across her abdomen. Her mouth was open, eyes staring.
“No,”I cried out.“No, no, no,”and sprinted forward, felt her carotid.
There was a pulse, but that was generous. It was faint and irregular, and with every pump of her heart, more blood stained the ground around her.
She was bleeding out.
I swore again, pulled off my jacket, pressed it to her abdomen to try to stanch the bleeding, even though I knew it was futile and wasn’t going to help. Not when the beast had torn at her flesh like it wanted to shred her to pieces.
I couldn’t call out. If I did, the beast might come back. I could lift her, carry her, but where? I was in the middle of the woods; the resort and the farmhouse were somewhere on opposite sides of me. Even if I could find a place to take her, she wouldn’t survive the trip.
“Fuck,” I said, and pressed harder, and blood seeped warm and wet through my fingers. There was so much.
My fangs descended, not in lust, but in reaction to the sheer volume of blood. Not even my monster was interested in her, in this death and waste and misery.
“Come on, Carlie,” I said. “Hold it together. Be strong for Georgia, for Connor.” But she wasn’t going to hold it together. If I didn’t do something, there wasn’t going to be a happy ending here.
I looked up, around, had to risk a scream.“Connor!”
I listened, hoping to hear the sound of paws on the ground, of rescue. But there was nothing but the beat of my heart in my ears, of theplinkof blood onto stone. Of life into stone.
There was another way. I knew it only in possibilities, in the stages that had been explained to me by my parents, my professors... because I was the only vampire who’d never experienced them.
The time that elapsed between her heartbeats grew longer, the beats softer, no longer a pulsing of muscle, but a sigh. A releasing. There was no more time to wait. Not for rescue. No one was coming to save her now. Which meant I had to, whether she wanted it or not.
“I’m sorry,” I told her, pushing back the hair from her face.
And sank my fangs into her neck.
Her blood was a sweet song, and I was torn between thirst, desire, and guilt. But the latter couldn’t matter; I had to do this, and I had to hope it worked.
