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“What do you mean?” Raj asked her.
Chisolm licked her lips. “He was… empty. Nothing behind the eyes. Just… blank. I wasn’t a person, just meat.”
I felt a chill run down my spine.
While both Shay and Raj looked confused, this time I was the one who knew what Chisolm meant. I remembered exactly what that expression looked like. A vampire taken over by bloodlust—not hungry, not even angry, but completely gone. That look that shark eyes have. Nothing going on behind them but the primal drive to eat. It was rare—veryrare outside of a hospital setting these days—but it happened.
I’d seen that same expression on a vampire’s face right before he’d torn the jugular out of the orderly at St. Christopher’s. That guy hadn’t been a person. He’d been food, and the vampire had been literally starving. There was no understanding of anything except where to bite to get the most blood the fastest.
The orderly hadn’t stood a fucking chance.
The fact that Bettina Chisolm was still alive said a hell of a lot about just how badass she must have been.
“You must be one hell of a fighter,” came out of my mouth, and I winced, but then I watched her expression flicker as she came to some sort of conclusion about me. I had no idea what it was, but I was pretty sure it was positive.
“Thanks,” she said, softly, and I knew that somehow that had been the right thing to say, despite the fact that Shay was glaring daggers at me.
I swallowed, trying to take at least a few seconds to think about what I was going to say before I actually said it.
But then my brain had to go and fucking run off with my mouth.
“Why didn’t the vampire attack anyone else? Why only you?”
She stared at me, and I waved a hand.
“Sorry.” I grimaced. “I’m… thinking out loud.”
Now both Raj and Shay were glaring at me.
“Please, continue,” I muttered, trying to back my way out of it. I’d chalk it up to the fact that I was still hungover and fucked up from yesterday, but that wasn’t really a good justification for subjecting victims to my bullshit. I told myself to shut up and listen.
But Bettina Chisolm was watching me curiously. “The chemical,” she said, then.
I saw Shay and Raj exchange a look.
“What do you mean, Ms. Chisolm?” Raj asked when it was clear that I wasn’t going to blurt out anything else.
“The chemical,” she repeated. “I thought… I thought they were trying to put it over my face, but…”
“Fucking hell,” I breathed, earning myself another glare from Shay, but Raj’s expression suddenly got excited.
I almost asked if anyone swabbed her throat, then realized that was a stupid question. Even if they had, whatever had been put on her would have been covered in blood, antiseptic, and whatever had been on her hands, most likely, as she tried to keep herself from bleeding to death.
“Ms. Chisolm, would that chemical have gotten on your hands?” Raj asked.
She frowned, thinking. “Maybe?”
I blew out a breath. If she’d gotten it on her hands, and then the fingernail swab got both blood and the chemical signature…
I met Raj’s eyes and knew he was thinking the same thing. I saw his fingers tap across the screen of his phone, presumably texting someone at the FBI’s lab. I kind of wished Mays were on it, but a federal case meant federal CSIs.
“Could you tell us what happened after the vampire attacked you, Ms. Chisolm?” Shay asked, shooting annoyed and confused looks between Raj and I.
“I—just kept hitting him. Kicking.” She looked down at her arms, which were covered in bandages, presumably from having put them between her throat and the vampire’s fangs. “Screaming. I fell. Then I heard people. At first—I wasn’t sure if… but they did. And the vampire—left. I didn’t actually see him go.”
So we had no idea if he’d left on his own or if someone had taken him—but if Raj and I were right about a chemical trigger being used to cause the vampire to go feral, I would be willing to put money on the second option.
The scary part was that, if we were right, they weren’tfakingvampire bloodlust—they were inducing it. And they were forcing shifters to change into and thenstay intheir animal forms.
