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“Just say it. I’m used to getting bad news at this point.” She leaned into my side and I wrapped my arm around her waist.
“See this area here?” He pointed to a clear area on her scans.
“Yep.”
“That’s where we’d expect to see a tumor if you were suffering from hallucinations. But yours is here.” He moved the pointer. “So as hard as this is to absorb…” Sympathy lined his features as he looked back at Grace. “You can’t be hallucinating. This is all very real.”
Grace’s mouth opened, then shut, then opened again, and her eyes flew wide as she looked up at me. “You’re saying that all of this—him, you, the house…it’s all real? I’m surrounded by…vampires?”
I nodded. “That’s exactly what he’s saying, baby.”
“Oh…God.”
She pushed away from me with all her strength and my chest cracked in two.
12
GRACE
“My boyfriend is a vampire,” I said, my heart climbing up my throat as my mind shifted on its axis.
This is real.
This is all totally and one hundred percent real.
“Mate,” Ajax corrected me, his eyes full of concern as he studied the lines of my face.
I held up a hand toward him, indicating I needed a second.
A lifetime, maybe. That’s what it would take for me to fully wrap my head around the fact that everything I thought was some sort of stellar death knell these past few weeks was actually all real.
Ajax. His hunter brothers. The men trying to kill me.
“Grace,” Gabriel—the king’s vampire doctor—said in that calming way only super intellectual people like doctors can manage. “You’re safe. I want you to try and take a few deep breaths for me, please.”
I almost laughed because the vampire looked like he could’ve walked right off of that vampire show True Blood. Did they all have to be so magnificent looking when I was totally ordinary?
I took the few breaths he requested, my muscles relaxing with each release of oxygen.
Okay, nothing has really changed. I’m still dying and I’m still totally head over heels for Ajax. The rest…the rest I can work out later. Or never.
My thoughts were erratic but I cut myself some slack seeing as all of this seemed too unreal to be true.
“Good,” Gabriel said. “Now, can you tell me how you’re feeling?”
“You’re all vampires,” I blurted out, but at least my voice didn’t crack. “Beings I never knew existed outside the pages of my favorite books and it turns out I’m a quarter vampire too? And there are people after me because of that and I have a tumor the size of an egg trying to kill me. How do you think I’m feeling?” The words spilled out of me on a rushed breath and I immediately cringed. “I’m so sorry. That was a lot and shouldn’t be directed at you.”
“Quite all right,” he said, flashing me a genuine smile. “It’s a lot to take in.”
I huffed a broken laugh.
Understatement of the century. Poor girl, first the tumor and now the Sons want her? And Ajax, Gods, a vampire who can stop time but can’t stop it enough to save her.
I flinched at the sound of Gabriel’s voice in my head.
“So, you don’t think I can be saved,” I said, and his blue eyes flared wide at my responding to something he hadn’t spoken aloud…which means all the other voices I’d been hearing weren’t a symptom of the tumor either. Great, add that to the list of my shifting reality.
Another deep breath. Ajax was a vampire but his blood couldn’t heal me like in all the books I loved to read. Not from the way Gabriel was thinking anyway. I’d tried to let go of hope the second I saw the scans of my brain, but this truth was a bitch to take.
