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Another day and night passed. For the first time ever, I sensed the setting sun.
And my mouth was so dry, my stomach hollow with hunger.
It was time to wake up. My new life was waiting for me.
Brien was waiting for me.
With a growl, I pushed at the sand until my head and shoulders popped free. Everything was blurry, my fingers clumsy, my body still transforming itself—but Brien was right there as he’d promised, helping me out of the shallow grave.
“Twilight.” His voice was choked with joy.
He pulled me onto his lap and brushed the grit from my eyes and mouth with a clean cloth.
My gaze locked on his smooth, tan throat. Beneath the skin, I heard blood pulsing in his jugular vein. “Hungry.”
“Let me wash you off in the ocean first.”
I barely heard him. The fangs I hadn’t yet realized I had extended for the first time, and my fingers clamped around his nape.
Pulling him to me, I sank the sharp point into that tempting vein and sucked hard.
32
BRIEN
“How is she?” Cain poked his head into my bedroom.
A newly made vampire sleeps both day and night, waking only long enough to drink before slipping back into unconsciousness. I glanced at the bed where Twilight lay, her dark hair spread across the bronze silk pillowcase. Her creamy skin was flushed, her mouth a bright, unnatural scarlet from the blood she’d ingested.
“She—” I cleared my throat of the grit that seemed to have filled it again. “She’s had a tough couple of nights. But she seems a little better now.”
It was dawn of the second night since she’d crawled out of her grave. After washing her clean in the ocean, I’d brought her to my apartment and given her a sponge bath to remove the salt from her skin before tucking her into bed.
Since then, I hadn’t left her side. She needed me now even more than she had that week she’d been buried underground. I’d bathed the blood-tinged sweat from her body, changed her sheets, soothed her when she groaned with pain. And when she was hungry, I’d fed her from my own veins.
“Good, good.” Cain’s hard face softened. “She made it through the first week—that’s the hard part. She’s tough. My bet’s on her.”
“Yeah.” I turned back to Twilight, staring at her as if my will alone would bring her the rest of the way through the transition.
Cain knew better than to get any closer to the bed—Twilight was still too weak for my vampire to allow that—but he stood in the doorway for another minute, silently offering support. Throughout that first, never-ending night, either he or Talon had checked in with me every couple of hours, asking how I was and plying me with blood-wine to replace the blood Twilight had taken.
Behind me, I heard Cain yawn. “You need anything?” he asked.
“No,” I said, my gaze on Twilight.
“Okay, then. I’m going to bed.”
A few seconds later, I heard the outer door close. I made sure it was locked, then carried Twilight into the vault and laid her carefully on the mattress. I locked that door as well, then slid beneath the sheets, my body curled protectively around her.
When I awoke at dusk, she was twitching. Her eyes popped open. “Brien?”
“Right here.” I kissed her cheek. It was cooler now than a human’s, and she’d stopped sweating. “How are you?”
She zeroed in on my throat. Tiny fangs peeped out from between her crimson lips, and for the first time, I saw a sparkle of blue in her eyes. “Hungry.”
I slid my hand under her head and guided her to my jugular vein. “Drink.”
Her fingernails dug into my shoulders. “Don’t…want to hurt you,” she said against my throat.
