I ordered some chicken noodle soup and added an extra-large side order of the garlic bread they made downstairs. I knew it wasn't exactly the first thing a sick person would think of, but the stuff was like hard drugs, and if Sylvie didn't want it, I'd eat it. And some dumb, paranoid part of me thought she might be ignorant of how things worked. That maybe Sylvie would refuse the garlic bread because she’d think it would hurt her if she knew she’d been turned.
I paced around while I waited for the food.
I had options. The most obvious was to bail. I could just leave. Leave the city, for all I cared. I could go up there and kill Maisey myself. She was a bloodsucker, even if she probably hadn't even grown in her fangs yet.
Or...
No.
I wasn't even going to consider it. There wasn't a chance in hell. Not because I had a problem killing vamps, but because this particular vamp was tied to Sylvie. Sylvie would never forgive me if I killed Maisey. I was getting soft, because that never would’ve stopped me in the past. Now, it felt like the only thing that mattered.
13
Sylvie
I had a rapid series of fever dreams. Visions of werewolves, vampires, and dark figures chasing me through alleys filled my nightmares. When I finally woke, I wasn't sure where I was at first.
I sat up in an unfamiliar bed. I ran my fingertips along the thin sheet I'd mostly kicked off and found it was scratchy and rough. I looked down and saw I'd sweated through my shirt, which now clung to me.
Maisey sat up beside me, reaching for my hand. Her touch felt like ice against my skin.
I smiled, but even the simple act of spreading my lips apart felt like it took an immense amount of energy.
"Hey, sleepyhead. How do you feel?"
Maisey put the back of her hand to my forehead, then frowned.
Then it was my turn to frown. My sister was basically a goddess. She always had perfect, glowing skin. Her hair always looked silky and straight out of a shampoo commercial. And her eyes were always bright and energetic.
The last few hours seemed to have taken an impossible toll on her, though.
Now her skin was pale and there were pinkish red circles around her eyes. She looked tired, hungry, and exhausted. Even her cheeks seemed sunken, but that had to have been my imagination. People didn’t deteriorate that quickly, even if they were deathly ill. Of course it hit me, then.
She’d told me to my face at the apartment. She’d let herself be turned into a vampire right before all this started. God. My poor sister was turning into the very thing these werewolves seemed to hate above all else, and we were trapped in a building full of them.
"Are you okay?" I asked, squeezing her hand with both of mine.
"Don't worry about me, silly," she said, smiling. But I caught the way her eyes darted to the werewolves all lurking around the room.
I met her gaze, then tried my best to work out some sister-sister telepathy.
All I got was a nearly imperceptible shake of her head while she held my gaze.
The look seemed to say, "act natural."
I relaxed back into my pillow. That was when I noticed Riggs lurking by the door. We'd also been joined by another huge man, who, given recent events, I assumed was a werewolf. I vaguely remembered hearing somebody else come when Riggs was carrying me, but everything about our brief excursion had gone a little fuzzy for me.
"Hungry?" he asked, approaching my bedside.
He had a brown paper bag in his hand, and something wrapped in foil in the other.
"Yeah, actually."
He pulled up a chair and started opening the bag. He pulled out a styrofoam cup with a lid and unwrapped the foil, which was covering a half-eaten piece of garlic bread about the size of my hand.
"Did somebody gnaw on this?" I asked, holding up the bread between two fingers.
"Uh," Riggs said. "Germs, right." He took the bread from me, then tore off the bitten part and handed me back the remaining chunk. "You took a while to wake up," he said, popping the bitten piece into his mouth and then dusting his hands.
I grinned. "Thank you."
I opened the soup, which was just a touch warmer than room temperature. It tasted amazing, either way. My head was pounding, and I felt dizzy, but as far as symptoms went, it was nothing too unbearable. The biggest problem was how weak I felt. I wasn't sure if I could've gotten up and walked to the bathroom if I needed, but hopefully the soup would energize me. That, and the little scrap of garlic bread Riggs hadn't eaten while I was asleep.
I noticed Riggs was staring a little too close at me until I took a bite of the bread. Garlic. Was it true what they said about garlic and vampires? God. He was wondering if I was one. Did that mean he knew about Maisey? I had to resist the urge to suddenly throw the bread across the room, just in case being close to the smell would weaken my sister. Instead, I decided to devour it in one big bite before Riggs could think to ask Maisey to try it.