Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
QUINN
Awareness comes back to me like a heartbeat, a steady pulse of voices and lights so blurred together that I can’t pick individual things or people.
Except for one.
‘Give him some space,’ Florence is saying in that calm but authoritative voice she’s used on me when drawing my blood. I feel steady, confident hands grasp my ankles, propping them up in such a way that sends blood back to my brain, pump by pump.
When my vision pulls back into focus, she’s right there, kneeling beside me with a small smile on her face, two fingers resting on the pulse point near my ankle.
‘Nice of you to join us,’ she says with a crooked smile, and relief makes my breath come a little easier.
If she’s joking, then I must be ok. Beyond collapsing in front of what looks to be everyone I know and love, that is.
But why would everyone I know be in my flat?
Perhaps this is a dream. Or I suppose there’s a chance I could have hit my head as I fell.
I snap my eyes shut again, resting a moment before tentatively opening them again. Nope, they’re all still here, looking equally horrified.
‘Why is everyone here?’ I ask Florence, reaching out a hand for her wrist. The skin contact calms me a little.
She looks up at someone in the crowd before her eyes meet mine again, her smile widening. ‘I think they were trying to surprise you. I guess it worked.’
‘A bit too well,’ Bram says, before kneeling next to me and saying, in a lower voice, ‘I’ve got you, man.’
I try to get up to speak to him, but Florence’s hand stops me.
‘You need to lie there for a couple of minutes,’ she says, adjusting the cushions underneath my legs. She looks up at Bram and he nods, without either of them having said anything.
‘Ok,’ he says to the assembled crowd, clambering to his feet. ‘Let’s give him a bit of privacy while he comes round. Emmy, Fox, could you sort everyone out with a drink, please?’
The siblings nod and lead the way out of the flat and into the bar. Only Bram, Sammi and Elias hold back.
‘Why is everyone here?’ I ask again, and this time Florence defers to Bram.
‘For your birthday,’ he says with a shrug. ‘Remember we said that because your thirtieth was overshadowed by the whole separation business, we should make a big deal for your thirty-first instead?’
Sammi snorts a soft laugh. ‘Surprise.’
My forehead creases, my brain still a little too fuzzy to connect any dots. ‘It isn’t my birthday for another two weeks.’
‘Yeah, obviously,’ Bram snorts. ‘Wouldn’t be much of a surprise if we did it on the right day though, would it?’
There’s probably logic there, but I’m not in the best place right now to find it.
‘Can I get up?’ I ask, suddenly feeling strangely vulnerable. ‘I’m feeling a lot better now.’
Bram looks to Florence for guidance, and when she nods her reply, he offers me a hand. I take it and haul myself to my feet. I feel a little shaky still, but otherwise I’m feeling much better. But when I look up, it seems nobody else is sharing that relief.
‘Do you need to get checked out?’ Sammi asks, her voice serious. ‘We can send everyone home if you need us to.’
I shake my head and flop down onto the sofa, stretching out my right arm, which is throbbing at the elbow. I must have bumped it when I fell. ‘I’ll be ok,’ I say. ‘Just need a few minutes and I’ll be good to go.’
Bram frowns. ‘It’s probably a good idea to get yourself checked. You really went down.’
Elias nods his agreement. ‘There might be something underlying there. I mean, who faints in this day and age?’
‘As a medical professional, I can assure you that people still faint,’ Florence says with a smile, and then she turns back to me. ‘You haven’t told your friends?’ she asks under her breath, but apparently it’s not quiet enough.
Surprisingly, it’s the human in the room who hears it.
‘Told us what?’ Sammi asks, her face lined with concern.
Ah, shit. Well, here they come, the inevitable consequences of my own choices.
The truth is that I could have told them. I could have, but I didn’t. I can’t even say there were no opportunities, because there were plenty. And I seized exactly none of them.
There were times it was on the tip of my tongue, a split second from being spoken, and every one of those times I held it back. I think maybe I thought that if I said it, it would make it real, like maybe this whole thing was just one long, vivid dream.
It’s only now, staring at my best friends in the world, that I realise how stupid that was.
‘Ok,’ I say, gesturing to the sofa and to the extra chair someone’s dragged in. ‘You might want to sit down for this.’
* * *
‘So what are you?’ Sammi asks, her perfectly groomed brows pulling together. I’ve just finished explaining what’s going on, with Florence’s help for the medical bits, and everyone’s looking at me like I haven’t cleared anything up at all. ‘Human or vampire?’
‘Kind of neither, but also kind of both.’
She screws her face up. ‘I’m confused.’
‘He’s human,’ Florence says definitively. ‘But there are vampire contaminants in his blood that are causing these symptoms.’
‘So how do you fix it?’ Bram asks, concern grating at his voice.
I try to smile, but I’m not sure the movement translates to my face. ‘We don’t know.’
‘We’re working on it,’ Florence offers. ‘Cam and I are working with a specialist lab to try and get some answers. But it hasn’t been easy.’ She sighs, smoothing her skirt over her thighs. ‘No one’s familiar with this scenario so it’s been kind of hard knowing where to start.’
Bram runs a thumb across his jawline, his tell for when he’s pondering something. ‘Elias,’ he says, after a beat. ‘You must have seen something like this before – you’ve been around since the dawn of time.’
Elias shrugs. ‘Nope, sorry. It’s always been a binary, in my experience. You are, or you aren’t. No in-betweens.’
The tiny spark of hope that Bram had lit in me burns out immediately. ‘I guess I’m a mystery,’ I say, trying to swallow past the lump that’s starting to form in my throat. ‘I don’t even know how the vampire cells could have got into me.’
‘Abby, I assume,’ Elias says, raking a hand through his dark curls. ‘She’s the only vampire you’ve had close contact with.’
My brain stutters to a stop as I struggle to process the words that just came out of Elias’s mouth.
Abby?
‘I’m sorry, what?’
I always knew Abby had a bad vibe about her, but I thought that was just her personality. She’s a vampire?
Elias blinks over at me lazily, like he hasn’t just casually lobbed a grenade into everything I thought my life was. ‘Isn’t she? Unless you’ve been with others we didn’t know about.’ He shrugs. ‘I’m not judging, man. Not my place.’
‘Abby’s a vampire?’ I’m trying to process this new information, but my brain is giving me nothing.
Bram snorts softly. ‘Er, yeah.’
I whip round to look at him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I was trying to keep the emotion out of my voice but it sneaks in anyway. Bram throws his hands up defensively.
‘I thought you knew!’ he counters. ‘We had that whole conversation about her bleeding you dry.’
I actually do remember that conversation, but I absolutely did not realise that’s what he was trying to tell me. ‘I thought you meant, like, my time and energy. I thought you were just looking out for me.’
Bram winces. ‘I mean, I was. I was trying to be subtle ’cause there were humans about. I was literally trying to tell you she’d suck your blood until you had none left.’
Elias snorts a laugh next to him. ‘Looks like you were half right,’ he quips, before a hand comes from nowhere and pushes him off the end of the sofa.
‘Not the time, Elias,’ Sammi says, staring him down unapologetically as he clambers up off the floor.
He grumbles something at her under his breath and moves to the other side of the room, out of arm’s reach.
It never fails to entertain me that a centuries-old immortal being is a little scared of a five-foot-tall human, but Sammi tends to have that effect on people.
‘This is actually useful,’ Florence says, slipping her phone out of her bag and furiously typing a message. ‘I’m going to let Cam know. You don’t still have her phone number, do you?’
I shake my head. I remember the day I deleted it. Emmy and I did celebratory shots after we closed up the bar. I was hungover for two days.
‘I do.’
We all spin to look at Sammi, who has a small, but very smug, smile on her face.
Bram barks out a laugh. ‘Why? God, I’m scared to ask.’
‘Because,’ she says slowly, like she’s explaining something to a roomful of children, ‘I’m a lawyer, so I know better than you lot how often things from your past can come back to bite you.’ Her eyes dart to mine. ‘No pun intended.’
I don’t dare reply. I feel like I’ll be in trouble if I do. Instead I nod, which feels like a safe bet.
‘And so,’ she continues, holding up her phone triumphantly, ‘I keep as much data as I can for seven years, like financial records. For me and for all of you, too.’
Honestly, that seems kind of insane, but I don’t say that. What I do say is, ‘Sam, you’re a lifesaver!’ And from the way she smiles at me that was definitely the right call.
Sammi sends the contact details to Florence, who forwards them on to Cam, who promises to get right on it. That’s all we can do, for now.
Well, except for the very important business of celebrating my birthday.
‘Come on,’ Elias says, hopping to his feet like he’s read my mind. ‘The others will be two drinks deep at this rate.’ He heads for the bar and we all follow him.
But Bram hangs back.
‘You could have told me,’ he says quietly as we walk together, and I feel a stab of guilt pierce my chest. There’s genuine hurt in his voice, and it was never my intention to hurt him. I owe him everything.
‘I know.’
He studies me for a moment or two before his features soften, eyes flicking to Florence, who’s looking back for me from the door. ‘But I’m glad you had someone there.’
She smiles at me, and an enormous, irrepressible grin takes over my face before I remember Bram’s there and I try to temper it. ‘I know I wasn’t supposed to be dating. You said—’
‘I said you shouldn’t jump into a relationship with just anyone,’ he interrupts, gently. He cocks his head to the side, sweeping his hair out of his eyes. ‘But Florence isn’t just anyone, is she?’
‘No,’ I say through the catch in my throat. ‘She isn’t.’
His face changes then, and a flicker of something like relief, or perhaps pride, crosses his features for a moment until he clears his throat and pats an inked hand firmly on my shoulder.
‘Come on, halfling,’ he says, mouth tugging into a grin. ‘Let’s go celebrate your birthday.’