Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
YOU’VE GOT TO BE PEPPERONING ME
Outside the Jeep window, the world smears past in a blur that turns my stomach. I snap my gaze back to Casey.
He looks worse. That makes no sense—he isn’t bleeding. After the bite, he barely bled at all.
“What the hell is happening to him?” The question is a shout, louder than the engine.
A hot spike of fury lances through me, sharp enough to make my hands curl into fists.
“You wanted me to trust you—we made a deal. I jumped out of a five-story window in your arms. I was chased by hissing vampires. I’m trapped in a car going faster than a goddamn rocket, so for fuck’s sake, I think I deserve some answers!
” My voice cracks on the last word. I press my lips together and look away, jaw tight, blinking hard at the smear of dark trees outside the window.
A muscle in my jaw jumps. The polite, patient mask I wear for entitled customers feels like it’s cracking right off my face. All that restraint is gone. I just need to know what the fuck is happening, and if I have to scream at a vampire to find out, so be it.
Stark finally breaks his calm facade, letting out a deep long sigh and rubbing the bridge of his nose in a very normal way. Not vampire-like at all.
My stomach plummets as I realize my frantic internet searches probably left a few things out. Great. More questions for the ever-growing list.
“It’s not the bite that’s killing your friend. It’s the venom. That’s what’s hurting him, not the blood loss.”
I wait for him to say more, but he doesn’t.
What the fuck.
“Listen, buddy, I was there, I am fully aware he was bitten. What I want to know is why he’s getting worse when his wound is actually healing?”
Stark and Alek exchange a long look, an entire conversation passing between them that I’m not allowed to hear.
My teeth grind together so hard I expect to hear them crack.
“Can we please discuss this out loud? Stop your mental whatever you’re doing and just tell me what is happening here. What will happen to Casey now? Where are we going? Who is attacking me if it’s not your vampires, and finally, who the fuck are you?”
I finish, panting, the questions finally filling the space between us instead of churning my gut.
“Kallie—” Alek starts, but Stark cuts him off.
“Don’t.” One word. Spoken like an order.
“She deserves to know the truth, Boss. She already knows more than most.”
Boss? Is Alek Stark’s employee? Henchman?
They stare at each other, Stark’s jaw a knot of granite, Alek’s eyes begging. It’s like watching a movie on mute. Whatever they’re fighting about, it’s about me, and I’m stuck on the outside of the glass.
I tear my eyes away from their silent war and focus on Casey. He groans in his sleep. His breathing is too fast, his eyes squeezed tight against a pain I can’t see.
I can’t lose him. Not now. An image flashes in my mind—Casey last week, laughing so hard at my stupid pun that he snorted wine. The memory is so sharp it hurts. I can’t lose him before I finally admit the boundary I kept between us was my own damn fault.
Fuck.
The thought slams into me, knocking the air from my lungs. He was just trying to protect me.
“He’s going to be okay, Kallie. But he’s… changing. He won’t be the same in the coming days.”
Alek’s voice is impossibly soothing for someone driving at breakneck speed, his reflexes confident and controlled. He handles the Jeep like the velocity is nothing, even as my own heart tries to beat its way out of my chest.
“Different how?”
This time, Stark answers.
“He’s changing. It shouldn’t be possible, vampires don’t produce venom anymore, but he is. What you are seeing are the symptoms for what we used to call the shift.”
“Wait. Hold up. The shift. As in, he’s becoming one of you?” The question tears out of me in a panicked screech. The sound is shrill even to my own ears, and both Stark and Alek wince, their faces tightening in unison.
“Oh, I’m sorry, am I hurting your delicate monster sensibilities?” I sneer, the words tasting like acid as my hold on Casey tightens.
Stark turns fully in his seat, so his dark eyes can look into mine, but we must be out of the city now because not even a streetlamp illuminates the inside of the dark Jeep. The shadows swallow his features, not just hiding them but claiming them, as if he belongs to the night itself.
My whole body seizes up, a reflex I’ve never understood until this second. It’s not just proximity. It’s prey. My pulse hammers against my eardrums, a frantic drumbeat against the silence of the predator in front of me.
“We are monsters, Daisy. Something worse than what’s under your bed. We are need made flesh. We exist only to take, and we ruin everything we touch. For centuries, our bite created more of us—more mouths, fewer throats. The math was never going to work in our favor.”
“But you said that’s impossible now. You can’t change us anymore.”
“There isn’t time for a history lesson. All you need to know is a group called the Guild used ancient magic to render our bites… impotent. We can still feed, but we cannot create more of our kind. And for that, the world should be grateful.”
“But Casey—”
“Casey is changing. That feral vampire’s bite had venom. I’m not sure how. But I intend on finding out.”
“So... is he going to wake up and want to just, like, drink my blood all the time?”
“Well, his instincts will tell him he needs human blood. Newly shifted vampires need more of it at first. But he’ll want to drink yours for entirely different reasons, Daisy Love. Unfortunately for him, he’ll have to get in line.”
I blink.
Once.
Twice.
“Excuse me?”
Stark pauses then, and even in the dark I can see his mouth spread into a smile.
He looks even more dangerous now than before.
The kind of dangerous my grandmother would’ve smacked me for looking at twice.
My pulse flutters anyway.
Well.
That’s probably a concerning development.
I hear rather than see Stark inhale. Alek’s eyes flick to me in the rearview mirror for a fraction of a second before he clears his throat, his grip on the steering wheel so tight I hear the leather creak.
Before I can question him, Alek yanks the wheel and swerves violently, throwing me and Casey sideways.
I hit my head on the window, hard, making my ears ring.
A starburst of pain explodes behind my eyes.
Le fucking ouch.
“Hang on Kallie, we’ve got company,” Alek says, grunting as he swerves again, but this time I hold on to the oh shit bar above me while gripping Casey’s head so it doesn’t bounce around.
I press my face to the window. A revving engine, like a motorcycle—but no headlights, nothing, just pitch dark and whatever is out there moving too fast to see. I squint into the black. Are they really driving without lights?
I see glowing red eyes speed past, and the nightmare slams back into me—the wave of blood, the terror, the feeling of being hunted. Something sour rises in the back of my throat.
One second Stark is in the passenger seat; the next, he’s twisting over the console, his hand gripping my arm. Before I can react, he’s pulling me into his lap and wrenching the door open.
The wind is a solid thing, stealing the air from my lungs and trying to peel my eyelids back. The world is just the roar in my ears and the hiss of leaves whipping past.
“I’m sorry, Love, but you’ll have to trust me again.”
He doesn’t give me a chance to say or ask anything before he leaps, and the force of his movement rips my hand from Casey’s. One moment he’s there, the next he’s gone, left behind in the dark Jeep as I’m pulled into the rushing wind. All I can do is squeeze my eyes shut and cling to Stark.
I brace for impact, but all I hear is the shriek of wind as the world tears past us.
I crack one eye and immediately wish I hadn’t. Trees are slamming past on both sides, close enough to graze, the ground a dark blur beneath us.
Another wave of dizziness overtakes me, but this one settles low in my gut, roiling with a hot spike of panic.
“Stark. Stark, please stop. Too fast. I’m going to be sick.”
“Sorry Love, we can’t slow down yet. We’re being tailed. Can’t risk your safety.”
I open my mouth to ask about Casey, about where Alek is taking him, but the question dies before it forms. Behind us, the treetops vanish in a pulse of orange light—silent first, the way lightning is silent, and then the sound arrives: a deep whump that I don’t so much hear as absorb.
No. no. no.
Was that the Jeep?
Casey. The explosion. An image of his body in the flames hits me so hard all the air leaves my lungs. My chest seizes, a band of ice tightening around my ribs.
“No!” The word is a raw scream, the nausea churning violently now, and Stark doesn’t get another warning before I start vomiting all over his shoulder and down his back.
It soaks through his expensive shirt, making him smell like a night out gone wrong, but I don’t stop—can’t stop— until my stomach is completely empty.
Stark doesn’t slow, his movements impossibly fluid as he weaves through the trees.
My brain scrambles to keep up, every event of the day crashing down at once as the sheer speed threatens to tear me apart.
My stomach drops, my vision blurs, and my teeth rattle in my skull, and there’s no way to know when any of it will stop.
I close my eyes, the world narrowing to a thin ringing sound and the distant warmth of Stark’s voice: “Don’t worry Daisy, I’ve got you.”
Which would be a lot more reassuring if he weren’t currently carrying me through a forest at the speed of sound.