Greg glanced toward Lissianna as she began to speak again.
“The way things stand, I can’t protect you if they’re determined to hold a council of three. I proved tonight that I can’t even protect myself. I didn’t even wake up until he was plunging the stake into me,” she said with self-disgust.
“Lissianna,” he chided.
“No. It’s true, but there
is
one way I can protect you.” Lifting her wrist to her mouth, she bit down into her own vein, then closed her eyes and pulled free of her teeth to hold her arm blindly out as blood bubbled to the surface. “The choice is yours.”
“Well that tears it. I haven’t got
enough blood here for one of them let alone them both.”
Greg lifted his head from Lissianna’s wrist at Thomas’s words and glanced toward the door to find that he and Mirabeau had both returned. When his gaze found the three bags of blood Thomas carried, Greg started to warn Lissianna not to open her eyes, but it was too late.
With a muttered “Oh damn,” she sagged into the mattress in a dead faint.
Mirabeau shifted on her feet and clucked with irritation, then said, “Why didn’t you warn me you were going to do this? It would have saved me waking up three neighbors in search of juice.”
Greg’s gaze slid to the pretty young blond woman at Mirabeau’s side. Orange juice wasn’t all she’d brought back. He was guessing the blonde was one of the neighbors she’d promised to bring back for Lissianna to feed on.
Mirabeau followed his gaze and sighed wearily. “Sit, Mary,” she ordered, then set the glass of juice she’d fetched on the dresser and crossed the room as her neighbor settled blank-faced on the chair by the door.
“How much did you have?” she asked.
Greg shook his head and opened his mouth to admit that he wasn’t sure, but moving his head set the room spinning. Closing his mouth, he sank weakly back onto the bed next to Lissianna without responding.
“Enough obviously,” Thomas answered for him. He joined her at the bedside and peered down at the pair of them, then glanced at Mirabeau to ask, “Have you ever overseen a turning?”
“No.” She arched an eyebrow. “You?”
He shook his head.
“This is going to get messy,” Mirabeau commented.
“Hmm.” Thomas nodded. “I’m thinking you don’t have enough neighbors for this situation.”
Mirabeau snorted, and the pair glanced at each other.
“Aunt Marguerite’s?” he asked.
Mirabeau nodded solemnly. “There’s no reason not to now, Lissianna’s seen to that.” She turned to glance back at the girl she’d left seated by the door. “So? Do we use Mary here?”
“Why bother?” Thomas asked. “Both of them need more than she could supply, and it will just slow us down.”
“Right. I’ll take her home then,” Mirabeau announced, and walked back to collect the girl.
“While you do that, I’ll call ahead and warn them. It’ll give Aunt Marguerite a chance to have more blood sent out to the house.”
Greg lay silent as they left the room, his heart thudding heavily in his chest as he tried to ignore the growing pain in his stomach. Lissianna had told him that they called the one who did the turning the sire, because the turning was a painful rebirth. He suspected the mild discomfort he was presently experiencing was nothing compared to what was coming.
“How are you feeling now?”
Greg grimaced at the question. Thomas had asked it at least twenty times in the last twenty minutes as they’d driven out to the house. He wished he’d stop. Every time the man asked the question, it seemed to focus all of Greg’s attention on the pain building and spreading throughout him. It had started in his stomach, an acidy eating-away sort of sensation that had been just bearable, but with every passing moment it grew worse and was slowly dispersing outward, spreading like a virus or cancer and eating away at him with sharp little teeth.
It had gotten so bad in just the half hour since he’d drank Lissianna’s blood that sweat had broken out on his brow, and Greg found himself clenching his teeth and hands as he struggled with the pain. His answers to Marguerite’s questions when she’d met them in the garage just moments ago had been monosyllabic at best. He was finding it terribly difficult to think past the agony consuming him.
“Take Dr. Hewitt to the rose room, Thomas,” Marguerite instructed, opening Lissianna’s bedroom door for Lucian Argeneau to carry his niece inside. “I shall be along in a moment, I just want to start Lissianna on her IV, then I will come see to Greg.”
“I can hook up the IV for you, Aunt Marguerite,” Jeanne Louise offered.
Marguerite hesitated, her gaze moving over Greg’s pale face as Thomas half carried him past, then she nodded. “Thank you, Jeanne Louise. I had Maria bring the IV and a cooler of bagged blood up right after Thomas called. If you could get her started for me, I will come check on her as soon as I can.”
“Yes, Aunt Marguerite.”
Greg saw Jeanne Louise follow her uncle into Lissianna’s room just before Thomas dragged him into the room next door.
“Put him in the bed, Thomas,” Marguerite instructed as she followed them inside.
Greg caught a glimpse of the ropes attached to the bedposts and glanced back sharply at Marguerite as she closed the door before Mirabeau, Elspeth, and the twins could trail them in. Marguerite saw his expression and grimaced as she moved to join them at the bed.
“Those are only to prevent you hurting yourself while in the midst of the turning, Dr. Hewitt. You are not a prisoner. I promise.”
Relaxing, Greg let Thomas ease him onto the bed. The moment he was flat on his back, Marguerite seated herself on the edge of the mattress and leaned forward to examine his eyes, though he hadn’t a clue what she was looking for.
“How long is it since Lissi offered her blood?” she asked, sitting back.
“About half an hour,” Thomas answered when Greg stared at her blankly, the answer suddenly eluding him when he knew he should know it.
Marguerite nodded and released a little breath that might have been relief. “It has not yet started then. It is still only in the preliminary stages.”
Greg felt his heart drop at these words. It hadn’t started yet? The agony he was experiencing was just the preliminary? Dear God.
“Thomas, I had Bastien call the labs and order some drugs to be sent over that might help Greg through this,” she said, as the door opened and Lucian and Martine entered. “Could you go downstairs and wait for them, please?”
“Drugs,” Lucian said with a snort of derision as Thomas left the room. “In my day we did not use drugs to
ease it. It was a rite of passage, and we took it like men…But I suppose men today are softer, they would not be able to stand the pain.”
“I don’t need drugs,” Greg said, pride making him rise to the bait the other man had offered. Lucian Argeneau had seemed to take an instant dislike to him during their interview the morning he’d first arrived, though Greg had no idea why. The only thing he could think was that the man had done a sweep of his brain and picked up on some of his less-sterling intentions toward Lissianna. Greg supposed he shouldn’t be surprised if the man took exception to his lusting after his niece.
“Lucian, stop it,” Marguerite snapped, then told Greg, “Yes, you do need the drugs.”
“No, I don’t,” he insisted, goaded to it by the superior expression on Lucian Argeneau’s face.
“Yes, you do,” Lissianna’s mother informed him firmly. “You are going to take them and like it.”
“I thought you said I wasn’t a prisoner?” Greg said testily.
“You aren’t,” Lucian Argeneau announced. “Marguerite, he is a grown man. If he does not want the drugs, you should not force them on him.”
She glanced at Lissianna’s uncle with exasperation, then sighed and turned to Greg.
“Are you sure?” she asked one last time. “It is a most painful and unpleasant experience without them.”
Greg wasn’t sure at all. He was already in enough pain that drugs were sounding pretty good, but with Lucian smirking at him from the foot of the bed, he’d have sooner bitten off his tongue than admit it. Nodding, he said, “I can take it.”
Lissianna’s mother opened her mouth to speak again, but Martine Argeneau moved to her side and placed a re
straining hand on her shoulder. “Let it be for now, Marguerite. The drugs will be here if he changes his mind.”
“Yes,” Lucian agreed. “It will be interesting to see how long he lasts before he’s crying like a baby and begging for the drugs.”
“You’ll have a long wait,” Greg promised him, and silently hoped that would be true.
“Well? Any luck?”
Lissianna recognized Mirabeau’s voice as she drifted toward consciousness, as well as Thomas’s when he answered, “No. They didn’t even bother to open the door this time. I listened in the hall for a minute though.”
“And?” This time it was Jeanne Louise who spoke.
“He’s mostly incoherent, moaning and occasionally—” He paused as a terrified scream came muffled from somewhere in the house, then finished dryly, “Screaming.”
“That poor man,” she heard Juli whisper unhappily.
“Makes you glad you were born one of us and not turned, huh?”
Lissianna blinked her eyes open to stare at Elspeth as she made that last comment. Standing at the foot of the bed, her cousin was eyeing the door uncomfortably, but turned to the bed, stilling when she saw her open eyes.
“You’re awake.”
Her cousins and Mirabeau immediately crowded around the bed, and Lissianna peered from one concerned face to the other with confusion. “What’s going on? Who’s screaming?”
There was a brief pause as the group looked uncomfortable and exchanged glances, then Jeanne Louise ignored her question, and asked, “How are you feeling?”
She considered the question, wondering why her cousin asked it with such concern, then memory returned
and Lissianna quite clearly recalled being staked. That lovely recollection was followed by a blur of pain-filled memories. She vaguely recalled waking up once before. She’d been in agony then and thought Greg had said they were at Mirabeau’s. Lissianna was sure something important had happened there, but couldn’t quite place what. It was all rather fuzzy.
Letting that go for the moment, she shifted experimentally in bed, relieved when she didn’t suffer any pain or discomfort. It seemed her chest was completely healed. Lissianna wasn’t even suffering any hunger pangs for a change.
“I’m fine,” she assured them, then realized that none of them should be there. Glancing sharply around the room, Lissianna realized that she was in her old bedroom at her mother’s and that it was
she
who shouldn’t be there. Suddenly, she recalled what the conversation with Greg had been about…and she remembered offering him her blood…and his accepting.
The last of her sleepiness ripped away, Lissianna sat up abruptly. “Greg! Is he all right?”
“He’s fine,” Jeanne Louise was quick to assure her. She stepped back out of the way as Lissianna tossed the blankets aside.
“We think,” Thomas added, as she surged to her feet.
Another scream made Lissianna pause and she stared around with horror at the faces of the people surrounding her.
“Is that him?” she asked weakly.
Six heads bobbed in reluctant admission and Lissianna sank back to sit on the edge of the bed and let out a shaky breath. “How long have I been out? How long has he been like this?”
“We arrived here about three hours ago,” Thomas told
her. “And he’s been like this for about…well, he’s been screaming for probably two.”
Lissianna’s gaze had been moving around the room, but paused on the empty bags on the bedside table. She turned on Thomas suspiciously. “I couldn’t have taken that many bags in three hours.”
“We were popping them on your teeth as well as using the intravenous,” Mirabeau explained, then shrugged. “You were unconscious anyway so it wasn’t like we had to worry about you fainting.”
“And your teeth suck it in much faster than the IV can drip it to you,” Jeanne Louise quietly pointed out.
“You were in a lot of pain, and we were trying to get you the blood you needed as quickly as possible,” Elspeth added.
Lissianna nodded and even managed a smile. She appreciated their caring for her. “Who’s overseeing Greg’s turning?”
“My mother, your mother, and Uncle Lucian,” Elspeth answered.
She nodded again. “And the staking? Do we know what happened? Who it was?”
Thomas tilted his head. “You don’t believe it was someone Uncle Lucian sent, then?”
“What?” Lissianna glanced at him with surprise. “No, of course not. He’d know that staking wouldn’t kill me. Besides, that’s kind of rough punishment for sneaking Greg out of here.”
“Greg thought it was them,” Mirabeau informed her, and Lissianna frowned.
“Well, he’d heard a lot about what the council does, he probably has a pretty grim picture of Uncle Lucian and the council.”
Thomas nodded. “Aunt Marguerite, Aunt Martine, and
Uncle Lucian were pretty upset to hear about the staking when I called. I’m sure they’ll look into it. Uncle Lucian probably already has someone doing so.”
Lissianna nodded, then got to her feet, grimacing at the stiffness of her blouse as she moved. The smell told her it was dried blood causing the cardboardlike stiffness of the cloth. Fortunately, the dark color didn’t show the blood; otherwise, she’d be fainting and back in bed.
“Maybe you should take a shower,” Elspeth suggested.
Lissianna shook her head. “I want to check on Greg first.”
“Lissi, they won’t let you in,” Thomas said quietly. “We’ve all tried to get in there to check on him, and they won’t even open the door anymore. They just shout that he’s fine and to go away.”
His words made her hesitate, but then Lissianna moved resolutely to the door. “I have to check on him. Where is he?”
“The room next door,” Elspeth murmured.
Nodding, she stepped into the hall, aware that the rest of them were following her. Their presence helped bolster her up so that when Lissianna reached the spare room, she didn’t hesitate and didn’t bother knocking, but simply opened the door and walked in.