Tainted Blood (41 page)

His head snapped around, and he bumped his table. I heard something fall. Next thing I knew, Felix’s angry voice boomed in my head, “Do not mention your father in front of Carter or anyone!”

Cringing away, I sucked in my breath and blinked at him several times. He spun back around and his hands worked quickly. Then he pushed himself back over to me, his sky blue eyes avoiding mine.

“I broke a vial,” he said levelly as he removed the cotton ball from my arm.

Carter disappeared again as Felix produced another needle. His eyes met mine as the blood slowly left my body. “I’m sorry, Delaney. I did not mean to snap at you.”

“It’s okay,” I responded quietly.

“I thought your father had made his safety concerns clear to you,” he said in my mind as he removed the needle and taped a fresh cotton ball to my arm.

I felt dizzy as I responded out loud, “I’m sorry, I just didn’t think.”

Felix pulled his old fashioned, black doctor’s bag out of the cabinet again and handed me another sucker, taking one for himself.

“That should help,” he told me with a smile, his dimple appearing. “How about the two of you take a walk
inside
the hospital while I work on this,” he suggested, nodding to the vials of my blood laid out next to a microscope on his cabinet.

“Okay,” I said as I slid off of the table.

He handed me another sucker as I passed by him. “For Carter,” he said. I nodded in response, and just before I stepped out the door he said, “Oh, and Delaney, could the two of you
please
try to stay out of trouble while work on this?”

I forced a smile and walked out the door. I couldn’t imagine what kind of trouble we could get into just walking around a vampire hospital but I’ll tell you what, I was damn positive my father was a vampire. Or in vampire protection.

I think I’d prefer he be a vampire.

I found Carter just outside the room and held the sucker up to him while I stuck my extra one in my pocket. Carter took the candy happily, and after shoving the wrapper into his front pocket, he popped it into his mouth.

“My arm feels great, Laney!”

“Cool,” I responded half-heartedly.

“Seriously, it does! You wanna arm wrestle?” I looked over at him, raising an eyebrow, and he smiled down at me, the stick to his sucker held between his teeth.

“I think I’ll pass.” We kept walking slowly down the dimly lit hallway.

“Chicken?” he chided playfully.

I raised an eyebrow again as I looked up at him. “Nah, I just don’t want to hurt you,” I said playfully. After all, I was pretty damn sure that I was half vampire.

“Ooh, ouch,” he joked, grinning at me again and bumping me off balance. I smacked at him as I caught myself. “Ooh, yeah, you’re super strong,” he said, rubbing his arm like I’d really hurt him.

“You are such a dweeb,” I said with a small laugh.

We continued walking and I lost myself in my thoughts. It wasn’t like this whole “dad being a vampire” thing was a total surprise. I’d been questioning it for a while now. There were too many holes, too many weird things that had been said to me...

As we wandered the halls, I played some of these “things” through my mind. But I also reminded myself again that he might just be under the protection of vampires, like Isaac and his family. Maybe my dad wasn’t a vampire after all. I really only got a couple of minutes to ponder any of this before Carter interrupted.

“Hey, Laney?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think this mixture of vamp and Were in my body will turn against me?”

I stopped and looked at him seriously. He stopped too. “No, I don’t think it will. Why?”

He shrugged and shoved his hands in his front pockets as his looked down at the floor. “I don’t know. I guess, maybe, well, because I finally feel like I belong somewhere. I feel like I finally fit in and I’m waiting for it to be ripped away from me.”

“Carter,” I said as I reached out and touched his arm. I had no clue Carter had ever felt like he didn’t fit in. His blue eyes lifted to mine. “You’ll be fine,” I told him. He beamed at me and then his phone beeped with a text.

He pulled his phone from his pocket and smiled. “It’s Kiera,” he told me as he responded to her message.

I waited as he and Kiera messaged each other back and forth for
a while
. The sound of a TV drew me to the far end of the hall. I recognized the voices from reruns of
Friends
,
and I guess I thought it would be nice to numb my mind while we waited for Felix to finish testing my blood.

As I reached the door, I found a familiar face. Not meaning to, I caught her attention and she smiled at me from a loveseat that sat under a high, blacked out window. It was Felicia, Justin’s very pregnant mate.

“Hi,” she said cheerfully.

“Hi,” I responded uncomfortably.

I was about to turn away when she said, “You look familiar.”

“Oh, um…” I didn’t know what to say and I figured, since she was part of the vampire world, I’d associate myself with one of them. “I’m Oliver Knight’s girlfriend.” It felt good to say it out loud. At the moment, that was all I had of him, the title of being his girlfriend. Plus, it was the only thing that made sense to tell her. She wouldn’t know me through him, but she might know who he was. And I was hoping she wouldn’t remember that I was one of the people she’d desperately pleaded to outside of Wal-Mart.

“That’s right!” she exclaimed, and it surprised me. “Oliver told me about you.”

“You’ve seen Oliver?” I questioned, probably a little too enthusiastically.

“Yeah, he’s been coming to check on me from time to time. I haven’t seen him in a while though.”

I imagined that she hadn’t.
N
one of us had.

“Laney, right?” she continued. I nodded, still somewhat taken aback. “You probably don’t remember me; we went to high school together,” she said. There were few people I remembered from high school and she was not one of them. “I graduated a year behind you.” That meant she was the same age as me since I graduated early, so I probably should have remembered her. “I think we had PE and history together sophomore year,” she told me.

I smiled and nodded like I remembered but I didn’t. Not at all.

“Come in,” she said, waving me into the room. She patted the spot next to her on the burgundy loveseat. I crossed the room, passed the bed that was centered in the room, and took an uncomfortable seat next to this unfamiliar girl whose boyfriend, her unborn child’s father, had died to save my life.

“So,” she said, “what are you up to nowadays?”

“Oh, uh, just school,” I said, hoping my fake smile didn’t show how uncomfortable I was. She smiled back, her hand resting atop her swollen belly. “So,” I began, “when is your baby due?”

“Around Christmas,” she said and looked down at her stomach for a moment and then back to me. “But she seems determined to make her debut much sooner than that.”

“You know it’s a girl?” I questioned.

She nodded happily and said, “Yeah, her name is Justine.”

“Ah,” I replied. The feminine version of her dad’s name, Justin.

It seemed like she knew I’d made the connection and asked, “Did you know her daddy?”

“I only met him once,” I told her forcing another smile.

“Whoa!” she exclaimed and I jumped. She looked down at her belly and then to me. “Do you want to feel her move? She’s really active right now.”

“Uh, sure,” I said with some hesitation.

She gave me a reassuring smile and took my hand, placing it on her swollen stomach. If I wasn’t uncomfortable before… Then something under my hand moved. I actually felt Felicia’s stomach move as the baby moved or kicked or something. “Wow,” I said under my breath and I actually smiled. A real smile and it felt good!

“Pretty cool, huh?” she said happily. I nodded as I removed my hand.

Carter found me talking to Felicia and introduced himself. I told him that we’d gone to school with her and he claimed that he remembered. I was pretty sure he was lying.

Felicia remembered us, though. A little too well, and I found that, well, weird.

“You hung out with Ashton and Tate, right?” she asked Carter.

“Yeah,” he said with a nostalgic grin. “We were inseparable back then.” That they were…

“Didn’t you date Tate, Laney?” she asked.

Carter’s eyes shot to me for a minute and then he answered. “They just went to the prom together.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. I didn’t need a reminder of why Tate and I had never become more than each other’s prom dates, but she crept into my mind anyway.
Avery
.

We chatted a little more about things Felicia remembered that we didn’t but pretended we did. Felicia asked Carter if he’d known Justin, and he told her that he’d never met him. I wasn’t sure Carter even remembered what I had told him about Justin.

Well, not until he totally spilled the beans and all hell broke loose.

A friend of Justin’s showed up while we were talking to Felicia. His name was Marcus and he was a vampire. That was not how he was introduced to us, but we soon found out that he was. And, since he was roaming the halls of the vampire hospital I’d kind of already figured.

So we had said our good-byes and nice-to-meet-yous, and Carter and I were standing just outside Felicia’s door while Marcus had taken a seat beside her on the couch where they were happily chatting. He was talking to her belly, and she was laughing.

Then my friend, who sometimes forgets his filter, says to me in a quiet voice, but still loud enough a vampire would hear, “That’s the girl we saw outside of Wal-Mart, right?” I nodded, hoping he was finished, but he was only getting started. “It was her boyfriend that got killed by that Were so you guys could get away, right?”

Well, that was the first sign that Marcus was a vampire, because he heard us. I was sure my eyes were huge when I stared up at Carter and mouthed, “Shut up!” When I turned my attention back to the couch, Marcus was already repeating to Felicia what he’d overheard. I watched in horror as her smile faded and she turned her attention toward us. I could see the heartbreak on her face. All her of happiness had disappeared.

Her words dripped with rage as she spoke to me. “Your
boyfriend
told me that Justin died a hero. He neglected to tell me it was to save his own ass and his precious, perfect Laney.” She pushed herself up off the couch. I took as step back and so did Carter. “You were trying to be my friend while all the while you knew. You knew! And you didn’t tell me!” Her voice was almost demonic sounding, and it was frightening how quickly she’d gone from that beautiful mother-to-be to a terrifying, scorned monster.

Marcus said something to her. He seemed to be egging her on. “Were you trying to play nice so that you could steal her from me too?” she spat. I could only I assume she was referring to her baby.

I tried to get words out but nothing would fit together quite right to make her pain stop. I pressed myself against Carter, wrapping myself around his newly healed arm.

Felicia shouted at us again and then she screamed a painful, bloodcurdling scream. She grasped the foot of the bed and hugged her stomach. Marcus grabbed ahold of her and held her up. Felix was there a moment later. He brushed past us as he hurried into the room. A nurse was right behind him.

Felix lifted Felicia into the bed, and from the other side the nurse began hooking all kinds of contraptions to her. Felicia continued to cry out in pain. Felix wrapped some sort of belt around her stomach, and the monitor it was attached began to beep frantically.

“Felicia,” he said, his voice booming over the commotion. “You need to calm down.”

“NO!” she screamed. “It was them!” She pointed at us through her pain.

Felix turned to us. “What is she talking about?”

Marcus butted in, “It was them!” he shouted. “They are the ones that got Justin killed.”

Felix’s eyes shifted from us to Marcus and then back to Felicia. He placed his hand on her forehead and a moment later she was sleeping soundly. When the beeps on the monitor slowed and stayed steady, Felix nodded to the nurse and she took over checking all of the cords and buttons and so on.

Felix then turned to Marcus, and in a very level voice he said, “Your visitation rights have been revoked and your application to adopt the Harding infant has just been flagged.”

That’s when it clicked who she was. Felicia Harding was one of Avery’s friends. She knew damn well that Avery stole Tate from me while we were at the prom. She knew that Avery and I had previously been friends. She also knew that nothing had happened between me and Tate, and she probably knew that Avery had just tried to steal Oliver from me…

Then I realized that if Felicia knew that Oliver was a vampire, Avery had to know, too. How could she not? I knew she’d seen too much, and who knew what happened between the two of them when he was “off” and they’d been behind closed doors. My stomach rolled but there wasn’t time to dwell on my sick and morbid (and hopefully not true) thoughts right then. There was a more pressing matter at hand.