Lora Leigh - Primal

The alarm woke me.

When I forced my eyes open, my head screamed with pain. I lay on my side in an awkward position on the floor, staring straight into the glazed eyes of Dr. Reynolds. Blood oozed down his forehead.

Dr. Reynolds was supposed to help save my life. He was my beacon of hope. My beacon of hope was now dead as a doornail.

The ear-piercing alarm made it difficult to think, but I knew I had to get out of here. I pushed myself up to my feet and scanned the room. White walls, gray linoleum floor, empty metal chair, stainless steel examination table to my right.

My heart slammed against my rib cage when I saw Declan lying on the opposite side of the room. He was badly hurt and not moving. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing. There was blood—a lot of it. Stumbling, I ran to his side and fell to my knees next to him.

“Declan, no!” I could barely hear my panicked voice above the sound of the alarm. “Please, please don’t be dead!”

For a long, horrible moment there was no reaction. But then his chest hitched and he opened his gray right eye. He blinked. “Jill—” His deep, raspy voice sounded as weak as I’d ever heard it, and that worried the hell out of me. “You—you need to get out of here. Now. It’s not safe. Get out and run as fast and as far as you can.”

I nodded. “Sounds like a good plan. Come on”—I grabbed hold of his muscled arm—“get up!”

He shook his head, the movement barely noticeable. “Leave me. Save yourself.”

Anger pushed its way forward. “Stop being a bad movie cliché and get on your feet. I’m not going anywhere without you.”

His jaw clenched. “I’m hurt.”

“You’ll heal.”

“I’ll be slow. I’ll try to catch up. Find Jackson. He’ll help you get out of here, and then—”

“No, listen to me, Declan.” I gulped a breath to help give me courage. “We got into this mess together and that’s exactly how we’re getting out.”

He glared at me. “Jill—”

“No.” My throat hurt from shouting over the alarm. “I’m not leaving without you. If you’re going to just give up and die right here, that means I am, too. So if you really want me to live to see another day, then you’re going to have to do the same damn thing. Do you understand me?”

The fire in his gaze, ignited thanks to my stubbornness, faded a bit around the edges.

“Well?” I touched his face, wiping the blood away from a cut on his forehead. “What’ll it be, dhampyr?”

His eye narrowed before he finally answered. “Fine. Help me up.”

“That’s more like it.”

I grabbed his arm and helped him to his feet as much as I could, considering I was a full foot shorter than him. He leaned his nearly six and a half feet of solid muscle against me. His gaze moved toward Dr. Reynolds and the growing pool of blood forming a wet, red halo around the dead man’s head.

“Fuck,” he said under his breath.

“Just what I was thinking.”

“You know what this means.”

“Yeah,” I said, grimly. “It means I’m definitely going to die. But it won’t be here. And it won’t be now.”

One look at Declan confirmed to me that he’d fought with Lawrence and lost. Several deep knife wounds were in the process of healing. I tried not to worry about that, but it was difficult. He wasn’t dead, and for that I was very grateful.

“I’m still feeling the tranq effects,” he growled, straining to be heard over the loud alarm. “That’s going to make this harder. And I don’t have my stake—Lawrence must have taken it.”

“Let’s try to stay positive.”

“You go ahead and do that. I’m going to be a realist.”

“And what does your realist self tell you?”

“It tells me that I’m in rough shape and healing slower than I’d like.” His grip on me tightened. “My phone’s set to vibrate—someone’s calling. Grab it.”

Without thinking twice, I slipped my hand into the inner pocket of Declan’s jacket and took out his cell phone, stabbing at the answer button and holding it to my ear.

“Yeah?”

“Jill? Is that you?”

“Who the fuck is this?”

“It’s Jackson. Glad to hear your voice, too.”

My grip on the phone tightened as I shouted into it. “Where the hell are you?”

“A level down from you, I think. What the fuck happened?”

I hurriedly explained to him about the vampire on the rampage.

“Shit. That explains it. The vampires have been let out of their cells down here. At least a dozen of them, maybe more. You need to get out fast. Is—is Declan dead?”

“No. But he’s wounded.”

There was silence for a moment. “Find the nearest stairwell. Don’t try to use the elevator, it’s been knocked out. If you see a vampire, kill it. Just don’t let them get too close or you won’t have a—”

The line cut out.

“Jackson? Are you there? Shit.” I shoved the phone back into Declan’s coat and tried my best not to worry about what just happened to Declan’s vampire-hunting pal. “We have to move. Lawrence must have gone completely batshit crazy because he released everybody from their cages and they’re hungry. We have to get out of here.”

He looked understandably grim. “It’s daylight. They won’t be able to come outside.”

Sunlight didn’t kill vampires. However, it did fry their eyes, making them blind and much easier to kill. Because of this, they much preferred the nightlife. Point for us.

But that was only if we could get outside.

I’d known this felt wrong from the moment we got here. I’d been so greedy to find a solution to my problem that it had blinded me to everything else.

“Come on.” I pulled Declan with me toward the door before I froze. Something Dr. Reynolds said came back to me. “There’s another woman, other than Lawrence’s wife, who’s being kept here for his dhampyr breeding research. She’s in danger. We can’t just leave her here.”

His arm was tense, his expression flat and hard to read. “If we can get to her, then we will. If we can’t, my first priority is to get you out of here in one piece.”

“But Declan—”

“No, Jill. This isn’t up for debate. We’re out of here.”

Faster than I thought he was currently able to move, he pulled me along with him to the door of the office. It was already open, the hinges broken as if Lawrence had taken out some of his rage on them.

Dr. Reynolds had chosen his research over friendship and loyalty. He tried to convince himself he was one of the good guys, but keeping a woman locked away until she gave birth to a monster that ripped her apart—that wasn’t something a good guy would do. I felt Lawrence’s pain, but this wasn’t right. I was just thankful he hadn’t killed me or Declan yet. All we could do was try to get out of here before he found us again and finished what he’d started.

Declan leaned against me as we walked, and that worried me. He was also dripping blood from his more severe wounds. As a dhampyr, he’d heal quickly, but not quickly enough.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Never better.”

Emotionless, yes. But not without the capacity for sarcasm.

We had to keep moving. The underground facility was huge, with mazelike hallways. The debilitated warehouse on the surface was only the proverbial tip of the iceberg to what lay beneath.

The lights flickered in the hallway. Suddenly the blare of the alarm cut out, and the resulting silence seemed as loud and as frightening as the noise had been. I strained my ears, trying to hear beyond the sound of our own steps, but there was nothing.

“It’s not the wounds that are slowing me down like this,” Declan said after a moment, cutting through the eerie silence. “It’s something else.”