Jeaniene Frost - Up From the Grave

Ever since I’d first met him, Tate had kept his brown hair in a buzz cut, a nod to his former days as a Special Forces sergeant. Now it was inches long, and the lower half of his face was shadowed by thick stubble, emphasizing his haunted expression. In the cell next to his was Juan, his mass of black hair now hanging past his shoulders while his skin looked pale even for a vampire. Dave was in the cell after his, looking equally unkempt and wan, but it was Cooper’s change in the second-to-last cell that made me gasp.

He’d lost thirty pounds at least, transforming his muscular frame into something gaunt. His normally tight haircut now resembled a seventies Afro, and his mocha skin held a sickly tinge of blue. It took me a second to realize it came from extensive bruising, with particular emphasis on his wrists, hands, and the crease inside his arms.

Needle sticks, I realized with a surge of fury. There was only one reason Madigan would bother with repeated blood draws or injections on a human. He was experimenting on Cooper.

My hands tightened on the edges of Bones’s bullet-riddled jacket. Wait for me, I silently repeated, feeling my anger grow. I have something to do before I see you again.

And with Denise here, now I had a better chance at succeeding.

Since none of my friends looked up when I passed, they must not be able to see out of their glass cells. My suspicion proved correct when one of my guards said, “Open Cell Eight” then my cart was unceremoniously pushed inside. When the glass door closed, all I saw was my own reflection underneath a pile of silver-and-razor netting.

“Didn’t you forget something?” I called out, knowing the employees had these rooms monitored for sound, too.

No response aside from the lasers on my cart disappearing. I sighed and leaned back against one of the poles, new tears slipping out as I glanced down at my husband’s body. From bones I rose and Bones I became, he’d said when he told me the story of how he chose his name after waking up as a vampire in a graveyard. That’s all he was now—bones—and the knowledge made my tears flow fast and red.

Then shock followed on the heels of pain as a click sounded in my triple sets of manacles and multiple knives stabbed me at once. When that pain began to slide through my entire body, searing my nerve endings as it went, I realized they weren’t knives.

They were needles injecting me with liquid silver.

I didn’t want to give the bastards monitoring me the satisfaction of hearing me scream, but after a few minutes, I did. Then I really didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of listening to me plead for it to stop, but after several agonizing hours of being burned from the inside out, I did that, too. No mercy came, however. Only mindlessness that led to darkness.

Iwoke up strapped to a table in a different room. Halogen lights dotted the ceiling with sunlike brightness, and I was so tightly restrained that my movements were limited to wiggling my toes, but to my relief, the horrific pain was gone.

“Ah, you’re awake,” a pleasant voice stated. “No doubt feeling better, too. We pulled the silver out of you by dissolving it with nitric acid, then flushing it out. It’s the only sure method when it penetrates that deeply.”

I tried to crane my head, but it was strapped down tight, too. Then I reached out with my mind. Most thoughts came through with the randomness of listening to the radio while scrolling through channels, but one person’s rang out clearly, and she was in this room.

Then a forty-something woman appeared in my limited line of sight, all but a few wisps of her ash blonde hair concealed by a medical cap. Her features were schooled into a polite mask, and her pale green gaze held the clinical detachment physicians everywhere had perfected.

Don’t bother trying mind control, she thought at me. I’m inoculated.

I tried it anyway. What did I have to lose? “Release me,” I said, putting all of my lagging power into my voice and gaze.

She didn’t even blink. “You only learn the hard way, don’t you?” she said out loud.

“Always,” I replied tightly. “Where’s my husband?”

A diffident shrug that landed her right after Madigan on my hit list. “The dead vampire? In the freezer.” With the rest of them, her thoughts finished.

I closed my eyes, a wave of grief crushing me beneath its weight. When I opened them, the female doctor had disappeared. I tested my restraints by applying pressure one limb at a time. Nothing. Then I tried heaving against them with everything I had, all at once.

Not even a budge. Madigan had spared no expense setting up a vampire-proof examination table.

“Now that you’ve gotten that out of your system,” the doctor’s voice said dryly, “how about some food?”

She returned to my line of sight, dangling a plasma bag with a long tube above me. I gave her fingers a brief, calculated look. Too far away to bite off. Clearly, I wasn’t her first captive.

Since I felt weaker than a baby vampire at sunrise, I caught the end of the tube between my lips and took a long sip. Then I grimaced.

“Wrong brand,” I said, spitting the tube out.

For the first time, the blonde showed a flicker of genuine emotion. Surprise. “You were drained almost dry to extract the silver in you. How can you refuse to eat based on mere blood type preference?”

She was right; I was so hungry that I ached, but for me, this wasn’t food.

“It’s not the type, it’s the source. I don’t drink human blood.”

Her forehead creased, deepening the fine lines already visible. “But you’re a vampire.”

“I’ll just call you Dr. Obvious,” I muttered.

At that, her expression cleared back into its serene clinical mask. “You’re not my first problem child. If you refuse the blood orally, it will be injected into you. Director Madigan has ordered extensive lab work once you’re rehydrated.”

I bet he had. “I’m sure Madigan told you I was a special case, but he doesn’t know as much as he thinks. Like the fact that I drink vampire blood, not human.”

I’d cracked that icily pleasant exterior again. Her eyes widened, and she parted her lips as though she were about to argue. Then she pursed them closed, nodding.

“I’ll inform the director. If he approves it, we’ll have some vampire blood brought to you.”

“Bagged like that won’t work,” I said, thinking fast. “It has to be straight from the vein of a vampire in my undead family tree, or I’ll starve, and Madigan won’t get his precious samples. Luckily for him, he has two vampires that my husband sired right here.”

I didn’t know when Denise would make her move, but if Tate or Juan were out of their cells when she did, so much the better. Now, to hope that Madigan believed my unusual diet requirements.

Dr. Obvious stared at me long enough to make the average person either squirm or blurt out a confession. I did neither. The worst thing in my life had already happened, so aside from grief and murderous rage, the rest of me was numb.

“I’ll let you know what the director says,” she finally replied. Then she disappeared from sight.

I closed my eyes against the glare of the overhead lights. I had nothing to do but wait, but soon, I’d be able to kill.

And once I was done with that, I’d be able to die.

About an hour later, several people came into the room, from the noise and sudden spate of thoughts. Again I tried to crane my neck and only succeeded in cutting the metal strap into my head deeply enough to draw blood. I didn’t have long to wait to find out who my visitors were, though. Two voices cut through the other sounds, both familiar, but only one welcome.