Virna DePaul - Turned

And someone—someone Ty suspected had to be a powerful vampire, maybe the same vampire that had been protecting Ana all this time and wasn’t Miguel as Ty had initially suspected—knew it.

Beside him, Ana stirred and murmured his name. Ty turned his head and pressed a kiss to her sleep-flushed cheek.

“Shh,” he whispered. “I’m here. I’ll always do my best to protect you.” He tried to say he’d keep her safe. That nothing would harm her. That he wouldn’t let anything harm her.

But he couldn’t say the words.

He wanted them to be true, but part of him doubted his ability to actually protect her.

How could he win a fight with a vampire powerful enough to invade his mind yet remain unseen? Unidentified?

Ty wrapped his arms tighter around Ana. He might not win but …

“I’d die for you, Ana. I love you.”

The next day, Ty sat at a picnic table across from the compoundlaundry facility. The wood was smooth and new. No carved initials, no emblems. He didn’t know why he’d expected to see any.

The laundry workers seemed to be mostly women from what he could see through the steamy windows. Red bins trundled toward the low building on a noisy conveyor belt, holding what looked like towels and linens. The women shoving the bins from a truck onto the belt didn’t look his way, calling to each other in Spanish.

He slipped the encrypted phone out of his pocket and checked his messages. Carly had texted him the results of the drone images he’d requested.

Second pipe inactive. Leads to portion of the main house next to kitchen. Check it out then plan your exit strategy .

That last part surprised Ty.

? he texted back.

Have a bad feeling. Need to regroup. Over and out . Which was Carly’s way of saying the conversation was done.

Shit. She was spooked. Carly didn’t spook easily. Now Ty was spooked even more than he had been.

But he also had a new lead.

An area next to the kitchen to check out.

He just needed Ana to help him with his cover.

“Cherry pie?” Ana said in an amused voice. “Honestly, Ty, you get the weirdest cravings.” She turned to Mrs. Tobia and smiled. “Thank you so much for letting us use the kitchen. Cooking together is one of our favorite activities,” she said in Spanish.

The older woman laughed at Ana’s joke.

As she left, Ana fiddled with various supplies until she and Ty felt they were alone. Ty pointed to a hallway to the left of the kitchen. “Stay close,” he mouthed.

She did. Methodically, they searched each room off the kitchen. Eventually, they came to the final room and still hadn’t found anything.

After scanning the room for bugs with his smartphone, Ty cursed. “I was sure we’d find something!” Ty explained. “Those pipes …” He shook his head. “You were right, Ana. Maybe there isn’t anything bad going on here. Let’s get back to the kitchen and make that pie in case Mrs. Tobia returns.” With a defeated sigh, he left.

Ana was about to follow him, but she paused to look around the room. The walls were bare, without pictures or a single piece of furniture or wall sconces. It was essentially wasted space. Why?

After a brief hesitation, she left, too, but the question stayed in her mind. She thought about it the rest of the day. By sunset, she still didn’t have an answer. But she did have a plan. One that involved retrieving the bottle of luminol she’d brought with her.

Twenty minutes later, she and Ty were back inside the bare room by the kitchen, staring at what she’d discovered.

The luminol revealed latent blood on the room’s floor. Not just traces of blood, but lots of it. The spatters outlined black squares, evenly spaced. Ty visualized the chairs that had been there. An irregular shape in one corner. He could almost see the curled-up corpse of a victim who’d bled out on the floor, neglected until it was too late by the ghouls in charge.

The outline was big and blocky. A man. Had he tried to pull out the needle draining every drop of his blood? Tried to escape?

Ty studied the unearthly scene in numbed silence. He saw more. An outline of a broken chain. A snakelike coil of surgical tubing. A scrawled word. Ayudenos .

Help us .

Ty blinked as the light came on again. Ana stared back at him, her face pale, her features pinched.

“You were right,” she said. “About everything. You were right.”

“Princess,” he said, his heart aching for her. But as he stepped toward her, intent on folding her in his arms, she shook her head and stepped back. Whirling around, she ran from the room.

Ran from him.

Ty barely stopped himself from going after her. Give her time, he told himself. A few minutes to sort things out. Meanwhile, he searched the walls, something he cursed himself for not doing earlier. He found the secret compartment with the chute that propelled the bottled blood through the PVC pipes and to the loading bay. He was taking pictures with his smartphone when the wave of dizziness hit him and he blacked out.

Ty came to. For several moments, he didn’t know where he was. The last thing he remembered was Ana spraying that room with luminol. Seeing the results. Finding the chute.

He didn’t remember anything after that, but he felt dizzy. Nauseous. Was he sick? Did vampires even get sick?

He was outdoors. Underneath some kind of tree, with moonlight shining through the branches.

Unable to comprehend the present, he cast his mind back to the recent past. What had he eaten? The fare at the compound didn’t vary.

At breakfast, he’d had the same thing he’d had the morning before, and the morning before that. Animal blood supplied by—

His eyes widened, but he couldn’t move any other part of his body. Had Miguel put something in the blood he’d given him? Had they been slipping him slow-acting poison a little at a time, so that he was only now feeling its full power?

Ty tried to sit up but he couldn’t.

“Hey.” A female voice broke through his racing thoughts. Ana’s sister. “Are you okay?” Gloria asked. “Do you want me to get Ana?”

She was taunting him in a malevolent voice far different than anything she’d used before now. “Oh wait. I can’t. She’s going to have her own shit to worry about soon. But tell me. What hurts? Because I really, really want to know.”

Nothing, he wanted to say. Everything. And it was true. Technically, he wasn’t in significant pain, but the knowledge that he had been poisoned, that Gloria had known about it, and that Ana was going to be defenseless without him, made him want to roar with agony.

He strained to move. Could feel his muscles tensing and the veins in his neck bulging. He tried mentally commanding her to let him go, hoping he could exercise some kind of mind control the way he had seemed to with Bobbie Hernandez.

None of it did him any good.

He was utterly paralyzed. His mind wasn’t working right.

He hadn’t felt this helpless since he’d learned his sister was dead. That had almost killed him. If anything happened to Ana—

God, Ana.

After fleeing that horrible room, Ana had immediately jumped into the shower, but no matter how hard she scrubbed, she couldn’t wash the stink of betrayal and despair off her.

Oh, God, those people. Those poor people, she thought.

She needed to get dressed. Needed to get back to Ty. Needed to get out of here—

Ana was drying off when she heard Ty moving around inside the room. He’s back, she thought. He came to check on me and I’m going to tell him. I’m going to tell him that despite the fact he was right, I don’t hate him. I’m not going to be a coward. Not this time.