Cam pushes his glasses up his nose. ‘I just spoke with the lab who’s researching your case, and they’ve confirmed what you already suspected– that you are turning, but at a rate far slower than usual.’
‘Ok,’ I say, trying my hardest to mask the twang of disappointment.
‘They’ve also confirmed that there’s an option for you to be fully turned sooner rather than later. There is a bit of a catch with that one, but the consensus there is that that would be the recommended course of action.’
That makes me sit up and take notice. If you’d have asked me a few months ago if I’d be interested in becoming something that primarily feeds on blood, I’d have laughed in your face. But somewhere along the line, I found something that scares me more than blood: losing Florence.
‘I have to say, I agree,’ Cam continues. ‘Obviously you could choose the timing and so on, but I’d suggest it be soon, before the strain on your body becomes permanent.’ He motions to himself with a self-deprecating smile. ‘Far better to be forever thirty than forever fifty-five, take it from me.’
‘I’ll do it,’ I say, before I have time to talk myself out of it. ‘Quick, one of you bite me.’
Cam frowns. ‘You don’t know what it entails yet.’
‘I don’t care,’ I counter, puffing out my aching chest. ‘I’ll do it.’
I look between the two men on either side of me. Bram is watching me closely, his brows pulled tightly in concentration. Cam shifts awkwardly in his seat. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him look awkward before.
Bram clears his throat. ‘Quinn, I think you should at least hear what the catch is.’
But I have a single focus now, and that is doing whatever it takes to win Florence back. I would walk through fire for that woman.
‘I’m telling you, I don’t care what it is, I’ll do it.’ I shrug, feigning confidence. ‘I’ll drink a pint of blood, whatever. I mean, I’ll probably be screaming and shaking while I do it, but I will. She’s worth it. She?—’
‘It has to be Abby,’ Cam blurts out. ‘Who turns you, I mean. In the experiments they did at the lab, it only worked when the host ingested blood from the same sire. When they introduced blood from a different vampire, the invading cells attacked each other and killed the host before either could establish dominance.’
It’s like a slap in the face. I’m pretty sure the last time I saw Abby, she told me that if she never saw me again, it’d be too soon. I told her I wanted to marry her and then hours later I said we should break up. Yeah, I might have burnt my bridges there.
‘You want me to call a girl I broke up with four years ago,’ I say slowly, ‘and ask her to turn me into a vampire?’
Cam squirms even more. ‘You don’t need to call her. We’ll do it.’ He brushes his hair off his face and tries not to look me in the eye. ‘But essentially, yes.’
All the air in my body leaves in one big sigh. ‘You know, we didn’t leave things on particularly good terms.’
‘It’s up to you,’ Bram says from my other side. ‘You don’t have to decide anything now.’
The coward in me wants to take that and run with it. Idon’t have to decide now. I don’t have to grovel at Abby’s feet. I could choose to do nothing for a while– to wait and see. But if I do choose that, it could also be a death sentence.
Cam shifts in his chair. ‘If we could at least find out who her sire is, we could ask them instead. Anyone along that bloodline would do, actually.’
I don’t listen to the coward in my head. He doesn’t speak for me. Not anymore. I’ve escaped death once already this week, and I’ll do anything I can to stop it coming for me again.
‘Call her,’ I say, bracing myself against the knot of unease in my throat. ‘It’s worth a try.’
ChapterThirty
FLORENCE
I’m just passing the abbey when I see the figure inside, barely more than a silhouette in the moonlight. There’s a secret, hopeful part of me that thinks it might be Quinn, here to tell me it was a misunderstanding, a near miss, nothing to worry about. But I’ve been alive long enough now to know that life rarely works out that way.
Nevertheless, curiosity gets the better of me, and I hop the wall and make my way across the field to the abbey. As I get closer, I realise that I recognise that silhouetted mass of curls.
‘Cam?’
He turns with a knowing smile, as though he’s been expecting me all along.
‘I was hoping I’d find you here,’ he says, the breeze doing insane things to his hair. ‘Your safe place, right?’
I nod. ‘Usually.’