She smiled until she saw his expression, then got up and padded to the dresser. He was glad her back was turned so he couldn’t see her face when she found the bottle. He heard it rattle, and then the long silence began.
She was wondering if he’d stolen them. How many he’d taken. He couldn’t blame her; it had been his pattern, after all, so he steeled himself for her anger.
When she turned around, though, she looked confused. “You haven’t taken any of these, or I would’ve been able to tell when I fed.” She studied the bottle. “It’s a generic prescription label, too. Krys wouldn’t have given you oxy—where did they come from?”
Struggling with the gravity that wanted him to remain on his back, he used his arms to push himself into a sitting position. The back twinges were fainter; maybe the vampire high had staved it off for a while. “I found it sitting on the dresser when I got in tonight. I’d been over at the Chow House with Nik Dimitrou. I know it didn’t come from Krys. She had to think hard about giving me freaking ibuprofen.”
Melissa returned to sit on the bed. “You think someone deliberately set them there who knew your history and wanted to get you hooked again?” She rolled the bottle in her hand, shook it, examined it again. “Anybody have keys to this house except you and Aidan and Krys?”
They looked at each other as one answer dawned: Britta.
Without a word, Mark got up, slipped into his shoes, and followed Melissa toward the front door. They didn’t need to discuss what came next: they had to talk to Aidan.
CHAPTER 18
Nik hadn’t been this tired in recent memory. He’d been worse off after slogging through waist-deep mud and muck during Ranger School survival training. His muscles had hurt worse after his last tour of duty in Afghanistan when his unit got pinned in their mountain outpost for forty-eight hours. But after the having the lining of his lungs seared, keeping vampire hours, keeping human hours, and now approaching vampire hours again? Something had to give.
Robin had fared better—not just because she was a shifter and had better physical tolerance, as much as it annoyed him to admit that, but because she was a professional napper. Leave the woman in silence for more than a minute, and she’d be asleep.
Tonight, though, she was nowhere to be found, and if he were a betting man, he’d wager a paycheck she was soaring somewhere high above Penton. Flying relaxed her, cleared her head, helped her think. He’d also wager a paycheck she was thinking—at least a bit—about Cage Reynolds.
And about the three chunks of blue glass. He’d found them on his bed, no note or anything. She’d be too cautious to leave his drawing lying around. He decided to take a nap before picking them up and using his Touch, however, because training time would be coming up soon and he’d be back on the vampire clock.
He’d spent the afternoon running Mark Calvert around town to tend to Penton business. The town might be in ruins, but it still had utility bills to pay; a burned house whose electricity needed shutting off; and a couple of small work crews of humans to check on, making slow progress hauling off the rubble of what had been, a year ago, a thriving little vampire-human community. He’d even taken Mark to pick up the mail; everyone kept post office boxes in the nearest town, LaFayette, ten miles down a road to nowhere.
Nik used the back of his hand to shove the glass pieces aside and stretched out on the brown-and-green patchwork quilt. The longer he lay there with his eyes closed, the stronger the pull grew to pick the damned things up.
Shit. He rolled over and looked at them, steeled his mind for whatever might be headed its way, and wrapped his fingers around the largest chunk, grasping it in his fist. An image flashed behind his closed eyelids: a canine—the one in his drawing, but it wasn’t a wolf. Smaller, maybe a coyote, with a yellowish coat and cream underbelly. What made it stand out was its muzzle, not carrying the bottle but coated in blood. Blood dripped from its mouth, colored its bared teeth red. He didn’t just see it; he felt it. It was hungry, but more than that it was angry. So, so angry.
He released the chunk of glass onto the bed and waited for his mind to clear before picking up the second. Where the first one had been the size of a large marble, this one was more like a button. From it came only the vision of a soundless explosion followed by a rush of flame, the image of a smoke-filled room, the struggle to breathe, the urgency of escape.
Nik tossed that one off the edge of the bed in his frenzy to get rid of it, and he lay panting for a minute, waiting for his heart to find its normal rhythm, for his brain to remind his skittering nerve endings that it was a memory, and not even his memory. He was safe. He would not burn. Whoever, or whatever, had been with this glass in the fire hadn’t been so sure.