“Fucking Frank Greisser,” Cage muttered.
Mirren looked at him and gave a single nod. “Tell us how they changed you, and what you can and can’t do.”
“Wait.” Glory pulled a spare chair from against the wall and dragged it to a spot in the room that was more conversation spot than interrogation spot. She held out a hand to Shawn. “Up you go.”
Shawn looked at Mirren, who gave another slight nod. Nik had never seen him not give Glory her way, although he was glad Shawn was cooperating. If she hadn’t, he wasn’t sure even Glory’s plea for mercy would carry much weight.
The unexpected kindness finally broke through Shawn’s resigned calm, and she cried for a few minutes before taking a deep breath. Mirren and Cage just stared at her, while Nik and Robin both had to look away.
“Once I agreed to do it, a vampire came to me. I never knew his name. He was young, handsome, and when he began feeding from me I thought I’d gone to heaven. I’d never been fed from before. He said it was . . . powerful, feeding from a shifter.”
Mirren blinked at that, and Nik figured that’s what he’d had a taste of when he bonded Robin. Shawn had taken him halfway to heaven earlier tonight, and while he hoped he’d turn her down if the opportunity arose again, he couldn’t make any guarantees. On the other hand, he could probably find a female vampire who’d deliver the same results without his losing an ear.
But that thought brought up an interesting question. “If Shawn is bonded to Will, why didn’t he know she was being disloyal and warn us?”
“Will’s been out of range since long before the fire,” Cage said, and then turned back to Shawn. “How were you turned?”
“He turned me the usual way, I guess,” Shawn said. “He drained me to the point of death, and then began to feed me his blood until my body changed enough to accept it. I was sick for months before I started to level off to what’s become normal.”
She turned back to Mirren. “To answer your other questions, I can’t go out in sunlight anymore,” she said. “I can’t eat solid food, yet I’m so damned hungry all the time. I smell it, I crave it, but if I eat it, my body rejects it. Blood’s the only thing that keeps me alive, but I hate it. Seems like I’m always starving and always sick and always angry.”
“Even when you’re a coyote you can’t go in the sun or eat?” Robin leaned forward.
Shawn shook her head. “No. It’s kind of the worst of both worlds. I don’t know how another person might react . . . Wait, you said there’s another one like me here? A shifter turned vampire?”
Mirren raised his gaze to meet Cage’s. “Find Fen Patrick. Now.”
CHAPTER 28
Robin was surprised to see Nik still up when she and Cage returned from their failed mission to find Fen. They’d run into Mirren as he hauled Shawn, still with duct tape in place, to the silver-lined room down in the old Omega facility. It was their most secure site. Afterward he planned to meet Glory at the lieutenants’ daysleep space.
She’d expected to have the living room all to Cage and herself, but there Nik sat, wide awake at 3:00 a.m.
“You should be asleep.” She did her mother-hen thing that always annoyed him, feeling his forehead with the back of her hand. His bandages still looked good except the wound on his ear had bled through.
The thing that really worried her—whether Nik had taken in enough shifter DNA through his bites to turn hybrid—was something that Nik hadn’t considered yet. She didn’t plan to mention it unless he did, but she’d sure as hell be keeping an eye on him.
Cage came from the kitchen with three glasses and a bottle of Mirren’s private stock of scotch that he kept under the sink. So sue her, she’d snooped. She grinned at him. “Does our host know you found his secret stash?”
Cage smiled but not very convincingly. “Do I care?”
“Brave words, big man.”
Her attempts to cheer him up hadn’t been successful all evening. Not when he’d first learned the suspicions about Fen. Not when they’d scoured all of Penton trying to find him and had come up empty. Especially not when they’d revisited the space under the greenhouse, although it had surprised her to learn how claustrophobic he was.
Nik had sucked down his scotch way too fast but had finally stretched out on the sofa, so she propped a hip on the arm of Cage’s chair, hoping he’d invite her to join him. He finally snaked an arm around her waist and pulled her onto his lap. Who’d ever have guessed her stuffy British vampire was a snuggler? A good one.