“Agreed,” Mencheres said. “I’ll set it up at once.”
“You want to have a party?” I asked, not sure if I was hearing them right. “That’s your big idea?”
“There are still ghouls who consider you a threat to their species,” Bones replied. “One in particular, Apollyon, has made the most noise about you. Showing him and the others that you’re a vampire will get rid of that problem. It will also garner goodwill toward us with the other vampires in the community, which we’ll need when Gregor has his unfortunate, gruesome demise.”
Cold and practical. Those were Bones’s strong suits. If I wanted my mother back alive, they’d better become mine as well.
“Good thinking.” My smile was bitter. “If I’d listened to you more often, my mother probably wouldn’t be in this mess.”
Bones grasped my chin. “Don’t you dare blame yourself. How many people you’ve protected in your very young life is nothing short of remarkable. You place too much pressure on yourself. All the answers don’t have to come from you, Kitten. You’re not alone anymore.”
For all but the two years Bones had been in my life, it felt like I’d been alone. No wonder it was such a hard mind-set for me to break.
“Okay, we’ll have my undead unveiling party. I’ll even suck on a human’s vein in public if that helps, since I assume we’re still keeping my eating habits under wraps.”
Bones shrugged. “I see no reason to alarm anyone over something so trivial, so yes, we’ll be keeping that a secret. But there’s no need to do something so dramatic. You’re clearly a full vampire now. That’s all anyone needs to see.”
“Where will this coming-out party be held?”
“Here. We’ve stayed in this house long enough. We’ll have the gathering here, then depart for another place afterward. And then, soon, we’ll find a way to rescue your mum.”
I was looking forward to that. Right now, slicing through Gregor’s guards sounded more fulfilling than anything else I could imagine.
But what if I couldn’t slice through his guards? I could be as weak as any new vampire now. There hadn’t been time to test my physical strength in the past few days. Only my mental fortitude as I got over the hunger insanity.
“Bones. We need to fight.”
To my profound relief, I discovered my strength had not been reduced to that of an average new vampire. In fact, Bones had been stunned in our first fight when I’d taken advantage of his restrained attack and beaten him. He’d gaped in shock at the knife in his chest—steel, not silver—then tossed back his head and laughed before engaging me in a no-holds-barred assault that left me feeling like I’d been dropped off a cliff—and then run over by a train.
My recovery period was now lightning fast in comparison to what it had been as a half-breed, but there was a price to pay for those upgrades. Everything felt more intense. This was great when it came to bedroom activities, but not when it came to brawling. A broken bone or knife wound might heal in seconds, but those seconds hurt with a mind-numbing intensity. Bones explained it was because my body no longer went into shock. No, it just went right from scorching pain into complete healing, assuming I was fast enough to not get any new injuries before the old ones cleared up.
The other thing I discovered was how different it felt to be cut with silver versus another metal. Never before had I realized how strong vampiric aversion was to silver, or how much my being half-human had shielded me from it. When injured by silver, I had all the blasting pain of my nerve endings going into shock, plus an added burning agony that made a steel-inflicted wound feel like bliss in comparison.
I’d have to learn how to control my instinctive reaction to the new, amped-up levels of pain. Right now, they stumbled me and cost me time. Time I couldn’t afford with the looming battle to get my mom back.
Four days passed with no word about my mother. I spent them in constant activity—when I wasn’t immobilized from dawn’s power over me. I found that the more blood I drank from Bones, the more I could force myself to stay awake as the sun crept over the horizon. I was up to being awake for an hour after dawn. Granted, that hour consisted of being in a state of near paralysis, but it was progress, though there was no meter for me to compare my progress to. I wasn’t the world’s only known half-breed, but apparently, I was the only one who’d been turned into a vampire. No one knew how long a typical new vampire’s weakness to dawn would affect me. I could be doing cartwheels at sunrise in a week—or it might take me a year.