“No,” Seth answered.
“Is she bleeding internally?”
“No.”
“Her pulse is thready. Are you trying to heal her?”
“Yes. I’m pouring as much strength and energy into her as I can,” Seth said.
“As am I,” David added.
“And I.” Zach said.
Minutes ticked past. Minutes during which the babe’s cries quieted to snuffles. Since the doctors were occupied with Ami, Lisette assumed Roland and Sean were cleaning up the baby. Wrapping her in a warm blanket. Doing . . . whatever it was that doctors and nurses did to newborns.
“Ami?” Marcus repeated, his voice choked and barely climbing above a whisper. “Come on, sweetling. Don’t do this to me. Don’t leave me. Please.”
“The incisions are starting to heal,” Dr. Kimiko announced. “Her pulse is getting stronger.”
“Her blood pressure is improving, too,” Melanie murmured.
Lisette conveyed the latest to the Seconds present.
More minutes.
More knees bobbing up and down.
More nail chewing.
“She’s stable,” Dr. Kimiko announced.
“Seth?” Marcus asked.
“I think Ami has slipped into her healing sleep,” Seth told him.
“You think or you know?”
A pause. “I think. If she has, it’s different this time, perhaps because we depleted her energy and kept her from healing long enough for the babe to be born.”
“Is she going to be okay?”
“Yes.”
“Seth,” Zach said, a faint reprimand.
“She’ll be okay,” Seth insisted, “if I have to feed her energy twenty-four hours a day until she wakes up. She’ll be okay.”
Seated at his desk in network headquarters, Chris Reordon rubbed eyes that burned from fatigue. He’d pulled too many all-nighters lately, trying to help Seth track down whoever the hell was betraying the Immortal Guardians. Now one of the vampires had admitted to leaving the area he was allowed to roam at headquarters and had stolen high-tech equipment, so Chris had to watch last night’s surveillance video to see what else the young vamp might have gotten into.
Dragging his hands down his face, he eyed with longing the cushy seven-foot sofa that had been his sleeping place more often of late than his bed at home. He looked at the clock.
No. He needed to get this shit done, so he could fill Seth in as soon as Seth finished helping Ami. Another concern.
Sheldon, of all people, had been thoughtful enough to text Chris and send him updates. According to the last, the babe was breathing (it had been a long damn wait for that text after Sheldon had texted him that the babe wasn’t breathing), but Ami had slipped into what Seth and the others hoped was a healing sleep and remained unresponsive.
Seth continued to try to revive her.
Chris forced himself to refocus on the computer screen. Nearly the size of one of the large-screen televisions every sports fan dreamed of owning, it bathed his office in faint blue light. A sleek desk lamp provided a small circle of sunny illumination in which his trusty notebook and pencil rested.
Multiple windows divided the monitor’s screen, each offering video surveillance footage from the cameras on sublevels four and five. Chris touched the space bar on the keyboard and set all of the videos into motion.
He had feigned anger earlier when the young vampire had admitted his deed, but it had just been for show. Since Cliff, one of the first three vampires ever to reside at network headquarters, had made this his home, he had won Chris’s respect. Descending into madness was a harsh price to pay for a stupid mistake made in one’s teen years. And Cliff had succeeded longer than any of the others in staving off the insanity. The young man had a will as strong as iron. Courage, too. And honor. Chris couldn’t help but like him.
Did Chris like that Cliff had flagrantly disobeyed the rules and stolen from the network?
No. But Chris sure as hell admired the kid’s reasons for doing it. And the tracking device Cliff had planted would provide them with invaluable information. Chris’s tech team already worked on tracing the newbie vampire’s return to what they hoped would be the vampires’ lair.
Chris was curious to see what the lair of such well-trained vampires would comprise.
He grunted when the footage he sought finally rolled around. “There he goes,” he murmured, scribbling the camera number and video time code in his notebook.
Biting into an apple, Cliff strode down the hallway toward the open door of Melanie’s office and headed inside. Anyone not specifically looking for it would have missed the barely noticeable blur that shot from the room a few minutes later.
Chris turned his attention to the camera focused on the elevator doors and rewound the video several frames. Dr. Whetsman stepped off the elevator and greeted Todd and the other guards. At the last possible moment before the elevator doors slid closed, Cliff swept inside. A couple of guards looked around with a frown, but most hadn’t noticed the breeze the vamp created as Dr. Whetsman distracted them with his latest bitch fest.