Once Bitten, Twice Burned(33)
“Maybe now that you have it, you’ll be strong enough to get out.”
He heard the guards coming. Wyatt had realized his little plan had just gotten screwed.
But Sabine hadn’t.
“Come back for me, okay?” She tried to smile. If he’d been human, Ryder was sure that smile would have broken his heart. “When you’re free, promise to come back for me.”
The guards wrenched open the door. They came in with their guns up. “Step away from her!” Wyatt shouted.
Ryder turned toward him. Bared his fangs. “Why don’t you come and make me?”
Wyatt merely smiled back. “Fine. She’s behind you. I’ll just have the guards shoot until the bullets blast through you and penetrate her flesh again and—”
“How do you want to die?” Ryder asked him, genuinely curious as he made his plans. “It’s going to be a slow death, but do you want me to start by cutting your flesh away? Or—”
“Death doesn’t come so easily to me.” Wyatt’s mouth tightened. “If it did, do you think I’d be here?”
Interesting response. “So that’s a yes for cutting your flesh away?”
The doctor’s cheeks flushed dark red with what Ryder suspected was raw fury. Not so clinical now, are we? “Let Twenty-Nine go,” Wyatt snapped.
Twenty-nine?
“That’s me,” Sabine muttered, sounding disgusted. “Because I’m not a person anymore. Just a number.” Then she walked around Ryder.
The hell she was just leaving. He grabbed her arm. “Don’t go with them.”
She gave him a faint smile. “I was wrong about you. For a vampire, you aren’t so bad.”
Yes, I am.
“You’ve got a real killer bite, but there’s more to you than just that.” She searched his gaze. “Don’t forget me,” Sabine told him. Then she shrugged away his hand.
His gaze followed her. So hungry and wild and, he knew, desperate.
Wyatt shrugged off his lab coat and offered it to Sabine. He pointed to the guards behind him. “I want her transferred to the second facility.”
A second facility? Hell, no. “Sabine!”
She looked back at him.
“You’re not a number,” he snapped.
She was so much more.
Her head inclined. “And you’re not a monster.”
Then she left him. The guards led her out of the room, and Ryder noticed they were careful not to touch her skin. Probably because they were afraid she’d fry them.
He hoped that she did.
Wyatt didn’t exit the room. He stood in the doorway, lingering after the others were gone. “Were you the first?”
Ryder glared back at him.
Wyatt’s lips tightened. “Don’t you understand what I’m trying to do?”
“You’re trying to get your kicks from torturing paranormals?” Yes, that bit was obvious. He more than got it.
“I’m trying to cure us!” Hushed, as if he were afraid someone, somewhere, might overhear.
Ryder slanted a glance at the observation mirror. “Us?” Sabine had been right, but then, he’d suspected that truth for a long time. When Sabine had fired her gun, Ryder had seen the truth with his own eyes. Her bullet had plunged into Richard Wyatt’s chest.
But the guy was still alive. Humans didn’t recover so quickly.
“No one’s in the observation room,” Wyatt said, voice rough. “Do you think I’d risk talking while others could hear?” Wyatt bent down and yanked out a pair of jogging pants from a duffel bag at his feet. “Fuck, put these on.” He tossed the pants to Ryder.
Raising a brow, Ryder yanked on the pants. “Guess that little naked scene didn’t work quite as you wanted, huh, asshole?”
Wyatt’s eyes narrowed. “You think you’ve helped her? If you’d had sex with her, maybe gotten lucky enough to get her pregnant, you would have helped us all.”
“Guess I’m not a helper that way.” Ryder gazed back at him. “What happened to the whole, ‘I’m not interested in birth, but transformation’ bit?”
“That was before,” Wyatt replied flatly.
“Before?”
“Before I knew just what you were!”
“The fangs and blood-drinking didn’t give me away?” Ryder asked, baiting. “And here I thought we’d long ago established that I was a vamp. Your science really must not be that good.”
The flush deepened on Wyatt’s face. “I knew you were a vamp, but I didn’t know you were the first.”
“Back to that, are we?”
“A child with your DNA, Twenty-Nine’s DNA—that would be a transformation.”