Ignoring the pain still eating away at him, Thomas ripped the bag from his mouth. Blood immediately shot from the punctures where his fangs had been, splashing up and out like a geyser, but Thomas ignored that too and dropped it to the bed as he tried to get up and go to Inez.
“Dammit!” Etienne caught him by the shoulders, forcing him back on the bed with little effort as Terri scrambled to grab the spraying bag.
“Stay put,” Etienne said grimly as Terri wrapped the bag in a towel and rushed from the room. “You need more blood. You’ll be no good to her until you’ve got your strength back. Bastien and Rachel are helping Inez.”
“Why haven’t they given her drugs yet?” Thomas growled, giving up struggling against Etienne. It wasn’t working anyway, the man was using only one hand to hold him down and didn’t have to put much strength behind it to do it.
“They’re in the other cooler. Lucern is getting them now,” he explained and then added, “We just got you both up here. That bag was the first we put to your teeth.”
“Here.” Marguerite’s oldest son, Lucern, rushed into the room with Kate on his heels. He was digging through the cooler he held as he moved. Stopping beside Bastien, he handed over an ampoule and syringe, and Bastien removed one hand from Inez to reach for it, but her good arm immediately jerked out of the hold his other hand had on her and plowed him in the face.
Thomas smiled as Bastien flew backward off the bed. That was what he’d wanted to do to him down by the river. It did his heart good to see Inez get the lick in for him.
“Bastien.” Kate rushed around Lucern to kneel at his side and Vincent and Jackie appeared from somewhere, though Thomas wasn’t sure from where. He hadn’t noticed them in the room before this, but suddenly they were at the bedside trying to help Rachel hold Inez down. The combination of nanos and pain was making her strong and even with the three of them, they had trouble holding her in place.
“Give her the damned drugs!” Thomas bellowed, or tried too, his voice didn’t have its normal strength. He really needed more blood.
Bastien’s head suddenly appeared on the other side of the bed and he crawled forward. Ignoring his broken, bleeding nose, he stuck the syringe into the ampoule to draw out the drug. He pulled the needle free once it was full, squeezed it until clear liquid shot out the top, and then injected it straight into Inez’s vein as Vincent held her arm out for him.
They all waited tensely, watching Inez. Her struggles and screams began to ease almost at once, the thrashing becoming restless writhing and the screams dropping to loud moans and then she stopped moving and fell silent.
A communal sigh of relief ran around the room like a wave and then every eye turned to him.
Etienne was the first to speak. “Open your mouth,” he ordered, and slapped a bag on his still-protruding fangs before anyone else could speak.
Thomas suspected it was an effort on Etienne’s part to keep him from saying any of the furious thoughts running around inside his head.
“Now,” Vincent said dryly. “Does someone want to tell us who this young woman is and what the hell happened?”
Bastien’s shoulders slumped as he replayed the night’s events.
“You used Thomas’s lifemate as bait?” Lucern asked with shock when Bastien was done. “His lifemate? While she was still mortal?”
Thomas closed his eyes with gratitude at Lucern’s reaction, feeling vindicated in his anger. A lifemate was as precious to an immortal as life itself. Mortals could divorce and remarry and go through mate after mate if they wished, but for an immortal, a lifemate was a once-in-a-lifetime deal, or twice if they were lucky. And with an immortal that was a very long lifetime.
“Jesus, Bastien. What were you thinking?” Lucern scrubbed one hand through his hair with disgust and said, “I’d have killed you for even considering something like that if it had been Kate. And I know damned right well that you never would have risked Terri like that.”
“I wasn’t thinking,” Bastien admitted unhappily. “I was just so worried about, Mother…and I thought I could keep Inez safe. I thought I’d considered every contingency.”
“We thought we’d considered every contingency,” Etienne insisted grimly, determined not to let Bastien take the flack on his own.
Lucern’s eyes skated to Etienne, and then away dismissively and Thomas saw the way Etienne’s hands balled into fists. It suddenly occurred to him that he wasn’t the only one the two older Argeneau brothers tended to dismiss as an immature young pup. Some of his anger with Etienne suddenly eased, replaced by sympathy. They were both in the same boat, he thought, and then glanced toward his older cousin as Lucern moved up the small aisle between the beds.