“Lame. And how often did the ‘tortured hero, anti-hero’ thing work out? He succumbed to his true nature more than once. Next?”
“Stef—”
“Became the Ripper more than once in his long life,” she said dryly. “I can at least respect Damon because he didn’t pretend to be good. He admitted he was a crap kind of creature who liked to suck the life out of people. He didn’t pretend to be something he wasn’t. Any more?”
Alice sighed. “Okay, so they don’t have the best track record.”
“And yet, you want me to willingly become one of these things?”
“Those are just stories. This is real life. And when it comes right down to it, what other option do you have?”
“Uh, go back to the streets and get myself murdered at a young age, just like the rest of the young, female, homeless population. It’s the natural order of things. Circle of life, blah blah, blah. That makes for a much shorter term of torture. Not to mention, I won’t be sucking the life force out of innocent people. I like my meat to be a little less bloody. Oh, and a little less human.” Lizzy folded her arms across her chest and waited to see what the chick would do. Finally, Alice sighed and stepped aside.
“The hard way it is.”
Lizzy thought the woman sounded genuinely upset, which was odd since Alice clearly had no problems working with the freaking vampire king who was willing to hurt innocent people.
Four men walked in, two large and two average. Lizzy jumped to her feet and made sure again that the walls in her mind were locked down. Finn would lose his ever-loving, wolfy brain if he saw men attacking her. She crouched and gritted her teeth, determined not to be taken without one hell of a fight. If nothing else, she would take a chunk out of one of them before they got her.
Unfortunately, Lizzy’s glorious last stand was nothing more than a fantasy. The men moved so quickly she barely saw them coming. In the blink of an eye, she was lying face down with a knee in her back. She heard a zipping sound and felt her wrists lock together. Dammit! Lizzy resolved that if she ever made it out of this place, she was going to take some sort of defense training. Fighting off pimps and drug dealers had made her tough, or so she thought. Now she realized how wrong she’d been. These guys were legitimate badasses, the kind of loudmouths you saw in movies smart-off to just before the punks realized what a terrible mistake they had just made. Lizzy hated being so helpless against them.
Two of the men yanked her to her feet and began pulling her out the door. She dragged her feet, determined to make them bear her full body weight, which was apparently like carrying a doll to them. Neither of her escorts so much as breathed hard. Their grips around her arms were like manacles, only more painful.
She tried to pay attention to her surroundings. For what purpose? Lizzy wasn’t sure. Perhaps she thought if she could memorize the layout of the place, she might find a way to escape it one day. But eventually, the turns became too many to keep straight. The place was a freaking labyrinth. She’d never figure out how to find an exit, even if she somehow managed to break out of her room. Lizzy was starting to resign herself to the fact that she was going to be transformed into some sort of wolf-vamp hybrid—a monster. What would it feel like? Would she keep her faculties? Or would she simply become a killing machine?
And what if something went wrong? Lizzy was far from convinced these fools even knew what they were doing. What if the transformation killed her?
She gulped. “You’re a good scientist, right?” Lizzy asked Alice as the men carried her along, her toes occasionally bumping the tile floor. “I mean, you didn’t graduate at the bottom of your class and skate by simply because your professors wanted to get you out of their program?”
Alice laughed. “I’m one of the top geneticists in the country, if not the world. You’re in good hands.”
“Hmm, and humble, too.”
Alice shrugged. “You asked. I’ve worked hard to make it where I am.”
“You worked hard to get here?” Lizzy scoffed. “Is this what you dreamed about when you were a little girl? Growing up to become the woman who could turn humans into something… unnatural?”
“To be fair,”—Alice glanced over her shoulder at Lizzy—“you were already something unnatural, and I had nothing to do with that.” She sighed. “And no, I never imagined myself doing something like this.” Alice spoke so softly that Lizzy barely heard her next words. “I honestly don’t want to have anything to do with this shit.”
“LIZZY!” Finn’s voice broke through her mind, causing her to wince.
“I already told you, Linc, you’ve got to tone that macho stuff down.” Lizzy wished her hands weren’t tied behind her back so she could rub her temples.
“Have they hurt you?”
“Not really. They’re just taking me to some lab to pump me full of vamp blood and this chick scientist’s blood. No biggie. I totally got this.”
Chapter
One
“She’s not from my world. I don’t know if she will ever fully understand what it means to be true mates and how it affects me. Can she feel for me what I feel for her? Will she want me the way I want her? I don’t know. And the possible answers terrify me. Nothing in this life has ever truly scared me, but the idea that she could walk away evokes a fear I can’t even describe.” ~Finn
Cain looked at the two figures standing before him: a fae and a vampire that both appeared as if they had barely escaped a war. Their clothes were torn, and abrasions and deep gashes covered their skin. Half of the fae’s head was bald and blackened, and some of his scalp appeared to have been burned off. The vampire had managed to keep his scalp, though his hair was caked in blood. Cain wondered why the fae’s injuries hadn’t healed by now and why the vampire hadn’t stopped to drain a human simply to obtain the blood to heal himself. “Were there any other survivors?”
“None as far as we know,” the vampire answered.
Cain narrowed his eyes at the male. “What’s your name?”
