A crash vibrated inside and a raised voice suddenly echoed through the house.
She stepped back, her heartbeat speeding up. Was Pax in danger? “Paxton?” She rang the doorbell several times and looked around for any patrolling soldiers, but the snowy street was quiet.
The door swung open and Pax’s dad stood there, scowling. He was big and broad with metallic copper eyes, and his black hair was ruffled around his shoulders. His face was wide and his cheekbones sharp, kind of like Pax’s. “What are you doing with the damn doorbell?”
Hope paused. “Hi Paelotin. Is Pax here?”
“I’m here.” Pax pushed past his dad, his lip bleeding. His dark hair was long and wild around his shoulders. “Let’s get out of here.”
“I’m not done with you.” Paelotin grabbed his hair and pulled him back inside, twisting and throwing him toward an end table. The sound was loud and frightening. Pax crashed into it and rolled, coming up on his feet as if it was no big deal. “I’m leaving.”
“The hell you are.” Paelotin turned and backhanded Pax across the cheek, throwing him over the sofa to land on the other side. Pax hit the coffee table, and glass shattered, cutting his throat.
“Pax!” Hope dropped the candy and reacted without thinking, rushing around the torn sofa to her friend. Her best friend.
Paelotin slammed the door shut, and she jumped, grasping Pax’s uninjured arm.
Pax shoved to his feet, his hands bleeding, his cheek already darkening with a bruise. “Hope. What the heck? You run from danger, not into it.” His smile showed bloody teeth and his pupils were dilated from being hit. He pushed her behind him and stood straighter than she’d ever seen him. “Hope is leaving. If you want to finish with me, that’s fine. But she needs to go first.”
When had Pax gotten so tall? He’d gone through a growth spurt when he’d turned thirteen, and now he had to be at least six feet tall and thin. The boyish chubbiness he’d always lamented was gone, leaving him gangly and wiry. No match for his father, who was at least eight inches and a hundred pounds or more bigger than Pax.
Her voice shook. “Come with me, Pax.” She’d known he didn’t like his dad, but he’d always said there was no physical hitting, and she’d never been allowed to just drop in before. He’d lied. “You can stay with me.” Her dad would never let Pax be hit like this.
“My boy stays here,” Paelotin snarled, his hands curling into beefy fists.
Hope’s legs shook.
Pax lifted his chin, even though blood was dripping from his neck to stain his T-shirt. “Hope? Take the back door and go home to your grandparents. Tell Cara and Talen that everything is fine here.” His voice cracked.
“No,” she whispered, her voice trembling. She moved over the broken glass around him and slid her hand into his, facing the threat. Her uncle Garrett had taught her always to face the threat. “I’m not leaving you.”
Pax’s hand tightened over hers.
Paelotin smiled and his eyes looked kind of funny. He burped. Was he drunk? How much did a vampire have to drink to actually get drunk? “Aren’t you the loyal little bitch?”
Her eyes widened and her stomach cramped. Nobody had ever called her anything like that. “Um.”
“And a prophet. A freaking lunatic prophet who’ll ruin us all.” He took a step toward them, and she gasped, tightening her grip on Pax’s hand. She should’ve run to get help. Now what were they going to do? “You’re more dangerous than any Kurjan enemy alive, and you have demon in you,” he slurred, kicking the broken table out of the way. “Maybe I should do what needs to be done.”
Pax shoved her behind him again. “Run, Hope. Now.”
Chapter 19
After a bland dinner of chicken noodle soup, Grace barely contained her irritation as she sat on the examination table and listened to Emma and Faith discuss her test results, which were spread over the wide counter, using terms that might as well have been in another language. In fact, some of them were Latin. Probably. She leaned to the side and drew her trusty old Pentax out of her bag, snapping several shots of the two women.
Emma, now wearing a white lab coat over her casual clothing, looked over her shoulder. “Sorry. That probably didn’t make much sense.”
Grace took several more pictures before setting the camera on her leg. “No, and none of it sounded good.”
Faith turned around and leaned back, rubbing her eyes. “No. Interesting but not good.” She brushed her hair away from her face. “We tested your samples with several others.”
Emma stuck her hands in her lab coat. “We let the virus attack your cells in a Petri dish, and it’s clear that if you took the virus, you’d be back in a coma.” She shook her head. “There’s something odd in your blood that I can’t identify, and it probably has to do with being a Key. I don’t understand the Key marking, by the way. But taking the virus will change you almost into a plant.”
Well, that sounded terrible. Grace braced herself for more bad news. “And?”
Faith looked at Emma and then back. “We used an agent that speeds up the life of a cell exponentially, as if you just did nothing and let your body do what it’s doing.”
Grace cradled her camera. “That was encouraging?”
