Page 38 of Bold Mercy

“I don’t care what you believe. She’s here, in this building—but that doesn’t matter right now. It’s enough that you know. Now, about what I wanted to show you. Dawn. Fetch it.”

And though I quivered in dread, terrified I would see my mother, the vampire lackey shoved a different human into the room. From the looks of him, he’d been there a while. He was naked, though his lack of clothing wasn’t from shifting, the way mine was. He was injured. Bloody. Terrified.

All to be expected when you were a human captured by creatures you hadn’t known existed only a few days earlier.

He gave a hoarse yell and shrank away when Avis approached him. “Now, now,” she said. “Let’s not get all dramatic. Remember what I promised you earlier? That as soon as I got this animal here, I was going to take all your fear away?” She gestured at me. “I have the animal, and I will keep my promise.”

Almost before she was finished speaking, she took the human’s head between her palms and forced him to his knees. Then she leaned forward, opened her mouth, and bit him.

She was not gentle. I heard the stretch and snap of flesh even over the man’s moans. She drank, and drank, and drank.

“I will kill you,” I said finally, unable to keep silent. “You mutant bitch.”

“Shhh,” one of her vampires said, putting a finger to his mouth. And when his black stare dropped from my face to my throat, I swallowed hard and went quiet, wishing my hands were free so I could drag my long hair over my shoulders and hide behind it.

Avis continued to drink from the human, who had long since slumped into her arms. He was dead. She yanked her mouth away from his flesh finally and stood, then dragged the body to me.

He was waxy and still, but his eyes were half-open. There was no spark there, though, just flat, dull…death.

“You won’t believe this,” she told me. “Watch what I can do. Watch what I am going to do everywhere.”

One of her vampires dropped to his knees at the humans head, then pried open the man’s jaws. He forced his mouth open wide, and then, before I was quite ready for it, Avis leaned over and began vomiting the blood back into the dead human’s mouth.

The blood gushed, and along with it, I got a whiff of the same putrid scent I’d caught earlier. My mind was overwhelmed, and my stomach rebelled. I turned my face away and took shallow breaths, trying my best not to throw up and add to the awfulness.

Dawn, the vampire who had dragged the human into the room, leaped to me and grabbed my face, forcing me to watch.

And then, the unthinkable happened.

The impossible happened.

Avis staggered drunkenly to her feet, giggling, and the human she’d killed began to twitch. In seconds, he sat up, his eyes snapped open, and he parted his lips. Fangs, long and sharp, shot from his gums, and he screamed, confused, horrified, and most of all, starving.

Avis patted him on the head. “Come with mommy, darling. There’s a lovely shifter waiting for you. You may feast until you are quite satisfied, and then I will teach you how to be a vampire.”

She led him from the room, and I really couldn’t decide which horrified me the most—the fact that she was about to take him to my mother, or the fact that she’d just made a vampire.

In mere minutes.