I lifted my hand and touched my throat. My smooth, untorn esophagus.
With the rush and thunder of the flames engulfing my body, combined with the shock and disorientation of waking in an unfamiliar room on an unfamiliar bed, my brain was slow to absorb anything else. I tore at my clothes, screamed up more blood, and thrashed against the burning, but a crushing weight was holding me down, bracing me on the bed and preventing me from extinguishing the flames.
It may have only been seconds, but being burned alive had a way of elongating time into excruciating increments. In what felt like hours later—years, maybe—I became aware of a voice in my ear—something besides the thunder and fire and blood of my screams—and a hand in my hand, anchoring me to the present.
“You must accept it. Embrace the transformation, Cassidy.”
Dominic. His lips were moving against my ear, and his hand was the hand in mine. His body was the weight over me, bracing my body back against the bed.
“I’m on fire,” I croaked. My voice, though hoarse, still spoke through a gurgle of blood. My vocal cords were miraculously intact, although considering the blood my throat was choking on, perhaps not as miraculously as I’d first thought, unless you considered the healing qualities in Dominic’s blood a miracle.
At the moment, it felt more like an execution.
His hand tightened. “No, you’re not. You’re just rejecting my blood, as usual.”
I’m not on fire, I thought, but my next thought was as devastating as if I were. The fire is inside me and can’t be put out.
Not for three days, at least, according to Walker.
“We’ve been here before,” Dominic said, his voice calm and soothing, and I wanted to tear his eyes out. I was on fire, damn it; there was nothing that could soothe that.
I shook my head. I’d never burned like this before, not from Dominic’s blood.
I must have said as much, because Dominic answered, although I didn’t recall anything intelligible passing through my lips, only blood-garbled screams.
“You have more of my blood within you than you’ve ever had before. Last time, I was only healing you. Now, you’ve lost enough of your blood that I’m transforming you. But you must embrace the transformation, Cassidy.”
“It’s killing me,” I gritted between clenched teeth.
Dominic’s grip on my hand tightened painfully. “It’s saving you. My blood is life. Feel the gift of its strength coursing through you, healing you, empowering you. Feel beyond the burn to the power that stokes its flames, the power that lives inside you now.”
I tried to listen to Dominic, I really did, but the memory of Walker’s voice inside my head was louder.
They say night bloods feel intense, focused burning over their entire body, Walker had explained, back when we’d first met, when he’d been more than willing to share his knowledge and weapons with me against the vampires, before the possibility of something more than friendship wasn’t a canyon between us. And they feel that sensation during the entire three-day transformation.
I would be on fire for three whole days.
My fear turned to resistance, and the burning inside me raged.
“Cassidy, no! Don’t you dare do this to me, not after everything we’ve survived, not after the lengths we’ve traveled to come this far and this close.”
His grip on my hand was painful now, crushing the small, fragile bones in my fingers. He was desperate; I could hear it in the tone of his voice and in his last-ditch effort to force my will to his command.
“Cassidy DiRocco, you will accept the blood I’ve given you as your own,” Dominic intoned, but the Leveling had depleted all his strength and abilities and given them to the very woman who had betrayed him. I didn’t feel the answering spark, like a tuning fork inside my mind at his command. I didn’t feel anything except the unrelenting, consuming sensation of my body being incinerated.
“Not. Working,” I panted between screams.
“Not trying!” Dominic accused.
He talked about the infusion of strength and healing and new life from his blood, but Walker’s scientific explanation for the transformation resonated with me more. The regenerative properties in vampire blood had healed my throat and wouldn’t necessarily transform me, except for the fact that I had suffered such catastrophic blood loss. With more vampire blood than human blood in my body, the rapidly regenerating vampire cells would spread through my circulatory system, into my organs and muscles to regenerate those cells, and eventually, into my brain until vampire blood regenerated every cell in my body and became my blood.
I didn’t want to change. I liked exactly who I was—bum hip, fragile body, dulled senses and all—and I wanted to stay that way. I didn’t want to be more entrenched in Dominic’s world, in a world of darkness and shadows, blood and hierarchy and power. I didn’t want more from life than my career, Nathan—and hell, even Dominic—but he could leave all his damn baggage at the door before he entered.
More than anything else I wanted, however, I wanted to live, and no matter how unfathomable the cost, that meant letting go of all the rest.
In the end, it wasn’t Dominic’s words of encouragement, his hand holding mine, nor the promise of enhanced strength, abilities, and senses that saved me. The choice was never whether or not I wanted to remain a night blood with my human ailments and Dominic’s eternal frustration or allow all my supposed potential to come to fruition and transform into a vampire. No matter the pros and cons of such a decision—of which there were many, and they were as catastrophic as the injuries that had brought me here—the choice was a matter of life or death, and that was no choice at all.
I’m going to live, I thought, and unlike anything else that Dominic could say, the knowledge that I would live anchored me in purpose and determination. I couldn’t necessarily find comfort in the knowledge that I’d survived worse, because the hell of being burned from the inside out was the worst sensation I’d ever experienced, but I’d be damned if I wouldn’t survive it.
Life as I’d always known it extinguished, leaving me in darkness.
“The face she sees in the mirror might be new to her, but I saw the potential in her human form long before her physical transformation. To me, nothing about her has changed besides the overdue assurance that I can hold her in my embrace with my full strength, and she will not shatter.”
—Dominic Lysander
Chapter 1
Seven days later
A bird was squawking, and after several minutes of attempting to ignore its repetitive, shrill bleating, I came to grips with the fact that it didn’t seem inclined to stop on its own. I snapped open my eyes, prepared to reach out the window and stop it myself, with my bare hands if necessary—I’d never heard such an obnoxious bird in my life, not in the city, not on the West Coast, not even on my one excursion to visit Walker upstate—and froze. There was no window. And if the vents Bex used to filter fresh air into her underground coven were any indication, there was no bird. Although the vents here resembled the ones in Bex’s coven, I didn’t recognize the room as the inviting, well-decorated step back in time that Bex had created either: no extra furniture for lounging, no scented candles, no gerbera daisies, and no kerosene lamps pulsing in a hypnotic, romantic beat.
This room contained only sparse necessities: vents for underground-air filtration, a bare bulb for light, a door for privacy, and, of course, a bed. I was in a strange room in a stranger’s bed, its dimensions and décor familiar only by its unfamiliarity, and suddenly, the last moments of my memory smashed into my brain like a semi.
Jillian tearing out my throat. Dominic healing me. The blood and