Deep Deception (20 page)

“What do you mean?”

“I mean someone else was manipulating you. Misdirecting you. And either they started the process that will turn you from human to vampire, or they wanted you to think they did. If they made you swallow even a mouthful…”

“Oh my God, Bran. I dreamed that someone kissed me, and my mouth filled with…” Adin stopped, suddenly frozen by the possibility that drinking blood represented.

“That’s what I mean. If that part of the dream wasn’t someone manipulating you, if it really happened, then it might have started the process. It isn’t always easy to tell at first, but it doesn’t take much. I’ve seen people change before and—”

“I dreamed it was Santos who kissed me, but then I saw Donte’s face.” Adin drew in a lungful of air, although it didn’t feel like he got enough.

“You’re sweating.” Bran put his hand on Adin’s shoulder and looked into his eyes.

“I’m scared, Bran.” Adin’s muscles began to tremble. He was dizzy suddenly, as if the floor of the elevator dropped out from beneath him. “I don’t feel well.”

The walls spun around him as Bran pushed the button that silenced the alarm and put the car in motion again. “Bran?”

“I’m here.” Bran’s panicked voice reached him from what seemed like a long way away. “I think it’s me that’s making you sick.”

“That can’t be true. No one would have tried to turn me except Donte, and I don’t believe—” Adin was in deep trouble. His heart raced and his breathing grew erratic. “I can’t…seem to catch…my breath.”

The elevator doors opened, and Bran pushed Adin out onto his floor, calling for help. The last thing Adin heard was Bran telling someone to call for Tuan.

Chapter Twenty-One

Before Adin opened his eyes he listened. Wind gusted around him. It lifted his hair and rushed against his eardrums. Sails snapped taut, causing the lines to creak. He struggled for balance as if he were on the deck of a boat as it rode over waves.

Water lapped against the hull as they bobbed and pitched gently from side to side. Sunshine warmed his face in a direct challenge to the breeze, which kissed him, brisk and chilly.

When he finally looked, he wasn’t surprised to see he was sitting on the deck of his father’s sailboat, the Odd Bean.

Adin’s first waking thought was pure elation, a sudden, intense rush of joy at seeing his father at the helm again. His heart swelled at Keene Tredeger’s boyish delight. He was in his element on the water, a man who’d grown up reading first Stevenson and Defoe and Melville, then in later years lived on Patrick O’Brian and C.S. Forrester.

The sun was barely breaking the horizon, and his father was holding a mug of coffee that steamed into the air. “Early bird gets the dawn,” he said, smiling. “Of course your mother and sister can’t be woken at this hour.”

“They get the sunset and they see it as a fair trade.”

“Little do they know…”

Adin’s father was so vividly alive at that early hour Adin wondered if he’d fortified his coffee with Irish whiskey. He looked around on the deck and found his own mug. He lifted it to his lips and sure enough, it was bracing in more ways than one.

“You spiked the coffee?”

“Arrrr.” His father grinned. “A little grog never hurt anyone.”

“Don’t let Mom hear you say that.”

“She’d have to get out of our berth to stop me, wouldn’t she?” He lifted his head and let the wind caress his face.

Adin leaned back and looked up into the rigging.

“This is the best thing we’ve ever done,” his father announced. “I’ve never felt more alive.”

“But this is how you died.” Adin sipped his coffee. “In this boat. There was a storm and the Odd Bean went down.”

“I know.” Adin’s father’s face never lost its elated expression, but he was silent for a long time. “I remember.”

“You and Mom both drowned. Your bodies were recovered but we put you back into the sea.”

“Thanks for that,” his father said. “It’s what I wanted.”

“Would you do anything differently?” Adin asked. “If you knew?”

“Maybe.” Keene shrugged. “I might have waited twenty years before I bought the boat.”

Adin nodded. “I thought you’d say something like that.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“You heard me, what would you do? Differently, I mean. If you had a second chance?”

Adin gasped and reached out blindly, striking his broken arm against the metal frame of the bed. He braced himself for the intense physical pain he knew would follow, but it never came.

His arm should have hurt a lot. It should have hurt like
hell
. He opened his eyes and found Tuan sitting in the chair beside his bed wearing a worried expression even as he got up and said, “Shh, Adin. Everything’s going to be all right.”

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know if—”

“Was what Bran said true? Am I…? Did someone…?”

Tuan’s expression tightened. “Yes.”

Adin closed his eyes. “Who?”

“Adin—”

“I asked you who did this to me.” Adin ground his teeth together against a wave of nausea.

Tuan lifted his hands, palms up. “We don’t know for certain. We’re still trying to get answers…”

“
Tuan
.”

“All right.
Yes
. Based on the information we have so far, and given that none but a handful of people know you’re here? We have to assume Donte did it.”

Adin shut his eyes, unable to think. How did he feel about that? How was he supposed to feel about that? His entire body felt cold suddenly—as if he’d been bathed in ice—and he began to tremble. Shaking like he was in shock. Maybe he was.

“Tuan?”

“Don’t panic, Adin. This is…” He gripped Adin’s hand. “This is just the beginning. But you have to know we’ll do everything we can. Everything we know how to do to help you through this.”

“Can you stop it?” Adin said through clenched teeth.

Tuan shook his head. “No, we can’t.”

“
So cold
.” Adin shivered as he looked around. “Where’s Edward?”

“He’s with Bran.”

“
Fuck
.” Adin held his body rigid, trying to keep it from shaking apart but it was no use. “Bran. Wh-what ab-bout B-bran?”

“Edward will take care of him. You’ll be here for a while, Adin. I’m not going to lie to you. This isn’t going to be easy, and it’s not always successful. There’s a fity percent chance you won’t survive it.”

Adin considered this. “W-where is D-d-donte?”

“I’m sorry.” Tuan shook his head sadly. “I don’t know.”

The days and nights that followed took on a dizzying, disorienting sameness for Adin. His dreams, which were already vivid and unpredictable since he’d met Bran, took on a nightmare quality as he changed, imbuing him with new senses, dark cravings and a dreadful and utterly insistent set of phobias.

The most potent was a terror of the sun that caused such vividly realistic panic attacks—all unnecessary because he’d been locked away early on in a room that had no windows, deep in the basement where they handled cases like his.

The panic made him fight against his restraints. He tore viciously at them until the flesh of wrists and ankles burned and his screams could be heard throughout the hospital’s long corridors.

Ultimately, someone would come to subdue and sedate him, leaving him weak and powerless, until the next time it happened.

He had no way to gage the passage of time. It was dark and quiet, sealed off from the outside world to prevent the stimulation of his new and possibly uncontrollable vampire behavior.

He could hear nothing from the outside, see nothing, and sense nothing unless someone opened the sliding door and entered his room. Bran’s calming presence no longer found its way into his dreams. Consequently, he faced them alone, unprepared for the sinister new longings he felt.

The hospital staff made their way into and out of his room, meeting his needs for the most part, offering palliative care as if he were a hospice patient. Everyone waited for the inevitable. He would live or die, and it wasn’t up to them.

He wanted, in his lucid moments, to be cured, to be with family or friends, to be free of the room—the dark IV and all its implications.

He wanted to be Dr. Adin Tredeger again.

When anyone entered, he couldn’t keep his gaze from following them, couldn’t help breathing in the richness of the blood that rushed through their veins.

Even though he needed no sustenance, he tracked their slightest movements. He watched the barely perceptible throbbing of the pulse in their necks, imagining the taste of their flesh.

As men and women worked around him, he discovered new talents. A simple push of his thoughts could cause hearts to race. The monster that was growing inside him triumphed to hear it. He smelled the release of sweet adrenaline. Breathing quickened as the objects of his experimentation fought the urge to flee.

Rationally, they had to be aware that he was harmless. He was restrained, sedated and helpless. But a gentle press of thought made fear grip them all over again, it was instinct too old to identify, too palpable—too visceral—to ignore.

He loved the terror that infused them. He tasted it on the air around him. The new thing inside him, cruel and predatory, craved it. Like some new lust, it caused saliva to run in his mouth as his canines ripped through his tender gums pressing aside his incisors, elongating, throbbing and ready to sink into human flesh until everyone left him once again, alone in the dark.

In those quickening heartbeats, there was only the hunt, the desire, the need for a clean kill and—above all—the urge to appease his new, insatiable appetite for blood.

There were moments, too, when he was Adin Tredeger again, aware, appalled and fully conscious of the thing he could become.

When despair and revulsion vied for the top spot on his emotional hit parade, he cried out for Donte, who never came.

Yet Adin
sensed
Donte’s presence. Donte seemed to color the atmosphere around Adin, hanging there sweetly like the vague scent of a subtle perfume. Every now and again, when Adin woke, he’d find a gift. Something new and different, placed on the table next to his bed or even clutched in his hand. Something simple that gave him pleasure, a faceted crystal orb with a tea light in it that threw rainbows across the sheet covering his nakedness.

A perfect conch shell, sleek and smooth on the inside, ridged and tactile on the outside. The shell smelled like salt and wind and sun to Adin, as though it had been dipped into the ocean then allowed to dry outdoors.

Blue glass and an ostrich feather appeared one morning. A golden lump of resin Adin knew to be Frankincense, released its heady aroma into the room. The symbol, sometimes used to signify transition, new spiritual life, wasn’t lost on him during what he’d begun to think of as his “Adin moments”.

The animal within him, the newly awakened beast was content to breathe in its sweet earthy scent. All of Donte’s gifts, thoughtfully procured, slyly offered, held the perfect appeal for each facet of the man who was once Adin Tredeger.

Sometimes they made him smile.

Sometimes they made him cry.

“Adin.” Tuan’s voice.

The predator leaped within him, angry at its captors. Especially Tuan, because Adin wasn’t fooled by the patient accountant anymore. He sensed something feral under Tuan’s skin. Another kind of predator. An enemy.

“It’s about fucking time someone showed their face. Come here and release me before I rip myself apart and come after you.”

“I understand your frustration.” Tuan moved to the wall and toggled a switch that caused light to flare in the small room.

Tuan and Christobel Santos stood inside his room, side by side, solemn and wary.

“This process is painful and frightening,” Tuan said. “We attempt to make it easier to bear with sedation and environmental control, but there’s no guarantee that anything we do will help.”

Adin tried to get control over his roiling thoughts. “I sometimes think I must be imagining everything, but then the hunger comes…”

Santos’s dark eyes regarded Adin with pity. “Eventually you will learn to control that, but it will never go away.”

“Did you do this?” Adin asked Santos directly.

“I did
not
.” Santos stepped forward. Adin watched his face carefully for any clue that he might be lying, but found none.

“I need to get out of here.”

“It’s not safe unless you have someone to mentor you,” Tuan told him quietly.

“Donte—”

“No one knows where Donte is.” Tuan’s face tightened in what Adin assumed was contempt. “He sends you little gifts when he should be—”

“Since Fedeltà has chosen to abdicate his responsibility,” said Santos, “I volunteered.”

Adin laughed weakly. “How you must be enjoying this.”

“The chance to take Donte’s prize? Oh, yes. I should be enjoying this, but unfortunately I find I am unwilling to take pleasure in your suffering. Even at Donte’s expense.”

“Have you suddenly found scruples?”

“Sadly, it seems I have.” Santos picked a minuscule piece of lint off the sleeve of his immaculate suit coat.

“Take heart, they probably won’t last.” Adin tugged at the restraints that bound him. Impatient. Angry. The monster inside him was ready to feed. “Who do I have to fuck to leave this dump?”

Out of nowhere, Adin heard Edward’s voice. “There’s someone here to see you.”

For a brief and awful moment Adin thought it might be his sister Deana. It was far, far too soon to face his only remaining family member with the sordid truth of his new existence…

“
Adin
.” Bran’s voice.

“Hello, Bran. It seems you were right. I’m afraid I didn’t dream—”

“It’s going to be all right, Adin.” Bran tried to console him and it made his heart feel like lead in his chest.
He
should have been taking care of Bran. Not the other way around.

“Bran, I’m so sorry I let you down.”

“You never let me down. It’s just…I don’t know. It’s the way things are in my world.”

“Where are you?” For the first time, Adin was aware of a fixture in the ceiling that resembled half of a Victorian gazing ball. A Camera.
Shit.
Had someone been monitoring him this whole time?

“We can see you, and there’s an intercom,” Edward said. “We haven’t been allowed in until now.”

“How long has it been?”

“Nearly four weeks.” Edward’s voice wavered. “Bran started school.”

Adin closed his eyes.
Four weeks
.

Santos spoke. “If it makes you feel any better, when I was turned it was nearly two years before I could be around humans. I spent that time in an iron cage like an animal, tearing my flesh from my bones in my rage, only to have it repair itself while I slept. Things have changed since the sixteenth century.”

Adin met Santos’s dark eyes. “Next you’re going to tell me that in order to kill someone you had to walk uphill both ways in the snow.”

Santos stepped forward and flicked a finger painfully against Adin’s forehead. “You’re a pain in the ass, Adin. There will be no end to the satisfaction of the man who will eventually beat that out of you. Thank heavens I have only to teach you how to survive your new existence, and the best way to feed,
without
killing.”

Adin noticed he no longer had a cast on his arm when Tuan stepped forward to remove Adin’s restraints. Santos moved to the other side of his hospital bed and freed his other hand.

Together, they lifted Adin’s naked body from the bed and helped him clothe himself. He was not physically weak, far from it. He simply found himself unable to coordinate the movement of his limbs into some semblance of normal activity, as if his mind and his body no longer communicated.

“What the hell?” He balked at sitting in the wheelchair that Tuan provided.