VAMP RISING (By Moonlight Book 1) (5 page)

              “Why don’t you start with those?”

              “You’re not hallucinating, first of all. Second of all, it’s not my place to give you the rundown of what you’re in for-”

              “Are you kidding me?”

              “Not really,” he said, as that lip curled up again into a playful grin.

              As far as Gwen was concerned the guy was taking pleasure in her frustration. In an instant she had his plaid shirt balled in her fists and was slamming his back against the wall, which judging by the look on his face both surprised and aroused him. His hands had found her waist and using her force against her he pulled her into him.

              As soon as they pressed together, Gwen pushed off him, backing away and breathing heavily. “I don’t know what that was, I’m sorry. Sorry I pushed you.” She wasn’t really, but she
was
highly confused by her erratic behavior. First the heart monitor she’d thrown across the I.C.U. and now physically assaulting a complete stranger just because she didn’t like that he wasn’t taking her seriously.

              “It’s fine,” he said. He was still leaning back against the wall where Gwen had left him. He looked down at her. His head was cocked to the side and he had a glint in his eye that conveyed a world of intrigue. You’d think they’d just kissed the way he was drinking her in. Again, she felt oddly disarmed by him. “But the fact of the matter is that I work here and would get into a fair amount of trouble if I stepped on anyone’s toes.”

              “Something tells me it wouldn’t actually bother you to step on anyone’s toes,” she challenged.

              “What makes you say that?” He asked, cocking his head the other way and eyeing her just the same.

              Gwen couldn’t help but look fixedly at him, taking him in with just as much intensity as he did her. It seemed there was a line between them that was starting to blur and though she didn’t understand it, Gwen had a feeling the blurrier it got the easier it would be to get the answers she was looking for.

              “I’m not sure. I guess you just strike me as the type of person who doesn’t care about getting into trouble.”

              He suddenly stepped out from the wall and crossed his arms. Had she laid the last compliment on a little too thick? His smile was gone and he made a point to tower over her. “There’s an Italian guy who’s in charge of your recovery. Have you met him?”

              “I’m not sure.”

              “Pale guy, black hair, looks like he just stepped out of an Armani ad?”

              “Oh, he’s Italian?”

              “No accent, I know, but yeah he’s from Italy.”

              “Yeah, he came into the hospital room with a few other people.”

              “If he finds out I told you anything, it will not be good.”

              “So you will?”

              “Not here,” he said, looking over Gwen’s shoulder then his own.

              Eager, her brows floated up and her eyes widened, indicating that if he leads she’ll follow.

              He started up the corridor and Gwen followed at his heels. “I’m Brandon, by the way.”

              “Gwen,” she offered.

              They passed through the back exit, Brandon first and Gwen following into a vegetable garden. As Gwen hopped up so that she could walk beside Brandon instead of behind him, she noticed the aisle they traversed was flanked by tomato and pepper bushes. She recognized the green fronds of carrot tops and other root vegetables, as well as the wall of flowers that wrapped the perimeter, which included sunflowers, roses, and interestingly golden rod. It occurred to her that she wasn’t sneezing. Golden rod tended to stir up the worst allergies and yet she felt fine.

              “We grow a lot of our own food. I don’t eat it, but the herbivores do,” he said offhandedly before they stepped through an archway of roses, leaving the garden.

              “What do you mean
herbivores
?” She asked, trying to follow. There had been so many bits and pieces of information between the Administrative Heads, Joseph, the pale Italian, and now Brandon and though Gwen kept the tidbits on mental file and well organized, she couldn’t make sense of any of it.

              Brandon held his tongue until they’d ducked into the forest where a mulch path stretched out before them. “So you know you’re in the Cascade Mountains,” he started.

              “Yeah, that much I got,” said Gwen.

              “Our organization is called The Cascade Sanctuary & Wildlife Preserve and what we do here is nurture sick and injured animals back to health, then release them into the wilderness.”

              “Ok,” she said to show she understood. That woman, Elektra had told her as much. 

              “But we also serve a different purpose,” he went on.

              “Ok,” she said again, encouraging a detailed explanation. She was now looking up at him as they walked deeper and deeper into the forest. His eyes shifted intensely as he kept his gaze straight ahead, as though he was searching for the right words. The stride of his gait was firm, deliberate, highly masculine yet fluid. There was something graceful about how he moved, the swing of his arms, the slight roll of his shoulders, the way his weight transferred from one foot to the other. It dawned on her that she found him attractive, but when the feeling struck she realized
attractive
didn’t fully capture her impression of him. In a snap decision, Gwen shut the feeling down before she could explore it further. The last thing she needed was to get blindsided by unruly emotions when she was clearly in the crisis of her life.

              “The Sanctuary homes shifters,” he said.

              “Shifters?”

              “Like what you saw in the Training Center, which was only our gymnasium, by the way. We have additional exercise rooms, as well as classrooms, and that’s only listing our indoor facilities. Outdoors we have countless practice spaces.”

              “Brandon, what are shifters?” She asked, gently bringing him back on topic.

              “You said you saw a guy turn into a wolf. Well, yeah, that’s what you saw. He
shifted
from his human form into a wolf.”

              Gwen stopped walking so she could focus on the mind-bending information. After a moment’s consideration, she asked, “The Sanctuary finds these people?”

              “No, it makes them,” he clarified, which Gwen found utterly jarring. “Sometimes hikers get injured, usually if they’re alone. The scouts at the Sanctuary spend all day combing the wilderness for animals in need, but when we come across a hiker in need, we bring them here and make them like us: shifters. If someone’s only injured in a minor way then we’ll arrange for transport to the nearest hospital. But if someone’s unconscious, sick with infection from injuries, or otherwise half dead, we’ll bring them here.”

              “So I’m a shifter?” Asked Gwen, hardly able to believe any of this except that she had in fact watched a man turn into a wolf before her very eyes.

              “Not quite,” he said. “You had blood cancer.”

             
Had
? Gwen felt a zing of excitement at his use of past tense.

              “When we turn people into shifters their blood constitution remains pretty much intact. It holds the same composition. If we’d turned you into a shifter, you’d still have cancer. You’d still die in a few months. That’s why Christoph is here.”

              “The Italian guy,” she added.

              “Yeah. The Administration didn’t have the means to save you, but he did.”

              “How did he save me? Just tell me,” she said turning frustrated once again by his lack of forthrightness.

              “Our only option was to replace your blood. We had to turn you into something that would completely cure you of the cancer in your blood.”

              “And?”

              Brandon gazed deeply into her pleading eyes. They were bright blue. Her mop of blond hair blew in the breeze, falling into her eyes, as the light shifted overhead.

              It was nearly dusk. Gwen ran her hand across her forehead to clear it of her side sweeping bangs, as she exercised patience.

              “You’re a vampire,” he said.

              It took Gwen’s breath away, though her mind didn’t race. Rather it seemed to go blank. She felt unusually calm, or maybe
stunned
was a better way of putting it. She was reminded of her original diagnosis, the way she’d gone blank then flew into a fit of wild laughter. Would she now lose her mind just as abruptly?

              She didn’t. Unlike the death sentence her doctors had delivered, what Brandon was telling her was quite the opposite. It was a life sentence. She would live, and if memory served her, if all those vampire movies she’d seen were true, she would live for a very, very long time.

              “I’m sorry,” she said after staring at him in a speechless state for too long. “It’s hard to wrap my mind around this. I didn’t think any of it could be real. You know you see things on TV and it's just fantasy. If it wasn’t I would’ve heard about it, you know? It’d be in the news or something. Vampires don’t exist.” Her rambling bubbled up into uncomfortable laughter. Oh good, she thought, that meant anger was next.

              “They do exist,” said Brandon as kindly as he could. “And so do werewolves.”

              “This is insane,” she said, finding herself pacing ahead and running her fingers through her hair again.

              Brandon shadowed behind her even though he could tell she wasn’t actually going anywhere. She turned on her heel and they nearly collided, but he stepped back just in time.

              “What day is it?” She asked, randomly.

              “Thursday.”

              “I got here on Thursday.”

              “That was a week ago,” he mentioned.

              “How would you know when I got here?” She asked suddenly scrutinizing his potential involvement.

              “I saw you set up camp,” he admitted.

              “I remember you,” she said, drifting into thought. Then her car, her job, her
parents
came to mind in rapid succession. They’d be worried sick by now.

              “Gwen, are you alright?”

              His voice seemed to be floating at the other end of the long tunnel Gwen had slipped down. Everything seemed to have gone dark, paralyzing her. She felt light headed and her legs had turned to rubber.

              “Gwen?”

              Without warning an incredible electric energy surged through her, snapping her back into herself, and in an instant she was tearing through the forest, dodging trees, veering this way and that. If her feet touched the ground, she couldn’t feel it, as she whipped through the wilderness with such speed that the terrain seemed to blur all around her.

*              *              *

              Brandon called after her again, but she had completely vanished. Her speed had been otherworldly, but he tore off after her none-the-less. He’d memorized her scent and it hadn’t changed now that she was a vampire. He sprinted, zigzagging and following her smell. Losing her was the last thing he needed. He knew he shouldn’t have taken her out, shouldn’t have explained anything to her, but he hadn’t been able to resist. The way she had given him her undivided attention, they way she had
looked
at him had sent his mind reeling with desires. He wanted to befriend her, he wanted to do what he could to get close, and he’d been able to draw her in by giving her the explanation she’d so desperately wanted. But this was the very definition of
backfiring
. And if he didn’t find her and bring her back, he was going to be in deep shit.

              Why had she taken off? Where would she be going? And how good was her sense of direction? His mind anxiously raced as he ran then shifted into his wolf form to gain speed and better track her.

              Brandon had tracked her all the way to Mount Rainier when human voices emanated from across Hollis Lake, stopping him in his tracks. Flashlight beams swept across the water’s surface, as people called out into the darkness, “Gwe-hen Kell-her! Gwe-hen Kell-her!” over and over like a chant.              

              The winds changed, giving Brandon the message that Gwen was far west so he started off in that direction leaving the search party behind him. 

              Seeing with acute vision thanks to his wolf eyes, Brandon spotted Gwen across a clearing. The moonlight overhead was just bright enough to illuminate her blond hair, the one light hue in a sea of darkness. She was perched on Birth tree limb, clinging dearly to its trunk and appearing somewhat shocked to be so high up.

              Before Brandon crossed the clearing, he shifted back into his human form so she wouldn't be alarmed then made his way to her.

              “I don’t know why I took off like that,” she said with a quivering voice. “I don’t know how I got up here.”