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“What are you talking about?” he demanded.
“That phone call? That was somebody I had searching for Susan. They finally figured out where she is.”
“You need to calm down, Lawrence. We need to talk about this.”
“All of this time I’ve trusted you, Victor. You gave me a chance when everyone else wanted to have me staked. You saw that I still could be a help to you, despite what I am. I thought you and my wife—you were the only ones who gave me a chance.” He let out a shaky breath. “And this is what you do to me? To us?”
I was listening, but I didn’t understand. Something had broken in Lawrence; his voice had a pitchy quality that made me think he wasn’t in complete control of his sanity at the moment. Whatever he’d heard on the phone had broken him.
“Lawrence—” Dr. Reynolds began, his voice filled with pain.
“She’s been here all the time, hasn’t she? In the rooms that are off limits to everyone but you. You son of a bitch. You stole her from me and have been using her in your goddamned experiments, haven’t you? Haven’t you?”
He came forward enough to grab the doctor by his coat and shook him hard enough to rattle anyone’s brain.
I crouched next to Declan, holding on to his arm tightly. “Declan, wake up. You have to snap out of this now.”
That feeling of dread I’d had in my gut ever since we arrived at this place—maybe I should have paid attention to it. But I never could have predicted this.
“I knew what you’d do if I told you the truth,” Dr. Reynolds said, his voice strong but now with a naked edge of fear to it. “Lawrence, listen to me, you didn’t know this, but—but Susan was pregnant. She was keeping it a secret from you.”
The rage on Lawrence’s face faded, replaced with shock. “Pregnant?”
“It was your child. A dhampyr was growing inside her.”
“Jesus.”
“She didn’t want you to know—she knew you’d take it badly. She came to me to get an abortion.”
A shiver went down my arms. Abortion was the normal way to deal with a human woman pregnant with a dhampyr. Since most of them turned out to be the monster kind, a birth that only happened when the dhampyr literally clawed its way out of its mother’s womb, which inevitably led to the mother’s horrific death, there really wasn’t much choice. Births of the more human dhampyrs like Declan were the rarity.
“Did you abort the fetus?” Lawrence demanded.
Dr. Reynolds shook his head. “The fetus was to be kept alive, monitored.”
“Another damn experiment.”
“Yes.”
“All this time I’ve been beside myself with worry and she’s been here. The same place I come to every day, working by your side. And you never told me.”
“There was no other way.”
“It’s always about research for you, isn’t it Victor?” His expression twisted into something ugly, and he raked a hand through his red hair. “I have a secret, too, one I’ve kept so it wouldn’t hurt you. Clara wanted to leave you before she was killed. She’d fallen in love with another vampire. She hated that you spent all your time here, working on ways to kill her kind. Our kind. If you hadn’t been such a damn workaholic, then maybe she wouldn’t have ended up on the wrong side of that hunter’s stake.”
“No, it can’t be true.” Dr. Reynolds’s expression filled with sick shock. His lovely vampire wife hadn’t been so lovely after all.
“Where is Susan?” Lawrence shook Dr. Reynolds. “Where? Tell me and maybe this can end well for you.”
There was silence for a few very long moments.
“She’s dead.”
“No!” Lawrence’s expression shattered, and he shoved the doctor back from him.
“The birth, it—it happened only yesterday. I did everything I could to find a way around it. To try to save her. It was impossible. The other woman we have up on the next floor—the one set to become our next test subject for dhampyr breeding—she tried to help. She held Susan’s hand the whole time until it was . . . too late. The dhampyr was killed immediately; it was too vicious to keep for further testing. I’m so sorry, Lawrence.”
“She died yesterday.” His voice was barely audible.
