Page 21 of Before We Burn

I take small sips of the blood, unable to hold the cup to my lips for longer than a second. Each time I attempt to, my head rolls and my heart pounds. Marissa must’ve noticed, because she holds the cup to my lips and urges me to drink.

“It’s a spell… one I’ve never seen before. The magic is as dark as what created vampires. The witch who crafted it… I can feel her in it.” Marissa swallows thickly, her heart racing loudly as her eyes go distant.

I lean back in my chair, my head falling back as I close my eyes. “Just get it over with.”

I don’t want to talk about it anymore. The blood is helping the haze, but the pain is making my stomach coil.

Marissa doesn’t speak to me—she doesn’t have to. When the burning starts and my body becomes weak, I know she is pushing magic into me for healing. It feels like a lullaby that will end in my demise.

When I wake, Marissa is long gone and night has already come. The only sleep I was able to get was during my healing, but it was enough to hold me over until morning. I need to feed on something more substantial, and the only place I can get that right now is at Connie’s.

The soldier stirs in his sleep for the first time since we got here. His heart rate speeds up, then suddenly he’s awake.

He sits up abruptly, his hands searching for his weapons. I shake my head in silence—he should be smarter than that. Once you're captured, your weapons are the first thing to go. I stand in the shadows, watching silently. I lean farther into the darkness, waiting to see what his next move will be.

He assesses the room, his jaw clenched tightly and his breathing erratic. He moves to get up, but I slowly click the safety off the gun I took from him, and his eyes shoot to me. He squints, unable to see me clearly since shadows are something I’m used to navigating.

My mask shifts, letting my fangs grow longer, the black veins in my face tingling as they appear. In the dark, vampire eyes glow iridescent, making my green eyes shine yellow. He jumps back.

I lean forward again, the gun still aimed directly at him and sigh. Something I will be doing a lot until this shit show dies down. “Relax. If I wanted to kill you, I would’ve done it already.” My stance is strong, my now-healed wounds tender, so I hold my side gently. “I need you to tell me how you found the school.”

He doesn’t answer right away, and I don’t expect him to. He’s sitting in my basement-turned-bedroom. No windows, a fridge filled with blood stolen from a random hospital, and an older vampire who should be feeding on him. I understand the alarms this raises in his mind, but I don’t want a fight.

“Please give me the answers I want so I can figure this out, then we can both carry on with our lives.” I take a step forward into the light. I don’t want to get too close, so I find my desk and lean my hip against it. He looks at the gun in my hand and back to me, battling his own intuition. I hear it in his thoughts. He’s loud—too loud.

“Okay, let’s try this,” I say, placing the gun on the desk and crossing my arms across my chest. “My name is Marzana, Marz for short. I’m 382 years old, a professor at that school you just blew up, and I can hear every thought pouring through your mind right now. So please, get a grip and tell me what I need to know.”

We sit there, watching each other for a moment. His thoughts slow along with his breathing, his expression morphing from worry to confusion. His thoughts attack me from all different fronts. Suddenly, he’s putting a name to the species and sees the oddness of it all, too.

“We were tipped off by another vampire.” His voice is deep and rough.

“Name?” I ask bluntly, ready to crawl out of my skin for the answer.

“We don’t know her name. She never told us. Just the person who told her to go to the gas station to feed.” His voice doesn’t waiver, and his heart rate stays the same. Unless he is an exceptional liar, there’s no doubt in my mind he’s telling the truth.

“Who was the person?”

“Alex.”

“Alex who?” I was beginning to get frustrated. There are plenty of vampires that go by that name. But there is only one who sticks out in my mind—one who decided to send me home early then completely disappear when the humans showed up.

“I don’t know!” he grunts. His brows pull closer together and the veins in his neck rise. I raise a brow and can’t help the smirk that comes across my face.

“Testy, aren’t you. Did this vampire have any identifying features? Were you supposed to meet with this Alex after the raid?”

“Yes and no. The vampire we captured told us we would know him if we saw him. He has one white eyebrow or something. We didn’t believe her; he sounded like he was made up.” My smirk instantly falls.

It was fucking Alexander.

I push off the desk, my anger flaring, and with it my old tendencies. I feel my wrath boiling over, and my fangs itch with the need to kill something—someone. I search through my room frantically, tossing clothes out of my drawer. Constantine had given me a burner phone to use if there was an emergency. This warrants an emergency.

Once I find it in a random drawer, I dial the only number I know. To my surprise, Constantine answers on the first ring, her voice low and bored as usual. Word must not have gotten to her about the school. She was one of the original creators of it, so I’m not excited to deliver the news to her.

“Hello.”

“The school was hit. Humans with UV guns, sun bombs, and UV darts. No one pulled a gun until it was me and them; it was just the darts for the others. They were taking all the New Bloods they could grab. A—” I pause for a moment, unsure if I should tell her about the human soldier.

Constantine isn’t Alexander—I know that—but Constantine has been alive so long she views life differently. She would think his death would be a blessing for him, but I feel obligated to see to it that he lives out the rest of his life.