Crimson Born - Amy Patrick Page 0,34

blood poisoning.”

Pressure filled my head, pressing out on my eardrums. “What are you doing to help him?”

“We’re offering him time-regulated feedings of blood. But so far, he’s refused to drink any. He’s a hard case. He was pretty far gone by the time they brought him in.”

“Would drinking vampire blood help?” I asked with a mind to volunteer some.

“It would certainly heal him faster, but it would also make him too strong for us to subdue and would put our staff and perhaps the entire Bastion at risk. We’ll stick with human blood for now,” Dr. Coppa said. “Hopefully when he gets thirsty enough, he’ll drink it. After that, we’ll wait for him to recover his senses enough to let someone get near him. Then we can inject him with small doses of vampire blood. It’s the only safe way to do it.”

“Can I at least look at him through the window?” I pleaded.

I needed to see for myself he was actually there and that it was truly my Reece in that locked medical holding room.

The doctor’s brow furrowed in an expression of reluctance, but finally he cracked a small smile. “I don’t suppose that would hurt anything. Follow me.”

He led me down a corridor lined with doorways. Opening one of the doors on the left, he motioned for me to proceed into a small, dimly lit room with two chairs, a table, and a computer.

The wall directly in front of us featured a door that was bolted shut and a large window that was completely blacked out.

“It’s one-way mirror glass,” Dr. Coppa explained. “This is an observation room. Since it’s too dangerous for anyone to be in there with him, we have to watch over him this way and record his feeding patterns and behavior.”

Stretching out a hand, he pressed a button in the wall, and the black window shield cleared to reveal Reece on the other side.

I sucked in a gasp of horror.

It was like looking at a stranger. Neither of us was human anymore, and I must have changed too, but Reece seemed more like a wild creature than either a vampire or a human.

His hair was disheveled and dirty, his clothes—the same ones he’d worn the night we’d met—hung in tatters around his tall, big-boned frame. His boots from that night were gone, and his bare feet were covered in dirt and grime.

Like other vampire males, he was muscle-bound, but his face was gaunt, and his skin had a dull bluish cast instead of the vibrant coloring I’d become accustomed to here at the Bastion.

He paced from one end of the holding room to the other, occasionally pounding at the walls and lifting his head to howl in frustration.

It reminded me of a pathetic grizzly bear I’d seen once during a childhood visit to the zoo. The poor animal had been nearly out of his mind with boredom and the hopeless frustration of captivity.

“You see why we can’t let you in there,” Dr. Coppa said. “We can’t even clean him up, poor soul. It’s the worst case of blood poisoning I’ve ever seen. I wasn’t sure we should even try to rehabilitate him.”

Tearing my eyes away from Reece, I turned to the doctor and gripped his forearm.

“You have to try your very best. He has to get better.”

16

A Familiar Face

For the next week I came back every day to watch Reece through the window and get updates on his condition.

Dr. Coppa told me Reece was going as long as possible without feeding then practically tearing the blood bags apart once he reached the threshold of starvation and caved to the need for sustenance.

But the blood was doing its work. I watched as Reece gradually transformed from a wild beast back into someone resembling the guy I’d met at the bonfire. He had no idea I was there, of course, but I was relieved at what I saw through the one-way glass.

The color had returned to his skin. His face had filled out a little.

There was sanity in his eyes instead of only fear and madness.

Someone had managed to get him into a shower—thank God—and had given him clean clothes to wear, but the clinic staff told me he was still hostile and suspicious, snapping at his care providers and demanding on an hourly basis to be freed from his secure room.

At least he could speak—they said it was the most hopeful sign so far that he’d make a full recovery.

The injections were still out of the