know any other way to do that except to hold you, and to listen whenever you’re ready to tell me what happened to you.”
More tears fell as I looked up at him, into his earnest, handsome face. I wanted to tell him. I needed to tell him. I wanted the pain to go the hell away, and I knew that the only way I could begin to drive it out of my mind and my heart was to talk about what had happened. I felt my hands squeezing his as if I could draw some of his strength into me.
“Three weeks ago,” I began, my throat feeling raw and torn, “two vampires kidnapped me. They drugged me and beat me and tortured me and they threw me out of a moving car and left me for dead. The next day when I went looking for my brother, who had disappeared, they tied me to a bed and raped me.”
As I spoke, Race began breathing heavily . I saw his eyes flash, changing from human to something animal, and he pushed to his feet, his chest heaving with what I instantly recognized as an effort to keep from phasing. For several long moments he stood that way, and I began to wonder if he was going to lose the fight, if his beastly nature would conquer his human control.
“Answer me one question,” he ground out through clenched teeth.
“What’s that?”
“Are they dead?”
“They are,” I replied, and was relieved to see him instantly begin to relax—though I knew his rage was far from gone. “Saphrona and Lochlan killed them. And I’m the one who put a match to their worthless corpses so they’d stay that way.”
Race looked at me. “Who are Saphrona and Lochlan?”
I took a deep breath. “Saphrona Caldwell is Mark’s bondmate. She’s a human-vampire hybrid and he’s a dhunphyr , an immortal human.”
“What the hell?” he said for pr obably the third time in the last ten minutes.
“Immortal humans —we call them dhunphyr —are created when a vampire has bitten a woman who is with child,” I explained. “If she’s far enough along in her pregnancy that the child could live outside of her womb, the draculin in a vampire’s saliva changes the fetus in a similar manner to the way it turns a human into a vampire. Except the placenta filters out the gene sequences that drive them to feed on blood, and they’re not ruled by the night. They do, however, have an advanced healing factor and they’ll live forever. Mark is the only one we know of.”
“How long has he been this way? Never mind, stupid question,” Race muttered, pacing away from me. “I can’t believe he never told me any of this stuff. Has he always known?”
I nodded. “Mark said that he’s always had an idea he wasn’t normal, because he never got sick. All his injuries healed almost instantly—even when he broke his arm falling out of the tree in your old back yard.”
“I remember that,” Race said. “I remember hearing the fucking bone snap and freaking out, screaming for my mom. But by the time your dad came to take him to the hospital, she couldn’t feel the break anymore.”
He ran his hands into his hair and fisted them in the strands again. “Who’s Lochlan?” he asked after a moment.
“Lochlan Mackenna is Saphrona’s brother. Her father, a vampire named Diarmid Mackenna, turned him about a hundred years before Saphrona was born. They consider each other as a brother and sister, and are as close as Mark and I are,” I replied.
“I didn’t even know fuckin’ vamps could have kids,” Race muttered darkly.
“Only the males can,” I told him. “And then only with human females. If the mother isn’t turned at the time of the birth she dies, because hybrids are about as strong as we are, if not stronger. Maybe not as strong as a full vampire, though. Anyway, the strength of a hybrid fetus causes so much internal damage as they grow inside the mother that when they’re born there’s massive bleeding. The mother dies within minutes if she’s not bitten. That’s what happened to Saphrona’s mother, and she’s hated her