The White Blood Trilogy - Complete Box Set Books 1-3 Page 18
“No!” I cried. “I used to work there, but I don’t anymore. I helped two of your kind escape that place.”
“What was your job when you worked at the Facility?” she asked.
“I was there as a doctor. I treated the prisoners and administered whiteblood injections.” I struggled to move, but she had me completely under her control. “Please, you have to believe me. Once I found out what they were doing there, I no longer wanted to be a part of it. They were chasing me even before I became a vampire!”
“I’m afraid your actions are not enough to redeem the injustices you’ve inflicted on my people. There is only one punishment for someone like you, and that is eternal death.”
She stretched out her hand, and someone placed an ornate wooden spike in it. She positioned it over my heart, and I heard my mother cry my name in anguish. The woman raised the spike high above her head and time seemed to slow down. My brain processed the incremental movements of the sharpened tip aimed straight at my heart, while at the same time rationally flipping through every possible reason I might be able to use to stay my execution.
“Wait!” I shouted.
The falling spike halted just inches away from penetrating my heart.
“I can help you. The whiteblood,” I continued. “I can reverse engineer it. I can make it so that vampires are immune to the whiteblood injections. Facility 47’s major weakness is that it relies entirely on the whiteblood injections to keep vampires subdued. Without it, they’d never be able to build a prison secure enough to hold anyone.”
“With immunity to whiteblood, we could seed our own people into the Facility and help tear it apart from the inside,” said one of the men who’d also been sitting on the dais. “Perhaps we should hear her out.”
The woman with the spike reluctantly let me go and rose to her feet. She waved her hand dismissively, and the vampires holding my companions released them. My mother rushed towards me and embraced me, blood red tears flowing from her eyes.
“The newcomers are to be given lodging and blood,” said the man who’d interjected on my behalf. “See that they are made comfortable, and we’ll discuss this further tomorrow night.”
The three head vampires departed the courtyard, and a young and friendly vampire appeared to show us to our quarters.
“I’m sorry you had to go through all of that,” said the boy who looked no older than sixteen. “My name’s Puck, and I think you’ll soon find that we’re not always so serious. There are certain things they take extremely serious, and the Facility is one of them. The only other rule here is basically to keep the secret. It’s why no one can be allowed to leave if they’re not accepted into Sanctuary.”
“Harsh rules,” said my father.
“This place is more than just sanctuary,” said Puck, leading us out of the temple and into the jungle. “We’re working on ways to convert more vampires to non violent ways. We’ve been working on our own blood substitute, but we’re missing a few key elements that allow us to mimic human blood. Without all the power inhibiting stuff that whiteblood has, of course.”
“Uh, how old are you exactly?” I asked Puck.
He laughed. “One hundred and forty-six years next month. I’ve been here for more than a hundred of those years.”
We arrived at a small collection of oceanfront quaint looking wooden huts that made up a village of sorts. It wasn’t anything fancy on the outside, but the interiors were comfortable and pleasantly simple. It was the kind of place most people would dream of being able to spend a few days on vacation.
“Most of these people look pretty normal to me,” said George. “I was worried this whole island was going to be like what we saw in there.”
“With the exception of the council, the people who come to sanctuary are like you are. They want to live free of persecution from humans, and they want to contribute to making a better world where humans and vampires can co-exist peacefully. The council is strict because they need to be, but the rest of us are pretty much normal.”
“So you think I’d be doing the right thing by helping them create a whiteblood immunity?” I asked. I trusted this Puck character, although I didn’t really know why. I wondered if my new vampire self had a sort of built in character judging ability that helped me better read peoples’ body language.
“I really do,” he said. “With your knowledge, we can help free wrongly imprisoned vampires and hopefully develop a blood substitute that’s better for us than animal blood, and doesn’t make the human population wonder if we’re going to turn on them every time we’re hungry.”
“I think we’ve found our place then,” said Ben. He wrapped a protective arm around me.
“Great to hear it,” said Puck. “Speaking of blood, who’s hungry?”
Puck showed us to our cabins. One for Ben and I, and one each for George and my parents. We accepted the blood he’d had brought out for us, and retired for the rest of the night, feeling worn out and like ready for a break. Soon I knew I’d have to shift over to the schedule of working during the nights and resting during the day when my vampire abilities were at their lowest, but for now I just wanted to curl up in bed with the man I loved.
EPILOGUE
“So what do you think?” asked Ben, stripping his shirt off and sitting on the edge of the bed.
I moved to straddle him and kissed him on the lips. “I think I want to get these filthy clothes off, and then I want to feel your ridiculously sexy body against mine.”
We kissed passionately and stripped off our clothes. Alone together for the first time since that brief moment in the barn nearly a week before, we took our time and explored each other’s bodies with our lips, tongues, and fingertips. My senses felt incredibly heightened and intense, and the feeling when Ben slid his manhood inside of me was like nothing I’d ever been able to imagine.
We made love for over an hour before reaching our climaxes together. Afterwards, we lay there in the semi-darkness of the nearly full moon that had come out from behind the clouds. I nuzzled against Ben’s shoulder and squeezed him tightly.
“Whatever might have happened over the last few days, and whatever comes next, I’m so glad we’re here together right now.”
“I am too,” he said. He kissed my forehead. “I love you so much, Jen.”
“I love you too,” I replied. “I’m sorry it took me so long to trust you, and also for me to even trust my own feelings.”
“It’s perfectly understandable,” he said. “The situation wasn’t exactly normal. Although, I have to tell you I fell in love with you from the very first moment I saw you.”
“When I gave you your injection on your first day?”
“Yeah. I’d already researched you, but none of that prepared me for what it was like to look into your eyes on that day.”
“It’s a little ironic,” I said with a laugh.
“What is?”
“Whiteblood is something most vampires fear above all else, but it was the very thing that brought us together.”
He chuckled. “I suppose you’re right. I’d do it all over again to be here with you though.”
“Me too,” I said, closing my eyes and squeezing him tighter. “Me too.”
I soon drifted off to sleep. I had to make the most of this since once I was fully turned sleeping would be a thing of the past. Until that point, I will be able to sleep like normal but, from what Ben said, eventually I will realize I can not sleep at all.
Deep in the first calm sleep I’d had in weeks, I found myself experiencing the same sort of ethereal vision that I recognized from the times Ben had connected with me through a psychic link. The difference this time was that I knew he had nothing to do with it, because it was a vision of my creation. It’s difficult to explain exactly how I knew that this was something more than just a vivid and realistic dream. There are certain things only the vampire mind can comprehend, and as my ghostly self wandered the halls of Facility 47, I knew that what I was seeing w
as in fact very real, and insanely enough, yet to pass.
The vision began from my old office in the infirmary. I felt a fleeting moment of comfort at being surrounded by my tools and my desk again, but then the memories of the awful things I’d been unwittingly helping these evil men perpetrate against the inmates trickled back and reminded me of how happy I was to be away from there. I pushed open the door and saw a man in medical scrubs and coat injecting a vampire with what I knew to be whiteblood. There were two armed guards in the room with them, and they seemed to be on high alert.
Leaving them behind, I went down the hall to the second clinic we’d set up. I looked in through the window in the door, and was happy to see that Linda was nowhere to be seen. Someone else was doing the work now, and by the cold and efficient way they were dealing with the inmates, I got the impression that after my infractions, they were only taking sterner ex-military personnel.
From there, I went to check on the general population area. I arrived just in time to hear the buzzer that indicated it was time for the inmates to get their exercise allotment in the yard. The doors to the cells clicked and slid open, and each of the vampires stepped out and filed into line. The guards seemed oblivious to anything out of the ordinary, but I could sense that something was going to happen.
Sure enough, the vampires all moved on some silent signal, some of them flying through the air to take out the guards, others still under the effects of whiteblood moving at a human pace but wreaking just as much havoc. I followed them through the facility, a silent witness to the destruction of this place that should never have been. Room by room, they destroyed the mechanisms that controlled the UV lights and gas clouds, and killed the guards who’d regularly abused them.
A group of whiteblood immune vampires went straight for the General’s office, and I followed them closely. The leader of their group blew open the door with a single kick, and they flooded into his office, grabbing him and securing him to a chair. I watched with mild horror as the inmates tore the General’s shirt off, sinking their fangs into his exposed flesh, feeding and taking just enough so that he wouldn’t die from the blood loss. On the one hand, I hated to see anyone in so much pain, but on the other hand, I knew that there was no one who deserved it more than General Edwards.
Laughing, they left him alone in his office still tied to his chair. This confused at first, until I realized that the fire alarm was blaring and water was splashing into the room from the overhead sprinklers. It wasn’t nearly enough to save the General or his precious Facility though. Flames raged through the hallways, incinerating everything in their path.
I left the General to die and pulled back my vision until I was watching from afar. The outer walls of the above ground portion of the Facility had caught fire now, and the last of the vampires were streaming out of the doors and running for their freedom. A few guards managed to escape the blaze, but they were soon taken down by vampires eager to feed after being locked away for so long.
Severing the psychic vision caused me to jolt awake with a start, and I gasped and sat upright in bed. Ben sat up beside me and placed a hand on my shoulder.
“Is everything okay?” he asked.
“I… I just had a vision of the future.”
“Was it bad? Do we need to worry?”
“No my love,” laying my hand over his. “It’s nothing we need to worry about. From what I’ve just seen, the future is looking bright for everyone that matters.”
“Good,” said Ben. “It’s only noon, but I feel like I could lie here all day.”
“Not me,” I said, feeling wide awake and full of purpose. “I’ve got work to do. For the first time in my life, I feel like I have real work to do that will help countless people live better lives.”
“How about a compromise then?” he asked. “A few more hours in bed, and then we both get to work once the sun sets.”
“That sounds like a deal,” I said, lying back down next to him. I curled up and let him wrap his arms around me, knowing that everything was exactly as it should be and everything was finally how i wanted it in life.
THE END
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