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  “It looks like whatever was jammed into you was mostly deflected off your scapula, so it’s not as deep as it was probably intended to be.”

  “One of the benefits of my current state is that I can hardly feel a thing, doctor Hastings. There’s a slight tenseness in my shoulder and right arm, but other than that I’m happy to have an excuse to see you again. Is that a new shade of lipstick you’re wearing?”

  Again, I found myself blushing from something Ben said to me. I prepared a suture needle and tried to keep my voice calm and casual when I answered. “It is a new shade. Linda suggested I try it out. Something about the lights in here and how this shade would work better with my complexion.”

  Oh god, why was I telling him this? I felt like a schoolgirl on a first date. Reminding myself of who he was and what he was capable of, I focused my attention on his laceration and began to stitch the wound.

  “Well I think you always look nice, and I’d say that even if you and I were to meet out in the world instead of down here with all these miscreants and madmen. I thank you again for giving me an opportunity to pretend that my life is at least something like it used to be before…”

  “Was it long ago?” I knew I shouldn’t be asking him questions like this, but we were alone, and there was no one to find out. I’d never been curious about any of the others I’d treated, and I told myself I could be curious and still keep my guard up. “That you were turned, I mean. Have you been a vampire for very long?”

  “Not long at all, actually. After I was turned, I tried to live with it for a few months, but the pressure to hunt and kill was too great, so I turned myself in.”

  “You turned yourself in? That must have been a difficult decision.”

  “The decision was made for me by the creature who turned me. By all rights I should have been left for dead that night, but for some reason she decided to make me like her.”

  “It was a she?” I asked the question before I could check my surprise and, to my embarrassment, jealousy. The image of a sultry raven-haired woman seducing him, feeding on him, and then turning him into a vampire frustrated and angered me more than I wanted to admit.

  “I was out at a bar for a friend’s birthday party one night, and the next thing I knew I was following this woman back to her house. That’s not the sort of behavior I typically indulge in, and I remember it surprising me how much I wanted to do anything she asked. I know now that it was her powers acting on me, but at the time I thought I was falling in love with her.”

  Standing there with a clamp and needle in one hand, and a piece of gauze in the other, I realized I’d stopped halfway through a knot to listen to him. I could have sutured a wound four times as long in the fifteen minutes it had taken me to do only part of his.

  “Are you married?” he asked, turning his head to the side so he could make partial eye contact.

  Knowing I could handle it, I met his gaze and told him what I tell every inmate who asks about my personal life, “I’m not at liberty to disclose any personal information. Facility rules.”

  “I apologize for crossing any boundaries. I only ask because it would be a tragedy for a woman like you to not have someone to love and cherish her.”

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but this job doesn’t allow for much of a personal or social life.” I tied off the last knot and set down the needle. Dabbing alcohol on a wadded up piece of gauze, I wiped the last of the blood away from the wound. This action alone would sting a human with enough pain that they’d probably pass out, but Ben seemed to not notice at all. “And if you’re trying to flatter me just to get your whiteblood dosage down, you should know that you’re not the first to try it, and you definitely won’t be the first to succeed. Everyone gets the same dose.”

  Ben shifted on the examination table to turn around to face me. “I assure you, I have no intention of trying to trick you. The last thing I want right now is a reduction in my whiteblood dosage. Being here and getting the treatments is the closest I can get to being human. It’s a shame vampires can’t procure whiteblood outside of this facility. It would probably solve a lot of the problems some of us face every day.”

  My glove snapped when I peeled it off my fingertips, and I sat on the stool next to the table. The guard would be back to check in on him soon, but I was enjoying his company and I didn’t want it to end before it had to. Going home on time just to sit in front of the TV with another takeout dinner from one of the two restaurants in town wasn’t at all appealing compared to spending another few minutes with Ben.

  “Is it hard being locked up in here knowing that you didn’t do anything to deserve it? Surely there must be someone on the outside who misses you. Some family to wonder where you are?”

  A strained look crossed his face, but it disappeared almost as quickly as it came. “I have no one. My father died when I was young, and my mother passed away earlier this year. There’s no one waiting for me out there.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It is what it is,” he said with a forced a smile. “And what about you? You spend your days down here with us, caring for us, keeping us alive with whiteblood injections. What about your life outside this place?”

  It was a question I asked myself on an almost daily basis. What about my life outside of this place? There was a security cleared psychiatrist available to us should we need it, and I’d made attempts to discuss it with him, but they never seemed to go anywhere. He’d told me I had to figure out what drove me to stick with this work before I could decide whether I was missing out on what others would consider a normal life. I’d yet to figure it out, but I wasn’t going to tell that to an inmate.

  “The work is important,” I said instead. “There are people here, people like you who haven’t done anything wrong. At first I was attracted to the secrecy and the exclusivity of the job. It feels good to be head hunted for something like this, but now it’s about hopefully being able to study vampires in order to find ways that we can possibly coexist out in society. There will always be a need for facilities like this, but a part of me doesn’t believe someone like you really needs to be locked up here.”

  I stood up and made myself busy cleaning up the tools I’d used to stitch his back. There were things someone in my position should never say to an inmate, and I’d crossed several lines in the last few minutes.

  “You can put your shirt back on now,” I said with as much cool professional distance as I could. “The healing will be slow, like a regular human, but as long as you’re on the whiteblood supplement, it will heal.”

  Thankfully the guard chose that moment to collect his charge, saving me from any further conversation. If anyone were to find out I’d told Ben that he didn’t belong here, I’d lose my job and probably never be able to work as a doctor anywhere again after the people in charge were done with me.

  “Doctor Hastings?” said Ben as he was being escorted out of the room. “Thank you for everything. Your kindness means more to me than you can ever know.”

  I nodded in response and didn’t exhale until the door had swung fully shut behind him.

  Chapter4

  There are times in everyone’s life when they know they’re behaving badly, but they still can’t seem to stop themselves from doing it anyway. For me, that happened before Ben Gold was scheduled to come in for his weekly dose of whiteblood. His was my last appointment of the day since he needed the extra time for me to check on his wound and replace the dressing. I’d already started wearing a little more make-up and paying closer attention to how I dressed on days that I knew I’d be seeing Ben, but standing in front of the mirror checking my hair and touching up my lipstick, I knew I’d taken it too far.

  He’s just a prisoner, I reminded myself. It doesn’t matter how nice he is, or how good he looks with his shirt off, he’s an inmate of a secret government detainment facility built specifically for vampires. Vampires that feed on humans. Ben Gold would be locked up for the rest of his li
fe, and there was no future in pursuing even the most superficial of romances with him.

  I capped my lipstick and shoved it back into my purse when I heard the door open. Quickly snatching up some papers from my desk, I pretended to be going over charts while Ben was escorted into the room. Since he’d need more than a simple injection, I asked the guard to remove the handcuffs from Ben’s wrists before he left. It wasn’t common practice, but it wasn’t exactly against protocol if an inmate had proven his good behavior in my office.

  “Good day to you, Doctor Hastings,” said Ben after the guard unlocked the cuffs and left them alone.

  “You can call me Jen, you know. Most of the more civil inmates do.” I pulled on a pair of gloves and prepared his arm for the whiteblood injection. “That’s a nasty bruise on your face.”

  He frowned and averted his eyes from me. “Yes, me being clumsy again, I’m afraid. I walked right into the edge of my cell the other day. Damn things are so hard to see, being made out of glass and all. If it hadn’t been the bullet proof variety, I’m afraid I’d have shattered it completely.”

  The needle slipped into his arm and I pushed down on the plunger. The whiteblood was a pale substitute for proper human blood, but even the most gentle of vampires sucked in air and experienced a moment of euphoria when the chemicals hit their bloodstream.

  “If there’s someone causing you trouble, you can tell me about it.” I said when the injection was complete. “No one should have to suffer the abuse of other inmates. I can go to General Edwards in confidence if you don’t want to be identified.”

  “I appreciate the gesture,” he said as he leaned back in the chair, letting the whiteblood course through his veins, “but it’s nothing for you to worry about. There are certain games that are played by the pawns in a place like this, and I have my well being under control.”

  “Well, if things fall out of your control, I want you to know that you can trust me.” I removed my gloves and laid a hand on his arm. It was as cool to the touch as ever, but not in an unpleasant way. This sort of contact was dangerous and against protocol, but I couldn’t help myself. Besides, most of the vampires were extremely docile immediately after their injection.

  “I do hope that I can trust you,” he said, his eyes locking with mine. “It’s difficult for me to express my feelings, but it’s important to me that you don’t think of me as a bad person.”

  Every part of my brain was telling me to take my hand off his arm, but instead I squeezed it reassuringly. “I don’t think that at all. In all honesty, I think you’re quite a good person trapped in a bad situation.”

  “That means a lot to me.”

  “Oh, I almost forgot about your back. Why don’t you take your shirt off and turn around for me so I can change the dressing.”

  As a doctor, I know I should have put on another pair of gloves. As a woman, I didn’t care to have a layer of latex between his skin and mine. I peeled away the bandage and saw that everything was healing cleanly with no sign of infection. Using a piece of gauze, I applied an antibacterial gel and covered it with a bandage. Smoothing the tape down over his back and shoulder with my fingertips, I let them brush across the skin of his back a little farther than necessary. The urge to slide my hands around him to pull him close and run my hands across his strong stomach and chest was so overwhelming that I had to pull away quickly.

  “That looks fine,” I said with a lump in my throat. “Just, uh, keep it dry and clean, and try not to exert yourself for another week or so.”

  It was impossible for me to look him in the eye without blushing, but trying to look elsewhere just brought my gaze down to his gorgeous body. Images of him wrapping me in those arms and holding me tight against him while he ravaged me flashed by one after another, and I became completely flustered.

  “Can I put my shirt back on now?” he asked with a grin.

  “Oh, um, of course you can. Just… go ahead and do that.”

  This time I didn’t even bother pretending to be busy. A big part of me wanted Ben to know I was thinking about him as more than just a patient, and I was starting to love watching him move. It was a small thing, but it felt intimate, like watching a lover get dressed after a session of passionate lovemaking. It was easy to imagine that he’d just gotten out of bed and was preparing to go fix them some dinner.

  “I guess that’s the end of our time together for this week,” he said, snapping me out of my daydream.

  “Right.” I walked with him and pulled the door open for him to walk through.

  He paused and turned towards me at the last second, and for the briefest of moments I thought he was going to kiss me. Instead, he just smiled, thanked me for the gentle treatment when I’d changed his bandage, and walked away.

  I was standing there watching him walk towards the waiting guard, admiring the way his ass looked even in the unflattering standard issue pants, when I heard the scream come from Linda’s office.

  Pressed flat against the wall as a group of guards rushed past me with an unidentifiable inmate carried between them, I held my breath and dared to hope that they’d subdued him on time. When I’d talked to Linda earlier that week, she’d told me that everything was going well and that she felt comfortable working alone with the inmates, but clearly something had gone wrong. It was rare that an inmate would risk attacking someone during their whiteblood injection, and even more rare that they’d do it with the whiteblood coursing through their veins and pacifying them.

  “Oh my god, Linda, are you okay?” I asked when I finally got to her office.

  She sat in a chair by her desk, a large icepack pressed against her face. She sat stock still, staring at the wall, with her breathing coming on short rapid inhalations and exhalations. It was immediately clear that she was in shock.

  “Linda? Can you look me in the eye Linda?”

  He face turned to me but her pupils were dilated and unfocused. She was looking towards me, but not at me, even though I was just inches away from her face.

  “Are you injured? Were you bitten anywhere?”

  I pulled the ice pack away from her face and saw the beginning of a large welt forming on her cheek. Whoever had done this to her had most likely knocked her against the table or to the ground. Luckily for her, I could see no puncture marks anywhere on her skin.

  “He… he broke out of his cuffs…” She trailed off into silence.

  “Who did?” I asked, placing the ice pack back on her face. “Who did this to you, Linda?”

  “King.” Her body shuddered involuntarily, and her eyes finally focused on me. “Trevor King. I was preparing his injection and he just snapped right out of his cuffs before the guards could lock him in the restraints. He tossed those guards across the room and lunged towards me… he… he…”

  Tears started to flow and she sobbed in big hyperventilating gasps. I held her close to me and tried to calm her as best I could, but I knew there wasn’t much I could do. Trevor King was a monster, and he wasn’t supposed to be in Linda’s injection group. How he’d broken his bonds was beyond me, and I could only imagine what it would be like to have him attack me like he did Linda.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” I said. “They’ve taken him away and other than a bit of bruising and a nasty headache, you’re going to be just fine.”

  “Jenny, I’m glad you’re here,” said General Edwards, entering the room with two guards in full riot gear. “How is she?”

  “She’ll be okay,” I said, leaving her side to speak with the warden. “How exactly is it that Trevor King ended up in Linda’s group? I gave specific instructions that the more powerful inmates were to remain with me. It’s too dangerous temping him like that. Can you imagine what would have happened if they hadn’t subdued him so quickly?”

  “I know,” he said, putting his hands up in a suggestion that I should calm myself. “It was an administrative oversight, and it won’t happen again.”

  “It should never have happened in the first place
. I mean, how the hell did he even manage to snap his cuffs? He’s receiving the highest dose of whiteblood out of any of the inmates here, and he still has that kind of power?”

  “This is why we need to get you back on studying how their powers work. If we want to more effectively neutralize their abilities, we need to understand the root source of their power. The whiteblood is the best possible replacement we’ve been able to synthesize, but we’re going to need something more powerful if we’re to be able to fully control them.”

  “Fully control them? What does that mean?”

  He shook his head as though he wasn’t sure of exactly what he’d just said. “Only that we want to keep you and the guards as safe as possible here. If it were up to me, we’d yank the fangs out of every last one of these freaks to keep them from being able to cause any real damage. I don’t care how that makes me sound, but when I look at that young woman there and think about what could have happened to her, well it makes me sick to my stomach.”

  Yank out their fangs? I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. There was no denying that Trevor King was evil through and through, but he was the exception among the general population of Facility 47. Even the worst of the others came nowhere near to exhibiting his malicious hatred of humans. More than that, a huge percentage of the population was like Ben; they were guilty only of the crime of having been in the wrong place at the wrong time when another vampire chose to turn them.

  “From now on I want the escort on Trevor King doubled, and I want him strapped into that chair before I enter the injection room. And under no circumstances is he to be brought near Linda again.”

  “Fair enough,” said the General. He turned to the guards nearby and motioned for them to follow him out.

  I was about to turn away from the door to check on Linda when I heard something jump out of General Edwards’s conversation with the two guards.