I scream, try to get to him, but all I manage to do is fall to my knees. I’m weak and dizzy and nauseous…so nauseous. The room is spinning and waves of cold are sweeping through my body, tightening my muscles and making it impossibly hard to breathe, to move.
And still I try to reach Jaxon. I’m sobbing and screaming as I crawl across the floor, terrified that she’s killed him. I know it’s not easy to kill a vampire, but I’m pretty sure that if anyone would know how to do it, it would be another vampire.
“God, would you shut up already!” Lia kicks me so hard in the stomach that she knocks the breath out of me. “I didn’t kill him. I just tranq’d him. He’ll be fine in a few hours. You, on the other hand, won’t be so lucky if you don’t stop that incessant whimpering.”
Maybe she expects me to get hysterical all over again at that threat, but it isn’t exactly a shock. As drugged and unable to think as I am right now, my mind is still working well enough to figure out that I won’t be getting out of this alive. Which is saying something considering I can barely remember my own name at the moment.
“You should have drunk more tea,” she tells me, disgust evident in her voice. “Everything would be easier if you just
did what you were supposed to do, Grace.”
She’s looking at me like she expects me to say I’m sorry, which definitely isn’t happening. Besides, what would that even look like? Oops? So sorry I’m making it harder for you to kill me?
Give me a break.
Lia keeps talking, but it’s getting harder and harder for me to follow what she’s saying. Not when the room is spinning and my head is muddled and all I can think about is Jaxon.
Jaxon, twirling me through the aurora borealis. Jaxon, staring at me with hellish eyes.
Jaxon, telling me to run, trying to protect me even when he’s drugged out of his mind.
It’s enough to have me rolling over, enough to have me trying to crawl to him even though I don’t have the strength anymore to push up to my knees.
“Jaxon,” I call, but his name comes out so slurred I can barely understand it. Still, I try again. And again. Because the voice inside me is screaming that if Jaxon knows I’m in trouble, he’ll move heaven and earth to get to me. Even if it involves waking up from a stealth-tranquilizer-gun attack.
Lia must know it, too, because she hisses, “Stop it,” as she towers over me.
Which only makes me try harder. “Jaxon,” I call again. This time, it’s little more than a whisper, my voice failing as everything else does, too.
“I didn’t want to do this the hard way,” Lia says, raising the tranquilizer gun and aiming it straight at me. “When you wake up feeling like a herd of elephants is running through your head, remember you’re the one who chose this.”
And then she pulls the trigger.
