Page 83

Story: Cullen

“No.” Corbin bared his teeth. “I can do it. You just figure out how to cure him.”

“Can I talk to you a minute?” Orion asked, pulling Cullen aside.

“What?” He glanced at Corbin, who was totally acting weird. “You don’t think Corbin got bit, do you?”

“Huh?” Orion tilted his head. “No. Why?”

“He’s just acting really odd.”

“Yeah. I know.” Orion sighed. “The dads don’t seem to think he can be cured.”

“What?” Now it was his turn to stare. “There has to be a way.”

“Well, I’m totally willing to look for it, but I thought I would tell you what they intimated.”

Corbin was looking down at the fae guy with this weird expression, and Cullen felt magic move in the room.

“Okay. But they deal in theoreticals, right?”

“Sure, but they’re pretty, uh, realistic about vampires.”

Cullen grinned. “You mean they told you I was right?”

“That too.” Orion chuckled, and Corbin rounded on them.

“If all you can do is laugh, you can leave.”

They exchanged a glance, and he poked at Corbin with his mind.Did he bite you?

“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course he didn’t bite me.” Corbin rolled his eyes. “He tried really hard. His teeth aren’t sharp, though, so that made it a little weird. It was sort of like watching a rampaging cow, but a pretty one.”

Cullen stared at his brother. “Are you sure you didn’t get bit? Maybe you have mad pretty cow disease.”

That earned him a glare. “Not funny, and we have to fix him.”

He winced, because the chance that they were going to have to kill the fae was huge. “Corbin, you know that?—”

“No, you have to fix him. We have to fix him.” There was a hint of panic in Corbin’s eyes, the green almost neon.

“We can’t let the family get infected?—”

“So let’s fix him!”

Cullen shrugged and glanced at Orion. “Corbin hasn’t been bitten.”

But that didn’t mean that this poor creature was not going to have to die if he threatened the children or his parents or the whole entire fae land. The good of the many—it was a thing.

Orion sighed softly. “Can you two think of anything? Do you have any kind of idea about what we could possibly do?”

He shrugged, racking his brain—not that he was a scholar or an herbalist or anything. “Do you mean like is there a vaccine?”

Orion shook his head. “Maybe an antidote?”

“Well, I don’t know. What’s the opposite of vampire.” Corbin never looked away from the fae tied there on the bed again. “I mean. Give me something that’s practical. We say, oh, they’re bad. Well, we’re relatively good, and you know, we can be vampires. They feed off children. That makes them evil. We rescue the children. That makes us good. I don’t know. How much do you get fed from even to be turned? Do you have to get emptied? And then the virus or bacteria or whatever vampirism is infects you as your blood starts to make itself again?”

Cullen glanced at Orion, whose eyes were wide.

“I don’t even know if that makes sense,” Corbin said.