Page 15 of Grim’s Delight (The New Protectorate Syndicate #1)

SEVEN

Dahlia thought she was pretty good at handling crises. She’d grown up in a home that had one at least once a week, if not more.

House burned down? Happened twice. Not a big deal. It wasn’t like she had much to miss in the first place.

Mom’s in jail again? Good thing Dahlia could usually pack her own school lunches.

Cousin Ricky blew up his car? That was just another Wednesday.

She’d been forged in the fires of a chaotic, often dangerous household, and while it came with copious negative consequences, it also made her damn good in a crisis.

She never questioned that she’d be able to make things work.

Rent would be paid, one way or another. There would always be food in her fridge. She’d get her degree.

Maybe she’d be sleepless. Maybe she’d eat nothing but rice and peanut butter. Maybe it’d take her twice as long as everyone else to get her education.

But she’d do it, damn it.

In her short life, she’d never met an obstacle she couldn’t overcome — until the day the doctor told her she’d been turned into a vampire.

Dahlia thought she could be forgiven for having a minor mental and emotional collapse.

And that was before the doctors and nurses finally convinced her to do the tooth extraction. It’d taken hours and hours of denial-fueled negotiation for her to consent. She hadn’t wanted to believe it.

She refused.

Being arrant in a world of dragons and vampires and elves and witches wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, but it was who she was. Who her family had always been. They didn’t have much, if anything, to be proud of except for the fact that they were scrappy survivors living in a harsh world.

Even if Dahlia hadn’t spent five years working in a vampire bar and witnessing some of the worst of them, she wouldn’t have wanted to be a vampire. She liked who she was.

Or she had, until one bad night ruined her life.

The doctors sent her home with numbing gel, an ice pack, two fewer teeth, and entirely new identity to grapple with.

Well, maybe that’s not fair, she thought, eyeing the small stack of glossy paper sitting on her kitchen counter. They also gave me pamphlets.

After they’d pumped her for as much information as possible, they’d sat her down for a disturbingly nonchalant rundown of what her life would be like. The biggest and most obvious change was that she’d be on a strict synth diet for the rest, but there were others.

No more sunlight. No more junk food. No more casual dating.

She had to worry about things like drinking from people and venom and how complicated it would be to have kids. That last part stung the most. She’d hadn’t even begun to process it yet.

That was on the list, she thought, touching her finger to a brand new fang. It was damn sensitive, but the doctor assured her any discomfort would go away within twenty-four hours.

Dahlia had it all planned out. She and Cecilia would move to San Francisco together. She’d get her degree. She’d start a business. Then she’d have a couple cute kids around the same time as Cecilia.

Her kids would have a soft life and never have to worry about whether someone would be around to help with homework.

But how would she have kids now? Everyone knew vampires were infertile until they found an anchor.

It wasn’t like finding a regular partner to hopefully stick around after knocking you up.

It took months of injections of a vampire’s venom to make their bodies compatible, and that was only after convincing a person to be your personal buffet for life.

Maybe another person would’ve been initially more upset about the horrific diet change, but Dahlia had been around synth and blood for so long that it only made small ripples in her mind. What she really cared about was her future, which now appeared almost unrecognizable.

Cecilia was the only person in the hospital who seemed to understand.

While the doctors and nurses went on and on about the dangers of too much sunlight or the risks of being reckless with her new venom, Cecilia held Dahlia’s hand and looked at her with so much sympathy it made her want to sob all over again.

They’d spent the rest of the day and most of the night curled up together in Dahlia’s bed. They didn’t talk. They just put Dahlia’s tablet between them and watched several episodes of a soap opera about a coven of witches embroiled in several torrid love affairs.

Cecilia had asked if she wanted her to stay over, but Dahlia knew she needed time alone to process, so she’d sent her friend to her own apartment around two in the morning.

They were used to the nocturnal life, but Cecilia had been up to take her to the hospital since noon.

By the time she shuffled off to her own bed, she looked almost as tired as Dahlia.

Left alone, her mind spun in circles of denial, anger, and acceptance.

A shower helped. So did another bottle of synth. Finally clean and full after weeks of illness, she forced herself to crack open her windows to air out her tiny apartment.

“You can grieve,” she muttered to herself as she sat on her floor.

The guts of her tiny closet were spilled out around her in piles of vintage silk, fur, chiffon, and wool.

“Some bad shit happened to you. You’re allowed to be upset.

But you can’t let yourself drown in it. Dahlia McKnight doesn’t throw pity parties. ”

Cool, wet air blew into her apartment as she sorted everything into piles. She should’ve been resting, but after weeks of sickness, she rode the wave of renewed energy the synth had given her.

Reorganizing her closet gave her something to do with her hands while she muddled through her feelings.

She hadn’t wanted to give the doctors more information about what happened to her, but she’d been given little choice.

Dahlia wasn’t reckless enough to give Patrol the names of those who’d been in the rooftop lounge that night and they hadn’t asked, assuming an insignificant server probably wouldn’t know, but she’d been convinced by the doctor to spill the details.

“It’s important for your health that we know who donated the blood,” he’d cajoled her. “If there’s some sort of problem or rejection, we can consult their records. You never know — it might just save your life one day.”

Even then, it’d taken his assurance that nothing would get leaked back to Patrol before she coughed up the name.

Dahlia gently rolled up a silk scarf, a treasure she’d found at an estate sale, her thoughts on what it meant to have someone else’s blood in her. She knew more about vampires than the average person, certainly, but there was plenty she’d never bothered to learn.

I have no choice now. How fun.

She wondered if it would mean anything to Mr. Bowan if he knew he’d accidentally turned her. It seemed unlikely. She was just a server he’d had the misfortune of meeting once. What would he care?

Dahlia stood up from her cross-legged position and began hanging her clothes back up, this time by color rather than occasion as she’d done the last time she reorganized.

Growing up with next to nothing, there was little she treasured more than her wardrobe, which was painstakingly assembled via thrift stores, bargain shops, estate sales, and swaps.

The rich colors, the sumptuous fabrics, the vintage craftsmanship… All of it made her feel special in a way nothing else in life had. When she wore her beautiful clothes, she was more than just a girl from a broken home. She was a beautiful woman making her way in a glamorous city.

I can still be that, she thought, trying to summon some sort of positivity. Things will just look a little different.

She’d have to get a new job, but she’d already decided on that, so it wasn’t too much of a shock.

There were many shops open at night. She’d worked retail in the past. Surely she could get a job at one of them.

Until then, she had a healthy savings account for emergencies.

She could take a couple weeks to get her bearings before she threw herself into real life again.

Her rent would still be paid. She’d still have food — synth, now. School would start up again in a few weeks. She could easily switch to being fully online, though she’d miss being in a classroom.

The rest… well, the rest she’d just have to figure out in time.

Feeling marginally more calm, she’d just finished carefully aligning her shoes and bags on the floor of her closet when the knock on her door came.

Dahlia heavily considered not answering it. She hadn’t ordered anything, and there was no reason for her landlord to come around. The gods knew he avoided the rundown apartment building like the plague, lest one of his many disgruntled renters corner him and demand improvements.

It was most likely one of Felix’s deliveries.

When she ignored him for long enough, he tended to get more and more extreme in his bids for attention.

A phone was just the start. He’d once sent her a necklace with a diamond bigger than an egg.

She’d been so terrified of having it in her apartment that she’d forced him to take it back.

In the past, the ploy had always worked. Whether she accepted his gifts or not wasn’t the goal. It was getting her attention.

Which was exactly why she’d been refusing everything. She wasn’t about to bend this time. She wouldn’t give in.

She was done with the game Felix played.

Not that it matters now. He won’t want a vampire.

A staggering pang of loss struck her as another knock came, more insistent this time. It’d been one thing to decide to cut him out once and for all. It was quite another to know he wouldn’t want anything to do with her now.

Vampires don’t date other vampires.

They couldn’t. Or at least, she’d never heard of any of them doing so.

Vampire venom was poisonous to them, and they couldn’t feed without releasing it.

And vampiric relationships were all about feeding. Especially the shallow ones.

Felix wouldn’t want anything to do with her if he couldn’t fuck and feed. He’d toyed with her for years, and though she’d grown feelings for him, she’d never been delusional enough to think he wanted more than those two things from her.

Her throat went painfully tight. Gods, they’d never even gotten close to dating. And she’d broken things off with him! So why did it hurt so much to think that there was no possibility of anything between them now?

Dahlia stood there in the middle of her apartment, her silk pajama shorts and flowy top fluttering in the cool breeze, frozen by the prospect.

A part of her didn’t want to see whatever outrageous thing Felix sent her, but another, bigger part was compelled by the fact that it would probably be the last gift she ever received from him.

She padded across the floor. If it was too much, she promised herself that she’d return it anyway. But if it was tolerable, she’d make it a keepsake for the strange, dangerous era in her life when she entertained a vampire suitor.

It was a deeply unpleasant shock to find no delivery man on the other side of her door.

Dahlia’s grip tightened reflexively on the door handle as she fought the urge to step back. “Devon?”