Page 76 of Suck This

CHAPTER 16

Sometimes you have to finagle things. Wiggle them a little to make them fit. Then others you have to force it. Pound them with a hammer until they go.

-Con’s secret thoughts

CONSTANTINE

“Mr. Worth!”

I turned to find a young vampire male running toward me as fast as his skinny legs would bring him.

He was so young that he barely stopped needing to breathe, and if this situation were any different, I would’ve almost smiled.

A little baby vamp like him walking into a room like this, well, it took some balls. Especially with the power that was floating around with all of my inner circle still in the room surrounding me.

Render letting him in likely spoke volumes at the vamp’s situation.

“Trent.” Pavlov stopped him. “Don’t move.”

Trent ignored him, instead walking right up to me, breaths coming in gasping pants, and stared at me with terror in his eyes.

“Your Acadia. She was shot,” he said. “Her neighbors called in a disturbance, but they think that the ‘neighbors that called it in’ are actually some activists that wanted there to be witnesses to the shooting. The cops say she didn’t make it. I was listening to the police scanner.”

One second I was looking at the carnage that my club was now in, and the next I was in her apartment, standing where I’d dropped her off not even an hour earlier.

Her brothers were kneeling next to her with tear-stained cheeks. Nash on his knees, his face dripping with tears. Corbin on his other side, staring at Acadia’s body with horror-stricken features.

I didn’t dare look at her.

Not yet.

“I can bring her back,” I told them both, urgency coloring my voice. “Right now. I have a narrow window, but I’ll need bagged blood, or a live donor to do it. Likely two or three of them. Yes or no?”

Being an old vampire like I was, I was able to turn newly dead mortals as long as they’d ingested my blood in the last twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and lucky for me and Acadia, she had.

Corbin looked at me like I was crazy.

I was doing it whether they wanted me to or not, though they didn’t need to know that.

If they didn’t want me to do it, I’d have taken her anyway, waited for them to leave, and then sequestered her somewhere that they would never be able to reach her again.

It wouldn’t work if I didn’t do it now, though. I’d have to distract them fast.

I didn’t dare look down at her body, either. If I did, I would lose it. I would have to admit that this woman was under my skin, and that wasn’t going to keep me calm.

“Do it.” That was Nash.

I didn’t even hesitate. The moment I got the okay, I was down on my knees and performing the same ritual I’d performed on Chen a few short weeks ago.

This time, though, my willpower was much stronger.

She would live.

And as I forced her to drink, forced her to take my undead blood into her body, and willed her to rise, I coaxed my powers into her organs. Sank them into her very bones. Her blood. Her tissues. Her unbeating heart.

And I shocked her. Sort of like a defibrillator would, but with the power that coursed through my veins instead of the machine that brought people’s hearts back to life.

I poured my blood down her throat until I had none left to give, and just when I was about to request someone to feed from, Nash shoved his wrist into my face.