Blake’s heart skipped several beats. Elise tensed, meeting Mencheres’s eyes. Soon. Very soon.
Panic made Elise want to snatch Blake out of the water and start to warm him up now. What if this didn’t work? What if this was the last time she’d ever see Blake? Dear God, how could she stand her heart being demolished yet again?
Blake said something she couldn’t understand. Elise bent closer until his mouth was almost next to her ear.
“What is it, darling?”
“Elise.” Her name was garbled and breathy, like Blake had barely the strength to form it. “Sing me to sleep.”
Blake’s eyes were closed, so Elise didn’t have to worry about him seeing her tears. She started to sing, dipping her hand into the freezing water so she could hold his.
Blake’s breathing became shallower, the intervals between his breaths extending longer and longer. His pulse was erratic, too, at times speeding up in bursts, then growing more and more sluggish. By the time Elise reached the last line of the song, Blake’s heart had stopped completely.
She stared at him, feeling more frozen inside than the icy water that brought about his death. Blake’s eyes were dilated, no spark of life in them. Just glassy, like a doll’s eyes.
Elise thought she’d been prepared to see him this way. That she was strong enough to handle it, but something inside her shattered. She ripped off the cover of the chamber and grabbed Blake up in the next instant.
Mencheres’s hands shot out, stopping her. Keeping her from lifting Blake all the way out of that awful, killing water.
“Wait,” he said.
“No,” Elise snarled. “I have to bring him back!”
Mencheres didn’t loosen his grip, and she felt his hold on more than just her arms.
“Not. Yet.”
Elise would have fought him, her own sire, whom she trusted more than anyone in the world. But a blast of power in the air around them stopped her. Sulfur fumes seemed to crawl up her nose, and a howl of rage filled the van until it shook.
“You fool,” Xaphan hissed.
The words didn’t come from Blake’s mouth. They came from behind her.
Chapter Fifteen
Elise didn’t have time to turn around before the doors blew off the van, and Mencheres was sucked out into the sunshine. She dropped Blake, careful to make sure his head was hanging outside the chamber, and ran out of the van.
“Mencheres!” she screamed.
Nothing was around but miles of empty, ominous white salt. Where was Mencheres? Her sire was the most powerful vampire she’d ever met, how could he simply disappear?
Something slammed into her from behind. Elise fell, getting a face full of salt. Then she was propelled up and flung into the side of the van, hard enough to make it tilt on its tires.
“Bring him back,” Xaphan growled near her ear.
Elise whirled, but there was no one there. Another blow knocked her into the van again. Then another and another, all made by someone she couldn’t even see.
Elise tasted blood where her lip had split. The bright afternoon sunlight, naked of any cloud cover, felt like needles on her skin. Something seized Elise’s hair, grinding her face into a ragged piece of metal from the dent her body had made.
“Bring him back,” Xaphan said again, and she was shoved into the van.
Blake was still slumped over the chamber, motionless. Elise pulled him all the way out of the water, laying him on the van’s floor. He was as white as the salt outside, all the color gone from his skin, and his skin was cool enough to feel like he’d been carved out of ice.
The van gave a violent rock that had equipment sliding into the corner.
“Stop it!” Elise snapped. “If you break everything in here, I can’t save him.”
“Do it now,” that horrible, disembodied voice ordered.
Her hands trembled as she set the breather over Blake’s mouth, turning on the machine that would pump warmed, humid air into Blake’s lungs. We must reheat his core slowly, Mencheres had said. Too much artificial warmth to his extremities will make lethal gases fill Blake’s bloodstream.
Therefore, Elise didn’t use the hot packs with Blake yet. She covered him with blankets and set up the IV to fill an artery with heated blood. Another IV was inserted for a warmed saline solution. Then Elise began CPR, forcing Blake’s stationary heart to pump.
An invisible hand slapped her across the mouth. “Faster,” Xaphan said.
The demon’s voice seemed to rise and fade at the same time. Elise took out a syringe with an elongated needle, punching that needle through Blake’s breastbone to inject epinephrine directly into his heart. Then she began compressions to his chest again.
“Bring him back now,” Xaphan roared. The van lifted off the ground a foot and smashed back down, shattering the windows.