Her heart beating rapidly, she asked, “What did he do?”
“He shot at me. The rear window shattered, but my seat and backrest were steel-plated. He couldn’t know that. But he realized very quickly that he couldn’t eliminate me by staying behind me, so he pulled to my side. His truck was bigger and heavier than my BMW. He rammed me. I did everything I could to keep control of the car, but behind the next bend there were road works. The truck managed to get past it. But my car flipped over and rolled down the hill, overturning several times.”
She gasped. “Oh my God!”
“I would have been okay even during daylight while I waited for help, because the windows in my car had a special UV-impenetrable coating. Something Thomas, one of our geniuses, invented. But the rear window was shattered. And at the angle the car landed, the rising sun would have fried me. I was at nature’s mercy.”
Blake ran a hand through his hair, then placed it back on her back, and continued to stroke her.
“Why didn’t you get out of the car and take shelter somewhere?”
“I couldn’t move my legs. The front of the car had been crushed and the engine was practically sitting on my lap. I was bleeding. I tried to get free, but I wasn’t strong enough. My injuries were draining me of my strength, and while I ordinarily would have been able to push the collapsed engine parts off me and wedge free, in my injured state, I was powerless.”
She felt tears brim in her eyes.
“Had Hannah not been out walking her dog, I wouldn’t be here today. Frankenfurter found my car and alerted Hannah. When she found me, she tried to call 9-1-1, but she couldn’t get reception. My phone had the same problem. We couldn’t call anybody, and the sun was about to rise. I had no choice but to tell her the truth. I was as good as dead anyway.”
“Don’t say that!”
“It’s the truth. I had no way of knowing how Hannah would react.” He shook his head. And he’d been too weak to exercise any kind of mind control on Hannah to make her help him. “But all she said was How can I help? Imagine my surprise. She wasn’t afraid. In fact, she seemed excited.”
Lilo had to chuckle involuntarily. “That’s Hannah. She’s game for any adventure. Always has been. She needs that excitement in her life. That constant rush of adrenaline.”
Blake smiled back at her. “That was my luck. When I told her that I needed human blood to heal myself so I could gain enough strength to free my legs and escape from the car, she didn’t hesitate. I took only as much as I needed. Human blood directly from a living human’s vein is much more powerful than any bottled blood. But of course, I had no time to warn Hannah about the side effects. The sexual arousal. The fact that my bite was erotic, even though sex was the last thing on my mind.” He sighed. “With her blood, I was able to garner enough strength to free myself. But the sun was already rising, so Hannah took a blanket she found in my trunk and we were able to make it to an old shed she’d seen on her walk with Frankenfurter. We took shelter there.”
“And Hannah, how did she take the bite?”
“She was stunned, as was to be expected. And hooked, but that was something I didn’t realize for a while.”
“Hooked? You mean she fell in love with you?”
Blake stroked his knuckles over her cheek, a gesture that comforted her. “No. She was hooked on the bite. On the feeling it gave her. We talked while we were waiting for nightfall. I told her about Scanguards, about what I do. Who I am. And I told her I’d give her anything she wanted for saving my life.”
“What did she want?”
“Very little. She really is too good for this world. All she wanted was a job. See, she’d been fired the previous day. That’s why she’d been out all the way in the woods with Frankenfurter. To think about what she wanted to do with her life. It was fate that she was there.”
“So you gave her a job.”
Blake nodded. “I could have arranged pretty much any job she wanted in this town. Scanguards has lots of connections. But she didn’t want to work for any human company. She wanted to work for vampires. I don’t think Ronny was her first vampire boyfriend. I think she dated several of the vampires she met as part of her job. I suspect that she was always chasing that high that she felt when I bit her.”
He combed his fingers through her hair. “That’s why I feel responsible for her and will do anything to save her. Not only because she saved my life, but because I’m the one who thrust her into the world of vampires. Everything that happened to her happened because I introduced her to this life instead of wiping her memory of the accident and how she saved me.”
“Why didn’t you wipe her memory?”