A Shade of Vampire 22: A Fork of Paths Read Free Page A

helped me toward the bed, his grip was surprisingly strong.
    Once I was seated on the thin mattress, he stepped away and retrieved the syringe from his pocket.
    “Are you going to kill me?” I blurted, wincing internally at how stupid and desperate the question was.
    He shook his head, even as he reached out and pressed the end of the gun against my neck.
    “Not if you cooperate,” he said. “You’re too interesting a specimen to kill.”
    He positioned the needle against my right wrist. I flinched at the sharp prick. I expected him to inject me with some other kind of tranquilizer, but this time, he didn’t seem to be injecting anything into me at all. Rather, he was withdrawing blood. Once the syringe was filled, he pulled it from my flesh. Reaching into his pocket, he removed a piece of crisp white tissue which he rolled around the needle. Then he backed away, his gun still aimed at me.
    “Then why did you try to kill me before?” I persisted.
    He raised a brow. “Before?”
    “In Egypt, in the Sahara desert,” I said. “You had men stationed there, and the moment they realized I wasn’t human, they attacked me.”
    “Ah, Egypt,” he said, nodding his head. “That would explain it. The training of our troops there isn’t yet complete, and they’re not proficient in distinguishing the varying… degrees of vampirism.”
    He reached the door and twisted the handle.
    “Wait!” I called. “Before you leave, at least tell me what you want with me.”
    The corners of his mouth twitched upward in a quick, artificial smile. “You’ll find out soon.”

Ben
    I was on edge every moment that hunter remained in the room with River. As he raised his gun to her before taking a sample of her blood, I was terrified that he was going to kill her. I still couldn’t be certain the man was telling the truth about not wishing to kill her, but the hunters’ actions so far indicated it to be true. Back in Egypt, after we had first escaped from The Oasis, the hunters’ tracking device had picked up on River. They had opened fire because they had just assumed that she was a vampire and hadn’t even given her a chance to explain herself. I wondered if this was the first time that this group of hunters had come across a half-blood. From the intense look of interest in this hunter’s eyes as he looked at River, I guessed that it was.
    But whatever they claimed to want to do, or not do, to River, I couldn’t bring myself to believe that their intentions in capturing her were anything but sinister.
    After he left the room, River became less tense. She leaned back against the wall again. He still had not unbound her, and it pained me to see how uncomfortable she was beginning to get, being so restricted in her movement. I moved to the wall opposite her and sank down to the floor, my knees bent. I stared at her, recalling her last dream that I’d managed to enter. She must’ve been wondering where all these random dreams involving me were coming from.
    As I’d kissed her in her last dream, I’d been tempted to tell her the truth about what I was, what I had become. She might not even believe it if I told her that I was a ghost—she might discount it as just a stupid dream. But after she’d already witnessed the validity of the previous dream she’d had involving me, I doubted she would dismiss it quite so easily, no matter how hard my words were to accept.
    I would sit her down in a future dream and start from the beginning. Tell her everything that had happened to me since I sent her away with Corrine… But now wasn’t the time. I couldn’t drop that kind of bombshell on her when she was still a captive of these hunters, with no idea what their true intentions were for her. Right now, the only thing I had to set my mind on was figuring out how to help her escape.
    If I was to have any chance of saving her, I had to discover where they were taking her. At the moment, the only plan I had was to find out their