Bone Crossed Read Free Page B

and a quick glance showed me my mother with a wicked-looking Glock out and pointed at Stefan. It was pink and black—trust my mom to have a Barbie gun, cute but deadly.
    “It’s all right,” I told her hastily—my mother wouldn’t hesitate to fire if she thought he was going to hurt me. Normally I wouldn’t worry about someone shooting at Stefan, vampires not being that vulnerable to guns, but he was in bad shape. “He’s on our side.” Hard to sound convincing when he was pulling me toward him, but I did my best.
    Adam grabbed Stefan’s wrist and held it, so instead of Stefan pulling me toward him, the vampire was slowly raising his own head off the floor. As he came closer to my arm, Stefan opened his mouth and scraps of burnt skin fell on my tan carpet. His fangs were white and lethal-looking, and also a lot bigger than I remembered them being.
    My breathing picked up, but I didn’t jerk back and whine, “Get it off! Get it off!”—full points to me. Instead, I leaned over Stefan and put my head into Adam’s shoulder. It put my neck at risk, but the smell of werewolf and Adam helped mask the stench of what had been done to Stefan. If Stefan needed blood to survive, I’d donate to him.
    “It’s all right, Adam,” I said. “Let him go.”
    “Don’t put down the gun,” Adam told my mother. “Mercy, if this doesn’t work, you call my house and tell Darryl to collect whoever is there and bring them here.”
    And, in an act of bravery that was completely in character, Adam put his wrist in front of Stefan’s face. The vampire didn’t appear to notice, still pulling himself up by his grip on my arm. He wasn’t breathing, so he couldn’t scent Adam, and I didn’t think he was focusing any too well either.
    I should have tried to stop Adam—I’d fed Stefan before without any ill effects that I knew of, and I was pretty sure that Stefan cared whether I lived or died. I wasn’t so sure how he felt about Adam. But I was remembering Stefan telling me that there “shouldn’t” be any problems because it had only been the once, and I’d met a few of Stefan’s band of sheep—the people who served as his breakfast, dinner, and lunch. They were all completely devoted to him. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a great guy for a vampire—but I somehow doubted that those people, mostly women, could live together devoted to one man without some sort of vampire mesmerism at work. And I’d sort of had my fill of magical compulsion for the year.
    Any protest I made to Adam would be an exercise in futility anyway. He was feeling especially protective of me at that moment—and all I would do was stir up tempers, his, mine, and my mother’s.
    Adam pressed his wrist against Stefan’s mouth, and the vampire paused his incremental closing of the distance between my arm and his fangs. He seemed confused for a moment—then he drew air in through his nose.
    Stefan’s teeth sank into Adam’s wrist, his free hand shot up to grab Adam’s arm, and his eyes closed—all so fast it looked like the motion of a cheaply drawn cartoon.
    Adam sucked in his breath, but I couldn’t tell if it was because it hurt him or because it felt good. When Stefan had fed from me, I’d been in pretty rough shape. I didn’t remember much about it.
    It was strangely intimate, Stefan holding me as he drank from Adam’s wrist, and Adam leaning harder into me as Stefan fed. Intimate with an audience. I turned my head to see that my mother still held her gun in a steady two-handed grip, pointed at Stefan’s head. Her face as calm as if she saw burnt bodies appear out of nowhere, then rise from the dead to sink fangs into whoever was closest to them all the time, though I knew that wasn’t true. I wasn’t sure she’d ever even seen one of the werewolves in wolf form.
    “Mom,” I said, “the vampire is Stefan, he’s a friend of mine.”
    “I should put the gun away? Are you sure? He doesn’t look like a friend.”
    I looked at