Mircea studied him for a moment and then turned to the gaping nurse. "Thank you for providing such excellent care for my kinsman," he told her. "Your actions will be remembered."
Irony laced the words, but she didn't hear. "I–I—it was nothing. Really. We were thrilled to be able to do what we could," she said, still talking as Mircea walked behind the partition and calmly shut her out.
There was no more talk of throwing us out, and no interruptions. Not that I think Mircea would have noticed if there were. His attention was focused solely on Rafe, who appeared to have fallen into a light sleep.
"Raphael! Attend me!" His voice snapped like a whip, demanding obedience. And somewhere in the fog of pain that had fallen over him, Rafe heard. He opened his eyes a slit, a bare glittering against the raw flesh. "At this point, the process itself might kill you," Mircea informed him. "What do you wish to do?"
I didn't know what Mircea was talking about, but obviously Rafe did. He said something, but it was unintelligible. His voice was muffled, cracking, and I was suddenly grateful that I couldn't understand. I didn't want to know what went with the soft, broken sounds. One hand curled into a painful-looking fist and he pressed it down with terrible, leashed force against the soft surface of the bed.
"Then you must be willing to fight," Mircea responded. "Life is not a gift, Raphael; it is a challenge. Rise to it!"
Mircea's eyes had lightened, brightened, mahogany fired to gold-chased bronze. Trust me, they demanded, fierce and proud and infinitely compelling. It was the look that made me want to make really idiotic decisions that would only end in heartbreak. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Rafe nodded.
And Sal pulled me up and out of the curtained area. I looked around to find myself surrounded by the family. Sal and Alphonse were there, along with Marco, the two security men and Casanova, who was managing to look suave and frazzled at the same time.
"What are you doing?" I struggled as Sal pulled me toward the entrance. "Let me go! I want to stay with Rafe!" My voice had risen three octaves in that short sentence, which meant I was closer to losing it than I'd thought.
I tried to tear out of her grip, but of course that didn't work, and her words caught me before I tried to shift. "It's private," she said sharply.
"What is private? What is going on?"
"Mircea is going to try to break Tony's bond with Raphael," Sal said, biting her lip. "Normally, it wouldn't be a big deal, but as weak as Rafe is. ."
"What are you talking about? What difference does it make who his master is if they can't save him?"
"You heard what that orderly said. The damage is too great for them to do anything, not that I think they tried too hard until we got after their asses. They took one look at him and decided he was a goner."
She plopped down onto one of the seats that Alphonse and Marco had dragged in through the main doors, and she pulled me down into another one. We were flanking the wall not far from the entrance in one of the few areas with no cots. Instead, a jumbled bunch of medical equipment—wheelchairs, gurneys, IV stands—had been pushed here out of the way. Unneeded for the moment. Like us.
"I still don't see how changing masters is going to help!" I felt edgy and hot and weirdly tight in the chest, like I couldn't breathe. Like I had to do something or I might explode.
"Mircea made Tony, but Tony made Rafe," Sal said tersely. "And the blood is the life."
I'd heard that phrase all my life; it was a mantra among vampires. But I didn't see the relevance now. "But Rafe's blood isn't helping him!"
"Because it's Tony's," Sal said as if I was being especially slow. "It isn't powerful enough to let Rafe repair this kind of damage. But Mircea isn't Tony."
Alphonse snorted. "No shit."
"We get our strength partly from our own abilities and partly from our master," Sal explained, reaching for a cigarette. She noticed a couple of oxygen tanks nearby and stopped, looking frustrated. "The more powerful the master, the more powerful his servants. If Rafe has enough strength left to absorb Mircea's blood, to let it become his new source of life, he should heal."
"And if he doesn't?"
"What do you think?" she snapped, obviously tired of twenty questions. She glanced up at Alphonse. "I need a drink."
"Send Marco," he said, settling into a permanent-looking stance by the wall. "If the master pulls this off, he's gonna be weak. And by now everybody knows he's here. If someone was gonna hit him, this would be the time."
"He brought guards," Sal said.
"Two." Alphonse sounded disapproving. "I got ten more boys on the way, and I ain't budging till they get here."
"I have guards," Casanova said, looking insulted. "Not to mention those thugs the Senate imposed on me."
For once, Alphonse refrained from a snide comment on the quality of Casanova's stable. "And now you got more."
Sal looked at me and I looked defiantly back. I wasn't budging until I knew about Rafe. She sighed. "I'll go. This place is fucking depressing. What does everyone want?"
As soon as she left, I rounded on Alphonse. "How could turning someone weaken a first-level master? They do it all the time!"
Alphonse tilted his head back against the wall. For a moment, I didn't think he'd bother to answer. But then he cut his eyes my way and I must have looked pretty frantic, because he sighed. "For a master to turn a non-magical human, yeah—it's no problem," he told me. "Three bites from the same vampire in quick succession and that's pretty much it. But Rafe was already turned."
"So?"
"So to break the bond, Mircea has to drain Tony's blood from Rafe and replace it with his own. Normally, it's exhausting, but no big deal. A first-level master's blood is pretty damn potent, so it doesn't take a lot. But Rafe's so far gone, Mircea's gonna have to lend him extra power just so he can survive the Change."
"And that means draining himself dangerously low," I guessed, wishing I hadn't asked.
Alphonse scowled at a couple of orderlies who had been loitering around like starstruck teenagers ever since Mircea showed up. They quickly found somewhere else to be. "The master's gonna be hemorrhaging power whether this works or not," he rumbled. "I'm here to see that he doesn't pay for it."
There didn't seem to be much else to say, after that. The three of us sat there silent, unmoving and, in the case of the vampires, not even breathing. I couldn't tell how Casanova and Alphonse were feeling, because they'd lapsed into the non-expression vamps use when there's no reason to impress the humans. But I felt anxious, miserable and utterly useless.
For some reason, my brain kept going to the presents Rafe used to bring me whenever he went on a trip. They were always thoughtful, fitting whatever I needed at the time. As a rambunctious tomboy, I'd received a plastic gladiator helmet from Rome and a matching sword that I'd used to chase him through the halls of Tony's farmhouse. As an adolescent girl who wanted to appear more grown-up than she was, I'd been given small bottles of perfume from Paris, perfectly child-sized but filled with adult fragrances. And right before my escape from Tony's, Rafe had slipped me my very first fake ID.
He had never asked for anything in return, had never seemed to expect or want anything. He was probably the only person in my life I could say that about. And now he was dying.
I usually wasn't a violent person. I'd seen so much of it growing up that it had lost its glamour for me, even before everybody and their dog started attacking me. So it took me a few minutes to put a name to the feeling flushing my cheeks and curdling my stomach. I didn't know who was behind the attack today, or even for certain that anyone was. But I knew one thing.