Annihilate (Hive Trilogy #3)(31)

Jayden was grinning and giving me this crazy look.

I groaned. “What? I’m too tired for your games.”

Jayden leaned forward, positively bubbling with excitement. “Becca and Sam hooked up one dark snowy night two years ago.”

I sat up quickly, almost cracking him in the face. “Shut up!” I whisper screamed. “You got that out of her?”

Jayden nodded. “Best sex of her life. Only sex really, and then she wakes up and realizes it was all a mistake.”

My mouth dropped open. I was totally in love with Ryder, but damn, I didn’t think sleeping with Sam would be a mistake. Boy had it going on.

“What? She’s loony.”

Jayden nodded, picking at his cuticles. “She realized he was her very best friend in the whole world and didn’t want to ruin that.”

“Ughhh.” Those two were the worst. One of them afraid of ruining the friendship and the other one afraid to have any liabilities to be used against him.

Whatever. Totally not my business. I could stay out of it … maybe. Okay, probably not.

Becca came out of her lab then and I threw myself backward on the couch.

“Hey, what are you guys—”

“Nothing!” I blurted, and Jayden snort laughed. Becca looked confused. Shit, I was such a bad liar.

She let out a few uncomfortable chuckles. “Okay, well, if you’re doing nothing, do you want to help me prepare the samples? I need an assistant or two.”

I jumped up. “Yep. Sure.”

I really wished Jayden hadn’t told me about the hot sex. Now I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Taking a few deep breaths, I made a concerted effort to put it to the back of my mind.

“So…” Becca said as we entered her makeshift lab. “I have three candidates for the cure that I’m ninety percent sure will work, and two that are fifty-fifty.”

I could see a bunch of beakers and empty syringes lying around. “Okay, tell us what we should do.”

She nodded, and over the next hour Jayden and I helped her label the cures one-five and put them into the syringes. Only at the last minute did she add some type of stabilizing compound I didn’t understand.

After we were done she stared at the five syringes and chewed a fingernail. The liquid inside was clear and it amazed me that with one bag of my blood she was able to extract the cure and turn it into this vaccine of sorts.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” Jayden and I echoed.

I realized then how much pressure we had put on her. Here we were making this entire plan for curing the vampires and setting up the network and spreading the word and she hadn’t even figured out the cure yet.

She grabbed the labeled syringes and slipped them into her pocket, and as we turned to leave she picked up a tiny handheld camcorder with tripod and handed it to Jayden.

Crossing through the hallway, we made our way down a dim and narrow set of stairs and into the dark, creepy, freezing basement. The walls were cement and the fluorescent lighting cast eerie shadows on the tied-up vampires before us.

The vampires were chained to various things. Two were on the steel drain pipe, two on the water heater, and the other one chained to a large stabilizing column.

“They’re all yours, Becks,” Sam told her, and my heart pinched at the endearing tone in his voice. She pulled out the syringes and motioned to Jayden to turn on the camera. He set it up and began filming her.

“I’m Dr. Rebecca Leander and this is trial one of the vampire cure,” she told the camera.

Whoa, it didn’t hit me until now how monumental it was that we were curing an entire race.

Becca walked to the first vampire, a scraggly male who was moaning softly. “Subject one will receive cure number one.”

She pulled out the syringe with a one on it and inserted it into the man’s vein at the elbow. His eyes flew open and his mouth widened as he bared his fangs at her. Before anyone could act, Sam was there blindingly fast, ripping Becca out of harm’s way.

The two shared an intense look for a moment, and finally Sam spoke: “How about I inject them?”

Becca gave a slight smile and nodded. Sam proceeded to inject the other vampires with the other cures.

Before we had tied them up, Becca had taken blood from each one of the subjects and written their subject number on their arm in black permanent marker. She was meticulous in documenting everything that was happening, every step of the way.

Now she stared at all of the subjects, lost deep in thought.

“What now?” I asked eagerly.

“Now we wait.”

Jared, Sam, and Markus stayed downstairs while the rest of us went upstairs to wait it out. Becca headed back to her lab to test the subjects’ blood for God knows what, and I was staring at the lines of worry crossing Ryder’s face. Sleep was going to take me soon; I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since we left on the trip to California, and here, safe in this cabin on this old comfy couch, I felt my eyelids drooping. But I was worried about my boyfriend.

“What is it?” I asked him softly.

He seemed to consider my words before turning to me. “The enforcers that the vampires killed back in the Hive… I recruited every single one of them. I brought them to their deaths.”

By mutual agreement, none of us spoke of those who’d been killed. We couldn’t deal with that and with everything else that was happening. But it was never far from my thoughts. Clearly Ryder’s either.