Fractured (Deep In Your Veins, #5)(79)

He didn’t take his eyes from Lazarus as he responded. “I told you, Imani. Good people do bad things sometimes.”

Realisation quickly dawned. And it hurt almost as bad as the burning pain in my chest. “Lazarus is one of the people you suspect injected me with the serum?”

“No, sweetheart, it wasn’t Lazarus. But he ordered it done.”

No way. “I don’t have time for games, Marco.” Butch was lying somewhere, wounded. Jared, find Butch and Paige. I think he’s hurt bad but I can’t get to him—I’m watching Marco and Lazarus have some kind of standoff.

“I knew it had to be one of two people,” Marco went on. “Him or Eleanor.”

I frowned. “Eleanor?” And then I saw her, standing slightly behind Lazarus. There was a seriousness in her expression that took me by surprise. She was usually always so animated and jolly.

“They both want the same thing so badly that they’ll do absolutely anything to get it. It was Eleanor’s mate who told me the truth…though he took some persuading.”

Eleanor gasped, eyes widening in horror.

I might have told Marco to just shut the f*ck up because I wasn’t in the mood for games, but something occurred to me as I looked at Lazarus, whose expression was carefully blank. “You should be denying this. He’s accusing you of trying to kill me.” Yet, Lazarus hadn’t said a word.

“Lazarus didn’t want to kill you,” Marco said. “Oh, he’d known you could die, which is exactly why he’s going to suffer for what he did to you. But he didn’t want you dead.”

Confused, I shook my head. I didn’t get what was happening. I didn’t get why the air pulsed with some kind of strange energy, or why I thought I could hear bullets being fired. I thought I could but wasn’t sure, because distant sounds seemed weirdly muted, distorted, and crackly.

Marco cocked his head at Lazarus. “You theorised that a vampire was more likely to get through the transition if they could feed on powerful vampires during that time, didn’t you? You knew that if Imani was injected, she’d be taken straight to The Hollow where the Grand High Pair and other powerful vampires would give her blood.”

Lazarus hissed. “You’re suggesting I was using Imani as a guinea pig?” The outrage in his voice sounded very genuine…but the emotion was absent from his eyes.

“It worked, didn’t it? She got through it because she had access to very potent blood. Congratulations. You were right. But I won’t let you take her.”

Take me?

Lazarus looked at me, a fanatical gleam in his eyes that made my stomach churn. “Imani, you have the power to save all those who suffered the same fate as you.”

“What?” Was he high? Maybe I was high, because this was all f*cking weird.

“Within you lies the answer to the cure for vampirism. Your blood has the answer.”

“I’m not cured,” I clipped, anger building inside me as it began to penetrate that, hey, he’d totally betrayed me. And I wanted to smash his face in. “There is no cure.”

“Wrong, Imani. You are partly transformed. With your blood, we can find a true cure. Then all of us who had this life forced upon us can once again be human.”

He said it with so much yearning and desperation that I almost felt bad for him. I had been in his position. I’d had everything ripped away from me, and for a long time I’d thought of nothing but getting back what I’d lost. I knew what it was to despise what you were, knew what it was like to long for all the things you once had and took for granted in—

I gaped as the truth slapped me hard across the face. “You’re Beau Irons.” I wanted him to deny it. He didn’t. He smiled.

“Well done, sweetheart,” said Marco. “It took me a while to figure that out. By the time I knew, he was already planning to take you while everyone was distracted in battle.”

And if Lazarus was Beau Irons… “All these vampires you’ve brought with you…They’re part of The Order, aren’t they?” Which meant they were fighting against The Hollow’s vampires, not alongside them. Shit.

Lazarus’ smile turned a little creepy. “Yes. And you will join us, Imani. You will leave with us.”

Marco slowly shook his head. “I can’t have that.”

“This is not about what you want,” Lazarus told him.

Staring at the vampire who’d once taken care of me, who I’d trusted with my life, I swallowed. “I can’t believe you’d do this to me. To anyone.”

“It’s really nothing personal,” Marco told me, his eyes still locked on the Master vampire. “He’s so intent on being human again, so focused on the end goal, that he can’t see anything or anyone else.”

Lazarus again held out his hand. “Come with me, Imani. You were brought into a life you did not want. You deserve to have back what was so callously taken from you. I can give you that.”

“There is no cure, Lazarus.” Marco shook his head. “You’ll never find one, because vampirism isn’t an illness. It’s just another state of being.”

Lazarus went on as if Marco hadn’t spoken. “You once told me that you would give anything to be cured. Now we can work together to make that happen.”