A Wind of Change (A Shade of Vampire #17)(44)

He shrugged. “We just need to keep waiting.”

Ten minutes later, all three of them finally descended. I wondered why they had taken longer than the others. I didn’t give it too much thought though. I was just relieved that they had finally come.

I was expecting the couple to part ways with Michael once they arrived outside Jeramiah’s apartment, but instead they remained standing and talking. Joseph and I looked away as Jeramiah turned, spotting us standing in the doorway.

Joseph’s hands found my waist. He lowered his mouth to my ear. “Put your arms around my neck and pretend that you’re kissing me,” he breathed.

I stared at him, raising a brow.

Then I realized why he was asking this of me. Standing here doing nothing but staring looked odd. We needed to look like we were doing something.

Joseph positioned me in front of him, so that he still had full view of the trio. Slowly, I draped my arms around Joseph’s neck and craned my neck upward. He leaned down until our lips were less than an inch apart. My breathing quickened as his green eyes met mine. He lowered his mouth to my cheek and pressed his lips gently against it, then averted his gaze back toward Jeramiah.

My skin tingled at the touch of his lips, so close to the side of my mouth. I hadn’t expected him to touch me. But now that he was… I couldn’t say that I objected. At all. When his hand rested on the small of my back, pulling me closer still, I felt butterflies in my stomach.

Geez, River. Get a grip.

He’s just an… incredibly handsome guy.

“Are they still there?” I breathed, attempting to distract myself from his touch.

He didn’t respond for almost a minute as his lips continued to graze my cheek. Then he said, “They’re gone now.”

He loosened his hold on me and I took a step back. Our eyes locked before he cleared his throat and looked back through his doorway.

We both knew what had to be done now.

Chapter 21: Ben

I was thinking of River as I left her in the apartment and made my way up to the desert.

When I’d bent down so close to her face, her radiant eyes gazing into mine, I’d found myself drawing closer to her than I had either intended or needed to… without even realizing it.

I shook myself.

Stop being a fool, Novak.

Focus.

Arriving aboveground, I was glad to see that nobody was still up here. Everyone had returned to their rooms. Thank God. It was 2:45am already. That left only fifteen minutes before Jeramiah knocked on our door. Fifteen minutes to get three humans up here undetected. We couldn’t afford for anything to go wrong.

Sure that the area was empty, I ran back down to the atrium and headed back to my apartment. I found River alone in the living room, standing over a basin that she’d placed on a coffee table. She had already cut herself again and was draining more blood. I walked over to help her, slitting my own skin and allowing my blood to flow into the wide container. Both of our bloods mixed and formed a dark red pool at the bottom of it. Once I felt like we had enough, I healed her, then took a mouthful from the small container of River’s blood in my pocket while she hurried toward the sauna to retrieve the humans.

I backed away, watching as she herded them into the living room. Walking to the basin, she dipped a hand in the blood and began to smear it over her sister. She looked toward Morgan and Hassan.

“Cover yourselves with this blood as much as you can.”

The humans had looks of disgust on their faces—especially Lalia.

There wasn’t enough blood to completely douse themselves with, but it was enough to dull their scent. It shouldn’t be much more detectable than the other human blood that was stored in all of the vampires’ apartments around The Oasis.

After the blood in the basin had been used up, I went into my bedroom and grabbed the dark beige rug that lined one corner of the floor. Rolling it up, I put it over one shoulder and then returned to the hallway to find that River had gathered the three humans to wait outside the door.

We had only ten minutes now before Jeramiah knocked.

I glanced at the three humans. I was going to have to carry two of them—the largest ones, Morgan and Hassan—while River would carry her sister.

This would be the closest I had ever been to a human without ripping out their throats since I’d turned into a vampire.

I swallowed hard. River looked nervously at me.

Here goes…

I allowed Hassan to climb onto my back—it was lucky that he was shorter than me—and then I picked up the girl in my arms. Even with River’s and my blood smothering them—as well as River’s blood on my tongue—they still called to me like a siren, especially the girl.

Her neck was so close to my mouth. So painfully close. All it would take to have her warm blood flooding down my throat would be leaning down a few inches…

I forced the thought out of my head and was about to head out of the door when River said, “Wait!”

She put her sister back down on the ground, and hurried into the living room. Reappearing a few seconds later, she was clutching her backpack, which she flung onto her back. I supposed that taking the backpack was a good idea. River didn’t know how long it would be before she reunited with her family. She might need money in the meantime.

River picked up Lalia again, so that the girl clung to her front like a monkey. And then we ran. I was so fast, I was sure that I was a blur to any onlooker. River was slower, but she wasn’t too far behind me. Reaching the elevators, we hurried inside and made our way to the top. And then the final stretch of the journey… I carried Hassan and Morgan through the trapdoor and began speeding through the sand toward the edge of the boundary.