I’m a completely different person.

A pang of sadness brought tears to my eyes, and Nathan looked up sharply. “What’s the matter?”

And then he shrugged, as if answering a question I hadn’t voiced. “I think I’ve been cooped up with you too long if I’m starting to read your mind.”

The lighthearted comment brought echoes of something to the surface of my consciousness. A medicated haze settled over me, and my words slurred as I spoke. “You should get some sleep. You don’t look too good.”

His hand was cold against my forehead. “Likewise, sweetheart.”

I’d been dead. That was the important detail I needed to remember. I’d been dead, and he’d been there.

But I drifted off again, and it was two more days before I woke.

Nathan lay on his side next to me, curved protectively around my body. If I turned my face, I could snuggle against him, listen to his heart beat. It felt so comforting to have him there. His hand stroked my hair, and I opened my eyes.

The gauze around my chest had been replaced by a navy-blue T-shirt that had seen better days. There was blood on it, and vomit.

“You had a bad, bad reaction to the morphine. I’d been giving you the meperidine, since you’d had it before with no trouble, but I ran out.”

His voice was hoarse. He still hadn’t slept.

“Well, reaction or not, it must be working okay. I don’t feel a thing.” The pain of my injuries was a distant nightmare, and only the lingering stiffness of a long bed rest plagued my bones.

He chuckled softly as he slowly sat up. “You’re probably healed by now.”

Like flashbulbs going off, I saw Cyrus looming over me, blood on his hands. My chest split open like a cadaver for dissection. Nathan’s stricken face when he found me in the alley.

One of the first things Nathan had explained to me about the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement was that they expressly forbid medical treatment for life-threatening injuries. I was dead when he found me. And here I sat. “You broke the rules.”

His back went straight at my accusation. “Yeah, I guess I did.”

I scooted up, wincing at the soreness in my unused muscles. I propped a few pillows behind me and drew the covers to my neck. “Why?”

I had a suspicion he rummaged a bit too long in the dresser for another T-shirt so he could think of an excuse. “I like to live dangerously?”

Of all the vampires I’d met so far, Nathan was the most serious, the biggest stickler for the rules. In the two weeks I’d been deciding whether or not to join the Movement, he’d called nearly every night with some new bit of information I’d never use, but that he felt was vitally important for me to know. He’d held Ziggy, the person who’d mattered most in his life, and watched him die when he could have easily turned him and spared himself the pain of loss. But he hadn’t, because of his affiliation with the Movement.