Page 84 of Fanged Embrace
Laurie’s smile was wistful. “They wouldn’t give her a real name… so I came up with one myself. When she was born, her hair was fluffy and white—stuck out in every direction. Like a dandelion puff.” A breathy exhale ghosted from her lips. “I thought when we got out, maybe I'd call her Dannie for short. We’d be Dannie and Laurie, living like we were… normal.”
“Dandelion.” I rested my hand beside hers, stroking her knuckles with my thumb. “It’s cute.”
“She would’ve been around three by now,” Laurie went on, voice barely above a whisper. “I keep trying to picture what color her eyes would’ve settled on, if her hair would have stayed white or darkened like mine, if her fangs would have grown in…” She swallowed hard. “She was a hybrid, just like these two—but I guess you knew that part.”
Silence stretched out between us. Laurie examined the glitter flowers on her forearm.
“What happened?” The question left me before I considered the pain it might dig up. But I needed to know. I wanted to carry a part of that pain with her. She shouldn’t have to shoulder that burden alone.
Laurie’s expression shuttered, closing up in an instant, and I worried I’d pushed too far. Her aura writhed and coiled around her, a vivid chaos in stark contrast to her complete stillness. But then she sighed, a deep, anguished exhale, and tilted her head back to stare at the ceiling.
“I never thought I’d leave the facility. I got so used to all the experiments and the pain and I… I don’t know—I just kinda assumed that was all my life would ever be.” She closed her eyes, fingers curling into fists. “But when Dandelion was born, things changed—Ichanged. The moment I held her in myarms for the first time I knew I had to get her out. I couldn’t let her grow up in that place. She’d be subjected to the same awful experiments I was.” Her voice cracked, straining in her throat. “I didn’t want that for her.”
I held my tongue, listening intently with my eyes on her pained face as she continued.
“One day a fire broke out at the facility. I don’t know how it started, but it was pure chaos inside. I thought it was my chance, my one and only chance to get out, and I took it.” Laurie paused, brow crumpling at the painful memories.
I remembered her nightmares that crept into my head that first night she slept in my home—the smoke and fire, blaring alarms. The picture was coming into focus, and it wasn’t a pretty one.
“Everyone was distracted by the fire, so I snuck away—I went to find Dandelion.” Emotion rippled across Laurie’s features and she bowed her head. “I grabbed her from the nursery, wrapped her up in a lab coat, and I ran. I was looking for the exit but everything was dark. There was so much smoke...” Her fists tightened, knuckles whitening. “I ended up on my hands and knees, crawling. I kept her tucked under the coat, trying to shield her face.”
She glanced down at Hazel and Hilda, breath catching as she forced the words out. “My chest burned. I couldn’t get any air in. I was choking—I could feel my lungs shutting down.”
Laurie shuddered and I lifted a hand to her back, rubbing slow circles while she tensed and shivered under my touch. A painful ache was forming in my throat, my eyes pricking with tears as she laid the story out, one painful memory at a time.
“Then Arlon showed up.” Laurie’s laugh was brittle, bitter. “He’d seen the fire, ran in to help—because of course he did. He found me lying there in the dark, half-dead and suffocating, and carried me out. I remember him shouting at me to breathe, and Idid. Then I realized… she wasn’t. Dandelion wasn’t breathing.” Laurie jerked forward suddenly, shoulders caving in as she buried her face in her hands. “Seconds, River. He was seconds too late.”
Her voice broke, raw and jagged like shattered glass. “By the time we made it out, she was gone.”
I caught her before she folded completely, arms winding tight around her trembling frame. Words felt useless—so I gave her silence and a steady presence, anchoring her to the here-and-now while her memories dragged her backward.
Laurie scrubbed at her eyes with furious knuckles, refusing to let the tears fall, but her aura radiated raw anguish—grief laced with a poisonous thread of survivor’s guilt. I understood the mingling emotions in her aura now. It all made a sad kind of sense.
In her head, the logic was painfully obvious. She fought for freedom, and she lost what was most precious to her because of it. Laurie wasn’t just hardened by loss and hardship, she was broken by guilt—it was a tool she used to torture herself with, long after she’d left the facility behind.
She folded over, forehead lowering to rest on my leg. Hazel and Hilda stirred at the slight disturbance, but kept on sleeping, both of them snuggled up against her side. I curled around Laurie, holding all four of us in a clustered heap, letting calm seep through our contact.
“Breathe with me,” I whispered, matching the rise and fall of her back until the shudders eased to tremors. But inside I was reckoning with a brutal truth. This kind of pain would not be easy to heal. It might not even be possible.
No comforting phrase could erase the hole left by a child’s final breath.
Laurie’s voice emerged, rough and ragged. “She died because I wanted out.”
“No.” I spoke softly but firmly, hunching over her andshrouding her body with my own. “You fought to save her—you did everything you could.”
“It wasn’t enough.” Her words trembled out. So quiet and yet so painfully potent.
I tightened my hold, but no counter-argument came. Because she was right. Despite all her efforts and all her best intentions, nothing had been enough to stop her child’s lungs from filling with smoke—and I was filled with a sudden, paralyzing fear that I couldn’t promise my own efforts would be enough, either.
It was fear that I might someday echo her words. A fear that all of my efforts, all of my love for the woman in my arms, would not be enough to save her.
42
Laurie
By the time Jordan’s mother, Sigrid, showed up to take over watching the twins, my tears had dried and my bleeding heart had retreated back behind the walls I’d erected to protect it. My eyes were no doubt still watery and bloodshot, but I balanced it out by aiming a scowl at anyone who looked my way with so much as a speck of sympathy.
Not that I got any from Sigrid. The tall, unflappable vampire woman took one look at me when she walked in the room and promptly turned her nose up, like she was at her wits’ end with all these humans hanging around her daughters’ inner circle. Fair enough; I was still adjusting to the sudden influx of friendly vampires in my life.
