“Aurora!” Kai suddenly turned and yelled at me. I broke out of my thoughts and ran over to him. Concern etched across his face, his nostrils flaring.

“Do you smell that?” he quizzed me.

I froze and inhaled. “Alek?” What was he doing here? Alek was the only vampire I had met that was good. He drank exclusively from blood banks and lived with a human wife.

Kai grabbed my hand and we jogged around to the front of our house. Tossing my gardening gloves on the ground, we ran down the main road and towards the smell. The road was lined with densely packed trees and as we rounded the corner, I saw that the headlights of a car showed that Alek was being pinned to the hood, Max’s elbow at his throat. Jai had pinned a young teenage vampire face down on the ground and had a stake in one hand.

Kai shouted in a deep baritone voice, “Stand down! They’re friends of mine.”

Max looked in Kai’s direction but didn’t ease up on Alek’s windpipe. Looking closer, I saw now that Max had a silver spike in his other hand. Alek wasn’t fighting back; he was rigid and calm. Max was Kai’s second in command for a long time until I came along. He was very dominant and often times didn’t listen, now seemed to be one of those times.

“Are you deaf, Max? Stand down!” I shouted and power oozed out of my voice. Kai gave me a side glance and I saw he was smirking. Max pulled off of Alek and gave me a glare that told me he didn’t appreciate my comment and I might be paying for it later. Well, too bad.

I picked up my pace into super-fast mode and grabbed Alek’s elbow, helping him up. Jai pulled the teen vampire into a standing position.

“I’m sorry, they don’t know about you,” I told Alek.

Alek nodded, eyeing Max with a look of revenge.

Jai pushed the other guy in our direction. “Since when are blood suckers our friends?” he addressed his brother.

The teenage vampire hissed, making a move to attack Jai, but Alek’s hand snaked out grabbing him by the shirt, restraining him. The boy’s hair was greasy and black, his frame was thin, and his hands shook. I inhaled. He smelled of heroin. That metallic smell was familiar now. I had first smelled it in the nightclub when Kai and I discovered that vampires were getting humans high on heroin and then drinking from them. Vampires couldn’t get high themselves; they metabolized it too fast. Drinking through a human was the only way.

“Calm down, lad, we have enough problems to worry about,” Alek told the teenager.

His voice shook. Now that I was close to him, I could see that Alek’s normally pristine appearance was disheveled. His pupils were black, dark circles ringed his eyes, and his clothes were dirty.

Kai picked up on it, too. “Are you guys okay?”

Alek sighed, then he looked at Jai and Max. “Can we talk in private?”

Max chuckled. “So you can kill our Alpha or steal Aurora? Nice try. No.”

Kai glared at Max but didn’t dismiss him.

‘He has a point,’ Kai told me.

I agreed, as shitty as it felt. We didn’t really know Alek that well. I motioned to Jai. “Jai, go get Alexa.”

Jai looked disappointed at the dismissal but did as I asked. Max was staying.

“What’s going on, Alek?” I asked him.

He let out a shaky breath. “Where do I begin?”

The teenager scratched his arms. “We need blood.”

Alek fit him with a death glare and for the first time I saw just how deadly Alek could be when provoked.

Kai had straightened his posture. To anyone else he may have looked like he was just adjusting his stance, but I knew he was getting ready for a possible fight.

Alek put his arms up in a gesture of peace. “That’s not why we’re here. The kid is a newly-changed vampire. He’s strung out on heroin. I’m trying to help him get clean. When you’re newly changed, all you can think about is blood.”

“But you don’t look so great either, Alek, so is it true? Do you need blood?” Kai asked him and put the power of the Alpha into his words.

Alek swallowed as if salivating. “Yes, the blood banks have all been burned to the ground, thanks to your little shout out to my people.” He looked at me.

I recoiled. “What shout out?”

Alek sighed. “On social media, the footage from the barn, Kai says, ‘Kill all the vampires’ and you say, ‘No, they aren’t all bad.’ Well, Layla didn’t appreciate that. She took out all of our blood banks. But I can control myself without blood. The kid can’t.” He motioned to the teen.

“Shit! I’m so sorry,” I told him. I had only been trying to help.

Kai had his poker face on. I could tell he was deciding whether or not to trust him. “Where’s your wife?” Kai quizzed him. Alek’s wife was human.

“Safe. I had her go into hiding as soon as the first blood bank went down a month ago. I don’t want her getting hurt from anyone, especially me.”

“Why would you hurt your own wife?” Max asked him.

Alek sighed. “Because she’s human. I have no source of food and I don’t want to do anything in a blood craze.”

“What’s a blood craze?” I asked, aware that we were pretty much interrogating him at this point and I felt pretty shitty about it.

“A blood craze is when a vampire becomes so thirsty they will feed off of and drain the life from any living thing in their vicinity. Rats, goats, humans … it doesn’t matter,” Alexa said from behind me.