Tall, Dark & Heartless (Pyte/Sentinel 3)

Jax was right. If anyone would know what was wrong with Danni it would be Ethan. For four centuries the vampire has searched the world looking for his son and gathering any information that he could find about Pytes. If the bastard failed to help them then he'd be making a little side trip later to rip his heart out.

He looked down at the beautiful pale woman in his arms as Jax paced the room, explaining the situation to Ethan over the phone. She was so beautiful, fierce, funny, a smart ass and made him feel alive. He couldn't be expected to live an eternity without her. It would be his own personal hell, living without the woman who was made for him.

"I love you, Danni," he whispered reverently as he leaned down and brushed his lips against Danni's cool ones. When he pulled back, part of him was hoping and praying that was all she needed to hear before she came back to him and kicked his ass. He'd happily take it too. As long as she came back to him he'd do anything.

"Hey!" Jax snapped. "I said Ethan wants to know if there was something wrong with her when she was human."

"She was perfect," he said in a daze as he continued to gaze down at her, "absolutely perfect."

"There was nothing wrong with her? She wasn't hurt or anything? Caine? Caine!"

"What?" he snapped, dragging his eyes away from the woman in his arms to glare at the impatient shifter.

"I'm trying to find out if there was anything wrong with her, you jackass! Did you change her because she was hurt or to take her as your mate? Ethan needs to know."

He gave himself a mental shake as he forced himself to focus. "Her heart stopped," he said, his eyes moving back down to his mate as he sat down on the bed and leaned back against the large headboard, careful with the woman in his arms.

"Come on, Danni," he said softly as he gently ran his fingers through her beautiful hair, pushing it back away from her face.

"Ethan said that wouldn't explain this, Caine. Was there anything else going on with her?"

"She was dying," he mumbled as he pulled her even closer so that he could rest his cheek against her cool forehead.

"From what?" Jax pressed.

"Cancer," he choked out, still unable to believe that he could have lost her.

"What kind?"

"I don't know," he mumbled as he nuzzled his cheek against her forehead.

"Did you scent it on her?"

"No," he said hollowly, knowing that he would have dragged her ass to every specialist in the world if he had.

"Thank f**king God," Jax said as he hung up the phone.

"What's wrong with her?" he asked, willing his mate to stop scaring the hell out of him and wake up. She had to wake up.

"It's poison," Jax said as he allowed his fangs to drop.

Caine frowned as he watched the man bite into his own wrist. "That's what I told you in the first place, ass**le. How exactly is this helpful?"

"Because," Jax said as he climbed onto the bed and reached out and gently pried Danni's mouth open, "it wasn't the blood. It's the cancer."

"Bullshit!" Caine snapped as he watched the shifter place his bleeding wrist against Danni's slack mouth. "I changed her. My blood fixed her."

Jax nodded as he got comfortable in front of them. He kept his eyes on Danni's face and away from her large teardrop shaped br**sts, his large teardrop shaped br**sts, which is why he didn't kill the bastard for coming this close to her while she was naked.

"Didn't you listen in?" Jax asked as he gripped his wrist and squeezed, forcing more blood into Danni's mouth.

"No," he said hollowly as he focused on his mate. She wasn't swallowing and her heart hadn't started beating.

He learned long ago how to control his abilities to the point that everything came naturally now. If he wanted to, he could have heard the entire phone conversation with very little effort, but he'd been too focused on his mate.

"Well, according to Ethan, she should have overfed for the first couple of weeks on fresh blood. None of that bagged shit for her and especially not human blood for a while. She needs immortal blood to help kill the poison that shut down her system," Jax said, releasing his wrist to rub Danni's jaw in an attempt to get her to swallow.

Caine kept his eyes locked on Danni's ghostly white face, silently pleading with her to swallow as he frowned. "What the hell are you talking about? My blood killed it and made her immortal. It's gone."

"Have you tasted her blood since she turned?"

No, he hadn't.

Several times he'd been tempted to, curious to see how her blood would taste now that the cancer was gone, but he forced himself to hold back. Not only because he didn't feed from the source anymore and didn't want to fall back into old habits, but because he was afraid that her blood was going to taste as good as he imagined over the years and that he wouldn't be able to let her go.

He wasn't worried about that now, because he was never letting her go.

"Ethan thinks the cancer forced her body to shut down. It must have been terminal," Jax murmured conversationally as he moved his hand down to Danni's neck and rubbed, but nothing worked. Jax's blood spilled out of her mouth and down her cheek and still her heart refused to beat.

He didn't bother to answer the man as he brought his own wrist to his mouth and bit. As soon as he tasted blood he pulled his wrist away and replaced Jax's wrist as the shifter smartly pulled his arm out of the way.

"My blood should have taken care of it," Caine said as he silently pleaded with Danni to take his blood.

"Unless you fed her continuously during her change and kept shoving bags of blood down her throat, the cancer remained in her system. When your blood changed her and made her stronger, it probably failed to kill every last cancer cell because you didn't give her enough blood to get the job done so it stuck around. Ethan thinks that when your blood made her stronger that it-"

"Made the cancer stronger as well," he finished for the shifter on a groan. He'd f**ked up, but there was nothing he could do about it now but figure out a way to get the poison out of her system.

"How much blood is it going to take?" he asked as he tried to figure out how many bags of cold blood he was going to have to down between feeding her so that he didn't accidentally go into bloodlust.

"Well, first we have to find out how much of it is still in her body. Then I guess we keep feeding her until it goes away."

"How in the hell are we supposed to know how much is in her body? And how do you propose we keep feeding her until it's gone when she can't swallow?" he snapped, feeling his control slip as more blood overflowed from Danni's mouth.