Ready Or Not

Fuck Yew

**Lydia**

Nobody had asked, but I knew what they were thinking. Had I made the right decision, letting Hannah walk away? After everything I'd told her, was it safe to just let her go?

It was.

Hannah and Amara couldn't be more different, but I knew in the back of their minds, my family was wondering if disposing of my girlfriends was going to be an annual thing. They were smart enough not to mention it. The thought of giving Hannah "time" was hard enough; thinking about a world without her was gut-wrenching.

Movies and ignoring the problem for a little while seemed to ease some of the tension in all of us, just like it always did. Even when Danny had called Theo by a name I'd promised him over a century ago he'd never hear again. Anna and I both promised him.

I knew Teo Iliescu. He was... well, he was a very broken man. But not so broken he couldn't help put Lydia Aribella Barrach back together a little bit. We patched one another up enough that there'd be something to bury, so to speak, and then we left those people far, far behind.

I was afraid Daniel digging up the name would stress those old fractures, and for a few minutes, my own problems really had been forgotten. Until Theo shooed me out of the bathroom and Anna had wrapped me in a bone crushing embrace. Or well, you know. What would have been one... anyway.

"He's okay," she said, somewhat awestruck. "Daniel is fixing parts of him I thought were just gonna stay walled off."

Daniel turned pink and pushed a hand through his hair, turning his attention to the floor where Duke slept.

"So you don't have to worry about him right now, yeah?" She yawned. She'd been doing a lot of that lately. Me too, if I was honest. Her exhaustion was contagious.

"You spent too long researching today. You're worn out." I scooped up Lorenzo as he walked by and found the spot on his head that made him purr like crazy, then let him go again as I walked to the fridge. "Let me heat up some food and you can tell me what you found."

Anna dropped herself onto the loveseat with Daniel, where he pulled her feet onto his lap and threw a blanket over her legs.

"Well, at first I just thought I'd look into yew itself but there isn't much there. It's what they used to drive through the hearts of corpses they thought might be vampires," she said.

"Which we knew," Daniel added.

I stifled my own yawn and continued making our meal as Theo rejoined us.

He sank onto my couch. "So then what? Did you get anything?" He was asking Daniel and Anna but he was watching me in the kitchen, eyeing the bottles I was warming.

"Mmhmm," Anna hummed. "Officer Beghley said yew was toxic to vampires, but it's toxic to humans too."

I hooked my thumbs in my pockets and leaned against the counter while our blood sat in its boiling pan. "Really. Huh."

"All except the berries," Daniel added. "But the seeds are too. And that got Melanie thinking."

"Oh?" Theo raised an eyebrow at that.

I probably did too.

Daniel ignored the reaction. "I was just sort of digging around to see if there were any shipments of the wood itself coming into the city in any large quantities or any discernable or unusual patterns. She started looking up symptoms of yew poisoning."

I pulled the bottles out of the pan and set them on the counter, emptying to boiling water as I spoke. "Okay, but that would be humans. Doubtful we'd share many overlapping symptoms."

"Right but still-" Daniel started.

Anna cut him off. "Most humans who are poisoned by it are poisoned when they ingest the foliage. Which is more toxic when it's dry and wilted."

Theo, who was still looking at our meal strangely, was up and into the kitchen in a flash. "They're steeping it in our blood like a damn tea. That's how they get it in there."

He sniffed one of the bottles and grimaced, slamming it down again before dumping another down the drain. "This is off. Just slightly. I never would have noticed if I wasn't looking for it. Fuck!"

I reached for the bottle and smelled it. It seemed fine and I told him as much. Anna and Daniel joined us and each sniffed the bottle in turn.

"It's there," Daniel agreed. "Just slightly."

Anna shook her head. "I can't smell anything different."

"Jesus Christ, cremă," Theo spat. "Oh, sis. You guys are used to it."

A knot made itself at home behind my sternum.

"What?" Anna's dark eyes went wide.

Daniel leaned heavily against the countertop. "Shit."

"They've been dosing me," I said, stating the obvious. "And because Anna and I live together, she's been drinking my blood."

I felt sick. They could do what they wanted to me, but not my Anna.

"Theo and I have had a fair amount of your bottles mixed in too, but it's so faint, and we didn't know... we never would have noticed." Daniel looked like he felt almost as ill as I did.

Theo looked ready to kill.

"How often have you two been feeding fresh?"

I shook my head. "I haven't. Not really. Not since Hannah..."

Anna just blinked. "It's been a week or so."

"I've seen you guys yawn about a half dozen times each tonight," my best friend pointed out. "How are you feeling?"

Daniel's head jerked up at this.

"Theo, it's like one in the morning, of course we're yawning," I pointed out. "I feel fine."

"Me too," Anna said.

"We're gonna keep it that way," Daniel stated, moving for the bottles still cooling next to the stove.

Theo was right on the same wavelength and the two of them dumped the remaining bottles.

"Nobody in this family is drinking bottled, got it?" Theo ordered.

The knot moved higher in my chest and settled somewhere in the vicinity of my heart. Now was not the time for me to be out hunting for every meal. The risk outweighed any possible and as yet still unproven ill effects of tainted donor blood. I couldn't do it. Maybe they weren't drinking bottled. In fact, I didn't want them to. But...

"I am," I told them. "Because I need Hannah back, and that means following the rules."

Theo's face went hard, then soft, then annoyed.

"What have I told you about my Lydia, iubit?"

Daniel pushed past me to my refrigerator. "That she's stubborn, and she puts herself last all the time. Oh, and that her eyes are gorgeous but don't tell her you said that."

I rolled my "gorgeous" eyes and moved to pull Danny away from the refrigerator. He tried to plant himself, but I managed to get myself between him and my food supply. I'm stronger.

"And?" Theo prompted as he effortlessly lifted me out of Daniel's way.

"And she's gonna get herself killed being a martyr," Daniel finished.

"Amen to that," said Anna, wrapping her arms around me.

I watched, helpless and oddly heartbroken as my food disappeared into my plumbing.