"Who is that?" she heard Tyler's hoarse voice ask as he clutched the side of his neck. "And what the hell is happening to me?"
Jules rushed into the room and pulled Tyler up by the arm.
"What the…" he started again, but she started running out of the room and out of the building dragging him along.
"Where are we going?" he asked, still clutching his neck.
"You have to get out of here, Tyler. Leave this building. Don't come back here for the rest of the night. Brady and I will find you shortly. Go, Go, GO." She yelled out as she pushed him out of the building and locked the door behind her.
She rushed back in and ran to Brady. He was still standing guard outside the room and the girl was no longer making any sounds.
"What's wrong?" she asked when she reached him.
"Nothing. It was too many bullets in short succession. She blacked out again. She will wake up in a few."
"We have to get her out of here." She told him. As Brady nodded, Val, a werewolf a year or two older than Tyler - came out of another room in the back. He was still belligerent, having only been through one full moon, and was jumping out of his skin in preparation for tonight's. He had none of the control that Tyler already showed. They had had to keep him in the back so that he wouldn't go for the blonde's throat even before he changed. They had tried to tell him that she could kill him given that he was still in his human form, but he was foolhardy, and listening to commands was not his forte. Brady had his work cut out for him if they were going to have to prep Val to run with the pack.
"Why?" Val asked now. "Why the hell would we get her out of here when we went to all this trouble to get her in here?"
Brady rolled his eyes and she knew that he was about to say something along the lines of, That's nothing you need to know. But Jules knew that exerting too much control on a teenager tended to backfire; they could become downright unruly, which would only make it all the more work for her and Brady. And so before Brady could say anything, she cut in.
"She is mated to Tyler Lockwood. It means that if we kill her, it only leaves two options for him, at least according to legends. He will go on a killing spree, taking down everything that in his path, including of course the ones who killed his mate, and then he will go mad. You don't want to go near a mad werewolf." She told him.
"What? That's fucked up! Is that what is going to happen to all of us when we get mated?"
Brady laughed without humor while she continued, trying to keep the information as brief as possible.
"We can find our mates, but it's no longer an option to "be mated." That sort of mating happens rarely."
"How do you know it can't happen to any of us?" Val asked again.
"To be mated, you have to fall in love with someone during your first transformation. I didn't have that. Brady didn't have that. You didn't have that. In fact, 99.9% of werewolves don't have that."
"How the hell did Lockwood find time to fall in love with someone while he was going through something that feels like your life is being ripped out of you?"
She and Brady exchanged glances and they looked back at the girl inside. "The only way you can fall irrevocably for someone during your transformation is if she or he was there with you throughout. That despite the possibility of harm to themselves, they stayed with you. That's the only way."
"This chick stayed with Lockwood when he wolf-ed for the first time? That's not the smartest move. She is a blonde!"
She and Brady were thinking the same; there was something fishy about this whole thing. But, it couldn't really be a ploy either, because the blonde had to have fallen in love as well for them to be mated. The feelings had to be mutual, or it didn't count.
"What do we do with her now?" Val asked.
"Like Jules said before, we have to let her go. This is one vampire who should not be killed." Brady said finally.
"Wait, if Lockwood will go ape-shit and crazy if she dies, will the same thing happen to her if Lockwood dies?" Val asked.
"No. If any male werewolf dies and he's mated, his mate will die automatically." Jules answered, remembering what she had learned with interest from her grandmother when she was young. Being mated was a cursed blessing. Or a blessed curse. No one really wanted it, even with the incredible bond that it promised, the tie that you developed with your mate was so powerful that it made you feel not your own person anymore. At least that's what she had heard.
"A werewolf mated to a vampire. Ain't that something! How many of these matings do you know of?"
She looked at Brady again before they both answered in unison, "None."