“You’re compelling me,” I say, but the tremor in my voice betrays me.
He slowly breathes out, causing my knees to buckle.
“I’m not,” he murmurs. “This is just you, reacting to me.” His mouth brushes against the back of my ear, unravelling me further. “This is how it will always be.”
I swallow hard. “Then perhaps it’s for the best that you’re selling me.”
He stiffens, nails digging into my skin, just for a moment. “Perhaps,” he says, the word falling cold and clear.
Then he places his lips below the necklace clasp, kissing me right on top of my spine.
I gasp, my heart thumping deeply against my ribs, my eyes opening wide as a jolt of pleasure throttles me. The jewelry box slides out of my hands and onto the carpet.
Fuck.
A gentle kiss on the back of my neck, and it’s ripping me apart like an orgasm would, making me come alive against my will.
I feel his lips part against my skin, and for a horrifying moment I think he’s going to sink his teeth in, but then I realize he’s smiling. “I didn’t tell you how beautiful you look, did I?” He pulls back and my skin goes numb from where his lips just were.
I don’t even have the words to speak, my blood is throbbing hard, in my head, in my chest, everywhere. Heat blooms, erasing any cold.
He lets go of me and swiftly crouches down to pick up the jewelry box, standing up again in such a way that screams supernatural. Sometimes there’s a liquidness to his movements, like he’s made entirely of silk.
He opens the box and takes out the earrings, appraising me, eyes checking my chin, my nose, my brows. Finally they settle on my eyes, staring at me in that intense unblinking way of his. “Do you feel beautiful?” he asks.
I shake my head, licking my lips, tasting the nude lipstick I’m wearing. “Does the lamb feel beautiful before it’s led to slaughter?”
That brings a crooked smile out of him as he takes one of the earrings and comes at my ear with it.
I inhale sharply, my skin going tight. I don’t think I’ve ever had someone else put earrings in my ears for me, but here he is, eyeing me calmly, doing this like he’s done it a million times.
“Regardless of how you feel,” he says, his voice low as he holds the post against my earlobe. “These rubies are worth millions. So don’t lose them, whatever you do.”
I open my mouth in shock seconds before he adds, “This might hurt.”
Then he stabs the post in through my earlobe and I’m crying out in pain.
“There,” he says, quickly fastening the back of the post in. I feel wetness, smell my own blood as it drips from my ear onto my shoulder.
“What the fuck,” I cry out harshly, my ear throbbing, and he concentrates on the other ear now, brows knitting together in determination. His eyes meet mine for a moment and his pupils have now gone completely red.
Oh, that can’t be good.
“Your piercings disappeared when you turned,” he says to me, nose flaring for a moment before he looks at my other ear. “Have to start anew.”
He quickly stabs the second post through my other earlobe, though this time the pain has dulled considerably. The blood still flows, dripping onto the top of my dress.
He brings out a black pocket square from his suit jacket and wipes it over my leather dress, cleaning up the blood with ease. “Leather was a smart choice for tonight.”
Then he brings the fabric up to my ears, wiping away the rest of the blood with surprisingly gentle fingers, considering he just punched holes into my skin, and I watch as the red in his pupils fades back to black.
“How do you do it?” I whisper to him.
He pauses, looking at me. “Do what?”
“The blood,” I tell him. “Doesn’t that make you…don’t you want that?” I mean, the sight and smell of his blood, and I’m the one who turned into the ravenous beast. And I’m only half of what he is.
He observes me closely for a moment before he says, “Patience and restraint. I’ve had a long time to work on those attributes.” He clears his throat, taking a step back. “Besides, it would do me no good tonight. I need to stay sharp. I’ve only sampled but a bit of your blood, and it intoxicated me. Had a hard time staying sober after that.”
Could have fooled me. He’s never been anything but one hundred percent in control.
“Are you ready?” he asks me, holding out his hand.
But I’m not fooled by how this all looks.
I know what this all is.
“I’ll never be ready,” I tell him, forgetting to fake bravery.
I put my hand in his.
“You’re braver than you think,” he says to me, gripping my hand, close to crushing it. Then he leads me out of the room.
We walk down the hall past the roses, which are dead again.
Bloom, I think in my head, staring at them with so much intensity that my vision starts to thin. Bloom alive with blood.
Nothing happens.
It isn’t until we turn to go down the stairs that I catch the roses moving. We’re out of sight before I can see the rest, but something hot and golden swims inside me, and I suppress a smile. Maybe I can do some things.
We walk down the flights of stairs, the house quiet and faintly lit, creepy shadows dancing on the walls, but as we get closer to the ballroom, the noise gets louder. There’s thumping bass and music and laughter and all the things that a good party promises.
And I’m scared as hell.
I stop just outside the doors, noticing for the first time the symbols on them, flowers that remind me of eyes. “Solon,” I say quietly.
He stops beside me, his grip moving from my hand to my wrist, growing tighter. “Solon? I have a nickname already?” he muses.
I stare at him. I don’t need to tell him I’m this scared, he wants me to be this scared. But I also know this might be the last time I get to say anything to him in private.
My jaw hurts from clenching it. I wiggle it first before I tell him, “I know you’re not a man who makes promises. Or vampire, for that matter. But no matter what happens to me, just…please don’t hurt my parents. I think they were only trying to help me.”
He stares at me, a twitch near his eye. “Do you know why your parents wanted to take you away for your birthday?”
There’s no use asking him how he knows about that. “So I wouldn’t change in the city, so I wouldn’t harm other people.”
“So they could kill you if things got out of hand,” he says. “These are the people you want me to abstain from hurting?”
I don’t want to believe that. But I nod. “Please.”
He seems to consider that for a moment, sighing softly. “Fine. You have my word. Believe it or not, it is worth something.” He adds under his breath, “Sometimes.”
Then his hand lets go of my wrist and slides up to my elbow as he pulls open the door with the other.
We step into a party.
There are about thirty people here, all dressed in tuxedos and gowns, men, women, and nonbinary individuals. If you’ve never had thirty vampires all looking at you at once with their fixed, unblinking stare, be grateful. I’m so scared, I think I might piss myself.
“Breathe,” Absolon whispers to me as we glide through the crowd, his hand firm on my elbow. “Let them get used to you.”
Sure enough, a few seconds pass and the vampires go back to talking with each other and the music seems louder still. It takes me a moment to realize it’s Depeche Mode playing and I shake my head. Of course they’d be music for vampires.
Wolf’s head appears above the others and he walks over to us, dressed in his tux. I can’t help but smile with relief when I see him, something that makes Absolon’s grip on my elbow become vise-like.
“Wolf,” I say to him as he eyes me appreciatively.
“This is quite the look,” Wolf says. “Very dramatic. You look beautiful.”
I’d blush if I wasn’t so scared.
“Thank you.”
Absolon makes a noise of irritation and leads me away from Wolf, straight over to a pair of vampires nearby. One has grey hair, which surprises me because everyone else seems permanently suspended between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five, and his skin is tanned. His eyes are dark red, brows black and sharp in contrast to his hair and beard, and he’s wearing a black collarless jacket, which makes him look even more sinister. He smells like an old church.
The woman he’s with looks my age, with dark black hair to her waist, and she’s wearing a lacey black gown with velvet gloves. Her lipstick is the darkest red, playing off her light skin.
“This must be the girl,” the man says with an untraceable accent. He reaches out and takes my hand, and even though I want to snatch it back, I can’t. I’m stuck in his eyes, the red pools glinting, and I know he’s compelling me. “Enchanted,” he says, and he runs his nose up from the back of my hand to my wrist, deftly flipping my hand over and running his lips over my veins.
Everything in me recoils in revulsion, but still I’m frozen and unable to stop him.
A low rumble emits from Absolon, a threatening sound that makes my hairs stand on end.
“Enough,” Absolon snaps at the man. “You’ve already gotten her smell.” He reaches out and grabs my arm, pulling it out of the man’s grip. “And you can stop compelling her, too.”
The man smiles at Absolon, his fangs sharp on the top and bottom, giving the appearance of a canine’s mouth. “Just making sure she is what you say she is.” He eyes me. “Has Solon not told you about me? I’m Yanik. I’ve been quite interested in your history, little girl. I knew who your parents were, your real ones. They were good creatures, too good. Their mistake was thinking they could run away from the lives they led. None of us can.”
Though the man is talking with a conversational tone, there’s a sinister edge to all of this, aside from the obvious.
“I knew who your real father was too,” he continues, eyeing Absolon briefly. “Jeremias.”
“That is just hearsay,” Absolon says with a scoff, but even so, his hand goes to my lower back, holding me against him. “It’s not been proven.”
I take the bait. “Who is Jeremias?”
“Ah,” the old vampire says, flashing those teeth again. “How little you know. Absolon hasn’t been truthful with you.”
“She knows no more than me,” Absolon says, lying.
“Surely you’ve tasted her blood, Solon. You can find out the truth that way.”
“Just a drop,” he admits begrudgingly. His fingers press into the side of my waist, either a protective or possessive measure.
“I see,” Yanick says, looking to me now. “You know that we can discover truth through blood. Your history. A drop won’t tell all your secrets, Solon would have to have more. But he hasn’t. Strange, don’t you think? How can we know exactly what we’re buying?”
“You’ll have to trust that this is the girl. This is the one who was taken from Alice and Hakan.”
“But that alone doesn’t make her interesting to us, old boy, and you know it.”
The fact that the aging Yanik called Solon old boy makes my brow raise.
“We should bleed her,” the girl says, her first words. “See for ourselves.”
Oh my god.
For some reason I expect Solon to get territorial and tell them to forget it, but he doesn’t. “Okay,” he says, and my heart sinks. “But then if you have some, everyone else will want to also. The price for her will go up.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Yanik says, his voice radiating evil.
Solon stares at him for a moment, then nods. “Fine. Let me get her ready. I’ll come back out and make an announcement. We have to do this fairly.”
“What?” I cry out, and then Solon is grabbing me by the elbow and hauling me across the room, the sea of vampires parting for us, their eyes hungry as they follow my every move.
Solon takes out his keys, bringing out another skeleton one, and yanks me toward the door to the side of the stage, the one Wolf had darkly referred to as one for “private events.”
“What are you doing?” I cry out as he unlocks the door, looking over my shoulder at the crowd, every eye still on me, fangs bared.
Holy fuck.
The door unlocks and then he’s shoving me into a dark room. The lights flick on and I gasp. It’s about the size of the cigar room, but that’s where the similarities end. The walls are painted black, the floor is steel with black leather mats every couple feet, right below two pairs of metal chains that hook into the wall. There’s a steel table at the end, the type you’d find in a morgue, with a fridge beside it, and in the corners there are two matching red leather chaises.
“What the fuck is this place?” I say, staring at it all in horror.
He doesn’t answer me, just leads me over to the chaise and sits me down on it.
“Solon, please,” I tell him, grabbing his jacket as he turns around, ready to leave. “Tell me what’s happening. They’re going to…bleed me? How? By biting me? Is everyone in there getting a turn? Am I being chained to the wall?”
With each question I ask, my fist gets stronger, my words trembling, on the edge of panic-fueled tears.
He reaches down and pries my hand off his jacket. “I thought it might come to this,” he says, voice flat. “Just stay here.”
Then he turns, and before I can grab him again, there’s a strange shimmer in the air, and then he’s gone.
Literally, gone.
Vanished into thin air.
Not even appearing by the door, something like I’ve seen earlier when he moves fast. He just disappeared.
And I’m all alone.
But I won’t be for long.
I don’t know who Jeremias is, but if he’s my father, apparently that’s a literal selling point for me. If they can find out my history by drinking my blood, taste my bloodlines, then who knows what will happen to me. As much as I do want to know the truth, it’s not at the expense of bleeding for all these vampires, and especially if I’m being held in chains.
How could Absolon do this to me?
You fucking idiot. He told you what he was going to do from day one.
I sigh, my breath fluttery. I need to get out of here. I can’t be in here.
How did he disappear like that?
I have some of his blood in me still, I don’t know for how long, but I can feel it, the traces of him.
If he can do that, can I do that?
But how?
I stand up and walk to the middle of the room, my heels clicking loudly on the steel floor. I stop and look around. There was a shimmer when he disappeared, like the air moved and enveloped him. Is it an invisible door?
I move my hands around in the air but feel nothing.
Think, think, think.
I know I’m running out of time.
I eye the door, the fear hitching in my throat. At any minute he’s going to come back in with Yanik in tow, and then who knows how many others. Who wouldn’t want to sample the goods before they purchase?
Think, think, think.
But I can’t think.
I can’t focus.
I’m doing that thing I did in the Uber when I was kidnapped. Too panicked to make sense of anything to make a plan. Hopeless, helpless.
But there was something you did and you can do it again.
I close my eyes and stop thinking.
I start imagining.
I see those roses, dead, and then the blood rising in them, bringing them back to bloody life.
I see the moon deep within me, reflecting on a quiet well, an unlimited source of power I need to tap in to.
I feel blue electricity running inside my veins.
I feel everything, all of it, every emotion I’ve tried to grapple with in the last two weeks. It builds and builds in the core of me, glowing white, rising through me until it feels like all my hairs are standing on end.
I need an outlet, I need to escape, I need to survive.
I need to disappear.
Help me disappear.
A sizzling sound fills the room, a slight breeze blowing against my face.
My eyes open to see flames in the air in the shape of a doorway.
On the other side of the doorway is the rest of the room, except it’s in black and white, like an old noir movie.
I look over my shoulder at the real door.
Then I make my choice.
I walk through the one I just conjured in the air.
Into a world of black and white.
Chapter Twelve
I watch as the flames fizzle out, the shape of the doorway fading until it’s gone and I’m still in the room.
Only everything is in black and white. I take a tentative step forward, afraid that the air might feel different or hold me back. I’m not even sure there is air. I try to breathe but nothing happens. When I walk, my shoes make a muted sound.
Fuck. Am I…dead?
Okay, don’t panic. Don’t panic.
I’m tempted to try again and create another door and step back into the normal room, the one with air and sound and color.
But then the real door leading to the ballroom opens.
And what comes in are shapes, white shimmery illusions of people. I make out Absolon’s striking figure, plus the old vampire and the woman, and Wolf too. They’re like ghosts, moving slow as if through quicksand.
But the door is open.
And every cell inside me is telling me to go.
I slip past the ghosts as they stop in the middle of the room, probably wondering where the hell I went. I might not have much time before someone finds me here, wherever the fuck I am.
So I move through Dark Eyes, fast, past the ghostly shapes of the guests, right through the back door, which doesn’t hold me back.
The house doesn’t hold me back.
I stumble out into the black and white night.
I’m free.
I look around, staring up at the Westerfeld house in awe. I stumble across the road to get a better view, shaking my head.
I’m free.
Black Sunshine Page 16
