by Rye Brewer
“Help me!” I cried out, but the sound fell dead at my feet.
I could hardly hear it myself, as if watching a television set with the sound turned nearly all the way down. No matter how I raised my voice, to the point where I was certain my throat would bleed, little more than a whisper came out.
Where was I? How had I come to be here? One thing I heard loud and clear, the increasingly frantic rhythm of my heart, pumping away in my ears. Like the sound of a speeding train. I clamped my hands over them—naturally, this was no use. The sound was coming from inside me, and it was growing louder, threatening to split my head in two.
This was it. The end. I would lose my sanity, become nothing more than a screeching, grasping, clawing thing trapped in her own ruined psyche. This would be my end, after such a dazzling and auspicious existence.
Only when my eyes fluttered open, and I found myself in actual, true darkness with faint moonlight filtering through a cracked and filthy window, did I understand I’d been unconscious. Elsewhere.
When I turned my head, and a flare went off at the base of my skull, I understood why I’d been unconscious at all. That was when I remembered. Sharp pain, dazzling fireworks shooting off behind my eyes. And then, nothing—until the fog I’d experienced when trying to claw my way back to consciousness.
Someone had done this to me. Was still doing this to me, in fact, as my arms were raised above my head and my wrists bound together in iron. Someone had placed me on this floor—this filthy, dust-covered floor which many industrious rodents had littered with droppings—and bound my wrists above me. Every muscle ached horribly, but it was nothing when compared to my head.
The scent of blood lingered in my nostrils. My blood. Someone had dared draw my blood when they’d struck.
Yet I had not the strength nor the clarity to summon up the correct amount of rage. Had I been more myself, I would have made the perpetrator suffer. Oh, they would have suffered unimaginable pain, the sort that crushed sanity to a fine powder and blew it away in the wind.
I’d done it before, after all. I’d watched my foes slide into madness thanks to my ministrations. The memory of my victories normally brought a smile to my lips.
Now? I could barely muster enough interest in the past, for the present was what mattered. The here and now.
Where was here? When was now? How much time, how many miles had passed since I’d last looked upon the face of my beloved?
“Anton,” I whispered, and now my whisper carried.
No more false fog. I knew this was real.
Yet it mattered not, for there was no one to hear my whisper. No one to know I had woken from my dreamless state. It was better that way, this much I knew. For whoever had placed me on this floor, shackled me, left me bleeding and unconscious, would not take kindly to my wakefulness. They’d hardly pull up a chair and share a cup of tea.
My gaze darted about, taking in the rest of my rather grim surroundings. Once I adjusted to the near total lack of light thanks to that single, grime-coated window, I was ever so thankful for my vampire vision, it became clear this was one a fisherman’s cabin. Poles sat against one wall, with hooks and lures in boxes on the floor. A pile of nets lay in one corner, tangled and rotting.
How long had it been abandoned? From the looks of it, decades had passed since it was used—upon closer inspection, a calendar which hung on the wall near my head declared the date on it to be December of 1955, and in the accompanying illustration a buxom young woman in a fur-trimmed negligee was just about to open her Christmas gift.
I wondered absently what was in the box she was going to open before turning my attention away.
If I knew where I was, it might be easier to plan a means of escape. Even if I could free myself from the shackles—a few tugs of my arms told me this would be a difficult prospect, if not impossible—where would I go? There was no telling.
Could I still be on Anton’s estate? If I were, would I be shackled? Surely, he would come for me.
If he knew I’d been taken away.
If he were even free to do so.
My heart began that building, increasingly frantic rhythm once again as I considered the stark possibility that he had somehow been incapacitated. Perhaps whoever had attacked me turned on him next. Perhaps they intended to hold him in place while they dispatched with me.
Perhaps he was already dead, for shifters and vampires who’d dared mingle had faced no less than death over the centuries.
Was it possible? I would know it, would I not? I would feel his loss.
That was a fantasy, and I knew it. Merely the act of grasping at straws, soothing myself in any way I could while the world fell to pieces about me. As if I would be able to feel him if he were gone. As if that sort of thing ever happened.
If he was no longer alive, there would be no one to come for me. No one would care if I disappeared and never returned.
The truth of this rocked me to my very core. It was a truth I’d grown accustomed to ignoring in favor of more attractive thoughts. I’d gone through life with my head in the sand, or virtually, always doing what I could to convince myself of my invincibility. None could touch me, for I was untouchable.
And those I’d hurt. Those I’d killed. Those I had swept aside when they no longer served me. I’d killed Marcus, after all, without thinking twice of it—and that was after I’d used him, led him to believe there could ever be anything between us.
I’d used that shade. Allonic. I hadn’t experienced the slightest bit of remorse, either.
On and on. So many before them. Dozens, hundreds. All of it in service of one and only one person: myself. All for me.
Look where it left me. I could nearly have laughed as I looked about the decrepit, old cabin. What a fitting place for one with my past. The rodent droppings were a nice touch.
I’d never been one to believe in karma, and I had seen nearly everything life had to offer. Every set of beliefs, every form of madness. It all stemmed from the same place, really, every last bit of it. Humans enjoyed twisting one central truth to fit their needs, adding and subtracting, vilifying at will. Karma and the beliefs surrounding it had to me only ever been one more spoke jutting from the center axle.
Yet there I was, suffering. Truly suffering, as I had in the dungeons beneath League headquarters, only now there was no telling where I was. At least there I’d known, and I’d known where to go once I escaped.
There, I’d had a chance to escape at all, for I’d been able to use Jonah Bourke. Yet another of my victims. I’d talked myself into his good graces.
Who was there to talk to now?
For the first time in as long as I could recall, a tear rolled down my cheek. One tear, but it held a million tears within it. Those tears were inside, bottled up. I did not dare release them, for they might never stop. I might drown in them.
Anton was the only one who loved me, and he might have been dead. There would be nothing left for me if this was the case. I would have nothing, no one.
I would die at the hands of my captors with no one to stop them.
And the world would go on without me. My clan would continue. The earth would spin. I would no longer be part of it.
It might very well have been what I deserved, at that. Never one to succumb to self-pity, I was uncertain how to manage the hopelessness which threatened to consume me—or if I should bother trying to manage it at all.
This was all so new. There was nothing I could use to block it out, to make it seem less overwhelming. I could not distract myself by taking a shopping spree or visiting a museum—one of my favorite pastimes while living in Paris, and even while visiting New York. No symphony, no theatre. No hunting for prey against League orders.
I had nowhere to go, nothing to turn my mind to.
I could only stew in my own misery, guilt, and grief.
I was not built for this. I had lost, yes, I had lost so many things during my long and illustrious life. My beloved father. All of
my family. They’d died to me long before their physical death, as they would hardly have accepted a vampire in the family. I’d shed them like a snake sheds its skin, though mine had been a painful and tear-filled process.
I’d been near enough my humanity then, to truly grieve. I had still remembered love, warmth, companionship, loyalty, and all of it had served to crush my heart when I could no longer be part of those who’d been my entire world until the fateful night I was turned.
Perhaps knowing they believed me dead hurt worst of all—no, it was knowing they would continue without me and in time forget I’d ever lived. It had been the knowledge that my grave would fall into ruin, overgrown and moss-covered. That had been the most grinding pain, the heaviest of the burdens my status as a vampire had afforded.
I hadn’t known at the time, or in the years which had passed since, just how heavy the burden would become once clarity returned and I realized how useless my life had been. Interesting, most certainly. Pleasurable, no doubt. But meaningless.
There would still be no one to remember me.
Jonah Bourke returned to my thoughts, and with him came his family. I’d always sneered at them, had I not? Why was there any call for family ties once one had been turned? Why this farce of being parents, brothers, and sisters? Why live and work together?
Why not let go of human ties and live free, unbound by responsibilities and loyalties? Why not live for oneself?
Shackled in that abandoned, rotting cabin, I thought I might finally understand. Vampires such as the Bourkes banded together even after they’d shed their mortal lives for the same reason humans lived and loved and worked alongside each other.
It was all in the hope that when their time came, they would not be alone. They would not feel utter hopelessness, the sort that left a person ice-cold in their very core. That once everything else had been stripped—health, vitality, wealth, hope—there would still be one last flicker of hope.
There would still be someone out in the world who loved them and cared whether they lived or died.
Strange how such revelations only occurred to a person at the end of their life, when there was little to be done and not even any way to share this newfound wisdom with anyone else.
The damned futility of it all.
The uselessness.
The—
The footsteps outside.
My head snapped up, my heart seizing for a moment before taking off once again in a flurry of erratic beats. Who was I? Who had this experience and the one at headquarters turned me into? Some cowering, frightened hare caught in a snare?
I let my shoulders drop—no, forced them to drop when they would not do so on their own, and fixed my expression into one of cool detachment. I’d worn it like armor through my entire vampire existence. It seemed only fitting to wear it at the end.
Within moments, the door opened. It did not swing, instead, dragging over the floor and moving aside what appeared to be a mountain of dust. Through the swirling mass left behind stepped a figure.
Curvaceous. Female. With long, white-blonde hair and full lips curved into a deadly smile.
She smelled of wolf. A shifter, like my Anton.
“Well, well, well,” she sneered.
I recognized the voice as the one I’d heard while on the edge of consciousness.
“Look who’s awake. The little bloodsucker.”
3
Cari
“Don’t look, don’t look,” I whispered my mantra again and again and hoped like hell it would help this time. It never had before—at least, not for long.
No matter how I swore I wouldn’t give in this time, my eyes always drifted over to the dried blood on the wall to my left. Every single time I fixed on it. A smear, it looked like, as if someone had hit the wall and slid down. Dried dark red, almost black.
We were not the first guests in my father’s dungeon. Not by a long shot.
My father owned a dungeon. Or, rather, he owned a home which sat on top of a dungeon. It wasn’t a mistake. I doubted he had purchased the estate without knowing about a freaking dungeon.
I looked over to where Gage was attached to the wall and tried to return his smile. How could he smile at a time like this? I wanted to tell him not to bother, if it was for my sake. He didn’t need to fake it. I understood what he was thinking and feeling.
It was no worse than what I was going through. In fact, I knew it couldn’t possibly be, since it was my insane father who’d locked us away and who insisted on testing us and who was determined to find a cure for vampirism.
Like I had ever asked him to cure me.
I hadn’t looked at myself in forever—at least, that was how it felt. Like we had been down there forever, the four of us, each of us chained to a different wall and too far from each other to touch. Even the littlest bit of contact would’ve come as a relief.
If I looked half as bad as any of the others, I was in pretty bad shape. None of us had been given a change of clothing since we were captured, and I could smell myself when I so much as flinched. I didn’t know vampires could stink, but we could do everything else. It made sense.
Unfortunate, too, because I was starting to nauseate myself.
How the people who came in to draw blood from us didn’t gag was a mystery. They didn’t seem to care. They hardly looked at us. Sometimes, if more than one of them at a time entered the grim space, they would hold a conversation over completely inane nonsense as if we weren’t there.
It took a few days before I understood they thought of us as animals.
Many days had passed since then. Days in which we had been starved, just to see how long it would take before we started losing our grip. Days in which various metals had been pressed to our bare skin to see if anything but silver burned us. Days when silver had been used.
Not on me. Never on me.
No, my father wanted to spare me the physical pain, but had no problem letting me endure the emotional pain of watching my friends writhe, of hearing them cry out from behind gritted teeth—and over it, the sound of flesh sizzling.
Naomi and Raze were both hollow-eyed, reminding me of photos I’d once seen of men coming back from war. I had glanced over those old black-and-white stills back then, and wondered what a person had to witness for all the light to leave their eyes.
Now I knew.
Naomi had taken to staring at the wall over my head. Not that I thought she was deliberately avoiding looking at me—though she might have been—but she had to look somewhere, and from the unfocused quality of her gaze I thought she might be reliving good times for the sake of turning her mind elsewhere.
I couldn’t blame her.
Raze was obviously crazy about her. The only time I saw him suffering was when she suffered—otherwise, he kept everything inside. He might explode at some point, but something told me he wouldn’t do it in front of Naomi. Sometimes their eyes would meet, and I would have to look away. It was too intimate, even though they were feet from each other and never said a word.
It was easy for me to identify how Raze felt for her, because I felt the same way about Gage. My heart broke when he grimaced or groaned. When it was his skin sizzling as the silver touched it, I screamed like my own skin was burning.
Not that it mattered to the monsters doing the testing. They hadn’t flinched, just like they didn’t flinch away from burning any of the others. There were times when I thought they liked it.
“What day is it now?” Raze asked, looking around at us. “Does anybody know?”
“I tried to keep track,” I whispered with a shrug. “But I know I lost it.”
The fluorescent lights mounted to the ceiling never flickered, never dimmed or got any brighter. Nothing ever changed. It was impossible to keep a hold on time.
“It doesn’t matter,” Naomi whispered. She almost never spoke anymore, so hearing her say anything was pretty much the same as witnessing a miracle. I held my breath, waiting for more.
When n
othing else came out, Gage replied, “Don’t say that. You can’t say that.”
“Why can’t I?” She turned her head slowly, letting it fall against her shoulder. Her empty eyes stared out at him. “Who are you to tell me what I can and cannot say?”
“He didn’t mean it that way,” I was quick to respond. “He meant—”
“I know what he meant,” she hissed, still looking at him. “Either way, he’s telling me what I should and shouldn’t do, and I don’t like it very much.”
“We can’t lose hope,” he insisted.
“Why not?” She started to laugh, but there was a sharp edge to it that carried no humor at all. Desperation, maybe. Insanity? Possibly.
When my gaze traveled over her forearms, I could see the wounds left by the silver. Half-healed, somewhat healed, fresh. The workers, whatever they called themselves, monitored the healing and how long it took.
“Because that’s all we have,” Raze whispered.
This caught her attention, turned her head. The look on her face almost killed me. She wanted to hope, she didn’t want to hope. She didn’t know what to do or where to turn. She wanted to turn to him, to believe him, but good sense told her he might not know what he was talking about. He might just be saying what she needed to hear—or even what he needed to believe.
“I’m so—” She broke off before she could finish her thought, but it didn’t matter.
We could all guess what she wanted to say. She was so tired. So cold. So hungry. Hopeless. Hurt. Depressed. Desperate.
“I know,” I whispered, and how I managed to keep a tremor out of my voice was a mystery when all I wanted to do was weep. “I am so sorry for this.”
“Don’t do that,” Gage warned.
“Now you’re telling me what to do?” I asked with a raised eyebrow. “I don’t like it any more than Naomi does.”
That got a snort from her, anyway.
