by Zara Novak
Jack nodded his head silently at the vampire’s introduction and for a brief moment he said nothing. “My servant and I simply want to travel through, we don’t want any troubles. I’ll happily pay the toll, but my servant will not offer a blood tribute. I will not negotiate on that.”
Rourke Valentine didn’t let the smile falter from his face. “And I wouldn’t expect you to. Servant tribute is only required from regular vampires. I can see from your eyes that you are no ordinary vampire. Tell me, Jack, what family do you come from?”
“No family,” Jack answered back. “I’m a lone nobleman, travelling back to my home in the mountains north of here.”
Intrigue flourished in Rourke’s face. Ellie caught a brief glimpse of his expression from behind Jack’s shoulder and sensed that the vampire didn’t fully believe the visitor. She also got the sense he didn’t want to press the matter. Jack was wild, unpredictable and his strength almost seemed to intimidate the man standing before him. “Very well,” Rourke said after a brief pause. “Your business is your own, I respect that. You are still required to fight, I cannot negotiate on that.”
“I’ve already demonstrated I am keen to fight,” Jack said quickly. “The only thing holding me up is all this talking.”
Another intrigued smile came to Rourke and he answered. “Very well then. We will put the civilities to one side and get straight to the main event. Fighting takes place on the hour, every hour, down in the main square. We have many criminals in our holding. You will fight against them.”
Them? Ellie thought. Just how many people was Jack supposed to be fighting here? She didn’t have any doubt that the vampire could stick up for himself, but she got the sense there was an undercurrent of something else lurking in Rourke’s words. There was a cocky arrogance in his eyes that seemed to indicate he knew something they didn’t.
Jack must have picked upon this, because he questioned it instantly. “How many?”
“Three,” Rourke said. “Regulars, but you will be required to take the Widow’s Draught. To balance things out of course.”
A dark bubble of chatter murmured across the group at Rourke’s announcement. Ellie looked at Jack, who remained perfectly impassive. Widow’s Draught? What was that?
“Then it’s settled,” Rourke said and clapped his hands together loudly. I’ll have my servant, Natalie, take you down to the fighting quarters so you can make your preparations. We normally don’t let servants accompany gladiators down there, but something tells me you aren’t prepared to let her leave your side.”
“Assumption correct,” Jack said, almost growling the words.
Ellie had to wonder where this defensiveness was coming from. The feral vampire that had taken her captive seemed awfully protective over her. In a way she found it endearing, but she also couldn’t forget that she was only here because of him in the first place.
A servant girl in rags broke through the ring of guards and approached Jack and Ellie, her dark eyes looking up at them in trepidation as she paused in front of them. “Follow me this way sir,” the grey-skinned girl said in a voice that was low but confident. “I will lead you both to the fighting quarters.”
Jack gave a curt nod, turned with some reluctance and followed the girl toward the edge of the circle. The guards at the edge parted quickly at Jack’s approach, giving him much berth on either side. Jack’s fist clenched tightly on the chain, keeping Ellie as close as he could. The servant girl led them to the tall wooden stairs that led down into the wide bowl below.
Ellie took hold of the handrail and gulped as the sound of heavy metal and chaos flared up from the pit of mayhem. They were stepping into hell itself, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
4
“Place your bets ladies and gentlemen, place your bets!”
Ellie watched in abject fascination as the fight before them unfolded. One fight was scheduled before Jack was due to step into the arena. They were currently waiting in the fighting quarters, which were personal rooms set off to the side of the arena. Ellie stood in a barred window which looked out onto the fighting ground below. The arena itself wasn’t very large. The floor was a small stone circle perhaps twenty feet across. At the edge there were tall walls, and above those walls were steep tiers of seats, filled with jeering vampires, hungry for violence, hungry for blood.
Looking up, she saw a thin sliver of sky at the tops of the ravine walls, which was now a pale shade of grey. It was just after dawn, but the vampires here wouldn’t have to move for several hours more. She doubted the spot in the ravine saw more than an hour of sunlight a day, which meant the air was cooler down here in the town. Ellie tried to shake the chill off, listening to the cacophony of chaos bleeding through the air all around them.
“Kill him!” people roared from the crowd. “Rip his head off!”
She’d never heard of vampires fighting each other for sport before, but here they were. Her eyes settled on the two men in the arena, two hulking masses of dirt-covered muscle. Both vampires approached the center, bumped fists and looked up to a wooden platform at the side of the ring. There a vampire stood in a suit, holding up a microphone on the end of a long cord, illuminated behind by a bright floodlight.
“Let’s get ready to rumble!” the announcer sang while smashing his microphone against a bell on the platform beside him. The audience shrieked their approval as the fight began.
The men came together in a clash of fists and fury. Hands grappled against hands, chests slapped against elbows, brows furrowed, teeth clenched, fists flung through the air. The men dodged and dived as they countered one another’s attacks. They were clearly experienced fighters, and both were intent on walking out of there alive.
Her colleagues in the Order would have loved to have seen something like this. Pitting vampires against each other, making a sport out of their suffering. Some of her former co-workers only found real pleasure when suffering was being inflicted on a vampire. Ellie watched the chaos unfold with some regret. A bitter taste rose in her mouth, accompanied by a cold pit in her stomach as the fight became more violent. There was nothing to enjoy here, there was only mindless violence.
One of the men got an upper hand, tripping his foe and slamming his back against the stone floor at their feet. His hand clutched at the fallen vampire’s throat, and he slammed the creature’s head against the stone over and over again. Ellie turned from the window and faced their small preparation room, just as the crowd let out a large cheer of violent triumph.
“What’s the matter?” Jack said from across the room. He was stood at a stone bench in front of a sink, waving a sharp blade under a stream of hot water. “Lost your appetite for the fight?”
Ellie stepped away from the window and took a seat behind the vampire. “I didn’t want to watch in the first place really, I just wanted to see what you were getting yourself into. This place is utterly barbaric… I wouldn’t expect anything more from vampires.”
Jack laughed, brought the blade to his beard and started stripping away long strands of his thick black hair. “These vampires are probably the worst of the worst. Their coven is young and have made the mistake of assuming they are strong. Exuberant displays of violence like this are very typical for young covens. It’s actually very tacky.”
The word almost made Ellie laugh. “And how would you know? You can’t even remember your own name, yet you seem to know enough to realize that this is madness.”
“Fuck, a mindless automaton could tell you this is lunacy of the highest degree.” Jack pulled the blade across his beard, snipping more strands as his other hand held them taught. “I’m a lunatic darling, there’s no denying that, but I wasn’t always this way. I came from something. I’m not sure what it was, but it was above shit like this.”
Ellie glanced at Jack in the mirror as she watched him shear the hair from his head. She had many questions that she wanted to ask him, but none of them felt appropriate right now. The vampire stood before her was a
deep well of mystery and she was sure that questioning him non-stop for the next hour would barely break the surface.
A large cheer echoed from the crowd outside and they both paused momentarily to look back toward the barred window. The muffled voice of the announcer floated in from the window outside, seeming to declare that the fight was over. A minute later a knock came at the door of their small room, and another blood servant entered, nodding as they stepped into the room.
“Sir, Madam,” the young girl wore a long loose dress that swallowed her stick-thin body. Ellie’s eyes didn’t fail to notice the dark red sores on her neck and arms. The vampires here had nearly drunk her dry. She looked over to Jack, her dim blue eyes scored with dark circles. “I have been told to tell you that the fight is over. Your fight will begin in an hour’s time. Rourke’s servant, Natalie, will be back with the Widow’s Draught shortly.”
Jack nodded for the girl to leave and she did so, leaving them alone once more. He went back to thinning out his beard and hair, which now mostly lay in thick tangles on the floor around him.
“Widow’s Draught,” Ellie said as she stood up from her stool and approached the counter. “What is that?”
Jack placed the shears down on the counter beside him, splashed his face with hot water several times then picked up a pair of electric clippers from a shelf below the mirror. He switched the clippers on and pushed them over his hair. “It’s a root that grows naturally in the forest. It can be boiled and made into a broth of sorts. The root has some strange properties. It takes a man’s natural strength and halves it. Covens like these will administer the broth to a Super sometimes to make fighting a little fairer for all those involved. The effects are only temporary, they’ll reduce my strength and speed to that of a normal man.”
Ellie sat there, blinking stupidly as she watched Jack buzz off his hair. “And you’re just going to let them drug you with this thing?! Are you crazy?! How are we supposed to get out of here if you can’t fight your way out?”
“I’m a very good fighter darling,” Jack said with little care. “I’ll still win, doesn’t bother me.”
“I’m not on about the fight in the arena,” Ellie stressed. “I mean what if something goes wrong and we have to get out of here. You don’t mean to tell me that you really trust these people, do you?”
Jack’s clippers buzzed as he smoothed the silver shears over his head, more of his hair dropping into the sink in front of him every second. “It seems to me that we haven’t much choice. Rourke and his sister are idiots, but even they’ll be able to tell if I’m fighting without the Draught. The effects only last for an hour, so I’ll be back to my old self after the fight is over.”
“But what if you lose Jack,” Ellie began. “I’m going to be trapped here—”
“I’m not going to lose,” he said with quick dismissal.
“But—”
“I’m not going to lose,” he said, firmer this time.
Ellie looked at the resolute red eyes glaring back at her in the mirror and decided to let it drop. Her captor seemed to be as stubborn as he was reckless, so it didn’t make any sense sitting here and arguing with him any longer. The crowd wailed outside once more and Ellie glanced back quickly in surprise. “What’s going on? I thought the fight was over?”
Jack leaned forward in the mirror, pulling the clippers over his cheeks. “I imagine they’ll have smaller skirmishes between the big fights. Keep the crowds entertained. They’ll be killing vampires twenty-four-seven around here. Lots of criminals in the vampire world. Lots of violence, lots of sex…”
“It’s depravity,” Ellie said dismissively.
“That’s just who they are darling,” Jack said as he looked back at Ellie in the mirror, winking as he did so. “A lot of young vampires are like this. I dare say this coven won’t be here for long. This position is much too important for a soiree of hedonistic madness such as this.”
Ellie winced as she heard the gong smash outside, indicating that another fight had started. The clash was met with another deafening roar. “I’ll never understand why anyone would want to watch something like this,” she said. Jack chuckled, and she turned to look at him. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” the vampire answered, setting his clippers down and splashing his face once more. “I just figured a vampire hunter would have a real hard-on for watching vampires die.”
Yes, Ellie thought, and most probably would. But she had never really been like the others, had she? “Well… this is different. Vampires repulse me, but this lot might be among the worst I’ve ever seen.”
Another laugh came from Jack’s direction and he turned the tap off in front of him. He grabbed a towel from the side and padded it against his face, turning and resting against the counter as he dried off. “Can’t say I blame you darling. These lot sure are a bad bunch. Like I said, I do apologize. I didn’t know the northern gate had gotten this bad. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have bothered dragging you up here.”
And why are you dragging me up here? Is what she wanted to say. What are we doing up here? Where are we going? What is this purpose of all this?! That’s what Ellie wanted to say, but Jack pulled the towel away from his face, and for a few short moments Ellie was rendered completely speechless. The vampire brushed the towel over his naked torso, patting it back against his face every now and then as he finished drying himself.
Ellie sat there, stupefied, looking at the new vampire on front of her. Jack looked up finally and saw Ellie staring. His brows knotted in confusion, and a scowl tugged at his lips. “What’s the matter with you? I got something on my face?” He turned to look back at the mirror, running his hand over his freshly shaven jawline.
Something on his face? More like something off. Jack had spent the last twenty minutes or so shearing the hair from his head and face in preparation for the fight, reducing the long, matted strands of thick black hair to neat dots of thick stubble. He’d looked wild before. He’d looked like a dog that had been left to fend for itself.
Now she looked at him, she saw him properly for the first time and realized there had been an actual man underneath the unkempt tangle of hair. Jack had shaved his long black hair back to a neat buzzcut and reduced his unkempt beard to a strap of perfect designer stubble. With the extra hair gone she could now make out his features properly, and he had some very good-looking features.
Square jaw, strong chin, high cheekbones, a broad and masculine brow line that sculped his thick-lashed eyes almost perfectly. His nose was straight, jutting out above a pair of red lips that were thick and soft. It all contrasted perfectly with that golden-white skin of his.
“Uh…” Ellie drew out the syllable as long as she could, trying to put words into her mouth. “It’s nothing. You just look different without all the hair. Very different.”
Jack stared at himself for the briefest moment in the mirror and shrugged it off, turning back to Ellie with indifference. She didn’t want to stare, but she also didn’t want to look away. Looking away might mean that her eyes would wander down to that ridiculous torso of his, which would be an even worse thing to ogle.
Stockholm syndrome, she told herself. That’s what it was. She’d barely been his captive for a week and she’d already developed Stockholm syndrome. But no, it wasn’t that. There was no denying that Jack was unnaturally attractive. It almost made her a little mad, because looking at him seemed to make her forget about everything that was really going on right now. He was a dangerous vampire. She was almost certain he was a criminal on top of that, he was insane, and he had taken her captive against her will.
So, it doesn’t matter how good looking he is, she thought. There’s enough red flags here to sell to China.
“Very different?” he asked. “I guess I’ll take that as a compliment.” Jack approached the bench and pulled his shirt back on. “Crikey. I must have done a good job to get such high praise from a vampire hunter.”
Ellie clenched her jaw at the wor
ds. “Can you stop just announcing that so freely and remember where we are? I could get killed if they find out what I am.”
“Relax darling,” Jack said dismissively. “I already made it clear that you are off limits for everyone. I might leave here with a few scratches, but you are walking out of here in the same condition you entered.”
“…Thanks,” Ellie said after a short pause. There was an initial burst of gratefulness for Jack’s protectiveness, but even then, she had to remind herself why they were here. It was hard to feel grateful when she took it all into account. Everything about this situation just felt ridiculous to her, but she did somehow feel safe with Jack by her side, even if she was his prisoner.
“It’ll be smooth sailing after this,” Jack said as he tied long white bandages around his fists. “I promise. We’ll be much better off when we put this coven behind us.”
“Right…” Ellie said, drawing the word out slowly. “And where is it you’re taking me exactly? Everything I’ve heard so far seems to indicate that the mountains are inhabitable.”
“They are, if you’re a stupid vampire that’s new to the valley. I’ve been here a while darling, I know the secrets this place has to offer, don’t you worry about that.”
Ellie flashed a brief smile in Jack’s direction before she looked away. She wasn’t so much worried about their destination, she was more worried about his intentions.
They both sat there as they waited out the start of Jack’s fight, listening as the crowd roared their way through the skirmishes in the arena outside. As the time stretched on Ellie felt herself growing more and more nervous. What would happen if Jack did lose? She still didn’t trust the Valentine vampires and she got the sense there was some greater trickery at play here. Looking at Jack, she wouldn’t have thought he had a fight to the death coming up at all. The vampire sparred with the air in front of him casually. Arms outstretched with silent and rapid punches, dodging blows that didn’t exist.
