Some of them could have been down here for decades, and nobody would have ever known…
But I knew now, and I was doing something about it.
Ray nodded to me. “We’ve got them all. Let’s get out of here before something goes wrong.”
Jenna and I took the lead, followed by Darren and the other dhampirs, with Ray, Quinten, and Carmen bringing up the rear. We were sure to be as quiet as possible, but every time a floorboard creaked, or a clock ticked, I was terrified that Roger would come running down the stairs, and we’d get in a fight that might end with someone seriously injured.
But, we made it to the window without any problems. I went first, and Jenna helped the dhampirs out the window after me. Darren stayed close by, but I noticed the same thing was happening to him as it had to Quinten.
The blood from the dead guards was making it hard to control himself.
“Darren?” I whispered.
“I’ll be alright. It’s just been so long since I’ve properly fed.”
“How did you get blood from those dungeons?”
“Roger would toss us a raw steak every once in a while. That was supposed to suffice, I guess.”
When everyone was outside again, Ray and Carmen took the lead. Quinten and I stayed near Darren and the other dhampirs, in case they decided to have a late midnight snack.
Although, it looked like there wasn’t much left of the guards. Carmen had taken pretty good care of them.
“I’ve got blood stored,” Carmen said suddenly. “You guys can have a decent meal once we’re safe away from this place. You’ll have to wait until then to feed.”
She had stored blood? What, was it in plastic pouches, like a juice box? Did she drink it through a straw? How did she get that blood? Did she buy it from a doctor? Or did she take it herself?
Some of the dhampirs were staring hungrily at the guards, which were lying facedown on the ground, and Carmen moved closer to them.
“We don’t have time. Let’s go.” She said.
The dhampirs reluctantly followed her. I saw them look at the bodies on the ground several times, and I wondered if I would be able to stop them if they decided to attack.
When we reached the trees, Quinten and I both had to help Darren walk. He was exhausted, and wasn’t capable of walking much further.
This is probably the first real use his legs have gotten since he was abducted.
Some of the others were having trouble, and I saw Ray and Jenna both helping struggling dhampirs to their feet. Carmen didn’t seem to care about them, and continued to lead the way.
The journey back home took longer with the addition of the weakened dhampirs.
Just when I thought Darren was going to collapse into an exhausted heap, Ray’s house appeared. “We’re almost there, Darren.”
He nodded weakly, and Quinten and I helped him into the living room.
Carmen disappeared, probably to get that blood she’d promised them, and I tried not to shift uncomfortably every time one of them looked at me with their hungry eyes.
Quinten seemed to be the only thing stopping them from attacking. He was standing protectively by my side, which I was thankful for. It felt good to have him close by.
I looked over at Darren, who was leaning against the counter nearby. Now that he was standing right in front of me, in the light, I was surprised to find that he was only a couple of inches taller than me.
He can’t be more than five foot seven.
Huh, I’d never really met a man so tiny before.
He seemed to know what I was thinking. “Yeah, I’m pretty short.”
He was watching one of the dhampirs, a girl, and I frowned. She was much younger looking than the others, barely thirteen, and she was in much better shape than them.
“You’re new,” Darren said.
She nodded, looking uneasy. “Yeah, he found me a few months ago, and I was brought in just the other night.”
“Good thing it wasn’t later, huh?” Quinten said. “Otherwise, you’d have spent the rest of your life in his dungeons.”
She grinned shakily. “Yeah, I never thought I’d be glad he decided to move me.”
Her control wasn’t as good as the others. I could tell, because she kept glancing painfully at my bedroom door, and I wondered what was making her so uncomfortable.
It all happened so fast.
Jax groaned, probably in his sleep, and she shot into the room, faster than my eyes could see. Jax’s muffled grunt of pain broke through my confusion, and I was running to my room, with Quinten right on my heels.
She was straddling his waist, and her fangs were buried in his throat. He was thrashing underneath her, trying to free himself, but she just held on tighter, and drank faster.
Quinten was there in a heartbeat. He grabbed her by the back of her shirt, hauled her off of Jax, and threw her across the room. She hit the wall with a dull thump, and fell to the ground, twisting sharply so that she landed on her feet.
She crouched down low, baring her fangs in a loud snarl. Her eyes were blood red and angry. She hissed. “Move!”
Quinten put himself between me and the girl, and I rushed to Jax’s side. His neck was bleeding profusely, and I didn’t know what to do about it. So, I grabbed an old t-shirt off the ground and pressed it tightly against his wound.
He gasped in pain. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
The t-shirt quickly became soaked, and the blood seeped through my fingers. It stained the sheets around him, and I began to panic.
Oh my god, where are Ray and Jenna?
Something hit the wall near the foot of my bed, and I saw Quinten crumpled on the floor. I turned, and she slammed into me, ripping me away from Jax’s side.
She lifted me up by my throat so that my feet dangled above the ground. “Time to die,” she hissed.
“Alanna!”
I reached out and caught the pencil Quinten had thrown, and jabbed it hard into her chest. There was a loud, wet pop as her heart burst, and blood began pouring from her chest. She dropped me with a startled gasp, and I fell to the ground.
She stumbled back, staring down in surprise at the pencil that was embedded in her chest.
“W-why?” She asked me.
Her eyes were no longer red and scary, and her fangs had retracted. Now she just looked like a scared little girl in pain.
Until she began to turn gray.
Her skin shriveled like a prune as her body emptied itself of blood. She let out one blood curdling shriek, collapsed to the floor, and began to convulse. Finally, after almost a full minute, she went still.
Ray and Carmen burst into the room. Ray looked terrified, Carmen just looked angry.
Ray knelt down by my side. “Alanna?”
I was trembling from head-to-toe, and I couldn’t stop myself. I burst into tears, and Ray pulled me close. I cried into his shoulder, trying not to think about the little girl I’d just killed.
That’s the third person I’ve killed…and two of them were children.
He helped me from the room, and we passed Jenna.
“Jax is bleeding,” I said quietly.
She nodded sympathetically to me. “I’ll look after him, don’t worry.”
Ray sat me down on the couch, and I saw Carmen and Quinten standing in the kitchen. She looked worried, and she was checking him over for injury. When she was done, she hugged him, and finally looked over at me.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
I nodded. “Yes,” I said, hating the fact that my voice broke.
“What happened?” Ray asked gently.
“Jax moaned once, and it was like she could tell he was injured. She took off, and when Quinten and I got in there, she was sitting on him, and her teeth were digging into his neck. Quinten threw her off, but she managed to beat him, and she tried to choke me.
“Quinten threw me a pencil, and I jammed it as hard as I could into her chest. I could hear her heart burst, and she started to bleed, a
nd scream. Then she went into convulsions, and then she just…died.”
“Alanna–” Ray began.
“You stabbed a little girl to death?” Carmen asked incredulously.
Ray glared at her. “It was either her or Alanna. She did the right thing.”
“She didn’t have to stab her!”
“Carmen, if you’re going to worry more about some dangerous bloodsucking tick instead of your daughter, you can leave, right now.”
Carmen glared at him. “She was a little girl, who spent the last few months locked away in a dungeon! It wasn’t her fault she couldn’t control herself.”
“She tried to kill your daughter, and your nephew!”
Carmen didn’t say anything else. She just turned, grabbed a large, blue cooler, and opened it. She pulled out large plastic pouches of blood, and called over her shoulder. “I’ve got enough blood here for each of you to have two. Don’t drink them too fast, or you’ll make yourself sick.”
There was a mini stampede as the five remaining dhampirs rushed to get their first real taste of blood since being locked up. Darren ripped open the pouch with his teeth, and slurped it down in three huge gulps. The others were drinking just as quickly.
When Darren reached for his second pouch, I noticed that he already looked better. Some of the cuts were healing over, and his cheeks were getting some color in them. He upended the second one as fast as he had the first, and by the look on his face, he could have easily eaten more.
“Let that settle, and then you can have some actual food,” Quinten said. “Carmen, what should we feed them?”
She thought to herself for a minute. “I’m not sure.” She looked at Ray. “Do you have steak? Or hamburger? Anything?”
He nodded. “There’s a freezer in the garage, against the far wall. It should be stocked with frozen meat.”
Carmen and Quinten went to get food for the dhampirs, and I tried not to think about the girl I’d just killed. If she could have just held on another few minutes, Carmen would have had the blood ready and waiting for her.
Why couldn’t she have controlled herself?
Chapter Six
The next morning, Quinten returned from hunting. His face was flushed and he looked satisfied. He sat on the bed beside me without so much as a word, and I wondered if he was trying to think of a way to say something.
“What’s wrong?”
“Roger’s realized that his dhampirs are gone.”
I sat up. “When?”
“A little over an hour ago. He’s on a rampage. Carmen and I were spying on him from the woods. He was so angry he killed his remaining guards, and ordered Ilene to dispose of the bodies in the woods. She looked more than happy to do anything he asks of her.”
“She completely idolizes him, doesn’t she?”
Quinten nodded. “Yeah, she does. She worships the ground he walks on.”
“Where are the dhampirs now?”
He hesitated, and I instantly realized that something was wrong.
“Quinten?”
“I’m not real sure,” he admitted. “Carmen took them someplace secret last night while everyone was asleep. She didn’t even tell me.”
“Why the hell would she do that?”
He shrugged. “I think she was worried that we’d have to kill another one of them. She doesn’t realize that you didn’t do it for fun.”
“She’s still mad at me for defending myself?”
He nodded, and kissed my cheek. “I’m sorry. She’s not being very fair to you.”
“She thinks I’m a stupid, flea-bitten mutt. She hates me, doesn’t she?”
“I’m not sure. I think she’s confused about her feelings for everything. She just needs time.”
“How can you defend her?”
“Alanna, you have no idea how strong the bond between a vampire and their maker is. Her maker was also her lover, and I think he filled her head with a lot of nonsense about werewolves.”
“So, I shouldn’t judge her because the man she left my father for was a horrible person?” I snorted. “Go figure.”
“Just try and understand. Please. I know you don’t want to hear this, but Carmen is going to be a part of our lives for a very long time. She’s my maker, and she still has a lot to teach me.”
I sighed and looked away. “I know. I just can’t forgive her. I’ve tried, I’ve thought about it, but I can’t. She’s a horrible person, and I don’t think time is going to change that.”
“You might be right. But, you don’t see the same person I do. When she’s out teaching me to do something, she never loses patience with me. She doesn’t get angry, and she doesn’t shout. She’s a caring person; you just have to give her a chance.”
That made me incredibly angry. Why should he have a good relationship with my mother, when I couldn’t? How was that fair?
“So, are all of the dhampirs gone?” I asked, trying to change the subject before I said something stupid and hurtful.
He shook his head. “Darren stayed, which wasn’t a huge surprise. I guess the others just wanted to get as far away from Roger as possible. Darren wants to make Roger pay for what he’s suffered through.”
“That’s understandable,” I said, standing.
Jax’s bed was empty.
“Where’s–”
“He’s fine,” Quinten said. “Jenna gave him a more flexible leg brace, and the wound in his neck is healing pretty well. She said he’ll be good as new in another day or two. Come on, Ray and Jenna are cooking breakfast for everyone.”
I followed Quinten out into the kitchen, trying to ignore the bloody patch of carpet in the middle of the room. Carmen was on the couch, drinking from a pouch of blood. Ray and Jenna were at the stove, and Darren was sitting on the kitchen counter stool.
He was shoveling food into his mouth so fast his hand was practically a blur. Jax was glaring at him from the kitchen table nearby. His leg was covered from ankle to knee in a black leg brace, and it was propped up on one of the other chairs.
I took a seat next to him, and Jenna brought over a plate filled with eggs, sausage, toast, and grapes. “Good morning.”
Jax looked at me. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” I mumbled, taking a large bite of toast. I didn’t want to talk about this, but I doubt he’d care.
“Alanna, it’s alright to be a little upset. I can’t imagine what must have been going through your mind after you stabbed that girl.”
“Jax, please don’t.”
He sighed. “Thank you, for saving my life.”
I shrugged his thanks off, and retreated into my plate of breakfast. Hopefully everyone else would get the idea that I didn’t feel like talking.
I didn’t want to accidentally let slip that I’d had horrible nightmares last night. They were the same as before. I’d been standing on a pile of dead children, and I’d been holding a bloody knife. This time though, the little dhampir girl joined the boy I’d killed in the Arena.
It’d only been about two weeks since I’d killed him and strangely, it felt like a lifetime ago. So much had happened since then; it almost felt like an entirely different person’s life.
I wasn’t sure what to do, now that Roger’s dhampirs were gone. How did we go about exposing him without making it seem like we were trying to hide something?
*****
Around noon, the back door opened, and I heard footsteps in the hallway. They came closer and closer, until the person stepped into the living room. She was as small as ever, and her normally waist-length strawberry blonde hair was much shorter, but her blue-gray eyes were still cold and calculating as they looked us over.
“Ilene.”
She sneered at me. “Roger didn’t think it was a good idea for him to show up here, so he asked me to do it for him. You guys think you’re just so clever, don’t you?”
She didn’t know about mom.
“Ilene–”
“You don’t really think that fr
eeing those bloodsucking freaks is going to change anything, do you? Do you know how old the werewolves on the Council are? Most of them fought vampires during the war. They’re not going to care that Roger had a handful of monsters locked away.”
Carmen walked into the living room, and Ilene stopped.
They stared at each other for a minute, before Carmen smiled, even after everything we’d told her. “Ilene?”
She was only a baby when Carmen faked her death, but Ilene had seen pictures of her before. She obviously knew who this woman was, and she was piecing everything together in her head.
“Mommy?”
She sounded so lost, and so young.
“Ilene Marie Moore, what have you gotten yourself into?”
The sneer came back. “I’ve gotten myself into nothing. I have a wonderful mate, and I happen to be on the winning side. For the first time in my life, I’m actually happy.”
“Really? You don’t look happy.”
She snorted. “What would you know about happy? You were so miserable with Dad that you ran out on him, on us! Now you’re a fucking bloodsucking leech. How happy can you be?”
Carmen didn’t get angry like I’d expected. If I’d said something like that to her, she probably would have leapt across the table at me, kind of like she’d done to Jax.
“Ilene, sweetheart,” Ray said. “You don’t fully understand everything that’s going on.”
“Don’t baby her!” Carmen snapped. “She’s not a child.”
Ray glared at her. “You don’t know the first thing about children, considering you walked out on yours, and you will not tell me how to talk to my daughter.”
Carmen’s eye twitched; she was pissed off, and Ray knew it. I just hoped he wasn’t trying to aggravate her too much. As much as it killed me to admit it, even to myself, we needed her.
“I just came to tell you that nothing you do will work. Roger’s already contacted the Council. They’re reviewing his testimony right now.”
“What did he tell them?” I asked.
She smiled at me. “He told them that you broke into his home, and stole several of his prized possessions, and that you’ve been screwing a rotting corpse.”
Arena Wars Trilogy Page 24
