by Zoe Winters
They were in Oregon now. She’d seen signs on the road they’d driven on. The Hub City was in Nevada. Sydney wasn’t sure if he was taking her the whole way or if they’d meet someone else who would take her. If she planned to kill him, this might be her only opportunity.
They’d passed a place called “Bend” about an hour ago. It was deserted like most other places. Or else those who lived there were in hiding, hoping the cities had lost interest in them.
Jacob pulled off the road when he spotted a farmhouse. Sydney contemplated running, but he’d catch her, and she knew he’d picked an area like this intentionally. It was so much wide open space, hundreds of acres. The only safe place for her when the sun came up would be inside that farmhouse somewhere. Or maybe the nearby barn.
“Let’s go inside and find you a safe space.”
Such an odd thing for him to say right now, but he would want her safe for the trade. If she died, she was no good to him and he couldn’t get back to his precious family. It made Sydney feel even more guilty for trying to escape hers.
She wondered if someone had delivered the truck and left it for him for the drive. She wondered what other things he’d been planning. He probably had non-perishable food already packed away in the back of the truck, shipped to him by humans. Figuring out what he’d eat likely just meant deciding on a canned meat and vegetable, not hunting something as she’d previously imagined.
As she followed him into the house, she envisioned jumping on his back and sinking her fangs into his throat, draining him so fast he couldn’t react, but she knew he’d toss her right off him. And then she’d be screwed.
No, she had to wait until he offered her his vein and distract him so she could drink more than she should. It had been so long since she’d drank too much from him—so long since it had been a real threat. In the decade since Elise had claimed him, he’d probably forgotten how weak he could get from blood loss and how fast.
Jacob opened cabinets in the kitchen, and a white mouse scurried by squeaking in irritation. A few cans of food in the pantry had exploded after years and years of sitting expired in a house with no temperature control.
“No one has been here since the original owners. And from the looks of it, they haven’t been here in a long time, either.”
His boots creaked over the rotting hardwood as he went down the hallway. Sydney silently prayed the floor would collapse and he’d break his neck falling into a basement, but it didn’t happen. He reached the end safely.
She stood in the hall, not liking close proximity with this Jacob. His head popped out again a few minutes later. “Bedroom in here, Syd. There’s a big, empty closet you can sleep in. I just have to cover this hole in the wood so the sun doesn’t get you.”
There was a large picture window directly across from the closet door that looked like it probably got some direct sunlight. As resting places went, this was far less secure than she’d like, but she had to be breathing for this trade to happen. Barring a freak raid on the place, she knew she’d make it at least until night in the closet.
He went back down the hall, leaving her in the bedroom. She heard doors opening and closing and banging around in drawers until he returned with shiny silver tape. He got a look of longing in his eyes.
“My dad used to have this. It’s duct tape. You can fix anything with it.” He covered the hole in the wood, then sat on the edge of the bed and tossed the tape on the floor.
Sydney pushed back the revulsion that went through her as he rolled back his sleeve. And then she thought, Great, he won’t let me near his neck. It would be harder to kill him this way.
She sat beside him and sank her fangs into the offered arm. Her hand inched up the inside of his leg, but then Jacob’s hand was on top of hers, stilling her.
“As good as you can make me feel, Syd, I know you’re just trying to sway me. It can’t be done. I’m going back to my family, and you’ll never see yours again. I’m sorry this is the way it had to go down. I’m sorry you come from a family of monsters and must suffer for their crimes.”
She cringed as his hand stroked through her hair. But then, he started telling the most insipid stories about his childhood before the vampire king had him brought to the compound to be on Sydney’s dinner menu. He wasn’t paying close attention to her feeding or how much time had elapsed.
If he just kept talking… After a few minutes, his words began to slur and slow as he stumbled and tripped over sentences. This could work! She could taste freedom. A moment later, she felt a sharp zap of electricity, and then she blacked out.
***
Sydney woke, feeling weaker than normal, even though she’d fed a lot. She struggled out of the closet she’d been carelessly tossed into to find an angry Jacob sitting on the edge of the bed, a black rectangular box in his hand.
He looked down at it, then back at her. “Just some protection that was sent to me with the truck and provisions.”
Provisions. Yes, there was food in the back of the truck. Far from roughing it, they’d provided her captor with everything he needed to comfortably transport the vampire cargo. Her attention went back to the weapon on his lap.
“I didn’t want to have to use it. You knew you were taking too much. Shame on you, Syd.”
“Shame on me?” She was only trying to survive. She wasn’t the one he had a conflict with. It wasn’t like she’d picked him out of a catalog, or like she’d known how her father had secured her meals. She’d been too young to think through the ramifications of any of that.
She felt gross from sleeping in the closet, and she wondered how many of those field mice had crawled over her in her sleep. She wondered if Jacob had done anything inappropriate while she’d been unconscious. And then she started to cry, because what was the point anymore of pretending to be brave?
A hint of guilt shone from his eyes, but he just said, “We need to get back on the road.”
He dragged her to the truck and made sure she was buckled in. This time he didn’t hide the fact that he had plenty of food for the trip. He took a dried meat product in a plastic wrapper and a canned beverage from the back and got into the truck.
Sydney was hungry, but she knew he wouldn’t let her feed again until they stopped. And she also knew the black box would be poised and ready in case she tried anything else stupid.
Chapter Three
Noah sat in a corner of the glass cell. An hour maybe until exercise time. The moon was getting closer. Tonight more than any other time before, he felt amped up, like he couldn’t run enough. He’d already been tempted on his laps around the yard to shift, but if he did it before the full moon it would look suspicious.
The twenty-eighth birth moon was the most important and special day for a therian. He should have been with his family, celebrating. As the alpha’s son, the whole pack would have gone all out for a huge party. Even with how the world had changed, they would make something special. He would have shifted and gone running with them all, fed, and then come back to party some more.
He’d been to a twenty-eighth birth moon celebration when he was just a pup, right after he’d shifted to human for the first time, and though he’d had to go to bed early since he was so young, and a lot of the party was more adult-centered, he’d remembered the buzz in the air, the excitement, and how he couldn’t wait until his own twenty-eighth birth moon.
It wasn’t turning out quite like he’d thought it would. Though now, it was even more exciting, because it might mean freedom and reuniting with his family, assuming he could find his way back home.
Noah went through the mental checklist of his escape plan. He’d been forming it casually for years, but only more specifically for the past three months. He was deep in thought when he smelled her through the glass of his cell. The sweetest smell in the universe.
His nostrils flared. It couldn’t be.
But it was.
He would never forget that scent if he lived to be two thousand. That scent was burne
d into his brain. That scent was Sydney.
“5856, congratulations, you have a new neighbor. Meet 5857B. Isn’t she pretty?” The cheery robotic voice emphasized the letter B too harshly, as if to say, Yes, 5857 is dead. We killed him. This one might be next. Perhaps there will be a 5856B as well.
Not if Noah had anything to say about it. He growled and looked down at his tattoo. If they laid a hand on her… If they marked her in any way… He began to pace in the far-too-small cell as a rage he’d never before felt began to build.
***
Sydney retreated to the other end of the glass cube, her back pressed against the farthest wall she could get from the angry, growling guy with glowing, yellow eyes. Fur began to sprout on his arms and fangs pushed through his gums. A voice came out over the speakers.
“Be polite, 5856. We would like this one to last a while.”
Polite, yeah right. But the fur disappeared back into his skin. The fangs receded, and his eyes went back to a normal brown. She wasn’t sure how strong the glass was. Was it shatterproof? Was she about to find out? What was he?
He could be any number of therian breeds but something inside her screamed “werewolf”. But the wolves she remembered as a kid had all been nice. Not like this.
Had he killed the last person in the cube she now occupied? How had he gotten in? Had they let him in? So many questions and way too much intense staring aimed at her.
A few minutes passed, and someone in a white lab coat came to her door. The glass slid open. The woman in the coat had a friendly smile, but Sydney didn’t trust it. Despite her recent road trip, she wasn’t that gullible. She knew the score now.
She sniffed the air. Human. Magical human. She’d never had blood from a magic user before, and she was sure she wasn’t about to get it now. The only kind of blood she’d ever had was regular human. It was all they’d been able to get.
“5857B, if you’ll come with me please.”
“S-Sydney. M-my name is Sydney.”
“5857B,” the woman repeated, glancing at the clipboard in her hand as if it contained all infallible knowledge. “Please, let’s not make this difficult.”
Sydney looked back to see 5856 growling some more and followed the woman in the white coat out of the cube. Between the two, she seemed to be the safer option.
She was grateful for the silence as they walked down the hall. It allowed her to digest everything.
Jacob had taken no chances with her and had always had the weapon ready in case she tried any further pathetic escape or murder attempts. She couldn’t even kill a regular human who’d practically shoved her fangs into his vein. What an awful excuse for a vampire she was.
Tonight had been a shorter drive. The night was only just now reaching its midpoint. She knew because she felt her strongest in the middle of the night. But she was so hungry. The traveling and stress had worn on her.
She’d begged Jacob to reconsider. She’d offered to help him find his family, even though she had no idea who they were or where they could be or how to get the information to find them. She’d even suggested that maybe the magic users he’d met didn’t know either. Maybe it was a trick. Maybe they just wanted her and were using the story they knew would most easily gain his cooperation. Maybe they were even a danger to him.
Stories had filtered out from the human cities. The human mates at the compound had all been criminals who’d been thrown out into the wilderness—to the monsters—for their disobedience. But they had never seemed particularly criminal to Sydney. Just scared. They’d expected the monsters to rip them apart or torture them. It was the kind of story talked about in hushed whispers in the cities. It was why they never tried to escape their prison even though the only barriers keeping them in was the fear of being thrown out. The real barriers were to keep the preternaturals from coming in and getting to the easy food and resources.
Vampires had been lying in wait for all of them as soon as they’d been tossed out. They’d never stopped to consider that, given how hard food was to come by, that they would be protected and cherished, not abused.
But Jacob’s story was different. He’d been taken from his family before things had gotten terrible. He hadn’t been tossed out as a criminal. He must have been so scared of the vampires.
She’d gotten Jacob to entertain the notion that the human cities might not follow through on their side of the deal. It was a few brief minutes in which her hope had overcome her fear, but then his face had hardened and he was back to his mission, his foot pressed more firmly against the gas than before. He’d been determined to deliver her to her fate.
The trade had been fast. Her, for a folded up piece of paper with an address. As two men in white coats had escorted her toward a steel tunnel, Jacob had said. “Syd, I’m sorry.”
She hadn’t looked back. She wouldn’t acknowledge him or give him the barest hint that there would ever be a point in time in which she could forgive him for this.
“5857B?” The woman said, snapping a finger in front of Sydney’s face. “We’re here.”
The room looked like a hospital room Sydney had seen once on an old movie her parents had in their collection. She panicked as the woman pulled her into the room.
“Relax. It’s nothing to be afraid of. We just need to run some tests. We know who you are and what you are. We’d like to know if you’ve stopped aging.”
Sydney calmed and allowed herself to be led into the room. She’d like to know that, too. The big question had always been whether or not she would age and die, or if she could potentially be immortal. She knew, of course, that she could never be immortal. She wasn’t strong like her father or other regular vampires. She was far too fragile and easy to kill, too weak to defend herself against anything. So no, she wouldn’t be immortal. Something would take her out eventually and free those who loved her from their constant vigilance.
But she wanted to know if she’d stopped aging, or if her aging process had slowed somehow. She didn’t think she looked twenty-seven, but then, some women aged better than others, and she’d never know how her mother might have aged. Charlee had been frozen at twenty-six when she’d been claimed by Anthony.
The woman in the coat guided Sydney to a medical examining table.
“Sit here and roll back your sleeve. We’re just going to take some blood and a tissue sample.”
“T-tissue sample?” Sydney’s mind went straight to terrible things involving scalpels.
“Just a swab inside your cheek.” The woman patted her on the arm and smiled kindly. Aside from insisting on calling Sydney by a number and a letter instead of her real name, she seemed non-threatening, nice even. But Sydney shook the thought from her head. They were only being nice to try to gain her trust. Just as Jacob had. There was no reason to think people who would lock you in a cell and run experiments on you were “nice people”.
Sydney’s eyes went to the vein pulsing in the woman’s throat. At least she couldn’t hear the blood rushing through like a real vampire would have, or the heartbeat. It might have driven her to do something stupid. Thankfully she could only see the twitch of the vein.
“You’re hungry,” the woman said, conversationally.
Maybe if Sydney were a real vampire, that thought would have struck some fear in the technician, but instead she went for a cotton swab.
“Open.”
Sydney opened her mouth and the woman took a sample and put it into a plastic bag.
“I’ll tell you what,” she said, “I’ll take your blood, then I’ll give you some blood in return.”
Sydney felt the glow come to her eyes, and she nodded. Now that she was an adult, she preferred to drink from men. It wasn’t like that for all vampires. Some women preferred other women, and some men other men. It seemed tied directly into who they were attracted to, but she was too hungry right now to care much about that distinction.
She winced and bit her lip as the needle went into her arm and the woman drew a couple of vials of
blood and put labels on them.
“There. That wasn’t so bad was it? It’s time to go back now.”
“But…” Were they lying to her already?
“Your food will be waiting for you when you return to your cell. You know the way. Don’t go exploring. We’ll know.” The woman pressed a button and the door to the room they were in opened. She went back to her clipboard jotting down notes.
Sydney wanted to run, but how? To where? And she was so very tired suddenly. She could sleep for a million years and yet, they’d just reached the night’s peak. Glowing arrows illuminating the glass guided her back to her cell.
When she reached the glass cube, the door opened and a perky robotic voice said: “Welcome home, 5857B.”
She winced. Home? Yeah right. This would never be home. It would end up being her coffin, if anything.
Inside the cube was a table with a few clear medical bags filled with red fluid. What the hell was this? Bagged blood? She couldn’t live on bagged blood. It was so weak, she’d probably die of malnourishment if she drank it—if such a thing was possible for a vampire.
She circled the bag a couple of times, a grimace on her face. This would be disgusting, like her mother’s stories of old ladies eating canned cat food.
She looked up to find the scary growly guy in the cube next to hers watching her intently. She wished he would stop that. It freaked her out.
She picked up one of the bags and turned away from him. There were glass cubes containing a preternatural on all four sides of her—if you didn’t count the hallway outside the door—as well as above and below her. It wasn’t as if she would get any feeding privacy here, but the way he watched her was too intense. The cubes were lined up and stacked on top of each other. She was on one of the higher floors as there seemed to be far more cubes below than above. It created an odd sense of vertigo, like somehow the glass would stop holding her and she’d just fall. But maybe that was the hunger talking.
