By a Thread

by Jennifer Estep

  “Stop! Stop it, Randall! You’re taking too much! You’re going to kill her!”

  I was dimly aware of Vanessa screaming at the vampire and clawing at him with her hands, trying to pull him off me, but I knew that it was no use. Dekes was high on my elemental power, as high as a junkie on any drug could be, and he wasn’t coming down until there wasn’t a single drop of blood or magic left in me.

  The bastard was going to drain me dry—and there was nothing I could do to stop him.

  For a moment, I sank into the cold, lethargic blackness that was slowly clouding my vision, my body, my mind. It would be so easy to let go, to let myself drown in the darkness where there was no more pain, no more torture, no more anything . . .

  Fuck that, I growled at myself. Gin Blanco never gave up—not now, not ever.

  I’d found my way out of a collapsed coal mine, I’d been electrocuted by LaFleur—hell, I’d even killed Mab fucking Monroe against all the odds. I’d survived all those things, and I’d come out stronger each time. Not to mention Bria, Finn, the Deveraux sisters, and Owen. I had them to live for now, and I wasn’t going to let some psychotic, power-hungry vamp be the end of me.

  Think, Gin. Think.

  I struggled to push away the numbing blackness from my mind and focus. My situation wasn’t good. I was tied down, immobilized, and bleeding from the deep, vicious bites that Dekes had inflicted on my neck and shoulders. Even if I were free, there was no way I could have fought my way past the vampire and the giants in the room. Not now, when I was so weak and injured and when Dekes had already stolen so much of my Ice and Stone magic.

  Desperately, my gaze zoomed around the library, looking for something, anything, that would help me out of this mess. That would at least make Dekes stop biting me and give me a chance to fucking regroup. But there was nothing. Just books and giants and Vanessa screaming and Victoria lying limp on the couch . . .

  My eyes focused on the other woman’s unconscious body, and a plan popped into my head. I couldn’t fight my way out of here, but maybe I didn’t have to. All I needed was a little bit of magic, but that was another problem. There was no way that I could reach for my own power, not with Dekes sucking it out of me as fast as he could—but maybe I didn’t have to do that either.

  I looked down at the spider rune ring on my right index finger—the one that contained my Ice magic. I didn’t know if my crazy plan would work, but it was the only chance I had left.

  I pushed the pain of Dekes biting me, of his teeth tearing into my neck, to the very back of my mind, surrounded it with imaginary stone walls, and locked it away where it wouldn’t distract me. Then I reached for the Ice magic stored in my ring.

  Normally when I used my Ice magic, I pushed it outward, releasing the power through my hands and using it to create lockpicks, knives, and other shapes. But this time, I forced the magic inward, coating my own heart with elemental Ice and then letting the magic spread to my lungs and the rest of my internal organs before carefully pushing it out toward my skin.

  Thump . . . thump . . . thump . . .

  My heart slowed, and my breathing stuttered, as my lungs frosted over. For a moment, I wondered if I’d miscalculated, if I was actually killing myself with my own magic instead of saving my ass. But I’d subconsciously used my Ice magic to preserve my body once before when I’d jumped into the Aneirin River in the winter, and I was hoping the same thing would happen here. I needed that to happen, or I was as good as dead. Besides, Jo-Jo had always said that my elemental magic was part of me and that it was mine to command however I wished—not the other way around.

  I hoped the dwarf was right, because I was about to bet my life on her wisdom.

  When I pulled enough Ice magic into my body to make myself completely cold and numb, I rasped out a great shuddering, agonizing cry, arching and thrashing against the ropes as much and as violently as I could. They didn’t call them death throes for nothing.

  The sudden bucking motion surprised Dekes enough to get him to stop biting me and lift his head. I kept up with my twitching and thrashing, and the vampire took a step back, wondering what the hell was going on. His eyes were even brighter than before, and once more, I could see my own power burning in his gaze. The sight made me angry—so fucking angry—and even more determined to get out of this alive. Randall Dekes would not be the death of me. He would not.

  I kept up my fake death throes for another ten seconds before closing my eyes, slumping forward in the chair as much as I could, given the ropes that held me tight, and letting my body go completely slack.

  Nobody moved, nobody spoke. All I could hear was Dekes’s ragged breathing as the vampire struggled to come down from the magical high he was riding on.

  “Check her,” the vamp finally ordered.

  Clothing whispered together, and soft footsteps crept toward me. A second later, I felt Vanessa’s slender fingers skim my throat, trying to find a spot that was free of blood where she could check for a pulse.

  Thump . . . thump . . . thump . . .

  By this point, my heart was barely beating, and my lungs struggled to function against the Ice that was weighing them down, but I was still breathing. The question now was whether Vanessa would notice or if the little trick with my Ice magic would fool her.

  The other woman’s fingers finally pressed against my cold skin, causing more blood to trickle out of the bite marks on my neck. I sat there, holding my breath, limp and still, and waited. Ten seconds passed . . . twenty . . . thirty . . . forty-five . . . sixty . . . My lungs started to burn from the lack of oxygen, but still I didn’t breathe. Sixty-five . . . seventy . . .

  “You killed her,” Vanessa said, dropping her fingers from my neck. “Her skin’s already getting cold.”

  “Are you sure?” Dekes asked.

  “I think I know what a dead woman looks and feels like,” Vanessa muttered. “Given how many of them you’ve made me watch you murder in here. I warned you that you were taking too much blood from her, but you didn’t listen. You’ve got no one to blame but yourself, Randall.”

  I drew in a shallow breath, to ease the ache in my lungs. I didn’t know if the Fire elemental really thought I was dead or if she was just saying that to convince Dekes. Didn’t much matter. What was important now was what he decided to do with my body—and whether I had the strength to somehow slip out of the mansion before the vamp or anyone else realized that I was just faking.

  More footsteps whispered on the carpet, and I got the sense that Dekes was pacing back and forth in front me. I stayed exactly where I was, slumped forward and doing my best to remain completely still. I’d seen more than enough bodies in my time to mimic the loose slackness of death. Yeah, maybe playing dead wasn’t my finest, most inspired, or deadliest moment as the Spider, but Fletcher had always told me that there was no shame in it if it got you out of a bad situation—like the one I was in right now.

  The vampire’s hand touched my neck, but instead of checking for a pulse, he started stroking my wounded flesh, dragging his fingers through the sticky blood that coated my skin and clothes. For a moment, I wondered what the hell he was doing, but then he drew his fingers away and I heard a low sucking sound, followed by a long, satisfied sigh.

  The bastard—the bastard was actually licking my blood off his fingers, like I was a piece of fried chicken that he’d been snacking on and he just couldn’t resist getting that last bit of greasy goodness off his hands and into his hungry mouth. The thought made my stomach roil, despite the elemental Ice that still coated my internal organs.

  “Such a waste,” Dekes said, swiping his fingers across my neck and licking them clean again. “She was even stronger than Jonah thought. I could have fed off her Ice and Stone magic for years, and no one would have been able to stand against me. No one would have dared to. And I was so looking forward to taking Gin’s power for a test drive. Perhaps even using it against Callie Reyes, since she’s been so reluctant to accept my offer for her restaurant.”


  “Why?” Vanessa snapped. “Have you grown tired already of using my Fire magic to burn people to death?”

  “Something like that,” Dekes replied in a mild tone. “After a while, it’s all the same. The tears, the screams, the flames. You know how I hate to be bored.”

  I thought of the photos that I’d seen of the vamp’s arson victims. So Dekes drank Vanessa’s blood and then used the Fire magic he absorbed from her to toast the people who tried to stand up to him, victimizing everyone but himself in the process. He was a fucking sociopath if I’d ever met one.

  At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to turn my head, bite off his fucking fingers, and spit them back in his face, but I concentrated on the Ice magic in my ring, using it to make my skin even cooler, as though the chill of death were already settling into my corpse just as Vanessa had claimed it was.

  “Very well,” Dekes said. “Since she’s of no further use to me, take the bitch’s body out on the west balcony and dump it into the marsh. Maybe the gators will have some interest in her rotting corpse.”

  17

  Dekes left the library, ordering five of his men to take Vanessa and Victoria back to their room and lock them away for the evening before returning to their regular posts. I had no idea if the vampire would feed from the other women tonight, but there was nothing I could do to help or save them.

  First I had to save myself.

  The footsteps faded away, leaving me alone in the library with the last two giants. If I hadn’t been tied down and lost so much blood already, I might have leaped out of the chair, grabbed my silverstone knives from the mantel, and had at the two men. But I was in no shape to do that or anything else, so I kept my eyes closed and my body slack.

  “What a mess,” one of the giants muttered. “There’s blood everywhere—her neck, her chest, I think it’s even in her hair. I don’t want to touch her.”

  “Yeah,” the other one replied. “Dekes tore her up good, didn’t he? She must have been really strong. I’ve never seen him act like that with any other elemental, not even Vanessa when she first came here.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter now because she’s dead,” the giant said. “So let’s dump her body and be done with it.”

  The two men got to work. One of them opened a drawer, probably in the desk that I’d noticed earlier, and drew out something with a distinctive crinkly sound. A garbage bag, I thought. The bastards were going to wrap me in a plastic garbage bag so I wouldn’t drip too much blood onto Dekes’s pricey Persian rugs and hardwood floors as they carried me to my final destination. The vamp wouldn’t want me to ruin any part of his house or his precious collections.

  “Put the bag on the floor,” one of them said, confirming my suspicions.

  More crinkles whispered, along with the sounds of someone smoothing something down. Then one of the giants cut through the ropes that held me to the chair. Since I was leaning forward, I slid off the seat and thumped to the floor, my arms and legs sprawled at awkward angles. I didn’t dare move. Not yet.

  I felt hands on my side, turning me over onto my back. One of the giants drew the plastic bag across my chest. By this point, I’d exhausted the Ice magic that had been stored in my spider rune ring, but the giants didn’t notice that my skin wasn’t quite as cold as before. They wrapped me up in the garbage bag. Then one of the men picked me up and threw me over his shoulder as if I were Cleopatra in a carpet being taken to see Caesar.

  “I’ll send in Sean to clean up the blood on the chair and rugs,” the first giant said. “Let’s go.”

  The two men left the library. I swayed back and forth on the giant’s shoulder as they walked through the house. I didn’t hear anyone else moving around in this part of the mansion besides them, so I cracked my eyes open. But since all I could really see was the floor sliding by and my blood dripping small teardrop-shaped tracks onto it, I shut them again.

  Finally, the giants stepped out onto a balcony. I couldn’t tell exactly where we were in the mansion, but I got the impression it was the far side of the house, the one that faced the marsh instead of the golf course. The air was cooler here, and I could smell the whiff of decay that went with the still water and rotting logs. The sun had set while I’d been inside the library, and darkness had already covered the land.

  “Grab her feet and we’ll heave her out as far as we can,” one of the giants said. “You know how Dekes hates it when the gators crawl up on the lawn and start chewing on their legs.”

  The giant who’d been carrying me dumped me on the stone patio, making even more pain shoot through my body, and I stifled a groan. Then he grabbed my shoulders while the other man’s hands clamped around my ankles. Together, they lifted me up and shuffled forward.

  “One . . . two . . . three!”

  They swung me back and forth a couple of times before letting go and flinging me out into the darkness as far and high as their enormous strength would let them. I felt my body rise up in an arc and quickly plummet.

  My final thought before I hit the water was that I’d done this very same thing to Dekes’s men just last night.

  Ah, irony. Going to be the death of me one day.

  Maybe even tonight.

  The murky, brackish water closed over me, warm, slimy, and disgusting, but I didn’t try to kick my way to the surface. Dekes’s men might still be out on the balcony, watching to make sure that I sank. Instead, I focused on getting one hand, then the other, free of the garbage bag and unwinding the whole thing from around my body. It wouldn’t do to get away from the vampire only to drown in the swamp outside his mansion.

  While I worked on the bag, I counted off the seconds in my head. Ten . . . twenty . . . thirty . . . forty-five . . . At the minute mark, the last of the plastic slipped off my legs, my head broke free of the water, and I blinked, trying to get my bearings in the semidarkness.

  There wasn’t any current in the marsh, but my struggles with the garbage bag had carried me out of the pool of light from the balcony that had arced out onto the landscape below. I remained still and quiet, doing just enough to keep my head above the surface of the water.

  “She’s gone,” the voice of one of the giants floated down to me. “The gators will find her on the bottom soon enough. Let’s go back inside.”

  A few seconds later, a door slammed somewhere far above my head. The giants thought I was dead, just like their boss did. Good. Now all that was left was to make sure the marsh and blood loss didn’t finish the job that the vampire had started.

  I stayed in the water, too tired and exhausted from Dekes’s attack to even think about lifting my arms and swimming to shore. Eventually, though, I spotted a ridge of land a little higher than the bog that surrounded me, and I forced myself to thrash toward it. My arms and legs felt as numb and dead as lead weights strapped to my body, not because I’d used my Ice magic on myself, but because there just wasn’t that much blood left in them. Somehow, I splashed and flailed around and finally managed to heave my chest up out of the water.

  I lay there, my face in the mud, panting from the effort of doing something so small. My neck and shoulders pulsed with pain with every breath that I took, ribbons of red-hot agony winding tighter and tighter around my upper body and strangling me from the inside out. But this time, instead of pushing the hurt away, I embraced it. As long as I was in pain, I was still alive and not sliding into the cold, cold oblivion that was the alternative.

  I put one hand in front of the other, weakly kicking my legs, digging my fingers into the slippery mud, and slowly pulling myself up the bank until I was back on semisolid ground again. Still panting, I rolled over onto my back and forced myself to sit up. The moon and stars were out in full force tonight, their pale light streaming in through the thick canopy of twisted trees that surrounded me. The silvery glow matched the starbursts erupting in my eyes.

  I don’t know how long it took for me to crawl over to the closest tree, wrap my hands around the rough bark, and pu
ll myself to my feet. I stood there for several minutes, resting my forehead against the trunk and trying to keep the world from spinning around and the flashing starbursts to a minimum. Then I pushed away from the tree and forced myself to start walking.

  Well, I don’t know if I’d really call it walking. I stumbled from one tree trunk to the next, weaving worse than a drunken frat boy, with no idea of where I was, where I was going, and not really caring about either one at the moment. I had a much more important mission right now—stopping the rest of my blood from leaking out of my body.

  Dekes had made some nasty wounds with his fangs, including one in my right shoulder that went all the way down to my collarbone. I could feel the broken edges of the bone scraping against each other and threatening to break through the tight skin that was stretched over their now awkward alignment. I could barely raise my right arm so I couldn’t set the bone, not by myself, but the bite marks needed to be covered up at the very least so that what was left of my blood would have a chance to clot. It was just dumb, blind luck that the vampire hadn’t hit my carotid artery when he’d launched into his feeding frenzy. Otherwise, I would have bled out back in the library.

  I stooped down, dug my fingers into the mud at my feet, and plastered some of that on my wounds, but more of it seemed to slide off than actually stick to my skin. Ditto for the grass and moss that I tried next. So I got to my feet and trudged on. I don’t know how long I stumbled through the swamp, teetering and tottering from one slippery step to the next, but finally, I came across something that could help me—a spider’s web.