by Kaia Bennett
I didn’t get what I came for, but I stumbled across Jesse’s motivation for living one day, one murder, at a time. Maybe even his motivation for keeping me alive longer than he’d expected.
Escape.
But what are you running from?
I severed the link, pulled my hand away. Suddenly, he could no longer taste the decadent bite. He could no longer escape into my senses. I cut the proverbial cord swiftly and he suffered for my swiftness.
He coughed, instantly sick to his stomach. He scraped his tongue with a napkin and stared at me with furious understanding.
“Cute trick.”
I gave him a smug smile and pulled my plate back. I took a bite and it turned out to be my last. The pancake didn’t taste as good this time, his potent disgust rubbing off on me. I sighed, angry that I couldn’t control my gift better, so I could reap the benefits and none of the slavish side effects.
I pushed my plate away. Jesse smiled this time. He pulled out a wad of cash, some of it stolen from his Ruby Falls victims, and dropped money for my breakfast, his untouched coffee, and a tip—vampires actually tip?—on the table. I downed the last of my orange juice and followed him out.
In the SUV, we hurtled back toward the motel. Another set of woods lined our path, another dusty road.
But first, we pulled into a truck stop because Jesse had plans to feed.
I sat watching him stalk his prey, his gaze darting over the entire expanse of people entering and exiting the restrooms.
His eyes settled on a girl hopping out of a pickup truck. She fixed the hood of her sweatshirt and tugged down her denim mini skirt, striding with purpose toward the road that led in the opposite direction of the motel. She looked skittish, her pace brisk, as if she couldn’t wait to get away from the truck stop.
I saw why when the driver got out and followed her. She turned and screamed, “Listen, man, I gave back your money! Fuck off!”
The man sprinted to her. Grabbing her by her jacket, and then her hair, he twisted her around to face him and shoved her face to the side.
“Shit.” Jesse exploded out of the car and rushed toward them. I felt his absence so acutely that for a second, I vibrated with one thought.
Run!
But run where? Anywhere I ran, he could catch me in a second. He’d already dragged the conspicuous man and the girl the truck driver was trying to rape into the woods lining the truck stop.
I looked down at a distinct jingling noise. The keys dangled in the ignition.
My hands shook. With one act, I could save myself—or lose Jesse’s trust if I got caught. Or, I could stay put, prove I’d become a good pet, and be rewarded with more rape, forced to witness murder after murder.
The girl. Kelsey. Michelle. My mother and father. My brother and Manny. Nora. They all rattled my brain, whispering to me until their voices lifted in a chorus.
I’ll never get another chance like this.
I slid into the driver’s seat, put the SUV in drive, and skidded out of the parking lot in the opposite direction of the motel, back into town as fast as I could go.
I couldn’t steady my hands, so shaken was I by my brazen choice. I hadn’t put on my seatbelt in my haste. I just wanted to find human faces again, to see beings who didn’t drink blood for sustenance, murder for sport, or view rape as an appetizer.
“And then what?”
My voice hit the air before I could think, but the vibrations left by words made me sob.
They’ll find me. They’ll kill me and everyone I love. They’ll rip me apart. They’ll make me suffer. Turn back, turn back. There’s still time to turn back.
I didn’t turn back.
I hit the gas instead, until I hit one hundred miles an hour and the world looked like a green and black streak.
When Jesse ran out onto the road in front of me, I didn’t have to time to slam on the brakes. My heart seized in my chest. Instinct made me lift my hands and the fury in Jesse’s eyes made me close my own.
The car stopped. I heard the crunch, my body floated up from the seat, and then shot like an arrow against the windshield. The glass shattered and I flew through the air, the sound of my own breath amplified in an unearthly, slow motion exhale.
So I’ll die after all, huh? Just when I found a little courage.
A calm I hadn’t felt since before my cousin’s death blanketed me. Why had I fought this moment so fervently? Why did I let another girl take my place when death could be as simple as closing my eyes and falling?
I realized when my body cracked like an egg against the street that I’d been talking fucking nonsense to myself. This was what I’d been terrified of. The crippling pain before the world went black. The snap of bones, the blood in my gaze, the scrape of fragile skin, ripped from the meat of my body, as I rocketed into concrete.
The shock began to subside as pain took hold. How many flavors of agony had I experienced in the last few days? Every bone in my body felt broken from the impact. Glass embedded my skin like scales. I should’ve died the second I hit the windshield, but I’d probably earned a healthy dose of good old-fashioned torture first.
“You stupid bitch. You stupid. Fucking! Bitch!”
Jesse’s boots came into view. I saw only a shadow of movement when one slammed into my twisted and bleeding guts. I wailed when the blow slid me several feet across the pavement. All the air wrenched from my lungs.
“Get up!”
I coughed up a glob of blood and bits of glass.
“Help.”
I didn’t know to whom I pled, but I saw my mother’s face.
“Now why would I do that, witch? You seemed so determined to take care of things on your own.”
My head fell to the ground. Several chunks of glass settled deeper into my cheek. I sobbed as my leg, which had landed at an abnormal angle, began to throb.
“Please—”
“Vaughn was right about you. Give you an inch and you take a fucking mile. You think just because I like fucking you, you can get away with shit like this? You think I won’t punish betrayal?”
I gritted my teeth. Darkness crept in at the edges of my vision. I spoke so softly, he knelt. “Say that again.”
“Boo. Hoo.”
If I could’ve spoken without exquisite agony I’d have told him to go fuck himself.
Lucky for me I blacked out instead.
16
I woke to a relentless light with shadows moving on the periphery.
A dull ache sharpened my senses.
Ping.
I squinted and turned my head. Immediately I felt the ache in my cheek, like I’d picked up where I left off before unconsciousness.
Ping.
The girl trying to escape a reckless vampire. My feverish race toward freedom.
Ping.
The accident. My crash through the windshield when Jesse halted the car with his bare hands.
I howled and looked down to see my body strapped to a gurney as someone picked glass out of my naked stomach. The fragment looked like a shattered iceberg, only the tip shining clear while the rest was painted crimson. I watched as the person who plucked the shard from my body dropped the glass into a metal bowl.
Ping.
The procedure hurt less than expected, considering.
“Nearly done,” said a man in scrubs tending to my wounds. “Focus on your breathing. Keep calm. That’s a good girl.”
His voice soothed me, but also reminded me I had every reason to panic.
“Where am I? Where are—”
I winced and bit my tongue hard enough to draw blood. My nurse—or doctor—pulled a shard of windshield from my inner thigh.
“You’re in the clinic beneath the motel. Your master brought you here for treatment.”
My master?
“Don’t worry, he’s here with you. Just cleaning up some of the hard-to-reach bits. It hurts more during the healing when your body has to push foreign objects out. After I’m done, your master will fe
ed you and you’ll be right as rain.”
“Maybe.”
I turned my head to the left side of the gurney and saw Jesse staring down at me.
“Maybe I’ll let you suffer instead, for being such a bad pet.”
“Ow! F-fuck!”
Scrubs dug his tongs deep into the underside of my right breast, and pulled out a shard surrounded by healing tissue.
“Last one, I promise. Already got the ones in your face when you came in.”
The last ping sounded, and I stared up at Jesse with teary eyes.
I could hear a sharp inhale of pain in the corner. I arched my neck to look past Jesse’s stomach and realized I wasn’t alone. Vaughn and Liam sat side by side, their chests bare and some fluid circulating intravenously in the veins at the bend of their elbows. A nurse pulled a syringe that couldn’t be shorter than four inches out of Liam’s chest cavity. I shuddered and turned my attention back to Jesse.
“What’s happening?”
“They’re taking their medicine,” Jesse slammed his fist down on the gurney and I whimpered in pain. “Thanks to your bullshit escape attempt I was late getting back to my brothers before they took a bite of rotten food. There’s an epidemic in this area.” Jesse’s voice could turn water to ice, his glacial tone a warning my suffering had begun in earnest.
Scrubs looked from Jesse to me and then took a step back to help tend to Liam.
I blinked. When he bit into his wrist, I heaved a sigh of relief for my poor pain receptors.
My desire for his blood frightened me and revealed how much I’d come to crave his essence.
He placed his bleeding wrist over my mouth. I arched into the flood, despite the pain. I closed my eyes and gulped deep. Then, I rummaged through Jesse's mind, searching for what happened during the time I’d lost.
I saw a vision of Jesse dragging the girl and the vampire into the woods. I saw now, through his eyes, what had compelled him to interfere with the feeding. The vampire had thin black veins scrawled across his skin. His mouth held diseased fangs that dripped with a golden substance that resembled honey. Black blood drained from his nose. The strange vampire’s fangs crumbled against the girl’s throat, unable to pierce skin.
Jesse dragged the girl and the vampire as deep into the woods as he dared with me still in the vehicle, unattended. Then Jesse grabbed the sick vampire by the back of the neck, broke through his infected skin and ripped out a chunk of his spinal cord. The girl screamed in terror, running as fast as she could toward the truck stop. Jesse cut her off, smothered her screams with his hand. He gave her a long hard sniff, searching the air for a specific scent, for disease in the blood. A distant part of me wondered why he wasn’t afraid to be near a diseased vamp, but still felt the need to check the girl. I knew, just through this vicarious link, that his senses were stronger than the others, that he could withstand disease. Questions zinged past, questions I needed answered. The answers remained locked behind barricades I wasn’t strong enough to topple yet. Only the recent past was visible.
The girl didn’t have flu symptoms, no fever or thick cough. After a long moment, his mind processed her scent.
Clean. Starving!
Jesse tore into her throat with his fangs. She went limp in his arms as he siphoned her life force with several deep sucks. When he came up with a gasp he spied a golden necklace, the pendant a delicate feather. He appraised the grooves etched into the metal, the subtle lines mimicking the texture of a real feather, while the girl’s blood dripped from his lips. He snatched the chain from her bleeding neck and let the girl drop.
I gasped, as if coming up for air after drowning, and craned my neck, pressing my lips to Jesse’s wrist, but he wrenched his blood away from me.
“Motels have clinics?” I asked.
“Ours do. They’re not just for sleeping and fucking and killing and—Ow! Fuck, lady! How about some bedside fucking manner?” The nurse met Liam’s quip with a snort and pulled a different needle out of his neck.
I, having hurtled face first into the Twilight Zone, turned away from the creepy intricacies of vampire healthcare.
“She’s all done now, sir. Regular feedings should have her right as rain again.”
“Goody,” Vaughn said. “Wouldn’t want you all weak and helpless when we carve you up into little pieces. No fun in that.”
I closed my eyes and floated back to the moments just before I fell into unconsciousness on the road.
Death hadn’t been something to fear then. Death had been a blessing denied. Pain had truly been what I feared. But which pain? The pain of losing my family? The pain in my limbs when beaten? The pain of shame when I felt pleasure?
What about the pain of letting another victim take my place? I could pretend the girl in the motel that first night hadn’t been my fault. I couldn't save myself, let alone her. But what if I’d denied Michelle a quick and painless death because I’d been too afraid of pain to take her place? They’d have killed her swiftly if I’d just been brave enough to shoulder the pain they inflicted on her instead. And what about the girl Jesse killed by the truck stop? Why hadn’t I made noise, drawn attention to her and Jesse? I’d run and left her all alone.
Vaughn could threaten me all he liked. Pain had fast become like death. Something inevitable. Something I feared less and less as the days passed. I feared the depth of my selfishness and my desire to live more.
“We done or what?” Liam’s agitated voice sounded from the corner.
“Almost,” the woman attending him said. “We’ve bled out the potentially toxic blood and the antibiotics are in your system. Maybe another ten minutes for your body to process the medicine, then we’ll get you a meal.”
“You mean like the meal that got us in this mess in the first place?” Vaughn scoffed and rubbed a hand over his healing chest.
“Our donors and complimentary meals are thoroughly tested before consumption, sir. Any symptoms you suffered would be the result of a meal found outside of our compound.”
Judging from Vaughn’s grunt and Liam’s sigh, the duo had gone hunting outside the compound and found a not-so-happy meal.
I wanted to hear more, but Jesse’s blood made me sleepy as the healing properties circulated through my system.
Just like the first time.
“You can take her upstairs for rest. She’s got plenty of blood in her system now.”
Scrubs said something else, but I tuned out due to drowsiness.
Jesse snapped at the doctor and the straps of my gurney eased and slipped away. Strong arms bracketed me and I floated down a hallway and into an elevator shaft. I felt like I was at Ruby Falls, ascending instead of descending, coming out reborn.
Jesse tossed me on the bed with less gentleness than a healing witch deserved. I grunted, naked, and still full of open wounds. I could feel my flesh knitting together, becoming whole and unblemished. But I sank into the bed, the weighty drag of sleep claiming me.
My eyelids lazed half open and I caught sight of Jesse’s broad back.
His shoulders slumped. On any other being, his body language might spell defeat.
But, why would he feel defeated?
Liam and Vaughn seemed healthy. He’d thwarted whatever this V-Sep stuff did to vampires. He’d healed me, freeing up my body and mind to torment another day or two.
I realized then what Scrubs had said to Jesse. He’d meant the words to be congenial, one master to another, though I’d been in too much pain to understand.
She must be quite the prize for you to give her so much of your blood. I find too much spoils their discipline.
Jesse had snapped. Mind your fucking business or your own pet will be missing a master.
I’d have laughed if I had the energy. Jesse had spoiled me? Ha!
I felt the echo of his boot in my gut, the desperate churning in my stomach when I couldn’t draw a breath.
He’d spoiled me the way a farmer spoiled a pig before the slaughter.
And yet….
At the edges of my mind, I saw Jesse lift the golden feather into the air. He’d watched the sunlight glint off the golden symmetry of the charm and the links on the chain. I saw him shove the necklace into his leather jacket just when he heard the squeal of tires as I made my escape.
I touched my neck and fell asleep with my fingertips lingering over the gold feather necklace. Jesse must’ve placed the chain on my neck sometime after I’d passed out, like a gift.
Or a leash for a prized pet.
17
Nora and I were in North Carolina, visiting our grandmother, and racing the summer sun as we crashed into the waves. Sweat, mixed with salt spray, clung to my skin. Oppressive humidity gave way to balmy night, and my stomach churned with hunger. Dinner, a shower, and a warm bed waited, but still, the ocean offered something safety couldn’t.
Victory. If I could master what waited out there for me in the water's depths, I could go home.
Nora wrung out her hair and exaggerated a yawned while I dragged behind. “You’re not still getting out of the water, are you? I beat you like ten minutes ago.”
“Of course, you beat me. You swim like sperm!”
She laughed so hard she had a coughing fit. “What do you know about sperm? You’re just a kid!”
While she recovered, I trudged uphill and dug my nails into the gritty sand. I used the water rolling off my body to mold a smooshy clump and tossed it at the side of her face.
“You little bitch!” Sand clung to her hair and dripped down the cleavage of her bikini top. She squealed in dismay and spit out several mouthfuls. I took my shot.
“Race you!” I screamed and turned with a giggle toward the waves.
I outpaced Nora in a foot race even with shorter legs, but she’d always been the faster swimmer. I needed every extra second.
My smile broadened when I heard her gaining on me. She’d never reach me, but the huff and puff of her exertion drew closer, and so did the freedom I sought in our competition. I could win.
