by Black, Paula
“I never died,” he said tightly, “and neither did you, it seems. You said the doctors gave you six months.”
Dante’s smile fell and his bad eye twitched. “Yet it has been a year since I saw you last. You see? I told you those pompous physicians know nothing.” He slapped Konstantyn’s upper arm. “But I have no more need of them. Not now I have you back, and the girl too.”
“You wanted me back that bad? Well, congratulations, here I am.”
“Yes,” he said, his lips curving in satisfaction. “Here. You. Are. Kiss me, and all shall be forgiven.”
I watched as Konstantyn went rigid, arms by his sides while Dante folded him into a brotherly embrace. I saw Dante’s lips move, whispering foreign words in Konstantyn’s ear. I couldn’t make out what he said, but a muscle at the corner of Konstantyn’s jaw tightened visibly in response, and once again, when I tried to make eye contact, his gaze slipped away.
His lips grazed Dante’s cheek, the same lips that had crushed a promise to my mouth only hours before.
A Judas kiss, I thought.
Dante was blackmailing him into submission.
“You are with me then?” Dante asked.
“This madness ends with her?” Konstantyn motioned in my direction with the hand that held the vodka.
“Yes. The sacrifices end with her. You have my solemn word,” he said, hand on heart.
My gut went into free fall. The bindings bit into my wrists as I strained to see more of Konstantyn’s face.
Look at me, my eyes pleaded, but his eyes were all for Dante.
Konstantyn’s expression was slitted with suspicion. “My sister will not be harmed?”
“Not a hair on her pretty head. On this too, you have my word.”
“Then I’m in,” he said. Closing his eyes, Konstantyn filled his lungs with air.
His words of allegiance hit me like a kick in the stomach. My world swam out of focus. My heart sank and my body sagged. He told me he’d do anything to save his sister. He’d warned me: when they caught up with him, Dante would be the one in control. If Daniel were alive, how would I have chosen? Part of me wanted to believe he had no choice, but the clench in my chest cavity felt like the bitter pain of betrayal. Surrounded by enemies, I’d never felt so alone.
“It is good to have you back in the fold, Lazarus.”
“Good to be back,” Konstantyn agreed with a terse nod. “Here, I brought you a gift,” he said, placing the bottle of vodka in the other man’s waiting hands.
Dante’s lips spread in a genuine smile, his good eye crinkling at the corner as he inspected the label. “Ah, how I’ve missed you. We drink to the Prodigal’s return,” he announced, nodding his approval and holding the bottle aloft.
They left me there, bruising my knees and quietly contemplating my death, while they sat on my couch and drank shots from glasses Konstantyn took from my kitchen.
“What makes this one so special?” he asked, refilling their glasses. God, he sounded bored. My brother’s murderer and the man I’d trusted with my life were discussing my rape and torture like normal people talked about the weather.
“She is the bastard child of a transference ritual,” Dante replied, “performed by the Order of Gilles, more than a quarter of a century ago. That makes her quite unique.”
“Transference? Of what? Something more than just body fluids, I presume.”
“Indeed. The ritual is used to transfer the living soul from one physical body to another.”
Konstantyn spluttered his vodka and his eyebrows disappeared into his hairline.
Man, and they said my mother was crazy? This Dante guy was a total nut job.
“You still doubt your mentor,” Dante said sourly, sucking vodka from the rim of his shot glass, “after everything we have been through together.”
“I believe what I see with my own eyes.”
Dante looked up from the glass, his eyes bright. “And what is it you see, my friend?”
“I see a desperate, dying man.”
“In Russia, you saw me shot through the heart, no? A wound no mortal man should survive.”
Konstantyn frowned hard.
“You brought me that girl,” Dante continued, “and I used her to heal myself. You saw it for yourself.” Dante popped a couple of buttons on his crisp white shirt and pulled the fabric aside to reveal a perfectly smooth chest. “Look. Not even a scar.”
“It’s not possible.” Konstantyn dropped his head and kneaded his temples. “There was no gunshot wound. You murdered her,” he said, but doubt weighed down his words.
“I used her. I channelled her fear, her sexual energies, and her blood into healing my own body. I didn’t mean for her to die, but my need was great, and once the ritual is underway, it is difficult to contain the flow of power. My donors rarely die anymore. Whilst searching for you, and the girl, I have been perfecting the technique.”
Konstantyn made a sound of disgust, deep in his throat. “You’re serious? You honestly believe torturing and raping innocent people is keeping you alive?”
“I do not believe. I know. See for yourself.” He motioned down his suit-clad body.
“That tumour is turning your brain into Swiss cheese,” Konstantyn countered. “And what’s wrong with your eye?”
Dante bared his teeth in a bad attempt at a smile. “Only a small nuisance. Sex and blood keep the tumour at bay, for a time, but effecting a cure requires something more radical. Believe me, I intend to divest myself of this rotting body at the first opportunity.”
Konstantyn jerked his jaw in my direction, but still refused to look me in the eye. “And you believe she’s the opportunity you’ve been looking for?” he said, sceptical.
Dante inclined his head.
“You’re not just sick. You’re fucking insane.” He laughed and refilled the glasses.
Alexei stiffened, like a dog whose master had been threatened.
Dante’s good eye narrowed. “It is a foolish man who mocks what he does not understand. I raised you to be better than that, Lazarus.”
“You’re not my father,” he said through gritted teeth. “Don’t speak to me as if you were.”
“You prefer that vodka-sodden wife-beater who sold you to me for a few measly kopecks?”
I saw Konstantyn’s jaw tighten at the mention of his biological father.
“Who made you the prime specimen of manhood you are today, if not me?” Dante demanded. “You were a weak, snivelling boy when I took you in. And how many times have I saved your miserable life since then? I’ve cared for you as my own. Everything you are now is because of me. Yet you run from me. Why? When the moment of truth is upon us, you doubt your own maker. You cut me deep, Lazarus. Loyal unto death. Have you forgotten so easily?”
“I’ve forgotten nothing. I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Yes, you are, Lazarus.” Dante rested a hand on Konstantyn’s shoulder. “And the girl too. My family is complete.”
“Your family?”
Dante waved a hand. “She might be mine, or she might be the bastard of any of the other six who fucked her mother and drank her blood that night. Her parentage is irrelevant. During the transference, the seven become as one.”
My mother? Every muscle in my body tensed and my head went on a tilt-a-whirl. Dante was saying my mother had also been a victim of their perversions. That he might even be my… No. No. No. Not freaking possible.
The guy was way too young for a start.
“The night of her conception?” Konstantyn said, echoing my own incredulity. “You’re saying you were there, at this ceremony, twenty five years ago? You can’t have been more than ten years old, Dante.”
“I am older than you know, Lazarus. Of course, I inhabited another body then, one whose heart was growing precariously weak, just as this body is failing me now. Human bodies are such fragile, mortal things. Don’t you agree?”
“You speak as if you aren’t human yourself.” Konstantyn’s laugh was sarcasm
distilled.
“Perhaps I am not.”
I jerked my gaze to Dante. He flashed his eyes in my direction, and for the briefest moment, I could have sworn his irises glowed red. A trick of the mind, I told myself. Buying into this whole group psychosis thing wasn’t going to get me anyplace good.
“I’d hoped to have another ten years before needing to complete the transference again, but this meat suit, blond and handsome though it is, unfortunately came with a fatal genetic mutation. I blame her mother’s impurity. She was unclean: a whore, and an addict.” His lips kissed the rim of his glass and he shot back the clear liquor, sucking air through his teeth. “But she was all I had at the time, and she was more than willing to let the seven impregnate her in exchange for drug money.
Except then she sobered up, and when the birth came close, she got cold feet. She ran, hoping to spare the child the same fate she’d suffered, I suppose. She made it to London on a boat. You know how easy it is to lose yourself with a new name in a big city, don’t you my friend?” His lips pulled into a wry grin that I wished I could carve off his face.
Painful though it was to hear my mother called those horrible things, every detail fit, from her mysterious immigration and my dubious parentage, to the timing of my birth. How could he know those things? And there was her abhorrence of anything even vaguely occult, and her raving about demons that had landed her in the psychiatric unit. But why couldn’t she have told me any of this? I reached for my anger, but when it came to my mother, that well had dried up a very long time ago. She’d been a victim, just as Daniel had, just as I was about to become. She probably had been trying to protect me, the only way she knew how. Now my rage was focussed solely on these men who had taken over my apartment and were planning to use me as the main course in some whacked-out sexual sacrifice.
“The foolish woman let herself believe she’d fallen under my radar, but I have always known where to find her. I have always been watching. And as I just explained to Neva before you arrived, the time has come for me to call in my debts. I need to move sooner than expected, but I am confident my new body will not fail me.” A smile threatened at the corners of Dante’s mouth as he looked Konstantyn up and down, and I wondered if Konstantyn saw what I did. The man was measuring him up, like you might a suit of clothes.
“Neva’s blood is strong, forged by the power of the ritual,” Dante went on. “That should overcome the many flaws of her breeding. We are ready. My new seven are assembled.”
“Was her brother’s blood strong too?” Konstantyn asked. “Is that why you used him?”
Dante shook his head. “He was a mongrel, worthless to me, except as an insurance policy to keep Neva here in line when the time came. The boy was handsome enough, and a good fuck.” He sneered over at me and I spat in his direction. “Raider and the Friar went too far with him, but he would have lived, if he hadn’t tried to run. My surgeon would have seen to that.”
His cruel words broke my heart and my spirit.
“You have reminded me of something, Lazarus,” Dante went on. “A loose end I need to take care of: the matter of the insider who helped the brother escape.” He reached over and grabbed a fistful of my hair, wrenching me toward him.
I bit down on the pain bubbling up my throat.
“She knows who it is. Don’t you, you little cunt. I can smell your concealment.” He licked his lips.
I spat in his face, and it took a moment for his fury to register. He twisted his fist in my hair and I felt the individual strands tear from my scalp. Tears sprang to my eyes and I grimaced.
“It will be my great pleasure to extract a name,” Dante sneered.
I gritted my teeth. Never. I would not betray Gracie.
“I know who betrayed you,” Konstantyn said.
Dante’s grip immediately relaxed and he looked to Konstantyn, expectant.
“Gracious Samuels,” he said, tossing back another shot and wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “Your drug pusher.”
My heart dropped to the pit of my stomach.
Bastard.
If I had my hands free, I’d have clawed out his traitorous eyes.
Dante’s disgust caught in his throat. “Of course. I should have slit that freak of nature’s throat when I had the chance. Raider’s too, for persuading me to let it live.”
“I’ll do it,” Konstantyn replied coolly. “I’ll kill her. I’ll kill both of them if you want.”
Dante smiled, seemingly appeased, and slapped a hand on Konstantyn’s thigh. “Yes, my Lazarus will hunt the rats from my cellar. I have trained you well. Raider will be no loss. He was only ever a substitute until I got you back, and I never did care for his perversions.”
Raider’s perversions? What a hypocrite, I thought. I’d seen the photographs of what this man did to innocent men and women. I’d kissed my brother’s cold, broken body.
“I want something in return,” Konstantyn murmured.
“Your sister Mariya is unharmed, I assure you.”
Konstantyn shook his head slowly. His mouth narrowed to a slash and tension bracketed his hard face. “That is not what I want.”
“What then?”
Konstantyn’s gaze cut to mine and his glassy, green-flecked stare stole my breath. I watched the muscles twitch in his clenched jaw, his chest rising and falling with scarcely controlled breaths.
Dante caught what passed between us. “The girl means something to you?”
Konstantyn shook his head and shrugged. “No. But I want in.”
“You two have been intimate. I can tell.”
“She gave me a blow-job,” he said with a shrug.
My eyes hit the floor and I pressed my lips together. I hated that his easy dismissal stung more than the humiliation of being tied up and on my knees, at their mercy.
“Ah. Is she talented?” Dante’s laugh was smug.
“Yeah.”
A pair of polished black shoes appeared in my field of vision, and I looked up to find Dante standing over me.
He stroked the muzzle of the loaded gun along the seam of my lips.
“Very nice. We’ll do her together. It’ll be just like old times, eh Lazarus?” He sneered at me and forced the muzzle into my mouth. The warm taste of metal was like blood on my tongue and my gorge rose.
“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll let you blood her first. As a peace offering, and proof of where your loyalties truly lie.”
He looked over at me, through me, with those cold shark eyes. The tip of his tongue probed the corner of his mouth as he said, “I am impatient. Perhaps we three should have her, here and now. Just a taste, before the ritual.”
In response to Dante’s suggestion, Alexei, who up to now had sat silently drinking vodka with an expression grim as a portrait from the Dark Ages, suddenly came to life. His flabby lips twisted into a smile revealing gapped teeth, and his flat brown eyes lit up in anticipation.
Fear had me clenched in its grip. With my pants trapped around my thighs and my hands bound, I was a wide-open target for whatever they wanted to do to me, powerless against these three brutes.
“We should go,” Konstantyn announced with a shake of his head, “before that body on the doorstep starts to stink.” He drained his glass, slamming it on the table, and I flinched at the gun-shot sound. He rose to his full height and I kept my eyes fixed on the wall. “You have what you came for,” he said, “Let’s get out of here.”
Dante cut him a sidelong, calculating glance, his thumb stroking the shot glass in his hand. “Konstantyn is correct,” he said eventually. “We should go. The brother’s body drew enough unwanted attention, and the alchemy will be all the more powerful for our abstinence. Alexei, take care of the mess outside, and meet us underground.”
Alexei’s eyes squinted with bitterness, not that I could find a shred of sympathy for the bastard.
“Don’t worry, you’ll have your time with her, as always.”
Alexei looked at me with predatory
lust in his eyes, then nodded curtly and got to his feet, getting busy with a cell phone.
I mentally added him to my ‘to die’ list.
“Oh, and Alexei,” Dante continued, “have the betrayer brought down too, so that Konstantyn can slit the swine’s throat.”
Poor Gracie. I’d led Konstantyn right to her, and now they were signing her death warrant. If only I had some way to warn her, but that was impossible. Bound and shuffling my pants around my ankles, Konstantyn hauled me to my feet and out to a waiting car, while Alexei dragged the pizza boy’s limp corpse inside my flat and barked orders down the phone in guttural Ukrainian.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Once we got out of the car, it got cold, fast. Dante held my elbow with an iron pressure that dared me to run. I had the scariest impression that if he chased and caught me, I might never be getting back up.
He needs you, Neva, I told myself. He can’t kill you until he gets what he needs from you. It was the only thing keeping me going. While there was still time, there was hope, however bleak the outlook.
Swallowing around the balled up shirt they’d stuffed into my mouth as a makeshift gag, I felt my steps out blindly, trying not to trip as I was hastened down a slope into the stale dampness of somewhere underground. It smelled earthy and dank, and even blindfolded I could tell when cloudy night transitioned to eerie, subterranean darkness. In a language I assumed was Ukrainian, Dante barked orders to the men who met us at the entrance, and led me deeper. It was disorienting. My terror made me clumsy and I lost count of the times I stumbled over some object on the ground, only to have Dante right me with a yank and lead me in a completely different direction.
Hallways, I thought, but I couldn’t be sure. My arms, secured at the base of my spine, denied me the luxury of feeling my way around, but when the screams started, I was grateful for the blindfold. Somewhere to my left I heard a male voice, raised in agony. Further along, a woman’s sobs rebounded off stone walls with a chime that made Dante hum happily.
“Your room, pretty one,” he announced, pulling me to a stop with a jingle of keys and the clank of a heavy duty lock. Hinges creaked and as I was led forwards, I caught my ribs on a metal corner, my hiss making Dante laugh.
