The Prince of Cups (Villainess Book 2)

by Melos,Alana

  Don’t what? Tell the truth? I’m not, and I want to rest and heal, be by myself, in my own head, for a little while, I sent back.

  Then just request it, he replied.

  Then stop being a douchebag and try stopping when I say no, I mentally snarled at him, anger running through my veins. I was angry at him, at Nazferatu, at … well, everyone, but those two especially. I wasn’t a fucking prize to be won, and I didn’t belong to either of them. Their proprietary shit was getting on my nerves. At least the vampire was more honest about it while Gerard insinuated himself around me with subtle touches, getting me worked up to get what he wanted.

  He stood up and smiled, giving me a saucy salute as he left my mind. I put up my shields as high and tight as I could while maintaining the quarantine zone, then watched as he chose the furthest bunk from both of us girls and laid down. I turned my back to him and faced the entrance to the passageway, my anger circling round and round inside my head without an outlet. I wasn’t mad at them. I was, but I wasn’t at the same time… I was mad at myself. Gerard had been right. We should have left, just slipped out quietly with none the wiser. It would have been the smart thing to do. The white hats of Prime could probably have handled it. Instead, I found myself facing near-certain death intercepting a well-oiled war machine of a nation in their home turf, with traitorous bastards surrounding me, supernaturally obsessed with a vampire, and sharing beds with a psychopath.

  I would like to say I’ve been in worse situations, but that wouldn’t be true. Maybe the impending doom wasn’t right up in my face like other dangerous situations had been in the past, but it was certainly impending and definitely doom-filled. I couldn’t blame anyone else for this, much as I wanted to, and I wasn’t going to let my confidence falter in front of anyone else, certainly not Gerard. I’d never hear the end of it from him. The only course of action was to follow through and win… and have an escape plan in case I didn’t.

  Chapter Twelve

  Activity in the room woke me. I peeled an eye open, and saw Regulus bustling about, his hair damp as he dressed himself in the Schattenkraft uniform once more. “If you want, you better shower now,” he said. “Might be the last time for a while, if things go sideways.”

  It wasn’t a bad idea, but I mostly just wanted to get the excess blood off of me and get into some clean clothes. After stretching, I went towards the back to investigate the bathroom area. It was just like any locker room with shower heads built into the wall, a tiled floor, and the undressing area just before the showers. Rebekah sat there on a hard wooden bench, looking freshly showered. She looked up as I entered.

  “Oh, hello,” she said smiling, but it was a wan smile.

  I started to peel off the crusty, blood soaked clothing I’d fallen asleep in. “You … seem down?” I phrased it as a question, as I wasn’t quite sure. Without my telepathy to read her, her emotional state was nearly a mystery to me. Body language and facial expressions could tell me some broad strokes, but I missed the nuances, the subtle things which colored the people I saw the many different colors they were.

  “A little,” she said. “Can I talk to you?”

  “Sure?” I replied, giving her a look over. I wasn’t quite sure what she wanted from me.

  “It’s about Gerard,” she said slowly. “He’s not… what I expected him to be.”

  “What did you expect him to be?” I asked her, finally getting the last of the old clothing off of me. I went to the sink and grabbed a towel. I wet it down and then started checking my wounds, to make sure they had all healed up. I couldn’t see the back one very well, but when I moved, the skin felt stiff, not sore. My nose was not swollen, and thankfully straight… mostly. There might have been a bump there where there wasn’t before. My wrist moved alright, but I could feel a couple of bones grinding weirdly when they hadn’t before. My neck was good, with a new mess of scars over Nosferatu’s old bite mark. My thighs had parallel matching scars on each of them where Nazferatu had clawed them to open my legs. My breasts and stomach seemed mostly fine; the lines were so small you could barely see them, but it still rankled me. I knew they were there, and as I added up the bill for the Doctor mentally, I groaned. This was going to be a small fortune.

  “I don’t know,” Rebekah said, her voice soft, sounding like she was in pain. When I looked over my shoulder at her, she wrung her gloved hands together, not looking at me. “Something else. Something…”

  “Nice?” I supplied when she trailed off.

  “No!” she said. “I mean, he’s nice enough. Just… older… or something. I saw his picture in the files, but I just thought that was an old picture, you know?”

  I started to wash the blood off of myself. “It threw me off too,” I said. “I was told he was dangerous, and when I saw him the first time…” I shrugged. “Looks don’t matter anyway. You can’t tell a book by its cover and all that.”

  “Well, yeah, uh, I… I just get this weird feeling from him,” she said. “I don’t know. Do you guys want me to come along? I mean, want me to be here?”

  “I don’t know you, so if you can fight, yes,” I said as the towel turned pink with watered down old blood. “If you can’t, get out of the way.”

  “I can,” the Siren said. “I just don’t really want to, anymore.”

  “You’re what, all of eighteen?” I asked, getting the last of it off of me. I hunted around for where my pack had been stored, and drew it out when I found it. “Can’t be exactly battle hardened.”

  “I’m twenty!” she said, her voice an indignant squeak. “And the Reich demands military service, enrollment, on your sixteenth birthday.”

  “Really?” I asked, pulling out my undercover uniform. I supposed I couldn’t just wander in there in with plainclothes, not that I could since they were ruined. Again. I wasn’t really interested in the conversation. My answer was purely perfunctory as I began to dress; something was required there, in a conversational manner of speaking, though it was curious that we both had life-changing events at sixteen. She joined the military, and I had left my home to find my own way. There was a certain synchronicity to it.

  “Yeah,” Rebekah said. “It’s… it’s just the way it is. They always need more soldiers. Not that many can be recruited voluntarily, you know. So, it’s, uhm, mandatory.”

  Eyeing her for a second, I buttoned up the dark grey shirt, “Is that how you got the rank of captain?”

  “No…” she said, biting her lip. “It’s because I volunteered for the Nacht program.”

  “Ah,” I said, buckling my belt. The uniform came with a long trench coat, so it would be easy enough to hide the sword underneath it. I wasn’t sure how we would be approaching the portal room. As far as I could see, we would be traveling with the wolves and vamps, and lose ourselves in their midst.

  “You don’t care, do you?” she asked, and I gave her an annoyed look.

  “Nope,” I said. “But don’t be offended. I don’t care about anything that doesn’t affect me.”

  “I don’t have anyone to talk to!” Rebekah said, bouncing to her feet. As she spoke, she paced back and forth in front of the bench, her hands occasionally waving in the air. “I thought this was going to be completely different. I thought he knew about me, and that he’d be happy to see me. I thought he’d be like, a dad or something, you know? And when I met you? I thought, well… I don’t know. I thought you were someone powerful, but you’re just a bitch!”

  I stopped buttoning my jacket and looked at her, cocking my head to the side. “Are you mad?”

  “Yes, I’m mad!” she spit, and I frowned more deeply.

  “Let me clue you in on this then,” I said, pointing for her to sit down on the bench. I went ahead and sat down next to the spot and pulled my boots over telekinetically. When she took the seat next to me, I started to yank the shiny leather boots on. “Life doesn’t turn out how you want it to, unless you make it. You can’t trust anyone except yourself.” I glanced over. She was frowning,
and I shook my head, “You’re optimistic, and naive, and that’ll get you killed. Maybe not your body… but your mind… your… soul, I guess. People will just walk all over you unless you harden up.”

  “That’s not true,” she said, picking at her dark green jeans. “People aren’t like that.”

  I arched a brow as I stamped my feet on the floor, making sure the boots fit well. “Look where you’re at,” I said. “Your whole dimension is built on lies. People know… but they don’t want to know, so they shut their eyes and hope it’ll go away.” I looked around, remembering what it was like feeling the people on the streets, seeing the paranoid strings underneath their bright faux-happy thoughts. “It doesn’t go away. It’s a sickness. But everyone’s choosing to shut their eyes and play along with them. They lie to themselves.”

  Looking over to her, I fixed her with a steady look, wondering what thoughts lay behind her pretty blue-green eyes. “Don’t be them,” I said. “You’re taking a first step, and getting out, which is good, but don’t… shut yourself off to the truth, the hard… brutal… ugly truth. Your father is a psychopath.”

  She shook her head, and I gave an exasperated sound. “Trust me, he is,” I said. “He’s got such a bad reputation over in Prime no one trusts him. And I’ve seen his mind… they have a good reason not to. You shouldn’t either.”

  “But he’s my father,” Rebekah said, a high, plaintive note in her soft voice.

  “You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family,” I said, bitterness creeping into my voice. I stook up and admired myself in the mirror. I might have to make a more formal ‘work’ outfit… the uniform really did look sharp. I was happy for the cap to cover the bald spot on my head too, from where Erick had snatched out a fist full of my hair. “Trust me, I know.”

  Blowing out her cheeks, Rebekah stood up. “If he’s that bad, why are you… uhm… you know….”

  “Fucking him?” I asked, turning around and fetching the trench coat. “Because he’s really good at it.” I shrugged, “And I like it. I never said it was a smart decision, but…” I smiled here a little bit, “Right now, I need him.” Looking her over, seeing nothing there at all with my telepathy… it was a little disconcerting, but it was also nice, in a way. Just like it was good to know Gerard with his more-or-less complete openness to me. It was good to have something to talk to, which didn’t pick at my brain. I didn’t know her, so I couldn’t really trust her, but it was really hard to think of her as ‘real’ in the first place. It was like talking to myself… a much younger, much more naive version of myself. The lost and alone part I could relate to.

  “You act like you’d … well, you’d like it here,” she said, chewing the words over slowly, picking them with great care.

  I shook my head. “It’s not my thing, total control,” I said. “It’s your father’s.”

  “I guess I don’t know what else to say,” she said, scuffing her feet and looking every inch the child. “It’s almost time anyway.”

  “You’ll see when you get to Prime,” I said, reaching forward to touch her cheek with one finger. She was real; that was the trippiest thing. And she wasn’t a sentient robot. I withdrew my hand and looked at the tip of my finger, feeling the lingering warmth of her skin there. The memory of not reading Harry more deeply when I’d had the chance lay heavy on me. Everyone was out for themselves after all, and with her immunity… I couldn’t know what she was thinking, not for real. Not ever. It was a disturbing thought. I made a frustrated sound, not used to feeling so many conflicting emotions at once. “Things are a lot different. You’ll fit right in.”

  At that, she grinned and her cheeks grew faintly red. “You think so?”

  “I know it,” I said. “We should go.”

  We walked out of the locker room together, where Gerard laid on his bunk, waiting patiently. I sent out mental tendrils towards him, querying silently if it was alright to talk? He lowered his shields, and sat up in his bed as I firmed the mental connection between us. “They’re just about ready,” he said, grinning. “If nothing else, you know how to show a guy an exciting time, Reece.”

  I smiled a little looking out towards the door. “Are they coming to get us or something?” I asked while I asked him mentally, Are you sulking?

  I’m not sulking, he replied, his mental voice sounding as chipper as his physical one. If you want something from me, you just have to say so.

  “I don’t know,” Rebekah replied. “This isn’t that complicated of a place; we can probably find the way back.”

  “Then let’s go,” I said.

  The three of us crept down the hall, Gerard and I feeling our way through the darkened tunnels while Rebekah put on her goggles, and seemed to see fine. They probably gave her night vision, which made sense given her stolen power. Noises drifted down the hall towards us, getting louder and louder, a sort of rhythmic chant or hum, until it was deafening. I saw Rebekah’s silhouette framed in the dim light from the main chamber, and she held her hand up, indicating for us to stay back. We didn’t, and crept up to stand next to her, looking into the main hall.

  It was packed with people. I recognized the vampires--they were easy to spot given their dead white skin and strangely skimpy clothing--and I assumed the rest were the wolves. There must have been a couple of hundred people here on the stone benches, doing some sort of deep throated inarticulated chant. The skin on the back of my neck pricked up, and I sensed energy in the room.

  You feel that? Gerard sent, his thoughts stained with derision. Primitive ritual.

  What is it? I asked.

  If my memory serves, he replied, it’s some sort of psyching up ritual, like they do at those big chain stores. Just… a little more extreme. The feel of his thoughts was unmistakable; he didn’t like it, and thought it was silly.

  In the middle of the ring stood most of the vampires, around a bunch of normal looking but utterly terrified people. The fear rode off of them in purple and yellow waves, and the surrounding bunch seemed to soak it up. By my count, there were at least three dozen people, some crying, some holding each other, some catatonic. All pulsed with fear. The vampires around them waited for some signal, their clothing only barely making them decent, and in one memorable case, naked. His dick flopped around against his leg as he circled the people in the middle, his fangs and talons out and at the ready. Nazferatu stood nearby, both a part of and distant from the meeting, dressed fully and looking sharp in his uniform.

  The wolves began to undress. I supposed that if one was going to transform into a wolf, man-wolf, or whatever combination of monster and man they were, being naked would probably be a good thing. Almost all of them had some sort of bag or duffle with them where they stored their clothing. All of them, uniformly, were in excellent shape. Many of them were big too, standing at six feet or taller--women included--though most seemed to have darker hair instead of the Aryan ideal. While they undressed, they continued their hum and chant. The music spoke to some primitive part of me. My heart hammered listening to it, and I stood in the shadows transfixed by the sight I was about to see. It was something taboo, forbidden, and the energy in the room rooted me to the spot.

  “All of you know why we are here,” Nazferatu said, addressing the room in a loud, commanding voice. “We know of the betrayers, and we fight not for them, not for country… but for us. Today, we show them why people fear us… we show them the monsters which live in our skins.” He raked his hard, cold gaze across the room. His eyes fell upon the three of us in the passageway, and I swore his eyes met mine, just for a moment… long enough for him to smirk and nod ever so slightly. The undead colonel turned back to the center of the crowd as they swayed and chanted, waiting.

  “NO MERCY!” he screamed, and the room erupted in chaos.

  The vampires in the middle fell upon the humans, grabbing and biting them, tearing into their flesh like tissue and drinking deep. They didn’t stop there, oh no. Like my Nosferatu, they bit chunks of fles
h out of the people, ripping them open and eating them. Blood spilled and ran freely, a slick river of gore while they laughed and fed until they were drunk, their pale skin actually rosy from all the blood they imbibed.

  The werewolves screamed and yelled, only some of it sounding like howls. Talons erupted from their nails, and their teeth fell out to be replaced by sharp fangs. They ran their claws over their naked bodies, and where their skin parted, fur lay, wet and matted with blood. I watched the closest one carefully, my heart jack hammering in my chest from a mixture of fear, arousal, and excitement. My thoughts went out to them, and I felt as they did. The call of the wild ran through me, howling and yipping in my mind. It hurt, but it was the good hurt of release from being leashed all of their lives. The woman I watched sliced the skin on her forearm, and peeled it off, revealing dark bloody fur. She tipped her head back and devoured her own flesh in an act of self-cannibalism.

  Her joints popped as she stripped herself naked in the truest sense, revealing her true self, and her thoughts were of nothing but savage joy, reveling in being a beast which people feared. Her body reconfigured itself, but it was nothing like the movies. As she fed on herself, she grew only a few inches, her knees popping backwards like a wolf’s back legs. When she grabbed her back and pulled, she tore a wide swath of skin off. A tail uncoiled and hung low, dripping blood. Her muscles filled out the fur, which began to dry in the warm air of the cavern. The growth underneath her skin made the hair ripple, like a shallow brown sea. It was the ultimate freeing of oneself. Her id, her beastial want and need ran unchecked and unchained, like a… well, like a wolf.

  All of the wolves were like that, and the mixture left me feeling weak in the knees. This was the joy I sought, the need I needed fulfilled. I looked over to my companions. Rebekah stood there shocked, with a hand clamped over her mouth, her goggles covering her eyes. Her pale skin paled even more, and she looked as if she were going to be sick at any moment. Gerard watched, but his thoughts were not of the joy they experienced. Instead, he scorned the experience, knowing himself to be better than these beasts. I looked back to the scene of terror and joy, and it seemed to me that this was me, in some way. It was my life. I had been caged and sheltered for so long, and when I went my own way, it was like stripping my skin off to let the beast reign free.