Liminality: Gay Shifter Vampire Romance (Kingdom of Night Book 2)

by L. C. Davis

  “N-no, I haven't,” I stammered. That was a much harder lie to stomach. I told myself it was for Hunter's own good, but I knew it was still wrong. “I'll let you know if I do.”

  “Thanks,” he said, slinging the bag over his shoulder. “Well, I'm gonna go jar these herbs. Good luck with your book.”

  “Thanks,” I said, giving him a few minutes to get settled before I crept into the hall and listened outside Ulric's study. The door was locked, so the chances of him being inside were slim to none. Quietly, I turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door to an empty room.

  Afraid that light underneath the door would draw attention, I crept around using my phone's flashlight app. I disappeared around the other side of Ulric's desk and fumbled underneath for the hidden drawer. It was locked, of course, but I knew the key was somewhere in the room.

  Nothing under the lamp or his mounting stack of files. I had exhausted every drawer and every surface on the desk when my gaze fell on the strangely ornate book on a nearby shelf. It had always seemed out of place and now I could guess why.

  Sure enough, the key was taped to the inside of the cover. I peeled it off carefully and breathed a sigh of relief when it unlocked the door. Relief faded into hesitation when the drawer's contents were exactly what I had expected.

  Inside the drawer sat only a single item: an ornately carved metal revolver with gold plating and a solid oak handle. I knew next to nothing about guns, but this one had to be old. The date of 1861 stamped onto the barrel confirmed my hunch.

  I reached for the revolver and drew back at the last second before gathering up the nerve I needed to actually pick it up. Just touching it felt dangerous. Hell, it probably was.

  With great care and trembling hands, I wrapped the gun in my scarf and locked the drawer. As soon as the key was replaced, I checked for any signs of my intrusion and left as quickly as possible.

  Doubling back to my room, I donned my tan spring trenchcoat since it was the only thing I owned that had pockets big enough to hold the gun. At least the safety was on, as far as I could tell. Ulric would have taken precautions about that.

  I grabbed my extra set of Sebastian's keys and prayed that the extra one I had never used belonged to what I hoped it did. The gun was burning a hole in my pocket, making itself impossible to forget. At least this time I wouldn't be walking into a trap unarmed. There was no way that I could actually use the gun, but Clarence certainly could and I was sure that he would be there if nothing else.

  To my relief, the key unlocked Sebastian's sportscar. It was a manual, of course, which was no personal strength of mine but I knew enough about the gearshifts to get myself out of the lot. The road disappeared behind me as I made yet another great escape from the Lodge.

  There was no need to question my own judgment. By that point, I knew it was glaringly flawed and always would be. This wasn't a matter of judgment, though. It was a matter of getting to Victor and Clarence before someone got hurt. I probably was walking directly into a hunter's trap, but the more distance I put between myself and the sanctuary of the Lodge, the less that knowledge bothered me. It was far easier to live with than the alternative.

  I knew all my hard-won efforts to change and become a better person were unraveling with each mile of pavement the car ate away under my lead foot, but I what good was being a better person if it meant I couldn't protect the people I loved? I gained in clarity what I lacked in discipline. Talk of submission and obedience was easy in the security we had been blessed with in the hunters' ceasefire. It all went out the window now that the stakes were raised and I was back to my old ways, ready to throw myself on the pyre as Sebastian so elegantly put it.

  The simple truth was that for me, burning in the place of someone I loved was easy. It was the possibility of losing them that I wasn't strong enough to face.

  As I pulled up to the Bergendorf, memories of my fairytale night with Sebastian played on a loop. I made my way up the elevator and avoided eye contact with everyone. It seemed to take forever to reach the top floor, but once I did I almost wished the doors wouldn't open. They did, of course, and I walked down the hall with purpose, my hand poised around the handle of the gun. I uncocked the safety and kept it aimed ahead, still sheathed in my coat.

  I stopped in front of the presidential suite and took a deep breath. Clarence hadn't mentioned a room number, but I knew this was the one as surely as I knew that there was a hunter in that room. It seemed like a long shot that the silver bullets loaded into Ulric's gun would do anything to a hunter, but what other choice did I have? If I couldn't get the gun to Clarence, maybe I could at least buy him and Victor enough time to escape, if they were even still alive at all.

  For a moment, I wondered about the best course of action. Time was ticking, but should I try to sneak in somehow or simply barge in like they did in those murder investigation shows? I finally settled on the middle ground approach of opening the door with my left hand while holding onto the gun in my pocket.

  When I opened the door, Clarence and Victor were both there, standing with crossed arms and perplexed expressions that only intensified when they saw me. Their shock was nothing compared to my own when I saw that they were both alive and unharmed by all appearances. My gaze followed the trajectory of what they had been looking and my stomach clenched as my assumption that a hunter was with them was confirmed. I drew the revolver from my coat and aimed it at the center of his forehead, horrified at my own reflexes.

  It was a hunter, after all. I had just never imagined that it would be Arthur.

  My former friend sat on the edge of the bed with his hands raised and his eyes wide in an award-winning display of fear. His jaw hung slack as he stared at me. His clothes were muddy and torn and dark circles cast deep shadows under his eyes. For the first time, he looked the part of the zombie that he was.

  “Remus!” Victor cried once the initial shock of my sudden appearance wore off. He approached me slowly, his hands cautiously outstretched as If I were the one he had to be worried about. “Put the gun down.”

  “You're brainwashed,” I said, coming to the realization out loud as I glared at Arthur, keeping the gun trained on him. “Is that another one of your tricks, you traitor?”

  “Remus, I don't know what you're talking about,” he stammered. His voice was hoarse. A lovely touch. He always had known how to play my emotions.

  “You know, it's really a shame you dropped out of school,” I said through gritted teeth. “You should have an advanced degree in manipulation by now.”

  “You have every right to hate me, but please don't shoot,” he begged. Tears welled in his eyes as he looked desperately between Victor and Clarence for help.

  “Remus, put the gun down,” Victor repeated, standing beside me now. He touched my arm and I flinched, dangerously close to pulling the trigger. “It's not what it looks like.”

  “Clarence called and said someone was going to die if I didn't get here,” I said, glancing at him out of the corner of my eye. There was no way I was looking away from Arthur until he was either subdued or dead, or at least whatever the hunter equivalent of dead was.

  Victor glared in Clarence's direction. “Nice job, idiot.”

  “You said give him as little information as possible!”

  “I said be discrete, not cryptic and threatening,” Victor snapped.

  Their bickering gave me pause and I lowered the gun just slightly. They didn't sound brainwashed. Victor didn't sound drugged, either.

  “Just give me the gun, love,” Victor said, cupping his hand gently underneath my elbow to change the direction the gun was pointing in. I still wasn't convinced that this wasn't some hunter mind control tactic, but I knew I would feel safer with the gun in Victor's hands than my own. His other hand closed over my wrist and applied just enough pressure to make my hand release the weapon involuntarily. It was necessary considering the fact that every muscle in my body was so tightly wound I felt like a statue. He deftly snatched t
he pistol from my hand and the safety locked back into place.

  As one weight lifted from my shoulders, another pressed down harder. “He's one of them,” I said through gritted teeth, grasping for a single straw that would make sense of this. “He's been spying on the Lodge for years and he used me to get to Ulric. His 'Family' wiped out Hunter's entire pack. Give me one good reason he doesn't deserve to die.”

  “We know what he's done,” said Clarence. “Trust me, he was tied up and interrogated hours before you got here. Why do you think he looks like that?”

  I narrowed my eyes and surveyed Arthur with a slightly more objective lens now that it didn't seem likely that any of us were in imminent danger.

  “Besides,” Clarence continued, “you really think this pipsqueak is a threat to either of us? Hunters are as weak as any human before ascension.”

  Adrenaline was still racing through my blood, but his words made sense. In my blind panic, I had forgotten that small yet crucial detail. Arthur was still human. I could smell it in his blood. More importantly, I couldn't smell sunshine.

  “He's still dangerous,” I insisted.

  “We're handling it,” Victor said firmly, guiding me over to a chair and forcing me to sit. He looked down at the gun and snapped open the chamber, snorting. “Next time you steal a gun, you really should make sure it's loaded.”

  I stared at the empty chamber in a mixture of horror and relief. All that for nothing. “Oh,” was all I could say.

  He shook his head. “My mistake was allowing Clarence to be the one to call you while I was,” he paused, glancing at Arthur, “busy.”

  The hunter's head hung listlessly and when he coughed, there was a thin trickle of blood coming out of the corner of his mouth. He wiped it away with his sleeve.

  “You tortured him,” I murmured.

  “Hardly anything that dramatic,” scoffed Victor. “At least not in the physical sense. I'd say it's nothing compared to what his family is going to do when they find out what he's done.”

  “What has he done?” I asked warily.

  “He ran away,” said Victor, picking up a benign looking manilla folder from the table. “And he gave us these,” he said, dropping the file onto my lap.

  My confusion only intensified as I scanned the contents. It was just page after page of what appeared to be coordinates, followed by strange symbols, codes and other words that seemed to have no intelligible value. “What is this?”

  “It's a list of every known hunter base in the world,” said Clarence. “Along with the code names of every hunter and their status: human, awakened or dead. If it's true, it's the kind of information that could actually give us a chance in this war instead of going off all this religious bullshit. No offense.”

  “None taken,” I said, gazing at the file with new appreciation. “What makes you think it's real?”

  “There's no way to know until we go and check out the coordinates ourselves,” said Victor.

  “Ulric will never approve that,” I warned.

  Clarence smirked. “Why do you think we're meeting in a hotel instead of the Lodge?” He frowned. “Hey, come to think of it, I was kind of freaked out on the phone. I don't think I actually gave you the room number. How did you know we were here?”

  “I just assumed either Sarah or a hunter was responsible. In either case, they both like to drive the knife in deep by showing up somewhere personally significant,” I explained.

  “That's an interesting theory, but we're here because rule one of hiding someone is to go to the most obvious place you can find,” Clarence said, tilting his head. “Why the hell is this room significant to you?”

  My cheeks burned with humiliation. What an unfortunate way for hunters and coincidences to finally collide.

  Victor cleared his throat. “I don't think that's important right now.”

  “Oh, right,” said Clarence, apparently catching on. “Sorry for scaring you.”

  “It's fine. You can't be held responsible for all of it,” I said, glancing up at Victor. “Sebastian and I have been looking for you, you know. He's on his way to Vancouver as we speak, ready to pull you out of some drug den and I covered for you.”

  “Good,” he said. “That'll keep him away long enough to figure out what to do with him,” he said, nodding towards Arthur. As if on cue, he slumped forward and crumpled to the floor.

  Whether it was instinct or concern I didn't care to sort out, but I lunged and got to him before either of them did. “Arthur?”

  “I'm alright,” he slurred. Blood dripped from his mouth onto the plush white carpet. Clarence lifted him up easily and placed him in the chair I had been sitting in, which seemed to help him stay upright more easily.

  “Your interrogation was a little excessive, don't you think?” I asked Victor.

  “You're awfully concerned about his wellbeing for someone who was going to put a bullet in his head not five minutes ago,” he said pointedly.

  “I didn't think it would kill him,” I said. “I thought it would just stun him or something.”

  “Right now, Arthur is every bit as mortal as any human,” said Victor.

  “What is he doing here, then? Why help us, why now?”

  “Ask him yourself.”

  I took a hesitant step forward and Arthur flinched. “I'm not going to hurt you,” I said, holding up my hands to show him that they were empty. When he lifted his head, I could see the faint blue hue of a bruise forming over his right eye. Up close, it was easy to see that his lip was swollen and his blood smelled undeniably human. Sympathy clutched in my chest and I tried to shout it down with reminders of what he had done, but it was no use. “I just want to talk.”

  His Adam's apple bobbed and he gave a shaky nod. In fact, everything about him was shaky. He looked like a broken marionette someone had draped over a chair and left forgotten. The pudgy, charismatic, fun-loving college student I had adored was gone and in his place was someone frail and empty. I recognized the blood-stained sweater he was wearing. It had once been snug but now it hung off him like a coat hanger. For some reason I had expected the hunter underneath the Arthur mask to be a seething, fire-breathing demon, but this person was just pathetic.

  Clarence draped a blanket around his shoulders and I began to understand the cause of his distress over the phone. Even I knew that Victor was capable of things no one else in the Lodge could stomach, but torture was a bit much, even for him. There was no mistaking the sympathy in Clarence's gaze as he looked down at the boy.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked in a voice so cracked and dry it hurt to hear.

  “Can I give him some water now?” Clarence asked, looking up at Victor. There was a hint of desperation in his voice.

  Victor nodded and avoided my gaze. I turned back to Arthur. One thing at a time. I waited until Clarence put a clear plastic cup of water in his hands and guilt momentarily outstripped anger as he drank like he'd never get a second chance. If the others found out, maybe he wouldn't. Clarence poured him another cup and this time he drank at a slightly slower pace.

  I looked at Victor and let the unspoken question hang between us. He shrugged defensively. “He was in bad shape when he found us, it's not all my doing.”

  He had a point. Seven or eight hours wasn't enough time to starve someone. “What did they do to you, Arthur?” I asked warily. It wasn't the first question I had planned, but maybe it was more pertinent.

  His eyes flickered down, away, anywhere but up. “They put me in the isolation chamber for a few months.”

  “What's the isolation chamber?” I asked.

  “Pretty much what it sounds like,” he said dryly. “No sensory input, no human interaction. Barely enough food to survive, a bit of water here and there.”

  “Why would they do that to you?” I asked, trying in vain to disguise my horror. “You're one of them.”

  “That's the idea,” he murmured, his voice barely audible. “They wanted to make me more like them.”


  “Sensory deprivation is a common torture tactic,” Victor mused. “If you can deprive someone of everything except their own thoughts, you can break their mind and reshape it to pretty much anything you like. That is, if there's anything left to shape.”

  Arthur said nothing, but his silence was proof that he agreed with Victor's assessment.

  “That's horrible,” I said in spite of myself. Disgust was outweighing my better judgment. “What could they possibly want to change so badly they'd be willing to subject you to that?”

  His head hung low and his shoulders jerked with a mild cough that I was afraid to assume was a laugh. “Take your pick. Found a bodybuilding magazine under your twelve-year-old son's bed? A week in the isolation chamber should straighten him out. Or maybe he cries at his own father's funeral and you want to toughen him up a little. It's an all-purpose punishment, really.”

  I tried to swallow the lump in my throat, but it stuck. “They did that to you when you were a child?”

  He finally looked up at me with bloodshot eyes. “Does it matter? This time it was punishment for sabotaging their plans to attack the Lodge.”

  “Plans?” I asked, my stomach churning.

  “Remember the night you broke into our room?”

  Funny that he still called it our room. I reminded myself that it was probably just an attempt to get me to let my guard down.

  “Prentice sneaked into the Lodge and left the letter earlier that day knowing you would try to save me. He wanted to use me as a plant to get into the Lodge before you inevitably went into lockdown mode.”

  “Looks like his interrogation is going better than yours, Vic,” Clarence said pointedly.

  Victor rolled his eyes. “Keep going, Arthur.”

  “I don't understand. Ulric and I both went to your room that night,” I said. “You were nowhere to be found.”

  “Not by that point,” said Arthur. “I knew I had to run if I was going to get out of it. When the rest of the Family started freaking out about the ritual, I knew you'd found the presents I left you.” The corner of his bloody lip twitched slightly.