by Helen Allan
“Freely,” he whispers, burying his head in my neck. I turn my head to the side, and my eye catches the sauna door. There is a small window in the door, and through it I can see a red pulsating light. I’ve only ever seen something so bright twice before.
“Fuck,” I spring out of the spa and run towards the sauna.
I open the door, but forget how quick Zan is too, he jumps forward, into the red glow, and plunges a chopstick into the chest of a vampire, who instantly turns to dust. I scream as a second one drops down from the ceiling of the sauna where he has concealed himself in the shadows, but Zan is quick, he holds his arm straight up and the second vamp impales himself on the chopstick.
We both stand back, dazed by what he has done.
“Your weapon of choice,” he says, turning to me and handing me back the chopsticks.
The masseuses come running into the room. They see us standing side by side, naked, panting, at the door of the sauna.
“What is it?” the older masseuse asks, “I heard a scream.”
“Dust,” I say, pulling my hair back and tying it up with the sticks.
“There’s dust in there, and I’m totally OCD.”
Chapter 8
We don’t talk about what happened in the spa, and Zan is careful not to be alone with me for the next three days of Thai talks.
I don’t think he is angry with me per se, although he might be, I can’t tell. But he has a firm set to his jaw that makes me not want to bring up the fact that someone, somewhere must have tipped off the vamps that a) we were in Thailand and b) we were going to have a massage.
I know he is smart enough to work out for himself that it could very well have been some of the other princes that want him out of the way, but I don’t want to state the obvious – all is not well in the state of Denmark, dude.
On the flight home, he raises the issue.
“I’d appreciate your take,” he says, sipping a whisky and looking across at me. We are in first class, and I’m loving the seats.
“I think you already know,” I say over my drink, watching his eyes carefully, “I think one of the little arsehole princelings you were meeting with set us up.”
“I thought you might think that,” he puts his glass down on the table between us. “What makes you so sure?”
“It’s elementary my dear Watson,” I laugh as I tick off the points on my fingers. “Number 1: We left on the spur of the moment and didn’t tell anyone in Bulgaria where we were going – so no one could have called ahead. Number 2: You set up meetings with the princes once you got there. So no advance warning. Number 3: The only ones who knew you were there, at that hotel, at that time, were the people you called. And you said yourself, one of them owns the hotel we were staying in. I think that’s how they knew to let the vamps in to attack us at our most vulnerable. Give the vampires a prince, keep them off the local princes’ backs for a while, happy families.”
“My thoughts exactly Freely,” he sighs, “What the fuck am I going to do about this?”
“What I don’t get,” I frown, “is the factions within the prince families. You would think they would all want to work together to protect themselves from the vamps. But even at the camp, I could see there was a kind of wide divide between some families.”
“I know,” he sips his drink thoughtfully. “It has something to do with the gypsies and how they are paired with the princes, but if there is some big conspiracy, no one shared it with me. My name preceded me there.”
“Mmmm,” I say, putting my drink down. “Maybe call your dad, he might be able to give you a bit more insight.”
“I did,” he snorts, “as soon as we were free from that bloody camp. He said it was just the usual politics and power plays.”
We are both silent for a time. Finally, I decide it’s time to have ‘the talk’ the one I’ve been putting off since Singapore. But I know I will have to go carefully.
“Zan,” I pause, “how do you feel about having killed those two guys in the sauna? Do you need to, you know, talk about it?”
He takes a deep breath; he’s obviously seriously considering my question, which is what I love about him, he’s not flippant like I am, he thinks before he speaks.
“I don’t think of them as men, really,” he says finally, “I think of them as monsters who are trying to kill my family, and have been killing my family, for centuries.”
“Right,” I say slowly.
He turns and takes my hand, and I’m surprised by his earnest look.
“I know your best friend is a vampire, Freely. But put yourself in my shoes. Imagine if she was hunting your family, had already killed some of your family. Would you feel the same way towards her as you do now? If you knew you would always be on the run, that your parents, your siblings, your future children, would always be hunted?”
I squeeze his hand and shake my head. My thoughts are still whizzing around, but I can’t deny what he has said makes sense. And if I think of anyone, I mean anyone, hurting him, I feel a crazy psychotic bloodlust.
“I think we have to do what you said you wanted to do,” I finally say. “We have to go hunt some vampires, blood you, show your worth to your contemporaries, or it’s only a matter of time before one of them takes you out.”
He nods. “I heard there are some rogue vampires running amok near one of the university towns out west. Small population, the young people are really getting a hammering. One of the aristocratic families called about it; they asked me to come up.”
“Personally?” I frown, “they want you to deal with it yourself?”
“Yeah. I imagine they are testing my mettle.”
“How many vamps exactly? Did they say?”
“The said three, holed up in a cabin not far from the town. It’s not a huge town, surrounded completely by forest. One of the major cities is only a few hundred kilometres away, but there’s a big student quarter, for on-campus living at the university. The town’s economy relies on them and if parents start thinking their kids are not thriving there,” he lets the word hang and pauses, “there’s a pretty high dropout rate already, apparently.”
“Well then,” I sip my strawberry daiquiri and very, very carefully place it where it can’t be bumped. “If there are only a couple of them, I guess we could try for our first stalk and kill. I don’t want to go all guns-a-blazing and try to take on a shit-load at once,” I’m still feeling uncomfortable about this vampire hunting gig, but I see he is determined. “Wild West here we come. And just so you know, I’m particularly pissed that those vamps saw me naked.”
“They died happy men,” he says quietly, releasing my hand, “but Freely, that can’t ever happen again.”
“I know,” I roll my eyes, “I’m not going to fall into the habit of getting my kit off for every vampire pervert.”
“You know that’s not what I’m talking about,” he says gently, before opening his laptop and studiously ignoring me for the rest of the flight.
He bandages my arm gently, looking up as I wince while he tightens it.
“Sorry,” he says quietly.
His head is so close to mine I could kiss the top. My breath stirs some of his curls, and I am so fucking tempted to grab him and plant a wet one on him and never stop that my breathing speeds up at the thought. But I know that is not what he wants.
We have been back from Thailand for a week, and in the university town for two days, and not once has he attempted any intimacy. In fact, he is going out of his way to keep out of my clutches, and I am feeling both rejected and angry. I wish he would just make up his mind about how I was allowed to feel about him; the goalposts seemed to continuously change.
He leans back on his haunches and smiles at me.
“You were not as quick as you thought.”
“What? I took out five, you barely took out two,” I snort.
“I didn’t get stabbed,” he laughs, but the laughter doesn’t reach his eyes, I see the tension in them and in the way
he holds his shoulders.
“Well, still, the odds were against us, and we won,” I sigh, leaning back against my backpack and closing my eyes for a second. I don’t add that really, hiding out in the forest because several dozen vamps are looking for you in town, doesn’t technically constitute ‘won’ in my book.
“Are you hurt somewhere else?” he asks, concern leaching into every word. ‘yeah, my heart’, “Nah, just tired, bruised, nothing out of the ordinary.” I wince as I adjust myself, I’ve obviously twisted something in my back, but I don’t want to sound like I can’t look after myself.
“What’s wrong with your back?”
I look up to see him studying me with narrowed eyes.
“Oh for God’s sake, alright, I got kicked in the back, I think a disc might be slightly out or something, it hasn’t felt right since Thailand, nothing a long soak and a chiropractor won’t fix.”
“C’mon then,” he stands, leans down and offers me his hand, “come and have a swim in the lake, it’s better than nothing, I’ll stand guard.”
I take his proffered hand and groan as I stand, he drops it immediately, and my heart takes another hit ‘you’d think I’d be over this by now’. I shake my head ruefully and head for the lake, it’s just through the trees and looks bloody cold, but I know he is right, I should swim before I settle for the night, loosen up my muscles.
“You could light a fire,” I suggest, as I head off, “I doubt there are any vamps way out here in the middle of nowhere, I could use a hot cup of instant soup.”
“If you’re sure,” he says dubiously, looking across the lake and frowning.
“Yeah, go on, I need to strip off, we’ve already ascertained that’s nothing anyone needs to see.”
He shakes his head, nods and leaves.
I wait until I can’t see him anymore and peel off my blood-stained jeans and shirt, stripping down to just my blue lace bra and panties ‘totally unsuitable for fighting, or running, but totally sexy’ I grimace as I make my way down to the water’s edge as the mud squidges between my toes, ‘ewwww’. I don’t mind my underwear getting wet, it needs a wash anyway and will dry out quickly. Besides I don’t want to swim nude, who knows what kinds of fish and bities are in the water, the last thing I need is something swimming up my clacker.
Diving in I totally forget about the new bandage on my arm which definitely shouldn’t have been soaked. I can see already blood beginning to soak through the linen, I am a dumb fucker, but decide since it’s buggered anyway I may as well swim for a while longer and get the kink out of my back. The water is freezing, but as my body temperature adjusts I float happily, looking up at the stars and trying unsuccessfully to locate the Southern Cross. The moon is full tonight, and I fancy I see a bat or two fly by, silhouetted by the lunar light, but I’m not sure. I wonder how the old myths about vampires turning into bats started. I know for a fact its bullshit.
After about half an hour I make my way back to the campfire. I’ve wrapped a towel around myself and rinsed out my jeans and shirt, hanging them on some bushes to dry by the fire. My blue bra straps are visible above the towel, but otherwise I’m decent.
Looking up as I approach Zan immediately notices the bandage ‘of course’ and growls.
“I know,” I sigh, sitting back where I was before and holding my hands out to the fire, ‘I’ll need redressing.”
He sighs and turns to his pack to get another bandage, and I watch as the firelight flickers against his profile and picks up little highlights in his dark curls. I’m once again struck by how beautiful he is, how much I want to touch him, how much I can’t.
He turns back and kneels down next to me.
“What?” he says, his voice deep.
“Nothing.”
“I know that look and what is going on inside that pretty head of yours.”
“No, you don’t.” ‘If you did you’d run for the hills.’
“You are thinking that I should have scoped the place out better, that I put us both in danger assuming there were only two vamps, should have expected they would settle in groups this far out in the country.”
“Nope,” I sigh, wincing again as he re-binds the new bandage over the rudimentary stitches he put in earlier. That was a drama I don’t want to relive, enough to say I don’t cope with pain very well, I cried a little bit, ok, a lot, but shit happens. “But we should have expected you might be set up by a bunch of aristocratic cunts.”
“I’m sorry Freely,” he says, looking into my eyes before looking down at the ground, “I put you at risk, to try and raise my own reputation, I didn’t think it through enough, and this is the result.”
“You didn’t put me at risk,” I say, reaching over and pulling his face by the chin, so he has to look back up at me, “I agreed to come. We are a partnership remember? Even I wasn’t Machiavellian enough to think it was a setup. And, if I cast my mind back, this might have even been my idea.”
“Not this place,” he sighs, running his hands through his hair, “this is all on me.”
As we have talked, the towel has slipped slightly, the top of my cleavage and my lacy underwear is clearly visible. His eyes drop down, and then flick quickly back to my face, and I stare at him like he’s a book that I want to read, a book in a foreign language, and the words I’m looking for, like I want you, all of you’ just aren’t discernible. Will never be. As I study him, it’s like I’m just drawn in, seriously, I fucking can’t resist those lips. It’s been months since we kissed, and who knows what might have happened in that spa if we hadn’t been interrupted; not a night had gone by that I hadn’t had dreams about him. Not a day went by when I wasn’t struck by how good-looking he was.
As if reading my thoughts, he moves his hand from my arm and runs a finger, gently, lightly, around the edge of the lace on my bra. My breath catches, and he looks back up, a pained, haunted expression on his face. He backs away, tries to stand. But I can’t let him, I reach for his arm, and suddenly he turns, fast, and he is all over me, pushing me down, kissing my cheeks, my forehead, my neck, my mouth. I feel like I’m on fire, I’ve wanted this for so long, it is so wrong.
“Freely, Freely,” he groans into my mouth, his long body stretched over mine, his lips wandering lower, to my cleavage, to the swell of my breasts, “make me stop.”
I laugh and draw his face back to mine. “Never,” I whisper, as his mouth claims mine and his tongue invades me. I close my eyes; I see nothing but orange sparks, I can feel our hearts pounding between us as he pushes the towel aside and lowers his mouth to my right breast. Pushing the bra aside he takes my nipple into his mouth and sucks hard, and I gasp, his hand kneads my other breast, he reaches into my bra and rubs my nipple between his thumb and forefinger and my hips automatically rise to press against him. My brain is in overdrive, I can think of nothing but him, and I want him inside me more than I’ve ever wanted anything. I reach for his jeans and slide my hand down the back, under his jocks, grasping his bare arse and pulling him tighter against me when I hear a low chuckle and a slow clap from the tree line.
Standing up instantly, Zan steps away from the fire and squints towards the trees as I scrabble for my gun and bounce up. We back further away from the fire, our eyes not adjusted enough to the darkness, making us targets for those hidden in the shadows.
The laughter continues as a tall man dressed in a black suit walks forward, applauding.
“A prince and his gypsy,” he sighs, chuckling and motioning to several others, previously hidden in the trees, to move in, “that is very naughty of you. It can’t end well you know.”
“Who are you?” Zan barks. The man is not one of those we had recently fought.
“I am your death, dear boy,” he replies.
His accent strikes me as odd, ‘maybe Russian? Maybe French? but I don’t have time to ponder further as he steps towards us. He nods to his goons to come at us, and three vamps spring forward like rockets. They are fast, but then, so am I. I shoot two in t
he heart with silver bullets before the third reaches us.
Zan ignores the vamp who is almost on us and flicks his silver knife out, past the third goon, towards the man who spoke, but the suit-wearer dodges and it misses.
‘Fuck how many times were we taught to go for the closest one first, idiot’ I think as I grab hold of the vamp and ram my knife into his ribs. He has Zan in a death grip around the neck and is strangling the life out of him. I pull my knife out and draw my arm back ready to thrust again, aiming for the heart, when I scream in pain and drop the weapon. The dark-suited man has me by my injured arm and is squeezing. I spin around to kick him when I feel a sharp smack on the back of my head, and the world goes dark. ‘There was a fourth’ I think as I sink into unconsciousness, ‘why didn’t I expect that?’
The smell of rust and urine is what I first notice when I wake. The second thing is the absence of my arms.
I wince and open my eyes; I have a splitting headache. Looking left and right I realise I still have my arms, they are just completely dead. I’m hanging from manacles, my wrists imprisoned and stretched up above my head, and all the blood has obviously run out of them.
“Ouch,” I moan. My throat is incredibly dry, and I start to shiver. I’m still in just my blue lacy underwear, and I’m hard up against a damp rock wall in what looks to be some kind of underground dungeon. I can see big rock tables with a hideous assortment of torture implements not far from where I hang, and chains and manacles on the walls opposite me, streaked with old blood. There is no sign of Zan.
“Well this can’t be good,” I mutter, shaking my head to get the hair out of my eyes.
“No, I expect not,” a cool voice says from the shadows.
I narrow my eyes and look towards the corner from where the voice had come and see him sitting on a red, velvet settee which looks entirely out of place in this damp, dark room – it’s the man who taunted us in the forest.
