“Slow down!” I called, but it came out more like, “Oh ow!” and he ignored me entirely.
Then his steps changed, and we seemed to be bounding up a set of stairs. In the middle of the woods? I wondered, but I couldn’t see. I could only hear the sound of a door splintering as he punched into it to get around the lock. Then we were through. It was a few more seconds before he threw me down on a couch that smelled of decades worth of dust and dirt.
Suddenly, I could see again—vaguely. The garlic still coursed through my system, leaving me weak and wonky, but it didn’t matter—there wasn’t much to look at. We were in a dark room with wood-slat walls, a few blurry chairs, and a makeup counter running the length of one wall topped with what looked like the general contraband of a theater company. Costumes lay discarded over the back of the musty couch and, now that I squinted, I saw something that looked like, and I sincerely hoped was, faux flesh sitting on the counter among the makeup sponges and containers.
I shuddered, hot and cold at the same time as though I had food poisoning. I hadn’t sweated since I’d gone vamp—just one more side effect—and if my sweat was anything like my tears, I couldn’t be doing wonders for the couch.
Alistaire, studying me, said, “It is perfect, no?” He laughed, and it felt like spiders with pin-prickly legs climbing over my flesh. “Humans use this as a haunted house. In less than a month, this place will be crawling with people, so kind as to cater to each other’s fears. Delicious.”
He squatted in front of me and I shrank back as much as I could. His black, pointed tongue came out to lick my nose again. “Yes, delicious. Except for the garlic aftertaste. But that too will pass. And then, pretty, pretty, you will be mine.”
Oh joy. Oh rapture. I had to escape before then. As soon as I could think, see, and walk properly.
Alistaire ran his hands over me until I wanted to puke, but stopped when he came to my cell phone. He pulled it out, wiped the screen where my makeup had probably left a smudge, and dialed. I was baffled. First, over the idea that he had any friends to call.
“You have this number now,” he said into the phone. “Call me when you’re ready to make a deal … Pater.”
Okay, cold, I was definitely running cold. Frozen with shock, actually. Was it the Mad Monk he was calling? Of course, it all tied together, the Mad Monk was his sire … but a vampire pater or a human one?
Either way made a stunning kind of sense when I thought about it. Both Raspy and Alistaire had cheated death several times over the course of their lives, Alistaire most recently when his vampire daughter, Bobby’s dam, had tried to take over Alistaire’s territory by killing him off but only managed to twist him into the fine figure of a boogeyman he was today. Maybe it ran in the family. If I remembered rightly, when Rasputin wasn’t advising Russian royalty or messing with magic, he was partying the night away, which usually ended with a partner or two, unless rumors of his affairs were greatly exaggerated. He probably had more offspring than I could shake a stake at. Had they all … been vamped? The very idea was terrifying, way more terrifying than anything ever developed for this haunted house we were in.
Alistaire slammed my phone shut and tossed it onto the counter beside the faux flesh. It made a gruesome still-life. “Don’t move,” he ordered, before leaving the room. Only for a minute, sadly. Not long enough for me to get my muscles to respond and escape. He came back with a roll of duct tape that he used with wild abandon, taping my legs to each other and binding my arms against my sides like some low-end seaweed wrap.
My blood-sweat made the sticky side of the tape gummy almost instantly. I vowed that when I got free, I was going to use up the rest of Alistaire’s nine lives in the most painful way possible.
It was either close to dawn or the garlic poisoning was truly catching up to me. I struggled to keep my eyes open, to find the strength and means to escape, but exhaustion hit me like a two-ton truck, and I slept like the dead.
15
I didn’t wake up so much as come to with a jolt. All around me was darkness. That didn’t mean anything, necessarily. Alistaire had put me in an inner room, but I had a strong suspicion that I’d sweated away the suncreen potion along with the garlic and a good bit of my blood. Lord only knew what had been happening while I was out. At least the other vamps would have been out as well … unless someone had bitten Bobby and gotten enough of his bonus blood into their system. Or … and this was the part I really didn’t want to think about … what if they’d drawn vials of his blood or taken something to study, maybe even learned what went into our enhanced bottles of blood so that they could recreate the special mixture for themselves? I was pretty sure that letting the baddies and state secrets slip through our hands qualified as total mission failure. What if the Feds decided to cut their losses, and us along with them?
I had to get free, find and rescue Bobby, destroy any of his blood Raspy might have managed to draw, and stop whatever plans they had involving my schoolmates and their bizarre behavior.
I struggled against my duct tape bonds, all gummy with the sweat and uck. I thought that if I shimmied just right I ought to be able to get the tape worked up my body and onto my neck and shoulders, freeing my arms to lift it the rest of the way. Alistaire had to be close by, but he must have slept in another room. Maybe I reeked that much. The garlic, not me really, although between the lovely blood sweat, the gummy glue, and last night’s run-in with the rain, I had to be a vision of fugliness. I wondered if I’d have time for a miracle makeover before rescuing Bobby.
But first, someone had to rescue me. As if in answer to my plea, my cell phone rang out some song I didn’t know the Feds had considered sufficiently gothic to preprogram. Then Alistaire entered, with that weird triple-jointed grace he had, and lifted the phone from beside the clumps of faux flesh on the counter. I wondered if he’d even know how to answer it, since he didn’t seem to carry one of his own, but he didn’t have any problem at all.
“Hello.”
I strained my super-vamp senses, which were back, thank goth, now that the garlic had sweated out of my system, stinging my skin but no longer poisoning me from within. Hey, a rhyme. I wondered if Byron would be able to use it in his death poetry. But I was getting distracted.
“Alistaire, what has it been?” I could hear the voice on the other end of the line asking. “A century? More. And yet when we come together again, you steal from me. It is a very poor welcome.” It was that heavily accented voice I now knew to be Russian rather than Transylvanian. Big diff.
“I left Dimitri alive,” Alistaire answered. “A token of good will. But you have something I want. You know how I deal with things that stand in my way.”
Alistaire actually sounded coherent. No pretty, pretty or morsel in his speech. If it hadn’t been for the veiled threats, I’d have been convinced he was a pod person.
“As you are standing in mine.”
“You’ve made it clear enough that I have always been inconvenient,” Alistaire snapped.
Oooh, Alistaire had daddy issues. It all seemed so …
so … Dr. Phil. Jerry Springer. Whatever. There was some majorly rotten fruit on that family tree. I wondered if it was intel I could use.
The man on the other end of the phone—Raspy—sighed. “I’m too busy for your games. What is it you want?”
Alistaire was silent, making him wait for an answer, taking some of that time Raspy didn’t have. It was a total power trip.
“I won’t give you the formula,” Raspy said quietly, as if Alistaire had asked.
I was no brain surgeon, but even I knew saying that was stupid. It told Alistaire exactly what Raspy most wanted to protect and gave his enemy the upper hand. Then I realized something else … Alistaire made his own pater nervous. His own infamous, I-can-hardly-believe-he’s-not-deader dad was babbling like a late prom date.
“I want the boy,” Alistaire said, which made my heart clench. He couldn’t get his hands on Bobby. I wouldn’t allow it.
“Impossible,” Raspy answered. “The council has already sent someone to collect him and bring my reward. If you bring the girl to me, I will cut you in on it. I know you don’t want to deal with the council yourself.”
Ah, so sonny boy wasn’t the only one who could make veiled threats.
“You’ve never had any idea what I want. It’s not your formula, Pater, or the money. I’ve never cared for your petty games with the mewling monkeys. I hunt higher on the food chain.”
Raspy was silent at that, and I wondered what was going through his head. Schemes, no doubt. But then he said, too quickly, “Very well. You can have the boy with my blessing, though I can’t speak for the council. In return, you will leave town immediately. Without first interfering in any of my plans. You will not visit the high school or harass any of my minions on the way out of town. I will know if you lie.”
Wow, you’d have thought he was a lawyer, closing up all those loopholes. I held breath I didn’t need, waiting to see what Alistaire would say.
“Once I have the boy, I have no reason to stay. Or interfere,” Alistaire answered. “But in return, you will not stop us from leaving. You will not act against us in any way.”
“This time,” Raspy agreed. “When next we meet—”
“To the death,” Alistaire said.
“Da. Yours. I will send instructions.”
With no good-bye that I could hear, he was gone. There was silence for a good second or two. I debated leaving it that way, but in the end, it was just too much for me to keep my mouth shut.
“You don’t trust him, do you? Besides his word—and, hello, bad guy here—what’s to stop him from setting up an ambush and taking me away instead of giving up Bobby?”
Sure, at least Bobby and I would be together again, but it kinda seemed like a frying pan/fire situation. I didn’t imagine we’d live long enough to enjoy it.
Alistaire cocked his head, birdlike, to look at me as if I were a worm he’d seen out of the corner of his eye, who he didn’t want to startle before he swooped in for the kill.
“There is nothing to stop him. And no, morsel, I am not so foolish as to trust. You will have to decide whose side you will fight on. Mine? I am after you and your boy only. I will have to free you to help me. You will both have your powers and your chance of escape. I have no interest in enslaving your friends, controlling those over whom I am already master. Pater … Father,” he said, with an inhuman twist of his lips, “has ever wanted to play shepherd and lead the sheep to the slaughter.”
“How do you know I won’t run?” I asked stupidly.
“How do you know I won’t look forward to the chase?” He licked his lips. “So, morsel, will you deal with the devil? Will you sacrifice yourself for the sheep?”
He was a madman. Not that I hadn’t known it before, but to ask me to fight at his side for the privilege of remaining his prey … insane. On top of that, you totally didn’t ask a fashionista about sacrifice. When I’d lived and breathed, every time I walked by a Starbucks without turning in, every time I ordered my mochachino with two pumps not three, no whip, and fat free milk, I was making a sacrifice. Every time my parents cut up my credit cards for going over the limit … I knew pain and sacrifice.
Besides, my choice was none at all. Say “no” and stay behind, or say “yes” and chance saving the day: rescuing Bobby, stopping the plot that put my peeps in danger. Ulric, Lily, Gavin, Byron, and Bram … they’d gotten under my skin. And even if they hadn’t, the villainous vamps weren’t likely to stop there. Today Wappingers Falls, tomorrow the world. Easier to stop them sooner rather than later—simple logic and laziness, really. Which meant that for now, the enemy of my enemy was my friend.
The promised instructions came after five agonizing minutes, during which Alistaire didn’t bother to ask about my decision. Being psychic and all, he probably already knew. I hated that. Whatever vision he’d seen must have worked out in his favor or he wouldn’t have been so smug. But I was chaos. He’d said so himself not so long ago. I just had to find a way to bust destiny’s groove.
“An abandoned warehouse,” Alistaire said, staring at the text message on my cell. “How … inventive.”
“You can’t seriously be planning to show. He’s got minions. You’ve got … me.”
“Don’t underestimate yourself, my dear,” Alistaire answered. I wondered if that meant I’d been upgraded from “morsel.” “He will be expecting a captive, not a consort.”
“Oh, I am so not your consort.”
He only smiled in that chilling, psycho-killer way of his.
“I’ll drop you off before we get there and go in alone. You’ll follow and surprise anyone who closes in behind me. Try to stay on the periphery if you can, and get your boy out of it if opportunity strikes. If you are within Rasputin’s range, your powers won’t work. He’ll be able to control you.”
“Is that what’s going on with Bobby’s powers? Rasputin somehow cancels him out?”
I suddenly wondered if my resistance was more of a genetic thing than a special me thing, like my green eyes and fashion sense. If Alistaire was planning to face down Raspy, he had to be counting on some resistance of his own. But if our resistance was inherited, it had skipped Bobby and all his vampire siblings. Okay then, maybe I was still special. Whew, crisis averted.
“Rasputin is a power vampire. Even before he came to the blood, it was power that sustained him. Energy.”
Like in the ley lines, I thought. If he was feeding from them, it was no wonder the Feds had noticed fluctuations. Dips as he fed, spikes as the energy renewed itself afterward.
“Don’t worry, he’s all yours,” I promised.
“Do you drive?” Alistaire asked.
“Do you?”
“How do you think I got here?”
“Grew wings and flew,” I answered flippantly.
Alistaire looked at me as though he could look inside. “Is that what you’d do?”
I blinked. Was that even possible? “Let’s say yes. How would I go about that, again?”
The psycho-psychic laughed, and I imagined dogs the neighborhood over trying to bury their heads in their paws to tune him out. “I jest,” he finally said. “Even the great Rasputin can no more than levitate.” Good to know. “Of course, he cannot walk in the daylight as you can … yet.”
Yeah, we totally had to get Bobby away from him. Then away from Alistaire. Then … okay, one thing at a time.
“My car is out back,” he said.
His car, as it turned out, had been someone else’s first, someone who was, in fact, still in possession of it … in a sense anyway. I heard a faint moaning as we approached the car. Alistaire escorted me by the arm, partly to keep control of me and partly, I thought, to keep me upright after all the blood I’d lost with the garlic. The moaning sound stopped when we got close.
I looked at Alistaire, who smiled, revealing more than the normal vampiric number of pointy teeth. “A little something for the road,” he said. “Please, help yourself.”
Sloppy seconds. My lips peeled back in distaste even as my eyeteeth grew in anticipation. “I couldn’t.”
“You mistake this for a suggestion. I need you in top shape. You will feed, or I will slit his wrists and feed him to you. That is your only choice.”
He opened the door for me and thrust me in. My gaze caught on the body in the back seat, nearly hidden under a dark blanket except for the face, which was turned toward me, eyes wide and staring, as if the man was in shock. That might very well have been the case. I couldn’t really take the moral high ground about feeding from the vein after I’d gone all fangtastic on Ulric, but if Alistaire had already been feeding, I wasn’t sure how much more this guy had to give.
Alistaire enjoyed my dilemma—I could tell by the smirk on his face as he got behind the wheel. Driving looked way weird on him, just like my cell phone had. “Eat,” he ordered.
I considered the greater good—saving Bobby, stopp
ing the Mad Monk from mind-messing with my friends, finding the strength to fight Alistaire himself when the time came. I wanted to think it was that which drove me to it, not the low tones of the man’s heartbeat, pumping all that glorious blood. I’m almost sure it was the greater good.
Before he could flinch, before he could soil himself with fearful anticipation, I swiveled in my seat, reached back over the center console, and grabbed him by the blanket, scrabbling for the right hold to bring him to me. His eyes barely widened before I bit down on his neck and sweet, hot life flowed into my mouth. I gulped it down as quickly as it flooded in, lost in the sensation until the flood began to ease, and I realized the heartbeat within the folds of the blanket had gone thready. Barely there.
In horror, I tore myself away from the man—the nameless man I’d nearly killed, and might yet if that heartbeat didn’t steady.
Alistaire laughed. “Saving me the leftovers, morsel? Think that alone will slake my thirst?”
I didn’t answer, concentrating instead on listening for the heartbeat all the way to the warehouse, ignoring the stolen strength that rushed through me.
“It should be another two blocks ahead, on the left,” Alistaire said, the good cheer gone and his high voice making him sound like a ventriloquist’s dummy on speed. Dummies had always freaked me out.
He’d no sooner finished speaking than he reached over, grabbed the door release on my side with one hand, and pushed me out with the other. The car swerved, and I went flying into a ditch on the side of the road, cursing him the whole way. I guessed I was supposed to look like somebody he’d disposed of, like the man I’d drained nearly to death.
Oh, the psycho-psychic was going down … hard.
My jeans were totally shredded up the side in a way that some people paid big bucks for, but then, so was the skin beneath, in a way people paid plastic surgeons bigger bucks to fix. Luckily, my vampitude would take care of it, if I lived that long. I pulled myself to sitting so I could survey the area, playing up the pain and injury for all I was worth in case there were any witnesses. It was an Oscar-winning performance, but if anyone was watching they didn’t bother to applaud, let alone throw flowers.
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