by L. E. Wilson
“More,” he rasped out.
“I don’t have any more, but I’ll get you some at next meal,” she promised. “Just hang in there, big guy.”
Luukas could feel his body continuing to heal, not much, but just enough to close the worst of his wounds. It wouldn’t last long, he knew. That sniveling little pet of Leeha’s would be back soon to add some more. He never stayed away for long.
The angel was talking again. He focused on her words. She was insisting she’d bring more, that it wouldn’t be long.
He calmed as he listened to her, opening his eyes to find her watching him guardedly.
“Why are they doing this to me?” He sounded pitiful even to himself, and he looked away from her, ashamed for the angel to see him like this.
She lowered her hand, and he felt the force that held him gradually ease up until he was free to move again.
Ah, yes. Not an angel. No, she was a fucking witch.
His eyes burned with hatred as he glared at her.
“Why are you helping them?” he gritted through his teeth before she could answer.
She turned away from him and his anger, taking the empty blood bag over to the corner she normally huddled in. Squatting down, she used her fingers to dig down into the dirt floor. When the hole was deep enough, she crumpled the bag and placed it inside, scooping the loose dirt back over the top, burying it. Once she was done, she stood and scuffed the top of it with her shoe, then walked over it a few times, until there was no sign that the earth had been disturbed there.
He watched her while she hid the evidence, his brows pulled down in puzzlement. He was so confused. Why was she helping him now?
“I don’t understand. Please," he begged, “Please, talk to me.”
When she finally turned back to him, her large eyes were brimming with tears.
“Listen to me," she implored him. "I don’t want to do this! I don’t want to help her hurt you! But I have no choice!” Her voice shook with emotion. “I can’t stand what that bitch does to you, what she’s been doing to you all these years, but there’s nothing I can do about it. At least not yet.”
“Years…" he repeated. "How long have I been here?” he asked.
She gave him a sad smile. “A long time.”
He tried to gather his scattered wits together into coherent thoughts, tried to think of the questions he wanted to ask, but they stayed just out of his grasp. He felt as if he was losing his sanity, and it terrified him.
The angel/witch appeared in front of him. “Shhhh. It’s alright, vampire. It will be all right. Sleep now.”
She raised her hand, and he felt the weight of his body ease up, providing welcome relief to his mangled shoulders. He groaned aloud at the respite, his head falling forward with exhaustion as he let the blackness take him again.
Chapter 5
Shea
Shea screamed in agony as the hands wrapped around her wrists and ankles and tossed her into the back of a van, where more hands joined them to hold her down as the vehicle took off. She was thrown to and fro as the van veered around a corner, but the hands held her in place.
Their touch caused excruciating pain to shoot through every nerve in her body, blasting down her spine and out her limbs. Her arms and legs flopped around like a fish, in spite of the strength of the vampires restraining her. She had no control over her body anymore.
Mindlessly, she screamed with the pain.
A hand smacked down hard over her mouth to shut her up. Shea convulsed harder, her eyes rolling back into her head, her fangs slicing into the male’s palm. She couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe.
“What the fuck is with her?” A wheezy voice asked.
“Who the hell knows?” The answering voice was gruff. “Let’s just get her to the boss lady. She can deal with her.”
What felt like an eternity later, tires squealed, and the smell of burning rubber rose up from the pavement as the back doors of the van were flung open wide. Shea was lifted out of the van and hustled up a set of stairs.
At least the hand was off of her mouth now so she could scream again.
“Shut the door! Shut the door! Let’s go!”
She was dropped onto a hard floor, and the hands were removed. Oh, sweet relief.
Shea sucked in air as she blinked open her eyes. Lights flickered above her head. The floor vibrated, and she felt wheels rolling underneath her again. They were moving.
A disembodied voice came over the speakers. “We’re cleared for takeoff. Everybody sit down and buckle up.”
Shea rolled her head to her right and then to her left, breathing hard, getting a feel for where she was. She was lying in the middle aisle of a small airplane.
“Should we buckle her up?” Wheezy asked.
“Nah, fuck ‘er. Let ‘er bounce around in the turbulence. Maybe it’ll knock ‘er the hell out, and she’ll quit with all the caterwauling.”
Wannabe gangster dude appeared to be the leader of her group of kidnappers.
She wondered if they also had Christian and Dante, Luukas' other two Hunters. She’d been looking for them when she’d been swiped right off of the street in front of their apartments, right before they were to leave to go meet Nikulas and Aiden.
She should’ve called Aiden, told him what was going on, before she just ran out looking for them.
Stupid, stupid! They’ll have no idea what happened to the three Hunters who were supposed to meet them up north and help them get Luukas away from that bitch, Leeha.
A nervous voice from the front of the plane spoke up, “She’s a Hunter, man. We should chain her up.”
“Doesn’t look like she’s gonna be huntin’ nothin’ at the moment.”
“But what if it’s a trick?” the nervous one asked.
A swift kick landed in her ribcage, knocking the air out of her. Shea curled in on herself, moaning, pulling her knees up to protect her middle.
“It ain’t a trick. Relax, idiot.”
Conversation stopped as the plane hurtled down the runway. A few seconds later, Shea’s stomach lurched as they became airborne.
“Where are you taking me?” she demanded weakly.
“She speaks, instead of screaming,” Gangster wannabe-man announced. “Don’t worry, honey. You’ll find out soon enough.”
Shea flopped over onto her back. Her body felt like it’d been through an electrocution. Maybe it had. She’d never been able to find out why the hell she’d started reacting this way whenever a male touched her, but it had started right after Luukas had disappeared.
If it would keep their hands off of her, she’d be more than happy to lay here and not cause any trouble. Besides, where would she go? Even if she somehow managed to subdue them all, she’d be stuck on this plane until it landed. She didn’t know how to fly a plane, so she’d have to leave the pilot alive. That would be a sticky situation.
No, better to wait until they landed and she could regain her strength and find a weapon. Until then, she could play the weak, subdued female.
The flight was short, with relatively little turbulence, and they were landing again much sooner than Shea would’ve liked. She wished she’d had more time to recover, but she'd have to make do. She’d never had so many men touch her at once, or had a reaction this strong; it’d completely incapacitated her. And for a vampire, that was really saying something.
She pushed herself up into a sitting position as the four vampires who’d kidnapped her right off of the streets of Seattle unbuckled their seatbelts and prepared to disembark.
“Stay right where ya are, honey,” Gangster-dude told her. “Skip, go get the chains from the front there.”
The whiney one scurried to the front of the plane to do as he was told, returning with an armful of chains with cuffs on the ends. The big one grabbed her around the arm, and she let out a grunt of pain as he yanked her to her feet. As soon as she was steady, she tore her arm from his grasp.
“Don’t. Touch. Me.” she hissed at him.
He eyeballed her, a thoughtful expression on his bulbous features. “I’ll tell ya what, girlie. You come along nice with us, and we won’t touch you. But you try anything, and you’ll be at the bottom of a man-pile again before you can blink, and I don’t care how much ya scream. Got it?”
“Yeah, I got it.” She held out her wrists like a good girl, and Gangster-dude clamped the cuffs on them, smirking when his fingers brushed her skin and she winced. He then took the other chain from Whiney and clamped those cuffs onto her ankles.
Dammit. They were silver. Not as lethal to vampires as the movies made it out to be, but not good either. Something about the metal weakened a vampire enough to where she actually began to worry about whether or not she’d be able to get herself out of this mess.
With Gangster-dude and Whiney leading the way, she shuffled off of the plane restrained by her chains, the other two big and silent types bringing up the rear.
They loaded her up into the bed of a pickup truck. Gangster-dude and Whiney got in the front, while the other two big talkers hopped into the back with her. Sitting up on the sides of the bed, they watched her with exposed fangs, paying particular attention to the dangerous area of her boobs as they bounced along the rutted roads. She glared back at them, but they weren't to be deterred.
They obviously took their jobs of prisoner-watcher very seriously.
After a while, Shea gave up and let them stare as she watched the scenery go by through the misty rain, and tried to figure out where she was. If the snow-capped mountains were any indicator, they had flown north. They must be in Canada, and she was pretty sure she knew where they were taking her now.
They’d driven for about forty minutes when they pulled off of the main road onto a barely-there sidetrack. Bumping along on the dirt road, Shea gripped the side to keep herself from bouncing out of the truck bed.
Ten minutes later, they pulled up outside of an old barn that appeared to be on the verge of collapse. About half of the roof was lying on the floor towards the back, and as they entered the debilitated building, an owl flew gracefully down from the rafters, swooped out the hole in the roof, and into the night.
Gangster-dude shoved her down into a corner. “Sit. We’re just gonna hang out here for a bit until we get the OK to bring you to Leeha.”
“So you are Leeha’s bitches.” Shea sank to the rotted, wooden floor gratefully.
Gangster-dude squatted down in front of her. “That deal we made includes keeping that smart mouth shut. You wouldn’t want me to have to keep a hand over it to shut ya up, now would ya?”
Shea gave him a stony stare, and wisely kept her mouth shut.
“Yeah, I didn’t think so.” With a snort, he stood and hitched up his jeans, then walked over to join the rest of his crew.
Shea settled back against the wall behind her with a sigh. Looking out the hole in the roof, she tried to determine how long they had until dawn. They’d all be huddled in the corner if they didn’t hear from Leeha before the sun came up.
***
Three hours passed since Shea had been grabbed off the street and shuttled up to Canada, and they were still waiting it out in the barn. All four of her captors kept eyeing the sky with trepidation, worried about the oncoming dawn.
Really, couldn’t they have found a nice cave or something to hang out in? Idiots.
She was beginning to wonder if they were ever going to get that call when Gangster-dude’s phone went off.
“Mistress! Oh, Josiah. Yes, we have her. Yes.” He was silent for a few minutes, his eyes growing wide as he listened and he looked at the others with alarm. “Yes. Right away. We’re coming.” Hanging up, he ordered the others to prepare to leave.
“Let’s go, honey.” Grabbing her arm, he pulled Shea to her feet, and gave her a push to get her moving.
“Let’s go!” he yelled to the others. “We gotta go. We gotta go right now.”
Hustling them all out the door, they loaded back up into the pickup and took off, back out to the main road.
“What’s going on?” Whiney asked him from the passenger seat.
Shea scooted back in the truck bed until she was up against the back windshield, turning her head to listen through the glass.
“There’s other vamps in the area. Leeha wants us to get back to the mountain pronto, and hide this one so they don’t see her.”
“What vamps?”
“Luukas’ brother, and another Hunter. They’ve got a human girl with them too.”
Nikulas! And Aiden! And they must’ve found Emma.
Shea smiled with glee at the two thugs occupying the back with her again. They didn’t notice. Their eyes were trained on her cleavage, amply displayed by her low-cut cotton shirt. One of them kept running his tongue over the tip of his fang.
Perv.
Shea rolled her eyes. Honestly, not to brag or anything, but she was used to it. Men usually found her hard to resist for some reason, women too actually. She was always getting hit on with cheesy pick-up lines, usually something about her mossy-green eyes being hypnotizing, her pale skin flawless, her dark, wavy hair luxurious…blah, blah, blah.
One guy had even asked to paint her.
Right now, the only thing her “luxurious” hair was doing was blowing into her face so she couldn’t see. Lifting her chained hands, she pushed it out of her face, ignoring the two idiots with the staring problems.
Let them look. It might be the last chance they’d ever get.
She watched the scenery pass by. It was dark, and there wasn’t much of a moon to light the way, but she could see just fine. Before long, she started recognizing the mountain range they were approaching.
They were heading straight towards Leeha’s fortress, which meant Nik and Aiden were most likely in their secret hideout, scoping things out. She could only pray that they were out watching and would see her.
They didn’t pull up to the front, but circumvented the base of the snow-capped peak to head around to the hidden side entrance. The truck skidded to a stop amongst the pine trees, the vampires jumping out before the engine was turned off.
Shea stood up and leapt over the side also, not waiting for anyone to “assist” her.
Once inside, they took a sharp right, and walked single-file through a narrow tunnel.
One of her watchdogs hesitated, “We’re not going to see the mistress?”
“No,” Wannabe gangster-man told him. “I was ordered to take her straight to the altar room.”
“We’re going to the altar room?” Whiney sounded even whinier than usual.
“That’s what I was told.”
Wow. Even gangster-dude didn’t sound like his usual macho self. What the hell was in this altar room?
“What’s in the altar room? Besides an altar, I assume,” Shea asked.
Whiney, who was directly in front of her, glanced back over his shoulder with worried eyes, but didn’t deign to answer her.
This couldn’t be good.
Other than the clanking of Shea’s chains, they traversed the tunnels in relative silence, turning down so many different side passageways, Shea knew she’d never find her way back out of there. The place was like a creepy garden maze gone awry, and the air became colder and mustier as they descended further and further into the bowels of the mountain.
She was nearly convinced they were just going to keep walking straight down into the Christian’s Hell when the tunnel they were in finally ended, opening into a spacious room lit with the flickering firelight of numerous torches hung at intervals along the walls. And right smack in the middle was, you guessed it, an altar.
It was large and made completely of stone, unadorned except for a brownish stain coloring the flat surface, with streaks of that same color running in rivulets down the sides.
She stopped just inside the doorway, not wanting to go any further inside. An evil presence suffused this room, floating through the air like an invisible fog. It was so heavy, she could practically
taste it on the back of her tongue.
The altar caught her attention again, as it was the only thing in the room, and she looked closer, trying to decipher what it was used for. Then she realized what the stain was; it was blood. That slab of rock was a sacrificial altar.
Not good.
“What is this place?” she whispered urgently to Gangster-dude.
He smiled at her, some of his old macho charm showing, “It’s Hell, girlie.”
One of the others snickered nervously behind her.
Shea’s heart began to pound rapidly as the adrenaline kicked in. She pulled on her chains, hard, testing their strength. Sweat beaded on her forehead when she realized there would be no escaping them, at least not easily.
They waited, the silence deafening in her ears, until she thought she would scream if something didn’t happen. Long, tense minutes later, they heard sure and steady footsteps echoing from another tunnel entrance on the opposite side of the altar.
Shea held her breath, as did her escorts.
The footsteps grew louder. Whoever was coming was not making any effort to hide their presence.
Right before they got to the room, the footsteps stuttered and paused momentarily, and then picked up again, stronger than before.
Why the pause? Or had she only imagined it?
She didn’t have any more time to think about it before their owner strode into the room.
Her first impression was of a large raven, perched on a man’s broad, cloaked shoulder. It tilted its head, curious, taking them all in with one beaded eye. A black hood covered the man’s head and half of his face; pulled down low so nothing was visible except his lean, clean-shaven jaw. His hands were tucked inside the wide sleeves, and the material fell all the way down to his feet, which were cased in black boots with treaded soles.
He came to an abrupt halt just inside the room, remaining on the opposite side of the altar from them.
“Who is this?” he demanded.
His voice was deep, and although soft-spoken, it had a strong timbre to it.
