by Jess Haines
I rolled my eyes, tone gone dry. “How sweet, I didn’t know you cared.”
After setting him down by the top of the stairs, where he would have a clear view of both the hallway and the blood-spattered stairwell, I made my way down. I took it slow, fighting a growing sense of terror and claustrophobia. The last time I was down here, Max had kept me locked up in a tiny room, telling me I was nothing but a piece of property to be used or discarded on a whim. The vampires who had participated in his slave auction had been down here, every bit as ancient and formidable as Max. Some of them might have hung around, and I had no doubt I would be dead long before Gideon or anyone else could help me if they were waiting in the dark.
Still, there were other people trapped in the rooms below. Even if I didn’t have the advantage of claws and fangs and supernatural strength anymore, I had to do something to help them.
Telling myself that wasn’t making it any easier to take each successive step. Neither was the blood on the walls.
When I rounded the bend and could see down the corridor, I grimaced. The beautiful gold inlay in the hardwood was lost under a sea of red. There were bodies in the hall, not all of them in one piece. People-sized holes had been made in walls and doors, the smell of death and piss and desperation an overwhelming, smothering blanket. Every door was open, most of the rooms dark.
I’m not sure how long I stood there, but voices at the end of the hall, from the room with the statues, drew me forward. Beating down the growing sense of panic, I picked a long, sharp sliver of wood, which might once have been part of a door, out of the red muck, and stalked toward the rectangle of light at the far end.
Once I reached the doorway, I sagged in relief and dropped my gore-covered, makeshift weapon with a clatter. Arnold looked up from where he was wrapping a bandage around someone’s leg, and Sara rose from comforting a pale, shaking woman to wrap me in a fierce hug. Returning the gesture, I peered over her shoulder, taking stock of the survivors.
There were only two vampires standing, both looking distant and pale. I wasn’t totally thrilled that Fane was one of them. Kimberly was crouched by one of the statues, her head bowed and arms wrapped around her knees. Over a dozen people in shredded, red-spattered white robes huddled together, including an elf with a black eye and some kind of Other with patches of tawny fur that kept sprouting and disappearing on various parts of his body as I watched.
“Is everyone okay?”
Sara briefly tightened her grip, then pulled back and shook her head. She was a bit shaky, and there were a few tight lines of pain around her eyes, but there was a hard edge to her voice that spoke of her determination and courage.
“Max killed half our people before he rushed off. We’ve been patching up the survivors. Where did you go? Where’s Gideon and that woman?”
“Gideon’s waiting upstairs.” I moved inside, addressing everybody this time. “Max is dead. We need to get out of here. Come with us, we’ll help you.”
Most of them looked up at me, even Kimberly. A few huddled deeper into themselves, and one or two of the people in robes started sobbing in relief. I shifted in place, uncomfortable with the wave of thanks and grateful hugs and touches some of them gave me as they worked up the courage to approach.
One of them jabbered something in a language I didn’t recognize. German, maybe? She sounded scared and a little angry, but I wasn’t sure how to respond. Neither was anyone else, judging by the blank looks all around. She complied when the others gestured for her to follow us out, even though she was obviously wary and kept as much distance between herself and the vampires as possible.
I led the way back up, Fane making his way to the front of the crowd to walk beside me. His sharp features had gone stony and drawn, and he didn’t say anything, though he radiated tension. Whether from the battle or fear or hunger or something else, I couldn’t tell.
When we rounded the stairs, Gideon braced himself against the wall and struggled to his feet, relief etched across his face. The vampire stilled beside me, then was nothing but a blur.
Half a second later, he was holding the necromancer against the wall by the throat and the wrist of his tattooed hand.
“Fane, don’t!”
The vampire’s fangs were bared, eyes gleaming crimson as he hissed up at the squirming mage, whose face was going purple from lack of air. “You have no idea what this is. It can’t be suffered to live.”
I pounded up the stairs after him, tackling him around the waist before he could choke the life out of Gideon. The three of us fell with a heavy thump outside the hole in the wall. Something sharp sliced across my upper arm as we fell, and I was pretty sure the other two hadn’t made it through unscathed, but it had the desired effect of startling Fane into letting the necromancer go.
Gideon clawed at the runner, trying to drag himself out from under us, but all he managed to do was pull the strip of carpet closer. The vampire snarled and struggled to grab at the necromancer again, but I straddled his back, putting all my weight into him, and whacked him as hard as I could on the back of the head.
“Leave him alone! He’s not a danger to you!”
“Like hell,” Gideon panted, then yelped as the vampire’s hand came down on his shoulder. The yelp quickly turned into an agonized shriek as Fane’s fingers bit into his skin, sinking deep into the muscle.
Somewhere on the stairwell, Sara gave an answering cry of pain.
I didn’t have the strength to pull Fane back, and he was still hell-bent on the kill. I did the only thing I could think of.
“For fuck’s sake, somebody help us! Get him off!”
The Other with the fur was the only one who bothered to help. He rushed forward, baring a mouthful of fangs at Fane as the vampire fought to keep his grip on the necromancer. Fingers tipped with wickedly curved black talons closed around Fane’s wrist, dislodging his grip with a sickening sucking sound from Gideon’s shoulder.
I traded places with the Were or whatever he was. The guy did a much better job than I had at keeping Fane pinned. The vampire stared at Gideon’s limp frame with raw lust in his eyes, but stopped fighting to reach for him when he realized he was at a disadvantage.
Shuffling forward on hands and knees, I gingerly touched Gideon’s back, relieved when he cursed and flailed. He couldn’t be too badly hurt if he was still fighting. “Stop that, I’m checking the wound.”
“Son of a motherfucking whoremaster, that hurts,” Gideon replied, and with feeling.
Yeah. He would be just fine.
Arnold shouted my name. I gritted my teeth and gave Gideon a light smack on the small of his back, far from the seeping divots in his shoulder. He flinched anyway. “Don’t move. I’ll see what Arnold needs. Maybe he can do something about that.”
He cursed at me again, and I managed a weak grin, relieved. Except when I turned around, the other vampire had Sara in his arms, Arnold holding her hand. She had gone paler than before, pain twisting her features into an unrecognizable mask. With a gasp, I dashed to her side, putting a hand to her cheek.
Her skin was cold, and there was a faint, reddish light glowing on her arms in the shape of the runes that Gideon had supposedly removed. Even as I watched, they faded away, leaving her arms unblemished. I whirled, only to see he was sitting up, rubbing his bad shoulder with an apologetic expression.
“Sorry. I tried not to,” he said.
Arnold made an inarticulate sound in his throat, his free hand lifting like he was thinking about hurling some kind of magic—but held back only by the thought of what it might do to Sara. His fist clenched, tightening until his knuckles cracked. Gideon had the grace to redden.
“I’m sorry, I can’t undo it. The siphon or the bond. The minute I do, I’m a dead man. Don’t deny it. I see it in your eyes.”
Arnold gave him a grim, humorless smile, all teeth. “You’re already dead. The minute I figure out how to fix this, I’ll hunt you down and end you.”
I stepped between them, hand
s up, though I was suppressing the umpteenth urge to throttle Gideon myself. “Look, we need to keep him safe for now, and he needs to come with us back to New York. We’ll figure out a way to undo it and keep everyone alive and well in the process, got it?”
Gideon gave me a tentative nod, but Arnold didn’t answer. I turned my attention to the mage, giving him a significant look, one eyebrow arching. His glare shifted from Gideon to me, lights flickering in his green eyes like lightning flashes in a thundercloud.
It was the first time I ever felt anything close to genuine fear of Arnold.
His stare stayed on me for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then he turned away without answering to focus on Sara, whispering something to her too softly for me to hear.
It wasn’t a promise not to hurt Gideon once the spell binding Sara to him was broken, but for now it would have to do.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Collecting the remaining survivors and finding Soo-Jin, Angus, and the others didn’t take long. The vampire who had been holding Sara handed her off to Arnold before rushing off at inhuman speed to track the rest of our party down and bring them to us. Fane, after promising not to attack first and ask questions later, was released. He made a point of sucking the blood off his fingertips, staring at the necromancer in a meaningful way as he did it. The perv.
Arnold and Sara weren’t speaking to me, even though she had for the most part recovered. Gideon had shuffled off as far from everyone else as he could get while remaining in the same room.
It was uncomfortable as hell, made worse when Angus and Soo-Jin returned with the others and gave me the kind of soul-chilling, disapproving looks I thought no one but my mother could pull off. Maybe the case of the shivers they gave me was because the capital “L” Looks I was getting were coming from an angry, ancient vampire and a nine-tailed fox-demon. They didn’t have to say a thing to make me feel like a heel. Considering I already did, all they accomplished with their unspoken condemnation was making my embarrassment deepen once I got over the urge to pee myself.
Rather than look either of the two in the eyes, I took stock of who was with them, searching for familiar faces. Max had moved his harem of unwilling donors to the same cages Sara and Iana had been in, which meant that the women I had shared a prison with should have been among the humans being ushered along by the surviving vampires. All of the mortals were terrified, eyes wide, limbs trembling, clinging to each other for comfort. One of them looked relieved when she spotted me, but the rest were far too scared of Soo-Jin and the vampires still sporting fangs and glowing eyes to relax.
There were a couple of familiar faces, but not enough. Not nearly enough.
We hadn’t lost as many of our number who had been with Angus, but I had to fight not to shed more tears when I saw how few of the people I knew from my imprisonment returned with them. Vivian and Na’man were not among them.
There might have been other places where they were hidden, someplace I hadn’t seen, but I knew Max too well to be hopeful we’d find any other survivors.
Angus led us out, some of the vampires carrying the weakest and injured back to the cars, and the rest making sure the scared senseless ones didn’t run off. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but the shielding the magi had summoned was gone when we made it outside.
Moments after we hit the snow-covered lawn, the guy who kept sprouting bits of hair had shapeshifted into some kind of big cat and darted away from the rest of the group. Not to leave us, but to get some distance. I guessed it might be because the overwhelming scent of blood and fear from the clump of now screaming, panicking humans was tweaking his instincts to hunt and kill. Without my night vision, I couldn’t tell if it was a puma or jaguar or what, but he was looking to me, Angus, and Soo-Jin for direction.
It took more time than I wanted to think about to calm people down. The Were had to lie down in the snow and let one of the vampires pat his head—though the cat lifted his lip to show just a bit of fang to express his disdain—for them to believe he wasn’t about to maul anybody.
The robe-clad former slaves had no fur of their own, let alone coats or shoes to protect them from the cold. They huddled together, some still crying, but none voicing a word of complaint.
Freedom probably tasted as sweet to them as it had to me when I had fled this madhouse. A bit of momentary physical discomfort paled in comparison to the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in servitude. Well, unless they thought we were taking them from one bad situation to a worse one. If that was the case then the lack of bitching on their end could be due to being afraid of being eaten.
Then Kimberly pulled a surprise out of her hat I wasn’t expecting. Though shaky and pale, she still had some spark left. With a gesture, and a look of fierce concentration focused on each inadequately dressed human in turn, she did something that brought looks of wonder to their faces and stopped their shivering.
I wasn’t sure what she had done until she turned to the elf. He frowned and shook his head, his dark hair sliding like silk around his face and brushing his shoulders. His voice was just as buttery smooth and enchanting as Royce’s, and I’ll admit I might have sidled a few steps closer just to hear him better. “I have no need of your illusions, mage.”
Illusion. She made those people feel warm. They’d still get frostbite if they were out here too long, but it was one hell of a kindness to take the time and effort to block out the bite of cold on their feet and icy wind chilling their skin. Probably went a long way toward making them realize we weren’t here to deliver them to a worse fate than they’d already suffered. It appeared to be more effective proof that nobody here intended to take a chomp out of them, too.
Despite my initial misgivings about Kimberly, I was coming to like the girl.
The magi who had been maintaining the shield were waiting for us by the wall, shivering and clustered together for warmth. Even though they had smudges under their eyes and some were exhausted enough to lean against each other for support, they all appeared to be unharmed and relieved to see us. Most of them viewed Gideon with naked curiosity and maybe a bit of fear once they noticed him limping along at my side.
Soo-Jin shifted back into her human form, giving no sign of discomfort from cold or the stares she was getting, first for the change, then for being buck naked in the snow. There was an intricate tattoo on her back of what she looked like as her other self, similar to one of the paintings I had seen in her house. She dug an extra set of clothes out of a duffel bag in the backseat, dressed like she had all the time in the world, then donned a pair of sparkly pink Adidas sneakers and got behind the wheel.
Mental note: Figure out how to introduce this woman to a new color scheme.
Fitting everyone into the cars was a challenge, but we managed, albeit with a few people sitting on laps or riding in the beds of the SUVs. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near Gideon, so he ended up riding with me, Angus, and Soo-Jin, with the big cat sprawled in the flatbed of the pickup. Now that the Were was close enough, I could see by the glow of the headlights from one of the other cars that his cat-form was a cougar, all tawny fur and sleek lines. He stayed low in the bed of the truck so no random passerby might see him, but I doubted it would be a comfortable ride.
My first encounter with an honest-to-God Were-cat, and I was too tired and hurting too much to give a shit.
Angus said nothing during the interminable ride, but the way he watched the necromancer made it clear that if he so much as twitched in a way the Highlander didn’t like, he would suffer for it. Gideon had deep circles under his eyes and kept uncharacteristically quiet, but he stayed awake and behaved himself the whole way.
We went back to Soo-Jin’s place. Our little caravan made it back with plenty of time to spare before sunrise, but exhaustion drove everyone—vampires included—to seek quick showers and a place to collapse.
After everyone was settled in and showered, some of the vampires went around to each of the rescued humans, using black
enchants to put them to sleep. Considering how scared and lost most of them looked, for once I didn’t think that was such a bad idea. Judging by all the hollow eyes and shaking limbs, they might never have gotten a good night’s rest otherwise. That, or they might have made attempts to run off on their own, much like I had after snapping out of the blood-fueled haze I had been in after being bound to Max and Royce. The enchants would keep them in a dreamless state, free of nightmares, if only for tonight.
I wished I could have said the same for myself.
None of the vampires or magi would abide having Gideon stay near them, and Soo-Jin was still worried Fane would try to make a move even though Iana had cured me. After getting everyone else settled, she led me and Gideon into her bedroom—but she drew the line at letting the big cat padding after us inside. He made a grumbling, growling-type sound of complaint before curling up in the hallway right outside the door. That settled, she made me shower first, then Gideon, lending us both some bathrobes before she took her own turn.
As soon as she stepped out, a big towel wrapped around her slim frame and a smaller one scrubbing the remaining moisture from her hair, she paused in the doorway and her nose wrinkled in disgust.
She made Gideon take a second shower before she’d let him sleep in her room with us. On his way in, I got a good gander at the bottom of his toned, bare ass hanging out of the too-short, fuzzy pink bathrobe Soo-Jin had given him.
Once he came back out, she also made him spritz himself with half a bottle of jasmine-scented perfume. Then she lit some candles and incense. The mixture of cloying scents made it hard to breathe, but it was better than the rot-and-chemical odors still wafting from the necromancer. How he lived with that constant stench was beyond me.
He must have been exhausted, because he didn’t have any snide comments for either of us and seemed perfectly content to curl up on the carpeted floor with nothing but the robe and a pillow.
His green eyes, dull and heavy-lidded, tracked me around the room as I tugged one of the blankets out of the closet for him. He mumbled thanks as I draped it over him, but he didn’t close his eyes until I was in bed and under the covers. Having him staring at me like that was worrisome. He’d proven one too many times how clever and vicious he was capable of being, so I had no interest in letting him trick or use me again. Whatever was on his mind, it meant I would have to be on my toes until he was out of my life.
