by S. K. Ryder
But Esteban had not forgotten him, and the slight figure of a male decked out in a shimmering silk suit suddenly stood by Jackson’s side to deliver a curt message. “Your lord requests that you attend him. Now.” He shoved a pitcher into Jackson’s hands and returned to Adilla’s side in a blur.
The winter-fresh scent of Dominic’s blood wafted from the pitcher. Jackson’s stomach hitched. Nothing. It’s nothing, he told himself and began putting one foot in front of the other. He looked only at Esteban, seeing nothing and no one else, least of all Dominic. But he felt their curious eyes. Hundreds of them.
Esteban had changed his vomit-soaked trousers for a fresh pair and occupied a small bench near Adilla’s throne apparently reserved for the favored few. He held out his glass and grinned with malice when Jackson filled it. But he also growled between his teeth, “Do not get sick, you filthy blood bag.”
It was the one compulsion Jackson decided to accept. He made good use of it and every other mental exercise in his bag of tricks as Esteban and Adilla reminisced about the bloodcurdling details of countless vampire atrocities—including Justin’s death. This was followed by a vivid discussion as to what to do with Jackson, complete with curious glances in his direction. He prayed that he was too valuable as a toy to dispose of quickly, but made peace with the thought of dying at any moment. The only thing over which he retained any control at all was his reaction. Nothing, it’s nothing, he chanted in his mind over and over again. Nothing at all.
After a while, they tired of their game. Adilla moved on to enjoying members of his court heaping flattery upon him and groveling for favors while Esteban ordered Jackson to bring the pitcher with him to a quiet seat. There he pulled out a smartphone and proceeded to check his email before contacting a long list of operatives and business partners via Skype. They might hail from long-gone centuries and sit under a mountain, but the colony maintained a Wi-Fi network of admirable bandwidth.
Jackson swayed on his feet, and half the crowd had already drifted away before Esteban made a decision about his new sheep. “Go to the surface and attend to your needs,” he said without looking at him. “Be in the cave two hours before nightfall.”
All the way up the lift, Jackson continued his chant. Nothing, it’s nothing. His heart began to pound with relief as he stumbled toward the daylight streaming through the cave’s mouth. But not until fresh forest air filled his lungs and a gloriously blue sky curved overhead did he allow himself to feel again. He sucked at the air, stuffing it into his tight chest.
A dam broke and all the terror of the night hit him full force. How the fuck am I still alive? He clenched his hands into fists to stop them shaking. Keep your shit together. You’re a long way from getting out of this, he admonished himself.
A very long way.
Dominic was still down there and in no shape to ever get out on his own, which meant Jackson would be going back there. He had promised Cassidy. But more than that, Jackson would not abandon his friend, even if he was the pain-in-the-ass lord of the vampires.
Fuck. What a mess.
As the sun broke over the peaks bordering the creek’s far shore, Jackson staggered into the village, hoping against hope to find his car sitting where he had left it with keys in the ignition. Of course, it wasn’t there. Hungry, thirsty and overdosed on adrenaline, he looked around in a daze when the front door of one of the cottages opened.
“You came back from the cave,” Earl called, sounding more than a little mystified. His bushy brows drew together. “Not many come back from there.”
His wife, a ruddy-cheeked woman with a mop of faded brown curls, was less philosophical. “You must have had quite the night, young man. Come in, come in. We’re just having breakfast.”
As neither one of them wielded a shotgun, Jackson decided to risk taking her up on the offer. He did his best not to gulp the fresh scrambled eggs and salty sausages heaped on his plate, but his appetite was such he wanted to unhinge his jaw and pour the plate down his throat and the plate after that, too. He wondered if this was what a starving vampire felt, this gut-wrenching need for . . . something. He wondered if this was what Dominic would feel when he regained consciousness.
He wondered if he would want to be anywhere near him.
Taking the lead from his hosts, he kept conversation to a minimum. Whatever they thought of him or where he came from, they didn’t say. Somehow it was understood—he had returned from the cave; he was one of them and in service to the cave dwellers.
Earl’s wife, June, had a mother-hen quality about her in appearance as well as spirit as she doted on her guest. Jackson didn’t even need to ask for a place to rest. When he stopped shoveling food in his mouth, she showed him to a small but tidy guest room upstairs and promised to keep down the noise in the house today.
Jackson used the last of his coherent thoughts to wedge a chair under the door knob and locate and set an ancient analog travel alarm. Its insistent ticking on the nightstand dropped him into dreamless sleep within seconds.
Its shrieking ring pulled him back out only four hours later.
He stretched and shook out his limbs and considered his options. There really was only one. He had to wing it like never before and do it now while the sun was at its highest. His phone had been taken from him when he was first put in the cell. God only knew where it was, but asking for it might well raise suspicions about his motives. Also, Garrett was too far away to help, and Cassidy was better off not knowing the details. In fact, he fervently hoped her link with Dominic couldn’t reach this far.
Jackson was flying solo. No backup, no Garrett, no Grid. If he failed, he was dead.
I’ve lost my fucking mind, he thought as he made his way downstairs. He had a bride-to-be and a child on the way. The last thing he should do was risk his life for someone who couldn’t die.
No, that wasn’t it. There was more to do down there than to rescue His Badass Highness from this jam. There was Dominic’s sister. She was a half-turned human in dire need of immediate rescuing.
And if he could relieve one Esteban de Santiago of his head along the way, so much the better.
A plan formed amidst the wheels spinning in his thoughts as he moved down the creaking wooden stairway. He executed phase one with an apologetic smile when he inquired about the whereabouts of his car.
“Oh? Going somewhere, son?” Earl wondered, sounding not quite casual.
“I have a bag in the back with a change of clothes I could use.”
“Huh. All right. I’ll show you.”
Playing along, Jackson smiled and nodded and let Earl lead the way.
The SUV had been moved behind the barn. With his back turned to his host, he checked his bag and found the contents undisturbed. A change of clothes, toiletries, and—most important—the black leather case with the suppressant.
Phase two was somewhat related to phase one in ways Jackson didn’t care to contemplate. “I’ll need a couple of the guys to come back into the mine with me.”
Earl halted his steps and peered at him. “The mine? Why would you want to go back there?”
He made a show of looking uncertain. “I was asked to go back today.” He dropped his voice a little. “By them.”
For a moment, the large man with his hands tucked into the bib of his overalls didn’t seem to have heard him. Jackson imagined he could see the compulsion churning in the pale eyes, trying to decide on a course of action. “And you need help?”
“Yeah. Some things need cleaning up.” About two-hundred-odd things, in fact.
Earl scratched his beard. “Well, if you were told, I guess you can’t say no.”
Jackson remained straight-faced. “Why would I want to?”
“Right. Okay. C’mon. Let’s get you your cleaning crew then.”
The crew was a little larger t
han Jackson had hoped. He was fairly certain he could handle two—so long as they didn’t pull out their shotguns again—but three was pushing it. Wing it, he told himself, smiling and nodding.
They were three of the four men from the day before. But there was no animosity in them. No one mentioned the shootout, and all introduced themselves to Jackson as though they had only just met. He shook their hands. Terry, the lanky redhead with the wary scowl and nasal voice; Tim, his fresh-faced younger brother and steadfast shadow; and Carl, a large man whose jaw was in constant motion over a wad of tobacco.
Compulsion can be a beautiful thing, Jackson decided as he led the way to the cavern with his new companions. This time they remained armed only with flashlights.
His backpack was still where it had been flung yesterday, all its contents intact. Returning his feeble borrowed flashlight to Terry, he pulled out the full-spectrum torch and lit up the small room bright as day.
The lift was still where he left it, thanks to the gate he had left open wide this morning, which blocked it from descending. If anyone noticed the glitch, they hadn’t cared enough—or been unable—to pursue a fix that late in the morning.
My lucky day, your loss.
When he stepped into the lift cage, all three men looked at him uncertainly. Terry scratched the back of his neck. “No one’s ever been down there.”
“I have. It’s okay. Really.”
The trio thought this over, their eyes drifting between Jackson and the lift. He tensed when Terry eyed the cell Jackson had languished in. “It’s not safe,” he concluded. The line sounded automatic.
“We’ll be fine. They told me to come,” Jackson said, hoping that ‘not safe’ referred to their safety, not the safety of the vampires sleeping deep beneath their feet, who were definitely not so safe once he got down there.
The reminder of his supposed orders galvanized his helpers. Carl spat out a stream of juice. “Guess we better get going, then.”
The lift sagged a little as they piled in. The motor ground to life above their heads and spewed oil-scented fumes that merged with the pong of warm male bodies in too-close quarters. Tension built like pressure with every foot they dropped, and the men held the overwhelming darkness at bay by keeping their flashlights trained on the coarse walls sliding up around them.
When the lift slowed and halted, they were surrounded by mountain on three sides and nothing on the fourth. Jackson sucked in a breath. Without the electric lights in the hallway beyond this vestibule, the darkness was thick enough to cut. Thick enough to eat their lights. Thick enough to nurture things that could not abide the sun.
Maybe even at this time of day.
Shoving that grim possibility out of his mind, he opened the gate.
“I don’t like this,” Tim, the youngest of the trio, said.
“This won’t take long. And it gets better just past there.” Jackson walked through the arched passage to the underground compound’s central hall. The wooden floors and silk rugs, the chandeliers and tapestries were all still there, silently waiting for the true night to return.
Terry made a low whistle as he swung his light around. “Will you look at that?”
“Epic,” his brother concurred.
Carl spat his juice onto the polished wood beside the rug.
“Can’t take you anywhere, can we?” Tim chastised.
“Shut up,” Carl retorted.
For reconnaissance, Jackson tried several random doors lining the hallway. All of them were locked. If he wanted to find any specific vampires—or a human in need of rescuing—breaking them down would take a while. Fuck.
A half-acknowledged fear that Dominic might have been moved into one of these chambers evaporated the moment he made the final turn into the throne room. There he was, the Lord of Night, where Jackson had last seen him, hanging by his ankles, still as a corpse. His skeletal torso blazed like a lamp in the heavy darkness when his beam hit it. Then it turned bright pink. Jackson jerked the lethal torch light aside.
“What the fuck,” Terry muttered. “Is this what we’re cleaning up?”
“That’s it,” Jackson agreed.
“Sick,” Tim said.
No argument there. Jackson swept his light around, confirming that the rest of the room contained only furnishings. A few shawls and other pieces of clothing lay scattered on seats, and many of the tables held glasses coated with blood. The hall was frozen in the damp, underground darkness, awaiting the return of its nightmare inhabitants. One of the bloodstained pitchers sat on a table near him.
“Carl, can you find the end of the rope that’s keeping him up there and get him down?” Jackson said, shrugging out of his backpack and dumping it on the nearest seat.
With his flashlight, the man traced the rope to the rafters and back down, then ambled off toward the far end without comment. The beams of the brothers sliced the cavernous darkness, glinting off dead chandeliers and crystal tumblers.
Jackson grabbed the pitcher. It came off the table with a sickeningly sticky noise. The smell of blood wafted out. His jaw tightened. He was about to fling the pitcher away when he realized that it wasn’t empty. A thin layer of half-congealed blood sloshed at the bottom. He froze a moment before lowering it. “Terry, see if you can find some cleaning supplies somewhere. We need to get this blood off the floor.” Turning to Tim, he added, “And bins to collect all these filthy glasses.”
“And do what with ’em?”
“I told you. We’re here to clean.”
“Oh. Right.”
The brothers moved off toward the gilded throne and the archways lining the wall behind it.
Dominic swayed and bounced as Carl loosened the line and lowered him into a cadaverous heap on the ground.
Jackson propped his powerful light on his backpack so it wouldn’t touch Dominic but also glare in Carl’s direction, blinding the man. He ignored the resulting holler of protest, grabbed the pitcher, raised it to his lips, and tipped it up.
The blood tasted of ice-encrusted iron and was about as cold against his tongue, triggering his gag reflex. As the slimy mass slid down his throat, he tried not to think of bloated corpses. Then the muted jolt hit him. Nowhere near what it was fresh from the vein but enough. Warmth suffused him, and some new strength. The footsteps of the men grew louder in his ears, and his eyes no longer saw nothingness in the far reaches of the hall, but a fuzzy collection of shapes and passageways.
Jackson wiped at his mouth with his shirtsleeve, set the vile pitcher down, and turned his attention to Dominic. Grabbing one bony shoulder, he rolled the would-be carcass to his back. The sight before him made his gorge rise. The bastards had bled Dominic as close to death as it was possible for a vampire to get. His body had struggled to compensate, creating the blood he needed to survive at the expense of almost every bit of soft tissue he possessed. By now his skin stretched over bones and little else. In human terms he was a fair imitation of a famine victim. In vampire terms he was disabled and one blow away from permanent death.
“This is fucking insane,” he muttered under his breath as he pulled the leather case from his vest pocket and quickly loaded one of the remaining two syringes. He should just stick Dominic in a body bag and hope to God that he could convince the trio that hauling him out of here and driving away with him was following his orders. And if the suppressant didn’t work, he might yet resort to that.
Though much more horrifying was the thought of what would happen if the suppressant did work under these circumstances. Jackson didn’t see how it could. But the odds of getting Dominic out of here—to say nothing of rescuing or killing anyone or anything else—were much improved if he could function autonomously.
With his fingertips, Jackson located the weak flutter of Dominic’s heart just beneath the sternum where the belly had caved in. Aim
ing the needle, he jabbed and pressed the plunger.
He filled the wait that followed by pulling the Bowie knife from his pack and slicing the bindings from Dominic’s forearms. There was still no sign of life when the tread of heavy boots approached behind him. “So what’s the plan for . . .” Carl’s flashlight fell over the vampire’s inert form. “ . . . that.”
“I’m hoping he’ll just walk out of here.”
The other man snorted. “Right. He looks to be done walking.”
Jackson stared at Dominic’s blood-smeared skull face, willing him to wake. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.
More footsteps, Terry’s this time, accompanied by a hollow rattling. The son of a bitch had actually found a mop and bucket. Who knew bloodsuckers could be so domestic?
Dominic’s chest rose and fell with a tiny breath. Jackson swallowed his relief. And his horror. “Rise and shine, sleeping beauty,” he whispered.
The eyelids struggled against the dried blood gluing them shut before opening into narrow slits.
Carl scuttled backward with a gasp. “Holy shit!”
“It’s okay,” Jackson assured, raising a calming hand.
“Holy fuck, how is that thing alive?”
The clattering bucket sped up. Tim’s flashlight swung in their direction from the room’s far corner. Soon all three would be on him or racing for the lift. Since neither outcome fit into Jackson’s ad-hoc plans, he got up, took two giant steps, and leveled a massive right hook at Carl’s jaw, all in a single fluid motion that felt more like a dance move than the contorted attack that it was. The large man keeled over onto one of the ornate tables, which collapsed in a mass of splinters.
The bucket clanged to the ground. Not so the mop. The moment Jackson turned around, he spotted the handle coming for his head in a wide arc. Jackson grabbed it and yanked hard. Terry jerked forward. His feet tripped against Dominic’s side as Jackson’s fist rammed home into Terry’s gut. With a loud oomph, the redhead doubled over and came down on top of Dominic who jerked up, his wasted arms flailing, mouth gaping, and blood-caked hair standing on end.
