by Amy Faye
“You take good care of yourself.”
“Apparently not good enough, if I’m getting lectured on my drinking habits by a fifty-year-old man.” I open my eyes sleepily and dare him to get annoyed about it. He raises an eyebrow.
“I like that. That’s cute. Come with me.”
I do. I can feel my nipples puckering themselves, stiff and sensitive against the fabric of my shirt. I didn’t think it was rough before, but anything would be too rough for me now.
“What did you do to me?”
“What do you think I did to you?” He sounds amused.
“You drank my blood.” It sounds absurd to say out loud.
“You’re starting to learn. Good! You’re making good progress.”
“So… what? Is this like… a fetish thing?”
I followed along behind dimly. The words coming out of my mouth sounded stupid, even to me. He stopped and turned and gave me a flat look.
“Maybe not such good progress, after all.”
He put his hand on a doorknob and looked at me. “This is my room.”
He turned the knob and opened the door. Inside was a room, the same size as mine, with two notable differences. First, there was an open door on the far side of the room. I could see a mirror and sink through it. He apparently had a master bath, where we were using a shared bathroom.
Second was another door. This one was closed, and he made his way over to that one immediately.
“Close the door, girl. What were you, born in a barn?”
I close it, blushing a little bit. It’s not like I know that it was supposed to be closed. But that doesn’t stop me from feeling embarrassed, and I don’t like thinking about that one bit.
“Are you ready?”
I look up, surprised. “Ready? For what?”
“The last part of your tour,” he says. There’s a smile on his face. His teeth are longer than I’d expected, though I would hardly say it fits with the Dracula teeth that I saw as a kid on Halloween. Vampires aren’t real, either.
“What’s in there?”
He fits the key into the lock and turns it. The key itself is old, and you could probably pick the thing with a bent-up coat hanger. So I can’t assume that there’s any point in the lock except keeping up appearances.
“Would you like to see?”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
He pushes the door open.
“After you.”
I step inside and take a look around. The rest of the house feels very traditional. Very Spanish. Like what you would see someone taking pictures of for a Spanish trip’s promotional pamphlet. This new room is different.
The walls are still the same stucco material, but the floors aren’t sun-baked clay tiles. It’s hard-wood, fitted tightly, and it looks old. He must have reclaimed it from somewhere, or he’s been in this room for a long time.
Against one wall is a bed. It’s bigger than a king, I think. Sized for two people who didn’t like each other to sleep comfortably. Three could sleep together if they did like each other. Four or five if they were particularly comfortable.
There’s a big, industrial-looking steel X-shaped cross against one wall, with leather straps hanging from the corners. I shiver.
“What is this?”
“This is the play room,” he says. “My own personal space, but you’re welcome to join me when I’ve got use for you.”
“Thanks,” I say. I don’t bother to hide my sarcasm.”
“You’ll grow to look forward to your visits here. They all do. Here. Since you’re new, I’ll give you a little bit of entertainment.” He stepped out of the room, and I heard the door to the hall opening, and then closing again. His voice was more muffled than it should have been with only a few feet between us. “Sarah!”
He waited a moment before he reopened the door, and then the woman who, only a moment ago, had threatened me with a knife, stood in front of me.
“Yes, sir?”
She looks almost chipper, until she sees me. I shrug slightly.
“I’d like to give your new sister a little demonstration, if that’s alright with you.”
“Of course,” she says. Like she means it. “What did you want me to do?”
“Can you get onto the rack for me?”
She doesn’t say anything, just wordlessly crosses over to the implement and starts cuffing herself, until she’s got only one free hand.
Ben crosses the room and starts testing the bindings for tightness. Apparently satisfied with her work, he straps in her other hand, leans into the crook of her net, and says something. Sarah sighs happily.
Ben steps away from the rack and over to a cabinet on the other side of the room. It’s ornate. I guess French, but I don’t know that much about specific furniture styles. The door swings open silently, as if it were the easiest thing in the world, even though as far as I can tell it’s nearly an inch thick.
There’s a rack inside, like a coat rack. On it are hanging all sorts of things. A half-dozen rubber cocks of various sizes, a thick coil of rope, a pair of handcuffs hanging from a hook on the door. He reaches inside after considering for a moment, and when he comes back, there’s a thin wooden paddle in his hand.
He looks at me pointedly, an expression in his eyes that seems to say ‘now watch closely.’ Then he uses the full force of his arm to swat it across her ass. She doesn’t react, except to squirm a little bit. For the space of an instant, he seems almost puzzled.
It doesn’t last long; he reaches around and undoes her pants, pulls them down. She’s got a great ass, I think to myself. There’s a hint of jealousy in it that I don’t like, and a hint of attraction that I like even less.
He taps more gently. She squirms again. Even with just the lighter tap, it makes a whap sound against her skin that sounds throughout the whole room.
Then he pulls back harder, and swings as hard as he did the first time. Full force. She yelps in pain, and then a moment later she lets out an obviously sexual groan.
Ben smiles, turns to me, and hands me the switch. I look at it, confused.
“Go on,” he says. “Give it a whirl.”
I line up and pull back. The switch is so light that it feels like I’m swinging an idea. When it connects, it doesn’t make nearly the appealing whip-sound. But I can see that she squirms, same as before.
“No, you need to whip it. Try to accelerate through, you see?”
He takes my hand and guides me through a practice swing through the air. Armed with the new tactic I try again. It connects hard. Hard enough to hurt my fingers. But the sound of the switch is a loud pop and Sarah immediately pulls hard against the restraints tying her down.
It only takes a moment for her to settle down, but she spends the whole moment moaning softly. I hand the switch over to Ben.
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to show me.”
“Help me get Sarah down, will you? I’m sure that between that and her little scare earlier, she’s more than learned her lesson with you, don’t you think?”
I have to reach high to get to her restraints, but I work on the left wrist as Ben works on the right. Working together, we’ve got her down in no time. Sarah has four red lines across her ass cheeks, two of them deep and ugly.
“Thank you, sir,” Sarah purrs. The look in her eyes is like she’s high or something. God, I’d love to feel like that.
“Now, Hailey, you’ve got one more lesson.”
“Lesson?”
“After-care,” he says. He pulls Sarah into his arms and holds her. The whole time, though, he’s looking at me. His eyes locked on mine he says something softly into Sarah’s ears. She shivers.
She stands up and pulls her pants up around her waist. “Did I do alright?”
“You did wonderfully, darling.” A spark of jealousy runs down my spine again.
“Thank you,” she says. She’s smiling. He’s smiling. In spite of myself, I feel a little giddy, and I’m willing to bet that t
here’s a smile on my face, unbidden.
Then the smile drops from Ben’s face.
“What’s the problem?”
“We need to go,” he says. “Now. Something is coming.”
Six
I don’t know where to go. Hell, I barely know where we are. I know that they speak Spanish here, or at least something that sounds a little like Spanish. It’s in Spain, legally speaking, but in reality, it’s the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. So whatever they’re speaking, it ought to be something pretty close to Spanish, even if it’s not the same as the Mexican Spanish that I’ve heard.
Which is to say, I know nothing at all about where we are. I don’t even know which side of the island we’re on. So I looked at Ben and waited for him to tell me what to do. He grabbed a hat and jacket and started to move, pulling on a pair of leather driving gloves.
“Sarah, get your sisters.”
She does what she’s told, moving out of the room and into the rest of the house. I stand, waiting for some instruction. I don’t know what else I could be doing.
“This way,” he says. His voice is forceful. Like it refuses to be questioned. I do what he says. I feel as if I could refuse, but I don’t know what else I would do.
“What’s happening?”
“You ever read Dracula?”
“I saw… uh… Dracula 2000,” I offer. “I don’t think it’s the same plot, though.”
“No,” he says. I can hear his eyes rolling in the tone of his voice. “Not quite.”
“What’s your point?”
“People don’t necessarily like my kind.”
“You mean that people don’t like it when you go out and drink some girl’s blood and kidnap her?”
“You’ve got spine,” he growls. “I’ll give you that.”
He pulls open the wardrobe and pulls an armload of coats off the racks. He drops them on the bed and slips one around his shoulders. Then he pulls on a knob and the back swings open, revealing a short passage, perhaps four feet tall. He climbs in first and starts moving down it, not bothering to tell me to follow. I do so anyways.
“So you’ve got people here to kill you? Here to rescue me?”
He barks a laugh. “Rescue you. I like that. No, they’re not planning on rescuing anyone. They’re here for me, but they’ll take anyone else they find while they’re at it. I can’t tell you how many wives I’ve lost.”
“You sound real broken up about it.”
He turns on me then, in a blink of an eye. He’s snarling and his finger rises to point in my face.
“Don’t you think you get to lecture me, Hailey. You don’t know the first thing about me, or my situation. If you want to be here when they arrive, you can see how much they care about innocent women. Then maybe you can look down from Heaven and see how much I grieve, too. If you’d like to make it out of this, then you had better keep your comments to yourself.”
I shivered at the look in his eyes. It drove home exactly how far the distance was between us. The reality that he wasn’t like me, and he never would be, no matter how much he looked like a human being. He was ready to kill me in an instant, and if he made the decision to do it, he wouldn’t hesitate.
“Yes, sir,” I said softly. He turned back and started moving again, moving quicker to make up for lost time. I took a deep breath and forced my heartbeat to slow down, and followed after.
The path turned and started down stairs. He pulled on a lever and something swung open. A door, obviously, but I guessed that it was disguised as something else.
Then he pulled open a drawer, pulled something out, and shoved something heavy and metal into my hands. A pistol.
“Don’t use that unless you absolutely have no other choice. Are we clear?”
“Yes sir,” I say.
He steps further into the room. Four women stand on the other side of the room, like a variety pack. I make the fifth. Sarah is there, but she’s standing back. I realize dimly that she’s probably the youngest, and almost certainly the newest here. Which explains the jealousy, and the eagerness to please.
The other woman who greeted me is there as well, looking annoyed.
“Are you ready to go?”
“What’s going on?”
“Hunters.” He lets out a long breath. “On their way. We’re getting out of here.”
The woman in front turns and says something to the other two in a language I don’t know. They nod. Then Ben starts moving. He hands another pistol to the other women, and gives them the same instruction: don’t use it. But it’s better to have it and not use it, than need it, and not have it, I think.
He moves quickly out of the house, careful to keep his gloved hands in his pockets and his head down to block the sun from his eyes. We climb into a car. It’s not the sports car I saw before. It’s a large sport utility vehicle, and the six of us fit, but only just. Sarah and I are in the back seats, which are little more than sideways benches in the trunk. I buckle myself in as Ben turns the key in the ignition.
Just as the SUV roars to life, something bursts out of the trees. The jeep barrels towards us at eighty miles an hour, still jumping and kicking from the uneven terrain it’s been encountering. Ben steps on the gas and the vehicle screams out.
“Hold on,” he says. He sounds calm, which makes exactly one of us.
Then we’re driving back out through the trees. The car forces itself through narrow passages. Passages where it barely fits. I grip tight to the bench, and I see Sarah doing the same.
“We’re going to be fine,” I say to her. I hope that I sound more certain than I feel. I hope that I provide even the slightest bit of comfort. But I don’t think that I do, in spite of my best efforts.
She’s got her eyes squeezed shut tight, but she nods.
The car’s suspension dips under my seat as we jerk sideways onto the road. Ten seconds later another offroader jerks out of the tree stand and follows after. Its engine screams out to compete with ours. But there’s nothing to be done by the smaller vehicle. The massive engine in the sport utility vehicle out-accelerates the Jeep without any trouble, and as it disappears behind us, Ben does nothing to slow us down.
The car jerks and pulls with every subtle movement, every crack in the road. I hold on for dear life in spite of the seat belt around my waist. Sarah does the same, but her added height means that her head bumps with every jerk the car makes, no matter what she does. It’s almost enough to make me feel bad for her.
I just want to feel alright again. I just want everything to work out. We get onto the highway, and finally I can feel Ben starting to relax. He eases down to the speed limit, and finally, we’re out on the open road. Finally we’re surrounded by other cars. Cars that aren’t filled with people looking to kill us.
I breathe out a sigh of relief, and in the back of my mind I can feel that there’s a palpable release of tension in the car. I slump back against the side of the car, which I’m pretty sure is the only thing that saves me.
A moment later, I feel the car jerk to the side, and then I feel the impossibly painful blow of something big and heavy smacking into the car from the front. At the speed we’re going, the tail end of the car goes up, and then we tip sideways and fall. Right onto my side.
The moment stretches out into eternity. I hear guns firing and people screaming. Arms wrap around me, and someone pulls me out of the wreckage. My legs move as I’m pulled by the hand along after someone. I don’t know what just happened, but I know that I didn’t like it. And I know that at least some of us aren’t as lucky as I am.
Seven
I don’t know what the original plan was. But there are three of us, now. Only three. And we’re running like our lives depend on it. Worse, even. They absolutely do depend on it.
I let out a long, low breath.
“Where are we going?”
Ben’s eyes stay closed. Sarah pulled me out of the wrecked hulk of a car. I don’t know why, except that I was the closest one to he
r. Only yesterday, she’d been trying to kill me, and now here she was, saving my life. I don’t understand it, and I don’t want to understand it at this point. I want to get out of here.
“We’re going somewhere that they won’t look.”
“And where’s that? Do you have some kind of secret underground bunker?”
Ben laughs. “What do I look like to you, some kind of doomsday prepper? Underground bunker. No. No, I’m afraid we’re all out of underground bunkers. Maybe I could pick one up in the mainland, though. I’ll bet that there are still one or two left from the second World War.”
“What happened to…”
“Don’t,” Sarah says softly. “Just don’t think about it, okay?”
Ben stays stiff in his seat in the plane. There are a dozen seats in the cabin, but only three filled. A stewardess has joined us this time, but she sits in the jump seat at the back.
Looking at him, he doesn’t look anything like the powerful, impressive, dominating vampire that I would have expected. He looks almost vulnerable. And more than anything, he looks angry. Angry enough that I realize that she’s right. There’s no time to talk about it.
“So where are we going, then?”
“We’re going to to the only place that nobody would think to look for me, I think.”
“Where’s that?”
“Someplace that isn’t mine.”
“Okay, where’s that?”
“Only two of us here own property. Sarah, the darling, gave hers up, oh… five years ago, was it?”
“You’re going to my house?”
“We have a winner,” Ben answered. The words were joking, but his face doesn’t show any amusement at all. His tone is flat. “We go to your place. Is that going to be a problem?”
“I mean, I guess not,” I start. There are a thousand things wrong with it. But none of them are problems.
Like, for example, there’s the fact that someone’s going to be wondering where I’m at. I’m going to have my boss on my ass about why I didn’t come into work for the past three days. I’m going to have neighbors wondering why I showed up with a supermodel and her dad. Or worse, why I’m fucking a supermodel and her dad.
