by Amy Faye
“Oh, I just thought, because she saved your life, and everything…”
“You’re not serious.”
He raises his eyebrows and waits several agonizing seconds before his face splits into a grin. “No, I’m not serious. We’ll figure something out.”
I let out all my breath and deflate, right there on the couch. Jesus Christ, I’d been convinced that he really meant it. And what’s worse, I’d been convinced that he was going to talk me into it, somehow.
Like maybe I was going to let him talk me into it. And maybe I was going to like it, in the end. I shivered thinking about how effectively Ben could control my mind when he wanted to.
“I’m open to suggestions,” I say aloud.
“I know you are, darling,” He answers me. “Give me some time. I don’t want to get your hopes up, and I want even less to dash your hopes before I even know what the situation is going to be. Is that fair?”
I let out a breath. “So now it’s ‘darling’?”
“You’ve always been my darling, since the moment I laid eyes on you.”
“Which was when?”
He smiles. “A man’s got to have some secrets, don’t you think? It lends a certain air of mystery.”
“Oh, good. Mystery. Exactly what I want in a man.”
He raises an eyebrow. “You mean to tell me it’s not?”
I chew on my lip. I did mean to tell him that. But that didn’t make it true, no matter how much it would have felt great to rub his face in how wrong he was. “Maybe.”
“You can’t resist a little mystery.”
“Maybe I can’t, maybe I can. You don’t know.”
“But I do know,” he says. “I know everything about you. Even the things you don’t want to admit to anyone. Not even to yourself. Did you enjoy that little kiss with Sarah?”
My heart beat harder. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I don’t mind,” he says. “Like the Sultan’s harem. You’re free to indulge in whatever you’d like, as long as you don’t go find yourself another man.”
“Thank you for your permission,” I reply, dripping with sarcasm. And yet, it does feel like permission. Like I needed it, even though I could easily have done whatever I wanted up there. He might know. He might even know immediately. But if he doesn’t try to stop me, I don’t think of myself as needing his permission. Does Sarah feel differently?
“Of course.” He settles into the corner of the couch, leaning back. His long legs stretch out in front of him, his fingers lacing behind the back of his head. “You have a very nice home.”
“Thank you,” I say softly. I hear the sound of the shower starting up. Unbidden images of Sarah climbing into the shower conjure themselves up in my mind. I scrub them out quickly, then look over at Ben. He’s got an amused smile on his face, and he’s not bothering to hide it.
“She’s very… excitable, you know,” he says. “You’d enjoy it, if you tried.”
“You’re doing this to me, aren’t you?”
“Doing what?” Ben’s voice has every sign of innocence in it. Dripping from it, even. Somehow that only makes it all that much harder to believe.
“You know exactly what.”
“I know that you’re a very suspicious young woman, Hailey. I told you before. I’ve got no desire to play with my women like little dolls. I want you to do what I tell you, yes. But I want you to do it for your own reasons. Love, or respect, or fear, or desire. I don’t care what they are, as long as they’re there.”
“I’m glad that I can be so interesting to you, then,” I growl.
“Oh, but you are. You’re so very interesting to me, Hailey. I just wish you knew how interesting you were. But that will come with time. You’ll come to understand me better, and I’ll come to understand you better. It’s a relationship, like any.”
“Except that I don’t have much choice in the matter,” I finish for him.
“You humans. So insistent on ‘choice.’ You know, I’ve been doing this for almost two hundred years. Would you like to know what I’ve learned?”
“Two hundred years? Is that a long time?”
“Long for a human, I suppose,” he says. He shrugs. “For a vampire… well, not particularly long. Not particularly short, either.”
“What have you learned?”
“Most of the time, choice doesn’t mean anything at all. Do you wear red or blue? Do you marry the man who will leave you in a year, but makes your blood run hot? Or do you stick with the particularly uninteresting one, and then when your blood finally runs cold, you start to wonder if maybe you made the wrong decision all along?”
“So you’re saying that it wouldn’t matter what my choice was?”
“I’m saying that I’ve made the choice for you, and you may not like it or understand it, but I’m saying that it doesn’t much matter, because in the end, it wouldn’t have changed anything for you to have made a different choice.”
“Your vote of confidence is very reassuring.” I mirror his posture, leaning back in the couch, my fingers laced behind my head, my legs crossed above the knee. Upstairs, the shower shuts itself off.
“I want you to be reassured,” he says, vaguely.
“Well, then, I guess you’ve got your wish.”
“I guess that I have.”
I hear footfalls upstairs as Sarah gets out of the bath. This time there’s no accompanying images, thankfully.
There’s a knock at the door that jerks me upright. Ben looks at me with an eyebrow raised. I shrug at him silently.
He nods at the door, and then points at himself, and points up the steps. I nod my understanding, and then in the blink of an eye he’s gone. I shiver, and it’s not from the cold that’s slowly bled out of the house over the past twenty minutes.
The knock comes again, more insistent this time. “I’m coming,” I growl, loud enough to be heard through the door.
Then I open it up, and I’m greeted by a total stranger. And there’s one more problem. He’s got a gun in his hand, and it’s pointed right at my middle.
Ten
My eyes are glued to the barrel of the gun. I should be looking at his face. Even in the moment, I can’t help thinking that I need to memorize it. Memorize every part of it. That way, if I see it again, I won’t be surprised. I’ll know exactly what to expect.
But my eyes won’t move upward, no matter how much I want them to.
“Show me your teeth,” he says.
That pulls my eyes up from the gun to his face. “What?”
“Your teeth.” He makes a grimace that shows most of his mouth, from his top gums down to the bottom. He’s got normal teeth. Unremarkable. Perhaps a little bit stained by coffee.
I do what he says. He looks at them for a long moment before nodding. His nodding doesn’t correlate to putting the gun away, though.
“Good. Step back.”
“What do you want?”
“Is he here?”
“Who are you? Why are you asking me all these questions?”
He gestures with the gun. I don’t know if it’s for my benefit or for the benefit of some unseen assistant. “You made a big mistake, dealing with these people. A big mistake.”
“What are you talking about?” I try to keep my face from looking as if I’m trying to pull a fast one. The good news is that I’m genuinely confused. I don’t have to fake that, at least, and that’s all that I can ask of myself at this point.
“I’m the one asking the questions,” he growls. “I’ve got the gun.”
“I can see that, but I just… I don’t understand.”
“Have you seen a man, about six-four, green eyes, wears a beard, reddish-blond hair?”
“No,” I say. I sound convincing. Confused. “I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”
He lets out a low breath. “I’m not enjoying these lies, Hailey.”
“How do you know my name?”
“I know a lot about y
ou, Miss Bishop. I didn’t just jump in here half-cocked. Which is why I hope that you’ll understand when I say, you can’t lie to me. It’s just not going to work.”
“Well, I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“You might have met him on Friday night. You might have talked for a few hours about nothing at all before going off to engage in sexual intercourse with this man.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” I repeat. But now it’s getting harder to deny. He’s obviously got me dead to rights at this point. He knows, he’s just waiting for me to confirm. And yet, the longer that I keep him busy, the longer that Ben has to figure out a way out of this.
“I think you do. I think you’ve known exactly what I’m talking about this whole time, and the look on your face right now proves it. Now, let me inside, or I’ll shoot you, and I’ll let myself in.”
I look down at the gun. He’s angled it up at my chest, and he’s pointing it more decidedly now. Like he’s getting himself ready to use it. I shudder. Now or never.
I reach for the door handle and step out of his way. Like a dance, he starts to slide in. Which is when I put my shoulder hard into the door and slam it shut. It catches right on his wrist. The gun goes off and I open it an inch and slam the door again.
The stranger yells a curse word at the top of his lungs and drops the gun. I kick it away, open the door again another inch and slam it a third time. I hear a pop that I can only guess is bone. This time when I open the door to slam it a fourth time, the hand slips away, and I slam it shut all the way. The bolt slides easily.
“You can’t stop us, bitch,” he shouts. “We’re coming in, one way or another.”
Another gun fires, and my front window bursts. The curtains catch most of the flying glass before it can go flying all over the room. A pair of smoking bullet holes appear on the far side of the room, with matching holes in the drapes.
“We’ve got to go,” I shout. An instant later I feel a hand wrapped around my arm, pulling me through the house. I turn. Ben’s got me, and he’s pulling me through to the back door.
“Go. Through there.”
I go. I hear the sound of boots crunching glass beneath thick soles from the front room, and I go through the door. There’s a man there; he’s got both hands full. One with a pistol, the other with a long, broken-off wooden stick, sharpened to a wicked point.
He turns and points the pistol. I turn away from him and start running. Sarah’s ahead of me, watching the whole thing and covering her head. Glass shatters behind me, and I turn. Ben catches the guy as he hurtles through the air, his teeth already biting down. His head pulls back and blood sprays across my back porch.
“Go,” he shouts at us. We go. At least, I do. I was fast in high school. One of the fastest in the state, and for my height, without a doubt the fastest. Perhaps the fastest in the entire rust belt. But there’s no way to make up the physical with a woman who’s got a solid foot in height on me. She keeps up easily.
A moment later I feel something behind me, like the hair on the back of my neck stands up all on its own. I flick my head to the side. Ben’s catching up with us. He’s not taking it easy, but he’s moving almost twice as fast as either of us.
“Through here,” he growls. He ducks through a gap in a fence. I’ve lived here for three years now, and I wasn’t aware of it. He’s been here for five minutes, and he’s already made an escape plan. I grit my teeth and run harder, focusing on leading with my shoulder in case I miss the hole.
I don’t. I feel something scraping my trailing arm, but it pulls away. There’s no blood, just a burning pain that runs the length of my arm.
Sarah comes last of all. She does slow down, but only for an instant. Then she’s hurrying to catch up with the two of us. Ben jumps the front fence like it’s nothing. Sarah and I have to vault over, but it’s not so high that we need to stop running. There’s a car out front, and he smashes the driver-side window with an elbow, and then reaches inside and unlocks it.
An alarm starts sounding before he can even hit the unlock button; he ignores it. Slides into the car and starts pulling at the wiring. Twenty seconds later we’ve reached him, and the car’s engine sputters to life.
“Get in,” he says. It’s not exactly a preferred chase vehicle. But you could have fit most of a soccer team in, if they were chummy.
I get into the middle bench. Sarah takes the front.
“What was that? How did they find us?”
He doesn’t answer me. He just pulls on the shifter knob and starts the car moving backwards.
“Do you know anyplace that’s safe?”
“Safe?”
“Anyplace that we could go where there’s not too many people around? Somewhere that we can hide out? Somewhere that you can get into, but you don’t go often enough for someone who’s got you under surveillance to know about it?”
“Uh…” I blink and try to think. “A few hours north, maybe. My uncle’s got a hunting lodge. I think I have the keys to it. But… oh, fuck. They’re back at the house.”
Ben doesn’t stop driving. “Okay, so we get across the Mackinac bridge, and into the UP? Is that right?”
“About right. But we don’t have the key, so…”
He settles in. His shoulders are hard and tight. “Is anyone hurt?”
Sarah immediately answers “I’m alright.”
“It’s just a scratch. I’ll be fine.”
He lets out a long, low breath. “Okay. Got it. Let me worry about how we’re going to get inside. You just give me directions. I know this might surprise you, but I’m only passing familiar with these roads, and I’m a little tired.”
Sarah immediately pipes up. “If you need to top off…”
“No,” he answers. His voice is unnecessarily sharp. “We don’t have time to stop.”
“I didn’t mean to…”
“I’m not angry,” he says. He pulls one hand off the wheel to run it through his short hair, and then puts the hand on Sarah’s thigh and gives it a squeeze. “I’m sorry for snapping at you.”
“Thank you,” she says. Then we all three settle in. It’s going to be a long drive up north, and I don’t even know if we’re going to be able to find the place. I haven’t been there since I was six. But we’re going to have to try. Getting shot isn’t exactly on my agenda for today.
Eleven
I hate going across the bridge. It’s so high above the water. It hurts my head just thinking about it. But the truth is, whether I like it or not, I have to admit that the thing is sturdy as all hell. Just not as sturdy as I would like, maybe. I let out a long breath and close my eyes and wait for it to be over. And thankfully, with time, it is.
I open them again when I feel the car bump over the seam between the steel bridge and the concrete.
“Now what?”
“Uh… West? I think? I don’t know, it’s been a long time.”
“Alright,” he says. Then he eases onto the westbound interstate. “Tell me if any of this starts looking familiar.”
“Will do,” I say. I close my eyes, but only for a moment. “So once we get there, what next? We live in the woods for the rest of our lives? I thought the woods was a werewolf thing.”
“Very funny,” he says. His frustration is clear in his voice. “The first thing we need to do is figure out who’s telling them where we are.”
I blink, and for a moment I can’t even bring myself to keep looking out the window. “Telling them?”
“Someone has to have been. You said so yourself. Nobody was around asking questions. And yet, they’ve got your name, they knew right where to find us, and everything. It was too easy. Someone must have told them.”
“Who would do something like that? The other three women…”
“More than just them, too,” Ben says. His voice is hard. “That was a bad wreck. You don’t just pull into traffic the wrong way on a tourist island, at that speed. It’s just begging to get innocent
bystanders killed.”
“I guess I hadn’t really even thought of that.”
“I didn’t expect you to,” Ben says. “But I don’t have the luxury of not thinking about it. I have to think this whole thing through. Someone who’s angry enough with me to get dozens of people killed. Or someone who’s associated with hunters.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
He lets out a long breath. “I don’t know what I mean, either. I’ve got to give it some thought. Just keep an eye on the road. I’ll watch out for someplace likely, too.”
“Okay,” I say. I don’t know if it’s that he’s telling me to do what I already wanted to do, or if he’s using his mind tricks on me, but I stare out the window and watch. I’ve been up north a couple of times in my life, but only a couple. I’ve never gone hunting with my Uncle, but I’ve been at the cabin once or twice. It’s got a little pond nearby. Good for fishing.
I vaguely recall there being a dirt race-track nearby, but I was young enough that it could have been twenty miles off and I would have forgotten. Still, it feels like it was right over the hill.
“You feeling alright back there?”
“I’m fine,” I answer. Sarah doesn’t answer at all. She’s leaning her head on the window. “Sarah? You okay?”
She lets out a long breath. A sigh. And her head tilts a little in the window. “I’m going to be fine. I just… miss home.”
“I know,” Ben says. “I miss it too. Once this is all over with, we’ll go back. But until I can guarantee you’re both going to be safe, I’m not taking any risks.”
“How do you know they haven’t burned the place to the ground?”
I can see his shoulders slump even from behind. “I can’t know for sure. But they’d have a hard time with it. Stone walls don’t burn so good. Maybe they could bomb the whole thing to the ground, but I don’t see why they would bother. It’s a perfectly nice historic site, after all.”
The car grows silent, and the miles tick by. I keep an eye on the side of the road. Anything that feels familiar? No. I grit my teeth and then unclench them again. There’s no reason to get mad, just because I can’t find it.
