None of that changed what he knew.
Something was definitely wrong.
Felix wouldn’t be lugging drained vamps out to the van on his own, no matter how anxious he was to get the work done and get back to his girlfriend.
Even if he and Melissa finished draining the cop, Felix would have waited for him, Michael, before transferring his emaciated corpse to the van. The vamp would be a lot lighter without his blood and heart, but he’d still be heavy as hell… and there was simply no reason for him to do that. There was no reason for him to do any of it.
They had two tables.
They didn’t need to move him at all, not right away.
They certainly didn’t need to move him before they hooked up the next animal from the freezer for processing.
Fingering the trigger with his fingers, Michael clenched his jaw, resolving himself.
Before he could change his mind, he made a run for the back of the building.
He hesitated only once he’d nearly reached the door, trying to decide if he should stop, try listening again. Some part of him wondered if he was being foolish, just running inside, blind, before he’d discerned if anyone else might be inside waiting for him.
In the end, he did it anyway.
Either he’d run in and get shot or ripped apart by vampire fangs––or he wouldn’t.
Chances were, whoever was inside already knew Michael was there. There were monitors on the processing center wall, displaying the garage, the gate, the back door. If someone was in there, someone besides Felix and Melissa, they were likely watching him right now.
If there was anything to hear, he likely would have heard it by now.
Michael ran inside the cool room with the blue-green lit walls, and the two stainless-steel tables.
It was empty.
He stared around, still gripping his gun, white-knuckled, in two hands. Breathing hard, and not from the run, he spun around in a circle, looking for anything, anyone––but there was nothing there.
Felix and Melissa weren’t there.
By then, he’d half-expected to find them in trouble, on the floor, hurt, even killed, bit or their necks snapped by vampires who got tipped off to their operation, or even by humans who wanted the venom––
But they just weren’t there.
The big vampire with the jet-black hair, whom Michael had last seen strapped to the table, had also disappeared. No other vampire had been pulled out of the cooler to replace him. The rig lay on the floor, along with a spray of blood, as if someone yanked the needles out of his arm and neck veins without putting pressure on the wounds.
Those threads of blood coagulated on the floor, weirdly dark and inhuman-looking.
The texture and sickly-sweet smell made Michael grimace.
He looked around the floor, but saw nothing else that told him anything.
Other than the rig and the blood, he saw nothing.
He lifted his eyes, finding the walk-in freezer unit. As soon as he did, he realized why it was even colder in here than he remembered.
Just like the door from the docking bay, the door to the freezer was open.
Steam trickled out the opening, floating up to the ceiling. Drops condensed there, gradually growing as they collected there, dripping down on the floor below.
Michael walked to the freezer door.
He now aimed the gun at the opening.
Using his elbow, he widened the gap of the open door from inches to a several feet, stepping sideways to push open the thick panel without taking his eyes off the interior of the walk-in unit––or lowering the gun.
Clouds of steam came out of the open door, making it hard to see.
Hands shaking, he winced at the cold air, blinking and staring into the opening and fighting to control his hammering heart.
It felt like minutes, but probably only seconds passed before the view cleared.
He found himself staring inside the freezing unit, now aiming the gun at nothing as he stared down at the bodies on the floor.
Vampire bodies that he’d help put there remained.
He and Melissa stacked them in twos and threes next to the industrial shelving unit to the left of the door, all of them naked, chalk-white, unnaturally stiff.
Those bodies looked stuck in a permanent state of shock.
They stared up at nothing, eyes milky, eyelids wide and unnervingly saggy. Ragged holes formed black and scarlet-tinged star shapes in their bare chests where their hearts had been ripped out. The rest of their skin was chalk-white, the color of new snow. Their drained vamp bodies appeared strangely old, strangely desiccated from the harvest. They looked less like dead animals and more like wax dolls, or movie props.
Despite all this, the sight of them was familiar.
Michael had seen them before.
Far more alarming than the sight of the drained vampire corpses was the realization of what wasn’t there.
The larger, undrained vamps were gone.
All six bodies that had been frozen in here, awaiting harvest, had vanished.
That’s when Michael saw them.
Someone had tossed them on top of the pile of dead vampires towards the back of the freezer unit, so he’d missed their specific faces and outlines in his first pass of the contents of the freezer unit. If Michael’s eyes tracked their specific shapes at all, his mind catalogued them as two more dead vamps.
Then he saw Melissa’s long, stringy blond hair.
It also struck him that she was wearing clothes.
They’d had no female vamps tonight.
None of the vamps they harvested and drained wore shirts or shoes after they finished with them, and the two bodies Michael saw now wore both. As steam continued to swirl through the open space, he noted her thin arms, bronze skin, the violet, baby-doll shirt, black pants, combat boots. He caught sight of her small fingers, but something was weird about them.
Something was weird about all of it.
Her hand lay on the shoulder of a dead vampire, half-open, in a near-supplicating pose, decorated with silver rings, but the fingers were misshapen, like someone had broken all of them in multiple places, pulverizing the bones inside.
He looked past her.
That’s when he picked out the outline of the male human.
Felix.
Just visible to the right of her tangle of stringy blond hair, he saw Felix’s face, staring up at the roof of the freezer. His eyes were unnaturally wide––even more wide than the eyes of the dead vamps. His face looked misshapen, like her fingers.
Every capillary in his eyes had burst, leaving the whites solid red.
Michael slid closer, breathing hard, every nerve in his body now on hair-trigger alert. He renewed his grip on the gun as he edged around the line of dead vampires, stepping sideways as he made his way down the aisle. He scanned the faces and disposition of every one, making sure they were dead, making sure they were all naked, that they all had those ragged holes in their chests.
He knew every face, every body.
They were all unmistakably dead.
All but one was a vamp he’d cut the cord on himself, using the alligator to rip the heart out of its chest. The only one he hadn’t killed was the one Melissa insisted on doing herself––the one nearest to the freezer door.
Then he stood over the two humans.
He stared down, half in disbelief.
Like the vampires, they were both irrefutably, irrevocably dead.
Melissa’s face, in profile, half-obscured by her hair, showed the same red eyes, the same blank stare and waxy skin as Felix. Her face also looked misshapen, distorted. Her shoulders were out of alignment, as broken-looking as her hands. So were her legs.
The two of them appeared somehow more real, more unnervingly physical, more animal-like, more…
…well, more dead than the dead vampires.
Maybe it was because they still looked more or less human, despite their red eyes and graying skin. Ev
en with their broken bodies, twisted bones and faces, he saw the humanity there. Or perhaps he sensed it somehow, felt it akin to his own.
Maybe it was because they still had most of their blood.
Michael stared down at their faces, fighting to make sense of it, to acknowledge it as real.
What the hell had happened to them?
Who had done that to them?
He was still staring down…
When he sensed movement behind him.
He whirled, his heart leaping to his throat.
He raised the gun, aiming it at the freezer door, even as the heavy panel shut with a resounding click. Michael stared at the closed door in shock, for a full beat.
Then he lowered the gun, running for it.
He threw his whole weight into the silver door, but it didn’t budge.
Looking down, he hit his palm into the emergency door release, a big, round, white stopper in the middle of the door, larger than his palm.
The door didn’t open.
He hit the release mechanism again. He kept hitting it, harder each time, but the heavy metal slab didn’t move.
“Hey!” He raised his voice to a yell, not thinking about how stupid that was until he’d already done it. Panic went through him, overriding reason, overriding logic. He threw his shoulder into the door, slamming his palm into the release hammer. “Hey! Someone’s in here! Let me out! LET ME OUT!”
His words came out deadened, wrapped in plumes of steam.
His bare hands, fingers, neck, and face were already prickling with cold, despite the sweat that broke out over him as he stared up at the closed panel. He watched his breath plume up and felt his panic worsen.
“HEY! LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT OF HERE!”
No one answered.
The door didn’t move.
“YOU CAN’T LEAVE ME IN HERE!” Feeling his heart slamming into his ribs, he blurted. “I’M HUMAN! I’M HUMAN, GODDAMN IT! LET ME OUT!”
If someone out there heard him, they made no sound.
They didn’t answer.
He screamed in his head, screaming for his brother.
He screamed for his brother, his best friend.
HELP ME! HELP ME, BROTHER!
If the voice answered, Michael didn’t hear that answer.
The silence of his mind deepened.
He heard nothing but his own pounding, erratic heartbeat, the sigh of his clouded breath, the slap of his palm as he hit against the door release, over and over, like a prayer.
If anyone was outside, if anyone heard him…
They simply walked away.
If anyone inside him answered…
Michael could no longer hear that call.
Chapter 13
Sanctuary
Light flickered overhead, dodging in and out.
He saw eyes there.
Ice-blue eyes.
Eyes that seemed to look through him––those ice-cold daggers stared through to the other side of his mind and heart. He saw them, but nothing else.
The light around them flashed, cutting up his view, making the eyes disappear and reappear, but the look he saw there never wavered.
Something about the expression in those crystal blue irises made him want to cry.
He heard a voice in there, a whisper.
Hands clutched his fingers…
He was cold.
He was so fucking cold.
His skin burned with cold, hardening his flesh.
He felt unbearably exposed, like he’d been stripped naked and staked out, spread-eagled, in the middle of the tundra, left for wolves to eat down to the bone, to eat leisurely, lingering around his half-consumed corpse to growl over his bones. He watched them there, in his mind’s eye. He watched them rip him apart, snarl and snap over his half-eaten ribs.
The pain didn’t start until later.
He didn’t know how long he’d been lying there, when the real pain started.
He heard more voices by then.
“Get him to eat something,” one of them said.
A male voice. He recognized it.
“He’s got to fucking eat something––” the voice began, angry.
“He can’t,” another voice said. Female. “Not yet. He’s too weak––”
“So what? Pour it down his fucking throat before he dies. Look at him, for fuck’s sake. Just look at him––”
“Calm down,” the second voice said. “Just calm down, Damon. We have him back. He’ll be okay––”
“The fuck he will. Jesus.” The anger wavered, turning into something like disgust, or maybe some other emotion Nick couldn’t read. “Bullshit, he’ll be okay. I can’t believe you just said that, given what––”
Nick lost the rest.
He faded out without warning.
That light flickered overhead, those ice-blue eyes…
Then everything eclipsed, leaving only silence.
“GET BACK! Jesus! Get back! Now! We have no idea if those restraints will hold!”
Fear.
Prey. Fear.
Prey…
Food.
His hunger surged, turning on with such an intensity, he couldn’t control his limbs. All around him, he heard snarling. He saw wolves. He saw the wolves again, snarling and snapping over him in a starving pack, fangs flashing white, sharp as knives behind his eyes…
The snarling grew louder… more familiar.
“Stay there. By the door. We’ll hit the release once all of us are out of there––”
“Can he knock down the door?”
“No. It should be okay. We’ve held vamps in here before––”
“Sure, lady. Sure. I’m sure you’ve had vamps exactly like this in here before––”
“No. She’s right. It’s the only way.” A third voice. Male. Decisive. “We’re going to have to lock him in. Leave the food. Hope it calms him down enough that he’ll regain reason. Once we can get him feeding normally again, he should calm down––”
“You’re assuming he can come back,” the other voice said. “You’re assuming he’s still in there somewhere. That he didn’t lose his fucking mind in all of this––”
The female voice again.
Hard. As decisive as the male’s.
“He’ll come back.”
The other male scoffed. “What makes you so sure?”
“Because I insist upon it,” the voice said coldly.
Another voice, younger, worried, female. “Is that going to be enough?”
The male scoffed again. “Does it matter? I don’t think blood bags are going to cut it right now, even if we give him gallons of the shit…”
That voice was familiar.
So damned familiar.
Male. He knew it.
He knew that voice––
“Well what do you suggest, for fuck’s sake?” Another voice, one he didn’t remember hearing before. Female. Younger than the one before. “You want to offer him your wrist right now, dude? Seriously? He’ll rip your head off, then probably chuck it across the room like a football, just for the hell of it.” A pause, then open impatience, worry. “Would you just come over here? We need to lock up. You’re playing with fire. If those straps break––”
“All right,” the male voice grumbled. “All right. Chill the fuck out––”
Nick could smell it now.
The smell of blood overpowered him.
It blinded him, making his tongue hurt, his mouth, his lips, his veins––
His mind tried to wrap around that voice.
He fought with the male voice, the female voice.
He tried to distinguish them, to give them names.
He fought to find names, faces, eyes to go with them. He struggled not to hear them as different flavors of prey…
He couldn’t.
He fucking couldn’t.
The snarling grew louder, more guttural.
His chest hurt.
His chest hurt so fuc
king bad.
“Okay.” The older woman’s voice. “I’m going to release the straps.”
She paused, and he could almost feel her watching him.
The snarling grew deeper, heavier.
“…Is everyone ready?”
He didn’t know he was straining against resistance. He didn’t know he was fighting anything physically. He couldn’t feel his body at all.
He didn’t know the resistance until, suddenly…
It was gone.
The resistance vanished.
He was on his feet, blind, and that snarling followed him.
He smelled blood, heard snarling, and a beating in his ears, like the combined sound of ten-thousand heartbeats, throbbing behind his eyes.
Sensation converged, blinding him.
He felt all of them, in excruciating detail… even as they crashed into one another in the darkness of his mind, wiping him clean, emptying the more logical parts of his consciousness of any meaningful information. He stopped trying to listen, to smell… to think.
He stopped trying to move. He stopped trying not to move.
Everything turned grey.
Somewhere in that, Nick ceased to be.
Nick ceased.
He simply… disappeared.
He was running.
He was running, and it felt good to run.
It felt good, urgent, important, desperate, unimaginably better to run.
He didn’t know where he was.
It was dark.
It was dark, there were trees, streetlights off in the distance that flashed and flickered like stars as he leapt and ran down a narrow game trail between dense thickets. He saw those lights, but they didn’t illuminate where he was. He kept to the shadows, to the deepest part of the dark, out of sight––but he was running, and he could see everything.
He had a memory of people before this.
He remembered people, crowds.
He got through them somehow.
He remembered pushing his way through.
He remembered pushing, knowing what he wanted, even though he couldn’t articulate any of it, not even to himself. He didn’t try. He knew what he wanted.
He knew where he wanted to go.
He felt it so intensely, so fucking intensely, he couldn’t see or feel anything else.
Eyes of Ice Page 15