“Un-fucking-believable,” muttered Brad, more to himself than to Nat. “Nothing for over two years and then all of a sudden, two of the damned bloodsuckers in the same night.”
My head struck the concrete floor hard, but the pain was minor compared to that from the silver blade piercing my chest. My two assailants dropped my arms and left me where I fell. I found I could roll my eyes to a limited degree and I took the opportunity to look around the room. There was not much to see. I observed only stark white concrete walls and a ceiling lit by a bare bulb mounted into a socket on the wall furthest from the stairs. The basement stretched out approximately fifteen by twenty feet, plenty of room for the three of us and the seven foot long, four foot wide stainless steel table standing in the middle of the room. I could just make out a figure laid out on top of that steel table, and the meaning of Brad’s words on the staircase began to sink in.
They had caught another vampire!
I was actually the second victim to wander into their trap tonight. A lucky bonus for them, though I could not fathom why they would take the risk to capture one of us, much less two. I briefly wondered if the unlucky bastard on the table had been led here by his prick as well, or if he had been seeking blood. Either way, the results were the same: pierced through the heart and laid out like a butterfly pinned to a corkboard display.
“So what do we do with him?” asked Nat as she stood over me, arms crossed in front of her chest. “We only have the one table. If we bleed him on the concrete, we could lose some of the blood.”
“We don’t have to do them both at the same time,” responded Brad as though lecturing to a child. “Hell, we don’t even have to bleed them both in the same night. We aren’t in any kind of hurry here.”
“How do we hold him then, when we pull out the dagger?”
“Leave the knife in. We can shackle him to the table when we finish with the first one.” Brad spoke slowly as if lecturing a three year-old.
Natasha slapped him across the arm. “Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid. The longer that dagger stays in him, the more blood he loses from the wound. Every drop that falls on the ground is a drop that we can’t sell later. It’s taken years to catch these two and there’s no telling when, or if, we’re ever gonna find another one. I want to get the most I can from both.”
“Stop being such a bitch! Fine! I’ve got some handcuffs upstairs and we can use a couple of belts, too.” Brad stormed out of my field of vision and I could hear him stomping up the wooden cellar stairs into the house above.
Nat squatted down next to my head and began to stroke my hair while she waited for Brad to return. With her free hand, she hiked the hem of her white dress up above her knees, intentionally giving me a view between her legs. Like her bra, her panties were midnight black. “I’m sorry, baby,” she said to me. “I was kind of hoping Brad was going to let us finish before he put the blade in. I’ve never done it with a vampire before. I’ll bet you’re pretty good at it, too. Not like what’s-his-name.” She cocked a thumb in the direction of the steel table. “Apparently he likes the boys. Brad had to reel him in by himself. That’s why I was waiting for him at the bar.”
She ran her fingertips along my forehead and down the side of my face. “You’re a nice looking guy. Maybe it’s not too late? How about before we kill you, you and I have a little fun? You would have to stay strapped to the table, of course. But this cowgirl would be happy to ride you all night long. What do you say?”
I couldn’t speak, but I had an answer for her. I vowed silently that if I got loose I would tear her head off of her body and drink from the bloody stump of her neck. I would drink her dry. And when there was no more blood to be had, I would fuck her corpse.
Unaware of the dark unspoken thoughts regarding her fate, Nat continued to pet my face and hair until she heard Brad thumping down the stairs back into the basement. She kissed her fingers and touched them to my lips, then stood up, letting her dress fall back into place. Brad came into the room holding a pair of metal handcuffs and several leather belts.
The two of them rolled me onto my side and pulled my hands behind my back. Brad placed the handcuffs on my wrists and pushed them closed until the edges of the cuffs began to cut into my skin. I heard the teeth clicking into place as each cuff was locked tight. He followed the cuffs with two of the leather belts, looping them around my wrists and pulling them as tight as he could make them before cinching them in place. He placed the remaining three belts around my ankles, securing them as he had done with the first two.
“Will that hold him?” asked Nat as she examined Brad’s handiwork.
“It should. This is as strong as the shackles holding the other guy, and he seems to be pretty secure.”
“Okay,” Nat conceded, uncertainty still in her voice. “Pull it out.”
Brad maneuvered me around until he could grasp the handle of the long weapon piercing my body. With one quick jerk he pulled it free. The pain intensified for a moment as the blade cut through my heart on its way out, but it quickly subsided as the weapon left my body. I felt control return to my limbs.
“I’ll kill both of you! I’ll tear you apart with my bare hands!” I screamed. I struggled against my bonds, thrashing wildly across the concrete floor, unfortunately Brad was correct in his assumption that the leather would hold me. Despite my strength, I could not find the leverage to break the belts and free my hands or feet. I fought for almost a minute before I had to concede that brute strength alone would not gain me my freedom. I was going to have to think my way out. In the meantime, I would conserve my strength until it might be used more effectively.
They watched me as I struggled and waited until I once more lay quietly on the floor. “We are probably going to have to stab him again to get him into the shackles,” Brad said calmly.
“Probably,” Natasha agreed.
I glared at them, impotently. Wanting them dead, but completely unaware of how to accomplish it. “Why?” I asked, already suspecting the answer, but wanting to hear them confirm it.
“For your blood,” said Brad. “I thought you would have figured that out by now. We are going to sell vials of your blood to the Friends. They can drink it, or fill a syringe with it and stick it in their neck or their arm or whatever. End result is they get to be vampires and Nat and me get to be rich.”
“And you are going to change yourselves, too?”
“Hell, no.” Brad’s face twisted with disgust. “We don’t want to live forever by sucking blood like a couple of murdering parasites. Besides, I personally like having a heartbeat. We just want to be comfortable while living a normal, human life. Selling your blood is going to make us enough money to do that for a very long time.”
“And when you have all the blood you can from us?” Again, I knew the answer, but I had to hear it out loud.
“When you have no more blood to give us, we’ll tear out your heart and expose it to the sun. It’s a perfect solution. It isn’t even murder because you’re already dead.” Brad laughed out loud at his own witticism. Nat did not join in.
I just nodded from where I lay on the cold concrete. I tried to sort through what Brad had told me, looking for an argument to counter his plans. Maybe, just something to keep him talking and buy myself a little more time to think of a way out. I felt something tickling my subconscious, telling me that I had missed something important. I had missed a clue to how I might survive this encounter. I could not tease out exactly what it was, however. Fear was clouding my mind and I needed to think clearly if I wanted out of this mess.
I pushed his words around in my head trying to find a flaw I could work with, but nothing clicked into place. Was I imagining it? Was the surge of hope I had felt just wishful thinking? I went through his speech one more time. What had he said? He was going to kill me. That was no help, besides I already knew that before he said it. He had also said something about … murder.
Then I had it. Twice he had mentioned murder. He had referre
d to vampires as “murdering parasites.” He had also said killing me “isn’t even murder.” Murder bothered him, or at least it triggered some moral response. I needed to work that angle. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had.
“Do you care if you kill anyone?” I asked, prodding to see if I had found the crack in his plans.
The two looked at me as though I had asked if they enjoyed kicking puppies. “Of course we care!” said Natasha, perhaps a little too emphatically. “We aren’t killers like you. We don’t want to hurt anyone. People anyway. You don’t count.”
I squirmed to the wall and worked my way into a sitting position so I could see the two of them more easily. I had found a point I could exploit and I allowed myself a small hopeful smile before pointing it out. “What about all the people you are going to kill with my blood?” I asked.
Nat looked confused, but Brad just shook his head in dismissal. “Turning themselves into vampires is completely their choice. We are just providing the blood,” he said.
“No,” I corrected him. “You are killing them. When a vampire dies – me, for example – all new vampires created from his blood are destroyed as well. And how do you think the Friends are going to feel when they see their own people drinking my blood and dying. Not changing, Brad. Dying. Don’t you think they are going to be a little bit upset at the people that gave them the poison?
“Hell, I don’t even know if you will have any blood to sell them, come to think of it. I have no idea what will happen after I die. The blood might just puff into dust before you can sell it.”
Brad and Nat stared at each other in horror and shock.
“That’s not true,” Brad shouted at me. “That can’t be true.”
“It’s true,” I told him sadly. “I honestly wish it wasn’t, but it is a fact.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, purely for dramatic effect. “I think there are some choices you need to be making right now. If you go ahead with your plans to drain us of all our blood and then you let us go, well, I can’t speak for the poor guy on the table but I can assure you that I will be pretty pissed off. Enough to want to hunt you down and exact a little payback.
“If you just keep us hostage and drain a little blood here and there over time, eventually I will figure a way to escape and then … same result. Me free. You dead. However,” I paused again to let them absorb my words and realize that I was about to offer them a way out. When I was sure that they were paying close attention, I made my pitch. “However, if you free me now, I will just walk away. You can forget about me and I will forget about you. It will be as if none of this had ever happened.”
Nat looked hopefully at Brad. “What do you think? Do we let him go?”
“No. We can’t trust him,” Brad told her, although I could see that he had briefly considered the idea. “He’ll kill us the second we cut him loose. I don’t care what he says.”
“So what do we do?”
“I don’t know,” he said, with a touch of panic touching his voice. “We could just kill them both right now and try again later when we figure something out.”
“Well, that would be a pretty lousy solution for all of us,” I interrupted. I needed to change the direction of the conversation before he decided to just kill me out of desperation. “After all the work you have already put in. What a waste to just kill us and have nothing to show for it. How about this: if you cut me loose, not only will I let you live but I might be persuaded to let you take one vial of blood for you to sell. Maybe two.”
Brad still looked doubtful, but he was at least listening.
“And the other guy?” he asked.
A deep male voice answered from the table. “One vial,” it said. “And you may live.” The voice was soft, rich, almost musical, and I could detect no sound of stress or fear despite the hopeless situation its owner was obviously in. I still could not clearly see him, but sitting up, I could make out the profile of a tall slender man in dress slacks and bare from the waist up. He was on his back, held to the top of the table by leather and metal shackles at his throat, wrists and ankles.
Brad grabbed Natasha’s arm and pulled her to the farthest corner of the basement away from me and they began whispering frantically. The attempt to create a private conversation was pointless as I could hear clearly every word they said.
“I still don’t think we can trust them,” Brad said. “But there has to be some way to make this work for us.”
Natasha was frightened and simply looking for a way out of the mess with their skins intact. She argued for taking the deal I had offered.
As I listened to their hissed debate, another voice intruded. The man on the table was whispering. Too softly for Brad or Nat to hear, but just audible to my keen ears.
“Can you stand?” he asked.
“I think I can get to my feet,” I responded in the same soft tones. “I can’t run or use my hands, though.”
“If you can get to the table and place your hands on one of mine, I can get the belts off of your wrists. You will have to move quickly, so he doesn’t have time to use his blade.”
The argument in the corner was coming to a conclusion. Brad was arguing for keeping us alive just long enough to sell our blood, then killing us after they had their money. That way if something happened to their customers, they would have the time and the cash to run. Natasha was grudgingly conceding to his ideas. The idea of causing the deaths of multiple people was losing its deterrent effect in the wake of self-preservation. If I was going to have any hope of escape, I had to act before they came to complete agreement.
I didn’t know how my fellow captive thought he could remove my bonds – especially as he had been unable to free himself from his own – but I was out of options. I drew my feet in under me and, using the wall behind me for support, I pushed myself erect. Two fast hops brought me to the steel table. Brad saw me move, but it made no difference, I was at the table before he could react. Still, he brought the dagger up over his head and lunged toward me.
This was the first chance I had to see the blade fully unsheathed. Previously I had only witnessed the pointed end protruding from my chest. The blade was easily eighteen inches from base to tip, almost a short sword rather than a large dagger. The silver and polished ebony handle added another half foot to its length making the weapon a full two feet long. This was not a blade to be ignored. Hoping my new ally knew what he was talking about, I turned my back to the table and placed my wrists over one of his shackled hands.
Something cold and razor sharp raked down the length of my right forearm. I did not take time to look away from Brad as he charged across the room, but from the corner of my eye I saw the stranger’s fingernails. They were long and appeared to be filed to wicked looking points. They cut into the flesh of my arm, parting skin like a sharp knife through a sheet of paper, but I tolerated the pain as I felt the leather belts also parting under their edge. The metal handcuffs did not cut, but with the leather straps defeated it took very little effort on my part to snap the fragile chain links that held them together. My hands were free!
Careful of my balance, as my feet were still lashed together, I met Brad’s attack. He came at me at a full run, thrusting the sword in front of him, the point angled toward my chest. He was slow and clumsy as humans are, and he did not have the element of surprise on his side this time. I slapped the blade aside with my bare hand as it approached, knocking it from his hands and sending it clattering to the floor. Reversing the direction of my swing, I brought the back of my hand across his face as his momentum carried him forward. I was not gentle. The bones of his jaw dislocated and broke at the contact with my open hand.
Like the sword before him, Brad crashed uselessly to the ground, sliding to a sprawling stop against one wall. Though he lay unmoving where he fell, I could still hear his heartbeat and I could see blood pulsing in the veins of his neck. I had not killed him. Not yet, anyway.
When Brad fell, Natasha ran for the stairs. I had to paus
e long enough to strip the three remaining belts from my ankles before I could pursue, but I still caught her before she got any further than the kitchen. With one hand I grabbed a tangle of her black, shoulder length hair and pulled her off of her feet. I dragged her by those same dark locks, crying and struggling, back into the concrete bunker that was supposed to have been my tomb, but would now be hers.
I could have been a little gentler taking her down those stairs I suppose, but something about dragging a screaming woman by her hair appealed to me at that moment. Maybe I was somehow in touch with my caveman ancestors. Maybe I have always been a bit of a sadist. Regardless of the reason, I wanted her to be afraid, and I wanted her in pain. More than anything else, I wanted her to understand to the depths of her soul that I was now in complete control; that whatever hopes and dreams she may have had for her future, they were now dust. My goal was to make sure that she knew that she and her boyfriend had fucked with the wrong vampire.
Back under the glaring light of the single bare bulb mounted in the basement, I pulled Natasha to the corner furthest from the stairs and dropped her to floor. “Stay,” I said simply, then watched her until I received a response. She stared up at me, tears running in dark black streaks down her cheeks, colored by the thick rings of kohl painted around her eyes. She sniffed loudly, wiping the back of one hand across her nose, then she bobbed her head in one short nod. Yes. She understood.
I turned to the table and took my first good look at the vampire who had saved me by cutting my bonds. My mouth fell open in shocked surprise. He was beautiful. I don’t know a better word. He was lean and muscular with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. He had thick black hair; naturally so, not out of a bottle like the sniveling creature in the corner. Deep brown eyes watched me from under a smooth, unlined brow. He had movie star good looks. Better. Movie stars would have killed to have his face. His features were clean and symmetrical, with a straight blade of a nose over a full-lipped mouth. A sharp chin and jaw line that appeared to have been carved by a sculptor’s hand framed the entire perfect picture. I would have guessed him to be in his thirties when he died. I had no idea how old he actually might be.
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