Vampire Master: Vampire Queen Series: Club Atlantis

by Joey W. Hill

  He doesn’t like to get dirty. Not like that. Another piece of information.

  Good girl. Keep collecting them, Ella. We’ll get out of here, baby. It might be a long road, but we’ll do it. And no matter what happens, I love you. I love you so damn much, with everything I am. That’s the truth, no matter how he’ll try to twist things. Beat him at his own game. I got him revved up, you calm him down. He thinks he’s conditioning us. We condition him right the fuck back.

  She couldn’t take her eyes from the screen, from Wolf looking at her through the camera. If Hollow was going to take that away, she’d get as much as she could out of it first.

  He thinks he can break you. He can. He can break you because you’ve been broken before. Plenty of times. You know how to break, but still embrace who you are and the life you’ve been given. That abundance.

  Use it to beat his fucking ass, and then I’ll tear him apart for hurting you.

  Wolf staring at her in the camera strengthened her. Unfortunately, Hollow noticed.

  It had not been easy to cuff him to the bars, and now they implemented a plan that made that unnecessary. The scientists inserted a grid in front of Wolf and behind him, and secured it to the bars of the cage, locking him into the middle of the cage, the bars pressed up against his flesh in front and behind. They made him hand over his clothes, too. Ella saw the looks a couple of the female scientists gave his genitalia. One of them made a joke about them that caused the other to laugh.

  On the surface, it looked like her and Charlene, whispering and giggling about a handsome Dom or sub in a club session. Whereas the scientists’ behavior appalled her, she and Charlene had been having flirtatious, harmless fun, earning grins from the sub or a mock reproof from the amused Dom. Context and consent were everything. But it made the surface similarities no less horrifying.

  The earphones and electricity were activated once again, effectively destroying any mental conversation between them. Just as Wolf predicted.

  Another…how long? Ten minutes? An hour? She wasn’t sure how one measured time when going through something like that. All she knew was when it stopped, she was slumped in the chair. She wasn’t sure, but she might have blacked out, because for awhile she couldn’t see Wolf, though the screen hadn’t been darkened. Not until the earphones were shut off. She felt so weak.

  The cage opened, and a woman in a rat mask was there, making her sip water. When she asked Ella a question, Ella just looked at her blankly. She couldn’t tell if the woman was new, or someone she’d seen before. She hated those masks. Her ears were ringing. And when she spoke, her voice didn’t work. At some point, she’d started screaming, too. Her vocal cords hurt.

  More fluid put to her lips. Blood this time. More of Wolf’s blood. She didn’t want them weakening him. He needed her blood, she was sure of it. How long had Hollow kept the electricity on this time? She wanted to reach out to Wolf, but if he was resting, unconscious, she wanted him to stay that way as long as possible. He’d reach out to her when he could. She didn’t want to rouse him from the bliss of unconsciousness.

  The whole idea was ludicrous, that she could do anything against a seasoned, sociopathic CIA operative that he wouldn’t see coming a mile off. So she’d be herself, wouldn’t she?

  He thinks he can break you. He can. But you know how to break...

  Hollow was saying something to the woman. She left, and it was just Ella and Hollow now. She didn’t want to think about what the others were doing, because if they weren’t here, they were with Wolf. Hollow was staring at his laptop, working on something. He glanced her way, spoke every once in awhile. Eventually, she started to hear him.

  “…told her your ears and voice needed to have time to heal after the administering of the blood.”

  “Yeah,” Ella said, clearing her throat. His head came around, eyes narrowing. She tried to straighten up. Tried to dispel the immediate memory of his fingers inside her.

  “Is Wolf going to break my heart, the way Saturnia did you?” she asked quietly. “Do you really think that? I’m still human, Hollow. I want to know.”

  He looked at her for so long she figured he would just ignore her, turn back to his computer. Instinctively she knew trying to make him believe she wanted an answer to the question wasn’t the right tactic. She had to make herself believe she wanted the answer. It had to be as close to authentic as possible to fool him.

  “Yes,” he said at last. “It’s too late for you, though. You’re already third marked.”

  “So are you, and it’s not too late for you.”

  “That’s because she doesn’t look into my mind to figure out what I’m doing. She just asks me where I am, what I’m doing, and takes it at face value. Saturnia can’t handle more white noise in her head than she already has. Communication with her is direct give and take.”

  “Sounds lonely,” Ella mumbled. “No meandering, no picnics together in the hallway of your mind. I like having Wolf in my head.”

  “Sounds clean,” Hollow disagreed. “Simple. Quiet. No messages exchanged, except what’s functional. That’s why she thinks I’m in Washington. She won’t be looking for me. If she asks me to come back to help look for you and Wolf, I’ll give her a reason I can’t get there, or tell her I’m doing something from my location that appears to be helping.”

  Messages. A phone. That was it.

  She needed access to a phone. If she could let anyone know that Hollow was the key…then Saturnia could figure out what he’d done, where he was…

  A vampire could scour a servant down to the soul. Hadn’t Gideon said that, as bluntly as possible?

  Sometimes the strategy was so simple, it was staring you straight in the face.

  Her gaze scanned the room, fixed on a glitter of purple. They’d put her belongings in a little cubby hole at the back of the temporary lab, along with the tiny purse she’d had slung across her body. That didn’t bring her any hope, because she’d left her phone at the club, like an idiot.

  No, not an idiot, she realized. Because while she didn’t know many phone numbers by heart, being like everyone else, overly dependent on the address book in her phone, she knew her own damn number. Someone at the club would be smart enough to track her phone’s whereabouts first, and would have it in their keeping.

  She was surrounded by people with phones, tablets, laptops. She just needed to get her hands on one for a minute…

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “How you can remain that…separate from her. I couldn’t be that way with Wolf.”

  “Because you think you love him, and he is attached to you.” Hollow’s mind was apparently agile enough to work on what he was doing and keep up a conversation with her. That meant he wasn’t assigning much significance to her questions, or his mind needed additional diversion while he worked. She’d noticed he preferred to listen to tapes while he worked. Saturnia had said he was always learning new things. Languages, history, politics. His mind never stopped devouring knowledge.

  “Ours is a practical arrangement,” he said. “The work…”

  He stopped, and the look that crossed his face was what she expected most men looked like when considering sex with a really good lover. “When we worked together, everything made sense. So I wasn’t surprised when she recruited me the same way she used to recruit assets for the CIA. She was up front about being a vampire. She knew I wasn’t happy without her, and she wanted an easy blood source. Working with Fort, she figured I’d appreciate a three-hundred-year life span to do more of what I was already good at.”

  “So killing off vampires wasn’t the grand plan from the beginning. Which means she was your focus, like Wolf said.”

  Whatever button Wolf had pushed with his question about Saturnia, apparently didn’t rouse Hollow the same way when the subject was raised by Ella. But then, Ella was a servant.

  At Hollow’s bemused look, Ella met his expression head on. “Wolf is the first one who wanted to keep me. I hoped…” Her voice caught. �
��I thought he really cared about me, but the way you’re making it sound, it’s about blood and convenience.”

  “For me and Saturnia. I think Wolf does genuinely feel something for you. At least right now. That worked out well for us. A flaw in the plan resulted in a better plan and avoided complete failure. It’s why you have to be fluid, adaptable, in this business.”

  He lifted a shoulder, paused to make a change, and then kept going, his fingers always smoothly moving over the keys.

  “Our planned target was Anwyn, because her attachment to Gideon is obvious. The hunters would blow up the alley, take out Wolf, so we didn’t have to contend with him. I would conveniently hear about the tragedy, alert Allan, Fort and Saturnia. Because of the friendship between him and Wolf, Fort would have automatically reached out to Anwyn, offered the team’s help. If necessary, I would have made the right suggestions to land us where we ended up, revamping security. Which would put me in the right position to set up Anwyn for capture the way I did Wolf.”

  “But Wolf…didn’t die.”

  “No, he didn’t.” Hollow shrugged again. He might have been discussing chess strategy. “We thought we would have to cut our losses. Especially when we recognized that Anwyn had an active sire. We never met him, but Wolf made it clear there was another vampire bound to her. Which meant he could track her if she disappeared, regardless of our precautions. So another plan was needed.

  “This time, it was the best one possible, better than the first, actually. Spending time in Atlantis, it was clear how much you’d come to mean to the heretofore ‘lone Wolf.’” A strange smile crossed Hollow’s face, as if he wasn’t used to making jokes. “He’s far too human, right now at least, to let you die. So we decided to realign our capture target to him.”

  Ella’s mind was whirling. So much had been going on, all of it so undetectable to the security measures that had been stringent, even before the revamp. And Bill…Bill had been a guest of a member. The vetting would have still been there, but he said he’d been at the cover job a while. Just the same way Perry had been homeless.

  She went back to her earlier angle. “What did you mean about Wolf…being far too human ‘right now at least’ to let me die?”

  “Caught that, did you? You may not have drunk the Kool-Aid yet.” He gave her a serious look as if the word choice was not meant as a joke, not even slightly. “Over time, they all relegate their human servants to a compartmentalized part of their lives. The inequities in their world make having too much emotion for them problematic.”

  She’d become Atlantis’s most in demand submissive for her ability to listen and anticipate, and she did that by being genuinely interested in the Dom, connecting to what he or she wanted. Not just what they said they wanted, but what they felt beneath that. Sometimes, especially with the less experienced ones, she knew what experience and result they were seeking before they did.

  She tuned out everything but Hollow. There was no Wolf, no Atlantis, no life or death situation. There was just her and Hollow, talking.

  “You haven’t really mentioned sex. Do you and Saturnia not…”

  Hollow shrugged, apparently unfazed by the revelation that would make most men defensive. “Either one of us can perform upon demand. It’s how we’re trained. We become what we need to be.”

  “Why would you want her dead? Don’t you love her?”

  Hollow’s jaw flexed, his fingers pausing on the keys as he stared at the screen without seeing it. “Love is just a social construct,” he said.

  Ella laughed, gaining a startled look from him. “Oh, ow, I shouldn’t have done that.” Her middle ached like fire. Since her arms were bound, all she could do to lessen it was press her chin to her chest, which did almost nothing. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have laughed, but I mean, really? How can something that’s affected so much of the world and so many people and decisions, be ‘just a construct’? That doesn’t make sense to me. That’s the first time you’ve sounded defensive. You do love her, but love is unfamiliar and unknown. Uncontrollable.”

  Hollow stood up, took a drink from his water bottle. Pointed at her. “Being a good undercover agent is about becoming the role you’re playing, so you’re no longer playing. Everything you do is motivated by who you are, the ultimate goal only in the peripheral vision, almost out of the picture entirely, so it isn’t detected by your target.”

  He put down the bottle and closed the screen on the laptop. When his gaze met hers, Ella’s heart sank at the knowing look. “You would have made a good agent.”

  He moved for the door. “The techs will be coming in to do some diagnostics on you. Don’t struggle; it will only waste time and make things worse. They’ve turned off the grid on Wolf for now, but they will turn it back on if needed to make you behave.”

  He stopped at the door, looking back at her. “None of this is personal, Ella. I know what you were trying to do, but you are human, and not completely under their control yet, so you deserve an answer. I was born detached from humans. Outside, looking in. The usual cliché for someone recruited to the CIA. But then, I learned about this vampire-servant relationship, all this overwhelming intimacy. We could be in one another’s minds. The possibilities were overwhelming. And yet…Saturnia told me she would give me the privacy of my mind, would stay out of it unless we were in a clandestine situation. I told her it didn’t bother me, but she said it bothered her.”

  He stared down at his hands. “This is the way she wanted it. Bad things happened to her, in our service. She needs four impenetrable walls in her mind. She comes to the safety of mine when the noise gets to be too much, but the only one inside her head is her.”

  A thoughtful look crossed his face. “I suppose you’re right. I expected the ability to connect as vampire and servant would mean more to her. It didn’t. That’s when I understood. It really is just functional to them. Humans are always seeking connection, intimacy, even someone like me, after a fashion. Vampires have no humanity, and made ones leave it behind quickly. None of them are like us. They see themselves as superior, and I can’t argue the logic of it. If a vampire dies, the servant dies. Not the other way around. So if push comes to shove, they will sacrifice the servant to spare their own skin. No point in both dying.”

  He raised his gaze to her. “Wolf’s a vampire and yet, despite that, he thinks he loves you, Ella. Maybe he even told you that. You’re this sweet, gentle little thing. It’s understandable. Who wouldn’t love you, want to protect you? But it’s his arrogance that was his true undoing. He thought he could save you and still preserve his own life. His feelings for you, temporary though they are, contributed to that miscalculation.”

  He pursed his lips. “I had nothing that would inspire such tender, protective feelings from a lover. But to answer your question, yes. At the end of the day, you are just a servant to him. He will never put you before himself. You are the help, the buffet table, the sex object. But I guess someone like you is okay with that. You’ve accepted it, as the closest thing you’ll get to what you truly want.”

  The door opened, a trio of masked scientists returning. Hollow moved past them, leaving the room without further instruction, telling her everyone knew what they were supposed to be doing. As they gathered around her prison, there was a low hum of excitement about them as they considered her and what questions they were going to ask her. Their talking among themselves added to her torment. They would record all of this, prove evidence of the vampire bond. How much had already been logged and transferred to the places that would spread the knowledge?

  They’d used Wolf’s feelings for her to trap him. Love between a vampire and a human would destroy an entire race.

  “If you don’t answer our questions, we turn the electricity back on,” one of the women reminded her in a firm, no-nonsense tone.

  “So?” Ella said in a subdued voice. “He just told me that Wolf’s love is only temporary. That it will go away.” She lifted her lashes. “You don’t have to threaten me. I jus
t want out of here. Can I at least sit at that table over there and have a soda or something?” She nodded toward it. “And clothes?”

  “No clothes,” one of the men said brusquely.

  “Come on,” she said plaintively. “I answer twenty of your bazillion questions, and you give me time at the table with a soda. And maybe some crackers. I know I can keep going forever and not die, but third marks still need food. Check with Hollow, see if he’s okay with it, but please let me out of here for a couple minutes. It’d be nice to go to the bathroom.”

  “Non-negotiable,” the other male said. She realized then that, at least for one of them, there was more to this than a scientist’s detached fascination with the data to be learned. The gleam in his eye as he ran his gaze over her made her feel a little sick. He was enjoying the whole planet Gor dynamic, holding power over a naked female, binding her so she could hide nothing, have no dignity.

  Yes, it made her feel sick, but it was something else that could be used. She filed that away. She might have just found her weak link.

  The laptop Hollow had left on the counter beeped. The scientist leaned over, tapped it. “Yeah.”

  Hollow’s voice came through the audio, sharp and clear. “She’s playing you. Another hour of conditioning. When she comes out of it, she speaks only when asked a question. Any requests, any questions, any comments or conversation, except in response to what we’re asking, and conditioning re-commences.”

  The scientists didn’t like it. They were obviously impatient to start their questions, but they deferred to Hollow. Dread gathered in the pit of her belly, and fear. No. No, no, no…

  She tried not to shrink away, but there was no use. The headphones were strapped back in place. Something else was said and responded to by the man at the keyboard, but she couldn’t hear it. One of the women, still in the cage with her, squatted next to her, ran an impersonal finger over the mark on Ella’s back. Ella wanted to spit at her and jerked away before she remembered she was supposed to be acting cooperative and docile. But she didn’t want them touching that mark, tainting it with their evil.