by Amy Faye
He had been fine the whole time.
Sarah tried to keep her face plain, tried to keep her expression neutral. She would need a moment to summon up the energy to escape again. It was going to be hard to outrun Jason. He'd already shown more than once that he was faster than her, that he reacted faster than she had realized was possible.
As long as she kept her intentions to herself long enough to gather the gumption, and she managed to get the jump on him…
Jason's hand pressed down on her shoulder, hard.
"You can't leave," he said flatly. "I know you're scared. Hell, I would be, too. No doubt about it. But you can't go anywhere. If there was anything like the fuss I'm guessing that you two caused, then Victor knows where you are. Hell, it'll be lucky if he doesn't find this place."
"You can't keep me here," he grunted out, each word accentuated by trying to twist out of his grasp. He was too strong, though, and he had good leverage. After a few moments of furiously trying to squirm away, Sarah realized how fruitless the entire thing was. She couldn't escape from him.
She could, however, bide her time. Eventually, even if it was tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after, something important would come up. Something would come up, and they'd let her out of their sight, and she'd be free from all of this craziness, once and for all.
"I'm not going to hurt you," Jason said. His voice was soft, almost caring. "But if you keep struggling, you're going to hurt yourself, and I'm not going to feel bad."
He tried to make the last line sound as if he were teasing her. Sarah had had enough of his tricks, though. He and his partner both, they had fooled her. She had trusted them, had let them into her home.
"Just tell me one thing," she said, her struggle finally letting go.
"Name it. I'll tell you whatever you want to know."
"I thought vampires couldn't go into a person's house without being invited."
Jason snorted. "Nah," he said. He sounded the same as he had always sounded, now. As if she hadn't just tried to run away and he hadn't stopped her. As if he hadn't condemned her to die at the hands of some freak. "That's a myth."
The conversation was over. Sarah rolled over and closed her eyes. If he wasn't going to press her any more for details, then she wasn't going to give them. Tomorrow she'd wait, and if she got the chance, it wouldn't be a minute before she was long gone.
It was harder to fall asleep than she'd expected. Every noise, every car driving by, every drip of water seemed as if it was Isaiah coming back, or worse, Victor.
The terror of the night had started to fade; now she was left with the exhaustion and trying to put together the pieces to a puzzle that she wasn't even sure all came from the same box.
If Isaiah had always been… what he was, then what did it mean that he had saved her before? Could he be working with Victor, some sort of protege? He could have gotten a hell of a lot less hurt if it was all putting on a show for her.
Was he going to hurt her?
And if he wanted to, could she even stop him?
After a long couple of hours she drifted off to an uneasy sleep.
Jason watched her sleep from across the room. It was dark, but he'd adjusted to it hours ago. The only outside light came in through a skylight, thickly caked with dust. By the time it was twilight it was nearly as black as pitch.
He could smell her, could smell the blood inside her. His stomach churned. What was he going to do with the night? He had hours to pass, and she needed to sleep. He needed to sleep, for that matter. But it didn't matter. He couldn't let himself sleep, couldn't let himself feel vulnerable.
If Isaiah had been hurt badly enough to let Sarah get spooked then they weren't just dealing with any old fresh-off-the-boat vampire.
They had known what they were getting themselves into when he had shown up on their radar. Rich and powerful meant established, and established almost always meant that they weren't young. He wasn't young, himself, now that he thought about it. Not like some of the whelps they'd dealt with.
He'd overplayed it for Sarah's sake. If she hadn't been spooked, she could have gone off and ruined the whole thing. If she didn't trust him, and he couldn't exactly blame her, then he at least needed her to believe that she had no other choice. At least until he was sure she was safe.
It would be so easy.
All he would have to do is put his weight down on her and take what he wanted. He could smell it. Her blood was sweeter than some. More aromatic.
But that didn't explain why Victor had bothered to show up in that apartment. That was unusual, even for the younger ones. They got attached, but they didn't know what they were doing. They might have tried, but for them to find it meant there was a special interest.
By the time they were old enough, tough enough, to bother waiting out the night to deal with them, most blood was as good as any other. You get what you can. If you're picky, you wait until you find someone who catches your eye.
That took an hour or so, if he needed it. Really needed it. Another hour, another sweet-smelling body.
Jason hated drinking the stuff. It didn't taste good enough to justify the way he felt afterward. Even after all these years he still remembered, deep down, what it felt like being human. He missed it. Isaiah might have given him shit about it, if he put it that way.
Then again, who knew what Isaiah would think. After a hundred years, Jason felt like he didn't know him any better now than he ever had.
The two things that he was sure of, though, were that he'd never seen Isaiah drink when time was short, and that if he were here now, he could have helped stopped the shaking in Jason's hands.
He could smell her from all the way over here. It would be so simple, and he only needed a taste. He could finally lay off the Tabasco sauce, could finally taste his food again. Even if it was only for a week or two, it would be worth it.
She wouldn't even miss the blood. Only a small taste, he reminded himself. He stood up. A voice in his mind shouted that whatever Victor wanted her for, it must be important. There must be a reason she was so interesting, and if he drank her blood she'd never trust him. He couldn't keep her around long enough to find out what was so special.
The hunger was louder.
He wanted it to be harder, for his body to fight himself as he walked across the room. For someone to stop him, for Sarah to wake up, to run.
He was too quiet, too light on his feet for her to hear through the veil of sleep, and then he was standing over her and he realized exactly how easy it was to take what he wanted, not for the first time.
A sound outside made him stop. He was coming. Jason recognized the sound of his footsteps, the way that his shoes scuffed the ground.
Jason breathed a sigh of relief and opened the door. It was hard to do it quietly, with the rust, so he took it slowly. Isaiah wouldn't be in any hurry to get inside.
He'd want to talk. Want to figure out what it was that had brought the shitstorm from before down on their heads. Want to figure out a plan of attack for the morning. Jason had been interrupted before, caught with his hand in the cookie jar when the hunger took him over. He'd been angry. He was angry now, on some level.
More than that, though, he was glad.
Until he saw Isaiah's face.
5
Sarah's eyes didn't feel as if they opened all at once. She thought they were closed, but then there was a whole new level of darkness that she could get when she closed them tighter. It was too bright. She wanted to go back to sleep, she was still tired.
Then she opened them for real. That was a mistake, and she realized it almost immediately. The sun was streaming down into the room through the window in the ceiling and seemed to point directly into her eyes no matter how she rolled over. Eventually she realized that she wasn't going to get back to sleep and sat up.
There was a problem, and the problem was visible right away. Isaiah walked towards her, his body strangely stilted, as if he didn't know how to act around her
. He was wearing sunglasses and long clothes, in spite of the ambient warmth. Jason was standing by the door, staring as if he could see right through it.
"You're up."
Isaiah was the one who had spoken, and he offered his hand to help her up off the mattress. She ignored it and tried to stand on her own. Her legs were wobbly, but she wasn't about to accept his help. Not from a—a monster, she mentally filled in. She couldn't bring herself to think it.
Somehow in the light of day the terror that had gripped her the night before seemed less real, as if she had been imagining the whole thing from the beginning. The fact that she hadn't woken up in her own bed, and that these two were here, that was the only reason she didn't think the whole thing had been some sort of surreal nightmare.
"I want to go home."
"You know we can't just let you go home," Isaiah said softly. "It's not safe."
"You should let her go," Jason added, his sarcastic tone sounding almost practiced. "She'll just do what she wants to do, in the long run."
"Exactly."
"Well, we're going to deal with Victor, and you're coming with us."
"No." Sarah felt as if she was gaining steam, and soon she was going to blow her lid and they were going to finally see what she was capable of. "I'm not going anywhere with you. You can't even leave, can you? You'll burn up in the sun!"
Isaiah pulled the sunglasses away from his eyes and blinked the sun out of his eyes. But in the end he was there, looking at her, the way that she realized immediately that she should have expected from the beginning. If he had to hide during the day, then he wouldn't have been standing in the main room at all.
"If you're going to come with us even for a few minutes, to take care of one vampire, you should know at least a little. They heal pretty fast. Faster than you expect. But they can be killed, more or less the same ways as people can be. They don't like light, but don't be an idiot. The stories aren't exactly the most accurate source of information. Unless you think that he'll glitter if you expose him to light, too?"
Jason snorted at the joke, and Isaiah's head turned subtly to acknowledge it.
"Fine." Sarah sighed in frustration, hoping to seem as if she had resigned herself to her fate. If they weren't going to let her go, then it was just a matter of time until she could lose them in the craziness.
The one thing that she was sure of, though, was that they were absolutely crazy, and she needed to get away as soon as possible. Then Isaiah reached out and grabbed her hand.
The feeling of his skin against hers reminded her of the night before. The way that he'd laid her down, then what had come after, the ecstasy that he'd shown her…
She closed her eyes. She couldn't have this kind of craziness. Couldn't deal with the baggage that they came with, no matter how they looked. No matter how they made her feel.
Someone else, some day, would come along and she'd wonder why she had ever thought that Isaiah and Jason were so breathtakingly good-looking. Only… they'd both been interested in her. At least, they'd talked to her, and kissed her, and saved her life. How many other men were going to be able to stand up to that comparison?
She let them pull her into a car and drive her along the streets, but her mind was somewhere else. There had to be a way to have it both ways. Maybe they could be cured? But how? And how would it affect their work? Would they even agree to something like that? Would they thank her?
She tried to stop that line of thinking. There was no future with these two, she told herself. Nothing to look forward to, so there was no reason to try to think too hard about "saving" them, either from their curse or from anything else, for that matter.
As long as she was with them, she was in danger. She repeated it to herself again to make sure that it stuck. The car slowed to a stop and then Jason was coming around to open her door and offering a hand to help her up out of the back seat.
She didn't know how long they'd been driving, but it couldn't have been more than twenty minutes. It was amazing that houses like this existed so close to the city. She'd thought most people lived in those little suburban homes, or apartments if they wanted to live downtown, but never something… this size.
The three of them walked around the estate in a group, Jason's arm entwined with her own. When she followed the line of their eyes, she saw a back door, almost hidden from view. They started to walk, pulling her along with them.
The door was large and heavy. She could tell more from the sound of it when it closed than any struggle on Isaiah's part when he opened it. It seemed to open easily and moved silently until it closed behind them with a dull thump.
If the outside wasn't misleading, the place was at least three stories tall. It looked as if there were two wings of the house, which was absurd. Who could possibly need so many rooms for themselves?
"Should we split up? It'd be better if we caught Victor before he caught wind that we're inside."
Isaiah seemed to weigh the options for a moment before nodding.
"You take the east wing, I'll take Sarah with me to the west wing."
"Wait," she cut in, sensing an opportunity. "What if he's in the basement? You can see the stairs leading down right there."
She pointed them out. Sure as can be, there was a set of stairs leading down into the darkness. It seemed exceedingly unlikely that anyone was down there, she thought. She hoped.
Again, Isaiah seemed to take a long moment to contemplate whether or not it would help, and the expression on his face seemed to suggest that he was going to refuse. Then, at the last moment, he nodded.
"Good thinking." Sarah smiled to herself. That was all she needed. A chance to get away from them both. Once she went down a little ways, and they went their own separate ways, she could double back and be out of there lickity-split. "But you don't have a way to get in touch with us. If you find anything—I mean anything, Sarah—you scream and you come running. Is that clear?"
Sarah blinked to cover her eyes involuntarily rolling. As if she was going to run into anything in a darkened basement. "Of course."
"Good. Be safe, both of you. I don't need this turning into trouble."
"Or what, you'll suck my blood?"
Isaiah's jaw twitched. She'd hit a nerve. Sarah tried not to let her pleasure show on her face. "Just stay safe, alright?"
"You got it, Dracula." Another twitch, this one stronger. She struggled to bite back a smile.
"Get to it," he growled, turning on his heel and not waiting for a response.
Jason's gaze lingered on her for a long moment. He seemed almost like he wanted to say something. Then he, too, was going. She thought she saw him looking back to check on her as she turned to go down the steps, but then she was around the corner and headed down.
It was a long staircase, and Sarah was beginning to realize that this was no average basement. After the first few steps her eyes started acclimating to the darkness, but it was still surprisingly difficult to see. She couldn't make out the bottom of the steps until she was nearly halfway down, and well more than twenty feet into the darkness.
She'd made a mistake, she realized. If there was any place that he'd be, it would be down here. She turned to look back up the steps. It was only a little way back, and she'd be free and clear by now. She took a tentative step back up.
A sound made her stop. What was that? She didn't want to know, didn't want to think about what it could possibly be making a noise behind her. She strained her ears to hear, but no noise came. Sarah shut her eyes and tried to be reasonable, taking another ginger step up.
The noise came again, clear as can be. Something behind her, and closer than the last time. She needed to leave. A sick feeling filled her; a feeling that if she didn't get out now, she wasn't going to get out at all.
Going back up was harder than coming down. Her breaths came in short puffs as she moved as fast as she could up the darkened stairs. Every single step she raised her knees higher than she thought she needed to. The terrified fee
ling in the pit of her stomach told her that she couldn't afford to miss a step, to stumble on the lip.
The doorway was getting closer. Closer. Any second now she would be up and into the sunlight. She'd be a short run to the outside, and then she'd be out.
Passing through the threshold and into the light of the morning sun was like being born again, the feeling of all her terror starting to slough off. Whatever was down there had gotten close. She'd felt it, heard the steps coming impossibly closer.
She didn't have time to enjoy the feeling, though. She needed to be gone, now. The feeling of relief was almost palpable. She was almost free, finally. Then a pair of powerful arms wrapped around her, squeezing the breath out of her.
Sarah tried to struggle to turn around, to see who had grabbed her, but the arms held her fast. Deep down, she knew. It was him. Victor. He'd come and grabbed her. How stupid could she have been to assume that she was safe? She'd known that she was in the house of a monster. A man who was powerful both politically and physically.
She'd assumed that Isaiah or Jason would have found him, though. That they would have done what they claimed to do best. They'd sounded so certain of their plan that as he pulled her back, down the steps, into the darkness, it almost didn't seem real.
Her eyes hadn't begun adjusting to the darkness when the arms loosened and another door closed, shutting off any but a tiny sliver of light from beneath the crack. Sarah was left in the dark, and the only thing that she was sure of was what was going to happen next.
She felt his mouth on her neck, felt the scrape of his teeth against her flesh, but he didn't bite down. Not right away. She shivered at the sensation, at the pleasure that it sent through her in spite of her terror.
She could almost make out the outline of his hands in the darkness as thin fingers started to work the buttons of her blouse, one by one. She tried to fight, but he was too strong. His body pressed against hers, the feeling of cloth against her skin, goosebumps raised from the cold and the fear that held her.
His lips came down on her throat again, and the sharp, sweet pleasure of the kiss was inescapable once more. She wanted him to… she tried not to think it. Tried to put the thought out of her mind, but as his teeth sank in, it didn't seem to hurt the way that she'd expected. No, it felt… almost good.