by Maria Amor
CHAPTER 13
“Jack! Jack, no, you can’t! Stop it!”
“She’s right, Jackie boy, it’s gonna burn like hell and you know it. Come on back inside, will ya? I still don’t know what the fuck is going on, but I know my partner burning up in the setting sun ain’t gonna do anybody a lick of good.”
“He’s right, come back! Please, Jack, don’t leave me!”
That last was almost enough to make him stop and do exactly as he was being asked. Not that it would have been good for Scarlett if he had. If he’d gone back inside of The Blood, he would have throttled her until he twisted her head straight off of her body, her Final Death delivered without flourish or fanfare.
Delbert Green should count himself lucky, too. Any desire to keep up good business ties was out of Jack’s mind completely. Jack Swells, it could be said, had gone off the rails. If he had gone back inside, he would have torn out his business partner’s throat and drained him dry.
What would happen to The Blood? He didn’t care. He didn’t give a flying fuck what happened to the place. It was only a building, after all. Only a building that would never represent the roots he had wanted to put down. He understood that now. He understood that what he had been doing was akin to spending a substantial amount of time in a waiting room without even realizing it was what he was doing.
He didn’t want to wait anymore. His desire for roots wasn’t totally gone, but it was clear to him that those roots weren’t going to be found in this nightclub he’d created. If Delbert wanted to try and run the whole place on his own, let him. Jack wanted no part of it.
“Jack! You won’t! You won’t leave me!”
It was the last desperate plea from a woman not accustomed to making them. Years ago, decades ago even, it might have worked. He had loved her. He had loved her a long time ago and hadn’t been able to free himself from it. It was only now, with her making her true nature so painfully clear, that he was able to see that the love had disappeared long ago.
What was left was only the idea of love, the expectation that he was supposed to love and therefore must continue. Now, he was free from that expectation. Despite his supreme anger, the lifting of that weight was truly magnificent.
He felt lighter inside than he had in a century. He was also, for the first time in so long, free to feel his heart lean in a different direction. At the moment, the direction it was leaning was toward Delaney. It was only the beginning of an idea, that he might reach a point where he cared for her. That was all he could allow himself.
He was very old and being such,was very weary of anything so easily tossed around as the idea of love. Caring for her in any personal sense was something that remained in the back of his mind, and at the moment was exactly where it was going to have to stay.
First, there was a much more pressing matter to deal with. If Lucas had gotten to her, if he really had gone to her home and found her there, Delaney was in a whole world of trouble. Lucas was not someone to fuck with. He was old, older than Jack himself, but he hadn’t adjusted well to the modernization of the world around him.
It was something that happened sometimes, and why shouldn’t it? If humans who lived long enough got to a point where the world was changing too quickly for them, how much worse could it be for a vampire who let it? Jack knew the answer because he’d seen it. Not often, but he’d seen in and Lucas was a prime example.
He’d been a terror when his brain was all there, a vampire who truly delighted in torturing humans. As he aged that hadn’t gone away, but his brain had gone soft. He was confused and crazy, which only agitated him more. The idea of Delaney being subjected to the whims of a madman like him made Jack’s guts twist.
He still held onto the hope that Lucas hadn’t reached her yet, so there was that. Scarlett was right about going out in the sun. The sun was almost completely set and Jack could still feel his skin burning. It was the sensation of a very bad sunburn, but one that occurred at an accelerated rate.
By the time he reached his car and vaulted himself inside, it felt like his whole body was trying to melt. In the cool, exceptionally dark interior of his vehicle, Jack took a moment to examine himself. He was in the habit of wearing long sleeves regardless of the temperature, but he was also in the habit of pushing his sleeves up above his elbows. Now, every bit of his exposed skin was bubbled and blistered. If he had been out in the sun longer, or if he had been out when it was at its highest point in the sky, his condition would be a whole lot worse. Lucas would have known that, that he would suffer greatly in the sun. There was still a chance that he was only now venturing out, and if that was the case, Jack was going to get to her first.
***
“Shit!”
Standing inside of Delaney’s apartment, Jack could see that luck had not been on his, or to be more accurate, Delaney’s, side. He’d known it even before he’d tried the knob of her front door, although he’d done his best to convince himself otherwise. He’d known because he could smell the blood. Normally it was a smell he liked, a smell he was drawn to, but in this instance, it was the exact opposite.
He wanted it to be in his imagination so badly that he had almost convinced himself it really was, until he opened the door. It wasn’t locked, which was the first red flag. It wasn’t standing ajar, but then again it wouldn’t be. Lucas was crazy, but he wasn’t a fool. He would know that leaving Delaney’s door standing wide open would alert everyone in the building that something bad had happened. There was a good chance the police would get involved, and no way did Lucas want that.
Once the door was open, though, once Jack was inside and had safely locked himself in, he saw that something awful had happened here. He hadn’t been wrong about the blood. There was an alarming amount of it spilled on her floor, along with several of her hairs plastered to a pole with more blood.
He could see how the scene had unfolded. He could get a general idea of where Lucas had been, that he had surprised her before his attack. She’d never stood a chance and he’d hurled against the pole. He didn’t know how badly, but he knew she was hurt and he knew that it was his fault. The idea was so close to being more than he could handle that, for a moment, he couldn’t even move. He just stood there, his body feeling petrified by rage.
It was only the sound of a child laughing from somewhere down the hall that got him moving again. It was a sound of life, a sound of a future, and the longer he stood there the greater the chance was that Delaney would get neither of those things. He wasn’t going to let that happen, not if he could help it. He’d already been the cause of far too much destruction in his life to allow it again. He took one more look around the little apartment, growling lowly in his throat, then strode purposefully from Delaney’s home. He didn’t know where Lucas would have taken her, but that didn’t mean all was lost. He had a starting point and he couldn’t get there fast enough.
***
“What the fuck?! Who the fuck are you, man?”
“Yeah! What the hell do you think you’re doing?!”
“You can’t just bust in here, not a fucking chance.”
“Lucas is gonna stomp your ass. You just see if he doesn’t.”
Jack stood in the middle of the shitty little hole in the wall bar Lucas claimed as his home territory hub. It wasn’t uncommon for vampires to do that, especially the older ones. Jack thought it probably had something to do with the same thing that had made him want to start The Blood.
For some reason, after enough time passed, many vampires felt his same desire to put down some kind of roots. Maybe it was so that they didn’t just go nuts. Maybe having something to hold onto helped them to know who they were, although in Lucas’ case it obviously hadn’t done much to keep him from losing his shit.
Whatever the reason behind it, Lucas had his own hangout for that and the location of it was pretty well-known amongst other vampires. When Jack had seen the destruction Lucas had left at Delaney’s place, that hideaway bar was the first place he’d
headed. Not because he thought Lucas would be there, he wasn’t hopeful or stupid enough to think things would be that easy, but because someone there would know something.
Lucas was one old vampire and vampires like that tended to establish their own sets of groupies. Lucas was no exception. He had a little circle of vampires who clung to his coattails, so to speak, and Jack was banking on at least a couple of them being around. And he’d been right. More than right, he’d been damn lucky. All of them were there, all of the greaser assholes (both vampire and human) who had the misfortune of having decided to worship the ground Lucas walked on.
Jack, seeing that this was so, had made his own decision, which was to enter the shithole with a bang. He literally kicked the door in, knocking it off its hinges like it was a piece of scrap metal instead of cold, hard steel. Lucas’ cronies had all been hanging around the bar with stoned, drunk expressions on their faces that were a little bit too slow to register that there was an enemy among them.
Jack would have laughed if he hadn’t been so royally pissed off. By the time these assholes had hoisted themselves up off their seats he could have put a pipe through each and every one of their hearts, if he’d wanted to. They were pathetically sluggish; numbed. That was probably the way Lucas liked them, knowing him. Lucas had this thing about respect and, for him, respect pretty much meant absolute control. He liked his followers submissive, his women too.
Thinking about that only renewed Jack’s sense of purpose. Totally ignoring the half-hearted cries of outrage that accompanied his entrance, he strode through the bar, walked around it, and poured himself a drink. The girl behind the bar was human and probably not more that nineteen. Pretty in a childish sort of way and definitely not fit to be in a place like this.
Jack pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket and without even counting it, thrust it in her direction. She just stood there shaking, no idea what he was trying to do. He ground his teeth, reminding himself that this girl was not to blame for Delaney’s plight.
“Here, take it.”
“Me? W-w-w-why? Why would you give me all that money?”
“I want you to get out of here. I want you to take the money, and it’s a lot, and I want you to get the fuck out of here. Find yourself a new job. Don’t come back here, not ever.”
“You serious?”
“As sin. But I mean it. Never. Don’t ever come back here. I’ll be checking in from time to time. If you take this money and I find you in here again, it won’t be good for you.”
The girl stood for a moment, her eyes darting from Jack’s face to the wad of cash to the regulars in the bar shaking their heads and telling her to tell him to shove the money up his ass. For that moment, she didn’t have a clue what to do, but it was a moment that didn’t last very long.
Maybe she was just desperate for cash, or maybe she was smarter than she looked, but after one last split second of hesitation, she tugged her purse off the hook where it lived, grabbed the cash out of Jack’s hand, and hauled ass through the place where the front door used to be. Jack nodded with satisfaction, then turned back to face the ones he’d really come there to see.
“Lucas’ll have your ass for that,” one of them snarled, his hollow eyes full of malice and fear. “That there was one of his favorites.”
“No need to worry about that. Believe me, he had it coming. Which brings me to my next point. I’m going to need one of you to tell me where he is.”
Lucas’ posse exchanged nervous, booze-fueled looks. Jack could practically read their thoughts right there on their faces. They were weighing their options, deciding how far their loyalty to the boss man went. Jack’s guess was that they had been expecting him to show his face already.
There was a good chance his absence was the very thing they’d been discussing before Jack so rudely interrupted. Put this new development on top of that and a half-way smart guy would know that trouble was on its way. For all they knew, it was big trouble.
Jack might not have been their chosen leader, but he had a reputation of his own in the vampire community. If he was in the bar looking for the boss, that meant the boss had done something stupid. The question was, did they want to get wrapped up in it, too?
Probably some of them did and some of them didn’t, and that was just fine by Jack. He was in the mood for a fight, and would like to take out some of his pent-up aggression. Also, there was a good chance that once (or if) one of these yahoos tried to take him on and his buddies saw what Jack was prepared to do, the rest would fall in line. And if they didn’t? Well, then so be it. Wouldn’t bother Jack any. Wouldn’t bother him at all.
“Right, so here’s how it’s going to go. You’ve got until I finish the drink in my hands to tell me where Lucas is. Once the drink is done, I’m going to handle this thing my way. Your choice, but I should warn you. I’m a fast drinker.”
Jack, who had moved into the dead center of the room, stood calmly and took a thoughtful sip of his scotch. He had to hand it to Lucas, for such a shitty bar it wasn’t a bad scotch. Not bad at all. He took another sip, wondering if the sorry sacks of shit watching had noticed that each sip had removed roughly a third of the glass’ contents. One last sip and he’d be knocking heads.
Again, nothing wrong there. Not for Jack. He moved the glass up to his lips, opened his mouth, and slung the last of the drink down. It was in the reflection bouncing off the glass that he saw the one coming for him. The dumbass had lowered his shoulders like a bull and was charging him, like that was going to make any difference.
Jack flung the glass to the side, shattering it against the wall, and took one easy step to the side. The vampire almost barrelled past him, completely helpless to stop the momentum he’d worked so hard to achieve. All it took for Jack to stop it, however, was one arm thrown almost casually in front of the guy’s chest.
That stopped him cold, knocking him flat on his back and causing him to gag and gasp for air. It was almost too easy for Jack to pick him up by the collar of his shirt, dangling him in the air for the whole room to gawk at.
“Look, I already told you what I’m here for, and it’s not for you. I don’t give a shit about any of you, not you or the piss poor company you keep. You tell me what I want to know and I won’t bother you. You don’t? I’ll kill every last one of you. It’s that simple.”
No more looks, and no more hesitation. They talked. They talked like they were in confessional and Jack was the only one who could save them. He supposed that, in a way, he kind of was.
CHAPTER 14
“No! No, no, no. Why do you insist on being so difficult? What’s the matter with you, girl? Do you like it? Is that it? Do you like it when I do these things to you? You must. You really just must, or else you would learn to do what you’re told. Now, do what I told you to!”
The feeling of his fist making contact with the center of her stomach felt like a concrete block being dropped on top of her from above. He was shockingly strong, this crazy vampire. Even after having gone through the trauma of having him launch her across her own apartment (a place she knew she would never step foot in again, she thought bitterly, if she was lucky enough to make it out of this alive), she’d underestimated him.
She’d underestimated his strength, but also his will. His will to hurt her, to keep going at it long after a human would have tired, was astounding. From what Delaney could tell, it literally knew no bounds. Strangely, crazily, she thought about when she had been a little girl and believed that the best way to get what she wanted from her mother was to nag and nag and nag until she gave in from sheer exhaustion and lack of the ability to fight anymore.
Delaney had long ago grown apart from her mother, but she would issue the woman an apology for it now if she could. For the first time, she thought she had some idea what someone being that brutally relentless with you actually felt like. She hoped she didn’t have to feel it for much longer, however this thing played out. She thought she’d go just as crazy as Lucas if she did.
<
br /> “Up! Get up, get up right now! Nobody told you to lie down, now did they? No, I don’t believe they did. After all, I’m the only one here aside from you, and I certainly didn’t tell you to.”
“I’m trying,” Delaney spat out with blood and spit through teeth that were grinding incessantly. “Just give me a second, okay? It doesn’t help when you hit me like that. It makes it harder. It makes everything you want me to do harder.”
“Does it really?” he asked with a questioning tone that couldn’t possibly have been real, “Imagine that. Imagine being so weak.”
“That’s what you like, isn’t it? You like women who are weak. Isn’t that what you said?”
“Well, well, look who’s paying attention now. I’m flattered, really. I didn’t realize you cared.”
Delaney, helpless to stop herself, let out a little moan of disgust. It was the last way to help herself and she knew it, but she was beyond the point of controlling herself. She was like a person subjected to hour after hour of interrogation who was on the verge of confessing to a crime she hadn’t committed.
She was very close to being too helpless to help herself. As if to bring that point home, Lucas crouched down in front of her again, his head cocked to one side like a wild animal trying to make sense of something he didn’t quite understand. Then he got very, very close, his nauseous breath pouring over her so that she couldn’t stop herself from retching.
. The look in his eyes was something she would never, never be able to describe. As far as she was concerned, Charlie Manson’s crazy didn’t come close to touching this. Not even a little.
“You do realize that I’m the one in control here, don’t you darling? Please tell me you’ve worked that much out.”
“Yes.”
“Then you like to be hurt. That must be it. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t make me so angry.”
“Said every man who ever abused a woman in the history of the world.”