by Gayla Twist
“I’m older than I look.” He lingered with his hand in my hair, lost in his own thoughts.
“Do you have a phone I could borrow?” I asked, verbally nudging him out of his reverie. “I’d better call my mom to come get us.”
Remembering himself, Jessie quickly lowered his hand. A part of me ached for him to touch my cheek, my lips, my neck, but I fought that longing. It was no time to indulge in a crush on a hot guy. He slid a gold pocket watch out of his jacket’s breast pocket and regarded the time. “How long would it take your mother to get here?”
“I don’t know. Depends how long it takes to get a hold of her and what she’s doing,” I explained. “Maybe twenty minutes. Maybe longer.”
Jessie frowned at his watch before closing it and slipping it back in his pocket. “It’s too close to midnight to take any chances. You’d better just stay here until the morning.”
“I can’t stay here all night,” I told him. “My mom will freak.”
“Better to have her worry for one night than to always wonder,” he said, half to himself.
My adrenaline level, which had been lowering since Viktor left, began to rise again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you and your friend snuck into the wrong party. The smartest thing you can do is stay in this room; keep the door locked and the windows closed.” He made his way toward the door. “Your friend should be fine by morning, and then you can leave. In the meantime, do not come out under any circumstances. Do you understand?” he asked as he stood over the threshold.
“Why? What’s going on?” I wanted to know. There was no way in hell I was going to stay locked in a room in some creepy castle all night.
He shook his head. “I cannot tell you. You’ll have to trust me when I say it’s for your own good.” With that, he closed the door and was gone.
The instant he made his exit, I sprang forward and threw the lock. What kind of party was it, and what the hell was I going to do?
I knew I couldn’t leave Blossom, even if it was to go get help. I was sure Viktor would be on her the instant I snuck out of the room. It was the law with girlfriends: if your friend passed out, you never left her alone—even at a party where you were friends with all the guys— because you just never knew. Not really. Being a good friend might ruin your evening, but being a bad friend might ruin her life. Blossom had acted like an idiot, but I was not about to leave her as prey to whatever letch happened past. I would just have to stay awake all night and deal with my mom in the morning.
A clock on the mantelpiece quietly ticked, keeping my mind on the time. The party grew louder and more raucous as the time inched toward midnight. The guests had filtered upstairs. Every once in a while, someone tried the handle of the door to our room, but finding it locked, quickly moved on. Blossom was breathing but, besides that, showed no signs of waking up any time soon. I became distinctly aware of my bladder. The bedroom we were in had no adjoining bathroom. What the heck am I supposed to do? I wondered. The hands of the clock met at the top of the dial, and it chimed out twelve beats. The party grew instantly quiet. Not just quieter but dead quiet. The music stopped and everything. It was bizarre.
The minutes dragged on, and still there wasn’t a sound anywhere in the castle. At twenty after twelve, I could no longer hold my water. I had to find a bathroom or pee in the potted palm tree that was next to the bed. Cracking open the door, I opted against the palm.
There was no one in the hallway. I leaned out a few inches and peaked toward the staircase. Still no one. Not a sound, not a voice, not a whisper. I pulled the door quietly shut after me and started tiptoeing down the hall. There had to be a bathroom somewhere nearby. I mean, I knew it was a very old castle, but it had been modernized. They couldn’t expect people to pee in chamber pots.
There were so many doors, and each had a different coat of arms carved above the arch. I saw a lot of knight’s helmets and roosters, but nothing that would indicate a place to empty my bladder. How did people find their way around? One of the doors was open a crack, and I decided to peep inside, hoping to get lucky. I was literally about to burst.
There was a couple stretched across an elaborate four-poster bed. The woman was on her back, just an inert figure, not moving at all. Her long red hair was loose from where it had been pinned up, and her dress was pulled off one shoulder exposing her breast. The man was on top of her, enthusiastically hickeying her neck.
What was up with some guys and hickeys? They were so tacky. And you’d think a classy guy in a tuxedo wouldn’t feel the need to mar some beautiful woman’s neck.
The woman seemed to gain consciousness for a moment, let out a soft sigh, and turned her head further to the side. I thought maybe she was trying to get away, but it only served to give the man better access to her neck. He lifted his lips briefly, and I saw something drip from them. It wasn’t drool. It was red. Blood red. I could see that there was an open wound on the side of her throat. He hadn’t been hickeying her like I thought. He had been drinking from her.
Chapter 4
Stifling a small shriek, I ran back down the hall as quickly and as quietly as possible. Fortunately, the room where I’d left Blossom had a very distinct crest of a wolf’s head above the door, so I remembered it.
Inside the room, I quickly scanned for intruders then closed the door and threw the lock. “I’m losing my mind,” I said to myself. I had to be losing my mind. There was no way I saw what I thought I saw.
I couldn’t think. I couldn’t focus. I said, “The hell with it,” and watered the potted palm.
Afterwards, I sat on an overstuffed chair and forced myself to calm down and think rationally. Vampires do not exist, so I didn’t really see what I thought I saw. It was more likely that Vanderlind Castle was just hosting some kind of kinky sex party and the guy in the tux had crossed the line in a major way. That also explained Viktor’s behavior and why the other guests were so amused. Jessie probably thought that if my mom came by when things started getting really crazy that we would either get caught up in the debauch against our wills or my mom would call the cops.
How long could a person bleed from the neck until she died? I didn’t know, but I was willing to bet it wasn’t that long. I had to get her help and I had to do it immediately.
Blossom was still blissfully unaware of our predicament. I inspected the room and discovered the old Victorian wardrobe that was sitting in the corner wasn’t very full. There was room for someone Blossom’s size if I shoved all the shoes to one side. Hiding her wasn’t as good as taking her with me, but at least I wasn’t leaving her sprawled on the bed unconscious.
Even without dragging my comatose friend, it seemed unlikely that I would be able to make it out the front door, across the immense lawn, and through the iron gates without anyone noticing me. I decided I would have to leave the way we came in.
There was a weighty silver candlestick on a small table, so I grabbed it. If any perv came near me, I was going to give him a smack over the head with it. I knew a makeshift weapon was better than no weapon at all. I wasn’t a fall-down–and-whimper kind of girl. If the perverts caught me, I was going to fight.
I slipped out the door, closing it firmly behind me. Blossom was as safe as I could make her. The hallway overlooked the great hall and no one seemed to be about, so I slunk down the stairs. It was only as my bare feet touched the cold marble floor of the main room that I cursed myself for not checking if the wardrobe had contained any shoes in my size. Still, I didn’t want to risk going back up. There was the sound of water running and pots rattling coming from one direction, which I assumed was the kitchen. The staff must have been cleaning up.
I tiptoed along the wall of the great hall, heading for the patio. There was a drunk passed out on the floor, but besides that, the room was devoid of people. Standing to one side, I peeped out the large glass doors that opened onto the patio and dock area. It appeared deserted.
Once outside, I immediatel
y started shivering. It was much chillier than when Blossom and I had started our misadventure. I hurried out on the dock and stepped onto the first yacht. “Hey! What are you doing there?” someone called from the patio doors. It was a servant, still in his purple livery.
“Oh, I’m not feeling well, so I’m calling it an early night,” I told him, trying to keep my voice calm. “Thought I’d lie down in our boat, but I didn’t want to disturb anyone.” I’d made it across the deck of the first boat and was transitioning to the second.
“Wait right there,” he told me, then disappeared.
When you are trying to get away from someone and they give you a command, like “Be quiet,” you should do the exact opposite of what they want. My mother taught me that, and I applied the principle immediately, scurrying across the second deck and leaping for the third boat.
A few more minutes of frantic scrambling and I was only two boats away from land. My movements, plus an unexpected wake, had all the boats bouncing, and I was grateful for my bare feet to help keep me from plunging over the side. As I sprinted across the deck, my foot caught on a rope, and I went sprawling. My knees would be bruised, and my legs were scraped. I was limping but not greatly injured. Unfortunately, I had let a small yelp escape my lips as I tumbled. It turned out there was a crew member asleep near the bow of the yacht, and my commotion woke him up. “What are you doing there?” he barked in an angry voice.
“Nothing. Just moving on. No reason to worry,” I assured him as I prepared to transfer to the final boat before I could step off onto the public pier.
“You come back here!” he commanded, darting forward to grab me.
“Get the hell away from me!” I shouted as I leapt to the next boat. He was hard on my heels, obviously used to dealing with bobbing boats more than I was.
I scrambled across the final boat as fast as I could and was about to make the leap for the pier, just as he reached out to snag me. He didn’t get a firm hold, but the contact threw me off balance, and I plunged into the cold, dark waters of the Tiburon River.
I made the mistake of shrieking as I fell, so when I landed, I got a good lung full of water. This caused me to panic a little, so when I tried to surface, I got disoriented in the dark and ended up smacking my head on the keel of the boat. At that point, I guess I really panicked because I started thrashing around, trying to find the surface while I choked on the water that desperately wanted to expel itself from my lungs. Because it was dark and there were no street lamps or anything, I was having trouble telling which way was up.
I’m going to die, I thought. I’m going to drown because I was stupid enough to go on another one of Blossom’s harebrained schemes. I felt myself starting to lose consciousness.
The cold arms of death grabbed me, pulling me down. They were so strong and held me so tightly, there was nothing I could do. I didn’t have to fight. I could just let go.
Then we burst through the water’s surface and someone was slapping me in the face shouting, “Breathe! Breathe, damn it!”
I started coughing, throwing up, and breathing all at the same time. I had gotten turned upside down in the water, and that’s why I thought I was being pulled under rather than up. “Help me! Help me get her up!” my savior commanded someone who was apparently on the pier. I felt another set of hands reach for me, and I was lifted out of the water quite easily then dropped unceremoniously onto the wood planks of the pier. “Careful!” the man in the water barked as he hauled himself up beside me.
It was Jessie. He had risked his life to save me. His brother, Daniel, stood towering over both of us, looking down at me with disdain. “Now what are we going to do with her? You should have let her drown,” he told his brother.
“No,” Jessie said, sitting up and then pulling me into his lap where I continued to cough, unabated. “She’s so like Colette, I could never do that.”
“You deal with her, then. I’m not protecting her,” Daniel snarled, turning on his heel and walking away.
I was freezing, half drowned, and my head was killing me, but being in Jessie’s strong arms felt wonderful. I could have stayed curled in his lap all night. There was just something about him that made me feel so safe, even though his brother didn’t think I was worth saving.
“Why didn’t you just stay in the room until morning like I asked you?” he said, smoothing my sodden hair off my face.
“There was a man,” I managed to say between coughs. “He was torturing a woman. He’d cut her throat. I have to get help. She might die.”
“I think you’re a little confused,” he said. “No one has been hurt at the castle. Everyone is fine.”
I pressed my hand to my head where I had whacked it on the bottom part of the boat. There was a lump beginning to form. “Ow,” I whimpered. Clouds that had previously been eclipsing the moon started to move aside, and I could see that the palm of my hand was red with blood.
“You’re bleeding,” Jessie said in a husky voice.
I looked up at his handsome face and started to scream. Peeking out between his full, beautiful red lips, I could see a set of gleaming white fangs.
Chapter 5
The Vanderlind Castle had a dungeon. I knew that for certain. I was lying on a cot in one of the cells, so I definitely knew there was a dungeon. Jessie was on the opposite side of the iron bars, looking in at me with a stricken face. I don’t know what happened after I started screaming. I saw Jessie leaning over me with those horrible fangs marring his perfect face, and then everything went black. When I woke up, I was in the dungeon.
“Are you all right?” Jessie asked in a low voice.
“No, I’m not all right,” I said. The cot was in the corner of the room furthest away from the bars, but I pressed myself against the stone wall, trying to put even more distance between us.
Jessie’s eyebrows narrowed in concern. “Is it your head wound? I don't think you have a concussion.”
“No,” I said, wanting to laugh, feeling a touch hysterical. “It’s the fact that you’re a vampire.”
He sighed, deflating a little. “I’m sorry you had to find out. It was the smell of your blood. I wasn’t able to keep my fangs retracted.” He put a hand, self-consciously, to his lips. “But you’re safe now. I’m under control.”
“Safe?” I laughed bitterly, waving a hand at the stone walls. “You’ve got me locked in a cell.”
“I know.” He nodded. “It was the safest place I could think to keep you.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out an iron ring with a few large skeleton keys hanging off of it. “Here.” He tossed the ring into the cell, missing the cot by a few inches. “Hang on to these, and don’t open the door for anyone. I mean anyone. Do you understand me?”
I didn’t understand him. I mean, he was speaking English, and I understood the words, but I was confused. “What do you mean? What are you doing?”
“I’ve got to go find your friend, and I need to know you’ll be safe. Don’t leave this cell. Not until morning. Promise me?”
“I promise,” I lied.
“Good, now where’s Blossom?”
“Like I’d tell a vampire,” I blurted before I could think of a better answer.
“Aurora, listen to me,” he said, pressing his face between the bars and looking directly into my eyes. “I need to get your friend and bring her here to you. I’m not the only vampire at the castle tonight. I can find her by myself, but that might take a while. If someone else discovers her first, she’s as good as dead.”
“She’s in the wardrobe,” I told him. “In the room where you left us. The one with the wolf’s head carved over the door. I left her in the wardrobe.”
“Good.” He nodded decisively as he stepped away from the bars. “I’ll get her, but you must do as I tell you, and stay in the cell. And hide the keys. You don’t want anyone to know you have them.”
Instantly, I snatched the ring off the floor and stuffed it under the thin blanket that was covering the cot. “Okay.
I’ll be fine. Just go get Blossom,” I told him.
As soon as he was gone, I grabbed the keys and wrapped the blanket around my shoulders. My impulse was to make a run for it before he got back. But I knew from experience that my first impulse wasn’t always the best. Jessie had saved me from drowning and trusted me with the keys. On the other hand, he admitted to being a vampire and locked me in a dungeon. My head throbbed. I was freezing, and I couldn’t think clearly. I just didn’t know what to do. My fight-or-flight instincts told me to run, but there was something about Jessie. Deep in the core of my being, I felt that he cared about me. I got the strong sense that I could trust him.
Footsteps caused me to conceal the keys with the blanket. I was so glad I did when Viktor appeared. “Well, hello, my little hors d'oeuvre,” he purred, eyeing me through the bars. “I’m so glad to see you’re still here. Where is your delightful friend?”
I sent up a silent prayer of thanks that I hadn’t unlocked the cell. Viktor was much easier to endure when there was a set of iron bars between us. I decided to ignore him.
“I asked you a question, little chick,” he said, sounding a little annoyed that I wasn’t eager to respond.
I decided to focus on the far wall and just wait for Jessie to return. I couldn’t imagine any conversation with Viktor going in a direction that wouldn’t haunt my dreams for the rest of my life.
“Answer me!” Viktor shouted, rattling the bars of my cage.
I didn’t want to look at him. I knew without looking that he had fangs that he was desperate to apply to my neck. All I could do was wait it out and hope that Jessie didn’t return with Blossom while Viktor was still there.
“You little bitch,” the vampire snarled. “I was just going to enjoy a small taste of your blood, but your behavior is impudent, and I don’t like impudence, especially from humans. I am going to drain you of every ounce of blood in your body. When I am through with you, you will be nothing but a dried out husk.”
“Viktor!” Jessie appeared behind him, thankfully without Blossom. “I told you the girls were not to be touched.”