by M. J. Scott
Chapter Fifteen
I scrambled to my feet, backing into the wall.
“You’re awake. Good.” He looked at me coolly. “That makes things easier.”
I didn’t really see how. My heart was jackhammering like someone had just dropped a sack full of rattlesnakes into the room. But Smith was human. He couldn’t hear how scared I was. So I didn’t intend to show him. “Did you miss me?” I asked, proud of myself when my voice didn’t shake.
He looked at me with icy blue eyes. Cold. That’s what I remembered about him. From the silver rims of his glasses to the snow white lab coat to the gray hair and emotionless voice, the man was ice. “Still a smartass then? You must be a slow learner.”
“I guess we’re both slow learners,” I quipped. “You keep trying the same old shit even though it gets you into hot water every time.”
He smiled slowly, and somehow that was worse than his default ‘you are a bug and I will study you’ expression. “I’m doing just fine. You’re the one back in chains.”
I pressed harder against the wall as my knees went a little weak. I would not show fear. “You’re the one about to have the full force of the law back on your ass.”
“They’ll be scrambling around trying to work out what happened. By the time I have what I need from you, they’ll still be looking in the wrong place.”
“What is it that you need from me?”
“Information.”
“Trust me, doc. Anything I know, I’m not telling you. I don’t talk to people who play with insane vampires. Where do you find them, by the way?”
He regarded me for a long moment and something almost like an emotion swam in his eyes. Then it disappeared. “Oh, I think you will.” He turned and gestured behind him. Four vamps stepped into the room. “Now, Ms. Keenan. This can be painless or painful. It’s entirely your choice.”
I looked at the vampires. Four of them. Not good odds. Though it was tempting to start a fight just to piss off Smith, I wasn’t the only one I had to worry about. Rhi was probably somewhere nearby. I wasn’t leaving her to Smith and his gal pal. In some ways, Smith was scarier than Tate had ever been. Tate, at least, had insanity as an excuse. Smith was completely sane. And completely amoral from what I could tell. “I’ll behave.”
“Very sensible of you.” He nodded at the vamps and two of them came over and grabbed an arm each.
They hustled me out of the cell and down a corridor, past several other doors. It seemed to be some sort of office building rather than a house but I didn’t have time to form much more of an impression than that before we arrived at our destination.
Smith opened the door and the vamps hauled me inside and strapped me down to something that my brain insisted on labeling a dentist’s chair, though it wasn’t quite the same.
“What are you doing?” I said to Smith. “Your anti-vaccine won’t work on me now, I’m a werewolf.” God, I hoped I was right. The last thing anyone needed was Smith coming up with something that could create some sort of weird were-vampire hybrid. That would really have the humans up in arms.
“Relax, I’m not trying to turn you.”
“Forgive me if I don’t find being tied down relaxing,” I snapped, tugging my arm against one of the ties, fear churning in my belly. This was all too familiar, and panic was starting to eat into my control.
“I thought you said you wanted to do this painlessly?” Smith said. “Do let me know if you’ve changed your mind.”
The lack of emotion in his voice chilled me and I stopped moving. “What do you want with me then?”
“Information, puppy.” The vamp from the woods appeared in the doorway. Smith smiled at her. I reconsidered trying to snap the bonds. She was wearing another long flowing dress like the ones Leah favored. I wondered whether there was a crazy vampire boutique somewhere. Leah usually wore dark colors though. Mystery vamp’s was a soft silky fabric in a gentle peachy shade. Against the dead white of her skin, it looked horrible.
She strolled into the room and hooked an arm through Smith’s. The look she gave me wasn’t friendly. “Is the puppy behaving herself?”
Smith patted her hand and disengaged his arm smoothly. I wondered whether she creeped him out too or whether he was just eager to get down to business. He took a syringe off the tray beside the chair. “Cilla, I thought we agreed you’d let me do this?”
Cilla? So much for Alpha and Omega. But knowing her name didn’t make her any less creepy. She had that same nothing-home-behind-the-eyes look as Tate.
“I changed my mind.” She bared her fangs. “I want to watch.”
He shrugged and busied himself filling the syringe from a glass bottle that looked all too familiar. “It’s not going to be very interesting. I’m just going to ask a lot of questions.”
“Questions about what?” I couldn’t help interrupting. I didn’t trust Smith in the slightest and the anti-vaccine he’d pumped me full of at Tate’s had come in exactly that sort of little bottle.
“We want what’s in your head, puppy.”
“In my head?” Now I was truly confused. “About the investigation?”
“No,” Smith said. He picked up a scalpel and sliced open my sleeve, baring the crook of my elbow. “About your father.”
I clenched my teeth, biting back a hiss of pain as he slid the needle under my skin none too gently. “What’s my father got to do with it? He’s dead.” Panic surged again. I didn’t know anything about my father’s work. I’d been sixteen when he died. What happened when they asked questions I couldn’t answer?
“True. But he left something behind before he died.”
“He hid it,” Cilla said, moving closer.
I blinked at her, feeling tiny prickles of heat breaking out across my skin as I sucked in a breath. My vision blurred slightly. “Hid?” I shook my head, trying to clear it. “What did you give me?”
“Just something to make you cooperative,” Smith said. He picked up my wrist, pressed his fingers over my pulse. “A little fast but nothing to worry about.”
Easy for him to say. He wasn’t the one feeling as though the room had decided to turn into a carousel. A carousel in overdrive. I closed my eyes as the walls blurred and shimmied and whirled. I tasted bile in the back of my throat and swallowed, hard. “I don’t know anything about my dad that you would be interested in,” I managed.
“You might know more than you think,” Smith said.
“Your father was working on an important project,” Cilla’s voice was too close to my ear. Hair brushed my face and I jerked my head. “Maybe he told you over a nice family dinner. He was always boring us with stories of your family dinners.”
“You knew my father?” I forced my eyes open, swallowing against the nausea again.
“We worked together for a while.”
Fuck. It wasn’t Smith we should have been looking for. It was Cilla. I tried to remember a name like Cilla or Priscilla from the long lists of Synotech employees I’d read over and over. But everything was foggy, sliding away from me like the remnants of a dream. My heart pounded. “I don’t feel so good.”
“Just relax,” Smith said. “Tell me about your father. What did you know about his work?”
Despite myself, I started talking. About how my daddy was an immunologist. About the vaccines he’d researched. About how he was helping people whose systems attacked them. How he smelled. How he came to watch me play basketball and to my dance recitals. A stream of memories came flooding out of my mouth. Unfortunately none of them seemed to be what Smith and Cilla wanted.
Cilla’s hand grabbed my jaw, her fingernails biting into my face. “Stop babbling.”
“Can’t.” I started to laugh, then to cough. I couldn’t catch my breath.
Smith grabbed my wrist again, his fingers curling to take my pulse. “Too fast. I’m going to bring her out of this.”
“Why bother?” Cilla said. “She doesn’t know anything.”
“We don’t know that. We were barely getting
started. And we have other things still to try.”
Another needle bit into me and an icy sensation flooded my veins. Better than feeling like someone was choking me. Just.
Smith watched me for a few moments, and then nodded. “Looks like we’re going to have to do this the painful way after all.”
* * *
I didn’t like the sound of that and braced myself when the four vamps came back into the room. But they just dragged me back to my cell and dumped me there, next to yet more Gatorade and a tray of sandwiches. I choked it all down because I had to keep my strength up. Whatever was coming next wasn’t going to be fun.
Of course, eating was also a distraction. Except that it led to the more pressing need for a bathroom. I spent a few minutes pounding on the door then settled back down to wait with tightly crossed legs. To take my mind off my immediate dilemma, I tried to focus on what Cilla had told me.
She knew my father.
Had I ever met her?
Her face wasn’t familiar and her being a vampire made things tricky. She might have been younger when she worked with my dad or around the same age she appeared now.
She might have already been a vampire. Dad hadn’t said anything at the time but the Taskforce had discovered that Synotech did have a couple of supernatural employees and, of course, it had to trial its drugs on live subjects. The vast majority of drugs were for humans of course but testing vaccines required supplies of vamp and were blood and
shifters—and to a lesser extent vamps—still needed things like anesthetics and painkillers that worked on them.
Had Cilla been a guinea pig? Was that what this was about?
I didn’t think so but that was, like much of the rest of what I was working with, just a feeling.
For someone who likes figures and cold hard facts, this case was turning into torture.
I dropped my head to my knees, banging it gently.
Think, Ashley.
What had my dad been working on?
Something about auto-immune diseases. I’d never been really interested—what teen paid much attention to their father’s work when said work was something distinctly uncool like being a scientist geek?
Plus Dad wasn’t really allowed to talk about what he was working on much. I had nothing. Just infuriating scraps of information that refused to join up and form any sort of useful pattern in my head.
When the combination of frustration and fear got too much, I got up and pounded on the door again. This time Smith came and slid open a hatch in the door to peer through.
“Bathroom,” I snapped.
He nodded. “Of course. We wouldn’t like you to be uncomfortable.”
“Heck no, I could tell that by the luxury suite you’ve got me in.”
“If I were you, Ms. Keenan, I’d hold that tongue of yours and save your energy for later.”
I stared him down even as my stomach turned over. “I want to see Rhianna.”
“I don’t think so.”
“She needs a friend.”
“Cilla is taking care of her.” A couple of the vamps appeared behind Smith and he started doing something to the door.
“Great, that makes me feel so much better.” I stood quietly while the door opened. “You know, you sure have a knack for picking the crazy ones.”
He looked at me with cold eyes. “Careful. You’re trying my patience.”
Heat flared along my cheek, a memory of Smith’s hand connecting hard with my face. I had to remind myself that he wasn’t the middle-aged GP he resembled. He was someone not afraid to hurt people to get to what he wanted. But I still couldn’t resist baiting him. I might learn something useful. “Tate, I can understand. He was muscle. What’s she?”
Smith nodded at the vamps and they grabbed me. “Someone you’d be wise not to annoy.” For a moment his expression almost seemed...sad. But that couldn’t be right?
“If you didn’t like Tate, then I suggest you don’t cross Cilla,” he added.
I had a hard time believing that someone who liked floaty peach dresses was scarier than a serial killer but if Cilla had Smith cowed, then I wasn’t going to underestimate her. “Why are you doing this?” I asked as one of the vamps tugged me toward the door.
This time he definitely looked sad. “I made a mistake once.”
I didn’t get a chance to ask anything else before the vamps dragged me off. A mistake? What did that mean? A mistake answering my questions? A mistake getting involved with Cilla, whoever she was?
Just another puzzle piece that didn’t fit.
I ground my teeth as the vamps hauled me down the corridor. They weren’t grabby like Rio and Kyra—Tate’s flunkies—had been but they weren’t exactly gentle. Plus they smelled like old blood and vampire, which was rapidly becoming a combination that turned my stomach.
They pushed me into a bathroom and locked the door behind me. It was another windowless room, so I did what I had to do, then washed up, trying to make myself feel semi-alive with cheap smelling soap and cold water.
I took advantage of the change of scenery to try yelling for Jase in my head again.
When the door crashed open, I jumped, my thoughts cutting off guiltily.
Cilla stood in the doorway watching me with a grin. “Bad dog,” she said. “No calling for help.”
“I wasn’t doing anything.”
“Lying isn’t going to help.” She stepped into the bathroom and I moved backward until I hit the wall with a thump. “I could hear you.”
Dumb. I’d forgotten about the Retreat. She used telepathy on me then too. Crap. Did that mean she could hear me now? Or only when she was trying to? Or only when I was trying to talk to someone?
The look on her face as she stood there, head cocked to one side didn’t give me any clue. Then she reached out and squeezed one hand around my throat. Pain seared up my neck. Like Esteban, Cilla liked silver. Rings around every finger.
“No calling for help,” she said as I struggled to breathe. “There’s no point. And you’ll upset the children.”
Children? Who? Rhi? Did that mean Rhi could hear me too?
“Do you understand?” Cilla asked, squeezing tighter.
I nodded, unable to speak. Even nodding was difficult.
“Good,” she said, releasing me. My knees sagged and I slid down the wall, trying to suck air back into my lungs. My throat burned, my skin felt like it was blistering. Only changing would help ease the pain and the predatory look on Cilla’s face made me certain I wasn’t going to be allowed to do that any time soon.
I closed my eyes, trying to sense whether it was night or day, trying to see if there was any lingering trace of the moon but either it was daytime or I was too tired to feel anything.
“C’mon, puppy,” Cilla said, hauling me up with one hand. “It’s time for the hard way.”
* * *
The hard way apparently involved me being dragged off to yet another room. I figured Cilla had to be the decorator. The walls were painted black and there were heavy black curtains everywhere. It would’ve been funny—the clichéd vampire lair— but the bare bulbs in the ceiling combined with all that black to starkly spotlight the other main features of the room.
A large rack filled with a variety of nasty-looking implements and a whipping post that stood taller than my head. This post wasn’t black like the others it had been my misfortune to see at Maelstrom. No, this one gleamed silver. Somehow I doubted it was chrome plated.
My stomach churned at the thought of being pressed against that much silver. It would be like being dipped in acid.
New goal. Avoid the post.
“I already told you,” I said, turning a nervous circle, trying to keep Cilla and the other vampires in sight as they ringed around me. “I don’t know anything about my father’s work.”
“I think you know more than you think you know.” Cilla’s voice seemed to bounce off the walls, reverberating weirdly in the small room so it came from all around me. More
vampire mind games perhaps. The vamps continued to flow around me, the shadows they cast adding to the disorienting effects of Cilla’s voice. Cilla, though, stopped by the rack, one hand trailing over the whips and knives.
She also had a knife in a sheath at her waist. A long sheath. The knife had to be ten inches long.
I shook my head, swallowed as the muscles in my throat tightened and my stomach dropped. “No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. Secrets are sometimes hidden.” She ran a hand along the top of the rack, her fingers drifting over the hooks that held each whip and blade like she was pleased by the feel of them.
“I was sixteen when my father died. He didn’t exactly tell me the nitty-gritty about his research.”
“Maybe not that you remember. Maybe you just need encouragement.” She lifted a bullwhip, shook the long length of it free until half its thong coiled on the floor like a snake. “This one is leather.” She tapped the handle up the row of whips, coming to rest against one that was little more than a length of barbed chain. “This one is silver. Trust me, you won’t like it if we play with this one.”
My stomach heaved. I believed her. I’d seen what silver chains had done to Dan’s wrists—damage that still hadn’t completely healed several months later. And that was just from being bound in the chains. He hadn’t been beaten with silver. “I don’t know anything.” This time it came out shaky and one of the vamps laughed. “Please, you have to believe me.”
Cilla wrinkled her nose. “Believing you is no fun. And it doesn’t get me the information I need.” She began to coil the leather whip up into loops. Like someone preparing to use it. I stepped backward but one of the vamps grabbed me. Think, Ashley. Think.
The only thought I had was that it would be less painful to be beaten up by vamps than tied to that post and flogged by Cilla. I should fight.
Or I could stall. “What is it you think I know? Maybe if you gave me a clue, I could remember.”
Cilla pursed her lips. “Maybe you could, maybe you couldn’t.”
“What does that mean? How can I tell you something if you don’t think I can remember it?”
“Maybe it’s something you don’t know you know.”