Fright Court

by Mindy Klasky

  I was still going over my plan in my head, still reliving the moment when I’d seen my best friend fall under the absolute control of a vampire who outclassed her in weight, strength, and pure brazen certainty, a vampire who was infinitely less threatening than the criminal rogue in front of me now. Before I could be sure of what I would say, how I would act, Richardson leaped forward, moving faster than my eyes could actually follow. He planted his forefinger squarely in the middle of my forehead, and his voice was a subterranean growl as he said, “Be mine.”

  For one heartbeat, I despaired. My training with James in the Old Library was worthless—pretend Enfolding or not, I could never defeat a creature that moved as quickly as Richardson had just moved. And yet, all those hours of grappling—those endless humiliating throws on the bright blue mats—had taught me something even more important. I was painfully aware of every single muscle in my body. I understood the interconnection of bone and ligament, of tendon and muscle. I had the ability to act as if I were Enfolded.

  I slumped forward, letting the strength flow out of my legs, letting my body collapse toward the floor. Even though I tried to prepare myself mentally, I nearly recoiled when Richardson’s cold claws folded around my arms. I concentrated on making my body a dead weight, on making him work as he guided me to one of his chairs. I gave my best imitation of a rag doll, letting my chin fall onto my chest.

  “Excellent,” Richardson hissed. “Now Sarah, look up at the ceiling.”

  I had to oblige him. I had to pretend that I was under his control completely, that he had successfully Enfolded me, and I had lost every last shred of resistance. With precious few resources at my advantage, I had to hold on to the only element remotely in my favor: surprise.

  I looked at the ceiling.

  Of course, the motion forced my head back. It bared the length of my throat. It exposed my jugular with more intimacy than if the creep had ordered me to give him a lapdance. I wanted to protect myself. I wanted to look away. I wanted to run, fleeing from the DFI offices until I found a policeman, an oaken stake, anything to keep me safe.

  I had to submit.

  “Relax, Sarah,” Richardson hissed.

  I could do this. Allison had shown me how. I closed my eyes. I forced the tension to bleed out of my shoulders. I ordered my lungs to exhale completely. I demanded that my body sink into the utter lassitude that James had taught me, the very first lesson we had shared in the Old Library.

  My traitorous memory told me that James had stood beside me then. He had placed his hand across my belly, measuring the tension strung through my frame. He had heightened my awareness, taught me how my body felt when it was being fully responsive.

  But James wasn’t here now. I was alone. On my own. At least until I figured out what Richardson wanted with me, why he had summoned me here under the pretense of meeting with Councilor Feld.

  I forced myself to unstring all of the terror from my limbs.

  “Excellent,” Richardson whispered, and my hard work was nearly undone when I realized he had glided up beside me. I wanted to whirl to face him, but an Enfolded woman would not whirl. I wanted to scramble across the room, but an Enfolded woman would not scramble. I wanted…

  It did not matter what I wanted. Not now. Not yet.

  One frozen finger traced the path of my jugular. If he registered the uptick in my heart rate, he didn’t comment. He was too intent on his study, too tied to his task.

  I didn’t feel him break the skin. His fang was too sharp, too precise. I felt the sting of air on my open wound, though, and I knew the instant that his icy lips closed over my flesh. His tongue pressed against my vein, shoving a jagged wave of cold through my body. Against my will, my eyes shot open. I tensed against the intense pain, barely biting off a moan.

  My entire body felt him measure out one full swallow of my blood. Every nerve burned with cold, with an agony that only increased when I felt his lips grow warm. My blood was thawing him, bringing him back to some unholy semblance of life.

  One sip, though, and he stepped back. One sip, as I summoned every last ounce of my restraint, to keep from giving away my secret, to keep from admitting that I was conscious and terrified and aching and furious. One sip, enough to make his teeth gleam crimson in the soft light from his desk.

  He ran his tongue across those teeth, taking care around the daggers of his fangs. A shiver rippled down his spine, like the convulsion of a snake shedding its skin. My throat stung in the cool office air as a trickle of blood traced its way down to my collar bone, but the worst of the agony in my bloodstream melted away as soon as he withdrew.

  “You’ve drunk from Morton,” he said, and the way that he smacked his lips was obscene. “And here, I thought the fool only kept you as a feeder.” The epithet sounded especially filthy on lips painted with my blood. “This changes things,” he said, turning his head to one side, looking at me with all the compassion of a father rattlesnake.

  I waited to hear how things had changed, how my drinking from James had modified Richardson’s plans. Alas, the worst vampire villain to stalk D.C. in centuries must have read the Evil Overlord Instruction Manual in his spare time. Richardson apparently had no inclination to babble about his plans to me. He wasn’t going to divulge his secret passions, disclose his deepest, darkest manipulations, tell me exactly what he planned to do with me, so that I could take him down in the last reel of the adventure film I suddenly found myself starring in.

  Not if I didn’t prime the pump a little.

  I lowered my eyelids to half-mast and relaxed my tongue in my mouth, doing my best to look and sound drugged, Enfolded. “Changes … things?” I asked. “What … things?”

  Richardson’s chortle was music to my perfectly-normally-functioning ears. He was buying my act. “So, you’ll fight my Enfolding, will you? Young Morton must have kept you deep these past six weeks, built up your resistance.”

  Yeah, right. I wasn’t about to admit that James had never succeeded in Enfolding me, that he hadn’t even tried after that first spectacular failure, after Brauer attacked me. I longed to push Richardson harder, to ask another question or two, but I dared not make him suspicious about just how deeply he had me in his grasp. Instead, I forced myself to wait, to hope against hope that he would reveal why he’d lured me here.

  A lot of good that did.

  Richardson snapped his fingers, the same insulting gesture that he’d used to send Feld to sleep. “Come, Sarah.” His hand closed around my right biceps, the fingers pinching all the way to the bone.

  He led me to the elevator lobby, never once loosening his grip on my arm, even when he snapped a command at Feld, sending the councilor back to sit at his desk, shuffling papers like a zombie. We descended twelve floors in less than a minute, went further, because we dropped into the parking garage. Richardson marched me toward a massive SUV, a hulking black monster that looked like it could take on the entire U.S. Army and come out with its chitinous plates intact.

  Tossing me into the passenger’s side, he reached across my chest to fasten my seatbelt. The only break in his demeanor at all, the only hitch in his plan was when he leaned close to my throat. He licked his lips, then, and I knew that he was tempted by the blood that still oozed from my wound.

  Tempted, but he didn’t give in.

  Instead, he punched open the glovebox and produced a pair of handcuffs. They glinted as if they were made of newly minted silver, but I knew they had to be steel—Richardson didn’t hesitate to handle them. He clipped them onto my wrists, ratcheting the loops closed until the sharp edges bit into my flesh. “Enfolding is one thing,” he said, “But only an idiot ignores obvious precautions.”

  Thanks for the lesson.

  He tugged twice, double-checking his handiwork. Vampires didn’t leave anything to chance. Not the ones who survived for centuries, anyway.

  Richardson closed my car door and walked around the vehicle. As he shoved his key into the ignition, he turned to me with a shre
wd glance. I realized he had never absorbed his fangs; they still edged out over his lips, reminding me of a crazed dog. “Forget, Sarah,” he said, and my name hissed over those elongated teeth. “Forget everything you see on the way to my sanctum.”

  His sanctum. His most private refuge. A place that he kept secret from everyone in the world—every vampire, every human. A place where I would never be found.

  I tried to keep my expression vague as Richardson started the car and drove out of the garage, but I began to worry that I’d made a very bad mistake, letting myself be captured, pretending to be Enfolded. Hopefully, I’d live long enough to confess my error to James.

  Even as I feigned being Enfolded, I tracked every single turn Richardson made through the night-dark D.C. streets. For once, my compulsion to organize proved to be a good thing—I let my brain treat the street names like random playing cards shifting into an orderly hand of poker. Pennsylvania to 14th Street. Left on M Street. Right on Canal. It was all there, all perfectly clear, all ready to remember, to recite.

  If I ever had anyone to recite to.

  How long would it take for James to come after me? He’d told me to report in, as soon as I’d met with the councilman. He would have expected me in his office at the beginning of my shift.

  Or would he? He’d seen my resume, the day we met. He knew that when the going got tough, Sarah Anderson took a hike. I had a long history of ducking out of difficult situations, a habit of walking away from employment that became even a trifle too demanding. Would James conclude that I had simply given up on the Night Court when Chris’s article raised the temperature of the proverbial bath water? Would he assume I was avoiding him, avoiding all of the imperials, everything that I’d learned over the past six weeks?

  Allison had always told me that my drifting from job to job would come back to bite me. I’d just never thought a “bite” could be so literal.

  No. James would put it together. He had to. He would make some phone calls, learn that I had shown up at the DFI offices on time. James would insist on meeting with Dan Feld, would realize that the councilman was Enfolded. James would realize that I’d been taken by Richardson.

  And James had resources at his disposal, just as he’d proven when he’d given me a police guard. As Director of Security for the District of Columbia Night Court, James could order up confidential records on anyone. Using his legitimate, mundane credentials, he could probe deep into property transfers, into phone records, into all the data maintained by credit card companies and utilities and Internet service providers.

  But none of that would help him to find me. If Maurice Richardson’s sanctum could be discovered through any sort of human or imperial system, James would have done so long before. Richardson was like one of those legendary black ops helicopters—absolutely off the radar. And I was too, when I was with him.

  But my despair at that thought didn’t keep me from memorizing the path to the ancient vampire’s house. Left on 48th Street. Pass five gated driveways. Turn into the sixth. Punch a code into the computerized box. Proceed down a driveway longer than Main Street in a lot of small towns.

  We pulled up in front of Richardson’s sanctum, a mansion that made Disneyland’s Haunted House look like a rotting beach hut. Completely unbidden, I remembered a line from Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”: “Here was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.”

  I really should have chosen a more upbeat author to study, back in school.

  I tried not to despair as Richardson hauled me out of the SUV. I tried not to give up hope when he dragged me through the towering front door. I tried to keep faith as he ordered me to march down a long hallway, past an immaculate kitchen, through a doorway that led to a steep flight of stairs, to the basement, to an enormous cage fashioned out of tarnished silver. I tried not to curl up in abject surrender as Richardson tugged on thick gloves and lifted a heavy silver key, as he opened an antique silver lock.

  Once my cell door was securely fastened behind me, Richardson let me pass my hands through the tarnished bars. He removed my handcuffs none too gently, ignoring the breath that I sucked between my teeth as the sharp steel edges cut into my flesh. I decided that I deserved to take three steps back as soon as I was free. Even if I actually were Enfolded, I wouldn’t stay close to the bonds that had made me bleed.

  Richardson’s fangs gleamed in the dim basement light as he eyed my bruised and bloodied wrists.

  I had to distract him, had to push him to tell me something more. I forced my voice into the sleepy register of an oblivious human woman. “What … now?”

  Richardson shuddered back to attention, pulling himself away from his study of my hands. He swallowed hard, and I tried not to think about my blood trickling down that muscled throat. “Now?” he said. “Now, I reconsider. I was going to trade you for Schmidt, but now that I know you’re more to Morton than just a feeder bitch…”

  “Schmidt?” I probed, desperate for more information.

  “No more questions, Sarah.” He bit off the command, clearly certain that I would comply in my supposedly-Enfolded state. Before I could figure out some other way to harvest information, he turned on his heel and stalked back to the stairs. He flipped off the overhead light before closing the door, leaving me in complete darkness. The thunk of a deadbolt sliding into place seemed like a redundant insult.

  * * *

  Richardson was gone for ages, for long enough that I realized the night must have ended, the sun was shining in the world outside. I strained my ears to hear anything moving in the house above me, any human who might have walked about in daylight, who might have been lured into freeing me. I contemplated shouting for help, but that seemed absurd—I’d glimpsed heavy blankets of insulation against the basement ceiling as Richardson chivvied me into my cage. No one was going to hear me. No one was going to rescue me. I had to help myself.

  I started by exploring my cell. The floor was stone, broad surfaces chinked with something that felt like concrete. I wasted a long time running my fingers along every seam, searching for a weak setting, hoping that I could pry up a rock to use as a weapon.

  No such luck. Richardson kept his prison in good repair.

  I followed up my survey of the floor with a count of the silver bars. The cage was set in a corner of the basement; two of its walls were cinder blocks, and lengths of silver formed the other two. They were spaced about four inches apart. I counted forty on a side. Ten feet by ten feet. Plenty of room to pace as I waited, as I plotted. As I planned.

  Three steps. Turn. Three steps. Turn. I tried to convince my body that the exercise was a form of meditation, a way of deepening my concentration. I told myself to ignore the hunger pangs that rippled through my belly. I wasn’t even going to think about the thirst that turned my throat to sandpaper.

  I couldn’t be thirsty. I’d drunk Richardson’s cinnamon water. That should be enough. That would have to be enough.

  Be mine, he’d said.

  Like hell I would.

  I’d bluffed for long enough. Richardson’s thinking I was Enfolded wasn’t going to help me anymore; he wasn’t going to tell me anything he hadn’t already said. It was time to fight, time to put into action all the things that James had taught me.

  Lesson number one: Don’t waste energy fighting a hopeless battle. Well, I had no choice but to fight this one. At least I had no intention of making it a fair fight. Richardson still thought I was Enfolded. My resistance would take him completely by surprise.

  Lesson number two: Vampires were fast. I knew that, of course. I’d already seen Richardson in action. I had to work out a plan that would work in real time, in vampire time, a plan that relied on trickery and surprise, using both to defeat inhuman speed.

  Lesson number three: Vampires didn’t breathe. There was no reason to focus on blows to the chest, on trying to strangle Richardson
. Fortunately, none of my martial training focused on breathing.

  And lesson number four. I was better off on the ground. I had to get Richardson down on the stones as fast as possible, before he could realize that I wasn’t Enfolded, before he knew that I still possessed free will—free will, and more than a little instruction from James, whom Richardson had so maligned.

  Great. So how did all that add up?

  I crafted the scene in my head. I’d huddle against the back wall of the cage. I wouldn’t respond to anything that Richardson said; I’d ignore his commands. When he came into the cage to see what was wrong, I’d kick out, knocking him off balance. I factored in the angle of the cage door, the way that it would swing on its hinges when he fell against it. The silver bars wouldn’t kill him; they’d just burn him. Badly. For as long as I could contrive to keep him pressed against them. That’s what jointlocks were for.

  It was a great plan, except for one thing: Richardson would never be stupid enough to come into the cage.

  I’d have to sweeten the pot.

  He’d come to me if I was bleeding. He’d barely been able to resist my bloody wrists; it had taken every shred of his will-power to back away when he realized that James’s blood ran in my veins. I just had to issue a stronger invitation. I just had to make myself so inviting a victim that Richardson could never, ever walk away.

  Easier said than done. My cell was completely bare, there was nothing that I could use as a blade, nothing to make a few superficially bloody cuts on my arms, on my legs. I patted my pockets, hoping against hope that I would find a forgotten … anything.

  Of course, I wasn’t carrying anything useful—only my bracelet and my ring, the jewelry I’d stripped off just before going to meet Feld. The jewelry that I’d thought would make me look less than professional.

  To hell with professionalism. I slipped the hematite band onto my wrist. The metal melted around my bruised flesh, immediately warming to my body temperature, soothing with its familiar touch. When I slipped on the ring, I felt like I was standing taller, like I was stronger, steadier. A dash of lipstick and a quick brush of my hair, and I could have faced down the world.