by Amy Faye
Then he jerked away from her, taking in a sharp breath. Sarah sat up to watch him. His eyes were wild and he looked strange—afraid, though she didn't know what of.
The cut on his face had faded into a particularly bad scratch, and he didn't stand at the same unusual angle that he had before. As impossible as it was to believe, he seemed almost as if he'd… just gotten better.
The realization hit her like a ton of bricks, after a long second of watching him stare at her and lean back against the shelves of the store they'd broken into. Unnatural healing, the power to fight with a vampire… That could only mean one thing. She tried to think of some alternative, but nothing was coming up.
"What the fuck are you?"
"It's not what you think," he said. Too quickly. He knew exactly what she was thinking.
And, she realized, in spite of what he wanted her to think, in spite of the fact that he wanted her to calm down and to stop freaking out…
He couldn't bring himself to say that he wasn't a vampire.
4
For a moment Sarah didn't move. Didn't want to think, didn't want to breathe. If she could have disappeared completely, she would've done that. She realized in that moment exactly what deer feel when they stand in the middle of the road, staring. Waiting for death.
Isaiah's face started to soften. For once his intense expression seemed to slip off his face like a mask. "Sarah, please—"
Then she couldn't stop moving. She slipped her clothes on, picked her jeans up as she moved past him. If she could just get past him… She shoved her way into her jeans as she stepped through the door, slipped her shoes on, and took one long look back at Isaiah.
He seemed to be waiting for something, his breathing heavy. He watched her, though, and the look in his eyes slowly returned to the same intensity, returned to the same power.
Before, it had made Sarah feel safe. As if he were driven. Driven to kill monsters, and by extension, to protect her.
Now she knew better. He was looking at her like she was a piece of meat, and to him, she was. A piece of the most succulent meat she'd ever seen. She started to run, not looking back.
She'd never been a runner. Her lungs burned, her feet felt like they were on fire. Her legs ached. But every time that she wanted to slow down she thought of that feeling, the teeth scraping against her throat. The way that with a simple bite down, he could have…
Her chest hurt, badly. She wanted to stop, wanted to fall to the ground. Her stomach churned with anxiety and fear and the ache of exertion all mixing around. Still she continued. It was only another half-mile, and if she'd come this far…
The loading-bay doors were closed when she got back to the warehouse. She slammed into it with her shoulder, her legs unable to slow her down before she hit. Then she slumped down, her body wanting to quit even as her mind raced.
No, she thought. She couldn't afford to stop now. If she stopped then she was dead. Isaiah could have caught her easily, but something had stopped him. For a moment, she knew. Any second he could come around that corner, and then she'd be helpless if she couldn't get up, get the door open, and get inside.
Once she was inside, she could talk to Jason. He needed to know what had happened to his partner, what had happened to her. He could keep her safe. He knew all about vampires. He hunted them, had been hunting them practically forever, he said.
If Isaiah was going to be a threat then Jason would know how to protect her. She forced her feet underneath her and made herself stand up. Her fingers scrabbled at the base of the loading-bay door. She took a moment to peek over her shoulder, praying that Isaiah wasn't there, that she had just a few more seconds.
Her hands caught on the handle of the door, and she strained her legs more than she'd ever strained before. As long as she could get through, she would be safe. Jason would be inside. He was her lifeline. She repeated it to herself, over and over.
Jason was safety. Jason would keep her safe. As long as she got the door open.
The door started to move, inch by inch, and then all at once. Jason stood under the door, his shoulder wedged underneath as soon as it had reached waist-height. He stood up under it easily, as if he'd done this all the time. Sarah fell inside, more crawling under than walking, and made her way to the mattress.
Her chest hurt so bad. Hearing the loading-bay door slam shut was like a lullaby. Jason needed to know what had happened. Deserved to know. He had as much stake in the fight as anyone, but Sarah didn't have the energy any more. She let her eyes drift shut.
When she felt Jason's hands on her shoulders, shaking her roughly awake, though, she realized that she wasn't going to get out of explaining so easily.
"What happened? I told you it wasn't safe."
"Isaiah," she gasped out. Just saying the word hurt. Her chest, the stitch from running, but something else, as well. Something deeper. "I saw Isaiah."
"Is he alright?" Jason's voice had a barely-contained panic contained in it, but as Sarah fought for breath and tried to search for the right words, they weren't coming.
"Isaiah," she repeated. "I saw him."
"Yes, I know, but is he okay?"
"No," she gasped out again. "He was hurt. Injured."
"But alive? Where did you see him?"
"He's not alive, Jason. He's not alive."
He gave her a strange look. A look that didn't mean anything to her. She was too tired to think clearly. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Jason, he—" Sarah was tired. She laid back down, closed her eyes. Her breathing came too hard to sleep, though. "He was acting weird. He tried to—"
The pause was too long. Jason started trying to prompt a response again. "He tried to, what? Did he try to—"
Now Sarah could hear it in his voice. Jason had an idea of what had happened, too. Now that she thought about it, it was obvious. If he got left behind, he'd either die in the fight, or he'd have been bitten. If she ever saw Isaiah again, it was going to be as a vampire.
"He was bitten," she confirmed. She tried to relax, tried to roll over. So tired. The stitch in her side was becoming a cramp, and it hurt, but more than that she was exhausted. The day had been too long already. She needed to sleep. She had work in the morning.
"Sarah, you need to wake up. I know I love sleep just as much as anyone, but—"
She rolled over. If she ignored him long enough he'd go away. She just wanted everything to go away. She was too tired.
"Sarah, we need to talk. Please. Sit up. Look at me."
She rolled over and opened her eyes. "What?"
"Look." He reached over and ran his thumb across her face. Those eyes of his, those piercing, powerful blue eyes. She couldn't resist them. "Isaiah's… complicated. You don't need to be afraid."
It took a long moment for the words to settle in. And then all at once she realized what had sounded so strange about the way that he had said it.
Sarah had thought, had hoped, had expected that Jason was going to tell her that it was all going to be okay because Isaiah couldn't get her, or because she didn't understand something about vampires. Maybe something about 'they can drink donor blood' or something.
But he hadn't said that. He hadn't even told her that he was still himself. He'd told her that she didn't understand who he had been in the first place. It wasn't that Isaiah was bitten by a vampire, it wasn't that he had died after they left and what she'd met was a new vampire.
He'd always been this way. And, another moment later, the last piece of the puzzle fell into place.
Jason had known, too. He was in on it.
Whatever they were doing, whatever the two of them were up to, she realized, they were in it together. Jason wasn't going to protect her from Isaiah. As far as he was concerned nothing had changed. His friend was still fine, was still alive. No wonder he hadn't been afraid of Isaiah being in the hospital.
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?"