by Jess Haines
That sent a fresh bolt of panic up my spine. Marked. A familiar. Had he and Fabian lied to me back in Los Angeles? Were those blood runes he had supposedly removed, the ones that let magi use Sara like a living battery to power their spells, still there, unseen under her skin, maybe not as dormant as we thought? Had his ritual keyed those runes to him alone, rather than leaving her open to assault by any passing mage?
Gideon glanced at me as he stressed his next words, though there was no mental message to go with it this time. “Though I’d prefer her alive.”
Holy shit. The necromancer really was planning on busting us out of here. I had no idea how or why—something must have changed between him knocking us out for Max’s benefit back in California and whenever he arrived here with Fabian to deliver Sara like some twisted housewarming present—but I was grateful for that change of heart, nonetheless.
“So be it,” Max said.
Gideon’s smile contained a world of mischief, though he did a passable job at making it look sincere and pleased as he bowed his head. Only I caught his wink—and Fabian’s fists clenching at his sides.
“Sire, I must protest—”
Max cut Fabian off. “The necromancer made his choice. You know the rules.”
“Yes, sire,” came the sullen response. “I’ll be in touch.”
Gideon blew Fabian a kiss. “Don’t worry. I’ll be home before you know it.”
Fabian’s discontented growl was low, but clearly audible. He turned on a heel and stalked out of the room, not bothering to shut the door behind him. I had to wonder what those “rules” were that Max mentioned. Was Gideon considered a power unto himself? Was it possible Fabian couldn’t force him to do anything he didn’t want to? Maybe that had something to do with why Gideon chose to stay behind.
My gaze flicked to Sara, slumped in the chair, her cheeks wet with blood and tears. I would do anything to keep her safe. If Gideon couldn’t get me out of here, I’d be content with helping her escape this hell. After all, it was me Max wanted to break.
For her sake, I would bend and bow and scrape. But knowing that Gideon might get us both out alive was the first sign of hope I’d been given since I stumbled into Max’s clutches.
I only hoped I could stomach being as obedient as he wanted until then. Judging by the sinister smile he turned on me, it wasn’t going to be easy.
Chapter Seven
I paced beside the pool, flexing my hands. It wasn’t just because I was incredibly nervous and worried about Sara, though that played a huge part in my jittery energy. The movement helped my concentration as I practiced making my nails grow into bone-white talons, then back to normal.
That might come in handy later.
The other captives, even Iana, avoided me. Sara had been taken elsewhere by Gideon. Max brought me back to my prison and then left to parts unknown. He either had better things to do than deal with my combined panic and rage, now that he knew how to make me do what he wanted, or he wanted me to stew for a while. Maybe both.
If I could have, I would have torn the place apart to find Sara and get the hell out, but even my newfound Other side didn’t have the strength to break down the door. After I tried a couple of times, bruising my shoulder, a voice over an intercom relayed that Max said if I kept it up, I would be sent back downstairs.
After that I flipped off the security camera above the door and stalked outside. Now all I had to keep me company was a vast sense of helplessness and a desire to control or unleash whatever was making my blood turn black. After refusing to acknowledge what I might be turning into for so long, it was strangely easy to accept my new abilities now that I wanted to use them. If I could summon those heightened senses and make that increased strength appear at will instead of only when I was angry, maybe I could use them to escape this mess.
So far, making the claws come out was pretty easy. If I concentrated on the thought of danger, they formed with little more than a tingle, growing out of the nail bed. Making them go away was harder, and they almost hurt as they slipped back under the skin.
Aside from the claws, I had no way of knowing for sure if concentrating was making anything else happen. I didn’t want to break any furniture testing my strength and I wasn’t about to ask Iana to be a sparring partner. Even with whatever edge the Other side might have given me, collar or no, I was sure she could wipe the floor with me.
She appeared, as if summoned by my thoughts, inches away the next time I turned around. Smothering a startled gasp, I suppressed the urge to hit her for scaring me. I ran at the mouth instead.
“First thing we do when we get out of here is buy a bell for that collar.”
She smiled, though there was little humor in it, then gestured at my hands. “I wouldn’t do that. If he catches you, he may declaw you.”
She wasn’t kidding. I raised a hand to eye level, staring at my fingertips. A massive shudder rolled down my spine. “Well, this place keeps getting better and better.”
She inclined her head, a subtle glow building in the depths of her eyes. “You have a better chance of escape than I do, and my freedom hinges on yours. If you compromise that, I will be very displeased.”
Awesome. Like I said, better and better.
Rather than risk pissing off her or Max or anyone else, I stalked over to the nearest empty pool chair and rested my elbows on my knees, cupping my chin in my hands. The sparkle of sunlight on the pristine carpet of snow outside our prison felt like a taunt, reminding me of the freedom I’d lost.
Iana pressed a hand to my shoulder, sending a jolt of heat through the thin silk of my robe to seep into my skin. I did my best not to flinch away, turning my head to look at her out of the corner of my eye.
“There is ... something new. Something dark in you. What did they do while you were gone?”
Oh, that was a pleasant thought. Just what did Gideon do to me when he touched me? “I don’t know. There was a necromancer—”
Iana made a sharp, hissing sound, her hand moving in a gesture that looked something like what I’d seen Arnold do when casting freehand spells. As I stumbled away from her, putting distance between us, she cried out in pain as nothing but a few fizzling blue-white sparks trickled from her fingertips just before she clutched at her collar. The skin around her throat and on her palms and fingertips where she grabbed at the metal was reddening.
When I reached for her, her hand shot out, slapping my own away. The sting was nothing compared to the mixed fear and loathing on her face. I wasn’t totally sure if it was directed at me or at my mention of Gideon, but it wasn’t pleasant to have that fierce, glowing gaze focused on me. Never mind if that collar protected me from her magic—there was nothing to say she might not use her supernatural strength to snap my neck if she wanted.
“A necromancer,” she said, staring into nothing. “I thought they ... never mind. If you’ve garnered that thing’s attention, there is nothing I can do to help you. Not like this.”
“What’s wrong with me? What do you mean, ‘not like this’?”
“It’s in you. In your blood. In your head. You’re cursed. Without the collar I might be able to get it out, but this ...” She tugged at the creepy fashion accessory, a low growl of frustration telling me better than words what she meant. She couldn’t cast a damned thing with that circle of metal cutting her off from wherever her power came from. It was still there. The sparks, even if they signaled the spell fizzling, told me as much. She just couldn’t do whatever it was she needed to in order to complete casting.
If only I could be sure she intended to help me, not destroy me, when she was trying to cast that spell on me.
I had already committed to finding a way of freeing her from Max if I managed to do the same. Now it looked like I’d be putting myself back in danger if I did find a way to free her. If I could have, I would have throttled Gideon for messing with my head and complicating this mess. Even if he was my best shot at finding a way out, who was to say he wasn’t doing i
t to find a way to have me under his thumb himself?
“Look, Iana, I’m sorry it scares you. Gideon saved my best friend’s life. He hinted he wants to get us out of here. He’s not a good guy—okay, he really is a bad guy—but I’m not sure his motives for being here are evil.”
She gave me a look that told me clearer than words she thought I was being hopelessly naïve.
Okay. Maybe I was. I sometimes had a hard time believing the worst about people, and never mind that I was a private investigator who regularly saw the ugly underbelly of “polite” society. Gideon had already proven more than once that he was two-faced. He was good at sneaking under defenses and manipulating people. He’d managed to get close enough to Sara to nearly kill her, sucking her energy or her soul or who knew what out through the blood runes carved into her arm by the long-dead sorcerer, David Borowsky. We’d trusted Gideon to keep his word when he promised to get rid of the runes. I wondered what he’d really done. They weren’t visible on her skin anymore, but if what he’d said was true, he might have done something to key the runes to himself instead of leaving her open to any mage who wanted to steal a bit of her.
If Sara’s mage boyfriend, Arnold, ever found out, he’d probably kill Gideon with his bare hands.
I wondered if Arnold had any idea we were in trouble. He hadn’t answered my last message, left when I was still with the White Hats—humans who fancied themselves vigilante supernatural hunters—in Los Angeles. Maybe he’d team up with Royce and ride in to save the day once they figured out where we were.
And maybe I’d win the lottery, too.
Iana stared at me, intent, like she was peeling away the layers of whatever she saw on my face to read the truths hiding in the dark corners of my mind. Maybe she was assessing whatever Gideon had done to me in some way I couldn’t see or understand. Either way, the two of them gave me the heebie-jeebies.
“You do realize how foolish that makes you sound, do you not? You should be afraid of it. Necromancers are things of darkness and corruption. Everything they come into contact with dies, quick or slow.”
I snorted. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
That probably wasn’t the right thing to say, judging by the murderous look she gave me. I held my hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay. Sorry. I know he isn’t all sweetness and light, and he’s definitely got something up his sleeve, but right now nothing scares me more than Max and what he might do to my friend Sara. They have her. He’s using her to make me do what he wants.”
“That doesn’t mean you need to play along. It’s probably using your feelings for her to goad you into doing what it wants. That’s how their tricks work.”
“No kidding. You think I don’t know that?” Scowling, I folded my arms. “I wish you wouldn’t call him an it. He might not be human, but I don’t think he merits an ‘it.’”
The glimmer in her eye took on a sardonic sheen when she cocked a brow at me. “You’re changing the subject. Whatever the gender, it is irrelevant. That thing isn’t here to help you. It’s here to help itself. You’re just letting yourself be used, and in a far more insidious way than Max Carlyle ever intended.”
“I can’t watch them hurt her. I just can’t. I have to get out of here, and if that means letting a necromancer help me, so be it.”
Iana shook her head and turned away, the curl of her lip telling me she was still disgusted with my life choices. Neither of us was ever going to get out if she wasn’t open to using whatever options were available to us, no matter how distasteful they might be.
Gideon might have thought Sara and I were both pawns to be shuffled around at his whim, a means to who knew what end, but I could play that game, too. Who said Others were the only ones who could be manipulative?
Then I remembered that I wasn’t exactly human anymore, and had to swallow down a sick feeling of inevitability. I didn’t want to turn into the kind of monster I’d always been afraid of, but if that’s what it took to escape, I couldn’t afford to be squeamish. I would be as careful as I could be, bearing in mind what Gideon was and what he’d done. He wasn’t just a manipulative asshole. He was a cold-blooded murderer. Letting him help me was a risk I was willing to accept if it meant escaping this place.
“We’ll get out of here,” I said, not sure if I was trying to convince Iana or myself. “Whatever it takes.”
She didn’t answer, padding away on quiet feet to leave me alone with my thoughts of curses, death, and whether I might not be letting circumstances bring out an evil in me that maybe had been there long before I started turning Other.
Chapter Eight
After the initial meeting with Fabian, Gideon, and Sara (I didn’t think zombie-Tiny or the other zombie guy counted), Max didn’t return for days. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but by the third night, it was getting hard to stay on the razor’s edge of readiness to face whatever evil might be waiting for night to fall.
There were a couple of touch-and-go moments where I nearly flipped out. One was when a trio of suited guards came in. I rolled off the bed I was lounging on and put it between us, looking for something to use as a weapon. They just stood by the door and smirked at me, sharing amused looks at my confusion and panic. A minute or two later, a couple of women in leather collars and, incongruously, neatly pressed maid’s outfits, came in with a cart of supplies to clean the rooms and change the bedding. Apparently this was something they did every two or three days.
Talk about awkward misunderstandings.
The constant, fearful jitters faded by the end of the week. Instead of jumping at every unexpected sound and intrusion of Max’s security team and cleaning crew, it became too commonplace to worry about. Aside from telling us to get off the furniture they needed to clean or to lift our feet so they could vacuum a patch of carpet, they left me and the rest of Max’s captives alone.
It was so odd to see how he had set up his private harem. We were treated relatively well, given pretty much anything we wanted, and left alone by Max’s minions. We weren’t starved, by any means. The cabana I’d noticed on my first tour of the place provided meals as well as drinks. Lots of iron-rich foods, like vegetables, nuts, shellfish, and steak, along with daily vitamin supplements, most likely to combat the frequent blood loss the others suffered from Max’s attentions.
We were supposed to return our dishes through the same slot they were provided through. It was too small to squeeze through and escape, but big enough for plates, bowls, and small glasses to be passed back and forth. I couldn’t see much of the kitchen through the slot, but it looked like the people who ran it were all collared and uniformed. Trapped like the rest of us. The forks and spoons they passed us were plastic, and all our food was already cut up, so we didn’t need knives. The design was clever but chilling in its efficiency.
My presence didn’t change the routine a bit. The other captives might have been a tad nervous around me, but even they didn’t treat my arrival as unusual for long. For the most part, the others avoided me the way they avoided Iana; not making eye contact, scooting away or getting up to move to another room if one of us got too close, keeping responses monosyllabic and hushed, like they were afraid of being punished for talking to us.
Maybe that wasn’t so far from the truth, since they figured from my conversations with Iana that I might be the one to save them. Or maybe they thought that getting too close might make Max furious with them for helping me. Whatever it was, it meant I was left alone a great deal of the time.
Basically, it was boring and claustrophobic as fuck, and never mind that my shoe box of an apartment back in New York could have fit into our prison ten times over. With no human interaction, TV, or Internet, and nothing much but a collection of books to keep myself busy, it was a wonder I didn’t go nutty from all the time I had to spend twisting myself in mental knots coming up with and discarding useless escape plans.
Being bored was infinitely preferable to being tortured, but I was also worried for Sara
’s safety. The one time I got brave enough to ask one of the security guards if he knew anything, he told me to sit back down and shut up. I didn’t want to invite trouble or give Max or his people a reason to send me back to my prison in the basement, so I did as I was told.
It might have saved me some pain, but it still left me in the dark. Where had Gideon taken Sara? What else had they done to her? It wasn’t like I could do anything about it, or about my own predicament, but I couldn’t stop worrying about her.
I was also worried about Devon, my hunter friend who was probably still in Fabian’s hands, but Sara was like the sister I never had. The woman had more money than God, and yet she had taught me that it didn’t take money to live a rich life. She was the one who took me on adventures to see plays and improv shows I never would have gone to alone, to view artwork in galleries I wouldn’t have known existed, to attend readings by authors I never would have thought to look up, and to see bands I’d never heard of in dives I wouldn’t have set foot in if I didn’t trust her so much.
That was what killed me the most about her being taken. Devon chose this life of tangling with vampires. He knew the dangers involved and had decided to take the risk. Sara was only in trouble because she was my friend.
Not knowing if she was badly hurt, or if she was even still alive, gnawed at me like a dog worrying a bone. Worse, I was afraid Royce was unaware that I had fallen into Max’s hands. The last time we spoke, he knew about Clyde’s trouble, and that a necromancer was involved. I hadn’t a clue, at that time, that Max might have had anything to do with it.
Though I also had a thread of a blood bond remaining to Royce, just as I did to Max, I didn’t think he could still feel what I was feeling like he had when I was in New York. He’d mentioned once that proximity strengthened the bond. It was a one way street for vampires—they could feel and exert some control over their bonded human servants, but for the most part it wasn’t supposed to go the other way around. I couldn’t be sure what he knew or felt about me or my predicament. Considering I must be at least a few hundred miles away, he might not even be able to tell if I was alive. Did he feel my fear? Did he know how scared I was, not just for myself, but for Sara? Did he know how much I missed him? I couldn’t let it go even though I knew it wasn’t helping to linger on questions no one would answer.