“You’re right Rufus.” And he was right. To Caden, I was more of a burden than a blessing. It hurt to hear it from someone else, but I couldn’t deny it and wouldn’t try. I felt completely disloyal to Caden, but I couldn’t defend him. I wanted to scream that he was there when Carl was attacking me. Maybe he wasn’t bending over backwards to fill my every whim, but he also wasn’t trying to breed me out to his brutish lackeys.
“Don’t you think you could be happy here Alexandria?” he asked.
“Maybe I could,” I lied. He was staring at me and I could tell he didn’t believe me. Why couldn’t I be a better liar?
“What you said sounds really nice,” I continued, trying to convince him that I was being honest. “I would love a lab of my own.”
“Let Leroy give you a tour of the house. He can show you the room that I think would be great for your work.”
“Okay, I’m excited to see the space.” I stood to leave as I saw Leroy approaching, obviously already aware of the plan.
“I’ve got guests coming to dinner tonight. I hope you feel up to joining us? Perhaps one of them might catch your eye?” Rufus added before I stepped away.
“I’ll definitely be down for dinner.”
I tried to smile through the entire tour, which strategically avoided half the house. I knew that Leroy would be reporting all my actions back to Rufus.
Even touring half the house took hours. There had to be a hundred rooms. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel any further along in my escape plan then when I woke up this morning. It was enormous and locked down better than Fort Knox.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I went to the closet and found the most conservative dress in there that would be fitting for dinner and sat waiting, actually dreading, my escort’s appearance. At seven fifty-five p.m., there was a rap at my door as Leroy arrived. Making our way through the huge house, I stepped into the dining room and I saw that Rufus was sitting at the head of the long formal dining table with Carl to his right. I was seated to his left and Vincenzo to my left. There were several others there I didn’t recognize, that didn’t hesitate to gawk at me and make me wonder who would be the first in line to try to impregnate me, the brood mare, if I didn’t start getting creative ideas on how to get out of this. Would it be one or several, like a game of Russian roulette in reverse? I couldn’t think about it or I’d never be able to choke down dinner and keep up a polite façade.
Dinner talk wasn’t anything like I had expected. I’m not sure what exactly I had thought it would be, perhaps guns and ammo talk, but chit chat about the latest movies and politics wasn’t it. Even with the appearance of normality they were displaying, every second dragged out, as I waited for one of them to pressure me for an inclination on my feelings. By the time dinner was finally rounding to an end, I thought I was going to be able to retreat into the solitude of my new room, when I was informed that we would be having port in the library. I found an armchair, so that I couldn’t be forced to share a seat with anyone, and settled in to wait this out as well. I didn’t want a port, but it was insisted upon in the nicest of ways by Rufus.
I’d never had port before, but it was quite tasty. Sitting back in the soft leather armchair, trying to be invisible, I watched the expensive French antique clock on the mantle ticking away wondering how long this portion of the evening would last. I knew it was a French antique because it looked just like the ones on the antique show I had seen. It might be a fake, but I highly doubted Rufus was into fakes. I was going on assumptions that this was indeed Rufus’s house. I was getting the impression that they all lived here, but I’d be shocked if this was Carl’s taste.
As I sat there, trying to be as small as possible, I realized my head was getting a little fuzzy from the port wine. I hadn’t even finished one glass. This stuff must be stronger than regular wine. I leaned back and looked up at the clock again. I felt a slight wave of nausea suddenly wash over me. Oh no, something is very wrong, this isn’t the wine. It could be food poisoning, but more likely, they slipped something in my drink, or possibly my food. I sat there and focused all my energy on trying to look alert and normal. Maybe if they thought it wasn’t working, and I could get back to my room, they would leave me alone for the night. It wasn’t the best plan, but it was the best I could come up with in my current mental state.
“Alexandria, darling, you don’t look well.”
I looked up to see Rufus looming over me, and I tried to shift back even further into the chair. Dread hit me. He knows I feel it. I looked up to him, with my vision wavering in and out, just trying to keep it together.
“I’m fine, just a slight headache is all.” I think I just slurred that.
“Maybe you should lie down?”
“I might do that, thank you.” Maybe if I could stand up and get to my room, I might still be able to pull it off. Bigger problem, my head was becoming so foggy it was difficult to care if they did know I was more vulnerable but some little tiny piece of my brain was still clinging to sanity and shouting at me to keep my guard up. That little piece of sanity was screaming over the serene feeling creeping through me, screaming that I needed to keep it together. I gripped the arms of the chair and pushed myself to my feet.
“Carl, come help Alexandria,” I thought I heard Rufus say. It was getting more difficult by the minute to stand, let alone protest their choice of escort. I felt myself starting to fall, but I never hit the carpet. Meaty arms surrounded me, and I was guessing it was Carl, but I just didn’t care anymore that I normally found this man repulsive. The little screaming voice had been gagged by the full force of whatever they had fed me.
“Don’t toy around. She’s ovulating,” Rufus said to Carl as I lay limp in his arms. I heard them, and I wanted to care. I just couldn’t. I’d worry about it tomorrow.
“I thought I couldn’t have her yet?” Carl asked.
“She’s pretending to go along with the program, but she’s lying. Naïve chit, I’ve been around thousands of years and she thinks she can fool me.”
I opened my eyes, fighting the weight of my lids and looked up at Rufus from Carl’s arms.
“I’m sorry it has to be like this. I hope for your own good, you come around to our way of things. Otherwise it’s not going to be a pleasant future for you like I had hoped.” He turned back to face Carl. “She’s only going to be fertile for tonight so don’t muck this up.”
“I know! I’m not an idiot,” Carl replied like a petulant child.
“If you don’t get it done, I’m giving her to your brothers next month, so just remember that.”
“She’s mine! I found her!”
“Then get it done and you can keep her, for now,” Rufus replied.
I knew I was about to be raped, but it just didn’t feel real at all. It felt like someone else’s body was about to be violated. I could feel us climbing up the steps and a little niggling feeling returned, hammering at me to try to do something to stop this. Anything. The problem was, even when I did get the fleeting will, I just couldn’t muster up the strength, so I laid lifeless in Carl’s arms.
Kicking open the door to my room he dropped me on my back on the bed. I felt him ripping the dress from my body and all I could think of is I wanted sleep and was he really so lazy he couldn’t use the zipper?
The nausea was still cloying and the movement Carl was causing was pure irritation. I felt the air on my skin and realized I had nothing left on. He grabbed my breast, and I moaned, as he was painfully rough.
“You like that?” he asked in a guttural tone and I knew he enjoyed being rough.
I wanted to tell him he was a stupid oaf, but I couldn’t seem to get the words out past my fuzzy feeling tongue. I felt his weight settle on the bed between my legs, and I knew what was coming. Somehow, I still had the presence of mind to know tomorrow, I’d be mentally destroyed over what was happening tonight, but whatever they had given me, numbed me to the now. All I cared about was that I wanted it to be done quickly, so
I could sleep.
Laying, there waiting for the worst, I felt a weird sensation running up my leg. Like pins and needles but without the pain. It was so odd that I had to look at what he was doing to cause this, but when I opened my eyes and looked down, he wasn’t even touching me. He was too busy opening his pants with his fat sausage fingers. I just laid there as the feeling intensified. As he leaned down, my leg lifted of its own accord and kicked him hard in the groin. So hard, in fact, that I actually watched him fly off the bed and land halfway across the room. My leg then collapsed against the bed, laying as limp as the rest of my body. Well, that was odd. Carl, laying in anguish, curled into a ball in the center of the floor, tears streaming down his face.
“You bitch. You’re gonna pay for that,” he gasped out in between struggling breaths. Turning my head I watched as he half walked, half crawled toward the door.
Whatever, I wanted to say, but I just thought it instead. It was too much trouble to speak.
He opened the door still bent over at the waist.
“What happened to you?” I heard a new male voice say.
“None of your fucking business. Get in there and don’t let anyone in,” I heard Carl say to the new guy.
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again I saw another man, standing at the edge of the bed, looking down at me.
“Your pretty,” he said as he ran a finger up my thigh. I tried to pull away from this greasy haired man, but I didn’t have the strength.
“Don’t touch her. She’s mine,” Carl said from the door.
I closed my eyes and laid there dozing in and out with no sense of time. My body felt anchored to the mattress as my head felt like it was floating.
“Lex?” I opened my heavy eyelids and looked up into beautiful silver grey eyes right above me. I looked to the side of the bed and saw that filthy watchdog Carl had left with me was slumped over in his chair, his head bent at an odd angle.
“Caden.” It must not have sounded right because his face scrunched in confusion. He leaned down and smelled my neck.
“They drugged you.” He was speaking but it came out as more of a growl. Wow, even messed up as I was I could tell he was scary when he was this mad.
I watched him walk around the room looking for clothing. I was lying completely naked, not that I cared now, but he seemed to want to dress me. He came back with a thick white robe from the bathroom and pulled me up into a sitting position.
I tried to say no, just let me be, but he ignored me and wrapped the robe around me.
“Where did you get these bruises?” he asked as he tied the robe’s belt around my waist.
“Bruises?”
“Forget it. We’ll talk later. We’re leaving.”
“Uh huh.”
“Listen to me. Everything might go dark for a couple of minutes. It’s okay.”
He lifted me in his arms, and I nestled my head into the crook of his neck. He paused outside my door and then proceeded to walk down the main staircase. Even in a drugged state, I knew the front door wasn’t the best choice for exit. Then all of a sudden, nothing was there but total blackness. I couldn’t feel Caden holding me anymore. I was just floating in the middle of nothing, with no floor beneath my feet. I just hovered in the darkness. I opened my mouth to call for Caden and nothing came out. There was no light, no sound. Absolute nothingness. I tried blinking my eyes, because I couldn’t even tell if they were open.
I screamed, but again, nothing came out. I remembered him saying it might get dark but this was complete emptiness. And then I was in his arms again in the woods with trees whipping past my head. I reached up and tried to tighten my arms around his neck, scared he would disappear again.
“It’s okay. I’m sorry but it was the easiest way to get you out. I tried to shield you from it, but it’s not always selective when I have to use it en masse.”
“What was that?” I was still slurring a bit, but the sleep I had gotten combined with the huge amount of adrenaline now pumping through my vein had started to dull whatever they had given me.
“It was just an illusion for their human servants. Once they saw us, I had to blanket our immediate area. It only works on humans so as you change you will be less susceptible to it and then completely immune.”
He was still carrying me and also running at an inhumanly fast pace and he didn’t even appear to be winded. He suddenly stopped and I lifted my head from where I had buried it to see the other guys waiting. They were mounted on bikes waiting. Everyone but Mike that is, and my eyes started to mist. Mike would be here if he could. Did they hurt him? Had he made it out of the diner that day?
“Do you think you can hold on to me?” Caden asked.
I nodded my head yes, but I wasn’t sure that I really could. I wasn’t staying behind though, that was for certain.
He must have realized what a struggle it was for me to sit up. He sat me on the back of the bike, but kept a hand on me as he climbed in front. I wrapped my arms around him and he grabbed them, pulling me tight against his back and then holding my hands in front of him with one of his as he steered with the other.
I clung to his waist the best I could as he kept a firm grip upon my hands. My cheek was pressed against his leather covered back as the tears rolled down my face. Mike wasn’t there and it was my fault. I never should have put him in that position. Why did I do that?
The ground flew past our feet and I could see a misting of the sun on the horizon as dawn approached. Before I knew it, we were flying through the empty streets of the city at a pace that would have gotten anybody else pulled over.
We pulled in behind the bar, and Caden got off the bike. I was about to slide forward but I felt his strong hands hoisting me up into his arms.
“Where’s Mike?” I asked.
“Did you ask, ‘Where’s Mike?’”
I nodded. I guess I was still a bit slurred.
“I don’t know.” I could hear a lifetimes worth of pain in those three words.
I had nothing left to say. Something snapped in me and the force of everything that had happened fell upon me all at once. My body shook with the force of my sobbing. I barely noticed we were back alone in the apartment.
He carried me to my bed and left. When he came back, he had a glass of what looked like milk with him.
“Drink this,” he said. He put both my hands around the glass to make sure I didn’t drop it. I shook my head and shoved it back toward him, but he just brought it to my lips anyway.
“It’s going to clean out your system of the drugs they gave you.”
I took it and swallowed it back expecting a milk taste, but what I got was more along the lines of what I’d imagine cement to taste like.
He pulled the covers over me and I was out.
I don’t know how long I slept, but I woke with a horrible taste in my mouth, and wearing one of his t-shirts. I sat up and looked at the clock reading seven p.m. My head started to clear, and the details started rushing back to me, hitting like a cinder block straight to my stomach. I tried to compose myself while I was alone, but Caden was at my door within minutes of me waking.
“How are you feeling?” he asked as he sat at the side of my bed.
“I’ve been better.”
“What happened?” He stared at me waiting for answers.
I filled him in on what I thought was important, from the diner to right up to before he showed, including my unexplained burst of strength. I told him Carl and Rufus’s foiled plan but withheld the degrading details of the actual play by play.
“It was the craziest thing that I was able to kick him that hard and I didn’t even feel like I had done it.”
He just sat nodding at me taking it all in, not saying much of anything.
“Why do they want me to have their children?” Even thinking about it again made me nauseous.
“Strength and power. It’s all they care about.”
“Why do they think my children would make them stronger?�
�
“Even if it’s simply that the mutation would be stronger because it was passed down from both sides that would be enough motivation. I think they suspect what I do, that it would be more than that.”
“Them wanting to use me as a brood mare is really disturbing, but it doesn’t matter as much as what we are going to do about Mike. We’ve got to find him.”
“We,” he pointed from him to me, “aren’t going to do anything. I’ll handle this. I don’t want you involved.”
“Maybe he’s at the same place that they took me?” I said completely ignoring his statement about me not being involved.
“Joey checked the place while I was getting you. He’s not there.”
I could see the concern etched all over his face.
“I’m so sorry Caden.”
“It’s not your fault.”
He didn’t mean it. He hadn’t even been able to look at me when he said it. We both knew whose fault it was Mike was missing.
I was afraid to ask, but I had to. It was hard to get the words out, “Do you think he’s dead?” I waited through the dead silence for a reply. This time I was the one avoiding eye contact.
“He’s alive.”
“How do you know?” I didn’t want to brow beat him, but I needed the reassurance.
“I would have sensed it. When our kind is together for a long time, we develop a type of bond. I’d know if they had killed him. Plus, he’s more use to them alive.”
His words didn’t make me feel better after all. What use did they have for him? I now knew exactly what they wanted of me, and I couldn’t imagine their plans would be too great for him either.
He answered my unasked question. “They’ll use him as leverage to try to trade for you.” He cupped my chin and turned my head towards him. “Are you okay?”
He hesitated over the word okay, and I knew what he was trying to ask. He wanted to know how badly they had crossed the line with me. How do you tell someone that if it had been a race, that they had crossed every mile marker but the finish line? That they had taken it so far that sparing that one last marker was of little solace.
Obsidian Souls (Soul Series) Page 14