by Sierra Dean
Each night was a new struggle to keep my eyes open, to keep my chin from lolling down to my chest.
He left me for three days after our introduction before he came back. His arrival in the room made me feel equal parts terrified and elated.
There was a strange hope in seeing the face of another person, even if he was my captor. When he came, the door opened, and with it a sip of air from the outside, a glance of hallway. Signs of freedom. They were tiny embers, but it was all I had to go on.
I wanted to ask him about Holden and Maxime. I had dozens of questions but lacked the ability to ask any of them.
Again the scream of metal on concrete sounded his presence in the room. I raised my eyes, barely able to lift my chin anymore, and gazed up at him. He smiled his cruel smile and folded his hands in his lap, looking pleased as punch to be sitting across from me.
“How are you feeling today, my dear?”
I lolled my head back, smacking my skull hard against the wall. Feeling pain right then was preferable to feeling nothing at all.
“Where…Hol…den?”
“Your vampire lover?” The Doctor leaned back in his chair, balancing one foot on his knee and lacing his fingers together over his belly. “What an unusual choice he was for you to make.”
Was. Past tense. I closed my eyes, trying to block him out, the familiar ache of uncried tears building behind my eyeballs.
“Alive?” My fingers dug into my thighs, poised to hear the worst-case scenario.
“He is a vampire, dear girl. Of course he’s not alive. By their very definition vampires are dead. Undead. Whatever that means. Undeath, as if something so final could ever be undone.”
Unable to keep my head upright, I let it slump down again, my chin pressing hard into my chest.
“You look terribly unwell, I must say.” He was ignoring my question. A question it had taken all my available energy to verbalize. “Would you like something to drink?” He played the part of a perfect host, asking a dinner party guest if they might want their wine topped off.
I raised my gaze, not able to do much else. I couldn’t feign disinterest with a casual shrug. I couldn’t nod.
“Well?”
“Yes,” I hissed, the word rattling out of my lungs like a cough.
“Yes what?”
Was this guy for fucking real? I squeezed my eyelids shut, imagining I might be able to count to ten and this whole place would vanish. I might wake up in a hotel room in Holden’s arms, discovering this had been another nightmare.
It had to be a nightmare.
“Yes what?” he said more forcefully when I didn’t reply right away.
“Please.”
“Good girl.” He snapped his fingers, and a man with scrubs arrived. I couldn’t recall the face of the one who had put the collar on me, so I didn’t know if this was the same man or a new one. It didn’t matter. If I lived long enough to get out, I’d see them all burn.
But for now, I loved this man. I loved him more ardently than I was sure I’d ever loved another human being. My heart sang for him.
He was carrying a plastic bag of donor blood, which he tossed onto my lap before leaving the room. I reached for it, but my arms wouldn’t respond. My brain—still somewhat sharp—shifted all my focus onto the small red bag in my lap, demanding some as-of-yet-unused synapses to fire and give me the push I needed to grab it.
My hand flopped limply beside it, unable to take hold, let alone lift it.
I sobbed.
It was a loud, guttural noise, and I surprised myself to find I still had it in me to make such sounds. I’d thought for sure my lungs had begun to shrivel up.
“Would you like some help?”
I didn’t bother trying his patience this time. If I was the lab rat, I’d already learned his maze. “Plea…se.”
He rose from the chair, his movements full of liquid grace like a dancer or a feline shifter. When he crouched over me, straddling my outstretched legs, my mind filed through a thousand different ways I could kill someone who was that close to me. I fantasized ripping his throat out with my bared fangs until I was soaked red from swimming in his blood. I wanted to bury my hands up to the wrist in his chest and squeeze his heart until it burst in my fist.
I stared at him, and he met my gaze unflinchingly.
Without glancing away he lifted the baggie from my lap and removed a small pocketknife from his trousers. He carefully cut away a hole at the top of the bag, then held it to my lips, tipping it upwards so the liquid would pour into my mouth.
When the first drops dribbled from my lips before I could swallow, he took my chin firmly in his hand and forced my head back. Blood filled my throat—cold and probably old—but nothing had ever tasted so good. The only thing I could have imagined being better would be drinking it straight from this man’s artery.
“There. Good girl.” He patted my leg as I struggled to swallow, and when it was all gone, he wiped away the stray drops from my mouth with his thumb.
I wish it had been enough. I wish one bag of blood after over a week without food had been enough to give me a sudden rush of strength and power. Enough that I could have grabbed him by the throat and yanked his windpipe out with my fingers.
He touched my cheek, and I was able to hold my chin up on my own. Small victory.
“If you behave yourself, we will feed you. Not daily, of course.” He grinned the way I imagined the snake in the Garden of Eden had leered at Eve. “But enough you won’t feel so bad. Does that sound fair?”
“Where’s Holden?” It still hurt to speak, but my lungs no longer felt like deflated balloons. I didn’t feel strong or powerful, but I wasn’t a useless bag of bones anymore either.
“Why do you care about someone else, when you should be worried about yourself?” He sat down in the chair, pulling it a few inches closer to me, leaning forward on his knees so our faces were almost level. “Do you know how much trouble you are in, Secret?”
Trouble? Tell me something new. This was the same shit of my everyday life in a different pile. At least that’s what I was trying to convince myself.
The truth was, the longer I was here, the more I related to the hopelessness and fear of my father’s dream. Each passing night it stopped being the memory of someone else’s hell and started becoming my own.
I didn’t want to think about it too long, because if I did, a nagging voice started to whisper, Calliope was wrong. You’re going to die here. Alone. Forever alone.
Chapter Twenty-Six
On the ninth day, when I awoke, I wasn’t in my room.
My first thought was, Salvation!
Except I didn’t think salvation would come in the form of wrist and ankle restraints. I squirmed, attempting to sit up or roll over, any movement would have done, but I was bolted firmly to a table, my waist cinched in place by a metal band.
Bright spotlights popped on overhead, blinding me from any view I might have had of the new room I was in.
The Doctor’s face blotted out the light for a moment as he loomed over me, and I blinked to chase away the ghost lights in my vision so I could focus on him.
“Do you feel well rested, my dear? I hope the blood has helped, because today is going to be…difficult for you. There’s no way around that I’m afraid. Best you steel yourself for it.” He patted my cheek.
“What?”
“I couldn’t test you the way I wanted when you were at full strength—you would have fought me, struggled too much—but having you near death wasn’t going to be any fun. These sorts of tests are much more informative when the subject is alive.”
He began undoing the front of my shirt. Each hook and eye being separated felt like a bit of my soul being stripped away. “What are you doing?”
“I can’t very well do what I need to with you dressed like this, now can I?”
“What are you doing?” I screamed, trying to move out of his reach, which was a pointless effort since I was pinned down.
/> “If you think this is going to be sexual, you can put your mind at ease.”
For some reason that did allay a few of my concerns. But if he wasn’t removing my clothes to molest me—and I was grateful he wasn’t—then why? What possible need could he have for—?
He reached out of sight, and when his hand came back into view, he was holding a scalpel.
“Now, dear, this is going to hurt tremendously, and I understand if you feel the urge to scream, I really do. But please remember it will do you no good, and will only draw from your energy.”
My eyes were open so wide I was surprised they didn’t roll right out of my head. I saw the knife, and I heard his speech, but all the same I still asked, “What are you do—?”
The scalpel tucked into my flesh, and the blade was so small and sharp at first all I felt was a faint sting. Down the center of my belly was a red line at least a foot long. I stared at it in shock, wondering why he was drawing lines on me.
Until he stuck his hand inside me.
The pain was tremendous, and I couldn’t have screamed if I wanted to. I was used to external pain, the kind caused when the nerves on the surface of my skin were in charge. Inside my body there were a million new nerves, and I couldn’t compute what I was feeling. It wasn’t pain like a cut or a gunshot. It was an invasive, squirming agony. My whole body wanted the unfamiliar presence of his hand out but could do nothing to stop his exploration.
I gagged, unsure if the clenching in my stomach was a reaction to what I was seeing, or if he’d physically done something to it. He made two other incisions before peeling back my skin and whispering, “Marvelous.”
When he stuck his hand under my ribs, my brain decided enough was enough, and the room went black.
A sharp scent snapped me back into reality, though I had no idea how much time had elapsed. The Doctor stood over me, his bare hands covered in a thick coating of my blood, reminding me precisely where he’d just had them. A nurse backed away with a bottle of smelling salts still clutched in her hand.
Glancing down in panic, I was relieved to see my stomach wound had closed, the angry red lines of his incisions beginning to heal.
“It really is fascinating to watch your kind patch themselves back up again.” He was staring the same place as I was, watching the skin regrow, building itself over the wounds until nothing was left but pink irritation marks which would soon fade away as well. “But you’re different. Different from the rest of them.”
He stepped out of view, and the only sound in the room was running water and my pulse loud in my ears.
When he returned, his hands were clean, but he was holding another scalpel.
“Don’t. Please, please…please.”
“How wonderful. You’ve learned some manners after all. Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?” He winked at me, but of all the things he’d said to me since I’d met him, none had been half as scary as that idiom.
He knew what I was.
When my gaze met his, he must have seen something in my expression—shock, perhaps, or comprehension—because his smile turned into something almost comforting and paternal.
“You will be my greatest discovery,” he whispered, squeezing my shoulder. “Take comfort in that.”
He rested the scalpel on my chest between my exposed breasts, and I stared at the point of it aiming up at my chin.
“Subject was able to heal a series of fine incisions in a matter of thirty minutes. All major organs appear to be normal size and are identical to a human counterpart. Subject’s stomach is below average size for a human woman of her same build and apparent age, but this is likely an evolutionary advancement due to her mainly liquid diet. We’ve taken samples from the subject’s stomach, liver and kidney to assess whether any unique traits exist within, but I hypothesize they will resemble those of a normal vampire.”
He stopped speaking and stared down at me again, reclaiming the scalpel. “Next we will have a look at the heart.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
My reward for not dying was a pint of blood and the cool reprieve of my cell. Since my bustier had been discarded I was given a thin blue scrub top like those the nurses were wearing. At some point prior to the surgery I must have been prepped, because my hair was no longer matted with blood.
It was a small favor, one I couldn’t fully appreciate right then.
I had a graphic imagination when it came to torture. Though I didn’t enact my plots often, I had come up with a few doozies in my time. More than once I’d fantasized about ripping someone’s heart out and showing it to them before they died.
Never again.
Not now that I’d seen it. The Doctor had cut open my chest cavity, split my rib cage open…
He’d lifted my heart without severing the arteries or veins, and he’d held it in his bare hands just high enough I could see.
I whimpered, rubbing my still-healing chest with the tips of my fingers. I’d lost consciousness seven times, and every time I’d been forced back so he could run his experiments on me while I was awake. Healing was the only thing he didn’t seem to need me alert for.
He’d cut out my heart.
My whimpers became sobs, and I wrapped my jacket tighter around myself, grateful it had been left for me. It felt like decades ago Dominick had given it to me. Since then, it had been to hell and back with me.
If a jacket could survive my life without falling apart, surely I could too.
I huddled in the corner, relieved to finally be able to cry. I knew it was a useless waste of energy, but I needed it. I’d spent days with no sign of rescue, no word on Holden or Maxime. If they were dead, how would anyone find me? The council would be looking, but what would they come up with if they went after me? Was there any trail to follow from the Winchester Mansion to wherever we were?
Since I hadn’t the faintest fucking clue where I was, I couldn’t imagine anyone else having an easy time locating me. My sleeps had been near comatose, and I hadn’t dreamed once. The psychic energy it took to reach out to someone was exhausting. In the past I’d been able to see things, communicate with my loved ones when I’d thought the end was near.
But this was real. This was the end of my days reaching out to me with arms spread wide, and I couldn’t talk to anyone. If I couldn’t find Holden now when I needed him most, I feared that meant the worst. He would stop at nothing to find me, to reach me by any means possible, but if he was dead, his fight for me was over.
If he was dead…
I didn’t want to think about it, but it made sense.
Unless The Doctor was holding him, starving him the way he starved me. Holden was a full-blooded vampire and could last infinitely longer than I could without blood. If he was being starved, it stood to reason he wouldn’t be able to reach out to me, or me to him. Two nearly dead batteries can’t complete a circuit, not the way fresh ones could.
A starved vampire was an appalling sight. It was considered a fate worse than death for most, but right then I was wishing that fate on Holden. I wanted him to be starved, prayed for him to be in agony.
I didn’t want him to suffer, but if he was suffering, he wasn’t dead.
All alone, with enough blood to be lucid, I started contemplating what I knew about the man who held me captive. I’d seen him before he took me, dressed as a homeless man, so it was possible he’d been following me for a long time, disguising himself to avoid recognition. But how long? Was it just in California, or did this go back longer?
Was he acting alone, or had someone hired him?
Sutherland had told me in his dream he’d been taken by The Doctor, which I believed now that I’d experienced those blistering emotions for myself. I understood why he’d told me to stop looking. Was he still here somewhere, or had this room been his first, until The Doctor finished with him?
I zipped my jacket up to my throat, like the leather could protect my chest from further penetration.
The entire time
he’d been cutting me open, he prattled on, making notes and comparing my parts to those of other creatures. He seemed fascinated by my normalcy in a lot of ways, commenting on how similar my organs were to those of a human.
What did he want from me? Did he want to open the hood to see how the gears worked before sending me on my merry way? It was unlikely.
I suspected once he got bored of timing my healing process, he was just going to dismantle me entirely. And I couldn’t fight back. Between the minimal amount of blood I was being given—barely enough to recover what was being lost in the surgery—and all the healing my body was forced to do over and over, I didn’t stand a chance. I couldn’t best him in a fight.
I might be able to land a few blows, but he had a full staff with him as far as I could tell, and he only spent time alone with me when I was weak or incapacitated.
He was smart, and had obviously perfected a system to keep supernatural beings from getting the best of him.
But for what?
Science?
Was he trying to create a real Dungeons & Dragons monster guide, some sort of ultimate physiological compendium of how we beasties ticked?
If that was the case, I could respect how rare a specimen I was for him. I didn’t empathize, because the guy wanted to filet me, but I kind of saw how I might appear to him. A white whale of sorts.
But how…how did he know about me?
The pocket of people who knew what I was had grown over the past couple of years, but they were all people I trusted, people I’d relied on. If one of them had spilled the beans on my condition, it had been under duress.
Unless it hadn’t been a friend at all.
Two people who knew what I was wanted me dead.
My mother had known from day one, and she’d abandoned me because of it. She’d worked closely with Alexandre Peyton in an effort to overtake the city, and though I don’t think she’d ever told him what I was, she hadn’t hidden what she was.