by R. Sullins
I heard thrashing coming from another table and saw my mother fighting her restraints and was yelling around her gag. I couldn’t fight this and neither could she. We were helpless against whatever the revenants wanted to do to me. I wanted to tell her to stop, she was only going to bring attention to herself.
The revenant bent down and bit into my arm, the excruciating pain caused me to stiffen my body and groan against my gag. The pain was terrible, nothing like when Crispin bit me. Then I only felt blissful and euphoric, this was excruciating. The other two revenants screeched and bent to my other arm and bit down just as hard. I felt a tearing sensation and wondered if they were going to take chunks of flesh from my body. I thought of every zombie movie I have ever watched and squeezed my eyes shut while my heart raced.
A loud gasp sounded and then quick footsteps hurried forward.
“What are you doing?” A familiar voice shouted and caused the revenants to pull away, tearing more of my flesh. I moaned in agony and couldn’t stop the tears that fell from my eyes to soak into the hair at my temples. My blood was pooling at my sides, quickly cooling in the frigid air of the building.
Steps came towards my table and I opened my eyes to see the blond hair and blue eyes of Katerina. She looked angry and grabbed a towel from a nearby table and pressed it against one of my wounds. I tried to shake my head at her and scream at her to find Crispin and tell him where I was. Finally, I would be rescued as well as the other Hunters.
“You fools! You can’t kill her and waste her blood.” She squeezed the towel harshly against the wound making me whimper at the pain. “I didn’t have you bring her here just to drain her on the first day.” Her voice was no longer soft and feminine but sharp and hateful.
Her words seeped slowly into my shocked brain. She wasn’t here to rescue me. Her eyes met mine, hers so full of bitter hate that I would have backed away if I weren’t strapped down. I pleaded with my eyes for her to stop this, to let me go but she just smiled a malicious smile, showing me her fangs.
“Awww, you poor little Hunter. You thought you could get free with my help?” She leaned down and whispered against my ear. “You are here because of me, I was the one to bring you here and you will die here when you are no longer of use to me.” She stood back up and smirked. “You look surprised.”
Did I? I wouldn’t have guessed she could be behind this entire plot to make an army of revenants, no. But I was always able to sense that she had been hiding something. I thought she was after Crispin. Maybe she was but maybe not for the reasons I had assumed.
“I bet you never expected this, did you? I have always been greatly underestimated and overlooked. I am just a female after all.” She stroked her pastel pink fingernails lightly down her face and across her breasts. “Nothing more than a pretty face. A body that they can fulfill their fantasies with. No one expects that the sweet little dollface will be sneaking around and listening in to conversations that give away all the secrets of the higher echelons of the vampire world.” She looked at me with a smug grin. “No one expects the beautiful doll will trap the big bad Hunter in an iron box and make all those pesky trackers nonfunctional. Of course, I have a signal blocker but what’s better than to trap the sweet little Hunter bitch in a box and wait until her heart almost stops before letting her out?”
She grabbed my face, her long, sharp fingernails dug into the soft skin of my cheeks and hissed in fury.
“I have been trying to get Crispin to my side for nearly 200 hundred years. Everything that I have suffered is because of him. He was supposed to Turn me. If he had I would be full of Power and would be ruling the vampire world. But he refused and had someone else Turn me instead. Now I have no Power and never will. I thought I could get him to make me his mate so I would be able to use his Power to rule but he was never interested in me.” She let go of my face and drew a sharp nail from below my eye to my chin. I felt the sting of the cut as I felt my warm blood seep out.
“I’ve had a very long time to plan. I researched Hunters and revenants, listened to the legends of Hunter’s blood. I found others, like me, that had been Turned and ended up with no Power even though they had been promised strength, Power, and life everlasting. Instead, we were Turned and had less than we did as pathetic humans.” She licked my blood from her nail and hummed. “Many of my kind were powerful humans, wealthy beyond imagination, wielded power in their governments. But Power is everything in the vampire world. It wouldn’t matter if you were the richest man on earth, if you were Turned with no Power you were less than worthless. Crispin could be king of all vampire kind. It has been said that that the only one more Powerful than he is Kane himself. But Crispin has no ambition. He is nothing but a vampire lord, he’s not even on the vampire Council! And Kane, I have never met him. I begged Crispin many times to introduce us, certain I would be able to seduce him, but Crispin always refused.” She spat out her fury. “I should have been more than this.” Her smile was wicked, “But I will be.”
Crispin? I have news...
Chapter 26
*****
Crispin had destroyed the meeting room. The chairs were in splintered pieces, the table a broken pile of firewood, the walls had holes. The entire house of staff and donors were keeping clear of the area of the mansion he and his sentinels had been in. The sentinels were holed up in the house since the sun had risen a short time ago. Jared and several of his other human guards were still searching the city for any trace of his Hunter.
Her news that Katerina was the one behind everything was difficult to swallow. The young woman that he had gotten to know like a sister was capable of such atrocities. That she was a great mastermind in trying to take down the vampire world and become its ruler. It made no sense in the fact that it would be nearly impossible. His Hunter had told him all that she said, that there were many others in a like mind of being unhappy with the status quo. It had always been the way of vampirism, some were just not going to receive the Power that most crave. Never had he guessed that she would have felt so strongly.
How had he not realized that she wanted him to be her puppet? How could she think that he would ever align himself with her? He never thirsted for supremacy. If anyone should be ruler over all it should have been Kane. But they were both content to let the Council guide and have the Kings and Queens maintain the regulations that kept the vampire world secret. For centuries the established construct of their world had run smoothly. There was no need to change it and no one person should be allowed to decide that it wasn’t working for them.
Crispin brushed against his Hunter’s mind again and hoped that she held strong. He would find her, there was no alternative.
*****
I watched Katerina sway on her feet in confusion. It wasn’t until I saw her eyelids drooping that I realized she had sun exhaustion and needed to find a place to sleep. If she was so tired than that meant the revenants should be as well.
“Don’t worry,” Katerina smiled smugly, if not a bit tiredly, “I’ll be back as soon as twilight falls.” She shuffled away going towards a door in the back of the room. I watched until I couldn’t see her any longer and closed my eyes in relief. I was giving in to my own exhaustion, hoping that Crispin would be able to find me before the sun set and I had to face the night with the torture it was likely to bring. At least I was able to give Crispin the information I had about Katerina and the Hunters held captive with me.
My body was sore from the bites and scratches but also from laying on the hard, uncomfortable table. I shivered uncontrollably in the cold air and undeniably from fright. Being unable to move was terrifying. Being unable to move my mouth, fully swallow, only being able to turn my head... it was bringing that feeling of claustrophobia back. I couldn’t imagine what my mother had been going through for the last 6 years. I blinked as the tears kept falling. My poor mother and all the other Hunters.
I lay there for hours, all through the day. My body was sore from the hard table, my joints aching fro
m the pressure of laying on the metal with no relief. I was finally able to escape into sleep for a while.
There were no windows to tell me the time of day but I knew that it became night when the revenants came back into the room. I whimpered and would have curled into myself to escape but they seemed to know to stay away from me after the reprimand they received last night though I did see their evil-looking red eyes looking at me from time to time. I was appalled to realize that they were cleaning the women by using rags and cold water. They were wiping the tables between the women’s legs and changing the sheets that were draped over their naked bodies. One of them was even changing the IV bags and blood bags.
During all of that the women lay there, only one of them moaned.
I was surprised to see that the revenants weren’t drinking the blood but were storing them in a refrigerator against a wall. I supposed Katerina ran a tight ship and had trained her pets very well. They were moving like robots, acting as if they were performing specific tasks that they had been trained to do, shuffling around the room, their stench strong in the air.
After they completed their jobs, including wiping down my own table, much to my disgust and dismay, they huddled around the refrigerator. One of the revenants opened a blood bag and poured each of them a small amount of blood in a plastic cup. They all moaned in ecstasy as they drank the blood and licked their cups clean. The cups were tossed in a large garbage can, lined in a black bag.
It appeared as though just as small amount of Hunter blood was enough to have them be obedient lapdogs and smart enough for commands. I had a frightening thought of what could one do or be if given a full diet of as much Hunter blood as they could consume? If one could be smart enough to think for themselves and control their own actions? What would their instinct be then? When they were done they shambled out of the room and through a door.
I lay there for a while more, wondering if this was to be my new reality. I worried about my sister, who I had just started getting back. I worried about Sandy, who was such a wonderful, selfless person. Neither one of them would know what happened to me. I hoped they would be able to cope with my loss if it came to that. That my sister wouldn’t retreat back into herself. She was ready to start living her life again and I was afraid that my disappearance would hurt her small progress.
Mostly, I worried about Crispin. He and I had such a strong bond. We were mates and planned to stay that way. I didn’t think there was any way possible to break that bond. He had to be going out of his mind. I communicated with him off and on throughout the night, telling him what was happening around me, but neither he nor I knew where I was. I had to work hard to hold on to the faith that I had in him that he would be able to find me. I believed in him but it was so hard while knowing that no progress was being made. Katerina had done her job well.
Katerina showed up some time after the revenants had left but this time she didn’t approach me. I was sure, to her, I was nothing more than another one of her acquisitions. Just another Hunter to bleed dry, to keep alive just enough to make use of. She walked to the fridge and took out a few more blood bags and walked to a door before walking back into the room empty-handed. There were probably more revenants outside that she had to feed to keep them obedient and loyal to her.
I watched as she hummed and danced across the floor, checking on all her little captives. She took the time to brush their hair, leaning down to place soft kisses on their foreheads before adjusting their sheets to fully cover their bodies. “Do you know what tomorrow is ladies? It’s hair washing day!” She clapped her hands with glee and bounced up and down on her toes before moving on to the next one to start the process all over again.
Her behavior was so disturbing it caused a tight ball of anxiety to curl up in my gut. I felt nauseous. I was so afraid I would vomit and have it get stuck in my mouth and choke due to the gag that I tried my best to deeply breathe through the feeling.
She saw me suffering through the panic and grinned at me but continued to brush at a dark-skinned woman’s hair. “The Hunter, the Hunter, all the Hunter’s in the world. The Hunter, the Hunter, all the Hunters are my girls.” Her sing-song voice drifted through the room, echoing in the space. The sound was creepy and had shivers racing across my flesh.
A noise from across the room was startling after listening to the humming and singing of the psychotic vampire. I couldn’t help a flinch as I saw revenants filter back into the space. I couldn’t be sure if they were the same ones from earlier but they began to perform the same tasks.
Katerina watched like a mother hen as the revenants moved around the room. the room and changed each of the bags once again before tossing the used IV bags in the garbage and stored the blood in the refrigerator before going back through the door again.
Katerina made her way towards me after she finished with each of the other Hunters, brush in hand. I screamed my hatred and anger at her, refusing to give up my spirit. The other women had been here for such a long time, I didn’t blame them for the state their minds were in, but I was still new. I would not be broken so easily. If she wanted me to lay there like a lamb while she drained my life from me the least I could do was show her how I felt.
Katerina grabbed a large fistful of my hair and yanked back viciously. My neck was stretched uncomfortably but it didn’t stop me from glaring into her large blue eyes. She seemed to get a kick out of my anger though.
“Awww, look at the Hunter. So angry, hissing like a little kitten.” She tapped her brush on my forehead. “You just don’t get it, do you? You are mine now. Isn’t it delicious? Crispin wouldn’t have me and caused me to have to go through all this.” She swung her arms wide, indicating the women in the room. “Now look, I took what he values most while I get what I want most.”
She gently pulled the brush through my tangles and hummed with a small smile on her lips. The gentleness was worse than the pain she could have caused. It almost made me feel sorry for her. She was obviously disturbed and likely had been for a very long time. I wondered how her brother hadn’t seen it in all their years. Or perhaps he did and didn’t know it was as bad as it was.
After she had all the tangles out and my hair was as smooth as she was going to get it, she stood up and kissed my forehead like she had done the others. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to ignore the feeling of horror that crawled up my spine.
She moved to a cabinet by the refrigerator where she stored it. I could tell that dawn was approaching because she looked tired. After a final glance around she smiled smugly.
“Until tomorrow, ladies!” She laughed, a pretty sound that rang like bells for all the ugliness of its intention. I watched as she walked back through the same door she had walked out the day before.
I finally let the tension flow from me. I couldn’t relax on the uncomfortable slab I was laying on but my muscles weren’t locked tight anymore as they had been for the last several hours with the revenants and then vampire bitch in the room. With the release of tension, I began shivering again and my teeth clenched down tight on the roll of leather between my teeth. It seemed like hours before I was able to drift off to sleep again.
Chapter 27
*****
“Crispin!” James came into the room looking upset.
“Not now James!” He growled. He didn’t have time for his friend’s nonsense. He’d been looking for any trace of his Hunter for over 24 hours. The sun had risen again and he still had no leads on where his mate was.
James pushed forward, though, ignoring Crispin’s angry glower and insisted, “I need to talk to you, Crispin.”
“James! I said not now!” He whirled around and punched the wall again unable to control his anger. James cautiously came further in the room. Crispin’s eyes blazed silver. He was already beyond angry and, though he didn’t want to hurt his friend, he couldn’t deal with James’ normal nonsensical attitude at the moment.
James took one step back before squaring his shoulders and stepping fo
rward again. “Crispin, you are going to want to hear what I have to say.”
Crispin turned to look at his friend and saw the determination and bravery. He felt the smallest bit of pride that James wasn’t backing down. “Alright, James, what is so important?”
James wrung his hands and looked at the ground. Crispin growled in exasperation and was once again going to order James to leave when he lifted his head. What Crispin saw there had his back straightening and his jaw clenching.
“I don’t know how to say this.” He took a deep breath. “I thought Katerina was acting weird. Truth be told, I think she’s been acting weird for quite some time now.” He turned and started pacing as he talked, occasionally stepping over or around the splintered wood from Crispin’s destroyed office. “Katerina was never happy after we were Turned. She always smiled and put on a happy face but I could sense her discontent that neither she nor I had received any significant Power.”
He looked over at Crispin and he nodded, noticing this himself but thinking that it was natural, that most vampires came to terms with their lack of Power. There was nothing to be done for it, after all. Those that never came to be happy with their state of being usually ended up taking their own lives. That was rare though, as those that choose to become a vampire did because they had a thirst for life and were drawn in by the promise of eternity.
“I followed her last night!” He burst out. “I followed her because she was acting cagier than normal. I just had a feeling that she was up to something.” He stopped and looked up at Crispin. “See, she’s been really good at hiding her displeasure with the way things turned out for her...us. She used to talk about how great being a vampire would be ever since she had found out about vampirism. She wanted to rule the world and she wanted to do that by your side after she met you. She felt she deserved the best of everything all her life since she was a little girl.” He wrung his hands again and looked guilty.