Because it wasn’t like that. What we’d done back in that room…yes, I’d just met her. And yes, it might not ever happen again. But in the middle of that experience I’d felt more alive and myself than I’d ever felt during anything else.
And I knew that, just for a moment, she’d felt it too. There was something between us. Something I couldn’t put into words, but it was there.
“This way,” said Alec after clearing his throat again. He continued down the corridor, and he didn’t look back.
What choice did I have?
I followed him.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked after five minutes of nondescript and seemingly unending corridors. There were other hallways off of this main one, but he didn’t take any of them, just kept going on at a damnable sedate pace, whistling something a bit off key with his hands shoved into his skinny jeans pockets.
“A room,” he shot back to me. “Unless you wanted to spend the night here in the hallway. It’s up to you.”
I wanted to ask him if this was usual. I mean, he’d said “her girls.” This was probably very usual. Alec coming after Elle had sex with some nameless woman, bringing said nameless woman back to some sort of erotic chamber where she could wait to be summoned again, like some enormous living toy. I bristled at that. I bristled at the fact that Elle would treat countless nameless women that way.
And I bristled at the fact that she was treating me like she treated everyone else.
I swallowed, feeling myself pale, and trotted a little to catch up to Alec’s long-legged stride. “Look, I really need some answers—” I began, but he cut me off.
“You ask a lot of questions.” He glanced at me with a frown, his gaze hooded.
“Well, this is kind of an unusual night,” I retorted. “And I’d like some answers. I came here with Elle,” I continued, “because these men were after me…”
He stopped at that.
“You’re…her?” He sounded shocked as he glanced at me with wide eyes, looking me up and down as if I’d transformed from something completely unremarkable one moment, to something very, very interesting in the next. “The woman that Magdalena’s goons were hunting,” he said as he leaned forward, as if he wanted clarification. “The one Elle saved last night?”
I stood there with my mouth open. The only way this man could know that about me is if Elle had told him about me. So. She had remembered me.
I shouldn’t have been so pleased at that, but I was.
“That’s me,” I said with a roll of my eyes. I remembered that name from what the men and Elle had shot back and forth. Magdalena. Who was she?
“Wow. Wow,” he said then, drawing the word out as he whistled lowly under his breath. He rocked back on his heels and grimaced. “Well. This changes things.”
“Excuse me,” I said, then, gritting my teeth as I tried to find patience from somewhere inside of me…and utterly failed to find it. “But what, exactly, is going on?” I guess that normally I wouldn’t have spoken to a self-professed vampire in quite that tone of voice, but it was extreme circumstances. And anyway, Alec exuded the air of a perpetually nice kind of guy, vampire or not.
“Well,” he said, wheedling the word out with a grimace. “You’re in a lot of trouble.
Chapter 5: The Wrong Place
“Trouble,” I repeated in a low growl.
Alec sighed for a long moment. “Look, Elle should really have been the one to be telling you all this crap,” he said, shifting his weight and running another hand through his white-blonde hair. “But she’s…indisposed.” He grimaced. “So, those goons are after you. You got that much, right?”
“I’m listening,” I replied with a frown.
“Well, the thing is, you’ve been marked.” He tapped his neck with a long finger and gestured toward my own neck, and the throbbing wounds still there, still fresh, still not leaking blood but could leak blood at any moment. I self-consciously reached up and wiped my fingers over the lowest wound. As before, my hand came away with a single drop of blood on my fingertip.
He turned his hand over and over in the air as he searched for a word. “Marked means…marked,” he finished with a shrug. “It means that a vampire laid a claim on you. Which wouldn’t normally be a problem, you know? Vampires lay claim on people all the time. The problem is that of all vampires, Elle is the one who marked you.” He sighed and shook his head. “So originally? Those guys were after you for no reason. Random violence. They were going to kill you, drink you dry, leave you. You’d be found dead, drained of blood, would show up on the morning news. Whatever. You’d be dead,, and that’d be the end of it.”
I stared at him with wide eyes. He was talking about my almost having been a morning news statistic like he might discuss his favorite sitcom episode.
“The point is that Elle stopped that from happening,” he continued, his frown deepening as he met my gaze head on. “And she challenged them and their hunt. And they work for Magdalena, see, and Magdalena and Elle have a long history…” He trailed off and shook his head. “Elle’s been exiled from Boston for the past fifty years because of that history.”
“Exiled,” I repeated in a deadpan tone as we continued to walk down the corridor. “Exiled from Boston.” I love my city, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not a magical kingdom or anything. “Who has the power to exile anyone from a major city?” I asked with brows raised.
“Well,” said Alec with a shrug. “Magdalena.”
“She’s a vampire?” I asked, my voice smaller.
He sighed. “Yeah. One of the most powerful vampires in North America. She’s been vying for control of Boston for a long time. But she hasn’t gotten it yet. Anyway, that’s all trade secrets that I can’t really be spilling to a humdrum like you. No offense. What you really need to be concerned about,” he continued, “is the fact that now that Magdalena knows that Elle has some slight interest in you…she’s going to use that to her advantage. The minute you step foot out of this house, you’re going to be hunted and killed.”
I stopped cold, the breath knocked out of me as if I’d been punched.
“But…but I’m not really. I mean…” I gestured aimlessly as anger began to build in me. “Won’t Magdalena forget that Elle marked me? I mean, it’s such a little thing... She can’t possibly remember and be pissed off about it forever, right? And…and—” I was spluttering, talking a mile a minute, adrenaline pumping through me. “This has nothing to do with me,” I told him plaintively as he gazed at me with a small grimace, his eyes sympathetic. “This has nothing to do with me,” I repeated, my voice very small.
“Yes, it has nothing to do with you,” he told me, voice soothing. “You were just caught in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said gently, reaching out and patting my shoulder twice. “But that doesn’t help the fact that it happened. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it can’t be helped. And anyway, on the bright side, you’d be dead right now if Elle happened along, so. That’s a positive thought, right?”
Hardly.
I followed after him, stunned into silence.
“Anyway,” he muttered, continuing down the corridor, his voice quieter now. “You can stay here until Elle figures out a solution to all of this. If she can figure one out,” he said, holding up a finger and shaking his head when I sighed with relief. “Probably there isn’t a solution. I don’t know, don’t get your hopes up. And it’s not so bad here, really. It’s a nice place. I mean, a bit musty since Elle’s been gone so long, but now that we’re back, we can do a really great spring cleaning, shine the place up a bit. It’ll be nice,” he said, glancing about at the corridor that, if you’d shown me a picture of it with its metal walls, cement floor and visible pipes in the ceiling coupled with the flickering florescent lights…I would have told you it was a still from a horror movie.
“So I’m just going to stay here forever?” I asked sarcastically.
“Hopefully not,” he frowned.
; But it did not, in fact, sound hopeful at all.
We walked along for several moments in silence as I tried to grapple with everything I’d just learned—including my new situation in life. It seemed impossible, like a dream. Like I’d wake up tomorrow morning and realize that I’d had a terrible, overly long dream involving vampires because I’d probably eaten an entire pint of ice cream in one sitting, and everyone knows you get nightmares if you eat an entire pint of ice cream in one sitting.
Right?
But, oh, God, it felt so real to me.
“So,” said Alec in a cajoling tone. He was trying to drag me into conversation, conversation that I really wanted no part of at the moment. But it wasn’t Alec’s fault that I’d been, apparently, in the worst place at the worst time.
“Are you…Elle’s brother?” I asked woodenly.
He laughed at that, a rich, baritone laugh that sounded surprised.
“No, no,” he said, shaking his head—but at least his voice was a bit warmer now. “I’m her friend,” he said, glancing sidelong at me. “We’ve known each other…a long time,” he amended finally. “I go where she goes, because Lord knows that Elle usually goes where the action is,” he said with a cocky grin.
“Right,” I replied, gritting my teeth together. “Where the action is.”
He cast a sidelong glance at me with a frown. “Look—”
“I just—I just want to get this straight,” I said then with a splutter and a shake of my head, holding up my fingers as I ticked them off. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I was going to be used as an evening snack for some vampires. But Elle saved me. And because she saved me and bit me, I’ve been marked by her. And because I’ve been marked by her, the very men she saved me from still want me dead, but now they want me dead because their boss doesn’t like Elle?”
“More or less,” said Alec, wincing. “Look, don’t shoot the messenger. I don’t like this anymore than you do. It makes me squeamish when we start using humans for our petty battles, but the fact is that it’s already happened. And now we just…work with what we’ve got, the best that we’re able.”
“But that’s not good enough for me,” I persisted. “You’re telling me I can never leave this house again!”
“Look,” said Alec, raising an eyebrow, “no one’s keeping you here. You can walk right out that door. I’m not stopping you. But someone else will when you step over that threshold, and it’s not going to be pretty.”
“I’m just…I’m just a normal woman pretty much,” I told him quietly. “I didn’t want…any of this. I didn’t ask for any of this.”
He sighed for a long moment, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, but whether you asked for it or not—you have it now.”
I followed him down the corridor, putting one foot in front of the other woodenly, not really looking where I was going. Not that it mattered much—there wasn’t anything in this long, seemingly unending hallway that I could have run or stumbled into.
My mind swirled with unhappy thoughts that kept coming back to: has this really happened to me? Am I absolutely certain it’s not some terrible dream?
“What’s your name?” asked Alec, then.
“Cassandra Griman,” I told him quietly. “My friends call me Casey.”
“Not Cassie?” He gave me a small smile.
“No,” I shook my head, surprised at the normal exchange of normal words and sentiments that I’d had in my normal life many, many times before this. It seemed so out of place in this cold, sterile environment. And in a conversation with a vampire. “Just Casey. It’s because of my foster sister,” I said then, which is how I always followed that statement up when a co-worker or other random person asked that question. “She was really little when we were both adopted, and she didn’t say ‘Cassie.’ She said ‘Casey.’ You know how kids can’t pronounce words correctly, and it just…stuck.”
“You were adopted?” he asked with mild interest.
“Yeah. My mother was deemed…unfit when I was eight. I was put into the foster system, and I was really lucky that I got adopted. Most kids my age just stay there.” I said it all in a rush.
Lucky. I was lucky then.
Not so lucky now.
Alec seemed to know what I was thinking for her flashed me another small, apologetic smile.
We walked for another moment in silence.
“Well, here we are,” said Alec then, gesturing at a side door in the corridor. It looked like all of the other nondescript metal doors we’d passed. I have no idea how he told any of them apart. There were no discerning features about this length of corridor, but somehow, he’d decided to stop at this door.
“You open them like this,” he said, pressing what, at first, had looked like the same metal the rest of the door was made out of, but was, in fact, a beveled square of metal about four inches by four inches on the far left of the door—kind of like an odd doorknob. “See?” He stepped aside and showed me how he was pressing into it and twisting. “You press here, turn it a little, and then you push it back—it slides.”
“Yeah,” I told him, but I wasn’t looking at the door anymore. I was looking at what the door had opened up into.
Unlike the nondescript corridor we’d seemingly walked in for miles of unending, monotonous gray, this room has personality. It was a big, sprawling room, full of antique furniture, pushed up against the walls, and other pieces of furniture covered in white sheets. Again, the antiques looked out of place with the metal walls and cement floor. There was a big, wooden four-poster bed along one wall with an actual little wooden ladder to get up into it.
Alec entered the room and began to turn on the old, dusty lamps, tugging sheets off of big, plush chairs and a loveseat. He drew his finger over the top of the little ornate table next to the loveseat and stared down at the finger full of dust with a sigh. “Well…I thought this room would be a bit cleaner, but I guess not. I’m sorry it’s a little dusty. We can get that sorted tomorrow, but will this do for the night?”
I glanced around, rubbing at my cold arms with equally cold hands.
Yes. It’d have to do.
“Thanks, Alec,” I told him with a half-smile. “Um…” I bit my lip, glancing around. “A…bathroom?”
“That door there,” he said, jerking his thumb back over his shoulder and giving me an encouraging grin.
“And…” I breathed out. “Am I safe here?”
He paused at that. And he actually considered the question as he stuck his hands into his skinny jeans pockets again, rocking back on the heels of his shoes with a shrug and a grimace.
“As safe as you’d be anywhere,” he said carefully after a long moment.
Great.
“Thank you,” I told him quietly. He gave a quick, curt nod, and then he was back through the door, sliding it shut silently behind him.
I crossed the room and turned on the overhead light in the bathroom. The bathroom was back to being an industrial affair, with the type of toilet, shower and sink that you might see in a prison. But it got the job done, I supposed. I went and stood in front of the sink, leaning forward at the waist and gazing into the mirror, staring at myself with wide eyes under the fluorescent bathroom lights.
The wounds in my neck were the same—wet blood pooling at the edges of my skin, but not falling. I sighed and reached up, but my hand drifted past the wounds to rest against my face. I brushed my fingertips over my lips.
It hadn’t seemed casual, what Elle and I had just done. But maybe it was. “Her girls” Alec had said, like she had a different woman every day of the week. And she probably did. She was a vampire for Christ’s sake. Weren’t they universally known for being walking sex magnets? I sighed, biting and my lip and flicking off the light overhead. I massaged my temples as I walked slowly over to the four-poster bed. I climbed up the two-rung wooden ladder, and I sat down gingerly on the overly soft comforter, glancing around at my surroundings, my eyes not really seeing anything but a prison.
After a long moment, I laid down, resting my head on the pillows, lying on top of the comforter. I stared up at the exposed ductwork and pipes in the ceiling, trying to keep my breathing steady. I tried not to think about the fact that I couldn’t leave this house. I tried, desperately, not to feel trapped.
And over it all, the thought that pounded through my head and heart echoed back to me:
This was my life now.
It didn’t seem real.
Chapter 6: Lovely Bait
I didn’t know anything about vampires. I mean, I’d seen some of the Dracula movies, like the super campy old black and white ones and the more recent sexed-up ones that Hollywood had poured a ton of money into and everyone flocked to the theaters to see, and I’d also seen the super popular teenage vampire movies, too, because Josie had wanted to go see them. I knew the popular culture stuff about vampires, like the fact that garlic was a big no-no to them, that sunshine was lethal and that they usually slept in coffins.
I knew vampires were sexy and magnetic and incredibly attractive and that they wanted to drink your blood.
I stared up at the ceiling of the room, and I realized that what I probably thought I knew about them was probably not true. Obviously, the blood drinking thing was legit. That’s what the men wanted to do to me after all, and I suppose that Elle had gotten a taste of my blood considering the open wounds in my neck, probably made from her teeth. But were any of the other pop culture myths true? After all, Elle had been out at that art gallery during the daylight, hadn’t she? Obviously the sunshine hadn’t bothered her all that much, and she certainly hadn’t spontaneously combusted. And I highly, highly doubted that she slept in a coffin.
I also was considering the fact that if Elle was a vampire and those men had been vampires and this Magdalena who had a rivalry with Elle was a vampire…the there were probably a lot more vampires out there than I could even imagine. Maybe I’d already known vampires in my life. Maybe they were common, and we humans just didn’t know about that fact because they’d kept themselves so carefully hidden all these years.
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