by Mandy Rosko
The stranger muttered to himself about what a pain it was to be constantly doing this, as though Seth weren’t right next to him. A chill settled into his guts at Tall and Dark’s words. How the hell long had he been here? He’d obviously pulled himself out of bed before and couldn’t remember it.
Maybe that was why this guy was allowing himself to get so close. He’d done this so many times before, this was nothing different. The thought made Seth’s guts churn.
Once back to sitting on the bed, the stranger with the deep brown hair knelt at his feet and grabbed him by the ankles. It was in doing that, that Seth noticed the bandage on the palm and wrist. Now he knew who his feeder was. By the scent of him, he wasn’t a vampire.
Didn’t mean he wasn’t someone else’s guard, though.
The guy was big. Not alpha werewolf big, but well muscled and thick enough in the shoulders to give off a sense of superiority. His chest was the perfect size, not too huge and far from small, before it dipped into a flat stomach. This guy did gym time. His body was tall, lean, and hard. Despite this, his touch was gentle, mindful of Seth’s healing knee as he positioned Seth’s legs onto the bed so that he was lying down above the rumpled covers.
Then he got up in Seth’s face, allowing him a close view of the seriousness in the other man’s eyes. “Stay here.”
He said it as though he were commanding a four year old.
Seth didn’t nod or acknowledge that he’d even heard him. The dark-haired stranger shook his head, curling his lip and half rolling his eyes, and left the room. He locked the door behind him, and Seth could hear the pounding of his heavy, booted feet as he stomped up the stairs. He listened to the creak in the floorboards above him as his feeder moved around, doing God only knew what.
There was a murmur of his voice, then another, softer, but still male. More footprints, and another voice, sharper and familiar.
How many people were in this house?
The heavy boot steps returned, the door unlocked, and the dark-haired man was back. There was a tray in his hands and one of those tiny folding bedside tables under his arm. A purple plastic cup sat on the tray, along with a plastic bowl of the same color. Seth could only imagine plastic cutlery would be used as well for whatever slop he’d be eating.
Fuck that.
“Where am I?”
Tall and Dark halted as he was setting up the little foldable table, and then he stared hard at him.
“You can talk.” It wasn’t a question, and that worried Seth.
“How long have I been here? Where am I?” he asked again, eyes darting to the high, tinted window. “Is this Wiktor Veturious’s property?”
He wasn’t about to beat around the bush on that last question. If he was in one of Wiktor’s houses, he wanted to know it now so he could get the fuck out.
Tall and Dark didn’t answer. His eyes flickered slightly at the mention of the name, as though about to widen before he caught himself, returned to neutral as he put the tray down, turned, and left the room. The sounds of the padlock being put back in place, followed by boot steps up the stairs, and then nothing.
Was he whispering to whoever else was up there about Seth’s condition? Didn’t matter. This was definitely Wiktor’s property.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Seth took one good look at the tray of food on the little wooden folding table. He reached out to pull it closer as it was still too far away. Water and what looked like a bowl of applesauce.
What the hell had these people been feeding him?
He took the cup and sniffed the water. It was clear as far as he could tell, with the purple plastic not helping at all. There was no scent or cloudy substance to indicate a drug, and he was so thirsty.
He took the risk and gulped down the water in one go. He wasn’t going to touch the applesauce. He took the bowl and threw it into the corner where it splattered nicely along the painted concrete walls and ugly carpet.
Ten minutes later, heavy boot steps returned, and the door opened.
Tall and Dark stepped inside the room, glanced briefly at the mess in the corner, and then approached the bed. With him standing and Seth lying down like he was on his sick bed, well, it gave the other guy a menacing and imposing aura, especially when he crossed those muscled arms across his chest.
His black T-shirt was way too tight, and maybe Tall and Dark thought it was just a little cold down here because Seth could make out the impressions of his nipples peaking under the material.
“Are you an employee of Wiktor Veturious’s house?” Tall and Dark demanded.
Okay. “I was.”
“Was?”
This guy was too professional to be just some random person. The clothes and attitude said as much. He was definitely a guard.
Considering Seth used to be one himself, he should’ve put it together sooner. Was he guarding the family upstairs? From Seth?
“I used to be. I ran away.”
A single dark brow lifted. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Is there a reason for this session?”
“My job is to determine if you’re a threat to my employers or not.”
“I’m not.”
“You were found half dead and fried beyond recognition in the river. Did the Veturious clan do that to you?”
Seth could only remember diving into the water, the exploding pain in his leg before his body twisted and head crashed into the rocks. This guy said he’d been found downriver. How far down?
There’s no way Jackson would’ve let him slip out of his grasp if he’d thought Seth was alive.
Better to give this guy some specifics if he wanted to get out of here, and that’s what he did, leaving out more of the unneeded details about Seth’s time as a feeder and Winchester’s pet.
“What’s your name?” Tall and Dark asked when he finished.
Seth didn’t answer. That was too specific.
“Is there anyone you need us to call?”
“No. When can I leave?”
“You’ve been mentally unstable for these last couple of days, and all but brain-dead before that. Believe me when I say that my employers aren’t happy with you here, especially now that they know you’re connected to Wiktor’s house.”
Mentally unstable. Brain-dead. That explained the applesauce.
For the first time, Seth was grateful to his vampire healing. A lifetime, or ten of them, spent as a vegetable would hardly have been better than his situation at Wiktor’s house. “They’re not in his good books either, I take it?”
The man’s hard lips became a thin line. “We haven’t been drugging your food. I’ll arrange for something else to be brought down. If you need to use a bathroom, I’ll escort you upstairs.”
Perfect.
“I need to feed.” There was no way this guy could misunderstand just which sort of feeding he was referring to, not with the way his eyes wandered down to the bandage wrapped around his wrist and palm.
That same hand clenched up. “Give me a minute.”
Before Seth could even offer up a protest, soldier boy turned tail and left the room again, that annoying click and metal scrape of the padlock getting put into place acting as the final barrier that would keep Seth a prisoner.
His body was still so weak, and his knee throbbed and burned like someone was making a fire inside the joint. He ached to shut his eyes and go back to sleep, but he forced the lids open and kept his mind alert, which was a small torture in of itself.
Not yet. He couldn’t sleep yet, not until he figured out who those people were upstairs, why they were hiding from Wiktor, and why his guard’s voice sounded so familiar.
Chapter Five
“You are certain of it?”
Ben nodded, and Silus sighed. That vampire downstairs officially didn’t know whose house he was in. A good thing since, according to Silus, he’d been a former guard in Wiktor’s house.
If that man took one look at Silus then he’d know what was
up, and he could potentially fuck up everything they had fought for last year. The guy wasn’t a serial killer like Ben had feared last week when he’d brought the man in. The truth of what he really was, however, was almost worse.
Times like these he wished he hadn’t given up his smoke habit back in college. It was one of the rules of Cyricus’s house. Cigarette smoke might’ve been sexy and mysterious and all that shit back in the twenties, but nowadays, according to him, it made the furniture smell, made guests who were non-smokers uncomfortable, and downright ruined the property value of his home. So he had to quit.
Never mind that the old fucker loved to smoke his cigars in his study, or the billiards room when he was meeting with other sun sprites or business men of high importance. For that, Ben loved it that Dacielle had kicked the old man out of the Billiards room and was redecorating the space into a girly boutique of some kind.
God, Ben was jonesing for a cigarette.
He forced calm into himself by taking a steady breath, and kept his voice low. He didn’t want that vampire downstairs hearing any of this. “We need to get rid of him. If he figures out who either of you are, he could get pissed and try something.”
The fact that Ben had only been smart enough to put together just who he’d found in the stream today, well, he felt like an idiot. Now the guy was awake and aware and would be harder to deal with, could cause problems just by knowing his rescuers were also involved in the Veturious clan.
For all that man downstairs knew, Silus had purposely left him out in the open for the other vampires to find, helpless after being transformed into a vampire.
When Silus’s parents had found out their son was in love with a sun sprite, they’d had him confined to his bed, and doctors were brought in to bleed him. Cleanse the sun sprite blood right out of him, or something like that. He’d nearly been killed by it, but the guard downstairs had offered to release him on the condition that Silus transform him into a vampire. Silus had done so and escaped.
Apparently, Wiktor didn’t take too kindly to that betrayal, especially after Silus faked his death in front of everyone like he did.
Silus had hidden the other man under his bed when he fled. Not the best place, to be sure, but he hadn’t left him out in the open to be found. Nope. That was Ben and Cedric.
They’d arrived later, right before the sun sprites attacked the manor, searching for Silus. Ben could remember slapping the guy’s cheeks in an attempt to wake him before they’d noticed the bite marks on him. In their hurry to get to Silus, they hadn’t thought to put him back in his little hiding place, and they were the ones to leave him.
Fuckin’ hell.
“He couldn’t go to our parents,” Cedric said. “Look what Wiktor did when he tried to escape.”
“He could go to your father,” Ben said. “Tell him you’re alive, fuck this whole thing up. The sun sprites weren’t the ones to torture him like the vampires did.”
For the first time, Silus, it seemed, would agree with him. “He would not have risked betraying my sire by fleeing had he not been placed under physical stress. Wiktor might even have blamed him for my death, seeing as he was the man who released me that day.”
“And we owe him for that. Ben and I pulled him out from under the bed and left him, right where someone could see him. If he was being tortured it was our fault.” Cedric crossed his arms, but not defensively. He seemed the most uncomfortable with all of this. “I think we should let him know who we are.”
“Cedric!” Silus snapped.
“Ceddy, I get that you feel guilty, but this guy only let Silus go because he promised to turn him into a vampire. He’s not some noble warrior that did you a favor. He wanted to be immortal.”
It was the main reason for Ben’s distrust of him, despite how that distrust conflicted with his inner instincts. Ben didn’t see this guy as being the sort who would focus his revenge on the wrong people, but as Cedric’s former bodyguard, he was trained to protect him, and he wasn’t about to set aside his feelings of duty over a gut instinct.
Ugh, gut instinct. Yeah, that’s where his instinct was coming from. His gut. More like his cock. He’d been able to admit to himself that the man downstairs was a little attractive once all the gore had either fallen or been washed away.
It was strange. Normally Ben went for the blond ones.
He purposely avoided looking at Cedric when that thought flittered through his brain.
Cedric turned his eyes to Silus. “Would it matter that he wanted to be a vampire?”
Silus clenched his jaw and threaded his long fingers through shoulder-length black hair.
All of this had been so much easier when Sampson, as his name apparently was according to Silus, had been in a coma, and later was slurping down his applesauce through a straw.
Ben wouldn’t wish those kinds of mental imprisonments on anyone, but God damn…if only that vampire healing hadn’t kicked in until later. Like after Ben figured out who he was and arranged for someone else to take care of him.
If only Silus wasn’t so weak that he couldn’t have gotten a better look at him that night they met. If only Ben and Cedric had paid more attention to the details of his face before they’d hurried off during the attack.
Too late.
Finally, Silus gave his answer, “He is to stay until he is well enough to travel. He has been here so long already…if my father’s werewolves are searching for him then they will not find him here if they already haven’t. Any possible scent he could have left behind is no doubt too old to track. Find out if he has family and escort him there. That will be the end of it.”
“He threw away his food and said he’s thirsty,” said Ben. “I can’t feed him my blood right now, I need to leave.”
Back to Dacielle, as a matter of fact, and he was low enough on blood as it was, considering the number of times he’d let Sampson drink from him. He needed his strength to be on the job.
After Cedric and Silus faked their deaths, in a room filled with both sun sprites and vampires, Ben had thrown down his bulletproof vest, quit his job, and stalked out of there with his head held high.
That hadn’t lasted. He could still remember the wince on Cedric’s face when he told the other man that he had to go back to work for Cyricus. With no references to give to any other employers, and his time in school being so long ago, it wasn’t long until his savings were running dangerously low. He’d had to give up and ask the miserable old bastard for his job back, guarding members of the family.
Oddly enough, the old man had been gracious about it, and had treated Ben well, and continued to be civil to him, even offering him a small raise in pay. Ben suspected it was because the man saw him as the last link he had to Cedric, the son he thought to be dead.
So Ben had been reassigned to Dacielle, whose mother took over the affairs of Cyricus’s house. It pissed off Cyricus to no end to no longer be the true owner of his ancestral home. The only reason he still lived there was because his wife and Dacielle’s mother were sisters, and one did not turn away one’s sister in polite society.
Cedric nodded. “I’ll bring him something to eat. He doesn’t know who I am on sight,” he added when Silus looked ready to protest.
Ben was hardly comfortable with Cedric going down there now that Sampson was awake, but what could he do? “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Don’t tell him who you are, at least until I get back, keep some distance between the both of you, and don’t be afraid to fry him if he tries attacking you.”
Sun sprites could release real UV light from their bodies. A pretty decent weapon when it came to vampires, though Ben hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
“Got it?” He asked.
“Yes, Father,” Cedric sneered.
Ben flipped him off before vanishing from their sight, teleporting from the large cottage where his best friend lived—leaving his Jeep behind since it would take too long to drive—to the huge mansion where his father still mourned him.
Ben would be taking Peter off his shift, and he didn’t look forward to it. Dacielle’s mother was bringing in new, wealthy suitors for her daughter to meet today, which basically meant that Ben would be spending the majority of his time standing in a corner. He’d be looking imposing and lifeless as the girl and her mother put on their makeup and tried on flowery dresses and mega, huge family jewels, before they talked weather with the boys over tea.
During all this time, Ben wouldn’t so much as be allowed to pull his phone out to check if Silus or Cedric sent him any messages. It was going to be a long night.
* * * *
“He’s got no strength. We’ll be fine.”
Cedric smiled that eager smile of his when he wanted something, and currently, Silus was being pulled by the hand toward their upstairs bedchamber.
“Two locked doors can hardly contain a vampire if he truly wished to escape.”
“He’s got no strength yet. He told me that.”
And the thought didn’t enter the idiot’s mind that Sampson could easily be telling an untruth. Silus would feel less concerned if he had guards posted, but such days when he had men to do his bidding was behind him.
Hell only knew how his former servant below would react once he discovered he was in his former master’s house.
Cedric had eventually ventured down to the cellar, food, a freshly killed rabbit to provide some blood, and several books to offer, whilst Silus had waited as patiently as his body would allow for his lover to return. He had paced in the kitchen where the final door to the basement was, worried until Cedric’s clomping feet had come back up.
Cedric returned after twenty minutes, having finished his task of changing bandages and offering the sustenance Sampson required.
He’d apparently deemed it appropriate to converse with their guest as well, which had caused the delay that made Silus’s heart beat that much faster.
The little shit hardly seemed concerned at all.
According to Cedric, Sampson did not know who Cedric was, and assumed he was another human, although he had been put out of sorts when he offered his true first name, Seth, and Cedric did not comply with the same.