Chasing Shadows (A Shadow Chronicles Novel) (42 page)

“Still doesn’t explain how you plan to get away with it,” I taunted her. “Father and Lochlan will be missed at work. Mark and Juliette’s parents will miss them. I have
friends who will miss me—people
will
come looking for us, Evangeline. Eventually they will come here. Our trail will lead them straight to us.”

She tapped her chin with her nail again. “May I choke on the next pint of blood I drink for saying this, but you have a point,” Vangie said after a moment. “No doubt some of you will eventually be missed out there in the human world, and people will question your absence. Guess that means I will have to rethink my plan.”

She paced for a minute or two, her eyes roaming over her four captives as she walked back and forth, still tapping her finger against her chin as she appeared to think things over. Meanwhile, I was twisting my hands in their chains, hoping to find some sliver of room to slip them out. Whoever had wrapped the chains around me had done so quite well—they were tight against my wrists, and twisting them against the silver still chafed something awful. It looked like the only way I would have even a remote chance of getting out of them would be dislocating my thumbs.

A small price to pay if it meant freedom.

“I know what I will do!” Evangeline said suddenly, raising her finger in the air as she stopped to look at me.

“Oh, do tell,” I said mockingly. “Enquiring minds are desperate to know your dastardly plan.”

She giggled that irritatingly mad laugh of hers again. “Oh, I just bet you are, my dear sister! Well, since there’s nothing you can really do about it, I shall tell you: I’m going to leave Lochlan and Father down here to rot. I’m going to go upstairs and watch as Peter and Martin rape and beat that mongrel shapeshifter friend of yours over and over again, until such time as they are tired of her and decide to kill her, which I will then gladly help them do.”

Then her smile grew wider, and her expression, though I could not have imagined it possible, grew even more twisted and evil.

“But first, my dear Saphrona, I am going to make you watch as I molest your boyfriend and then kill him, which means that in the end…you will also be dead.”

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“After your boy-toy and his mutt sister are dead,” Evangeline went on, “Peter, Martin, and I will load up our cars—by the way, thank you, brother, for yours—with valuables from this house that we can sell, and we will be well on our way before any hope of rescue arrives.”

She stepped away from me to stand in front of Lochlan. “Of course, there really is a small chance that
someone
will come before too long,” she said somewhat absently as she regarded him. “Lochlan here, and our father, they have at least a small chance. I suppose I owe them that much, given that they did love me, too.”

“We did love you, Vangie. We still do,” Lochlan said. “Why don’t you let us go? End this now, before you do something you’ll regret.”

“Ah-ah, dear brother,” she said, wagging her finger at him. “Your Jedi mind trick won’t work on me. I regret nothing, you see. Sure, you and Father loved me, but it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough to overcome the foolishness of loving her! Of loving somebody who didn’t appreciate you or love you for
who
and what you are instead of what she thought you should be! I loved you unconditionally! I never judged you! But who did you favor? Who did you love no matter how many times she turned her back on you?”

Evangeline cast me a cold, hateful stare,
then
she suddenly brightened, stepping away from Lochlan to turn and walk across the room again. She stood in front of Mark and looked over her shoulder at me. “Get ready to watch as I have my fun with your beloved, dear sister.”

She turned back to Mark, positioning herself so that I could not see her face, but so that I would see everything she did to him. He stared straight at me, capturing my gaze with his own even as she reached for his pants and began to undo them.

Vangie noticed he wasn’t looking at her, and she slapped him. “Look at me! She doesn’t own you anymore, I do!”

At last Mark looked down at her, his expression disinterested as he said, “Nobody owns me, vampire, except for me.”

“Then if Saphrona doesn’t own you, she won’t mind sharing,” she returned, emphasizing her words with a caress of his manhood through his white cotton briefs.

“I thought you didn’t like sloppy seconds? I can assure you, she’s had every part of me—there’s nothing Saphrona hasn’t touched or tasted,” Mark said, taunting her.

“True, I don’t usually. But you are a prime specimen of manliness, and I simply must have a taste of all you have to offer.”

With that she grabbed hold of the waistband of his jeans and underwear and yanked them down, exposing his lower half.

“Evangeline, stop this!” Lochlan shouted.

“Since when aren’t you a voyeur, dear brother?” she said over her shoulder, her hand wrapping around Mark’s scrotum and massaging his testicles. He clenched his jaw together and kept his gaze on me.

“Take your hands off of him, Evangeline,” I growled. “Can’t you see? He doesn’t
want you. He’ll never want you. No other woman can make him hot like I can.”

She wrapped her other hand around his penis, turning her head to look at me as she stroked him with both hands. “Are you so certain about that? Or are you jealous that another woman is touching what once was yours? I bet you I can make him hard, sister. I bet you I can make him so hard he’ll be begging me to suck him or fuck him just so he can get off.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you Mark?” she said as she turned to face him again. “You want to get hard, I know you do. You want to see how jealous Saphrona gets watching another woman make you come, don’t you?”

Mark lowered his head toward hers, and I saw from her profile that Evangeline was smiling, thinking she’d won a victory over him.
Over me.

“The next time I get hard—the next time I come—it will be while I’m making love to your sister,” he said when his lips were but an inch above hers.

Angered, Evangeline squeezed his private parts. Mark’s jaw clenched, but he made no noise of protest. When she took notice that she still wasn’t getting what she wanted out of him, she screamed and began slapping him.

Mark still didn’t make one sound.

Evangeline growled and reached down to pull from her boot a knife that I hadn’t even noticed was sheathed there.

“Evangeline, no!”
I said. “Don’t do it. Don’t hurt him.”

She turned to me. “Or what?” she said with a sneer. “What are you going to do if I hurt him?”

She emphasized her words by jabbing the end of the knife into his leg. Blood welled and ran down it in a bright crimson
line,
and all three vampires—myself included—who were conscious inhaled deeply at the scent of his blood.

“Are you going to curse?” She jabbed the other leg. “Scream at me?” She jabbed his stomach. “Swear vengeance? Tell me I’ll never get away with it?”

With each sentence she jabbed the knife into him at a different place, deep enough that blood began to fall but not deep enough to do real harm. Mark now had five tiny fountains of blood pouring down his skin. Evangeline stuck out her tongue and wiped first one side,
then
the other, of the blade of her knife on it, then curled her tongue inside to swallow the blood. She shivered as if she’d just gotten a narcotic hit (not an erroneous analogy, given what
dhunphyr
blood did to a vampire), then she leaned into Mark and licked up the trail that led to just over his right nipple.

“He tastes
so
good,” she purred, then licked up the other four trails as the wounds closed.

I hissed loudly, once again straining against my bonds, desperate to be free of them.

As she stood from cleaning his legs she rubbed his crotch again. “Of course, those wounds are already healed, and now there is no more unless I cut you again,” she said. Then she looked over at me. “Do you think the stories are true, Saphrona? The ones that say
dhunphyr
are like vampires in that they can regenerate from mortal wounds?”

A knot of dread formed in my stomach.

“Vangie, don’t,” I pleaded. “Don’t do what you’re thinking of doing…please.”

“Please?” she said with a harsh laugh. “Now you ask a favor of me? Well, I’m so
very sorry to disappoint you, Saphrona, but I don’t do favors for traitorous bitches like you.”

Vangie looked at Lochlan. “What about you, dear brother? You’ve been rather quiet these last few minutes. Are you also going to ask a favor of me? Are you also going to beg for his life and the life of our sister? Because certainly even you know that if I kill one of them, the other is going to die as well. Or are the stories true? Will he reanimate in three days like Father will?”

Lochlan looked sideways at me for a moment before answering. “I don’t know if he will,” he said slowly. “There is still so much we don’t know about immortal humans. But no, I would rather not find out at the expense of his life or Saphrona’s. Please don’t do it, Evangeline.”

“How very…diplomatically spoken,” she said after a moment. “But not good enough.”

I watched with horror as she raised the knife and plunged it into Mark’s heart.

*****

A scream the likes of which I had never heard before erupted from me as the knife pierced his skin. Mark’s breath caught in his throat, and I watched helplessly as the light of life faded from his eyes. His head fell forward and his whole body sagged as he hung in the chains limply.

“
You’re dead!
” I screamed hoarsely. “
I swear by all that is holy, I am going to kill you!
”

Evangeline laughed. “I seriously doubt that, sister. Have a nice life—what’s left of it.”

Leaving the knife lodged in Mark’s ribcage, she began to sashay her way across the room. As she reached for the knob on the door Martin had passed through not half an hour before, I was finally able to pop my thumbs out of place, and I jerked my hands free of the chains that had trapped them. Ignoring the pain or the fact that my thumbs were all but useless being out of joint, I launched myself across the five or so feet that separated me from my sister.

Evangeline was startled, but only for a moment. As I slammed into her and we fell to the floor, she locked her hands around my throat and squeezed.

“I don’t know how you got free from those silver chains, but it won’t do you any good!” she hissed, rolling us so that she sat astride me.

As I was gasping for air, I took the opportunity to slam my hands into the concrete floor, painfully forcing my thumbs back into joint. I then reached up and tried to force her hands apart.

“I’ve had his blood more recently than you have, Saphrona,” Evangeline hissed in my face. “I’m stronger than you are now.”

“Maybe…you have,” I gasped, “but not nearly…as much as me!”

I lifted my leg and kneed her as hard as I could in the back. She ignored me and held on, but after I repeated the move several more times, she growled fiercely. Removing one of her hands from my throat she began punching me in the face, but it was enough to relieve some of the pressure on my windpipe and I sucked in a lungful
of air. I kept up with the knee kicks to her back and kept one hand clamped on the wrist of the hand that still held my throat, while I jammed the heel of my other into her elbow with all the force I could muster.

Evangeline screamed as her elbow shattered. She held the injured arm close and lifted the other to punch me again, but because she was no longer holding my upper half down I was able to throw her off of me. I rolled away from her, rubbing my sore throat for just a moment as I breathed more freely, then I launched myself at her again. Vangie evaded my advance, swinging her good arm at my back as I breezed by. The blow caught me off guard and I went sprawling.

She used the seconds it took me to get up to straighten her broken arm, but she did not have time to see if she could use it, as I was rushing at her again. She gave her mad laugh then, which irritated the hell out of me, and even though she slipped away from my arms, she did not escape the kick I threw out as I spun back to face her. My foot caught her in the side right above her kidney and she howled in pain, her knees beginning to buckle. I clapped my hands together and brought them down on her back, the blow pushing her flat to the floor.

“Get her, Saph!” Lochlan crowed, cheering me on. “Show the bitch who’s a better vampire!”

Evangeline rolled over and kicked up with her right leg. The blow glanced my hip but wasn’t hard enough to knock me off balance; I lifted my foot and stomped on her stomach. My opponent grunted, expelling her breath in a whoosh; as I brought my foot down a second time she grabbed it and yanked hard, and I fell again. I tried pulling my foot away, but even one-handed her grip was strong. I knew she was trying to break my ankle as I had her still-useless elbow, but I wasn’t going to let that happen. I rolled onto my left side since that was the foot she held, and I brought my right foot down on her forearm again and again until she let me go, rolling away from her to get back on my feet again.