Enslaved by the Others (6 page)

“Little liar,” he breathed, whispering in my ear as he tangled his fingers in my hair again and drew my head back. “Someone had to take his place, and Rhathos does not let his new pets stray. You were there. You know something. Stop trying my patience and tell me.”

Panting, I clutched at his shoulders, trying to push him away as he leaned in. My voice broke on a scream as his fangs scraped over my jugular. I was dimly aware of other voices rising in terror, people rushing around us to hide in the other rooms.

“Please, I’m not lying! I don’t know, I don’t, I swear!”

He growled—a soft, dangerous sound I might not have heard if I hadn’t been pressed so close against him. I was glad I didn’t know anything about Royce’s business, because I knew I wasn’t strong enough to withstand whatever Max might do to drag information out of me. He was quiet save for that low rumbling, and with his fingers tightening on my hair, I was afraid that he was contemplating either snapping my neck or draining me dry.

“He must have fortified his defenses since I attacked. Who were the replacements for the guards who were killed?”

I wracked my brains for something to tell Max. I didn’t want to betray Royce, but I didn’t want to die for him, either. When Max’s fangs pricked my throat, threatening to puncture my skin, I stammered out a response.

“M-m-mouse is s-s-still there, and Angus, Clarisse, Wesley, Reece, and Ken. I don’t know the other vampires by name—”

“How many are there? Describe them.”

I did. He made the occasional thoughtful sound when I described the handful of other vampires I had met in Royce’s apartment building, but he didn’t interrupt. When I was done, he said nothing for a time. His grip on me gradually loosened, but he didn’t let me go. I stayed still and quiet, hoping against hope that he was losing interest in interrogating me and would leave me alone.

Instead, he blindsided me with a question I wasn’t expecting.

“The werewolves he keeps—do they have any relation to the pack you are allied with? The Sunstrikers? Who fought with him when I was in New York?”

He interpreted my astonishment as deliberate hesitation. The silky way he spoke told me better than words that I was in deep shit.

“Choose your words wisely, pet. Lie to me one more time, and I will bind you to me again, offers for you be damned. Taste my blood again and you’ll tell me everything, and worship me while you do it.”

Oh, fuck that noise. I squirmed desperately. For a crazy second, I wished I had the hunter’s belt with its stakes and the enhancements it might give me, even if it meant risking losing my body in the process to the dead mage whose spirit fueled the magic.

Max shook me until I subsided, then removed his hand from my hair long enough to run one of his nails over his throat. While I was busy gaping at the self-inflicted wound, he shifted his hand back behind my head to pull me closer. The slice was sluggishly dripping what looked like tar with gold flakes in it. I shrieked my response, shoving my arm up under his jaw to keep from being forced to drink. Cold liquid slid along and clung to my skin like an oil slick when my bare arm touched his neck. Eww.

“I don’t know! I didn’t even know he was working with Weres! Please, I don’t know anything about it!”

He shook me again until I was grabbing at his shirt to stay steady. That conveniently made it easier for him to draw my head to his shoulder, that much closer to the seeping wound. He tilted his head, his lips brushing against my ear as he spoke in those low, silken tones, the promise of my death in his voice.

“Listen to me, little girl, and listen well. I have limited time, and even less patience. You will obey me, and you will tell me everything that you know. Binding you to me means that, after I wring information from you, you will become useless to me. If I cannot sell you to another and must resort to force to get what I ask, I will keep you by my side until time ends. I will make every day you live a waking nightmare. I will sire you if only to have the eternal pleasure of making you experience exquisite agony from dusk till dawn.”

Tears sprang into my eyes as he yanked my head back again. I wished I knew what to say to make him stop, to leave me alone, but no words could escape past my fear-closed throat.

“The only way you will ever be free of me is to submit, and once you do, you will be sold to someone who will most likely bind you to them for what remains of your pathetic, insignificant life. Choose your path, my pet—the hard road of servitude or eternal pain. Your choice.”

Though I wish I could say I was brave in the face of danger, this was like nothing I’d ever faced before. Royce wasn’t here to protect me. I was too far away for him to “feel” my location, so no one knew where I was. I didn’t have the chance of a fart in a windstorm of finding a way out of here. Max cutting himself removed any doubts of my coming out of this predicament intact. Before, I might have been able to pray and hope and lie to myself that everything would be okay. I’d outwit Max and escape somehow, or Royce would figure out where I was and save me. That I was so close to being turned into a mindless puppet again drove home just how unutterably screwed I was.

“Tick-tock, pet. Make your choice before I must choose for you.”

A life of indentured slavery with the unknown looked a shade better than an unlife devoted to torture. Heart heavy, I choked out a few words, my stomach twisted with sickness and a bitter taste on my tongue at my own weakness.

“No, the werewolves with him aren’t Sunstrikers. I don’t know of any alliance between the Sunstrikers and any vampires. The ones who helped in the battle against you were there because my ex-boyfriend was their leader, and he asked them to come. They were there for my sake, not for Royce.”

He stilled, and I discovered I had a whole new reason to be afraid. Something about what I’d said was important. Important enough that he flung me aside—with enough care that I landed on a nearby couch, thankfully not breaking anything in the process—and stormed off without another word.

What the hell had I just done?

Chapter Five

Max left me alone for a while. Long enough for the other donors or prisoners or whatever they were to creep back into the room, though they all avoided me like the plague. There were just shy of a dozen of them, all trapped in here with me.

Well, all of them except for the Other with glowing green eyes, so like the Los Angeles necromancer’s that the sudden reminder of that backstabbing little shit made me shiver.

She sat down next to me on the couch, that borderline-rotting peaches scent wafting from her like perfume. Her skin showed no sign of the damage that Max’s touch had done to her earlier, save for two tiny puncture wounds that were wreathed with red rings of what probably passed on her for infection. Her blood had dried into twin lines of pale golden film, staining the collar of her robe. She didn’t appear to care about that, or that the thin material was gaping open.

“One day,” she said, voice low and oddly calm, “I will kill him.”

“If you have any ideas how to go about it, I’m all ears.”

Her eyes glowed—literally glowed—when she turned to me, one hand curled around her collar. “If I had an answer to that, I would have done it by now.”

I scooted away, putting more space between us.

The glow dimmed, her features twisting into a rueful, far more human smile. “My apologies. The others have no heart to defend themselves. I thought you ...”

The way she trailed off made me worry about hearing her complete the thought. Whatever she might think, I wasn’t crazy enough to attack Max Carlyle without a hell of a weapon and an army at my back. Hell, if I had the option, I’d nuke him from orbit. Just to be sure.

“Your name is Shiarra?”

At my nod, she removed the hand from her collar to place over her heart. I couldn’t help but notice as she shifted her hand that her palm and fingers looked burned, like she’d left it on a hot stove. “I prefer the name Iana.”

I nodded again, not feeling particularly chatty.

“Is it true? Did he successfully depose Clyde Seabreeze?”

Frowning down at my fists clenched in my lap, I thought about not answering. It probably wasn’t in my best interests to alienate this woman, but this wasn’t a safe topic for casual conversation. Tone curt, I hoped she got the hint that I wasn’t going to give any details. “Yes, I guess he did. Fabian is running Los Angeles now.”

Her tone became urgent, demanding. “You must not tell him how to reach your wolves. He will use them to speed his plans to take New York away from Rhathos of Thessaly. Ian Taft barely clings to Boston. Too many bow to his whims, or turn a blind eye to his machinations. New York cannot fall. There will be no one left on this continent to keep him in check if that happens.”

“I’m doing my best,” I muttered, embarrassed for no reason I could readily put my finger on. “What do you mean, anyway? Who is Ian Taft?”

“The Master of Boston. The one who replaced Euphron of Sicyon as commander of the northern colonies after Rhathos drove him out. Euphron will take this land. All of it, if he’s not stopped. If I could only get rid of this”—she tugged at the collar again, grimacing—“I could lay waste to this gods’-forsaken place.”

“Don’t start that again,” one of the others hissed from across the room. “If he finds out, he’ll get mad and hurt the rest of us. You know he will.”

Iana quieted, hands clenching into fists. Though I wasn’t totally comfortable making direct contact, I liked the idea of her being able to do something to destroy this place. Whatever she was, it must have been something powerful if Max kept her in a collar that suppressed magic or shapeshifting. If he couldn’t face her as she was, maybe finding a way to free her could be my ticket out of this hellhole. Light, careful, I touched her shoulder, flinching a little from the intensity of the gaze she leveled on me.

“Why can’t you take it off ?”

Her expression turned sardonic. Heat bloomed in my cheeks. “Sorry, just asking. I’m not exactly familiar with mage-work like that.”

Even as I said it, I realized that wasn’t true. Maybe the collar she was wearing was something like the collars on Christoph and Ashi, Royce’s unwilling “guests” back in New York. They were werewolves, but because they had attacked him on his own turf, Royce had chosen to hire a mage to find a way to prevent them from using their supernatural strength or shapeshifting powers. Thanks to the collars they wore, they were, for all intents and purposes, human.

Better than being dead, I supposed, though Ashi might have disagreed with me.

“I require a mage to remove it,” Iana said. “Max will never do it of his own accord.”

Arnold might not like the idea, but if I could get this woman to help me escape I would do anything to help her. Even without knowing what kind of Other she was, whatever she was capable of without that collar, it couldn’t possibly be worse than what Max was doing to me and the rest of these people now. I was willing to bet that, like Royce, now that she had known captivity she was unlikely to hurt anyone without serious forethought once she was freed. She would probably need shelter. Friends. Someone who understood.

Even if Arnold wouldn’t help her, I wouldn’t stop until I found someone who could. She had to believe it—and so did I—if I was going to get her on my side.

“If we can get out of here, I know someone. He’d help you.”

She didn’t reply, her gaze going distant as she gave another tug at the metal band around her neck.

I tried again, a little more forceful this time. “I promise. If we can find a way out, I know a mage. He can probably do something about it for you.”

“What makes you think you can? I’ve been that monster’s prisoner since he was driven out of Boston during the police strike. A century, mortal. What makes you think you can find a way out of here when I am so much more than you and I’ve been trying for a hundred years?”

“Hey,” I said, tone sharp to cut through the despair she was radiating before it could infect me, too. “Don’t give up before we’ve even tried. You didn’t have me here before. We’ll find a way.”

The flat look she gave me wasn’t encouraging. I mustered up a glare, hiding creeping doubts behind a not-so-false anger that she wasn’t even willing to give me a chance.

“Are you going to help me or not? If you prefer to stay here, by all means—”

Her voice was soft, raw, but I still shut up when that haunted gaze met mine. “Please. I can’t remember what I looked like. I can’t be like this forever. Stuck in this body. This weak. I can’t.”

She probably didn’t realize her nails were digging into her skin, thin rivulets of golden liquid trickling down her forearms, accompanied by that sick-sweet smell of her strange blood. I grabbed her wrist, pulling until she noticed and stopped hurting herself. Glowing eyes narrowed and focused intently on me.

“Listen,” I said, “we’ll figure out a way out of this. Help me, and I’ll figure out a way.” Somehow.

Another voice from behind startled me. “You promise? You’ll get us out of here?”

If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought I was looking at Mouse’s twin. The mute vampiress had been turned by Max, and he’d been very intent on getting her back when he invaded Royce’s home, so maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised to see someone who looked so much like her. This girl was shakier, maybe, human and still talking, but otherwise a dead ringer.

Startled by that thought, I glanced around the room at the others peeking in warily from behind furniture or just beyond the doorways in the other rooms. Max was keeping a bunch of humans on hand for I-
really
-didn’t-want-to-think-about-what. At first I thought they were all women, but then I spotted a single man in the back, hollow-eyed, slender and swarthy. Even though his skin was naturally a darker hue, he looked too sallow to be healthy. As soon as he noticed I was looking at him, he averted his gaze.

Now that I was paying more attention, it looked like most of the women here—save for myself and Iana—were short, curvy brunettes. Most had pale skin and a fragility about them that made them all look like china dolls. They looked delicate and easily breakable, and, in some cases, already broken. The lost and hopeless or empty expressions were more prevalent than those with hope.