Hunger Chronicles (Book 1): Life Bites (34 page)

And there is that cold icy tendril of fear again. I tamp it down. Can’t tell him about John. Raoul will kill him. If he hasn’t already. Oh God. Is John even alive? Has he been captured? Does he sit in the queen’s dungeon right now?

Don’t think like that, Eva. Bluff.
And hope. I clear my throat, trying to put the right amount of perplexity into my tone. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

He gives me an exasperated look over his shoulder. “The werewolf, Eva. The one I could smell on your clothing. The one whose trail paralleled yours before splitting off and heading back into the downtown.”

Clothing, trails. Either Raoul and the guards hadn’t bothered to try and track John down, or John had managed to slip past them. I work hard not to smile at this thought. Instead I shake my head.

When all else fails, plead the fifth, Eva girl.

Not that my dad ever encouraged me to lie. He’d only said that to me when I’d witnessed his accidental killing of mom’s prize rosebushes by weed-eater, and wanted me to back him up with silence. But I think he’ll understand if I use the strategy now.

Raoul’s jaw clenches, the veins in his temples plumping. “Fine, have it your way. But know this, Eva, if you won’t speak to me, you will speak to my mother.”

His mother. God no. The queen would as soon kill me as look at me. I try to read him to find out if he’s actually serious, but he seems to have reined in all his emotions again and I can’t get a bead.

He turns and starts for the door. I practically leap at him to get him to stop.

“You would give me up to her?” Even I can hear the edge of panic in my voice.

He stops, looking down at me, his crystalline eyes seeming to weep in his stoic face. “Only if you leave me no other choice.”

And with that he steps around me. A moment later the door opens and then closes again, the soft click as the lock is turned sounding to my ears like the death knell.

37.

Take me back to my prison or drive a stake through my heart. Either is preferable to what’s behind those gilded doors.

I walk between my four guards, my legs like anvils as I’m led to my fate. The bastard hadn’t even given me a chance to plead and beg for my life. Nope, it wasn’t even an hour later when the door opened again and a contingent of guards, sans Raoul, came in to take me before the queen.

Whether or not I am the unwilling member in the two-way bond seems to have no bearing on my disappointment in this fact. I honestly hadn’t thought he’d do it. Just goes to show how naive I still am.

Eternal love my ass.

I flinch as the two guards flanking the door step in and pull them open, making it possible for us to breeze right in. Drat. Even a moment of borrowed time is preferable to nothing. I need to come up with a plan. The long walk through the maze of halls to this inner room should have given me more than one chance, but so far the only one that’s made it past my chest-tightening sense of betrayal is: Die gracefully.

And quickly. Can’t forget that.

We enter the room, the flickering glow of hundreds of candles gracing their chandeliers the only light in the room. Too bad it’s not dim enough to hide the woman stalking down from the raised dais at the far end.

Only slightly taller than I, the queen glides across the room, her diaphanous gown—like something out of a Victorian whorehouse—billowing out behind her. That corset has to be uncomfortable, but knowing the queen’s sadistic nature, I’m not surprised to find a touch of masochism in there as well. Even knowing she will be my judge, jury, and executioner all rolled into one, I shiver. She is gorgeous. Intoxicatingly so.

Until she opens her mouth and spoils it with a voice that is sickly-false in its sweetness.

“Eva, my dear. We are surprised to find you back. We thought, perhaps, when you ran, that would be the last we’d see of you.”

I spread my mouth in a fake grin. “Something
we
were both hoping for, I’m sure.”

She tsks, but the look she levels on me lets me know I’m going to pay for that borderline disrespect. She does, however, drop the royal we, her heels clicking as she circles around me like some sort of buzzard. “So what are you doing back, then? And don’t bother to lie. Raoul might be delusional in his belief that you were drawn here because of him, but I am not so easily fooled.”

I shudder. The queen is even more dangerous than Raoul. The blood Raoul and I share strings us together with a tenuous emotional bond, a bond I don’t have with the queen, but the queen has something better: She has an uncanny ability to read minds. It’s just one of the skills that elevated her to the throne and keeps her there.

I know I need to erase all thoughts from my mind, but that’s hard when her question immediately draws up images of my father, his workshop, and the notebook that could save humanity. So, instead of forcing the thoughts out—an impossible task for sure—I dredge up every memory I have of home, my parents, the world as I once knew it.

There, let her try to get anything out of that.

“Hmm.” She taps her lips with her long painted nails. “You always knew how to annoy me. Strong mind. Not unbreakable, but certainly an annoyance. I wonder, will your were boyfriend be so tricky to break?”

Ice settles in my veins.
No. Not John.

“Ah. John, is it?”

I curse myself for letting that bit of information out and clamp down further on my thoughts. The African Daisies around our school, the musky smell of the Ponderosa pine, mom’s apple pie. These are the things I think about.

It has the effect I expect. The queen’s lips thin, her black eyes flashing crimson. And then I’m flying across the room, hitting the wall with the force of a freight train.

Plaster smashes, I slide to the floor in a cloud of dust, curling in on myself. Even with vampire physiology, I can feel my insides bleeding. Can I bleed out that way before my body heals itself?

“Eva, darling.” The queen’s dainty heels click on the floor as she draws near. “Do we really have to do this? Do you really want to do this to Raoul?”

As if I give a flying monkey about Raoul. He’s the reason I’m here.

I drag myself onto my hands and knees, panting through the pain in my abdomen. Yup. Something in there is definitely mush, but it is also mending. Too bad.

“Oh, my my. My baby boy is going to be so disappointed to hear that.”

Her words are said with a kind of Disney Princess surprise, but I hear the edge in them. I raise my head in time to see her leather boot strike out, which means it hits me squarely in the chin. There is a sickening crack, agony explodes along my jaw and into my ears. Broken. Quickly is looking even less and less achievable with each passing moment. Damn, I hate long drawn out endings.

“Have you reconsidered your position yet, Eva? Are you ready to tell me what you were doing back here in Arizona?”

I’m defiant enough to shake my head. Stupid that. Her eyes flash fire. I fly across the room again, this time smashing into a heavy marble table. My ribs scream out in protest as I slip back down to the floor. I’m so wrapped in my agony, I don’t notice she’s beside me once more until the heel of her boot digs into my broken jaw.

I latch onto the pain, using it to keep my mind clean.

“The were, Eva. Where is the were? What were you two doing here?”

Nope. Not going to tell her that. Not even if hell freezes over.

I punctuate the thought with an image of her there, frozen in a scream of agony, her skin crisped, her eye sockets empty after having spent an eternity in hell’s fires before being flash frozen in eternal damnation.

She screeches, as she yanks her foot back and kicks. The pointed toe smashes into my stomach. I spin, my hip whacking into the carved leg of the table. How many bones does the body have?

Probably shouldn’t have thought that because that’s when the queen really gets down to business.

Pain. I float in it, embracing every sharp scream of agony, every bone-jarring ache. The beating goes on and on. Each burst of pain an exclamation point of the queen’s anger when I refuse to answer. Time passes. Minutes?Hours? If I were anything but a vampire, I’d have been dead long ago.

I tell myself this is good. If the queen is focused on me, then she won’t be trying to find a random were. But as the pain shoots up my broken spine, I can’t help but think nothing can be good about this.

And then suddenly it stops. I lay. Panting.

Can’t take this. Too much.

Yes you can, Eva girl. You’re a Harper. Harpers don’t give up and they don’t give in.

Dad. His face, stern and full of an underlying prideful love drifts up from my memories. I cling to it, fighting back the pain.

“One last time, Eva. What were you doing in Flagstaff? Where is your friend?” The queen’s voice comes, cloying. Easy.

Through the muddled cloud of pain, I carefully construct an image of the back of my hand, middle finger raised.

I think I hear a hiss. Then…

She bends down, crouching over me. “You do know what I’ve always wanted from you, don’t you, my dear?”

I lick my lips. No saliva, just blood. Besides, I doubt I can get my jaw to work properly. So I nod my head instead. Or at least I think I do, hard to tell when the room is spinning.

A knife digs deep into my flesh, plunging between two of my lower left ribs. I scream, wishing the blade were six inches higher. End it now, oh God, end it now.

“Say it, tell me what I want.”

I bite my lip, swallowing down my own blood. It wets my throat enough that I’m able to croak out the words past my smashed jaw. If I can scream I can do this. “Die…’ant me to…die.”

“Very good.” She twists the knife, agony lancing up and outward along my ribs. “Now say please.”

Yes, please. Please just do it.
I yell this in my head, the only way I can get out the words, I’m too busy screaming.

All of a sudden the pain stops. A body embracing numbness washing over me as she pulls out the knife.

“I forgive thee.” I sense that these are ritual words. And then she lowers her head, her lips puckered as if for a kiss. Like butterfly wings, they brush my throat, her tongue dipping out to taste the point of my pulse. And then her lips curl back, two sharp pricks slicing into the tender skin there.

Like before… just like before. I was helpless then too.

Darkness clouds my vision. Or maybe I just close my eyes. Don’t know, don’t care. My world is focused around the stinging punctures at the base of my throat. The bite shouldn’t hurt. Like a well-played seduction, it should dull the senses, lull the prey into nonresistance. The only thing left is the mind. The horror of what is happening. It’s true I can’t move, but the rest? Pain. I burn as if in the fires of hell.

Poisonous. I remember that now. Forget sadistic, forget powerful, this is what truly marks her as queen.

The kiss of death, indeed.

38.

The queen’s poison runs through my veins like a living fire, destroying my organs one by one. I keep waiting for death. My real death. It procrastinates.

Through the fog of pain I become aware of something external occurring. Something beyond my pending death. Something that involves lots of yelling and the ring of blade on blade. I slip into the void before I can determine what it is. I stay there for a long time, surfacing occasionally when something significant sparks a change in my decent into oblivion. I don’t like these brief ascents. They bring with them the pain, the agony. The queen’s venom still attacks me. I finally realize what these moments of painful life are: Transfusions, one after the other. Beyond the need to stop the agonizing fires, I don’t even care.

At some point I pass the tipping point, coming down on the other side. I’m going to live.

That’s when I first realize
he
is there. He’s lying behind me on the bed, his arms wrapped gently around my torso. His endless litany of endearments and promises that I’ll be all right is punctuated with the ever violent refrain of “I’m going to kill her.”

I have the urge to soothe him, if nothing else to stop the tidal wave of emotions that ram into my weakened buffers. Love, anger, hate. Love, worry, anger. Around and around it goes.

I shift, trying to get away, but his arms tighten around me. I gasp at the sting of pain this causes.

“You’re awake.” The arms immediately release me. The bed shifts and a second later Raoul is kneeling on the floor before me. He reaches out, his fingers shaking as he touches my cheek. At least I think it’s my cheek. I can’t tell, everything is numb now. No. Not really numb, but a kind of allover sense of overstimulation that comes from all the body’s nerves screaming at once. It’s the kind of pain that could drive a person crazy. The kind that could cause them to jump off bridges or down bottles of pills.

“Is that an option?”

Raoul’s lids draw down over his eyes in confusion.

I lick my lips. My lips don’t register this, but my tongue has no problem sensing the cracked and dried out protrusions of flesh. I shudder at the thought of how I look.

“Why aren’t I dead?” My voice cracks over the word dead, but Raoul understands, his eyes darkening with anger before, a moment later, a wave of remorse tries to consume me.

“I’m sorry, Eva. I should never have left you alone. I went out to think, to clear my mind and when I came back…” he shakes his head.

I get the gist. Raoul came back just in time to save me. I think I might be grateful if it actually mattered. But it doesn’t. I am back in my luxurious prison. Still trapped.

There is a knock on the door. Raoul curses but stands, gliding across the room.

He must have worked hard to swagger while we dated.

He cracks it open, briefly conversing in whispers to the guard on the outside. I strain to pick up what I can. The queen. Audience. Raoul says no. The guard tries to argue, his face pale, but Raoul shakes his head and firmly closes the door. I’d think he has a death wish, but it
is
his mother. No, sadistic mommy’s wrath will probably fall on me instead.