Thrall (A Vampire Romance) (8 page)

“Is the other one still in the bedroom?”

Victoria shrugged. “Penning up your cattle is not my concern, Vincent. The union is demanding a new contract-“

“Deal with it,” Vincent snarled, and shoved me through the room.

“Did you have to bring it up here all wet?”

“I’ll clean her,” Vincent sighed, waving his hand. “We have staff to clean the floors.”

“I abhor filth,” said Victoria.

She ignored me as Vincent dragged me to the other side of the room and down a short hallway. The windows on the far side went from floor to ceiling, and normally my jaw would have dropped from the view of the Strip. We must have been in a casino-hotel, and on the top floor. The lights were like a galaxy of their own beneath the dead black sky, the real stars eaten away by the light from below.

Vincent shoved me through a door and closed it behind him. I found myself in a richly appointed bedroom, with no windows. Someone was lying on the bed, sleeping, her chest rising and falling slowly.

He pushed me forward and I recognized her as I saw her face.

Andi.

“What is she doing here?” I said. “You’ve got me. Let her go.”

Vincent ran his hand up the back of my head.

“Do not presume to order me, thrall. I will again indulge you, but only because this is your first feeding.”

“What?”

Oh.

Oh no.

Oh, God,
no.

Andi stirred. She sat up, clutching her head. She was still dressed in her outfit from earlier, for the show. She blinked a few times and looked at me.

“Chris? What’s the matter with you? You’re all pale. Who’s that guy? Where are we? What… what’s happening?”

Vincent looked at me. “Kill her and drink her blood.”

He locked the door behind him.

“No,” I said, backing away.

I felt heat behind me. There was a fireplace in here, too.

“I’ll give you one chance,” said Vincent. “Do as you are commanded or you will learn who is master.”

I didn’t just say no. I threw myself at him, screaming. I moved so fast I could barely understand it. I went for his throat with both hands, and he caught my wrist with casual ease, his face flickering between contempt and annoyance. Andi came at him from the side, swinging a lamp. It cracked apart against the side of his head and he gave her a flick of his fist, hitting her right in her belly. She flew backwards and her head thumped against the nightstand by the bed.

“I liked that lamp,” Vincent sighed.

He picked me up off the floor by the neck and studied me for a moment with his lifeless rust-colored eyes.

Then he threw me in the fire.

My head hit the mantle but the pain came from the flames. When the fire touched me, I burst into flames with a hollow
whump
. The heat licked over my body in raw, scorching agony. I screamed, Andi screamed, and I felt ash in my mouth. I pushed away from the fireplace and rolled on the floor, batting out the flames, but the damage was done. I looked up at the ceiling and saw what happened to me, but something else was happening, too.

My fingers were longer. My hair was brittle, like straw, falling out in scorched handfuls onto the floor. When I breathed it burned, like sucking fire into my lungs, and a throbbing, razor sharp agony sliced through my veins at a million miles an hour, like my blood turned to razor blades. I was aware of what was happening, but it was like I was standing behind myself, watching. I wasn’t sure if it was the mirror or if I could really see myself from outside, but my charred, smoking body heaved towards Andi.

She shrieked in terror and kicked at me but her feeble blows did nothing. I wrenched her away from the bed and the nightstand and licked the blood off her forehead, where her skin split from hitting the edge, and when my tongue touched it, it was like dunking my body in ice water. There was a feeling to it, an immediacy that I’d never experienced before. Andi screamed and screamed and beat at me with her fists.

“Chris, stop!
Stop it! Christine!”

Even though she was taller and outweighed me I pinned her to the floor, ignoring her attempts to push me away as I grasped her jaw in my hand and pushed her head back, and plunged towards her neck.

“God, please don’t! I’m sorry!”

She…
she
apologized to
me.

“Help! Help me!
Daddy!
”

Her words turned into choked gurgles as my teeth closed on her skin.

I tried to stop, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t in charge anymore. All I could do was make my jaws tremble as I felt my teeth digging in, the pressure welling until I took a
bite
out of her throat and then the blood came, gushing hot into my mouth, and I gulped it down but there was too much. A red stain spread across the white carpet as I gnawed on her throat and gulped down the gouts of blood until she went still beneath me.

When I pulled back, I was in control again, and when I fully saw what I had done I screamed and screamed until it hurt, until I was rattling the walls, and threw myself away from her.

This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. It was a nightmare. I was still on the plane. I worked myself up about how horrible the trip was going to be and now I was having a bad dream on the airplane and any minute Andi would shake me awake and tell me we were landing and I would make
sure
it wasn’t real. I’d find something for us to do, keep us together until we could go home and be safe and I could put this horrible dream in the past and be safe with… with
him.

For a moment I could feel him, but I didn’t know his name.

Andi lay on the floor, dead, her eyes locked on nothing. She didn’t look scared, she looked deeply confused, confronted with something she did not understand. I looked away from the ruin of her throat.

Then Vincent grabbed the back of my head and turned me to look.

“Eyes open, or I’ll peel your eyelids off. They grow back.”

I looked.

“That is what you are now.”

He pulled me up onto my feet and pushed me into a bathroom as big as a small apartment, and there he tore off what was left of my bloodstained, ripped, scorched clothes and shoved me under the spray. The water was steaming, scalding, but it was just water. All feeling on my skin was dying. The whole world felt like paper.

I killed my best friend. I worse than killed her.

Chapter Seven

“I tried to stop,” I burst out, sobbing. “I tried and I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t stop. I tried so hard,” I plunge my face into my hands. “You son of a bitch, why did you make me remember that?”

“Christine,” he says, rising.

“Get away from me
,” I hiss, crawling to the other side of the bed.

I grab something, a vase, and hurl it at him. He plucks it from the air and drops it on the bed where it lands with a soft thump as he comes around the other side.

“Christine, I can’t let you hurt yourself.”

“I can’t do this anymore,” I wail. “Just put me out in the sun or drive a stake through my heart. I can’t. I
can’t
.”

“Andi wouldn’t want you to-“

I grit my teeth and snarl at him. “How would you know? You didn’t know her.”

He stops, and his hands fall to his sides. The look of utter despair clouding his features shocks me into stillness. He puts his hands on my shoulders, and his touch is soft and warm. There’s something in me and my head swims. I can feel it moving around, like there’s something soft and weak crawling in my chest, but the other feeling is there too.

It’s like when Vincent bit me, that scratchy, insect-ish feeling that moved down my throat now crawling around in my chest, scratching at soft places with hard sharp limbs like blades. My legs begin to tremble.

He looks at his watch.

“Come with me.”

He takes my arm and pulls me into the bathroom, and wipes my cheeks clean. I didn’t even feel the blood leaking from my eyes. There’s a cold pit in my belly, the thirst taking shape, but all I can see is him. He’s so alive. He’s pale but there’s still blood under his skin, he has stubble, I can feel his breath on my cheek as he cleans around my eyes until I pressed them shut and let him wipe away the blood before it dries.

“Put on some clothes. Don’t think about anything, just get dressed for me. Then, step out into the hall.”

“The hall?”

I think about the collar squeezing my neck.

“You can pass the door.”

I quickly change out of my sleeping clothes, into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and those sneakers. My fingers tremble when I touch the doorknob. I can feel the collar move, like it’s
thinking
, but nothing happens. I step out the door and he’s waiting, standing in the hall wearing a jacket and a wool hat, his dirty blond hair tucked up under it and poking out around the fringes. He offers me a hand.

After a moment’s hesitation, I take it.

“Where are we going?”

“Outside for a walk. Here.”

He hands me a blood pack. I want to throw it away, feeling the cold softness of it in my hands, but I rip the cap off and drink it anyway.

“Don’t watch me.”

“Okay.”

He turns away until I’ve drained it and takes it, and leads me down the hall. He tosses the empty bag into a garbage can at the top of the stairs and leads me down a grand staircase into a huge formal parlor. This a big house. Not rich-big, but it was built by somebody with some money.

I look around and feel a stir, like echoes of a conversation I can’t quite hear. There’s a grand piano, a wall of pictures, and antique furniture. I run my hands over the wood on the back of a chaise lounge. My fingers naturally find a worn place, like I’d done this before.

“Come on.”

He tugs my hand and opens the front door. The moonlight spills through and I look up at the sky and stop.

There’s so many
stars
. We must be out in the country. Light spills across the whole sky in a stunning profusion that I can barely believe, the only competition the light of the moon itself. All around it’s dark. The house is surrounded by woods. As my eyes adjust the world comes alive in silver hues. I haven’t been out in the real dark for a long time. In cities, the only difference between the night and day is the color of the sky and the depth of shadows in alleys.

Another tug and I start walking. My hand swings, holding his. It feels so natural, his skin is so soft. It must be cold. There’s color in his cheeks and a puff of mist in front of his nose every time he breathes.

Not mine, though.

I don’t breathe. I’m a corpse.

As I walk I realize I’m not paying attention to the winding path of worn stones that leads away from the house towards the woods. It’s like my legs know the way. It must be winter, now. There’s a dusting of snow here and there. I feel strange as I walk, something moving and swirling in my stomach. There’s something about the blood I swallowed. He’s still holding my hand. He stops and looks down at me and I look back up at him.

He smoothes my hair over my shoulder and I freeze. The moon is at his back, and the stars.

He burned me. He put this
thing
on my neck, but he looks so kind.

“Are you alright?”

I shake my head. “No. Where does the blood come from?”

“What blood?”

I scowl at him. Something in my expression amuses him. He cracks a smile, just a little.

“It’s just blood. Nobody died to give it to me.”

He’s lying to me. I know he is, but when I look in his eyes I get nothing, just a kind of buzz. He’s keeping me out.

We keep walking. Into the woods. I’m not afraid. He isn’t either. I can see it in the way he walks.

“What happened to your friend was not your fault.”

I stop and pull my hand out of his. I think about running and the collar squeezes my neck. I push that thought out of my head.

“You weren’t there,” I say, softly, staring down at the frozen leaves coating the stones. “I saw her face as I was killing her. Like she wanted to know why I was doing this to her.”

He puts his arm around my shoulders. I just stand there.

“I’m sure she was confused, and very scared, but there was love between you. Monsters like Vincent hate love. It frightens and confuses them.”

“Why?”

“Love is a kind of magic,” he says, pulling his arm from my shoulder as he looks me in the eye. “Some say the most powerful kind. It may seem like hate and fear rule the world, but it was love that made it, love that keeps it going around.”

“All you need is love,” I say, and laugh softly to myself.

There it is again. Echoes of something just out of my hearing.

“I didn’t get to ask my question,” I say. “I told you about my first kill. I get to ask something now.”

“Go on.”

I take a deep but unnecessary breath. Old habits die hard.

“What happened to Andi after she died?”

“You’re asking me if there’s an afterlife.”

“My mother said…” I trail off, freezing in place, eyes wide and fixed on nothing.

My mother said all good girls go to heaven.

There it is. I can feel her, but I can’t see her. I know there was a soft touch once, a pair of strong gentle arms that wrapped around me when I was scared or sad, hands that fixed my lunch and bandaged my scraps and brushed my hair, but the knowledge is empty and hollow, like the papery touch of an old wasps’s nest. There’s nothing inside it. No face, no name. No sound of her voice or color of her eyes or hair.

I had a mother, once. Most people do. That’s all I’ve got.

“Christine?”

“It’s nothing. Answer my question.”

“The afterlife.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve never been there.”

“If there are vampires,” I say, walking to take my mind off that hollow feeling, “what about other things? Ghosts? If there’s ghosts there must be an afterlife, right?”

“There is something in us that is more than our flesh,” he says. “We’re more than just our bodies. Where we go after that, I don’t know. I hope it’s someplace good.”

“It’s not,” I say. “It’s like when I’m sleeping. There’s just nothing. Or worse. I don’t even know if I want there to be something after. I can’t think of anything worse than seeing her again, after… after what I did.”