Chapter Thirteen – Jack
Chapter Thirteen
Jack
As we both walked back from the desert to Sam’s convertible I crossed my arms to hold myself, realizing I felt a strange sensation.
I was…cold. I had been in the cold many times since Rosalie had changed me, but I’d never felt cold before.
The initial sharp pain of the splash of darkness now radiated out across my entire body, like I had frostbite from it.
Whatever it was that’d been trying to take Sam down was chilling.
And hungry.
Like recognized like.
I looked over at Sam, who appeared unwell. “Do you want me to,” I began, as we reached her car. She tossed me the keys without question and got into the back seat, laying down. I wasn’t sure where to take her to—I sure as hell wasn’t going to take her home. Driving back to Dark Ink seemed safest.
I would’ve raised the convertible’s roof, but that would’ve created more shadows inside the car, something I could now do without.
I took off, putting her car through its paces, racing across the night, occasionally looking back in the rear view mirror at her, realizing from the fluttering rise and fall of her chest I was watching her panic.
Whatever it was that’d almost claimed her—it had not been expected.
“Do you do that often?” I twisted to shout back so that she would hear.
“Which part?”
“Talking to dead people.”
She sat up at long last, lacing her hands through the front seat headrests. “Not many friends of mine die.”
“Lucky you, then,” I muttered. “Was that his ghost?” I asked more loudly.
“No. Just an echo of it. His actual soul is safe. Bryan led a clean life,” she said. The ‘unlike some people’ was implied.
“You knew he was dead. Why did you need to see it?”
“I had my reasons.”
“Were they worth risking your life for?”
I watched her jaw clench in the rearview. “That doesn’t usually happen.”
“And what if I hadn’t been there?”
She didn’t answer me.
I was only now starting to warm up. My brain kept trying to shove the memory of the event back to protect itself, or rush it forward to scare me straight with, over and over again.
It was like whatever it had been attacking her oscillated at the frequency of fear for me, and now I’d be vibrating with it all night.
“You mentioned something about a conduit.”
“I don’t need to explain myself to you,” she said.
“Hey, I don’t save people’s lives for the hell of it.
” She pulled back, but didn’t let go of the headrests.
“Is that—whatever that was—just hanging out on the other side,” of what, I had no idea, “or did it come find us? Is it going to be waiting there, if anyone goes back? Did you close however it got here off?”
I knew she heard me. I assumed she was thinking.
“Maybe I left myself open a moment too long because I wanted to see him,” she confessed.
“When you open a door, you can’t always be sure what’ll come through.
Plus—that was a dark place. Your people did bad things there.
” I watched her chew her lip in reflection.
“The ground was used to blood, and now it thirsts.”
And who would feed it now? The Sangre Rojo—if Maya sold it to them.
“Can that thing…be turned into a weapon?” I asked.
Her head snapped to look at me—and I realized that if she were truly telekinetic she wouldn’t need flying objects to kill me: she could probably twist my head and shoulders opposite directions.
“Asking for a friend,” I clarified.
“Nothing in your dossier says that you’d be interested in that. It’s one of the main reasons you’re alive now. Do not tempt fate, or me.”
“Fair enough.” A threat was already an answer. “You have a file on me?”
“Don’t let it go to your head. We have files on everyone.”
“Who, precisely, is this ‘we’?”
She looked at me as though I were insane. “The Faithful. The organization Bryan and I belong to. Rosalie never told you? Did she want you to die?”
“Probably,” I answered truthfully. “What does being Faithful even mean?”
“It means that we are unsullied by the outside world, while seeing to the heart of the true inner one. We are bound to serve and protect humanity.”
“Even though you’re not human?” I looked back at her in the rear view mirror, one eyebrow cocked. I’d seen her levitate things, summon a ghost, and she was fucking gorgeous, in a threatening ‘don’t touch me, ever’ kind of way. Like a tiger up close. Or a hawk.
If Sam wasn’t human…what was she?
“Do you always ask so many questions?” she complained.
“Only when I’m driving.”
Sam frowned, as I turned down the final road to Dark Ink. “I am human. I’m just pure. My pureness gives me powers.”
And now I couldn’t help it. I looked fully at her in the rearview, trusting my instincts to handle the road. If pureness meant what I thought it meant….
“Look at me any longer like that and I will separate your eyes from your head.”
“Yes ma’am,” I said, staring determinedly back at the road.
Soon I stood alone in Dark Ink’s parking lot.
From the speed with which she drove away, I had no doubt Sam would not be following me home tonight—although seeing as I had a repetitive schedule, figuring out where I lived probably wouldn’t be so hard.
One small point in the ‘keeping bloodslaves’ column—they could protect you from attack during the day.
Or, I could just live a clean-ish life, and not require protecting.
Good thing the Faithful apparently didn’t mind me having sex with a ton of people.
The streetlight made the nearby fence cast shadows, inside Dark Ink was black, and right now even I, a creature of the night, found darkness creepy.
Mattie would curse my name when he got here in the morning and I was gone, but hopefully he’d assume the best—that I’d worked hard and taken off early—because I felt I needed to make a pre-dawn stop at Vermillion.
I parked the Pack’s loaner truck in Vermillion’s parking lot.
It was decently full, which was bad because anything after four AM at a strip club was trouble.
If you had better places to be, you’d be there already, drinking hard or getting laid.
If you were still at the strip club at 4, chances were you wound up there with no place better to go, so drunk you were hoping beyond hope you’d score a girl—whereas the girls had already scored you.
From champagne room solos to fanciful make-out sessions with one another very nearby, dancers were better at creating the illusion of sex at a strip club than Penn and Teller were at anything they did on stage.
I went in, dodged the hostess, and made my way to the back, looking for Maya along the way.
A big man—not Tamo big, but respectable—tried to turn me around.
The temptation to show him who was boss loomed large, but now that I knew I had my own Faithful Santa judging whether I was naughty or nice, I just told him to tell Maya I was here with a whammy.
Five minutes later, Maya emerged. From her expression I was clearly unexpected and unwelcome, but she gestured me back nonetheless.
“It’s tomorrow night, at midnight, Jack,” she reminded me, heaving a sigh as she lead me back through the public dressing room.
“I haven’t forgotten.”
“Then why are you here?” She was worried I wanted to renegotiate our deal. Of course. It’s what she would’ve done. One of her hands pressed the door open to Rosalie’s old dressing room which was apparently where I’d interrupted her as there were two women and one man hog-tied on the ground.
“Hors d'oeuvre?” she asked. The man’s eyes were wide open in terror.
I made a show of nudging him with my shoe. “Depends. Are they caged or free range?”
“Duck-duck-goose,” she said, pointing out the two women first who were smiling. They, no doubt, had been responsible for the goose’s capture. “Don’t worry, Jack. We’ll have our fun with him and then we’ll set him free. Anemia can feel a lot like a really bad hangover—he need never know.”
“I actually have business to discuss.”
Maya pouted at me and put her hands on her hips. “Do you really, or are you just saying that to make my life difficult?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” I held my arms wide. This was where Rosalie had turned me—and where I’d slept with Maya after being turned, not knowing any better. I had no love for Vermillion in general and this room in particular.
She made a disgusted sound and yanked on one of the girl’s quick-ties, releasing her wrists, then leaned over looking at the man. “Everything after your second drink is a blur now. You don’t remember anything that happened—other than having a fantastic time. One girl even gave you a blow job.”
“We don’t have to, do we?” the rising girl asked, setting the other girl’s wrists free, before working on her ankles.
“I just might, for fun,” the other said.
“Go-go-go,” Maya said, shooing them along. Between the two of them, they carried the now semi-comatose man out. Maya turned toward me. “I hope whatever you’re going to tell me will be worth it.”
“Yeah—I’m thinking you need to cancel that appointment with the Rojo tomorrow night.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Because there’s something bad out there.” I told her about the evening I’d had with Sam, as she looked increasingly pained.
“You talked to a Faithful?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve got the luck of an idiot, Jack. You do realize that they kill us, with very little provocation?”
“I’m beginning to get that picture, yes.”
Maya started pacing. “The Faithful are why Rosalie mostly used humans she controlled. Humans invite less suspicion than vampire armies.”
“Look, I really don’t care about history—I just don’t think you should sell the land. I’m not sure if you’d be giving them a door to another place—or the leash to some kind of hellish monster—but why take the chance?”
She frowned. “Because it’s already done.”
“But thought you were leery?”