Chapter 15 – Jack
Chapter Fifteen
Jack
I woke up in Betty’s wreckage not that long before dawn, remembering the last thing I’d been worried about.
“Luna?” I asked aloud.
I could scent her here—she’d been bleeding—and so had I.
I braced a hand off of Betty’s ceiling, which was now the floor and uncomfortably close, and undid my lap belt, letting myself drop half a foot down onto my shoulder.
I groaned and reached for my face first. It was covered in dried blood, my jaw ached, and what the fuck . . .
We’d been hit hard.
Had it been on purpose?
Where was Luna?
I wheeled myself around on my back enough to kick the remaining glass in the driver’s side window out and wriggled myself free to stand up and look at Betty’s carnage.
“Fuck,” I growled. I loved that car—but I could get another one, in the fullness of time, which I had a lot of .
. . but as far as I knew, Luna was one of a kind.
“Luna!” I shouted out in case she’d woken up earlier and climbed up to the highway to flag down help.
Then I circled the car, and saw the drag marks in the dirt outside the passenger side window, where she had been pulled through the scree.
I could see small drops of her blood on the rocks, black in the moonlight, that went out for a trail of six feet and then stopped.
“FUCK!” I shouted a whole hell of a lot louder, and then started climbing up the hillside for the road.
I made the driver of the first car I commandeered take me to Vermillion, my old Mistress’s strip club, and banged on the door so that my blood-sister Maya’s new muscle would come and let me in.
“We’re closed,” a large strange man growled before seeing me fully and recoiling.
“Let me in,” I snarled, and his fingers fumbled for the lock. “Get Maya.”
He disappeared to do as he was told and I waited, waving at the nearest camera in the ceiling.
The club felt like a ghost town without patrons and scantily clad women, but I knew I wasn’t alone. There were a fleet of people who lived here to service Maya’s needs, in a warren of tunnels and rooms full of bunk beds below Vermillion’s shiny, cherry-scented surface.
“Jack, what the hell,” Maya muttered, strolling into the lobby barefoot, wearing a gauzy white robe with a fur trimmed edge.
Her flaming red hair and pale skin made her look otherworldly, though she was less imposing than usual out of her spiked high heels. She took in my current state and actually looked concerned for me, a rarity, quickly pulling me toward the nearest table to sit across from her.
“What happened to you?” she asked, then looked behind me at the door. “Do we need to go to arms? Is whatever attacked you coming here?”
“Luna’s been kidnapped,” I growled. “I need your help to find her.”
Maya blinked, and then looked bemused. “I keep forgetting Rosalie never trained you, Jack—but this is trivially easy. Tell me how you’ve made Luna yours, and I can show you the spell.” I inhaled, and Maya read me before I could say anything. “You . . . haven’t?” she asked, incredulously.
Luna had offered me blood and sex multiple times before, and I’d never once taken her up on it.
“How do you . . . what . . . why?” Words continued to spill out of Maya’s mouth in disbelief. “You do realize, according to the old rules, I could take her back from you because you’re wasting her, right?”
And Luna had told me as much, when she’d tried to foist herself on me as a bloodslave after Rosalie’s demise. “You said you didn’t want her back,” I said in a threatening tone.
“Yes, but this is foolish, even for you, Jack.” Maya tilted her head, not understanding me in the least.
“I want her human,” I snarled. “Feeding from her isn’t part of that plan—but keeping her alive is.
If you can’t help, then tell me where I can find a Faithful,” I said, starting to stand.
My runner up plan was to go find Sam and shake her ’til answers fell out.
I didn’t know why I’d wanted to believe she was “good” when I should’ve known there was no such thing.
Maya waved me back down. “Why?”
“Because I got us set up.” The words tasted like bile on my tongue. I’d been beating myself up for the entire ride here, wondering why the fuck I’d taken Luna out, thinking that somehow Sam and I might be what . . . friends? It’d be one thing for them to attack me, but—
“Doubtful,” Maya said, interrupting my train of thought.
“Think again. If Rosalie’s dead, and you haven’t fed from Luna, she’s an unclaimed human—the exact kind of person the Faithful are sworn to protect.
They have their stupid code, remember? And kidnapping’s very much not their style,” she said, shaking her head. “So what other enemies do you have?”
I considered this and sat back down. “None, that I know of.”
She squinted at me. “Really?” I nodded. “Well. That must be nice.”
I looked around at Vermillion’s walls, remembering what’d happened the last time I was here. “With the exception of the Sangre Rojo we murdered here last week, that is.”
Maya stiffened slightly. “They had it coming.”
“Definitely—but I can see why they might be pissed.” I tried to rake a hand through my hair but found it clotted with dried blood.
I’d skipped feeding tonight to make the show, and now I wouldn’t get the chance.
After as much blood as I’d lost, I’d wake up tomorrow starving. “Why would they take her, though?”
“I don’t know, Jack,” Maya said, spreading her hands wide.
“And you would help me if you could?” I asked her quickly, bringing the full force of my whammy to bear.
“Reluctantly,” she admitted, but I knew she was telling the truth. “Although you using your powers on me is the height of gauche.” She glanced behind me like she was waiting for someone. “Jack, it’s almost dawn. I don’t have room for you here. Especially not if you’re in trouble right now.”
Was I? I wasn’t even sure. I’d been right there—anyone who’d taken Luna could’ve easily killed me, if they’d wanted to.
But if Sam wasn’t responsible for Luna being kidnapped, she’d still told me to stay topped-up, and meant it—so maybe she knew that danger was a possibility.
“I still need to know how to find the Faithful,” I told Maya.
“Not in this state, you don’t. It’s too close to dawn; they’d let you dust on their doorstep.
” She gave me a complicated look then, and put a hand out on top of mine.
“Much like our not-so-dearly departed Mistress, I find I enjoy having you owe me, Jack. I’ll send you home with one for the road,” she said, and snapped her fingers lightly. “Sleep and come back tomorrow night.”
I leaned against the table Maya and I had been talking at, waiting for whoever she was sending me.
“Jack?” A woman came into the room, wiping a tired hand across her face, and it was the first time I’d seen her with clothes on.
“Zevvi?” I remembered her from the night fighting Rojo.
“Yeah,” she said. She was curvy, with shoulder-length wavy brown hair to match, and green eyes that were currently surrounded by smudged eyeliner. Her jeans clung to her readily, while the rest of her was clearly braless under a baggy T-shirt.
“You?” I asked. I knew she was one of Maya’s favorites—at least that’s what Maya had told the others.
“Don’t feel too special, we’re racing daylight, and I was the only one still up.” She grinned and shook car keys for me to follow.
She led me to a silver Volvo in a distant parking lot, and let all three of us in: her, me, and my hunger, which felt big enough now to have its own seat.
I couldn’t help but watch the way Zevvi walked out to her car, and I sensed that she was tired, which whatever was left of my humanity felt bad about, whereas my hunger merely said it’d make her easier to catch.
“Maya also asked that you not bleed all over everything,” she informed me, as we took off.
I caught another glance of myself in the rearview mirror, after giving her directions. My jaw still ached, from where it’d been healing, and while I thought my fractured nose had straightened itself, I hadn’t done anything about all the blood. “You’re not . . . scared?” I asked.
“Of what?”
“Of coming home with a strange hungry vampire.”
Her knuckles flashed white around the steering wheel, but that was her only tell. “You’re not a stranger,” she said, like that would make it true. “I remember you trying not to let the Rojo kill me. And . . . I overheard you earlier. You’re helping Luna. That’s sweet.”
“Sweet. Huh,” I said, as we raced against the dawn beneath streetlights.
“Yeah. I don’t even like her—oh my God, she was always glued to Rosalie like a barnacle—but you’re trying, for her sake, and I want to think that says something about you.” She twisted briefly to look over at me. “So don’t prove me wrong?”
Wicked things inside me wanted to run wild and taunt her, to be ominous in the face of so much raw trust. But I could sense the uptick of her pulse, and knew that this was costing her. “I’ll try not to,” I promised with a low voice.
I’d finished a slippery slope of calculation by the time the Volvo coasted into my apartment building’s parking lot.
If the Rojo had wanted Luna alive—because not only could they have killed me, but her, too, right there, I’d realized—then surely she was living still.
And they were bound by the same rules I was—none of them would be able to stay up after daylight.
So I had another night to find her.
I hoped.
Zevvi followed me to my apartment’s door—luckily Zach-free tonight—but somehow I’d still gotten a visitor inside.