Chapter 16 – Luna
Chapter Sixteen
Luna
But what was strange about where I was in total darkness right now—with the exception of the fact that I didn’t know where the fuck I was—was the scent of blood.
Strong and metallic, wet and coppery, like a mouthful of cold pennies. If all of what I smelled had come from me, I was dying for sure.
Which might explain how at peace I was here, wherever this was, in the dark.
Even though I was on . . . stone?
And I was freezing.
I was only wearing the thin dress I’d gone to the ballet in, but I suspected I was cold due to blood loss.
You needed blood to feel warm. Rosalie had taken me to bed with her so that she could feel alive often enough—not just from sex or blood, but just to feel my heat beside her, while she read a book or checked her phone, petting her free hand through my hair like one might idly stroke a beloved pet.
She had been my sun and my moon—my goddess, really, because she promised to save me from my inevitably horrible fate but . . . now?
I was sore all over, and more certain I had bruised ribs with every breath. Where was I, and where was my current Master? I’d been lying earlier with Jack at the ballet—while he might now know true freedom, I was only dabbling in it.
“Are you up?” a disembodied voice in the darkness asked of me.
It didn’t seem worth pretending otherwise. “Yeah.”
A dim light flickered on, revealing the space I was in.
It was narrow—and three of the walls around me were corrugated, like some kind of cargo container. And there were piles of people I didn’t recognize around the edges of the space, vampires that’d had fallen dead where they had stood.
I sat up. I was on a strange stone dais in the center of the room, surrounded by what appeared to be a moat of blood a handsbreadth wide, a few millimeters deep.
I carefully pushed my hand over it, and felt a charge of magic push me back.
The blood was swirling, I could see it moving, like the water at the edge of an infinity fountain, and I could see who it was coming from—a woman chained by her foot, outside the moat’s circumference.
There was a contraption leading from her arm to the moat itself that looked like it was quietly breathing, pulling blood from her and sending it around me.
She looked worse than I felt. The sad overhead light wasn’t doing her sallow color any favors, her hair looked matted, and there were deep circles beneath her eyes.
She was in a green dress, and there was a healing cut on her chest. While I couldn’t really place her, she felt oddly familiar to me, although she wasn’t the person who had spoken.
“I was talking to her, not you,” said a woman coming up, in a clingy black top and jeans, her low heels clacking on the metal floor.
She’d entered through a door on the only non-metal wall at the back of the room.
She picked her way through the collapsed vampires, to kneel beside the chained girl with a thermos in hand.
“Of course you were,” I muttered. She had dark brown hair swooped up one side in a floral clip, and warm brown skin, like the healthier version of the girl who was chained, and I realized where I’d seen the chained woman before.
“You,” I breathed, in recognition. The girl in the green dress had come with the Rojo, and we’d fought at the back of Vermillion.
I’d swiped at her with the nightblade before passing out entirely.
I could still remember how greedy the weapon had been for her blood; somehow, I’d felt it thirsting in my hand.
And now, here I was without it, trapped in a Rojo nest by her blood.
“Do you know her?” the girl who was mobile asked me as she settled the other woman into her lap and untwisted the top of the thermos.
I belatedly remembered to try for innocence, and looked around, pretending to be horrified. “No—you have to let me out of here! Where am I?”
The woman snorted as she poured fluid into the chained girl’s mouth. “Nice try,” she said quietly.
I tried pushing my hand out again—I felt like I could probably out run the healthy girl with enough adrenaline on board. All I had to do was break through the magical barrier.
“You can’t cross it,” she said, and in answer to my unspoken question, “and neither can I.”
“You could stop it, though,” I said, looking at the machine that was sucking out the chained woman’s blood slowly.
“They wouldn’t like that.”
And by they she meant the ten or so vampires surrounding us.
“She’ll die,” I said.
“It’s been decreed.”
“Which is why . . . you’re trying to keep her alive right now?” The scent of chicken soup made my mouth drool—I was both hungry and thirsty.
She shrugged. “You’ll die too, once they’ve had their way with you tonight.”
I got to my knees, hissing with pain and holding my side.
Now that the light was on, I could see additional strange carvings in the stone that I was trapped on.
“My name is Luna. I’m still human, and I don’t want to die.
” Her dark eyes flashed over at me, and I recognized the similarities between her and the woman on the floor.
Related for sure. “She your sister?” I asked, then didn’t wait.
“I know other vampires. If you can get me out, I can keep us safe.”
The woman scoffed and shook her head. “Nowhere’s safe.” She finished what she was doing and put the cap of the thermos back on, slowly lowering her sister back to the ground.
I had no other munition but the truth. “I did that to her,” I said, pointing to the chained woman’s chest. “I’m pretty sure she was trying to kill me at the time—but that doesn’t make any of this here right. So if this happening to her was my fault, I’m sorry.”
The woman’s red lips pinched into a line. But then she rose up and turned, walking away, and any second now she was going to turn off the light and I would be in here with a dying woman, ten dead men, and the scent of too much blood.
“My name is Luna!” I shouted after her, my voice cracking.
“That’s nice,” she said, and the light still went off.
I tried a simple healing spell on myself to knit my ribs up, and it didn’t do jack shit—I should’ve hit up that girl for ibuprofen.
I moved around in the dark, testing the edges of the barrier around me, but found myself surrounded. I didn’t feel like the magical cage I was in had a lid, but if there was a space above me where it ended, it was too high for me to reach.
If the Rojo vampires were asleep, Jack and my Master were too, which meant I was on my own.
I curled into a ball, trying hopelessly to find a more comfortable position and retain a little bit of warmth.
I wish I knew more about my Master.
If I could’ve predicted how any of this was going to go down, I would’ve made vastly different decisions.
But at the time . . . when I’d been hiding in the back of Vermillion, watching Jack and Maya kill Rosalie, it didn’t feel like I had much choice.
The second Rosalie had turned to dust I knew I was dead—either Maya would kill me, or worse yet, she’d bind me to her, but she would never consent to changing me, and the end result would be the same. A messy death, just like my mother’s.
And that’s when I heard a whisper in my ear.
“Come find me,” it’d said.
I didn’t listen to it at first, because I didn’t know what it was—but then Maya was summoning her favorite bloodslaves in for an orgy of celebration at her unexpected freedom, and I knew I had to get away, before her pull became magnetic enough to catch me.
“I’ll protect you,” the voice promised, as if it knew my fears. “I’ll keep you safe.” I swatted it away, just like it was a mosquito, and it changed tack. “Find me, and I will reward you.”
“With what?” I whispered quietly, barely breathing the words.
“The eternal life you dream of,” the voice promised me, and it didn’t have to say anymore.
It led me to Rosalie’s office, where I tore through her things at its behest, looking for what I didn’t know, until I found an ornate wooden box at the back of her closet, beneath a floorboard.
And inside was what I’d taken to thinking of as the nightblade: a perfect little scythe-like weapon made of bone.
It fit my hand perfectly, like it wanted to be there, and I heard the creature that’d been directing me sigh in satisfaction as I picked it up.
“Bind yourself to me,” my new Master crooned inside my head.
I looked between the blade and my forearm, twisted my wrist so I wouldn’t cut anything important, and slashed it down, gulping back a shout.
Blood flowed from me and . . . into it, for lack of a better word.
I saw the skin peel open and a familiar red swell, but I hadn’t lifted the scythe’s tip, and I could feel its . . . hunger.
Its want.
Its need.
It siphoned all the blood that’d spilled from me up, and then demanded “More,” and I had a sudden powerful desire to give it—him, now that I could feel him, so much more clearly—everything he wanted. I had a vision of me stabbing myself, no, other people, just anything, to let him feed.
And then I could feel the swelling magic from the room where Maya was and knew I needed to escape—I’d grabbed the blade, a small bag of my belongings, and ran out the door to my car, as fast as I could, like I was being chased.
And I’d belonged to him ever since.
But what had he actually ever done for me?
If he cared for me—why would I be trapped here?
I had my knees hugged to my chest in the blood-scented dark, and was having a full on pity party for myself when the metal container I was in shimmied like a diesel engine, and the entire thing began to move.