Chapter 23 – Jack
Chapter Twenty-Three
Jack
I woke up very hungry to someone softly calling my name.
Jack.
Jack.
“Jack?”
I blinked, trying to figure out what was and wasn’t real. It was still dark even though my eyes were open—but I moved around, successfully.
At least I wasn’t buried or chained.
“Jack?” a voice said again, slightly more panic-tinged.
A real voice, not the one I was sure I’d heard echoing inside my own head prior.
“Yeah?” I whispered, because quietness seemed appropriate, and then I realized I could smell who it was. On top of her own unique scent, my one Faithful friend seemed to prefer a particular kind of dryer sheet. “Sam?”
“Jack,” she repeated, sounding relieved. “I knew you were alive, since you didn’t dust, but I wasn’t sure about much else.”
I sat up slowly. She was about twenty feet away from me.
I could tell because in addition to her dryer sheet, I could smell her blood, inside her.
Smelling was the wrong verb for it—it was something akin to sense-feeling her edible presence, but it was close—and disconcerting—enough.
A soft blue light began glowing, illuminating her face and reminding me that her blood was attached to the rest of her.
She had her back to a roughly carved wall on the other side of a small cavern, and we were separated from each other by cage bars and a door, like animals at a zoo, and once again I cursed the gods that saw me spending so much of my time in danger in assorted holes underground. “Fuck.”
“Pretty much,” she agreed, eyeing me warily. “How . . . do you feel?”
“Unhappy?” I guessed, looking around—and then I realized why she was asking, because I was now who knew how long out since my last feeding, and a couple pints low. “I’m still me.”
“And you’ll be sure to tell me when that changes, will you?” she said. People in space probably could’ve heard her sarcasm.
“Yeah. I’ll do an interpretive dance or something,” I said, standing up to look around. “Where the hell are we?”
“Some kind of magical cage.”
I grunted. “Can you make that brighter for me?”
“It won’t help,” she said, but she did it anyhow, and it showed me the rough stone edges of the rooms we were both in.
I still made a show of running my fingers against the stone behind me though, and tapped it, trying to see if I could find anywhere that it was weak, not that I was hiding a jack-hammer on me.
“It’s the same over here,” she added, when I was finished.
“How’d we even get down here?” I wondered.
“Magic. The super-bad-not-good kind,” she said with a sigh. “Near as I can figure, everything with Luna and the Rojo was a trap.”
“Towards what end?”
“I have a lot of unfortunate guesses.”
I circled around and came to the bars to check them out—and I saw her flinch on the other side. Half of me was ashamed of her fear, and the other half thrilled at her weakness.
I backed away more to make me comfortable than her.
“Want to share?” I asked, because things were easier on me when we were talking.
There was a long pause. “Once upon a time, I lied to you.”
I sat back down, against the far wall. “Isn’t that illegal for you or something?”
“It was for the cause,” she said with a snort. “Remember when I told you we didn’t find the Sleeper?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, we did. We backhoed that lot of land down to practically magma, we found its coffin, and inside, its corpse—which we were excited by at the time. We spent about twenty-four hours being thrilled that an evil entity had been wiped off the map, as our scientists carefully transported it back to our labs, where we realized the truth—what we’d found was just its shell. An empty chrysalis.”
“Do I want to know what it looked like?”
“You ever see those cicada shells, out in the Midwest? The ones that get left clinging to trees and screens?”
I could remember them clearly from my youth in Texas. Us boys would carefully pry them off of things and then run around chasing girls with them. “Yeah.”
“It was like that, only human sized, with a lot more legs and mouthparts.”
“And . . . where did the rest of it go?”
Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. We were working on it.”
“Do I want to know what that has to do with us?”
She looked between us, despondent. “Have you ever heard of parasitic wasps?”
One of my eyebrows crawled high on my forehead. “No, and I don’t think I want to.”
That didn’t stop her though. “I think we were put down here as food. Or—at least I was.”
It took a long while for what she’d told me to sink in, and then I made an irritated sound. “Sam, if I’ve tried to live by one motto as a vampire, it’s that friends don’t eat friends.”
“Yeah, well, sentiments from Finding Nemo aside, the next time you wake up, I don’t think I’d trust you as far as I could throw you—without magic, that is.” Sam quenched the light in her hand, leaving us both in the dark.
I looked in the last direction I’d seen her, with a slight afterimage of the door in my mind. “Can you turn that back on a second?”
“Sure,” she said, and did so.
“Do you see, uh, any latch-looking things on your side of the door?”
Her gaze scanned it quickly. “No,” she said, then frowned. “Do you?”
I moved to standing, and she did the same, mirroring me quickly, and pulling her hands up into what I thought of as “battle-mode.”
“Yeah—Sam—you’re really not going to like this much, but you need to trade sides with me. Now,” I said, walking over to flip the latch on my side of the gate and draw it through its rusty slot.
It creaked and groaned and I could hear her cursing, then see her sweat as she tried not to do as she was told, and when she finally took a step forward, she glared daggers. “You swore not to order me! Under penalty of death!”
“It wasn’t that long ago. I remember,” I said, stepping away from the doorway.
She kept fighting. I tried to give her space, but my hunger found the herky-jerky way her stubbornness was making her move enticing. She looked wounded and weak—like something I could readily put down. My stomach twisted with a pang.
She smelled so good and she didn’t even know it.
“Jack!” she shouted at me, now firmly ensconced on my side.
I focused up again. “Thank you,” I said, and ducked past her, so we’d switched. “Lock me in.” She muttered, but then did as she was told, and stepped sideways to frown at me through the bars. “See? Now you’re safe,” I told her.
The bright light of her anger still lit up her face. “Until you order me back through to feed you.”
I moved as far away from her as I could, putting my back against the wall. “That’s not happening.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said, not taking her eyes off of me as she made a quick tour of her new environs, before looking over. “Did you see any water in here?”
I shook my head, then looked behind me, where I could see a thin trickle of moisture trailing down one wall.
“Fuck,” she whispered.
“Indeed,” I agreed.
She sat down to put her head in her hands, letting the light go out, and I didn’t ask her to turn it back on.