Chapter 33 – Jack
Chapter Thirty-Three
Jack
I woke to the taste of metal—not because I’d drank anyone’s blood, but because there was a rusty piece of iron shoved sideways into my mouth, keeping my jaw open, and my head ruthlessly pressed to a cold dirt floor.
My hands appeared to be tied, and Sam was looming over me, her dark skin casting a shadow inside her own magic light. “Are you awake?” she demanded, and as my eyes opened, she grunted, “Good.”
I tried to say something around the metal bar, but couldn’t.
“If you bite me now, Jack, I’m going to be so fucking pissed.”
I shrugged, helplessly, but otherwise did my best to seem innocuous, because I could hear the sound of a drill grinding on stone.
“Hear that?” she asked. I attempted to nod, and she dared to smile. “We’re about to get rescued.”
There was more to it than that—it took several more hours. But right before morning came, the back wall of her cage crumbled, and she looked down at me.
“Can I trust you?” she asked. Her entire face was lit up, not just with the excitement she felt from our oncoming freedom, but because it felt like I could see every red cell in her body, and each of them glowing like a neon sign. She looked like an angel made out of blood to me.
I shook my head, grinding my teeth against the bar slightly.
She nodded, and started shouting “Blood! I need blood!” back to where the people coming in could hear. There were shouts past that, and the first people in the room were wearing medical gear.
That didn’t stop them from running up to us both and pointing guns at my face.
“Don’t shoot!” she chastised them. “The blood’s for him!”
I heard a scuffle, Sam say “Give me that,” and then felt her yank the metal bar out of my mouth only to replace it with cold plastic.
I bit down and tasted life.
My hands reached up, still tied, and squeezed the blood bag she’d given me, then I started gnawing on the plastic like some kind of rabid animal, trying to get out every drop.
“More!” Sam demanded, and another blood bag was tossed onto my chest, rather like a grenade, from a safe distance.
And by the time I was done with that one—I could speak. “Make it like that scene from Flashdance—no, Carrie.”
Sam laughed, and stood nearby. “Can we get out of here?”
“Yeah,” I said, slowly nodding my head against the ground.
She knelt down and she offered me her arm.
I sucked on a third blood bag like it was a Capri Sun, leaning against Sam as we made our way up the tunnel her people had bored.
I was tucked against her for several reasons: it was going to take me a long while to replenish myself, so I was weak, the fact that it was almost dawn wasn’t helping, and I needed to be inside her envelope of protective magical light for safekeeping.
All she’d needed to do was mutter the phrase “potential for friendly fire,” and I lost all my pride.
It didn’t matter anyhow.
I was alive.
And when we walked into the desert night together, coming up a ramp of construction debris her people had created, making their hole in the ground, the night air had never smelled so good to me.
It didn’t matter that there were three rows of people with assorted weaponry and magics aimed in my direction.
“He’s safe!” Sam shouted. “We’re okay!”
And then there was a somewhat familiar roar from my right as a man I recognized lunged forward.
Sam cranked up her shield another notch, just in time to deflect someone’s panicked blast from her team’s side.
“We’re fine!” she shouted, only this time with more irritation—as Paco picked me up and spun me.
I threw my arms around his neck, just breathing him.
“I thought you were dead!” he said when he finally released me.
“Yeah. Me too.”
There was some other conversation happening behind us, between Sam and her people—someone was shouting at her to step away, but I couldn’t be bothered to care.
I set my forehead against his. “I fucking love you,” I said, then put my hand over his mouth before he could say anything back—I needed to say my piece, first.
“When you were human, Paco—you had everything you needed but me. Now you have me . . . but don’t have anything else.
I can’t tell you if that trade-off was worth it.
I fucking hope so, because I know I didn’t give you any other choice.
But I couldn’t just watch you die.” He started nodding halfway through, tears streaming down his face—and I knew I was crying too.
“I know some part of you always wondered if I could truly have feelings for you, as a vampire. Well, now that you are one, can’t you tell?
” I asked and slowly pulled my hand away.
“I love you,” he whispered—and his mouth came for mine. Our lips met, and I had never had a kiss so sweet—and it wasn’t just that I could still taste blood.
It was that this was, quite literally, the first kiss of the rest of my life.
With him.
Then I heard Sam yelling—and I realized that maybe I should be concerned and pulled back some.
“If you all don’t get back right now I am going to start indiscriminately strangling!” she shouted.
A man I recognized pushed through the militarized ranks. “Samantha. Gentlemen,” he said curtly.
“Nilesh?” I said aloud, placing him. I tried to draw Paco protectively behind me, which went about as well as moving a tank.
“I had hoped to do this debriefing elsewhere, but seeing as time is of the essence,” he said, jerking his head at the upcoming dawn. “Which one of you is harboring the creature?”
I closed my eyes. “Oh, fuck.” I’d almost forgotten everything that’d happened before—it was like that Jack was a different Jack—because he was.
Whereas this Jack was holding hands with Paco.
“I take it that’s a confession?” he asked, one eyebrow high.
“Yes,” I said. “I didn’t let it do anything, though.
” I looked between Sam, and Nilesh, and then back at Paco.
“It wanted me to kill you,” I told Sam. “And then if I didn’t, it said you were going to kill me—so it’d just take control of you when you did.
But I didn’t, and you didn’t, and we’re both here—so can I just go the fuck home already? ”
“You . . . refused it?” Nilesh said, tilting his head like he wasn’t sure he’d heard me right.
“It didn’t have anything I wanted.”
And when he looked to her, Sam gave Nilesh a tough look and shrugged. “I didn’t stake him because I figured I was going to die. Didn’t want to pollute the air around me.”
I snorted. “Gee. Thanks.”
Nilesh made a thoughtful sound. “All right, then. Stand up straight, vampire, and don’t hold your breath.”
I turned toward him. “Why?”
Rather than answer, he punched me. But not physically—like, psychically or metaphorically—I didn’t know what the fuck, just all of a sudden his fist was inside my stomach but I wasn’t dusting, and then he yanked something black and disgusting and with too many legs free, pulling it out to throw on the ground, where it wriggled, glistening wetly.
“Holy shit,” Paco said.
“Nothing holy about it,” Nilesh said, bringing his boot down on its head with a crunch.
The four of us took a moment, watching it struggle and then die.
“Is that it?” I asked, before looking up and around. “Are we done? Can I go home?” I asked as Paco put his arms around me. Sam dared to dim her light—and beyond her, the first row of Faithful lowered their weapons or put out their magics, though the second row didn’t seem fully convinced.
“Yes,” Nilesh said, slowly nodding his head. “I think so.”
“Hooray? Right?” I said, standing a little taller.
“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “Hooray,” she said, and laughed.
“Then—do you guys have anything else I could drink?”
“We’re probably good for a few more bags,” she said, grinning.
“You had better be!” Luna said, storming up.
“She bit me! I’m sullied!” someone shouted out from behind her.
She put her hands on her hips and whirled to shout back. “I’m still a human, you asshole! I just needed you to let me go!”