Chapter Six #2
He hated himself for feeling that way, the pit of his stomach churning. Suddenly the softness of Hilker’s hair was too oily, his scalp too warm, Isaiah’s fingers caught between the strands. He hurried to finish the job, re-making Hilker’s bun and stepping back.
He breathed in and then out and felt… he didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t want to know.
“I’ll be…” he said.
But Hilker cut him off, “Don’t go too far.”
Too far. As though that was a thing he hadn’t already done.
Or that he wouldn’t ultimately do again.
When Hilker had said he was a genius, maybe he was right after all.
Isaiah stood slowly from his mattress, his blanket nearly falling from his shoulders as he did.
He’d thrown it across the cell when he’d first entered, its smell too like Hilker’s hair still, as though the bastard was trying to weasel his way under Isaiah’s skin even while halfway across the lab.
Not five minutes later, he’d found himself slinking after it, burying himself in it despite the knot it left in his stomach.
Now, that knot was almost forgotten.
Isaiah’s brain still hadn’t quite caught up with the single, straightforward statement that Hilker had just made, and he stammered, uncertainly, “What do you mean, a serum? To do what—and why you?”
From where he stood in the open cell doorway, Hilker actually smiled. “To do everything we’ve been working towards all these weeks, and the years that those before us failed.”
“Fuck,” Landon whispered across the wall, then louder, “Is it… Fuck.”
“It is, unfortunately, not particularly beneficial for fucking,” Hilker responded.
“But yes, it seems to be capable of reverting Isaiah’s individual cells back to a pre-vampiric state.
But it may take a substantial amount of time to be processed out of the biological system after it has done its work, so I’ll be testing it on myself first to ensure that it’s at least safe for humans before… anything else.”
Anything else meant Isaiah, and if all went well with him, then Landon. He knew this. And yet. “If something happens to you…?”
“Then there are hospitals which will admit me.” Hilker sounded unfazed. “Though I have no reason to believe it should come to that.”
“And if it doesn’t kill you?” Landon asked, breathless. Isaiah swore he could feel them pressed against the wall, breathing too hard, too fast.
“Then we hope it doesn’t kill your whipping boy.”
Hilker let the door hang open as he left.
Before he went, though, he handed Isaiah a sleek, black walkie-talkie, pointing out the call and speak buttons. “This connects to Varsity. It’s in your best interest that I don’t die.”
“You can’t find some other human to test it on?” Isaiah winced as he said it, feeling a chaos of emotions storm in his chest: shame, guilt, desire, disgust. Hilker had let him be the whipping boy for months. That Isaiah should even think to suggest such a thing for someone else…
“We all must make sacrifices for the betterment of our societal knowledge. This has been required of you more than most, but I should not be immune simply because my part includes the comprehension of it all.”
It was such a conceited, confusing, yet gallant way to put it, that Isaiah wanted to—to slap him?
To be slapped by him, with as much passion as was in his gaze now?
Isaiah shuddered, trying to revoke the thought of Hilker grabbing him by the hair after and whispering that he deserved it.
Not that. God, he had to put that thought right back in the box.
He was still trying to scrub his mind clean when Hilker settled himself into one of the lab chairs and began drawing up a syringe of an ominous liquid, opaque and shimmering with something that looked almost like flecks of gold.
Carefully, Hilker untucked his shirt, pulling it up over his taut stomach and pinching the skin.
He seemed to hesitate, breathing in, then out.
His gaze flickered—towards Isaiah? He wasn’t sure—and slowly Hilker inserted the needle.
“Do you really think…” Landon sounded too nervous to finish the statement.
Do you think it’ll work, was probably where they’d intended the sentence to go. But did that mean, Do you think we’re getting out of here? Or How long do you think we have left together?
Isaiah felt sick. They still might not have realized…
but maybe he didn’t want them to understand what the end of this years-long experiment meant for them both.
Perhaps it was better if they believed Isaiah would be leaving with them until the moment their mother came to take them away, take them home, to be her human child again, and Isaiah was left behind for Varsity to dispose of.
He could beg, he thought—he could promise never to leave Landon’s side, never to tell anyone what he’d been through.
He could have Landon demand it. But from the few times she’d bothered to make an appearance during the three months Isaiah had been there, he knew that Landon’s mother was not good at giving them what they actually wanted.
If she thought they wished for a friend, she’d hire them one; one who’d never had fangs and could not corroborate her child’s story of captivity and torment.
At least though, if this worked, Landon wouldn’t be here anymore. They’d see the sun, and the trees, and the lake, have a whole mansion in place of a prison. Maybe their twin brother Quinn would be there. That was better for them.
Better than being locked in a lab, listening as other vampires suffered in their place, anyway.
“I think there’s a chance this might work,” Isaiah replied to Landon with more hope than he really felt. He cradled the walkie-talkie in his hands and forced himself not to dwell on his impending doom. “I really do.”
One more day—that was all he’d asked for.
Now, one more day was perhaps all he’d get.