Chapter 28
Bedraggled and beautiful, she stared at him as if terrified past comprehension.
Of course, his entrance left nothing to be desired in the way of violence; he idly catalogued and monitored the various states of those clinging to tenuous mortal life amid the mess, pleased that none were in a position to harm her.
The scent of his leman bore a warped note, a smoky searing of starvation, battle, and the metabolizing of some acrid mortal potion.
Her bare arms were striped with blood, both mortal and her own; his fingers flicked out, drawing lightly down the left limb, and he almost winced at the damage to her luscious skin.
A good feeding, rest, and the cessation of all this nonsense was in order.
He pressed his fingertips to lips, savoring the spicy, addictive tang of his treasure along with the strange, sharply venomous substance she had been dosed with.
She flinched, lovely eyes gone dark and round with pain, and as the flame of her burned away encroaching madness and calcification he remembered the name again—her gift, all the more valuable after being temporarily mislaid.
Jonathan. That is who I am, to her.
“I…” Her cracked, chapped lips shaped the words so elegantly, and her voice was a nightingale’s warble amid all the furious metallic bleating. “They… I didn’t try to—”
“I know,” he soothed. He could not wait to feel her mouth drawing against his veins once more, but open flame now crept upon a lake of spilled substances, belching nasty discolored smoke.
The killing roar was gone, though the thrall prickled deep in his marrow with sharp silver rowels.
There was a swollen, blistered band across her forehead, another at her throat—had they sought to strangle her?
She tensed. Fearing she lacked the strength to stand, he grasped her arms and drew them both upward. His leman flinched again, though his grasp was as gentle as possible, and the rage threatened to return despite the anodyne of her presence, the soothing cloak of her scent.
“There.” He steadied her, then let go, slowly, ready to provide more support at any sign of crumpling. “Time to leave, darlin’.”
“Yeah.” A small shake of her tousled, beautiful hair. “Yeah, I —”
“Bitch,” a mortal voice wheezed, from a shadowed ruin of tubes and glass behind her. “Fucking… mess.”
Now Jonathan noted the slab with its straps—silver somehow woven into cloth, no wonder she was raw and suppurating. The daring of mortals to do this…
Well, they were dangerous in swarms. Every sanguinant knew as much.
His leman turned, regarding the smaller mess. She took one uncertain step, then another, and Jonathan suppressed a sudden urge to simply grasp her, take flight, and bear them both through the twisting passageways to the clean, forgiving night outside.
The flames were spreading; he did not like their closeness to what he cherished.
But sweet Simone’s shoulders drew back, her chin lifting proudly, so he trailed in his leman’s wake, keeping a wary eye upon the spreading fire.
Tiny snippets of memory gnawed at him, were ruthlessly shelved.
This was no time to brood upon the past.
Fire could not harm him, but a tender fledgling? She had suffered enough.
When she dropped, he twitched as if to catch her again.
But it was a controlled movement, exquisitely graceful even as the betraying hitch near the end spoke of pain.
Every instinct but one shouted to simply drag her away, no matter any struggle; the single still, small voice which had led him through the madness, the fractures, through centuries of insanity to finally find the greatest gift of all existence made a different demand.
That voice was hers alone. It spoke again, this time outside his head. “You could have just let me walk away,” she said, softly.
The wreckage here was comparatively small, though no less deadly to a fragile mortal frame.
A broken form lay speared and crumpled, wheezing as it stared at her.
Two additional corpses twisted among sprays of shattered glass and polished steel, smooth surfaces reflecting flickering flameglow and weak fluorescents.
Jonathan peered closer, to discern what held his leman’s interest so.
Steel bars and crumpled metal had gouged unmercifully at a mortal male with goggle-eyes and a thin, cruel mouth.
He had been flung, with some force, into a collection of thin spears and strange sharp instruments.
The scent of cold mortal blood from storage was very strong as well, painted in great splashes near a twisted, fallen pole.
Had they thought to feed her? Jonathan’s lip lifted at the thought. That was his duty, as well as his pleasure and prerogative.
“You bitch,” the male mortal wheezed. The voice was familiar from the hotel ballroom as well, though this broken whisper bore little relation to the arrogant, glad-handing tone of before. “You weren’t… weren’t supposed to…”
“What are you going to do?” A note of genuine interest to her hoarse, supremely soft purr. A thrill slipped through Jonathan, crown to soles; he could, he discovered, listen to her speak so for hours, months, mortal years. “Fire me?”
“Please.” The mortal’s lungs were either punctured or filling with fluid; he gave another gurgling wheeze. “You… don’t understand… I’m supposed to live… forever.”
“You really do remind me of him,” she murmured, almost too quietly to be heard even with sanguinant acuity. Yet the tension in her was not soft at all. Her strained, strenuous control finally cracked with a thin sound, as a crystal wineglass trod under a careless heel, and she struck.
Like an uncoiling viper, like a stooping hawk.
The movement was breathtaking, and she buried her fangs in the mortal’s throat so deep it would have been an incapacitating blow even without his various other injuries.
Swift and sure she drank, her slim back rippling with each pull, and though Jonathan was glad to finally see her feeding naturally, he disliked the thought of her mouth upon another’s skin.
Yes, he disliked it intensely. The roar of possessive rage rose within his ribs, was denied for the moment.
Even this, he would gift unto her.
The mortal’s heart stuttered, laboring under a triple burden of shock, pressure loss, and a soup of chemical substances wholly unlike that sweet Simone had been subjected to.
Perhaps this fellow was some manner of drug addict?
Jonathan was about to utter a warning when his leman retreated, springing up and away from her prey almost as if startled, scrubbing at her mouth with the back of her hand, blundering into him and freezing.
Not nearly enough feeding to repair the damage. Still, the air had warmed alarmingly inside this confined space. “Shh,” he soothed. “All’s well, darlin’. Done?”
She shook her head, a nervous toss, as a thoroughbred scenting fire. The rawness down her left arm was far less glistening now. He longed to know what had happened—if she would speak of it, if she needed or wanted to—but there was one small matter remaining.
“Are y’ done?” he persisted. “Tell me, an’…” Speak as she likes, fool. He sought the proper cadence, the accent she found pleasing. “Then we shall leave.”
A tiny nod, her hair brushing the front of his torn, spattered shirt. “I… didn’t kill him.” As if expecting her sanguinant to argue.
“No,” Jonathan agreed. But your fangs were in another, and that I will not abide. “You did not. Stay still. Understand? Stand, right here.”
Another small dip of her chin. “Everything’s burning.” Had she just noticed?
“One moment.” His claws were already out. Crack of bone, tearing of gristle, no spray of blood—for she had, after all, drunk deep—he reduced the prey she had touched to anonymous pieces.
As any sanguinant lucky enough to have a leman would.
Through the twisting passageways and strange, stutter-lit rooms he shepherded his reeling, exhausted fledgling, pausing only to gather her into his arms when she stumbled for the second time.
The madness retreated swiftly, fractures healing with every deep spice-laden breath, though her glorious scent was now also freighted with smoke.
His senses sharpened afresh with each moment, her sweet lithe softness held close as he chose the swiftest path to the parking level.
No few of the vehicles were missing, gaps in their serried ranks. She stirred as he slowed to contemplate the remainder, and shook her head.
“They’ll have trackers,” she whispered. Pale save for two hectic spots high on her cheeks, heavy-lidded, she trembled now with fatigue and quite possibly shock. Careful care, a place of rest, feeding to repletion—those were her requirements now. “Transponders, probably. Not a good idea.”
“Ah, you are a wonderful teacher,” he murmured in reply, and arrowed for the hidden entrance.
A cold, clear burst of freshness swallowed them both. He plunged down the slope he had traced her upward so laboriously, and found the guardhouses at the bottom empty, their windows shining with golden electric light.
No doubt they, like other animals, had sensed a paroxysm of vengeance. He followed the road for some short while before veering away, soundlessly leaping the yawning slash of a ravine, landing feather-soft and halting, turning to regard the mountain.
Halfway up its frowning bulk a sullen red glare was visible, peering through heavy summer foliage.
A faraway detonation rippled the fabric of darkness; disinterested stars gleamed through a pall of smoke before a fresh gout of black vapor rose.
He did not like thinking of his Simone trapped in such a place.
Let it burn.
“Gas.” She had turned her head, craning to witness what could be seen of the destruction. “And whatever else he had for running the labs. But cameras in there too. Evidence.”
He was cheered at the caution, for it showed she was not entirely lost to shocked numbness. “We shall evade all notice for some short while. Mortals forget things.”
“There’s forums. Online. They’ll hunt us.” Barely audible, each word muffled, forlorn. She shuddered, finally turning away from the view, and pressed her face into his shoulder despite the blood, the filth, the evidence of pursuit and battle daubed upon his clothes.
Was it wrong to find the single movement so sweet as to stagger even an Archon? In the distance a howl arose, high and savage—a wolf singing to the absent moon, perhaps drunk with sudden freedom. “Then they will die.”
It was quite simple, after all. He bore her into the darkness, already occupied with the task of finding shelter.