Chapter One #2
The thud from Landon’s cell meant either they’d found something new to throw or their fist was bruising. “We don’t need your fucking science!”
“You don’t want my fucking science,” Hilker corrected, as though Landon was an unruly child. “But there’s a number of reasons you do need it, regardless. Should I list them?”
“What I fucking need is a key or a knife! Better yet, both!” Landon shouted back.
Another thud followed, but this one had to be Varsity’s doing. “You think you’re making this easier on your friend, huh?” she snapped from down their hall. “Every way you have to hurt yourself, we can hurt him triple.”
The thought still made Isaiah’s blood run cold, but Hilker just looked annoyed, as though trying to calculate such a thing would simply be more trouble than it was worth.
“I’m coming.” Isaiah stood and walked toward Hilker, like it was his choice, trying with every step to convince his body that was true. As the locks clicked and churned and the door slowly creaked open, his muscles still shouted for him to run.
But to where? To the larger, thicker exit door he caught a glimpse of with each short walk to and from his cell?
Where would he even go without Landon? If he did escape, he’d spend the rest of his—probably short—life running as his captors tried to hunt him back down.
And during that time, they’d have found another vampire to torture in his place; someone who wasn’t so dedicated to making sure Landon came out of this in one piece.
As the crack between the door and its frame widened, Isaiah must have delayed for too long because Varsity stepped through, twisting her toned shoulders to fit. She grabbed Isaiah by the wrist and forearm, yanking him forward like he was an ornery dog.
He let her drag him into the hall.
From down the curving passage, Landon called, “Take me instead, motherfucker!”
“You know what your mother would say about that,” Hilker replied.
Another bang followed—clearly not Landon’s fist, this time—and Varsity added, “We can still take your temper tantrum out on your friend.”
Landon’s cell went quiet, but in the eerie stillness Isaiah could almost feel their seething.
“I’m fine, princess!” Isaiah said, focusing on the fact that it was still true.
His skin began to tremble in rough bursts as he neared the table.
It was the only other place he was allowed besides his cell, lightly padded—to keep him from bruising, he assumed—with manacles at the mid and far points.
Are those still necessary? Isaiah had asked the first day he’d chosen to leave his cell willingly.
Varsity had opened her mouth, but before she could protest, Hilker had made some excuse about involuntary movements caused by the effects of the holy silver.
The fact that holy silver rendered Isaiah no stronger than any human seemed irrelevant.
They wanted him like this: no control, no will, no agency. Barely a person at all.
He stopped before the little stepping block and flinched as Varsity yanked free the strings at the back of his medical gown.
She nearly dropped it entirely as she pulled it down his thin torso, his ribs all clearly visible though his once-unblemished brown skin, healing nicks and scars now covering him from the waist up.
It felt like someone else’s body now. Even the bat tattoo tucked beneath his heart didn’t seem like his anymore.
With Hilker’s help, Varsity tied the gown around his boney hips.
Isaiah tried to ignore the way Hilker watched him through this. It was unsettling—as unsettling as every touch and look the man gave him, like his clinical gaze was hiding something.
Varsity shoved him from behind, and only his quickened reflexes carried him onto the table without hitting anything. His body shuddered against the cold of the padding, and the moment he closed his eyes, a ridge of moisture crept into the edges. He swallowed.
One more day. He could do this for one more day.
In the back of his mind, he transposed the words.
One more day, one day more, setting the familiar Broadway tune to it, holding it beneath his heart where that traitorous little Batman tattoo lay, and pretending their revolution hadn’t ended in tragedy.
If living was Isaiah’s own form of rebellion, he knew that would end in tragedy soon too.
Still, he sang to himself, one day more.
Isaiah could feel the moment Hilker removed his holy silver from its box, the influence of the metal washing over him like a hot poker held directly above the skin. As it neared him, the sensation sharpened, the heat turning to pain. He gritted his teeth. One day more.
He couldn’t open his eyes—couldn’t force himself to watch as Anthony’s instrument of choice slid into his skin, the sensation of it hidden by the rising agony of the holy silver.
The burn seemed to flare through his flesh, deep into his bones.
He shook, and a hand held him steady—he didn’t know whose, but compared to the pain, it felt like the gentlest thing in all his world. One day more.
Isaiah sobbed, biting down the sound as soon as it tried to leave him. Not soon enough.
“Take me instead!” Landon screamed, their words turning to a blur, a mumble, a tumbling echo through the waterfall of pain that obscured Isaiah’s world.
Isaiah held his breath and focused on that sound instead of his own whimpered responses. Just one more day. He could do this, for one more day.
And hope with all his soul that sooner rather than later, he would save Landon, even if he could never save himself.
It wasn’t over as soon as the pain dimmed—it was a cycle.
The hovering of the silver, the pressure of the needle or the bite of the scalpel or the steady whir of Hilker’s machines, or, in a few rare cases, the momentary bliss of anesthesia that would have him waking to a newly sutured gash in his side and the full-body torment of too much holy-silver exposure, then quiet. Recovery.
Then, again with the silver and, if he was lucky, this time instead of taking something away, something was pressured into him: a serum or an implant.
Those nights were the best and the worst. Varsity’s quieter second-shift counterpart would read while Hilker monitored Isaiah for god-knew-what—life or death, maybe.
Once, Isaiah had collapsed from a pain in his chest and come back to the sight of Hilker and the second-shift guard holding electric paddles, Hilker’s face a ghostly shade as he flicked a light in Isaiah’s eyes. But mostly, nothing happened.
The more nothing that happened, the more Hilker would pace and grumble to himself, and eventually storm out, not returning again for days.
They were days of living, of pressing the side of his head to the wall to hear just a little more of Landon’s sporadic cussing, or smiling at the ceiling when Landon shared a tidbit of their life before the cell and responding with small details that no one else knew about Justin—had known, before Justin started dating Clementine, telling him all the secrets he’d once shared with Isaiah.
As much as it hurt, Isaiah could not stop himself from imagining Justin and his new boyfriend together: Isaiah’s Batman perched atop roofs with a different vampire at his side.
Only this vampire, Justin loved in return.
He had found someone who gave him what he’d never wanted from Isaiah, and Isaiah should have been—was—happy for that.
It was just that happiness didn’t cancel out grief.
Isaiah wasn’t alone now though—he had a bloody princess, pacing their tower, crying for freedom. Princesses weren’t saved by whipping boys, but goddamn if Isaiah wasn’t going to try.