Shackled to the Night, page 17
Chapter 25
Victor had purchased dozens of warehouses all over the country in preparation for his plan. He knew he would not be able to stay in one place for very long, and he needed large spaces to house and train his soldiers. After much thought, he decided warehouses would suit his needs perfectly.
Every industrial area had warehouses, and some were built without windows. It was the perfect set up for him and the boys. None of that God forsaken UV light could get to them, and the warehouses were big enough for beds and training. Just perfect.
As he stood in the office of one of the warehouses in Verdi, Nevada, a small town that resided on I-80 west on the way up to Lake Tahoe, he watched one of the scientists he employed work on a boy who was laying on a cot, completely knocked out from the anesthesia that had been administered. The scientist had placed a device at the base of the kid’s spine, and it was extracting hormones from the child, the hormones that would give Victor back his youth and power.
“The extraction is complete,” the scientist murmured. He looked up at Victor.
“If you would like to lay down on the other cot while I prepare the serum, I can then administer it to you.”
Victor slowly lay down and closed his eyes. It was exhausting staying in this cloak of Victor Marano, a thirty-something year old man with brown hair and blue eyes. He had told the scientist that he suffered from Multiple Sclerosis, and that was why he moved so slowly and decrepitly and why he needed the hormones. No sense in telling the scientist that he was helping to rejuvenate a full-blooded vampire so that he could have the energy to slaughter the human population. Guy probably wouldn’t have been too excited to help knowing that little slice of truth.
He pictured himself strong again, invincible. He imagined the speed and agility he would once again have. He thought of having sex again, and a small smile crept on his lips. He would find himself a beautiful human female who he would use over and over, and then he would kill her. He couldn’t wait to be able to have a hard-on again.
As the scientist came over, Victor opened his eyes. The scientist rubbed an alcohol swab over the inside of Victor’s elbow, and held up the long needle. “This will most likely hurt,” he said.
Victor nodded.
The doctor stuck the needle in Victor’s arm. He didn’t flinch. He was concentrating on his body, ready to feel the changes within it. He expected he would feel some sort of surge of power through his cells. He closed his eyes and waited for the sensation.
“Let’s wait a couple of minutes and let the serum travel through your body,” the scientist said.
Victor lay still, waiting. He felt nothing, but didn’t give up hope. He tracked the aches and pains in his body, waiting for them to dissipate.
Ten minutes later, Victor didn’t feel any different, except for the rage coursing through him. He opened his eyes and looked at the scientist sitting next to him, regarding him with a clinical eye.
Victor motioned the man to come closer, as if he wanted to tell him something. Victor then let his veil of disguise drop, and the scientist tried to draw back away from Victor, horror on his face. He was too slow. Victor smiled, revealing his fangs, and relishing in the pure terror on the man’s face as he came mug-to-mug with a pure-bred vampire. Victor’s long pasty white bald head, the large, black evil eyes, his bony body, long claws, and of course, the gleaming white fangs. Victor had the scientist by the nape of the neck, and brought the man’s neck to his mouth.
“You have failed me,” Victor hissed into the man’s ear. “And now I’m very, very angry.”
With that, Victor sunk his fangs into the scientist’s throat, blood shooting out of the artery and arcing across the wall. The man could only try to fight back for a moment, and then life left his body.
When Victor had finished, he let the man slump to the floor. He was slightly disappointed in himself for losing his temper with the scientist, but it was a good thing he employed two scientists to work on his rejuvenation serum. He only hoped the other one wouldn’t fail as well.
The boy in the cot next to him groaned. Victor cloaked his true self again into the illusion of the brown haired, blue-eyed male. The boy opened his eyes, and Victor watched with pride as the kid’s fangs elongated from the smell of the blood that covered the room.
The boy looked down at the scientist lying on the floor. Victor sat up and said, “Feed my boy. Feed. He is yours now.”
The boy pounced on the man, his fangs sinking into the man’s neck. He took greedy pulls, draining the man.
Victor watched the boy and contemplated nature versus nurture.
He had changed the boy’s nature by altering his DNA. Yet, as he thought back over the time he had the boys in his care, all of them had become more bestial, more vampire than human, and that had happened through nurture. He had encouraged the boys to accept their vampire side, to embrace it, to allow it to run free in their veins. He had asked the boys to not hold back on their new instincts, to let go and follow them, and for the most part they had. In fact, their behavior bordered on full-vampire. They were ruthless in their kills. Most were becoming intensely selfish, and totally untrustworthy. They were out for number one, and didn’t give a shit about number two, three, or twenty. Victor knew that in order to keep his reign on the boys, he would have to make sure that their loyalty remained to him, and to him alone. He could not let any of the boys take charge or rise above their stations as future slayers.
The boy looked up to Victor, blood smeared on his lips and cheeks. “Thank you, father.”
Victor smiled at the boy. “You are very welcome, my son. It’s my duty to keep the future of our great race nourished.”
Chapter 26
Emily moved around the kitchen, her and Thaddeus cleaning up from dinner. She had shooed the boys and Mark outside after they had finished eating, claiming none of them needed any more time in front of the Wii. Mark had complained the loudest.
She had watched for a few moments as Mark impressed the boys with his ability to leap from large cliffs, soar into a free fall, and then make his wings appear before slamming into the ground. She had mused on the safe phrase her and Brandon shared: Angels fly at night. They most certainly did. Mark looked heavenly as he glided through the evening sky, his wings shimmering in the moonlight.
The boys thought it may have been the coolest thing they had ever seen, and Emily had reminded them that they didn’t have wings, and doing what Mark was doing was not to be tried. As she watched, she did have to admit that it was pretty awesome.
They had pulled together some spaghetti with garlic bread, and the clean up was easy. She and Thaddeus worked together in an easy, comfortable silence of two people who had been around each other for a long period of time, and didn’t need to fill the dead air with unimportant words.
She watched out of the corner of her eye as Thaddeus dried the last pot. God, she could feel the worry rolling off of him in waves, and she wanted to comfort him, to step into him and throw her arms around his big body and tell him that everything was going to be okay. He was such a good man. vampire. Whatever.
Emily knew he was concerned about Aiden, and thinking of them as brothers was hard to do. Where Thaddeus was fair and light, Aiden was dark, evil. There just wasn’t another word she could find to describe him. Aiden also possessed chiseled features, just as Thaddeus did, and he was as tall as Thaddeus and just as broad and muscular, but his eyes, not to mention the tattoos and piercings, made him look like the type of guy that a girl would bolt across the street if she saw him walking toward her on the sidewalk. She couldn’t imagine two brothers being anymore opposite.
However, one thing she did know was that Aiden was in pain. It was almost a force onto itself. She sighed, and hoped that one day he would be able to find his peace.
Just off the Great Room, two large, sliding doors had revealed a huge dining room area. Earlier she had helped Thaddeus set up what was beginning to look like a central command for finding the missing kids. Emily had a street map of Reno in her car, and that went up on the wall.
They had spent some time on the phone with Thaddeus’s brother Cy, and he had pinpointed the addresses of where the kids lived and where they were taken. Both sites were marked with corresponding colored tacks. Cy had also emailed pictures of the boys along with their names, and they were put up on the wall alongside the pictures that Thaddeus had taken from the pedophile’s house. Cy was busy running those pictures from one of the many, many databases available to a cyber hack to see if he could find a name to go with the pictures. If they could identify the kids and pinpoint their addresses, then Thaddeus could show up on their doorsteps and play the human cop with information on a possible kidnapping plot. Sure, it would scare the parents to death, but at least their kids would be safe.
Despite the vampire’s incredible computer skills, Cy was unable to track down anything on Victor Marano. “It’s as though he never existed!” Cy proclaimed through the speakerphone, irritated not to have been able to find anything.
Thaddeus told him to do some digging among the vampire race databases, chat rooms, blogs, anything he could find, as it was now known that Victor was actually vampire, not human. Cy huffed, mumbled something about wasted time and the Microsoft firewall, and then clicked off.
Emily turned her attention back to the last few dishes in the sink, and thought briefly of the trajectory her life had taken in the past two days, how it had spun out of control, and now seemed settled, like her and her son belonged where they had ended up, like they had landed right where they were supposed to be. It definitely felt right. And the feeling that settled into her bones was also about Thaddeus. She felt it in her heart, her brain, her bone marrow, no matter how ridiculous it sounded, she loved him. They had only known each other two days, they were from different species, from different worlds even though they shared the same planet, but she did love him. As comfortably as they worked together in the kitchen, they were also a good pair in the search for the kids. They thought along the same lines, both of them driven and focused.
Partners, she thought. Somehow, in this very short period of time together, they had become partners. At least that was how she felt.
She looked back over at Thaddeus who had just put the pot away in the overhead cabinet. She took four steps over to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, her chest pressing into the hard plain of his back. They stood like that for a moment, their breathing in sync. She then let her hands travel up to his chest, and back down over his stomach. She felt her body heat rise, that delicious ache in her lower belly that never seemed to be satisfied for long, and decided to take things a step further and she let her hand roam down past his waist. Thaddeus growled, and then placed his hand over hers, stopping its decent.
He held her hand and turned around to face her. His face was grim. He softly kissed her fingertips.
“You need to leave tomorrow night,” he said quietly.
She winced as if he had slapped her. But then she thought, of course she needed to leave. He would want his peace and quiet back. She may have felt that she was where she was supposed to be, that they worked well together as partners, but that didn’t mean that Thaddeus felt anything like that at all. She felt stupid thinking that perhaps there was a little of what she felt on his end as well.
He had gone from living alone to having a house full of people, not to mention drama. And just because they had slept together didn’t mean that he loved her. No, she imagined that for a man like him, a man who looked like he did, and man who moved like him and had sex practically seeping from his pores, sexual conquests were a dime a dozen.
She pulled her hands away. “Of course,” she said, looking at his chest. “Would you mind finishing up the last dishes? There are only a couple. I’ll go and get packing.”
Not that she had a lot to pack—a few pairs of sweats, jeans and t-shirts. But she needed to get away from him to nurse her bruised ego and her aching heart. He didn’t want her around. He had made that very clear.
As she walked across the Great Room, she didn’t see him pass her until she almost ran into him at the door leading to the bedrooms. Damn vampire skills. She stopped in front of him and swiped at a tear. She tried to make her way around him, but he wouldn’t let her pass.
“Emily,” he said softly, and gathered her up in his arms. “I didn’t handle that very well.”
As they rocked together, she cried and listened to him explain how Cy was preparing documents that would allow her and Brandon to start anew. They would have different names, social security numbers, and she would also have a fresh credit history. His brother would also go into the computer files at the police station and erase all of her records pertaining to her run-in with the pedophile two nights prior. She would also have a lot of cash to help her start her new life, as well as transportation to wherever that new life would begin. All she had to do was choose where that destination would be. He had set it all in motion, and it would be completed by dusk tomorrow.
Emily felt like she was being dismissed with a champagne flute stuck in one hand, a rose in the other, and then shoved into a limo and squired away. The first thing she felt was indignation at him assuming that she couldn’t take care of herself, which she had managed to do for many, many years, thank you very much. But then reality hit, and she realized that she needed his help. Right now, she was in big trouble with the law, and if he could make that disappear, it would definitely help. And there was the fact that she now had a vampire for a son. Thaddeus had been working with Brandon to help him integrate into his new life, and their lives from now on were going to be very, very different.
She marveled at Thaddeus’s kindness and generosity, but she felt like a flower that had grown its roots and was now being pulled out and hauled somewhere else.
She lifted her eyes to his, and saw pain in his eyes. Her heart swelled a little, knowing that the feelings she felt weren’t one-sided. She could see in his eyes that he had cared for her as well, and this impending goodbye would be difficult for him. And it twisted her heart knowing that he was hurting as she was.
“I don’t want you to leave,” Thaddeus blurted.
They both smiled a little, and then Emily asked, “If we both want this, then why? Why am I leaving tomorrow night?”
Thaddeus pulled her to him again, wrapped his arms around her and put his chin on top of her head as he spoke. She snaked her arms around his waist.
“Because if you don’t leave, you’ll be killed, and I won’t let that happen to you.”
Emily was confused. How would she be killed? If he had wanted to kill her before, he had plenty of opportunities to do so. Was he talking about Aiden? Yes, he was scary looking, terrifying in fact, but she knew that he wouldn’t lay a hand on her either. The boys? She knew in her soul that Brandon wouldn’t hurt her, and Robert seemed harmless enough.
“I don’t understand,” she murmured into his broad chest.
He brought her over to the couch, the same couch when he had told her about the vampire race just the previous night. He gave a brief history of the race, The Council, and then moved on to the creation of the vampire race as it was now.
The Council’s main directive was to make sure the vampire race survived, and to do so they would need to mate with humans so that the harsh vampire traits, the cold, lifeless scary-ass eyes, the really hard facial features, and the huge fangs, would soften, and vampires would be able to pass as humans. He grudgingly told her about the rapes of human women, and how the babes born to the humans were raised to hold humans in high standards, to never kill and only take what was necessary for their survival. He went on to tell her how his mother had been chosen to breed the soldiers of the race. He told her how her mother had cloaked herself and lured strong human men into her bed, and then killed them.
“My mother is pure vampire, Emily,” he said. “She is frightening to look at. She is mean and nasty, a self centered, selfish, evil bitch. There isn’t a shred of humanity in her. She is also a control freak, and right now, we are breaking one of the rules of vampire law: You know about my race. This is a death sentence for both of us if she were to find out. I could give a rat’s fuck about my own life, but I’ll not have yours put in danger.”
Emily sat stunned. “Your mother? She would kill you? Me?”
Thaddeus nodded. “Without a second thought.”
“Even if you told her that we … that we are together?”
Thaddeus nodded again, taking a lock of her hair and twisting it around his finger. “Pure vampires are ruthless, Emily. They are set in their ways, and they follow their path stringently. My mother will show up here sometime, well, her spirit will, not her corporeal form. I can’t have you in that position. I won’t put you in danger.”
“What if we tell The Council that I am helping? What about me having a vampire for a son now? Doesn’t that give me any sort of pass?”
Thaddeus watched her hair twist in his fingers. “I can’t take that chance, Emily,” he said softly. “It would kill me to know that you were no longer on this Earth. Besides, Brandon needs his mom. You need to be there for him.”
Emily knew he was right. Her first priority needed to be Brandon and helping him adjust to his new life as a vampire. How they were going to manage that, she didn’t know. But they would get it figured out, taking it one day at a time.
“Will I see you again?” she asked, afraid to look at him. Instead she studied the floor, steeling herself for an answer she didn’t want to hear.
He brought her chin up so that she had to look at him. “As much as it pains me, fucking kills me Emily, I think the answer needs to be no.”
She looked away again and nodded. “Okay,” she whispered.
Thaddeus’s phone rang. He never took his eyes off of her as he reached into his pocket. “Yes,” he said into the phone without enthusiasm.
He listened, but didn’t do much talking. Every now and then he threw in an “okay” or an “uh-huh.”
