From Beyond the Darkening © 2008 by Kerry Allen
Chapter Three
The cab driver must have overcome his disapproval long enough to report her alleged breakdown. Why tonight, of all nights, did she have to encounter a conscientious human being?
”Thank you so much for rescuing me from that nice windowless building.”
Her eyes darted toward the eastern horizon, though it couldn’t yet be midnight. “Dawn is hours away. There’s no need to panic.” She added that last part for her own benefit, since Nate’s sarcasm pointed more toward annoyance than apprehension.
She fished her cell phone out of the bag to call another cab. They could drive around until midnight, when she could make another ATM withdrawal— most of which would have to go toward reimbursing the driver for prolonged chauffeur service. Then they’d be right back to no cash, no transportation, and no way to contact Leo.
The phone showed a full battery bar, but no signal. She walked back toward the highway, where she’d been able to connect earlier. Time to stop deluding herself. She didn’t need a ride to the bank. She needed a car, and one wasn’t going to come into her possession through lawful means. “I’ll get us a ride.”
”This game is getting old.”
She glanced over her shoulder. “What game?”
He leaned against a tree trunk, arms crossed over his chest. “It’s been fun crashing through the woods with you, sweetheart, but did you think I wouldn’t notice the lack of electrified fences and unfriendly Dobermans and bullets impeding our progress? Admit it. We’ve been walking in circles around the employee picnic area.”
”This isn’t a maximum-security facility like Nevada. The subjects brought here are in no condition to attempt escape, so there’s no need for measures to contain them. This lab specializes in autopsy and disposal.”
”What fun for you.”
Fun? She’d given up her identity six years ago, done terrible things to prove to evil people she belonged with them, and she’d been utterly alone for the duration. The closest thing she had to a friend was Leo, and his interest in her extended only to her knowledge of SPH secrets. If she dropped dead, it would mean nothing to him but the inconvenience of replacing her.
Stopping the march of genocidal zealots was a purpose worthy of some degree of sacrifice, but when forced to confront the harsh reality that she’d given up everything and no one gave a damn, she couldn’t help but wonder why she’d wasted so much of her life on someone else’s cause.
Sure as hell not for all the fun.
She left him there. He’d proven himself capable of tracking her if he wanted, and she couldn’t force him if he didn’t. With or without him, she was putting distance between herself and the lab.
She ducked behind a tree as two black SUVs raced past on the highway, closely followed by two police cruisers, sirens quiet. The last vehicle in line had K-9 emblazoned on its side. So much for their head start.
She hurried back to Nate. “In the universe’s continuing effort to spoil you, it looks like the dogs and bullets you requested will soon be delivered.”
”You think I’m spoiled?” He abandoned the support of the tree to tower over her. “Everything I’ve ever given a damn about has been taken from me. Let’s start with vision and blood and freedom and work our way back down memory lane.”
She probably outweighed him at the moment, but he still had a nine-inch height advantage, fangs, and a multitude of other vampiric talents that reduced her odds of a happy outcome if she antagonized him. She took a breath and softened her tone. “You’ve had a shitty week. I’m sorry. But we really need to focus on the future now, because the next twenty minutes or so will decide if we get another twenty minutes after that.”
Her mouth fell open as he melted into the darkness between the trees. “Where do you think you’re going?”
”I know where we can acquire a Porsche.”
”You can’t wander around in the woods.” His rebuttal consisted of being more sure-footed than she was with two working eyes. She stumbled after him. “They’ve called the mercs away from their lap dances and reminded local law enforcement of SPH’s generous contributions to their organization. They can spread the word a vampire is on the loose and have half the town marching through the woods brandishing torches and pitchforks in half an hour. You can’t go back to the lab.”
”You have a better suggestion?”
With the cops involved, there would be roadblocks in place within minutes, if not already, cutting off the highway as an escape route. “If we keep following this side road, we’ll eventually find a car or shelter.”
”Or a door right back into your lab.”
That was the last place she ever wanted to set foot again. “You’re just going to have to trust me.”
She cringed at the bitterness in his laugh. “Humans who work for my family tend to be loyal. Ex-employees, particularly ones who now carve up vampires for the enemy, don’t inspire the same confidence.”
She grabbed his arm. His skin burned with fever beneath her hand, his body protesting the drugs making it do things it wasn’t designed to do. “If you go back that way, they’ll kill you for sure. Maybe I’m toying with you, or maybe I can get you out of here alive. Maybe I’ve screwed this up so badly we’ll both end up dead, but right now I’m all you have.”
His muscles bunched under her fingers. Even in his present condition, he could snap her bones like pretzels and make a snack of her if he decided she was good for nothing else.
A low hiss expressed his displeasure with the arrangement. “It appears you’re the lesser evil.”
They kept to the cover of the trees, paralleling the road—until the road dwindled to nothing more than a rutted path and veered in the general direction of the lab. Defeat dragged her to a halt. Her entire plan hinged on what turned to be an access road that led straight to the place she wanted to escape. Without a better lay of the land, she had no way of knowing if ahead of them was a subdivision on the other side of a strip of trees a hundred yards wide or if they were on the edge of ten thousand acres of forest it would take a week to cross.
The sun’s effect on Nate didn’t worry her. Worst-case scenario, she could bury him during the day. He wouldn’t like it, but it would keep him alive.
What worried her was their pursuers’ advantage of daytime mobility. The dogs would lead them straight to buried treasure.
”The opportunity to go back has passed,” he said from a good distance ahead of her.
Easy for him to say when he couldn’t see their latest predicament. “The road is a dead end, no more theoretical salvation waiting somewhere along its path.”
”I know what’s behind me. The unknown in front of me couldn’t be any worse.” He ducked under a low branch, never missing a step. “If you want to stay here and wait for them to catch up, go right ahead. I’m not sticking around to see how that works out for you.”
Catching up and keeping up with him commanded all of her attention, taking her mind off whatever might be closing in behind them. The view was familiar—she’d spent a lot of years following him. He’d led her into all sorts of trouble with that confident stride. Like then, he seemed to know exactly where he was going.
Just when he had her convinced he wasn’t blind at all, he almost walked into an obstacle. “Stop!”
His momentum shifted in midstride, propelling him back toward her. He caught her with an outstretched arm and shoved her behind him, body taut with tension. “What is it?”
She couldn’t decide what surprised her more, that he listened to her or that his protective nature extended even to someone he thought of as the enemy. Some habits died hard. “There’s a fence.”
Luck smiled upon them for a change. It wasn’t high-voltage or razorwire, just the sort of board fence the locals threw up around horse farms and cattle ranches. There were no animals in the field to shed light on the nature of the operation, which suited Amanda, since it also meant no animals to startle and call attention to their trespassing.
She didn’t consider attempting to squeeze between the boards. The gap was far too narrow to accommodate a starved vampire, much less a well-fed woman overflowing a C cup. “We’ll have to climb.”
She pulled herself up on the first rung, settled one foot on the second, and swung her other leg over the top. He reached for the fence, and his hand connected with her bare thigh. The shock of heat nearly toppled her from her perch. “Hey!”
”What the hell are you wearing?”
She tugged the hem of the dress down an inch. As soon as she let go, it crept up two. “I was trying to seduce a frat boy, remember? Overalls weren’t going to do the trick.”
His fingers scorched a trail up her thigh until they encountered fabric. “Is that… spandex? Figures I’d be blind when a woman in a skintight miniskirt is scaling a fence right in front of my face.”
She slapped his hand away. “You’re not missing anything. It’s not a pretty sight.”
”Pretty enough for the frat boy.”
”His standards aren’t as high as yours.” She’d never been able to figure out exactly what Nate’s standards were, based on his eclectic choices in women, but she knew from experience she didn’t meet them.
Ever the showoff, he vaulted over the fence while she climbed down the other side. A sensation of exposure that had nothing to do with her skimpy attire kept her hunched low to present a smaller target as they waded through a field of overgrown grass. Common sense dictated safety relied on moving forward, but instinct favored hiding in the trees.
They scaled two more fences before coming to a house. She studied each dark window, searching for signs of life. The derelict air didn’t necessarily signal abandonment. Plenty of people weren’t big on home maintenance. “There’s a house up ahead. Wait here. I’ll go find out if it’s empty.”
She muttered a muffled protest when his hand closed over her mouth.
The other flattened over her belly and roamed up her ribcage. His breath ruffled her hair, a silent laugh. “Oh, it’s a skintight dress. Classy.”
She raised her foot and drove it back into his shin.
He lifted her a couple of inches off the ground, forcing her to stand on her toes and taking away her leverage for a second kick. “Be still. If I can isolate your scent and pulse, I can sort out who else we have to deal with before you resort to ringing the doorbell.”
She quit struggling so he could concentrate. Once she relaxed in his grip, his breathing fell into rhythm with hers. The hand splayed across her abdomen burned its imprint through the fabric and held her tight against his body. His heat seeped into her back, melting the stiffness from her muscles.
They stiffened right up again when his stomach rumbled.
”I have good news and bad news, and they’re the same.” Slight pressure of the hand over her mouth bent her head, exposing her neck to the brush of his lips. “You’re the only thing larger than a cat within a quarter mile with blood in its veins.”
Silence beat against her eardrums. The night held its breath with her, waiting for the danger to pass or be consummated.
She couldn’t blame fear for the acceleration of her pulse. A number of feelings vied for the spotlight, but that wasn’t one of them. Resignation—he outclassed her physically several times over, so fighting him would accomplish little other than tenderizing her for the inevitable. Curiosity—how far would he take it, a sip or a full siphon, and how much would it hurt? And something else she didn’t care to analyze too closely—more than a desire to provide what he needed, a yearning to submit, surrender, and have him take it.
She squeezed her eyes shut, disgusted with herself. Vampires didn’t have superhuman mind control abilities to make their prey more compliant like they did in the movies, so serving herself with a sprig of parsley for garnish was all her idea.
If she’d been subconsciously projecting the willing-victim vibe all along, the type of men she attracted suddenly made a lot more sense.
His hand slid from her mouth to cup her throat, fingertips gliding over a rapidly pulsing vein. “Are you offering?”
Being seconds away from stuffing her neck in his mouth could be construed as offering, she supposed, but now wasn’t the time. “I can spare you a drop or two, but at the moment, the need for transportation is more urgent than yours.”
He released her. “I love being told what I need and how badly. Reminds me of my mother.”
Caroline Hilliard was controlling, manipulative, and set in her ways, but she wanted the best for her son. Amanda respected the sentiment, if not her methods or her elitist idea of best, having suffered the consequences of both on more than one occasion. “Another insult like that, I’ll punch you in the mouth and remind you of your brother.”
A dilapidated barn behind the house suffered from a shortage of right angles, its drunken list creating a crack between door and frame. She peered inside, but the impenetrable gloom defeated investigation. She braced one foot on the frame and yanked on the door with both hands. It didn’t budge. “Hey, vampire, come here and put your muscle to use for something other than threatening women with the kiss of death.”
”I don’t threaten. They beg for it.”
She bit back a scathing remark about his conceit, since as she recalled, that wasn’t far from the truth. Women flocked to him, even on the rare occasions he wasn’t the best-looking guy in the room, because he was indiscriminately friendly, had an infectious laugh, and gave a convincing performance of devoting his undivided attention to every single one of them.
Unless, of course, he happened to have known one most of his life, in which case he treated her with slightly less regard than a used Kleenex.
She shot him a narrowed glance as he felt his way around the door. Too bad some random bimbo hadn’t saved his life. They could be having loads of fun together right about now. The idea pricked her temper, and she took it out on the nearest available target. “I hate to break this to you, but unless you have a donor who loves you for more than just your pretty face, you better accustom yourself to the idea of strong-arming your food for a while.”
”You volunteered.”
She could give him a number of perfectly good reasons why.
Losing a pint wouldn’t hurt her but would do him a world of good, so it was no different than her regular contributions to the Red Cross.
She had a monopoly on blood at the moment, and giving it away was marginally safer than having it forcibly extracted.
She had to keep him alive long enough to deliver him home.
But mostly, seeing him reduced to this condition, a constant reminder that if he’d been taken to any other facility at any other time, he could be dead right now, caused a pain in her chest that made it hard to breathe.
He probably had two dozen women at home who felt the same way, so getting all breathless and teary-eyed over him would be superfluous. “I’m going to need a new job. Might as well ingratiate myself now. Can you pull that door open or not?”
He braced his foot on the frame and seized the door with both hands as she had. When he pulled, the corner of the door gouged through the packed dirt in which it was embedded. The gap widened several inches at the bottom.
She dropped to the ground and wriggled through the opening. Her eyes rapidly adjusted to the new level of darkness, making the most of the moonlight leaking through the gaping seams of the roof. A truck that looked like a prop from a Depression-era movie squatted in the center of the floor. She followed every look with her hands to make sure, but the keys weren’t in the ignition, glove box, under the seat, or conveniently lying around anywhere else. Not yet discouraged, she grabbed a shovel from the corner and pushed it out the exit, squirming through in its wake.
He released the door, and it shuddered back into its original position. “Find anything?”
”Truck, no keys.” She lurched to her feet and reclaimed her gardening implement. “Shovel to dig out the door when I find the keys in the house.”
Despite her recent eagerness to carjack a cab, she hesitated over the locked door at the back of the house. More pressing things on his mind than an arrest for breaking and entering, Nate applied his foot to the knob and dislodged it from the frame with one kick.
The musty odor inside confirmed the residents were gone for good, not just for dinner and a movie. While she rifled through the kitchen drawers, he bent over the sink and washed the residue of grime and blood from his face with the dribble of stale water left in the pipes.
She found no keys but did unearth a flashlight to assist with the search. “I’m going to look around upstairs.”
Five minutes later—all the time required to search the empty second floor twice—she tromped down the stairs. “My hope for wheels is dwindling, unless you know how to hotwire a car by touch.”
”No, but that gap in my education will be rectified as soon as possible.”
He crouched in the narrow passage separating the kitchen from the living room, running his hands over the peeling linoleum.
”Drop a contact lens?”
”Ha ha. The floor sounds hollow here. I’m looking for—” He emitted a humorless huff of laughter. “I’m groping for an entrance to the cellar.”
She tapped her foot against the linoleum, then the hardwood a few inches away. “I don’t hear any difference.”
”It wouldn’t be much of a secret entrance if everyone could find it.”
”So of course, to conceal its location, they put it in the highest traffic area of the house.”
”Yeah, that area with the least lighting, the most noise, and a little bit of an echo to confuse the issue, where someone like you would pass right over it.”
That someone like you couldn’t have been more caustic. She tried not to take it personally. Her employer had soured her on humanity too. “What are you suggesting, this is some sort of vampire safe house, a neighborly distance from an SPH facility?”
”The closer we get to your organization, the more safety we tend to need.”
”So the smart thing to do would be invest in real estate elsewhere. This close is suicidal.”
”That it’s abandoned and right on their doorstep isn’t particularly encouraging, but unless you have a Plan B that’s far better conceived than what you’ve managed so far, it’s time to give some consideration to even less probable options.”
They’d already exhausted her Plan B, and the rest of the alphabet wasn’t lining up to volunteer alternatives. She cast the light over the walls and floor, looking for some kind of button or switch, not sufficiently hopeful to be disappointed when she found none.
He hadn’t yet felt his way to the metal strip holding down the linoleum where it met the wood floor. She slid the tip of the shovel under the strip and leaned on the handle. He rocked back on his heels to keep his balance when the floor tilted beneath him, and she let it fall back into place. “When you’re right, you’re right. Help me open it.”
A two-foot square flipped up to reveal a pit of such dense blackness, it might as well have been filled with tar. The beam of the flashlight penetrated only a couple of feet before being devoured by the dark.
Her throat tightened, making her voice thick. “You go ahead. I should stay topside and keep watch.”
”And fight off our pursuers with a shovel?”
A more comforting thought than falling into that hole or, better yet, getting wedged like a cork somewhere between top and bottom, unable to move, unable to breathe. “I can lead them away from you.”
”In that outfit, I’m sure they’d follow. However, I don’t relish the idea of being underground, blind and starving, with no clue what’s going on, so I think I’ll keep my seeing-eye human close. In you go.”
She scooted backward. “There’s no ladder, and I can’t see the bottom.”
”I’ll lower you down. It won’t be far.” He tossed the shovel down the hole. It banged a couple times against the sides of the shaft, but she never heard it hit bottom.
He grabbed her ankle when she tried to scuttle away. “Maybe I’ll toss you down a mineshaft and break every bone in your scantily clad body, and maybe it’s a gentle drop to the bottom ten feet down. Either is better than what the SPH will do to you when they catch you.”
She’d read reports detailing the handling of human sympathizers. The methods were very Salem, circa 1692. Which did she prefer, roasting over an open fire or a little claustrophobia?
She thought about it longer than most people would need to. “Okay, I’ll go.”
She tucked the flashlight between her breasts, the band of her bra holding it securely in place. She gripped his hand with both of hers and swung her legs into the hole. He stretched out on his belly to lower her. When his fingers loosened, her sweaty palms slipped free despite her desperate grip.
She dropped three feet, at most, before she hit bottom. She pawed at the flashlight with one hand and flailed with the other to ward off whatever subterranean monsters called this hell home. Her fingers collided with something long, narrow, rounded.
Bone-like.
She bit back a scream, thrust the flashlight at the skeleton… and discovered the shovel wedged sideways in the shaft at mid-torso height.
”Did the zombies get you?”
At least he hadn’t seen her make a fool of herself. “I’m holding my own. They eat brains, so you should be perfectly safe.”
He moved away when she directed the light toward him, but she thought she saw the flash of a grin just before he disappeared from view. Another scream gathered in her throat. “Um… You are joining me, aren’t you?”
”Just waiting for you to get out of the way.”
”Oh.” A less panicked look at her surroundings revealed an opening to a small chamber. She tugged at the shovel, but it stuck fast. “I’m moving, but I have to warn you, there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’re going to land unpleasantly on the shovel.”
She tapped the flashlight against the handle. If he could pinpoint a pulse a quarter mile away, he ought to be able to avoid a groin injury at a couple of yards.
Standing upright, the top of her head grazed the ceiling in the chamber. The horizontal dimension was about the same, the depth only slightly more generous. The space was about the size of an elevator car tipped on its side.
Nate slipped into the shaft, hanging from a handle on the underside of the hatch by one hand and using the other to slide bolts into place that would prevent the floor being lifted from above. Sealing out the enemy. Sealing them in.
She drank shallow breaths through her mouth. She couldn’t scream if she didn’t have any excess air in her lungs. “Watch your head over here. They only planned for short refugees.”
The light revealed a thin mattress on the floor and nothing else. The accommodations failed to live up to the luxurious standards of the Hilliard family. He was better off not seeing it. “There’s a bed, such as it is. Nothing else.”
He landed lightly on his feet behind her, clearing the shovel without mishap. “You take it. After a full day of genocide and a night masquerading as a woodland hooker, you must be exhausted.”
”I got you out, didn’t I?”
She interpreted his lack of thanks to mean he was so far unconvinced his fate had improved.
He mapped the room in a few steps, head bowed and hand upraised to follow the contour of the ceiling. “Do you have a name?”
”It doesn’t matter.” She slid down the wall, tucking her knees to her chest. If he could see, the view of her underpants would be scandalous. Of course, if he could see, they wouldn’t be having this discussion. He might have forgotten her scent, but he’d remember a face he’d seen as often as hers. “We’ll be out of each other’s hair soon. I can answer to Hey You until then.”
He sat against the opposite wall. With his legs outstretched, his heels touched her toes. “Tell me about your vampire fetish.”
His interest likely stemmed from boredom. She cooperated because the walls felt further apart when the air was filled with words. “It’s as made up as my willingness to join in a threesome, for essentially the same reason. There’s no room in my bed for me, a lover, and the constant companion all vamps have—that colossal ego.”
”I agree most are unjustly full of themselves, but I’m entitled to a bit of conceit, don’t you think?” He ran his fingers through his hair, incorporating the tails of the scarf with a flip at the ends.
She covered her smile with her hand. Even if he couldn’t witness the evidence of how easily he won her over, she didn’t care to broadcast her weakness. “You’ve looked better. It’s not that bad, though. It takes models millions of dollars of heroin to get the same look. More blood will help.”
She switched to his side of the cave and extended her arm. She jiggled the flashlight in her free hand and concentrated on the glowing dot dancing on the wall. She’d never been lunch before and really didn’t want to see her own flesh tear. “Keep in mind you still need my eyes, so don’t drain me dead.”
He laced his fingers with hers, establishing the illusion of intimacy. She’d seen him hunt many times. His technique more closely resembled courtship than stalking prey. About the time puberty struck, so did her desire to be that girl he flirted with and kissed and led off to some private place to take what he needed.
What an idiot she’d been.
”I had a playmate when I was growing up, a human girl.” He lifted her hand and rubbed the edge of her thumb against his jaw. “Her parents sent her to some fancy finishing school. She came home all grown up, except for the childish notion that becoming a vampire’s steady plaything would earn her special benefits.”
The only benefit she’d been after was his attention—back before he’d made it clear she could never be more than a plaything. “How stupid. Everybody knows vampires don’t fall in love with food.”
”That’s what I told her.”
She couldn’t give herself away by knowing too much. There had been hundreds of witnesses to his rejection and her tearful flight from the dance floor, during which she tripped on the hem of her dress and fell flat on her face. Hundreds of gawkers to laugh during the eternity that passed before she got to her feet, struggling not because she was injured, not because of the crushing burden of the additional humiliation, but because the world had been wrenched out from under her and she kept falling and falling with no hope of ever getting back up. “I’ve heard the story a million times. It’s been embellished over the years. Last time it made the rounds, she lost her glass slipper.”
”Does anyone ever mention what happened to her after that night?”
He traced the veins in her wrist with a fingertip. Her blood seemed to heat at his touch, licking a fiery trail up her arm, despite a stern internal lecture about the biological impossibility of such an occurrence. It was part of the hunt, the seduction, and like good prey, she was susceptible. She didn’t really want him any more than he wanted her. “I heard she developed an intense dislike of vampires and runs around staking them in their sleep. I also heard she became a professional Jell-O wrestler, so grain of salt advised. Are you going to bite or not?”
He touched his lips to her wrist, the caress of his breath sending a shiver racing along her nerves, then broke the contact. “Your poison seems to be doing its job. I have no appetite.”
She jerked her hand from his grasp. His mother had taught him well. He recognized inferior goods even when he was starving and she was anonymous. “I’ll try real hard not to cry.”
Easier said than done, she discovered as she crawled back to her side of the room.
”You can have the bed, Hey You.”
Tired and hollow, she took him up on the offer. The mattress wasn’t much softer than the floor, but it had the advantage of being as far away from him as she could get within the confines of the room. She faced the wall and closed her eyes, clutching the flashlight against her chest. The faint glow filtering through her eyelids offered meager comfort, but it was the only offer she was going to get.
From Beyond the Darkening © 2008 by Kerry Allen
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