“But if you find me and free me—” he began.
“You’ll kill him. I get it.” I looked back at the temple behind us. He was like it, in a way. Hugely powerful, currently completely useless. “Why me? Why haven’t you asked someone else for help?”
The temple shimmered like a mirage and we were in the hilly desert again, forcing me to look back at him. His face was serious and drawn. “You’ve already been a servant long enough to know that admitting weakness among our kind is halfway to defeat.” I nodded, and he went on. “When I woke you from your last dream to save your life—did you kill the one who tried to take it?”
I closed my eyes. “No. Which was probably a mistake.”
“Probably,” he agreed. “But it shows that you are ruthless enough to contemplate your Master’s death for freedom, but not ruthless enough to kill without thought.”
So he was willing to help me because I seemed unlikely to kill him. Damned with faint praise, once again. “There are others here who want out. Why not one of them?”
“Because they’re not also with a child they want to keep.”
My baby was just a little extra assurance that I wouldn’t kill him for his blood once I found him. I hugged myself. “Why’re you so weak?”
“I’ve been starved for the better part of three centuries. A servant shoves in pieces of half-drained corpses that I wouldn’t feed a dog, then leaves them here to decay and foul me.”
“A servant? Which one?”
“Different ones over time. This most recent one, I could not say. The scent they leave behind is artificial—your world, not mine. And no one ever visits at night. But they’ve been absent for a month now.”
Was there a way I could ask the others, safely? Jackson, maybe, but none of the rest of them. “How long does it take a vampire to starve to death?” I wouldn’t only have to free an angry vampire—I’d have to figure out how to feed one too.
“Hopefully not as long as it takes for you to find me,” he said, lips pulled thin. “If you value your own life, and that of your child, you must find me quickly.”
There were other things I wanted to know—how his dream powers worked, how he’d originally been trapped, and just how old he was—but for now the final thing I needed be sure of was my safety. “You promise you won’t hurt my child? Or me? Or my friends?”
“Do you have any friends here?” he asked, eyebrows rising.
“Who knows how long it’ll take me to find you. I might by then.” I already knew I didn’t want to kill Jackson. I frowned at myself. Dammit, Edie,
dammit.
“Then I promise to not kill you, your child, or anyone you mark as friend. Just find me as soon as possible.”
Easier said than done. But if the Shadows had stuck around overnight, maybe they could be convinced, or threatened, into helping me. “I’ll start looking in the haystacks for you tomorrow.”
A questioning look clouded his face. “There is no hay down here.”
“It’s called an idiom. You’ve missed out on some things. Let me go back to sleep, okay? I might need the rest.”
He looked for a moment like he might refuse me, long enough for me to wonder if even vampires could get lonely, and then acquiesced. I slept.
* * *
I woke up feeling unrested, but at least no one had tried to kill me during the night. Or morning. Whatever it was right now. I hadn’t felt the moment when the night had changed to dawn, but I had a feeling that Raven was asleep—it was as if a subtle weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I found the remote and clicked on the light and heard Celine complain inside her bed-palace.
“I’m going to the restroom. If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, send reinforcements.”
Celine snorted. Her foot had pushed a corner of her curtain out of the way, and I could see her face pressed into a pillow, hiding from the light.
I took the bag of fast food with me, to throw away, or so I could confer with the Shadows in private. The sooner I could set them loose to look for the prisoner, the better.
I moved the bell and stepped out into the hallway—and found a pile of shirt boxes, with a nice note on top.
Now you owe me,
it said, and beneath that
Estrella,
with a flourish, as if she were signing an autograph for a fan.
So that was the female vampire’s name.
The door opened up behind me and I jumped, afraid Celine was coming after me. She held her ground. “What? You’re not the only one with a bladder,” she protested. Then her eyes flicked to the hip-high boxes of clothes, and she saw the note. Her lips, still the color of last night’s lipstick, puckered as if she’d just licked a lime.
“I didn’t mean to—”
Celine held her hand up for silence, and then walked around me, hand still outstretched. After that she sauntered on to the bathroom, and I was afraid to follow her.
* * *
It was probably impossible to piss Celine off more than her Mistress’s actions already had. I opened up the top box. It had a kilted skirt, pleats ironed neatly, and a folded white top below that. The second box held shoes, for the skirt in the next box—a slinky floor-length skirt with a tight black tube top?
Each box was as improbable as the next, and many of them came with suggested shoes or items of jewelry. Was she honestly suggesting I should wear any of these? They did look like they were my size, but they were uniformly hideous—and none of them would look good on me a month from now, or a month after that.
Maybe Natasha would at least give me a lab coat. Hopefully not made out of test subjects’ skin. At that dark thought, I felt queasy for the first time since I’d left the
Maraschino
and cursed my overactive imagination—then wondered if the safety of Raven’s blood had been breached. It wasn’t only me “wearing” his blood out—it was my wonderfully immune and tenacious half-shapeshifter child too. I paused, trying to find a tickle of morning sickness in myself, not sure if I was hoping it was gone, or back—it would be nice to feel pregnant again, even if it meant throwing up some.
Things are going okay in there, right, baby?
Nothing in response. But I was only five or six weeks along. I hadn’t had any bleeding or cramps. I’d have to assume the best for now, because I couldn’t afford emotionally to think about anything else.
I opened up the next box from Estrella, expecting another hideous outfit and finding it. A romper, the sort of thing that I wouldn’t have even worn back when I was thirteen. I prepared to toss it aside, and then thought better and checked. It, unlike all the other options so far, had pockets.
Outfit acquired.
I was wearing it by the time Celine came back, but I didn’t dare talk to the Shadows with the chance of her hearing. She took one look at me and snorted before remounting her bed. I was hoping she’d draw the curtains closed and I could turn the light off again, but there was a polite knock at the door and I answered it, knowing no one but Jackson would bother.
His eyebrows rose, taking in my sartorial choice. “You’re wearing that?”
“Yep.”
“Well,” he said, surveying the other boxes in the hall, “all right then. I came to get you—Natasha’s up, and she’s already sciencing away.”
“Thanks.” I was torn. Now there was no way to get to the Shadows safely. Even if I took the fast-food bag to the bathroom, Jackson would be right outside, listening in. Despite the fact that he’d trusted me with his secret, I didn’t want to share them—if they managed to find the man in my dreams, they were my ticket out of here, maybe even before Anna got involved. I looked back into the room behind me. “Hey, Celine, I want to save these fries for later.”
“I’ll get more—” Jackson said.
“I like cold ones, and salt.” I gave him an I’m-not-quite-in-control-of-my-hormones smile. He shrugged, and Celine groaned.
“Fine. Leave me the remote.”
I turned off the light and tossed it into her bed.
* * *
After we’d walked down half the hall he turned toward me. “You realize when you get back, those fries’ll be laced with cyanide?”
“I’m okay with that.” I wished I’d been able to set the Shadows loose. At least I’d left them in the dark—assuming they were still in the room.
“So what’s with the boxes?” Jackson asked, leading me back toward the crossroads.
“Estrella wants to be on my good side.”
“Like a lamprey eel,” he said with a snort.
“This is better than spandex.”
“Not by much.”
There was an awkward silence between us when I knew what I wanted to ask, but not how to ask it. “How’d the rest of last night go?”
“Did I find two more test subjects? Yes.”
I twisted my lips to one side without saying anything.
“After a while it gets easy. Until people start coming in here and looking at me like you are.” He turned away from me, as if there were something interesting passing by on the gray stone wall. “You do what you have to do to get by. The ends justify the means, and all that.”
I had a lot of questions for him about how House Grey was “protecting” humanity by having him get people for Natasha to kill, but I knew they’d have to wait. “So all the bodies get lye’d afterward?”
“Yeah. But there haven’t been any new ones for about a month.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure. The cages are empty, and Natasha keeps needing new people—maybe she’s doing her own cleanup now. There’s more than one key to the lye chamber.” He shrugged.
“Were all the bodies that you disposed of … intact?”
He gave me a surprised look. “No. Why?”
I shrugged. “No reason.” I had a feeling I knew who was now feeding the prisoner, intermittently.
The plot thickens, baby.
I wondered what had changed with her research during the past month, though.
We were almost at the crossroads. I knew we wouldn’t be going down the darker path I’d taken last night, and since I still wasn’t sure about the Shadows, my search might be on my own. I didn’t think I could ask for a flashlight, but maybe I could get away with a little less. “Jackson, can I borrow a lighter?”
His attention was back on me in an instant, perhaps imagining Celine’s bed going up in flames like a pyre. “Why?”
“I used to smoke,” I lied. “Might as well start again while I’m invulnerable now.”
“No, you didn’t. Your teeth are too nice. And you don’t need to be going down dark hallways, besides. You have an assignment,” he said with a tone. To spy on Natasha on House Grey’s behalf. Right.
We reached a metal door, and Jackson opened it with one hand.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The doorway led to a short hall, and I could hear the whirring of ventilation ducts. “Negative air pressure?” How’d they manage that down here?
“Only the best for Raven’s princess,” Jackson said with a nod. He opened up the next door, and the stone floor changed to tile.
Natasha’s room was a lab. It was twice as big as Celine’s room, and had partitions with shiny fume hoods and brown glass light-proof jars of chemicals. Several machines thrummed—I recognized some of them from biology lab, centrifuges and a spectrometer, but others I couldn’t name. Levered refrigerator doors lined one wall.
I’d been imagining something medieval-torture-chamber-esque, not white floors and shining metal. Then again, some of the worst atrocities known to man had been done in the name of science—and revenge, if you counted the
Maraschino.
“Natasha! Delivery!” Jackson shouted beside me, then, more quietly, “She doesn’t like it when I wander around in here.”
“Of what?” Natasha yelled back.
“A co-scientist!”
Not hardly. I stuck my hands in my new pockets and waited for her to appear.
When she rounded the corner she was wearing a lab coat. Her hair was in a high ponytail again, safety goggles perched on top, and her lipstick was a childish shade of fuchsia pink, the only pop of color against the rest of her black. When she saw my outfit, she broke into an amused grin. Rompers were pretty nonthreatening; I’d accidentally made a good choice. She waved her hand in dismissal at Jackson. “I’m done with you now, janitor.”
“I’m supposed to take her back whole at nightfall,” he said.
“Yeah, yeah,” she agreed, and kept waving.
Jackson’s face wasn’t as positive, but he left the way we’d come without comment. One of the machines in the room picked up speed, like a washing machine finishing its cycle.
I hadn’t realized until right then how alone we’d be. The last time I’d been alone with her father he’d brutally dislocated my shoulder. Fear surged inside me at the memory—Nathaniel’d hurt me, he’d hurt Asher, and he’d killed four thousand people, all to rescue her. A tar-black flower blossomed in my heart, a petal for each dark idea of how to make her pay me back for what he’d done—
She leaned in, startling me from my line of thought. “I said, at least you have closed-toe shoes!” she shouted as though I were deaf.
I blinked and looked down. I was still wearing my trusty tennis shoes. The ones I’d been through hell and back in. “Yeah.” Reality was back and the darkness was gone. I wanted to keep it that way. I curled my hands into fists, biting my nails into my palms.
“I’ll order you safety goggles and a lab coat. Try to find some pants, okay? Sometimes we use phenol, and I don’t want you melting spots into your legs. You won’t need them today, I’ve already done all the work with the last sample batch.” She turned and walked away, still talking, assuming I was following after her. The light caught the charm bracelet I’d seen before on her wrist and made it sparkle.
Natasha paused and looked back at me. “Well? Come!” she said expectantly. I trotted up to her like an obedient dog without thinking. I’d forgotten Raven had told me to do whatever she’d said until that exact moment.
She watched the surprise on my face and frowned. “I forgot he tied you to me, sorry. I’ll try not to use it, as long as you don’t go crazy, okay? What I’m going to show you next might startle you.”
It felt weird to have her sympathy after I’d been guilty of such dark thoughts. “Okay,” I said with trepidation.
She nodded and pushed the door open, revealing what was inside. “Meet test subject sixty-four.”