Large buildings loomed in the distance ahead as they turned down another street. An industrial complex. Was Tor there?
She kept directing Vincent and he slowed as they entered wider streets and the coming dawn increased the amount of traffic on the roads. Her instincts led them onto the complex of warehouses and deep into the heart of them. They drove past countless buildings that all looked the same. How was she meant to find Tor in this place?
The internal compass that had been leading her towards Tor swung around and said he was behind her.
“Stop!” Eve twisted on the seat and looked out of the back window of the car. “I think we passed him.”
Vincent nodded and banked left, heading down a gap between two buildings. Serge cracked the back window and inhaled.
“Blood. Plenty of it.” He jerked his chin towards the building on their left. “This one stinks of it.”
Her heart leaped into her throat and she swung her gaze that way. A chill swept down her arms. Tor was in there. She knew it.
She reached for the door handle again and Vincent held his arm out in front of her.
“It’s too late.” He nodded towards the sky in front of them. The sun was rising higher, beginning to cast light down on the world.
Every instinct demanded she ignore Vincent’s warning and jump from the car and run into the building. She tamped it down, years of training and experience telling her that if she ran in there without knowing what she was up against and without a clear exit strategy, she would only end up getting Tor, and possibly herself, killed.
Vincent drove around the other building, away from the one that contained Tor, and parked the car. “It will stay shady on this side throughout the day. We will be safe here until nightfall.”
Eve looked back in the direction of Tor, unable to see the building through the one beside her. Her heart said to go to him. She shut out the compelling voice and closed her eyes, replaying her time with Tor to soothe her ragged nerves. He was strong. He would endure whatever Adam threw at him until they could reach him. He would survive.
The weaklings would feel the call of the sun and sleep through the day, believing they were safe.
As soon as night fell, Eve was going to show them just how wrong they were.
They shouldn’t have messed with her man.
It had been a mistake on their part.
And they would pay the ultimate price for it when she swept into that building with the three Law Keepers as her back up.
They would leave none alive.
Tonight, Adam died and her past died with him.
T
or watched the needle drawing his blood, barely aware of anything. Adam had filled his head with cotton wool again, the heavy dose of toxin he had administered keeping him weak and hazy, unable to fight back. Just the way the bastard liked it.
He weakly flexed his arms against the thick steel restraints. The strength left them, his muscles trembling from the minimal exertion, his bones like liquid beneath his skin. He hated this feeling infesting him. This weakness.
He felt human.
It disturbed him.
They had kept him out of his head on the drug since he had shaken the effects of the tranquilizer, waking strapped against one of the metal boards in the torture chamber of the compound. He had fought them and had managed to break one of the shiny cold steel cuffs. The moment his right arm had come free, leaving blood streaming down it from the cuts around his wrist caused by his struggle, he had lashed out at the nearest enemy.
Tor smiled grimly. He had clocked the bastard pretty good too, sending him crashing onto the grimy white tiled floor, his nose dripping blood all over it.
His head swam with words, not imagined this time. He tried to focus on them and the vampires around him, but didn’t have the energy. No matter how hard he fought the drug flowing through his system, he couldn’t completely shake the effects, but he had set in motion a plan to change that.
In an effort to regain his strength and give himself a chance at escaping, he had taken to pretending to be in a worse condition than he really was and was behaving himself. The plan had come to him when he had regained consciousness after hitting Adam and had again attempted to break free of his new, stronger bonds.
In response, they had upped his dose of tranquilizer, leaving him weaker and more hazy.
Before passing out, he had decided to behave himself and bide his time.
Now, they only administered more of the drug at set intervals.
The fuzziness in his head finally began to clear, allowing the mash of sounds around him to become individual voices. With each timed dose, he recovered quicker, the amount of drug not enough to keep him in a stupor for long. He was slowly recovering, purging the toxin from his body, undoing the effects of the mass quantities they had administered at first and when he had fought them.
His skull ached and his body throbbed with it. They had enjoyed beating him up for his disobedience, kicking and punching him, weakening him further and awakening a fierce hunger within him.
He had felt certain they wouldn’t stop until he had passed out but the doctor had come in and berated them, dragging them away from him, muttering things about needing their specimen intact.
Tor hated that word. They banded it around as if he didn’t have a name, was nothing but a blood bag they were going to use to orchestrate mass-genocide in an attempt to create a mass-turning.
He couldn’t let that happen and it was difficult to deny his desire to struggle against his bonds, break free, and tear the heads off every vampire in the room. He subdued that urge, telling himself that he would deal out some pain and death in time, when he was strong enough. Right now, all he could do was play the victim and keep up his pretence of being completely under the influence of the drug.
He closed his eyes and thought of Eve, using her image in his head to calm his pain. She had provided him comfort in the long hours of his captivity, but picturing her also stirred his anger and his fear.
He feared that she would have sensed his pain and would be coming to find him. He couldn’t have her enter the compound where they were holding him. He couldn’t let that vision of her death play out. He needed to find a way to escape before she could track him to this location. He needed to save her.
He focused on her, trying to detect whether she was already closing in on his location. Pain screamed through him in response, his tired and battered body unable to take the mental exertion needed to use his senses to that extent. He groaned and tipped his head back against the metal board supporting him, his skull banging hard on the cold surface.
“He need another dose?” one of the thug’s said.
Getting twitchy?
The two burly men Adam had with him at all times didn’t like him. They looked at him with a grim black edge to their expressions, but also a hefty dose of wariness, as if they knew he was stronger than they were and could eventually be the death of them.
They had been the ones so eager to beat him to death, and afterwards drug him until he felt certain he would die from the devastating effects on his body.
Tor grinned to himself. He would be the death of them.
“I think we should drug him.”
“He doesn’t need another dose,” Adam cut in, his tone sharp and commanding. “Look.”
Adam drew the needle from Tor’s vein and then slapped him, sending his head slamming to one side. Tor stayed there, his cheek buzzing and rage boiling through his veins.
Playing the addled victim was beginning to chafe on his pride. He wanted to bare his fangs and roar at them all, wanted to rail against his restraints. It wouldn’t get him anywhere though. They would raise his dose and he would be back to square one, fighting the drug to get it out of his system little by little, regaining a sliver of his strength.
Tor turned his thoughts back to Eve and tuned out the men he wanted to kill with his bare hands.
Part of him wished he had completed the bond with Eve through a true mating, awakening a stronger connection that would allow for telepathic communication. He needed to warn her away from this place of death. He knew with chilling certainty that something catastrophic was going to happen here.
He opened his eyes and looked across the room at the row of boards and the woman strapped to one. She was young, petrified, and the only human left alive. The man at the end of the row was dead.
Tor went back to glaring at Adam as the doctor stepped forwards and started drawing a second vial of blood from Tor’s arm.
Devil, he wanted to grip the bastard’s head in his palms and crush his skull. He wanted to make the bastard pay for what he had done to Eve, and what he had now done to him.
He couldn’t hold his tongue any longer.
“The humans play God, too,” Tor slurred, his tongue thick in his mouth. “Must be a disease among the weak.”
Adam just glared at him.
Tor smirked.
“You didn’t know Eve was special. She became a pureblood when you fucking killed her because the humans played God with her.” He chuckled, the sound hoarse as it scraped over his dry throat. “Maybe you weren’t good enough to get the same treatment. Only the best hunters got to become stronger, faster… better than vampire fodder like you.”
Adam shoved the doctor aside and punched Tor hard across the face, snapping his head to his left. Tor’s smirk widened and he spat the blood in his mouth onto the floor. Devil, he liked goading the bastard.
The good doctor sighed and went back to work. Adam paced around to his left, coming to face him again, his eyes deadly dark slits as they searched his. Looking for the truth behind his words?
After endless seconds, Adam said, “I would have known if that was true. Eve would have told me.”
Tor inched his shoulders up as much as he could manage with the restraints locked tightly around his wrists.
“Maybe you weren’t special enough to her. She told me.”
Adam growled at him, flashing his fangs, his eyes blazing gold.
Tor held his gaze, unfazed by the threat. “She’s mine now. She belongs to me.”
Adam took a step towards him. The doctor cleared his throat and withdrew the needle from Tor’s arm. Adam ground his teeth and stalked across the room to meet the doctor at the metal bench loaded with vials, glass beakers, and other implements.
The doctor began messing with a glass beaker and several different vials, one of them Tor’s blood.
“Why do this?” He couldn’t hold that question in.
Adam turned back to him. “The answer is so simple even you might understand. I offered the vampires information in exchange for making me stronger… imagine how I felt when they killed Eve and she woke up… still stronger than me. A pureblood.”
Tor took grim satisfaction from the flicker of pain in Adam’s golden eyes. The bastard deserved to suffer for what he had done to Eve. He was glad her awakening as a pureblood had grated on him for all these years, building up his inferiority complex to dizzying heights.
“I never believed the bullshit about there being a vast difference between the strength of the purebloods and the strength of other vampires…” Adam paced across the room, his boots loud on the white tiles, his agitation flowing from him in waves. “Until Eve attacked my ‘weak blooded’ kin and slaughtered several of them before we could contain her. I thought becoming a vampire would elevate me, but it didn’t. Eve showed me exactly where me and my weakling kin fitted into the equation… above the humans but far below her kind.”
Tor sneered. “You’re worse than the humans. At least humans have a purpose and a use. You’re beneath them.”
Adam punched him again, stoking his rage up another degree, making it even more difficult to hold his tongue and refrain from attempting to break his bonds.
“See, you purebloods and your superiority complexes.”
“Better than your inferiority complex.” Tor spat the blood at him this time. It hit the man’s black t-shirt square in the centre of his chest. Adam’s lip curled, flashing a hint of fang. Tor shook his head. “So your death took you down a level in life and not up. Why try to kill Eve and why do this to the humans?”
The doctor distracted Adam by holding a glass beaker out to him. Adam took it and added a dose of Tor’s blood to the layer of yellow liquid in the bottom. He swirled it together and held it up, pride shining in his golden eyes.
“They call it Midnight,” Adam murmured, transfixed by the beaker. “The point when something ends and something new begins.”
He turned his back on Tor and headed towards the woman. She began struggling again, hysterical as she wriggled and shrieked.
“I don’t want to die,” she screamed and fought her restraints, cutting her wrists and ankles, spilling blood that increased Tor’s hunger.
Adam calmly grabbed her jaw with one hand and shoved her head back against the metal board, pinning her in place. Tears streamed down her cheeks and she didn’t give up her fight until the moment Adam poured the yellow liquid into her mouth.
She coughed, her eyes wide and fixed on the ceiling. Her body shook, convulsions seizing her, so fierce the metal board rattled beneath her. Tor could only watch on as her thrashing reached a crescendo and then she slumped in the restraints.
He listened hard. No heartbeat.
“I will raise an obedient army and we shall see who has the weaker blood.” Adam handed the empty beaker back to the doctor and faced Tor.
He laughed, wouldn’t have been able to contain it even if he had tried.
Adam’s expression soured.
“You don’t know your bloodlines,” Tor said and shook his head, a smile starting to curve his lips. “You want to turn a group of humans en masse to make an army to fight the combined forces of the seven pure bloodlines? You’ve not done your research. That’s thousands of vampires, all stronger than your ones because you had to mix in weakling blood to stop them from becoming purebloods too. My kind will crush you and your followers before you even have a chance to raise an army big enough to take us on. You would have done better to hire Aleaeries demons.”