Chapter 17: Dinner
The red dot pulsed, a single, malevolent heartbeat on the screen.
“Stay here,” Luka said, his voice stripped of all texture. It was a command carved from ice. “The wards on this structure will hold. Nothing gets through that door unless I allow it. You do not open it. You do not look out the window. You become a part of the concrete.”
He was at a steel cabinet in seconds, unlocking it with a key he produced from a chain around his neck. Inside, Sloane glimpsed polished wood and cold steel. He retrieved a long, narrow case.
“What are you doing?” Her own voice sounded thin.
“Leading them away from you. If they’ve found the perimeter, they’re tracking a scent. Mine is stronger. Older.” He opened the case. Inside, nestled in black foam, lay two identical blades. They were not knives. They were stilettos, maybe ten inches long, with simple cruciform hilts. The metal was a non-reflective grey, like old bone. He slid them into sheaths at the small of his back, hidden by his sweater. “If I’m not back by dawn, there is a cache of supplies beneath the floor panel under the rug. Wait two nights, then take the SUV and go west.”
He said it like he was giving her the weather. Like it was a simple contingency. The finality of it stole her breath.
Then he was at the door, a hand on the heavy steel handle. He paused, looking back at her. In the low light, his face was all stark angles and shadows, the man she’d driven north with utterly gone, replaced by something ancient and lethal. “Do not follow me, Sloane. This is not a gallery. This will be wet, and dark, and without witnesses.”
The door opened, a sliver of biting night air, and he was gone. The lock thudded back into place with a sound like a tomb sealing.
Silence.
It was worse than the tension. It was a vacuum. She stood frozen in the center of the room, listening to the frantic drum of her own heart. The red dot on the screen was moving, circling. Leading them away, he’d said. Her lungs felt tight. The concrete walls, meant to be a fortress, now felt like a burial slab pressing down on her.
This was her pattern.The waiting. The fort of blankets while the monsters screamed. She’d spent a lifetime building rooms like this in her head and sitting quietly inside them.
“Fuck that,” she whispered to the empty air.
The defiance was a spark, igniting the strange new fuel in her veins. She moved to the window, keeping to the edge, and peered down into the ravine. At first, nothing. Just wind in the pines, the scrape of branches. Then a flicker of movement, impossibly fast, a shadow detaching from a deeper shadow near the tree line. Luka. He moved with a fluid, predatory grace that made her skin prickle. He wasn’t running. He was stalking.
She lost sight of him. The compulsion was a physical pull, a wire hooked behind her sternum. He’d told her to stay. He’d spelled out the smart, survivable play.
Sloane had never been good at playing smart.
She found the smaller side door—a utility exit, she guessed—and tested the handle. It was stiff, but unlocked from the inside. He’d secured the main entrance, not thinking she’d be this stupid. Cold air, sharp with the scent of pine and decaying leaves, rushed in as she slipped out.
The gravel was treacherous under her boots. She stuck to the softer ground at the edge of the tree line, using the dense trunks for cover. Her senses felt amplified, the night vibrating with details she normally wouldn’t catch: the rustle of a mouse in the dry ferns, the distant drip of water, the brittle snap of a twig far ahead. His senses.
She crept closer, the sounds guiding her. Then she heard it—the wet, meaty impact of a fist, a grunt of surprise that ended in a gurgle.
She ducked behind a thick pine, her breath fogging in the air.
The clearing ahead was a scene from a nightmare painted in monochrome. Luka stood in the center, a statue of controlled violence. Two figures lay at his feet, one motionless, the other twitching feebly. Their outlines seemed wrong, too long in the limb, hunched. A third circled him, a low growl rumbling in its chest.
“Voronin sends pups to do a wolf’s work,” Luka said, his voice calm, almost bored. “It’s insulting.”
The circling vampire lunged. It was a blur. Luka moved faster. There was no dance, no finesse. He sidestepped, his hand flashing to the small of his back and coming up in a silver arc. The stiletto punched into the attacker’s throat with a sound like a shovel hitting wet earth. Luka didn’t pull it out. He yanked sideways, opening a cavity. Dark fluid spattered the frozen leaves.
He let the body drop, already turning, sensing the fourth before Sloane did.
She’d been so focused on the fight, on his brutal efficiency, that she’d missed the soft compression of snow behind her. The smell hit her first—coppery decay, cloying and cheap, nothing like Luka’s clean, cold scent.
A hand clamped over her mouth, yanking her head back. She reacted on instinct, driving her elbow back, connecting with something hard. The grip loosened for a fraction of a second, long enough for her to twist.
His face was inches from hers. Younger than Luka, with hollow cheeks and eyes that were all pupil, black and hungry. He smiled, needle-like teeth gleaming in the dark.
“The little snack came out to play,” he hissed, his breath foul. “I can smell him all over you. What’s he doing, hiding behind a human shield?”
She fought, hard and dirty, using every trick she’d learned in back alleys and bad bars. A thumb to the eye, a kick to the knee. It was like fighting a sack of wet cement. He absorbed the blows with a chuckle, his strength obscene.
He got an arm around her throat, cutting off her air. She clawed at his forearm, her vision spotting. “He’ll be distracted,” the vampire whispered, his lips against her ear. “Watching you die. We only need a second.”
Then the pain came.
Not the sharp, clean puncture of Luka’s bite. This was a tearing, a ripping violation. His teeth sank into the side of her neck, not with precision, but with a frantic, greedy voraciousness. It was agony. White-hot fire lanced down her spine, seizing her muscles. She couldn’t even scream, the sound trapped in her strangled throat.She felt it. A sick, sucking pull, deeper than the physical wound. It felt like he was dragging her soul out through the rupture in her flesh. Her heartbeat, which had been a frantic drum, became a weak, fluttering stagger. The world dimmed, colors leaching away into grey static. The cold of the ground seeped into her bones.
Over the roaring in her ears, she heard a sound that was purely animal—a roar of raw, unfiltered rage that shook the trees.
The vampire’s head whipped up from her neck, blood smearing his chin. “Got your attention, old man?” he slurred, drunk on his stolen mouthful.
Then he was gone.
The pressure vanished. Sloane collapsed onto the frozen earth, the impact a dull thud. She lay on her side, gasping, her hand going to her neck. It was wet, hot, the flow terrifyingly steady. The edges of her vision were tunneling to a pinprick.
Through the narrowing dark, she saw Luka.
He had the vampire by the skull, his fingers buried in the man’s temples. There was no struggle. With a single, vicious wrench, he twisted. The crack was deafening in the sudden silence. He dropped the limp body like garbage.
He was at her side in an instant, his face looming above hers. The calm was gone, shattered. In its place was a feral panic she’d never seen in him. His eyes were wide, his lips pulled back from his fangs. He stripped off his sweater, balling it and pressing it hard against the ragged wound on her neck.
“Look at me,” he commanded, his voice shaking. “Sloane, look at me.”
She tried. His face swam in and out of focus. His skin, usually so pale, seemed to be glowing from within, a faint, sickly light thrumming just beneath the surface.
“Hurts,” she managed to whisper. Her voice was a stranger’s.
“I know.” His other hand cradled the back of her head, his touch incongruously gentle.“Listen to me. His blood is in you.It’s poison. My blood is… fighting it.Do you understand? You’re feeling a war inside your veins.”
She felt it. A cold, sludgy sickness spreading from the bite, clashing against the electric, live-wire energy Luka had given her. It felt like her blood was crystallizing, freezing and burning at once.
He looked from her face to the ruin of her neck, his expression collapsing into something like despair. The ancient weariness was back, but etched with a fresh, crippling fear.
“I can’t fix this here,” he breathed, more to himself than to her. He slid his arms under her, lifting her from the ground as if she weighed nothing. She cried out at the movement, the pain flaring bright and catastrophic.
He held her close against his chest, his stride eating up the ground back toward the concrete box. His heart beat against her cheek, a slow, steady rhythm that felt like the only anchor in a dissolving world.
“Stay with me,” he said, the words a low, desperate chant against her hair. “You do not get to leave. You detonated, remember? You’re still in the blast zone.”
Darkness lapped at the edges of her consciousness. The last thing she felt was the frantic, unnatural heat of his skin, and the vibration of his next words, more plea than promise.
“I need you to drink.”
He didn’t wait for a response she was too far gone to give. Cradling her against his chest on the cold concrete floor, he brought his wrist to his mouth. His canines, already extended, gleamed in the low light. He slashed the skin with a sharp, decisive motion. A dark, almost black line of blood welled up instantly.
“Drink,” he commanded again, his voice raw.
He pressed his bleeding wrist to her slack lips. Her head lolled back, unresponsive. The blood beaded and trickled down her chin, wasted.
A sound of pure, cracked desperation escaped him—half curse, half prayer. He brought his wrist to his own mouth, sucking hard to draw a more vigorous flow. Then, cradling her jaw in one hand, he leaned over her, sealing his mouth over hers. He worked her lips apart and let the hot, coppery warmth of his life spill from his tongue into hers.
At first, nothing. She lay limp in his arms, a pale doll streaked with her own ruin. He broke the kiss, his breath coming in ragged gasps, and simply let the blood drip from a fresh cut on his thumb directly onto her tongue. Drop by thick, dark drop.
A minute passed.
Her throat convulsed. A swallow, reflexive and weak.
Luka dripped more, his other hand pressing the ruined sweater harder against her neck, as if he could physically hold her together. “Come on,” he whispered, the words trembling. “Fight it. Get angry. Get up and yell at me.”
Another drop.
Then, a violent, full-body tremor seized her. Her spine went rigid, bending backwards in a tense arc against his restraining arm. Her eyes flew open, wide and sightless, reflecting the room’s dim light with a glassy, unseeing sheen. A raw, guttural noise erupted from deep within her chest—not a scream, but a primal, animalistic growl that vibrated through both of their bodies.
Luka held her tightly, his own muscles straining to contain the surge of violent energy coursing through her. He gritted his teeth, a low hiss escaping him as her fingers, suddenly claw-like, dug into the fabric of his shirt. He could feel it, the war inside her turning, the invading poison met by a torrential, savage tide of his own ancient power.