Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (36 page)

And yet that thought made him angry. It was
almost a pleasant sensation purely to have some other emotion than
the constant fear and paranoia. He hadn’t made much of a life for
himself here, and he was pretty sure he couldn’t make anything more
of it. But damn it if it wasn’t
his
life, and he felt that
he had a right to it. The Dusters were hunting one thing they
didn’t understand so instead went after anything else they didn’t
understand. Cory wanted to do something about it, but he didn’t
know where to begin. He didn’t even know if he had what it took to
make that kind of change. He was just a frightened kid.

A frightened kid with abilities that set him
apart from humans, he realized, but knowing that and using that
were two different things. He just wasn’t sure if he was ready yet
to go from the former to the latter.

Of course you are
, the voice said.
You always were. I made sure of it
.

He didn’t want to hear that voice. It was a
reminder that his head wasn’t like everyone else’s. But it
continued to nag him at the back of his mind, telling him there was
more he could do, there was more to see, if only he would allow
himself to be greater than what he thought he was supposed to
be.

Cory felt that momentary panic again as he
approached the blue building as though if he entered the walls
would close in on him and that bedroom would become the cage, but
he reminded himself that the two situations were not even close to
each other. Cory had freedom here. He wasn’t a prisoner. And Lynn
most definitely was not his jailer or guard. The halls in the
building led to more apartments and some rot and ruin, but there
was no door at the end from which no one ever returned. This was a
safe place, he had to keep reminding himself. It was the place that
FancyDancer couldn’t provide for him.

Still, even as he went through the back door
and up the stairs, he fought against the idea that everything was
wrong, that everyone around him including Lynn would betray him. He
expected the mystery head voice to tell him that he was incorrect,
but for now it was disturbingly silent.

Before he even reached the door Cory could
hear Lynn stalking around the apartment. She moved quickly and the
floorboards creaked beneath her weight, making it sound as though
the building itself found something objectionable about her
presence.

Stop thinking like that
, he thought to
himself.
There’s nothing wrong with Lynn just like there’s
nothing wrong with FancyDancer. She’s nice. She’s taken care of me.
She was the one who was there for me when I needed someone the
most. She’s pacing because you were an asshole and took off without
telling her. She’s worried
.

He opened the door, trying to think of what
he might say to calm her. Before he even made it over the
threshold, however, something grabbed him by the wrist and
violently yanked him into the room before slamming the door behind
him. His initial thought was that the only thing that could have
gotten the drop on him with that kind of speed was one of the
guards from the tunnel, and the thought instantly made his entire
body go rigid with terror. He tripped and fell face first to the
floor, waiting for the creature to pounce on him and restrain him
to be taken back.

Nothing happened for several seconds. He
couldn’t even hear anyone breathing. Maybe he had been wrong. Maybe
there was nothing in the room with him. This could just be a new
manifestation of his occasional breaks from reality. But there had
to be someone else in the room with him, Lynn at the very least. He
had clearly heard the pacing. But Lynn could not have been able to
grab him like that, nor would she.

As nothing continued to happen he pushed
himself up enough to see the apartment around him. At first he saw
no one. Then, in the shadows of a far corner, he saw Lynn crouched
low, her dirty hair hanging in her face yet not covering her
scowl.

“Lynn?” Cory asked. He knew he had to be
missing something important here, a detail that was crucial to
understanding what had just happened. He glanced nervously at
everywhere else in the room trying to see what had just attacked
him, but there was nothing.

“Where were you?” she asked. There was
something foreign about her voice that he had never noticed before,
a rasp deep in her throat as though she had just been choking on
some thick, viscous substance.

“I had to get out,” Cory said. He again tried
to think of some way to reassure her, but nothing about her
demeanor suggested she needed reassurance. In fact, as she stood up
and walked across the room, she looked more furious than anything
else.

“You had to get out?” Lynn asked. “That’s
seriously your answer?”

“I’m sorry, but I felt like…” Suddenly he
wasn’t sure how he could possibly explain that desperate moment of
panic to anyone who had never experienced it. It would require
words that weren’t even in the vocabulary of someone who had never
felt that icy grip in their chest or vivid, unrelenting flashback
to a horrid event that others spent their lives thinking could
never happen.

Lynn stood stock still halfway across the
room. “You felt like?” she asked. Suddenly she moved with a speed
that should have been completely beyond her capabilities. Cory
might have been able to stop her under other circumstances, but he
still felt a slight sluggishness. He was also completely unprepared
for her to run across the room at him and slap him across the face.
The force was unlike anything he had experienced before in his
short memory. Had he been a human he was sure the palm of her hand
would have hit his cheek hard enough to shatter parts of the bone.
He fell to the floor again, this time with tears in his eyes as he
struggled to understand the why and how of what had just
happened.

“How about you felt like an ungrateful little
piece of shit?” Lynn said. Her tone softened as she said this, but
somehow this only made the words sting more.

“Lynn, I don’t understand,” he said. He felt
like he should be embarrassed that he was suddenly weeping, but he
didn’t know how else to react. He didn’t even know if there was any
way that anyone else could react.

“Don’t tell me you don’t understand. Don’t
you
dare
tell me you don’t understand.” She knelt down next
to him and grabbed him by the chin. Cory’s immediate reflex was to
pull away from the unwelcome touch, but her grip dug into his skin
painfully and held him firmly in place. “You did this to me on
purpose, didn’t you?
Didn’t you
?”

“I didn’t do anything on purpose. I just
wanted to…”

“Don’t interrupt me!” she screamed. “Just say
it! Admit it that you purposefully wanted to hurt me! Say it now!”
She shook him by the head, a bizarrely painful movement given his
awkward position on the floor.

He didn’t understand any of this. This
conversation was happening too fast. It hadn’t even been a full
minute since he had opened the door and everything he thought he
had understood about Lynn and their relationship was out the
window. None of what she said or did made sense, but he was
frightened. If he continued trying to protest his ignorance at what
was going on Cory was sure she would do something drastic to him,
either some physical or emotional abuse that should have been
completely out of character for her. The only option he saw right
now was to agree with her and hope that she would let him go.

“Okay, yes, I did it on purpose. I’m sorry.”
He still didn’t have the slightest clue what he was supposed to be
sorry for, and he wasn’t sure that she would even be able to hear
him through his tears. But apparently she did, because she let him
go. The tone of her words was just as venomous, though.

“You did. I knew it. You left just to hurt
me.”

Cory wanted to say that he had done nothing
of the sort, but he didn’t dare correct her. Her sudden change made
no sense. There was nothing in the last week that had given him any
warning that she could be anything other than she seemed. He
continued thinking there was some sort of mistake, but he didn’t
know what or how it had come about.

“I should have known,” she said. “After
everything I’ve done for you, you’re just treating it like nothing.
Were you going to leave me permanently? You were. Of course you
were. That’s what everyone does.”

He wanted to say that didn’t make any sense,
that if he’d wanted to leave permanently then he wouldn’t have come
back at all. But in this moment, where someone he thought he knew
and cared about stood over him screaming what seemed like complete
nonsense to him, he couldn’t think of any way to address her that
might work. She yanked him by the chin, causing a violent pain to
shoot through his neck as she somehow managed to pull him all the
way to his knees. She shouldn’t have had this strength, and at the
very least he should have been able to break out from her grip. She
held him harder, though, her finger nails piercing the flesh of his
cheeks. He felt the same horrid sting he had on the night he’d been
shot, and for one crazy moment he thought that she must have shot
him. That could be the only explanation.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she said. The
sound of her voice had changed yet again, and this time she sounded
just as she had on the night they’d met. It was as though she was
concerned for him, desperate to help, even though her actions said
exactly the opposite. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell
you. Maybe you won’t believe it right now, but I love you. I love
you with all my heart. I have since I first saw you two weeks ago.
I knew it as soon as I saw what you were.”

Cory might have been frightened and confused
and unable to think straight as it felt like venom surged through
his veins through the slices in his cheeks, but even through all
that he realized the significance of her words. He weakly tried to
struggle from her hand, first trying to pull his head back then
trying to hit her, but she held strong and ignored his punches as
though she couldn’t feel them at all.

“Lynn, please let me go,” Cory said, although
he could barely even hear his own words. It was the wrong thing to
say, because with her free hand she took his arm and threw him back
across the room where he hit the bedroom door and knocked it
open.

“Let you go so you can run away again? I’m
making your life better, you little sack of shit! You never would
have found someone like me to take you off the street and finally
love you if we hadn’t been looking for you. The others wanted to
kill you once we had what we needed, but I’m the one who told them
no. Do you understand? I’m the only one who saw your real value. Do
you get how many times I have actually saved your life
already?”

She stood over him and again grabbed him by
the face. This time he made no attempt to struggle. He didn’t think
she was going to kill him, but whatever it was that had been on her
fingernails—either silver or garlic—had hit him hard enough that he
knew nothing he tried would stop her if she wanted to do more
serious damage. He still wasn’t sure how she was managing such
strength and speed but…

The answer came to him. He didn’t want to
admit it, but it was the only thing that made sense.

“And all this time you haven’t been grateful
at all. Did you even once thank me? Did you?”

Yes, he actually had, but again he knew that
talking back to her was the last thing he wanted to do.

“I want you to say it,” Lynn said. “Say thank
you.”

Anything
, Cory thought.
Anything to
get her to stop
.

“Thank you.”

She leaned closer, looking him directly in
the eyes. Only now, when she was so close, did he realize she no
longer had quite the same smell as when he had first met her a week
ago. With most humans he would have had the vague, unsettling
sensation to take a bite out of them thanks to the thick, barely
perceptible scent of blood coursing under their skin. He could
still smell her blood, but it was different now. There was no
mistaking this as something he could take nourishment from.

“Do you really mean it?” she asked.

“Yes. Thank you so much for everything you’ve
done for me.”

He saw a quiver in her face as though she
were trying to hold back some emotion, and momentarily he saw that
same woman again, the one who had helped him, the one who had
seemed so nice and caring. She was in there. It couldn’t just be an
act.

“Do you love me?” she asked.

No, I can’t say that
, he thought. He
couldn’t love anyone. Loving someone meant getting close to them.
It meant trust on a level he couldn’t manage, nor did he want
to.

But he had to say something. If he just said
it, maybe she would let him go, or at the very least stop digging
her poison coated fingernails into his face.

“Yes,” he said. The lie sounded obviously
false to his own ears, and he was certain she would notice. She’d
hit him again, scream at him, tell him how worthless he was, and he
wouldn’t be able to do anything but curl up and hope that it would
all end soon.

Except that would have been better than the
way she actually responded. Instead she knelt down next to him,
placing both hands on his chest to hold him down.

“I knew you would,” she said. As her hands
moved elsewhere she placed her lips against his, forcefully opening
them with her tongue. He wanted to scream, fight back, do anything
other than continue to cry, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to.

Especially when he felt her teeth. They were
still normal size, but he knew from personal experience that would
continue changing over the next few weeks, slowly growing sharper,
just like his own. But for now they just had an added hint of
sharpness, the telltale sign of a recently turned vampire.