Vengeance of the Demons (17 page)

“Unfortunately, we don’t have any vamps at the moment. So we’re going to use the next best thing.”

“Me?” asked William. “But I’m not a vamp.” Fear mixed with dread inside him. He was about to become someone’s lab rat.

“It shouldn’t matter too much,” said Nicholas. “Your blood is similar to theirs.”

“Similar but not exactly the same,” William replied.

“I don’t care either way,” said Lou. “Be glad this was what the doctor suggested for you, boy. If it was up to me, you’d be dead already.”

Another assistant walked in holding a syringe.

William pulled at his restraints. His skin crawled like a million snakes slithering over him.

Nicholas took the syringe and walked to William’s IV.

He didn’t want to show fear. He wanted to stay strong. For Evan, for Danika. But all logic left him as the needle plunged into the port at his wrist and a burning sensation raced up his arm.

“What… What’s going to happen to me?” he asked.

“To be honest,” said Nicholas. “I don’t know. But I hope this will make you human again.”

“Human? I don’t want to be human.”

Lou stepped closer. “Well then maybe you’ll get the outcome I’m hoping for. That you’ll die slow and painful. What you did to my baby girl—” Lou turned and walked out.

Nicholas and the assistants gathered their things to leave as well, but Nicholas stopped and turned back. “They said you’re from Chicago.”

“Yes.” William couldn’t take his eyes off his arm as the veins under the skin turned from white to black to blue.

“Did you happen to know Danika Chekov?”

William’s head snapped up. “I’m her fledgling,” he said.

The man’s eyes widened momentarily, and then his lips pressed together in a tight line. He nodded once.

“I truly hope this works,” he said.

The thick plastic curtain swung together, and William dropped his head onto his pillow.

“I hope it kills me,” he replied.

* * * *

Evan was confined to her room the following week. Every morning Joe silently brought her food, set it on her desk, and asked if she was okay. And every morning she would ask about William and Tommy. Joe would only shake his head and say he didn’t know before leaving.

The first day he’d informed her that Peter’s leg had been broken in the fight. She wished she’d been the one to break Peter’s leg. And a bunch of his other parts as well. But knowing Peter’s healing abilities, he wouldn’t be down for more than a couple weeks.

She, however, found her own leg to be less than cooperative. Though the wound had closed and all that remained was a jagged crimson scar, at odd moments it would ache or spasm, making it unreliable at best.

An hour after Joe would leave, Lou would arrive. He’d showed her photographs of her parents, her siblings, his wife, and dozens of other people, telling her the horrible things that Vampires had done to them. He made her stand, arms outstretched for hours while he played videos of news clips from after the awakening and the outbreak.

For seven days, he came and tried to bring her around to his way of thinking. And for seven days Evan thought of nothing but what was happening to William.

By the following week, Evan had begun to go stir crazy. Being locked in her room with guards posted outside was worse than being at the coven house in Chicago. She’d taken to counting the guards outside her window and writing down their rotation schedule. She calculated the steps to the fence, how high it was, and what it would take to jump it. Every moment not spent with her uncle was spent planning her escape.

Tuesday, it was Tommy who brought her food. She ran to him and threw her arms around him in joy.

“Oh my gosh. Are you okay? I was so worried about you.”

He pushed past her and set her food on the desk, refusing to meet her eye. A chill ran up her spine, and she grabbed him by the arm before he left. His head snapped up, and she noticed his black eye and split lip.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

His brow furrowed and he shook his head. He stepped closer to the exit and she blocked his path.

“You’ve been in a fight. Please, Tommy. I’ve been in here for almost a week and a half. I don’t know what’s going on with you or William. I didn’t even know if you guys were dead or alive or being tortured or anything. I know you’re mad at me because of what happened to Peter and I’m sorry about his leg but please… Tell me what the hell is going on. Is it William? Did something happen?” Panic scoured over her.

He opened his mouth, but the door swung inward and one of the guards looked in. “Come on, Tommy. Lou asked to see you.”

Tommy nodded and pushed past Evan. Tears blurred her vision, and she swiped them away. Her lies had cost her the only friend and family she had left.

She had to get out of here.

* * * *

William coughed violently. Blood trickled from his nose and mouth down onto his bare chest. His head pounded as though it were in a vise grip. And his ears sounded muffled from the buildup of dried blood caked in them.

Nicholas had inclined the bed two days prior, afraid that William would choke on his own blood. From his vantage point, he now had a view of the entire lab. For the past week, everyone had gone about their business as if William wasn’t even there. Everyone except Nicholas, who spent hours talking to William about the demons and Chicago and his life there. It wasn’t a friendly conversation as much as it was a fact-collecting expedition.

The thirst had begun to build every single day to the point where now his every focus was on blood. He tracked the humans that came into the room with predatory precision. The sound of their veins pumped in his ears like a maddening musical rhythm. The scent of their fear if they had to enter his section was a fragrant wine that delighted his senses. Like a starving man in the desert, his every thought consisted of the feed.

Twice so far they’d tried to give him human blood transfusions, but all it did was make him hungrier. The lab tech who gave them, a small, beady-eyed man with a pockmarked face, took special pleasure in sticking William over and over with the needle, claiming to have missed the vein. Holes and scabs zigzagged from his hands to his elbows, itching and stinging the skin that he was unable to scratch.

The bell on the elevator rang, and William’s head whipped that direction. He tried to focus his thoughts as Lou stepped out of the elevator with Evan in tow. His mind jumped between wanting to scream at her to get away and the all-consuming need to drain her dry like the rest of them.

Her beaten expression stretched to the rest of her body as her shoulders slumped and she trudged forward. Lou pushed her toward the clear plastic barrier that separated his area from the rest of the lab. Evan spotted him and dashed away from Lou. She threw the curtain wide and ran for his bed. Feet from him, she skidded to a stop.

The pulsing of her veins was like jackhammer in his head.

“William?” Her expression was tentative and fearful.

“Don’t…come…closer…” he managed to croak. He licked his lips at the sweet fragrance of her body.

Tears welled in her eyes and she stepped closer. His muscles twitched at the thought of draining her. She reached for him, and he bared his teeth and pulled on his restraints to get at her, as Lou tugged her away.

The restraints creaked and groaned but held tight.

“See,” said Lou. “He’s like all the others. He wants nothing more than to drain you dry.”

She yanked from Lou’s grasp. “What did you do to him?”

“I did this for you, baby girl. To save him for you. To make him human again so you could be together proper if that’s what you wanted, but you can see now that it isn’t possible. Vampires are Vampires. They always will be. Nothing but the thirst matters to them. I’m sorry. I truly am.”

She looked back at William. “I don’t believe you. He isn’t like this. William isn’t like this.”

It was like watching through a fog of desire. Inside the recesses of his mind, he wanted to tell her that she was right, this wasn’t him, but he couldn’t get the words out. There was no way to tell her Lou was lying. Every shred of his remaining sanity was focused solely on trying not to kill her and everyone else in the room.

“Evan…” He moaned and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, she’d stepped closer. “Go.”

Again he lurched from the bed, unable to take the scent of her any longer. He tugged at the leather cuffs, flexing every muscle in his body, but in his weakened state, he was no better than a human at trying to break them. He growled and snarled then flew into a coughing fit, spewing blood over the front of her. She gasped and stepped away.

“You! You did this,” he yelled at Lou. “I’m going to freaking kill you. When I get off this bed, I’m going to rip your head off. I’m going to tear your throat out and bathe in your blood. Then I’m going to find Peter, and I’m going to remove his arms and beat him to death with them. I’m going to drain every last miserable drop from the humans in this place. I’m going to kill you all. That’s what you deserve. All of you. You deserve to die.”

His eyes landed on Evan, and she swallowed hard, backing away. He didn’t care what she saw; he didn’t care what she thought. All he wanted in that moment was her blood.

* * * *

Evan used her T-shirt to wipe William’s blood from her face. Her hands shook so hard she could barely keep them doing what she wanted them to. She’d never seen a Vampire or vampyr look that bad before. Blood dripping from every orifice, staining his chiseled pale chest. But the blood hadn’t been the worst of it. The worst had been his eyes. Greedy, hungry eyes that wanted to devour her. She’d heard of bloodlust before, but this was different. He was different. Lou had taken a gentle soul and turned him into the monster that they had always been taught that Vampires were.

How could he do that to someone? Someone who’d taken all the abuse they’d shelled out and only when she had been threatened had he finally lashed out.

She walked to her room in silence. The two guards still stood faithfully outside her room. Lou followed her inside. She headed for her wardrobe and stripped her T-shirt off, then grabbed another and yanked it on.

“I tried to tell you, baby girl. Now you see. They want for nothing except to use us as food.”

She turned to face him. For several moments she couldn’t speak.

“I’m sorry you had to see that.” His face held true remorse.

“No. You aren’t.” Her voice came out flat and emotionless. “You thought taking me to see him like that would tip me back over to your side, but you don’t know me anymore, and I don’t know you.”

“You need to understand—”

“No.” She held up her hand. “You need to understand. What I saw up there, what you did to him, only confirmed to me that you are not the man that raised me. It confirmed to me that we aren’t any better than the Vampires.”

“How can you say that?”

“You took a kind and selfless man and turned him into a monster!” she shouted. “He risked his life time and time again for me. He has done nothing to you or to Peter but what you deserve. You twisted him and tested on him and have not a single ounce of remorse.”

“Why should I? They killed my mother, my father, my brother, and his wife.”

She stepped toward Lou, her fists balled. She wanted nothing more than to punch him in the jaw. “But not him! He didn’t do that. Until a year ago, he was human too. And this is the thanks he gets for having something happen to him that he had no control over.”

“No matter how it happened, he isn’t one of us anymore. He’s one of them.”

She nodded. “That’s what I thought too until I met him. You took the one person who came here with goodwill, asking for help, and you murdered him. The one person that could have made a difference. And now… When his family finds out what you did… God help us all.”

“Are you threatening me? Are they a threat? We are more than capable of taking care of those kind of things here.” He took several steps closer to her.

She shook her head. “You have no idea what’s out there. You live here, safe in this bubble, and you rule this world but you have no clue what it’s like. I’ve seen the horrible and ugly things that happen, but no worse than the horrible and ugly things that happened when humans were running things. And then I come here. The one place that I dreamed every night of coming back to when I was out there, and I find the horrors even that much more unfathomable. And you. The man I once called dad. You’re the worst of them all.”

“Well then. If it’s so bad here, and I’m so horrible, maybe you should go back to where you came from.”

The offer hit her like a sledgehammer to the ribcage. If she left this time, there was no coming back. She’d live the rest of her life out there, on her own, on the run. Even if she went back to Chicago, without William, who knew what would happen to her. But if she could get William back to Chicago…

She blew out a heavy breath and stared at her toes. Finally she looked up at her uncle. “You’re right,” she said. “Maybe I should.”

The door opened and Tommy walked in carrying a tray of food. He looked between them, and then Lou swore and stormed out. Tommy jumped out of his way, almost spilling the contents of the tray on himself.

The door slammed shut and then the sounds of Lou cursing and punching the wall several times reverberated around the room.

Tommy stared at her for a minute and then set down the food.

“You already brought me something to eat,” she said.

“I know.” He stared at her long and hard before swallowing. “I want to help.”

“Help what?” she asked.

He held up his key card. “You and William. I want to help you escape.”

“Where are we going?” Evan swatted away a fly from her face and followed Tommy as closely as she was able in the dark without holding on to him. The scent of sweet fruit and dewy grass reminded her of home before the outbreak.

They’d left through a service entrance in the back of the cafeteria area. Impending rain clouds obscured the moon, and she barely could see her feet as they trudged through the orchard.