13 Bullets (Laura Caxton / Vampires #1)

Reyes wasn't going to kill her-at least not right away. He was still too full of undigested blood from the devastation of Bitumen Hollow. Whenever he even thought of drinking her blood his reaction was pure nausea.

She could feel these things in her own head. He had violated her brain and left something of himself behind when he withdrew, a relic, an image of himself. Now she could feel his thoughts. No words came across that channel, nor even images. She could feel his unnatural heart pounding, though, pounding hard to move all that sluggish blood around, and she knew how sick he was. She got little bits of him, little inklings and fragments of thoughts. It was a link, and it was enough for her to know his moods and some of his motivations.

He wasn't going to kill her because it would be a waste of blood. She remembered when Hazlitt fed Malvern he had said the blood had to be warm, and fresh. If Reyes killed her now her blood would go to waste. He couldn't drink it and he couldn't store it.

There was more to it, though. He wasn't going to kill her-because he wanted something from her. Or to do something to her. That scared her, but she was getting used to being scared. Caxton's fear reaction was becoming so familiar to her that she felt strange when she wasn't scared. She felt, when she was unafraid, that she must be missing something.

Reyes carried her up the stairs, climbing no more than twenty-five feet. On the way down, in the dark of the casket, those stairs had seemed to descend forever. They emerged at the top of the staircase into a vast open space surrounded on every side by thick walls. The concrete floor was cracked everywhere and green weeds sprang up from below. The scale and the emptiness of the place made her think of an abandoned factory but then her eyes adjusted to the moonlight slanting in through the long windows and she began to make out details. Chains hung from the ceiling in great profusion. Molds and casting equipment littered the floor like the playthings of a giant who has outgrown the need for toys. The tall windows were broken in places, panes of frosted glass having been replaced by plywood or filled in with ventilating fans. In the distance, at the far end of the concrete floor stood an enormous coke-powered blast furnace that must have gone cold decades earlier. A thirty-foot-wide crucible, an enormous reinforced cup that had once held hundreds of tons of molten steel at a time, hung before the furnace on one thick chain, the other having given way. The crucible's lip dragged on the floor, mired in a vast wash of hardened slag. Reyes' hideout was a defunct steel mill, she realized. There were a lot of them in Pennsylvania, mostly around Pittsburgh but she didn't think she'd been carried that far. There were plenty of them around Philadelphia as well. She could be miles from the corn field where they'd caught her, or only hundreds of yards away. In the sensory failure of the casket ride she'd had no way to accurately measure distances. Her mind spun wildly, trying to figure out how far they'd taken her, to no avail.

At least she was somewhere, somewhere with light and sound so that her mind wasn't adrift in darkness. She studied her surroundings as best she could while being bounced around on the vampire's back. Reyes and his half-deads were using only one small corner of the vast cracked floor. The faceless minions had a good campfire going and had set up some furniture, old chairs and couches with springs sticking up through rotting cushions. Fifteen or so of them were gathered around the fire, watching the flames leap and dance, giggling amongst themselves at some no doubt unspeakable joke. They fell quite silent as Reyes approached. He tossed Caxton onto a mildew-stained easy chair and then squatted next to the fire. He made no attempt to tie her up or otherwise constrain her.

"If you're not-" Caxton started, but she stopped instantly as they all turned to look at her at once. All those mutilated faces unnerved her and made her think of her own mortality. "If you're not going to kill me then I need to go to the bathroom," she said.

She was expecting the half-deads to mock her, and they did. Their whining, high-pitched taunts made her cheeks red but she really did need to urinate.

"Pee in your fucking pants, bitch," one of the half-deads screamed at her. His skinned jaw flapped open in amusement. "Yeah, come on, do it, I want to see this. Pee in your pants!" He started chanting it over and over and some of the others joined in.

Reyes stood up and grasped the half-dead's head in one long-fingered hand, his shoulder in the other. The vampire twisted his hands and the half-dead came apart in two pieces. Reyes threw them both into the fire. The flames leapt dangerously high as the broken body was consumed and a stink of unwashed horror rolled over them all.

There was no more chanting after that. Reyes searched about in a pile of junk for a moment and came up with a rusted tin bucket. He tossed it to her and she caught it.

"Gee, thanks," she said, but she got up to walk away from the fire. The vampire didn't even look at her as she walked far out onto the mill's floor, well away from the half-deads. He didn't need to. She could feel him inside her head and she knew she would never get away from him again, not really. He was with her even as she squatted over the bucket. She closed her eyes and tried to block him out but it wasn't possible.

She left the bucket there and walked back toward the fire. It was brutally cold in the unheated mill and she figured that it was better to get over her squeamishness about her captor than it was to die of hypothermia.

A half-dead waited for her, a bag of fast food in his bony hand. She took it and realized just how hungry she was. She hadn't eaten in well over a day and while adrenaline had confused her body into ignoring food for a while it couldn't last forever. She opened the bag and found a cold hamburger and a flat, watery soft drink inside. The hamburger already had a bite taken out of it. She wasn't sure whether the half-deads had gotten the food out of a dumpster or if one of them had taken the bite. It didn't matter. She devoured the burger and washed it down with the syrupy clear soda. Her lips were chapped, she'd been so thirsty. With her needs essentially met she climbed back onto the easy chair and wrapped her arms around herself. She wasn't sure what she was supposed to do next. Fatigue sapped her energy for a moment and she had to blink rapidly to clear her head. She wasn't tired, not really-she'd slept all day. The feeling came back, a wash of listlessness that made her arms so heavy she had to let them fall at her sides. Her neck ached with the weight of holding up her head.

It was Reyes, she realized. The vampire was playing tricks with her mind. Maybe he was just showing off the power he had over her-or maybe he really wanted her to sleep for some reason.

She thought of the half-dead she had tortured and killed on her bedroom floor. He had told her of the hechizo they used to make Deanna break the window. It only worked in dreams, he had said. Dreams. You had to be asleep to dream. Whatever he wanted her for he would use magic to get it, and his magic only worked if she wasn't conscious enough to fight it off. She scowled at the vampire. "I don't feel the least bit sleepy. I feel like staying up till dawn," she told him, "so I can watch you melt into a puddle of goo."

His reaction made her feel as if the force of gravity had been doubled. Her limbs dragged her down into the cushions of the chair, her body curling over on itself, her eyelids squeezing shut. She fought it and had just enough will power to push it back, to stay conscious. It took everything she had. She knew that the next time he tried to pull that trick she wouldn't have the strength to resist.

He still hadn't said a word to her. Piter Lares hadn't spoken to Arkeley, either, when he dragged him back to his lair. Caxton wished she knew what that meant. She wished she knew what the hell was going on.

Reyes didn't look at her. Instead he knelt on the floor and pushed one of his hands deep into the fire. Immediate pain rushed through him and Caxton's body curled up in response. She felt only a fraction of what he must but it was enough to make her gasp in agony.

When he pulled his hand out of the blaze it was dark with soot and some flesh had burned off of his fingers, revealing narrow bones beneath. The flesh grew back over the space of a few seconds but the soot remained, darkening his white fingers. Reyes came stomping over to her and dragged his fingers across her cheeks and forehead. She tried to turn her face away but his strength was beyond her measure. He could hold her perfectly still, so still she couldn't even wriggle like a worm. His hands smelled like woodsmoke and burnt meat. She sensed his impatience as he drew complex symbols on her face with the soot under his fingernails. He was writing a word on her face, she realized, a single word:

SUEnO

It should not take so much work to make her accept the curse. A glance had sufficed in his own case, a chance meeting of the eyes. She was fighting too hard and it was taking too long.

"What curse?" she asked.

Reyes' eyes went wide. Apparently she wasn't supposed to have heard so much of his thoughts. He frowned and grasped her head in both of his hands. She tried to close her eyes but he pried them open with his thumbs and she couldn't look away. His red eyes bored down into hers like drills biting into soft wood. He tore her consciousness away from her as if he were ripping off her clothes. She couldn't fight, she could barely utter a meek protest, a hissing "No..." under her breath. In a moment she was asleep.