Oliver's Hunger

Zane nodded in acknowledgement, then grabbed the prisoner by the neck and slammed him into the only chair in the room.

“Now we talk.”

Cain watched intently, knowing that he could always learn something from Zane.

The captive looked up defiantly, his eyes wild. He bent forward on this chair, seemingly unable to keep still. His hands twitched, and the cords in his neck bulged.

“I want blood!” he demanded, his eyes narrowing.

“You had enough last night,” Zane claimed. “You almost drained that girl. You’re lucky she’s alive.”

“Or what?” he spat in response.

Zane jumped, grabbing his neck once more. The captive’s hand came up. However, the silver handcuffs that made contact with Zane couldn’t do him any harm: Zane wore a long-sleeved shirt and leather gloves.

“Or I would have ripped your heart out while you watched!”

Cain glanced at Thomas. “He’s bluffing, right?”

“He’s done it before. I don’t see why he wouldn’t do it again.”

Cain tried not to show his shock at Thomas’s words, and instead focused back on the events in the room below. It appeared that the prisoner was reasonably intimidated by Zane’s claim and shrunk back into his seat.

“You won’t feed until I have the information I’m looking for.”

“You can’t hold me here forever.”

“Can’t I?” Zane tossed his captive the semblance of a half-smile. “Piss me off and I’ll throw you into an underground cell and forget you.”

The wary look on the vampire’s face was evidence that he started to believe that Zane was capable of doing just that.

“What’s your name?” Zane asked.

There was a short hesitation, then the answer. “Michael Valentine.”

“Not his real name,” Thomas commented to Cain while he already typed it into the keyboard in front of him.

“Funny name! How about your real one?” Zane continued.

“That’s my name. I was turned on Valentine’s day in 1900. Somebody’s idea of a sick joke. So I took the name.”

“What was your name before that?”

“Garner,” he pressed out.

Zane glanced up to the window, a silent question on his lips.

Thomas pressed the speaker. “Give me a minute.” Releasing the speaker button, he continued typing on the keyboard. A moment later, he went back on the speaker again. “Checks out. Continue.”

Cain looked at the computer screen where a message blinked. “No entry found,” it said. He gave Thomas a questioning look.

Thomas shrugged. “Zane might not bluff, but I do. We just want him to think we can check on anything he tells us. It’ll make him more likely to tell us the truth.”

“But if Garner isn’t his real name either, he would realize you have no way of checking on what he’s saying.”

Thomas smiled. “But Garner is his real name.”

“How do you know?”

“Experience. I watched the movement of his eyes. It tells me a lot about whether a person is lying or not.”

“I see. And what about the database then?”

“We don’t have a complete database of all vampires past and present, nobody does. There must be hundreds of men named Michael Garner. It would be a waste of my precious time to go through all public databases and the internet to find the right one. However, I’m adding to my database every day. And that punk’s name is in it now.”

Cain looked back down to Zane and the vampire who called himself Michael Valentine. Zane stood only a few feet away from him now, his legs broad, his arms at his sides. He looked almost relaxed, but the captive would be a fool to assume such a thing. Zane was ready to pounce if Valentine made a single wrong move. Cain had seen Zane in action before. He knew what to expect.

“So, here’s the deal, Michael Valentine: I ask a question, you answer it. Do you get that?”

Valentine nodded.

“What happened at the nightclub? Why did you feed in public?”

He lifted his head and grinned up at Zane. “That’s two questions.”

Before the last word had left his lips, the back of Zane’s hand hit right across the idiot’s cheek, whipping his head to the side so violently that Cain almost expected it to separate from his neck.

“Fuck!” the prisoner hissed as blood dripped from his nose. “You broke my nose!”

“Well then you’d better start talking before I’ll break something more precious.”