He had to quell an urge to mimic. The reflex was occasionally irritating, but apparently etched too deep into mortals for sanguinant to escape. “Your senses are becoming far more acute. This eases the transition.”
“Are you sure it’s not...digesting me? Like a spider?” She sounded so wistful, instead of pleased.
“Very sure.”
“All right.” She lapsed into a long, softly breathing silence, occasionally moving her hand through the darkness and staring raptly at whatever vision the Gift granted one so beautifully made. “You know I hate you, right?”
I know. “It is,” Lukas said, “better than nothing. I am not ready to die yet.”
“I’m tired.”
“Rest, Beatrice. It will be dawn soon.”
CHAPTER 19
Golden, rainbowy tracers faded bit by bit as Bea drifted through lassitude. There was a lot of thinking to do, and for once she had what appeared to be plenty of time. Everything was moving so very slowly.
You just drank monster blood. Helluva kick—and was that his plan? To get her addicted, then she’d be a henchman? Henchperson? Had he done this to Mrs. Martinez, to that Wren guy?
Maybe not since they both seemed so...untouched. Human.
Mortal, the monster kept saying. A term with real implications, Jare would interject, both eyebrows lifted as he nodded meaningfully. Her brain kept bouncing between past and present; the sense of an underlying pattern forming into coherence was one she’d had only a few times in her life. Like after Mom’s passing, when she realized her parents would never again compare Beatrice to her brilliant, talented big brother, and the recognition of their final, unalterable judgment was almost as painful as the fact that she had never had a chance of measuring up to begin with.
But the biggest pattern-moment had occurred in Don Bertram’s warehouse, the night she pounded on his door in a warm spring rain, probably scaring the bejesus out of him.
Bea, come on, you’re not thinking of actually killing someone, are you? Don’s worried frown, before she made him spread the papers delineating ‘Chris Everly’s’ businesses—gathered by both Don and her brother when the first weirdness started—on the table, opened a scrounged pawnshop laptop and showed him a copy of the footage from that one camera on the post near the stable, put up to possibly catch the creatures besieging the house in action.
Scrambling out of the house that night with the crammed expanding file folder of Jare’s ‘evidence’, some clothes grabbed at random, a few thumbdrives, and the rosewood box containing the necklace, fleeing whatever had killed her brother—she hadn’t even called 911, partly out of panic and partly because alerting complicit authorities was a no-no in Jared’s new conspiracy-laden world—and ending up at Don’s place three days later, banging on the door like a lunatic, gabbling about little green men…
Don watched the footage, sure, but he hadn’t really been on board until the coroner filed it as an ‘accidental’ death. At the time they were both sure ‘Everly’ had paid off the authorities and other Noll Mountain property owners, as monsters were said to do, and Bea spent at least a year sick with fear at the inevitable deductions drawn from their discussions.
The horrible drilling whine came back at intervals, warning of the billowing yellow mist and near-naked green henchmen—their laughable size and shape made the grotesqueness even more terrifying. Moving every few months, slipping down the chain of cheap apartments into motel rooms, saving what she could of Jared’s occult research, pestering Don for more information, relentlessly scrolling creepy dark-web forums and sites dedicated to the weird—it wasn’t paranoia if monsters really existed, right?
I am going to kill him, Donny-Boy, she’d said, grimly. No matter what he is.
And by golly, she’d failed, as per usual. All the preparation and work ended up here in the dark, high on monster blood, out of her goddamn mind.
If at first you don’t succeed...Dad’s favorite saying, uttered fondly while walking Jared through a skill or achievement, grimly delivered when Bea brought home B’s instead of A’s, never quite reaching her brother’s academic or creative heights.
Maybe the monster liked telling stories about hunting and tribes and night spirits. Maybe it was the thing to do around campfires in his day. She was pretty sure he was muttering in other languages, too—of course, being an immortal bloodsucker would give you time to practice all sorts of things. Imagining him taking a high-school French test was morbidly hilarious; Bea had to laugh, nearly forgetting she was stuck in a bed with said monster, his hand inches from her face.
The forlorn chuckle shook her entire weary, tripped-out body. The monster’s grip on her waist shifted; he had a hard-on shoved right up against her. The guy seemed definitely oversexed.
Your senses are becoming far more acute. It eases the transition.
So was she supposed to be a vampire sex toy now? For how long? Was she going to get fangs? Her teeth still felt the same, but she hadn’t immediately noticed her eyesight becoming oodles better in complete darkness.
She had to get on the ball, or something even worse might happen.
Come on, Bebe. Think it through. Christ, it was horrible to hear Jare’s voice in her head. He wouldn’t leave her the fuck alone, ever.
You know how strong this guy is. If you’re also a monster, well, all you have to do is get the stake going fast enough.
The worst thing was, her dead brother definitely had a point. It would be fucking ironic to end up as the very thing she’d set out to eradicate—but she’d do it, if she had to.
Even if he didn’t kill Jared? What if…
She had nothing to hold onto except revenge, and maybe escape. But if she got out of here, would she eventually crave human blood? She could work night shifts at another meatpacking plant, probably, and…
