“He’s using me for what? I don’t have anything to offer.”
Her head lolls to the side, like she cannot believe I just said that. “You really are stupid. In my next go-around as an evil, conniving witch I will do an IQ test first.”
“You know what? I don’t have to take your shit anymore. I’m not your bitch.”
“No, you’rehisbitch now.”
I nod. “Yeah. I am.” This is when I realize I’m naked, so I fold my arms across my chest. “And I like it, OK? He’s… good to me.”
Lucia bellows out a laugh that echoes off the ceiling. It’s such a hearty laugh, it takes several seconds for the air to still after she’s done. “Good to you? He carved evil into your skin, served you up as food to the halfbreeds, used you to kill them, let them destroy your body until it was nothing but tatters, and then”—she flips a hand in my direction—“brought you back to life so you can be his sex slave. This, my dear, is not what salvation looks like.” Her gaze is trained and focused on me again as she stares into my eyes. “This is damnation, girl. You just don’t have the good sense to understand that yet.”
“Well…” I’m not sure how to respond to that, so this is all I have. But Lucia waits, allowing me to gather my wits. “If this is damnation, you’re the one who put me here.”
It cuts, but only a little. Lucia, from my perspective anyway, isn’t the kind of woman who lets herself dwell on past mistakes.
As I’m thinking this, she smiles. It’s a very small Mona Lisa smile. “You are not, and have never been, a mistake. Do you really think I was afterBoyd, Echo?”
I blink. “What?”
“Boyd?” she says again. “Come on. Give me some credit. I wasn’t after Boyd. Is Boyd here?” She pans her arms wide and pretends to look around the cave. “Do you see him anywhere?”
“What are you saying?”
“I was never after Boyd, Echo. It was you.” She gives me a real smile now. “Poor, forgotten, used and abused Echo from Spokane. Do you know where Boyd is now?”
I lift up one shoulder, feigning indifference. Boyd and I were brought to the compound together, but everything up here was so… well, confusing, but exciting as well, that I just lost track of him. And there were so many other men to be distracted by. And Paul, of course.
Paul never took any notice of me until he came back up from the ground last New Year’s Eve, but I sure as hell saw him.
I give Lucia my best guess. “Dead?”
“No.” She purses her lips and shakes her head. “He was stupid, but he wasn’t discarded. He had a family who cared about him, Echo. I can’t turn people into halfbreeds if they’ve got family who will miss them. He left the very first day he got here.”
My eyes narrow down. “No, he didn’t.”
“Name one time, after you came up here to the lodge, that you saw Boyd.”
“Well, I can’t remember right now?—”
“You can’t remember because I sent him home. He’s married now, you know. Two kids. Both boys. He married into a large ranching family. He lives a simple, but good life, in Boise. Wears a cowboy hat and everything.”
“Married with kids?” I scoff. “What the hell are you talking about? I haven’t even been up here long enough—” But as soon as this sentence starts spilling out of my mouth, I know it’s a lie. When Paul came back on New Year’s Eve, he had been gone for two years. And I’ve been through several Paul disappearances. I blink at Lucia. “How long have I been up here?”
“Twenty-one years.”
“Twenty-one…” But I can’t finish. I look down at myself. Naked now, but I look the same. Better, actually, after bathing in that magical hot spring after my death. I look back up at Lucia. “What?”
She nods. “Time slips when you’re not really alive. I killed you, Echo. Decades back. I gave you the blood, and you drank it, and time just… slipped.”
Of course I knew I was dead. I mean, I remember the way Josep carved me up. I remember the halfbreeds feeding on me and tearing me to shreds. I even remember the part where Josep brought me back down here and walked into the pool, holding me in his arms until I was healed.
I remember all of that.
But for some reason, it is the knowledge that I already died decades ago that shakes me to my core.
“That’s what a halfbreed is, Echo. Something in between. Not in between human and vampire—you’re nothing like a vampire. Something in between Heaven and Hell, for lack of a better example. But this stage, like all stages, will end.”
“And then what?” I’m afraid to ask, but feel compelled to at the same time.
