Almost Human (19 page)

I glanced around. The grimy, off-white tile
was covered in strange marks done in dried blood. They circled me.
Crap. Either those were the real reason I hadn’t been secured to
the chair, or they were the prep work for some sort of ritual.
Neither option was great.

I managed to unravel my hands from the ropes
and quickly untied my feet. I needed to be armed. Now. Another
blood-curdling scream filled the air and I flinched. I needed to
get to him. Whoever he was. Wherever he was. My options were
starting to look like shit. I perused the room from within my
circle. I didn’t want to leave it. I had a sneaking suspicion that
whatever was causing that man to scream would immediately be headed
my way if I crossed the barrier. Eventually I would want that, but
I needed prep time first.

The room was small and dirty. All white and
almost dirty enough that you couldn’t tell. There was a drain in
the center of the floor, under my chair. The room was windowless,
and the air was stale with the slight smell of natural gas coming
from somewhere. There had to be a leak. Fortunately, it didn’t seem
like enough to be fatal. If vampires could even die from inhaling
gas. I knew fire would be a problem, though.

I listened for a second, trying to hear any
sounds from outside. It was dead silent, except a slight ringing in
my ears. I would never be able to tell where we were. We would have
to make it out and figure shit out from there.

I took a deep breath and rotated my
shoulders. It was time to cross the circle of power. I didn’t think
it would be pleasant, and I wasn’t feeling that great. I wasn’t
looking forward to getting beaten to hell by a circle whose symbols
I didn’t even recognize. I approached the side closest to the door.
Speed would be key for getting out of here and as soon as I was
able, I wanted to stumble out the exit.

I pressed my hands outward and met the
invisible barrier. It was heavy and hard to push against. Pieces of
power clung to my skin like taffy. Evil taffy. Whatever this magic
was, it wasn’t good. It felt familiar, but at the moment I couldn’t
place it. I needed out. I shoved with my magic and put my whole
weight into passing through it. The air squeezed from my lungs as
bitter cold filled my limbs. There was no pain, which I was
grateful for, but I desperately needed to breathe. I stepped
forward, trying to fight my way out.

The power clenched around me, struggling to
keep me in. My vision began to dance with little black spots. I
needed air. I clawed at the power. I wouldn’t be able to get out
before I died. I shoved with all I was worth and stumbled out of
the circle. I was moving too fast now and smacked into the wall. My
first breath came screaming into my lungs and I choked on it.
Coughing next to the wall.

And then I felt it. Rage and magic so
powerful I collapsed onto my stomach. I had the barest flash of red
eyes meeting mine across the body of a man.

“
Bitch.”

I came back to myself lying on the ground. I
could feel the beast moving toward me like a pull in my gut.
Braxus. Nothing else was that pissed at me. I needed to get out of
here. Hopefully he couldn’t track me now that I was out of his
circle.

I leaped to my feet and yanked open the
door. I wasn’t sure which direction he was coming from so I picked
one and ran. I could double back later, but for now I needed a
place to hide, and hopefully I wouldn’t run in to him. And maybe I
would run in to the man he was torturing.

I wasn’t sure who he was, but all I could
make out was that he was blond. One of the brothers most likely. I
ducked around a corner and opened the door to a room. It used to be
some kind of public restroom. Same disgusting, dirty, white tile,
but there were broken stalls and smashed toilets lying in the room.
The floor had a solid coating of mold. The place smelled of damp,
rotting wood.

I stood there for a minute and listened for
any sound. I heard nothing and felt no dark power moving toward me.
It seemed to be getting fainter. Either I was moving away from
Braxus or my brush of powers with him was wearing off. I hoped I
was heading away from him, because I needed to find an exit, not
get discovered hiding in a moldering public restroom.

I stuck my head out of the bathroom and
glanced around. There wasn’t a sound. It was too quiet. I didn’t
see anything either. I would have to risk walking around out there
sometime. I took a deep breath and gathered my courage, trying to
slow my heartbeat. I could hear it drumming in my ears. I was sure
others could hear it too—things in the dark I might want to sneak
up on.

I walked down the damp halls looking for
windows, light, a whiff of fresh air. Anything.

And then I caught it. A light breeze of ice
cold wind. A pure, crisp winter evening. I followed the direction
of the breeze and discovered a window a little higher than my head
with a hole busted in the corner of it. I stood on tip toes, peeked
through.

It led to a meadow. During the day it might
have been pretty. Now fog had rolled in and drifted across the
ground with eerie grace, waiting to snatch someone into the mists.
I shook my head. My imagination was getting to me. I needed to stay
focused.

To get out I’d have to smash the windows. I
desperately wanted to, but there was still someone in this building
who needed my help. What if that man died before I could bring back
help for him? I didn’t know what Braxus wanted from either of us,
but it couldn’t be good. That man might not survive if he didn’t
leave here with me tonight.

I started down the hallway in the opposite
direction I’d come. I didn’t want to run into Braxus before I found
this man. After my look outside, I knew where I was. I was in the
old high school. I had only been in there a few times. They’d
closed it before I’d made it into high school and they’d opened the
new one. But I recognized the old elementary school across the
street.

The building was condemned. No one would be
looking for us here. And it was far enough away from the new
schools that people were very unlikely to hear us if we were kept
here long enough for classes to begin. It was Saturday, unless I’d
been unconscious a lot longer than I thought, and Monday was a
holiday.

But since I’d been in here before, I knew
the school ran in one big square. Hopefully Braxus wouldn’t catch
up with me before I found the room the man was being held in.

“Someone get me the fuck out of here.” I
jumped when his shout broke the silence.

“Keep screaming, dude. Let me find you,” I
muttered under my breath and headed in his direction.

“Fucking witches and demons and zombies.
You’d think my life would be screwed up enough as a vampire, but in
five hundred years this takes the cake.”

I heard his words as I passed a door on my
left.

I swung the door open. “I suppose you don’t
want one of the witches to save you then, do you?”

Jairdan narrowed his one good eye at me. The
other was swollen shut. One of his arms was broken, the bone
sticking through the flesh. His chest was a bloody mess.

“Kori, shit. You’re alive.”

I rushed forward and put my finger over his
cracked lips. He flinched, but quieted. “You have to whisper, and
honestly it’s better if you don’t talk at all. I have no idea where
Braxus is, but I certainly didn’t defeat him. We need to get out of
here.”

I untied the ropes on his feet before moving
to his arms. As much as I wanted to keep him quiet, I couldn’t help
but ask, “What the hell happened?”

“I was injured in the explosion protecting
Astra, but she was still hurt. I was helping her when you hit the
ground after you killed Sherra. We all thought you were going to
die. Alaric did the best he could to keep you from banging yourself
up as you had a seizure, but Gideon said there was no hope. You
were going to die. And then it came out of nowhere. It grabbed me,
because I couldn’t stop it. It threatened to kill me if they didn’t
hand you over.

By then you’d gone limp. You weren’t
breathing and had no heartbeat. Gideon made the call to let Braxus
take you. There’s nothing he can do with a dead body. Instead of
handing me over, he took us both. He needed vampire blood for
whatever ritual he must have done to raise you.”

I paused and stared at him. “Are you saying
I’m a zombie?”

He frowned and shook his head. “I don’t
know. I can hear your heartbeat so zombie doesn’t sound right, but
I don’t know. I’m not a magic expert. What do you think?”

I had no idea. I felt normal. More normal
than I had since I’d been turned into a vampire. There wasn’t even
a feeling of evil or the desire to hurt people that there had been
after Dagger had given me his blood. I felt good. Which had to be
bad.

“I don’t know what Braxus did to me, but it
can’t be positive. Come on. I’d like to escape before we figure out
what his plans for us are.”

I helped Jairdan stand and he cursed under
his breath. “Braxus is particularly inventive when it comes to
torture. He said he hadn’t even gotten started yet, and I could
take all the abuse he could possibly dish out.”

He glanced at me, his gaze raw and strained.
“Thanks for coming back for me. You could have bolted. You don’t
even like me.”

I shook my head and pulled his arm over my
shoulder. “I wouldn’t have left anyone here.”

I grinned at him. “Besides, I had no idea
who he was torturing. You lucked out.”

He snorted, then flinched and held his ribs.
“Glad I did.”

We walked down the hallway, trying to be as
quiet as possible. Vampires healed incredibly fast. Jairdan was
already starting to take most of his weight from my shoulders. The
swelling in his eye was going down. He would still need to feed to
gain his strength back, but he was doing well.

However, I was getting antsy. Where was this
demon? It couldn’t be a good thing that he was MIA. He had been
coming for me. Now the halls were quiet, so at odds to how it had
been the last time I’d been here.

Even though I knew where we could find an
exit, last time I’d seen the double doors of the high school they’d
been chained and padlocked. I didn’t want to make the detour to
find out we were locked in. Instead I took us straight to the one
non-boarded window. I released Jairdan.

“Okay, I’m going to bust this window and
help you out. Then you can pull me up. We need to hurry, because if
that demon isn’t already stalking us, it will know where we are
when I break this damn thing.”

He nodded and I took a deep breath, bracing
myself for the noise. I picked up a toppled chair and tossed it
through the old glass panes. The sound was deafening in the
silence. Jairdan ran to the window and jumped, pulling himself out.
I pushed his legs to give him some help, and he rolled out onto the
grass.

He spun around and grasped my hand. I braced
my feet on the slick, painted bricks and helped. Under normal
circumstances he would have been able to yank me out like I weighed
nothing. But today he was working one handed, and probably had some
broken ribs.

But I made it out. I took a deep breath as I
collapsed onto the damp grass, Jairdan’s hand still wrapped in
mine.

Something seized my ankle in a crushing
grip, claws digging in. I screamed and scratched at the ground as I
started to slide backward.

“You go nowhere. Your body is mine.” The
voice was so deep it hurt my teeth. Fear streaked through me. What
did he mean my body was his?

Jairdan threw all his weight into pulling me
out, but I kept sliding backward as his grip broke something in my
hand.

I screamed. “Jairdan, get back up.”

He shook his head. “I won’t leave you
here.”

He stumbled forward and braced himself
against the building to keep from getting pulled back in with me. I
met his gaze. “You can’t do this on your own. We’ll both end up
back in there. Go. Hurry.”

I loosened my grip on his hand and he cursed
me. “Don’t you dare let go.”

I released him and was pulled into the
darkness.

I hit the ground face first, catching myself
on my forearms so the smack into the ground wasn’t as stunning. It
still wasn’t what I would term “pleasant.” Braxus dragged me down
the hall on my stomach while I scrambled to grab on to
anything.

“I didn’t lock you in before because I
thought your mind was gone. I should have known better when I
couldn’t enter your body immediately. Though sometimes witches
still require a ritual for entrance, even when they’re crazy. You
should be insane.”

“Why?”

“The demon piece was burned out of you by
the sword. It should have killed you entirely. Or at least boiled
your brain. But here you are with all your faculties.”

The door to the room I’d been kept in flew
open on its own and Braxus released my ankle. Before I could even
stand, he wrapped his hands in my hair and jerked me to my feet. He
shoved me into the circle and touched it. I felt the power rush
over me as the barrier became active again. Great. Captured, again.
My week was really sucking.

I rubbed my scalp. “That’s why I feel
different. Peaceful. The demon part of me is gone?” Why hadn’t I
died? A mystery to be solved if I made it out of this alive.

“Yes, that would be why. But this leaves me
with a problem, Kori. I need a host. I grabbed you because I felt
the demon presence being destroyed. I can’t enter another person
with demon blood in them, but I thought you would be easy once that
was gone, and your mind was turned to mush. But now I need your
permission to take over.”

“I’ll never give you that.”

The creature smiled. “Oh, yes you will. I
live in a place your people would consider hell. It’s brutal,
violent, and bloody. I can cause you pain in ways you can’t
imagine. I can either convince you to give me your body, or I can
drive you insane. Either way, I’ll win this.”