Along Came a Spider (36 page)

“Enough!” Ian roared. McCain started for me, but Nicky bum-rushed him, knocking him on his ass. “I said enough, goddamn it!”

Ian shook his head in disgust. “My apologies, Trish,” he said with a politeness I saw through in a fairytale minute. “My men seem to have experienced a troubling lapse in manners. You’re our guest here, after all. Isn’t that right, Freddy?”

Freddy just glared at me with murder in his eyes. Yeah, well, I had news for the little bastard—two could play that game. And the look I sent back made it clear he’d better hope no one left him in a room with me or the shit was gonna get real. I glanced to where McCain was picking himself up off the ground. And that asshole was next.

“As you see, I’ve not harmed your lover,” Ian said, clasping his hands behind his back. “However, I’m afraid that thanks to this little altercation there might be some hard feelings that could impede our discussions. How regrettable.” He sighed theatrically and motioned to his men. “Please escort Mr. Blue out so that Trish and I may continue our conversation.”

“No!” I rushed to Nicky, reaching him before any of the agents worked up the courage to get in my way. I grabbed the lapels of Nicky’s jacket and ground out through clenched teeth, “I’m not letting them take you away from here.”

Nicky shrugged and forced a grin. “Forget about it. I’m sure it’s nothin’.” He turned his gaze on Ian. “I’ll just go hang out in the other room. Right?”

“Of course,” Ian said too quickly.

Nicky winked at me. “See? It’s all good.”

I knew it was bullshit. And Nicky knew it, too. They’d let him live to prove Ian had kept his word. And they’d keep him alive for probably a little while longer, just in case they needed to use him against me. But then all bets were off. We were both living on borrowed time and we knew it.

“I love you, doll,” Nicky assured me as McCain and Freddy dragged him toward the door. “Always have. Always will.”

My fear choked me, making it impossible to respond. And the ominous thud of the steel door slamming felt like someone had just closed my coffin lid. I needed help if any of us had a chance of getting out of there. And at the moment, the only person I had on my side was the ghost of a dead Ordinary.

I was so screwed. Unless—

“Now, where were we?” Ian asked, assuming that infuriatingly smug nonchalance.

“You were about to take me to Dracula,” I reminded him, a plan—albeit a seriously fucked-up plan—beginning to form. “Might as well get on with it.”

Amanda’s spirit sent me a look of such gratitude and relief, it was a little heartbreaking. Even in the afterlife she still had it bad for the vampire who’d ended her life. Talk about a dysfunctional relationship. . . .

The two agents who had remained in the room—the better to glare daggers at me, from the looks of things—came forward with a pair of wicked-looking iron shackles in hand.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I snapped, pulling my hands back before they could slap them on. “Not without Nicky. You don’t have to shackle me.” When Ian’s eyes narrowed at me, I added, “Besides, I need to use the restroom.”

The men frowned with such identical scowls it would’ve been comical had it been in a different context. “Pardon?” Ian asked. “Now?”

“When you gotta go, you gotta go,” I insisted.

He sighed and mumbled something indecipherable about women under his breath but gave one of the agents a nod. All three of them escorted me from the room to a door down the hall. The biggest one, whose nose was still bleeding from the earlier smack-down I’d doled out, opened the door and took a quick look inside. I don’t know what he expected to find. It’s not like I was planning to come out swinging with the plunger. And no matter what the martial arts films would have you believe, I had serious doubts that I could lob the Glade Plug In effectively enough to knock out all three of them. Although they might smell nicer.

“Make it quick,” Ian ordered.

I was relieved to see the restroom was little more than a closet with a toilet and sink and—thank God!—a mirror.

“What are you doing?” Amanda hissed, having joined me. “You’re wasting time!”

I shook my head, frowning, and held a finger to my lips. “I can’t go with you guys listening!” I called out.

“Then run some water or something!” Ian snapped.

Perfect. So far, so good. . . .

I turned on the faucet and prayed the water would actually be hot. Fate was smiling down on me, apparently, as the water was generating steam in seconds. Between Amanda’s spirit making the air even colder than normal and the heat of the water, the mirror began to fog up exactly as I’d hoped. I whispered the words Lavender had taught me and sent the call out to the universe, praying like hell it would be heard.

Chapter Twenty-Six

We were underground. Had to be. We’d traveled down several floors in the elevator before finally coming to a stop, and when the doors slid open, we stepped into a hallway made of thick layers of concrete; bare lightbulbs lined the ceiling in evenly spaced intervals. It looked more like a bunker than a prison.

“You’ve been keeping him down here the entire time?” I asked, glancing toward the doors we passed, wondering who or what was trapped behind them. Angry hisses greeted us as we walked by each of the doors, and I swore I heard dark, sinister laughter beneath the feral susurration.

“Not the entire time,” Ian admitted, without volunteering any additional information.

Luckily, I had my ghostly little spy to fill me in. “They kept him in one of the cells upstairs at first,” Amanda informed me. “But during one of the starvation periods, he was able to break out of the room and killed two of the agents who had beaten him every day, trying to bring him into submission. The bastards! They had it coming.”

Couldn’t exactly disagree with her there.

“We’d hoped to have an off-site facility up and running by now,” Ian continued. “But we’re having issues with our contractors. But then, I imagine you know all about that, don’t you?”

“You think you had trouble with the Pigg brothers before . . .” I muttered, letting his imagination fill in the blanks.

A wretched, bloodcurdling scream suddenly split the air, making even Ian start and send a concerned glance toward one of his flunkies.

“Who else are you keeping down here?” I demanded, my skin creeping with unease as the hissing and wailing grew more insistent.

“Just a few of our other guests,” Ian said with a shrug that wasn’t nearly so nonchalant now.

“It’s the women Vlad was forced to turn,” Amanda informed me. “They keep them here until they release them ‘into the wild,’ as they call it. They just turn them loose and hope for the best. They don’t give a shit what happens to them—or anyone else!”

Beatrice . . .

My head snapped up at the sound of Vlad’s voice.

Amanda apparently heard it, too. “He feels you approaching,” she murmured. “He knows you’re coming.”

My brows came together, and I shook my head, confused. “But I thought—”

“Sorry?” Ian interrupted. “What was that?”

I hadn’t realized I’d spoken out loud. “Nothing,” I said quickly. “Never mind.”

“It was his voice you heard,” Amanda assured me, apparently understanding where my thoughts were tending. “He had bonded with you through the blood of the woman you bit in the alley. You had taken in his blood, connecting you. But he couldn’t really draw you to him without tasting you, so I acted as his physical surrogate.”

“Beatrice. . . .” came the eerie hissing from beneath the tightly bolted doors, the many voices slithering toward me in a terrifying chorus. “Beatrisssss. . . .”

I shuddered. Apparently, Dracula wasn’t the only one who knew I was coming. I heard Ian chuckle and sent an irritated glance his way. “Looks like you have quite the welcoming committee,” he drawled, finally coming to a halt in front of one of the doors. He jerked his chin at one of his agents, who produced a pass card. He swiped it through the scanner at the side of the door, and I heard the heavy thunk as the bolts on the door slid away.

Ian pulled open the door with more than a little effort and swept his arm. “Shall we?”

“After you,” I replied, forcing a polite smile. “Really, I insist.”

He pressed his lips into an angry line, his faux cordiality vanishing instantly. Then he grabbed my forearm and shoved me into the dark room.

“Welcome, my dear,” came a hoarse voice, reminding me of the sound aged, crumbling parchment made as one turned the pages. The words were followed by a labored wheeze. “I’d stand up, but . . .”

The light from the hallway filled only a small area just inside the door, not providing any illumination within the room. I squinted into the darkness, searching for Dracula, but my vision was inadequate to penetrate the blackness. I felt Ian standing close behind me, could feel his eager trembling as he waited to see what would happen now that I was so close to the infamous vampire.

“Come to me, Beatrice,” Dracula rasped. “You are the one I want, the one I need. . . .”

Amanda hovered near me, her fingers an icy vise where she grabbed my arm with nervous anticipation, the chill penetrating my bones. “Oh, God,” she breathed, her voice choked with sorrow. “He’s even worse.”

I edged closer to the voice, my heart pounding so loudly, I knew Dracula could hear it. He would feel each heartbeat like a timpani vibrating in his own blood. I knew this because I could feel the increase in his heartbeat pulsing in mine.

But as I edged closer, went deeper into the darkness, I instinctively knew that the connection we shared was a tenuous one—a phantom of the real, a shadow of what Dracula shared with his other victims, of what he’d shared with Amanda before he had murdered her in a moment of panic upon realizing he’d actually turned an Ordinary.

The image of that moment popped into my head as if I was looking into Vlad’s eyes and reading his final thoughts, accepting atonement for his sins. He was dying. The starvation, the imprisonment, the beatings and torture had taken their toll, leaving him a desperate, pathetic shell of the man he’d once been. He was clinging to life, clinging to hope that he would be rescued—that the Agency’s madness could be put to a stop. And I was the one he wanted to do it. The one he needed to do it.

I knew it as surely as I knew we were not alone in the darkness.

Ian sensed it at the same moment and jerked a flashlight from his pocket, flipping it on. “What the fu—”

The startled curse died on his lips as the first vampire lunged forward, her fangs dripping with saliva when she let forth a furious hiss. Ian’s flashlight flew from his hand, clattering to the floor and spinning wildly, the eerie strobe effect as it spun revealing easily half a dozen vampires, crouching along the wall, their sunken eyes glowing red with each pass.

Holy shit!

Ian’s terrified scream snapped me out of my stupor. I bolted toward where I’d seen Dracula, hoping like hell the vampiresses wouldn’t come after me, too. I heard the hurried footsteps of the other agents rushing into the room and their startled cries when their flashlights illuminated the carnage.

I dropped to my knees in front of Dracula and took his face in my hands, turning his gaze up to mine.

“Beatrice,” he breathed, attempting a smile that was pathetically weak. “You came to me.”

I nodded, tugging frantically at the heavy iron chains that secured him to the wall and floor. “Yep, but your girlfriends are righteously pissed. So now would be a really good time to give me some of that vampire mojo of yours.”

His eyes rolled in his head. “Amanda. . . .”

As soon as he said it, I glanced up to where the spirit was standing beside me. In a blur of movement, she rushed toward me. I felt a jolt of energy, a surge of power, as she took control of my body. Ignoring the chaos and cacophony of hissing, slurping, and screams behind me, I grabbed the chains binding Dracula and yanked, pulling first one and then another from the wall, freeing his hands.

I had just taken hold of the chain binding his ankles together when Dracula’s arm went around my neck. With a growl, he jerked me off-balance and onto the cold floor. My heart jolted with panic until I saw him lash out, ripping away the throat of one of his own creations.

The vampiress fell back, grasping at her neck as blood spurted through her fingers.

As more agents rushed into the room, shouting and firing at the errant vampiresses, Dracula gathered me into his frail arms and dragged me close to his chest, snarling wildly as some of the agents edged cautiously toward us, their guns trained on us. And I wasn’t entirely sure if they’d mind putting a few bullets in me if it meant weakening Dracula enough to subdue him again.

Where the hell was Gideon?

As if on cue, the fairy suddenly appeared before us, his powerful fist nailing the nearest agent with a bone-crushing blow. Then there was a rapid pop, pop, pop and corresponding bursts of light. My head snapped toward the sound, tears of joy and relief filling my eyes.