The Better to Eat You With: The Red Journals (35 page)

I pressed my hand to the
glass panel and a red ripple rolled across the surface. The hulk moved toward
me, towering taller than Vince. When the door cleared and I stepped back, the
hot, heady scent of bear Shifter rolled towards me, mixed with an exotic spice
I’d come to associates with Moors.
Interesting mix.

I glanced over at Lola,
who was sending a being no taller than me zipping up the corridor. I craned my
neck to look up into his nearly white irises of the bear. “Exit is that way.” I
pointed. “Can you let out others on your way?”

The big man stared at me,
then nodded, and took off running after the little one.

I moved onto the next, and
repeated the process, and then the next. As I pressed my hand to the third one,
alarms began to wail. The sound was deafening after the silence of the past
week and the soft murmurs from the individuals I released. The variety was
shocking. Gremlin Fae, Wiccan Merfolk, several kinds of mixed and rare Sprites.
A Were as pale all over as a thousand year old Vampire, and a Vampire with skin
sparkling sky blue and eyes are dark as a clear night sky. The rarity and
variety was shocking.

At the end of the
corridor, Lola and I quickened our feet, knowing that the steel-paneled door
ahead of us with the flashing red light above it could burst open anytime and
Ambrose’s guards come piling through.

The first thing I saw when
I pressed my hand to the glass of the last cage was black feathers, glossy and
hinting at a deep blue. As the glass cleared to a hollow doorway twice the size
as all the others, a giant black wing shifted and a dark head of wavy hair
appeared. A male in a black tank and sweats tried to lift himself to hands and
knees, but could lift no further than elbows and belly.

This must be the
Gryphon they were talking about gassing.

“Help…”

I was already in the
habitat, a sandy floor and walls and ceiling painted to look like clouds,
gripping his arm and heaving him off the floor. His great feathery appendages
dragged on the floor as I hauled ass down the corridor.

“Red.” Lola was suddenly
on the other side of the Gryphon, swinging his other arm over her shoulders,
another Amazonian-like female with midnight skin and white dread locks coming
to relieve my shorter form of the Gryphon’s weight.

“He’s been gassed,” the
Amazon said, her nose wrinkling at the unnatural scent.

“Double-dose,” I agreed.
“I heard them say—“

Suddenly a metallic
thunk
sounded behind us. The steel door. Heavy footfalls pounded quickly towards us,
and fear shot across both females’ faces.

“Get him out of here,” I
said, slipping the bracelets from my wrists. “I’ll hold them off.”

As I turned to go, Lola
gripped my arm. “So many owe you their lives today,” she said.

I fought the lump in my
throat and stared bleakly at her. “They owe me nothing.”
Because the man who
did this to them was once my husband.
“Go. Quickly. I will follow.”

Lola nodded, and then they
were gone, black wings sweeping the corridor floor.

I turned just as guards
closed in, Alexander behind them with his customary death-stare plastered
across his stern face.

“Go after the freaks,” he
commanded, and a dozen or so black-clad men went jogging past me. Alexander’s
eyes were bottomless pits of merciless jet. “Take her down, men, but don’t kill
her. She’s the boss’s wife.”

And that was all the
permission the guards needed. With snarling smiles of anticipation they all
came at me, fumbling over each other in the narrow corridor like over-eager
pups. I sucked in a deep breath laced with the scent of Vampire, new by their
power levels that they were too new to take me, and launched myself amidst
them.

I shot out one hand and
wrapped the chain around a throat, yanking hard to sever the head clean off as
I spun with the other chain, flicking it out to slice open a throat. A gleam of
dark metal, and I barely managed to twist fast enough to dodge the blade aimed
at my shoulder. I wasn’t fast enough to avoid the one going for my ribs, and
the slice burned across skin and bone.

I hissed, baring all my
teeth, and the guard jerked back in surprise. I grabbed the arm of the first
blade wielding guard and jerked. As he stumbled forward I rammed the heel of my
palm into the back of his elbow, breaking it, then dipped to catch his blade as
he dropped, screaming, to the floor. I leaped back to avoid another knife
slice, then flicked out a wrist to capture his freehand with a chain. I pulled,
he spun, and the guard’s blade I’d procured was in his throat. He gurgled an
outraged, shocked cry and fell to the floor.

They weren’t truly dead,
for they were Vampires, but they were out of action.

That was good enough for
me.

I lifted my eyes to meet
black eyes, and stepped back when dark brown burned into me with a fury so pure
I felt it down to the very essence of myself.

Ambrose. And he was
pissed.

“Alexander,” he murmured
softly, his voice barely discernible over the alarm. “Do not interfere.”

The black-eyed Vampire
grinned maliciously at the command. “As you wish, Sire.” He stepped back,
giving Ambrose space, and something cold and terrified shivered down my spine.

My breaths came faster. My
heart began to pound. My blood roared in my ears. I knew the symptoms of fear,
of panic, the adrenaline only making the sensations more intense, but I
couldn’t stop any of it. The very idea of fighting Glenn—Ambrose—left me
weak-kneed and nauseous. I could never beat a Vampire his age. His power and
strength out-stripped me like a marathon runner a fat kid.

I spun and ran. I didn’t
get far.

With a cry, I was jerked
to a halt by a savage grip on my nape, spun by the bruising grip, and slammed
into a rock solid chest. With another cry, my head was wrenched back by my
hair, and uncompromising cold brown eyes glared into mine.

“You,” Ambrose voice was
low, bland, but his eyes were fierce, “set free my treasures.”

I think he’s going to
kill me. I think I’m going to die.
“Yes.”
My voice was a wavering whisper.

“They were mine.” His grip
on my neck and hair tightened, and I grimaced at the pain.
He
is
going
to kill me. I
am
going to die.
Might as well go out with a fight.

“No longer,” I told him.
“Now they are free.”

“No!” Ambrose snapped,
giving me a rough shake. “No.” He shoved me away.

“Yes!”

His hand whipped out so
fast I didn’t even get a chance to think about blocking it. Before I knew it, I
was spinning away from an explosion of pain in my face and the taste of blood
in my mouth, my already throbbing headache shooting up to full-blown pulsating.
My knees throbbed from hitting the concrete, and wobbled when I pushed myself
to my feet and straightened to face him.

“You are going to learn
that defying your husband will not go unpunished, Willow,” Ambrose said coolly,
rolling up the cuffs of his crisp white shirt, not a hair out of place, his
face schooled to be perfectly expressionless. Yet his eyes scalded me with his
fury.

I lifted my chin. “I am
not your wife, Ambrose. Willow died the same night Glenn did.”
She died when
I was raped.

Ambrose’s lip curled back
to display massively elongated canines, “You’ll always be mine, Willow.” His
eyes flared with gold, making the fury all the more sinister. “Always.”

Ambrose flew at me with
vampiric speed. He slammed into me with vampiric strength. The impact shattered
ribs and sent me flying down the hall. Landing stole what little oxygen was
left in my lungs, and the pain searing through my body as I slid across the floor
made dark splotches dance in my vision.

It had no time to clear.

Before I could regain my
senses, Ambrose had gripped my ankle, lifted me off the floor, spun me and
slammed me into the glass wall of one of his cages. Given how much it had taken
me to break that glass wall in my cage, I expected the impact to kill me. As it
was, my shoulder, ribs, hip and head blasted with pain, something in my knee
and ankle popped from his unrelenting grip on me. The glass spider-webbed in an
instant, and as I fell to the floor, a kick to my stomach scooted me back the
single foot gap to slam against the glass wall again.

The impact shattered the
glass.

It rained down on me like
a sparkling shower of stinging death, and the scent of my blood perfumed the
air.

I’m going to die.

A hot hand on my wrist
pulled me away from the wall. Pain lanced my body and glass bit into my skin. I
cried out as my eyes latched onto the furious gaze of a man I had once loved,
right before he drew back a fist and punched me.

I tried to lift my arms to
block him, but one arm wouldn’t move, and all he did was break the other. My
scream echoed down the corridor, resounding off glass walls. I kicked my legs
futilely until he straddled me, punching my face until all I could see, taste,
smell and hear was blood.

His breath rushed
delightfully cool across my face, but I couldn’t see him. My eyes were too
swollen. “Learn this lesson well, Willow.”

I tried to turn away from
him, but the pain, I was nothing but pain. A deep hollow throb in body and
soul. In my heart. I was utterly broken. I knew it, and I felt relief. I was
going to die, and I was relieved that my longing for him was over.

“Learn it, and know. You
either accept, or you die.”

My eyes peeked open,
painful against the swelling, but the words he had spoken pulled something
furious out of me. I watched as Alexander tried to drag him off, but his fierce
gaze held mine.

“Never,” I mouthed, barely
moving my lips at all, but the flare of gold in his cold eyes told me he knew
what I’d said, and it enraged him.

And then they were gone.

I lay where he left me,
staring down the hall at the open steel door, at the red flashing light. I
wondered if the alarms had been turned off, because all I could hear was a
deafening ring. My vision was dark around the edges, and getting darker. The
warm wetness under my broken limbs was turning cold.

I was turning cold. So
cold. But shivering hurt and made the darkness creep in faster. They say when
you’re about to die, your life flashes before your eyes. They say your memories
whip through the mind’s eye like a movie on fast-forward. That everything you
ever did, that you ever said, ran from start to finish and then you died.

They’re wrong.

What moves past your eyes
moves in slow motion, forcing you to recognize what you’ve lost, what you
almost had, what you’re giving up if you give up. It shifts like smoke through
your mind, across your memories, making thoughts skate across the surface like
pond spiders, making ripples that bring more regrets.

What I saw was Felix.

I saw him smiling,
laughing, giving me glimpses of those dimples, from flashes to out-right lean
lines. I saw him scowling, thoughtful, amused and intrigued. I heard his voice
calling me ‘pet’ in tones of mirth, frustration, anger and enticement. I felt his
touch, his skin, sometimes cool and sometimes warm. I saw every shade of his
eyes, from luminescent lime to deep dark moss to gold lightning. I felt his
rage and his passion, his desperation and his hope, and his love. Above all,
his love. I remembered his kisses...

The dark shadow around the
edges of my vision became so thick my sight was narrowing down to nothing, my
last memory of Felix, of his face as I let go of his hand, of my regret at
having never gotten to love him as I wanted to, was overwhelmed in my mind’s
eye by what was happening in the real world.

The cavalry had arrived.

The last thing I saw as I lay there on the floor,
getting colder and colder in a pool of my own blood, was Felix. He was running
through that steel door under the flashing red light and into the corridor
where I was, and realized all the things I felt in my dying moments weren’t
memories. They were real. Everything he felt, I felt, and was real.

The connection we had, the bond he’d tricked me into,
was still there, had always been.

Then there was nothing at all.

I woke up in a Wiccan medical facility outside of
Jacksonville, Illinois. As it turns out, Vince had a few choice secrets held
back that only came to light when I wouldn’t respond to the miracle-healer that
was Vampire blood. It took regular blood infusions and the resetting of all my
broken bones, a Fae healer and the interminable waiting for swelling in my head
to go down.

I slept for seventeen days. I dreamed. I thought I’d
passed over.

Then I woke up, dazzled by sunlight, and aching from
head to toe.

I lifted my hand, equipped with pulse monitor and
intravenous drip, and tried to block the light, but I was so weak I barely got
my hand a couple inches off the bed before someone was there grabbing it. Felix
and Vince were there. So were Des and Mark. Jade and Fletch. Frost and Porcia,
and Osiris to control Porcia so she didn’t overwhelm me. They were all so
relieved, so happy. I could smell their worry even as they smiled. It was a
sour taint, and as the scent of other emotions began to fill the air, I tired
quickly. The doctor, a Fae female with a sharp tone but soft eyes, kicked
everyone out. Reduced visits to half an hour total, no matter who came to see
me.

I was never so thankful to be left alone. I loved all
of them, all these people who cared whether I lived or died, but I needed to be
alone. I needed to think about…stuff.

I heaved a heavy sigh as I lay propped up on pillows,
gazing out the window at the bright blue spring sky dotted with fluffy clouds. It
would be summer soon. I wondered if my soul would still feel as shredded then
as it did at the moment, or if the raw sting of it would have lessened. I
wondered if I would have found my way again, and the lost feeling that had
burrowed inside me so deep was only temporary. I wondered how I was ever going
to love Felix the way I wanted to, the way he wanted to love me, when I
couldn’t get past the all-encompassing fear that shivered up my spine and
clutch my heart in an angry fist every time I thought about it.

How could I love someone new, when my old love
nearly killed me, in every sense of the word?

And that was the crux of my thoughts.

I analyzed my emotions obsessively. It had been so
long since I’d felt anything more than a tiny bit lonely after a Rat-Pack
musical, or indecisive over shoes, that being destroyed had me doggedly trying
to figure out why.

I had only one answer.

I’ll give you three guesses and the first two don’t
count.

I snorted, and then winced as my healing ribs
protested. Who knew breaking every single one of them wouldn’t even come close
to what it felt like to be broken inside?

In the end, I’d acquired a surprising number of
injuries. I’d dislocated my jaw, cracked vertebrae in my spinal column, four
broken ribs on the right, two on the left, with another two cracked, broken
right ankle, dislocated right knee and hip, broken right collarbone, dislocated
right wrist, broken left wrist, and myriad bruises, cuts and swelling all over.
I was a mess.

A rape kit confirmed what I’d already known. What
shocked me was that samples taken were from five different males.

The only consolation was the safe escape of all the
other captives in Ambrose’s’ menagerie. Except for trauma and some poisoning
from the regular gassing for the females, most of them were fine. They would
recover in time, like me.

I’d learned from Fletch that he’d managed to hack the
second flash drive. The combined encrypted files revealed, of all things, a
family tree, with Ambrose’s line gracing the bottom. Vince had taken the info
and handed it over to his contacts at the wolfy archive place, wherever that
was, and they were researching the names listed there, trying to find a
connection that would help us.

In the meantime, I was left to heal. Mostly.

“Hey.”

I knew who it was without having to look, but I turned
my head anyway. Felix stood in the doorway, clad in a long-sleeved grey T and
washed out blue jeans with tears in the knees. His hair was swept back and his
biker boots were dirty, and the scent of him wafted over me like the most
familiar of caresses. I wanted to bask in it so desperately, and I was utterly
terrified to do so.

“Hey.” I smiled weakly back.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, moving closer. The
hand he couldn’t see clutched the bed sheet.

“Weak.” I rolled my eyes. “So over being weak.”

He chuffed a laugh, one of his hands coming out of a
pocket to trace circles on the bed near my hand. “Only in body, pet.”

Pet.
I swallowed against the lump in my throat.
“The doc said I could have steak—”

“Eventually.”

“—but someone would have to cut it up for me—“

“Uh huh.”

“—and I would
kill
for a burger—”

“I’m sure.”

“—maybe some French fries—”

“Indeed.”

“—and a
big
banana milkshake.” I stuck out my
bottom lip, despite the fact that it was swollen and already stuck out, and
gave him some big, sad hybrid eyes. “Pretty please?”

His very proximity was driving my emotions insane,
bouncing between elation and fear and it was starting to make me feel sick,
trying to keep the emotion was leaking out into a scent.

Felix brushed his fingertips over mine, and it took
everything in me not to flinch at the contact.
I love you, but you terrify
me.

“If I bring you an enormous bag of hamburgers,” said
my Vampire, “will you promise to heal faster so I can take you home already?”

I sucked in a sharp breath at the heat suddenly
flaring in his eyes.

I’m not strong enough for you.
I gave him a wry
smile. “Only if you get me fries and milkshakes too.”

Felix laughed. “I’ll be back soon.” He leaned down and
brushed his lips over my forehead, the kiss so tender my heart clenched in my
chest and made my skin burn with a held-in shudder. The lump in my throat was
back.
God, how do I survive this?

As he was leaving, Vince slipped into the room, mixing
up the ice, coffee and anise with his California beach boy aroma, trading soft
insults with the Vampire as he left. The big Alpha, back in his rocker t-shirts,
leather pants and big, clunking shitkickers, blonde hair curling around his
ears and shining like pale gold in the sunlight, set his pale blue eyes on me
in an assessing manner.

He moved around the bed, and took a seat beside me. I
watched him recline there, staring back at me, his fingers brushing his lips.
“Did you know,” he began softly, “that you look like you’ve gone ten rounds
with an ugly tree?”

I laughed, as he’d intended, then groaned in pain, for
my body and my face, pulling stitches that weren’t quite ready to be taken out
yet. “Asshole.” I panted, pressing a hand to my side.

Vince smiled. “Better than when you first came in.
Then
you looked like you’d gone ten rounds with
ten
ugly trees.”

I kept laughing, curling in on myself in a vain
attempt to reduce the sting. “Stop! God, what the hell?”

“Okay, okay. I’ll crack jokes when you’re better.” He
was still smiling though. A killer smile. “You won’t be so ugly then.”

Fucker is trying to kill me.

While I caught my breath, he glanced between me and
the window, a contemplative air about him, and I wondered what he was going to
say. Never had I seen him hesitate. It was…disconcerting, to say the least.

“Spit it out, Cujo,” I finally demanded, twitchy
enough as it was given Felix could be back any moment, and I’d have to pretend
everything was fine.

Vince’s smile flashed again, and then he leaned
forward to lean his elbows on his knees, all serious and shit. “I have a
proposition to put to you, darlin’.”

I waited for him to continue, and after a moment, he
did.

“The Were Council and the Immortal Commission want to
offer you a job.”

My brow arched.
Didn’t see that coming.

 
“I, and many other Immortals, work for them as
a sort of task force, employed to enforce the laws of our kind so that beings
like Ambrose
are caught as soon as they transgress.”

Jeez, even his name made a small part of me shrivel
up and cower.

“
We hunt them down, capture and neutralize.” He
paused and stared at my face, as if to gauge my reaction. “Our teams are elite,
our training is intense, and the rewards are exponential. Not only will you be
policing our kind, but you’ll also be protecting it.” His gaze was heavy with
intent. “You’ll be making sure people like Ambrose don’t have a chance to make
Collections.”

“So you want me to hunt someone down? As you can see,”
I gestured weakly to my stitches, casts and general inability to do jack-shit,
“it didn’t go so well for me last time.”

Vince was shaking his head. “This isn’t a one-time
offer, darlin’. This is an offer to train you, to make you stronger, faster,
harder,
better
.”

I waved my hand at him to stop talking. I’d already
decided, though I couldn’t quite believe it. This was the perfect opportunity
for me to get away, heal, mend, recuperate and be exactly what Vince said;
better. I wanted to be better. I wanted to be whole. I needed to be. Otherwise
I’d never be able to move past how terrified I was to love Felix, how terrified
I was to love anyone. I didn’t want to have to fear I’d flinch whenever someone
touched me.

I was sick of all the questions, too. The ‘what if I
open up and he hurts me?’, ‘what if I can’t open up and he leaves?’ and ‘what
if I can’t be fixed?’.

Getting away from the cause of all the fear was
exactly what I wanted. I could answer all these questions without the added
pressure of Felix hovering around me. And when I was eventually fixed, I could
come back, and I could win him. It was perfect.

“I’ll do it.”

Vince’s brows shot up, as if he expected to have to
convince me. “You will?”

“On one condition.”

“Name it.”

I’m sorry. So sorry. I’m sorry I have to let go
again.

“Get me as far away from Felix as you can.”