Blood Magic by Laken Cane
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jennifer took us to a small, locked room, and when she shoved open the door and we followed her inside, my stomach immediately began to hurt. My heart thudded painfully, and for a few seconds, I thought I might embarrass myself by throwing up all over the gleaming wood floor.
I had no idea why. It was just a room and not even a bloody one. There were two large, comfortable reclining chairs, each with a small table holding a bucket of popcorn, and a dark screen hanging on the wall across from them.
That room scared the crap out of me.
“Please,” Jennifer said mildly, indicating the chairs. “Sit.”
“Are we watching a movie?” I was trying for casual but was nearly certain she heard the wobble in my voice.
“Actually, yes.” She walked to the screen and tapped, and the screen lit up at once. An image appeared—a slender, gnarled tree, its empty limbs twisting and black in the pearly, early morning light, two motionless, hooded men dressed in black clothes and holding shovels, the edge of a single tombstone barely visible at the edge of the screen.
“Are you ready?” Jennifer asked, but didn’t wait for an answer she surely knew would not come. She hit the play button and the paused video began to play.
I didn’t want to stand there and watch whatever was about to happen. I wanted to stride from the room with Joe, who was about to get a dose of tortured reality he likely didn’t know existed. I wanted to run.
But I couldn’t, because though Axton wanted to shock, hurt, and warn me, the person he was using to do just that might need my help. Sure, they were likely long dead, but maybe…
Maybe it was Brenda Ferguson, and they simply wanted me to see what they’d done to her before they handed her over. Or maybe it was another human. Axton would want me to know what he was capable of and how much in danger the humans were.
But that time, I was dead wrong.
The two men began digging, flinging black dirt behind them, and suddenly, the video sped up as Jennifer hit another button. “The digging is boring. I’ll get you right to my favorite part. Are you sure you don’t want to sit and have some popcorn?”
I silently stared at her until she shrugged and gave up trying to bait me. Watching the screen for a few more seconds, she muttered, “Here we go,” and tapped another button. “Okay, here we go.”
There was something darkly eager in her voice, and I wondered how many times she’d watched this particular video. I didn’t look at Joe, because I didn’t want him seeing anything but calm fearlessness in my face—and I was pretty sure that once the video started, I was going to be anything but calm.
There’d probably always be an attitude of “them versus us” when it came to how the supernaturals thought of the humans. It didn’t matter that I protected the humans from bad nonhumans—I’d also protect the supernaturals from the humans. But I was always going to be more protective of the supernaturals when I saw a human abusing them. I was always going to take it personally.
So when Jennifer glanced at me, cruelly excited, her stare flitting between the horror on the video to my face, I had to forcefully restrain myself from hurting her. It wasn’t easy.
“Fuck,” Joe muttered, and there was no satisfaction in his voice at seeing a “monster” being tortured in a video. He was disgusted and angry.
I was enraged and hurt.
The hooded men on the video dug up the vampire Bastien’s sleeping place. He’d lain curled up against Farrow, the girl who’d begged me to save him. They dug him up, removing the protective earth from between him and the milky Fall sun, and the person filming the horror zoomed in on their faces.
I saw the exact second his eyes flipped open, the exact second his skin began to steam and then melt, the exact second he realized what was happening before he blanked his stare and accepted that a torturous death had come to claim him.
Vampires lived long, long lives, and they experienced pain so often that they learned to accept the pain and fear and horror. They lived with it. All supernaturals did, because it wasn’t our world. But vampires were on a whole different level, because they hurt each other. The masters hurt the ones under them, used them, punished them. They’d lost their humanity with their turning, I thought, and their capacity to cause pain to others was even larger than a human’s was.
“No,” I whispered, not caring that Jennifer was watching me with her bright, bright stare. “Bastien.”
He curled himself around the girl, but it didn’t matter. He could not protect her. The sun, in its sinister, magical brutality, melted his clothes into his flesh, and finally, Farrow began to scream, unable not to. She wasn’t as old as Bastien, and she had none of his control.
The person videoing the nightmare must have crouched at the grave, for the footage shook and then righted itself close up on Bastien’s profile. And finally, he moved his head enough to look directly at the camera.
I felt as though he were looking at me. Asking me to help. Needing me to make the pain stop. Even more than the pain, no vampire wanted to go into an afterlife that terrified them more than anything else. He believed he was being tortured to death and would only go into more torture. An eternity of torture.
A shovelful of dirt hit him in the face as his killers proceeded to rebury him.
I was so caught by anguish and pain that I could barely think. I didn’t remember walking the few steps to where Jennifer stood, her breathing fast, her pulse rapidly beating in her white throat, her lips parted.
I slammed her against the wall and dug my fingers into her throat. “Where are they?”
“Wait,” she gasped, half laughing. “There’s more.”
“Kait,” Joe murmured, and I knew from his voice that not only was there more, there was worse.
I think that was the moment I began to harden. Remy had said I was a stone-cold killer, and in a way, I was. But I was also emotional and soft and hotblooded, and my heart was big. But the awfulness of the world was getting to me, and I couldn’t funnel it off to my wolf, because she was free and wasn’t going to let me.
I forced Jennifer to her knees and held her there as I made myself put my reluctant stare back on the screen.
Axton appeared, and though his voice was mild, his eyes held only rage. “Ms. Silver. You’re such a warrior. Such a sweet, sweet warrior. And you may not realize this, but you’re alone. The world is full of darkness, and you are not strong enough to be its light. My message to you is clear, is it not?” He leaned forward. “You cannot take anything from me, Kaitlyn, because I will slowly twist you up in ways you cannot imagine. This is just the beginning. I cannot make Kaloni live again, but you will bring me back my whore.”
Abruptly the image cut from him to Detective Rick Moreno. He was standing at the edge of a crowd, talking with other police officers on the street. Dressed in his familiar suit, his gun beneath his jacket, his badge clipped to his belt. He gestured as he spoke, intent upon dealing with whatever crime he stood in the middle of.
The video cut away to show another video, this one a somewhat fuzzy closeup of the detective leaving his house and getting into his car. Another of him walking into the police station. And still another of him leading his wife from the car to his house. He put his arm around her shoulders and glanced down at her, his lips moving as he spoke to her.
And though the threat was huge and horrible and in my face, I relaxed a little. Axton didn’t have Rick—he was simply threatening to take him.
As though he knew what I’d be thinking at that exact moment, Axton’s image once again appeared on the screen. “Your partner is quite beautiful, Kait. I hope you get the chance, someday, to see him again.”
I closed my eyes in a long, slow blink, because I knew. I knew.
The next time the detective appeared on the screen, he hung by his wrists against a filthy brick wall, and blood ran in rivers down his naked body.
“If you want him back,” Jennifer said, looking up at me. “You’ll return my master’s slave. Now you may leave. The human you came for is waiting for you in the hall. This was fun. I hope we can do it again soon.”
And it was only the mad joy in her eyes that kept me from breaking down into screams of pain and tears of terror. I punched her in the face, though she was simply a device used by the master, and by the time Joe pulled me away—almost immediately—she lay crumpled on the floor. Axton’s constant feedings would have made her physically stronger even as they’d slowly warped her mind. I didn’t know if she was dead, and I didn’t care.
Stone cold.
With Joe at my back, I ran from the room, intent upon only two things.
I would see if there was any way in hell I could find a spark inside Bastien and Farrow and somehow save their lives.
And I would find my detective.
