A Wicked Night (Creatures of Darkness 2): A Coraline Conwell Novel (20 page)

As if reminded he’d gone without long enough, he pulled a cigar from his back pocket and bit off the end, spitting it to the ground. He lit it, pulled a long drag and blew a thick cloud into Cora’s face, looking down his nose at her. She kept her gaze stony, fixed on the ceiling above her.

Finally, without another word, the two men left to torment the other captives.

Ordeal over, Cora’s body sank into miserable dejection. Her bottom lip quivered. Her eyes were red. Watery. Her hands shook. Her adrenaline was wafting. Bray could tell she was using everything in her to keep from showing just how terrified she’d been.

“Go ahead and cry,” he said softly.

And so she did.

Days passed by, but to Cora, it might as well have been years. Time became nothing more than a solid lump of suffering to varying degrees. The routine was this: Swap blood with Bray, endure the dire lust that followed, occasionally suffer through the guards tormenting
bath time
; twice more they’d unleashed that fire hose on her, the cigar man chortling in sadistic pleasure. She’d never imagined something as tepid as water could berate so painfully. She was always surprised when it didn’t manage to rip away skin just as it made it impossible to breathe till the brutal stream shut off.

Her thoughts often cycled back to before she’d been captured. She should have listened to Knox. He’d been suspicious of Devon from the start. So had Mace, but Knox had been more inclined to put action to words. If she’d given her go-ahead, he might have killed Devon without a second thought. She wished she could have seen the logic of his ruthlessness. But, then, she wasn’t a killer, was she? And yet, her well-intentioned mistake might have brought Mace to an end.

That was the kicker.

She had no way of knowing if Mace was still alive. The wondering ate at her every moment. And when she slept, she sought him out in dreams, which were becoming more vivid, but alternatively less coherent. She didn’t think she was entering the dream realm. Just plain dreaming. The only tangible escape she had.

When awake, Bray regaled her with stories from his long life, rarely pushing her to reciprocate. He told her his father had died long before his change. And that Cortez was younger by three years, though he’d always tried to act ten years older. Bray called him a stiff prick with brass balls. He always smiled when he spoke of Cortez, even when he had nothing good to say, which was kind of endearing.

On the occasions she couldn’t hold in her tears, Bray never failed to sooth her, saying that “it would be alright” and “we’ll find a way out of here.” And when she lost hope completely, he was full of encouragement, suggesting that Trent would likely double the search effort for her alone. She didn’t reveal that she wasn’t exactly Trent’s favorite person. Bray was clearly loyal to the man.

How he remained so positive, she couldn’t understand.

On the rare instances when he made her smile, he seemed to take it as a personal accomplishment, adorably jutting his chest, drawing another smile from her, which she could tell was always his intention.

However, there were cracks in his façade, and she began to realize it was put in place for her alone, as if it had become his sole purpose in life to comfort her. Every so often, mostly as he skated that place between sleep and consciousness, or when he came out of a drugged stupor, the deep-seeded threads of his loneliness choked strong emotions from her. It burrowed deep, to her very bones, and nested there.

The melancholy that accompanied Bray’s awakening dissipated quickly, however, once he caught sight of Cora and recognition took hold. Most of the time he was jovial. There was a natural goodness in him that had undoubtedly existed before his preternatural transformation, back when he’d been a hopeful and vibrant young man…young
hu
man. He’d been a heartbreaker, or so she imagined. For the opposite to be true would be impossible. Not with that mischievous, boyish smile of his. Women would have swooned. After his transformation, with the mysterious and dangerous nature each vampire seemed to exude, they would have died for him.

And to her own amazement, sometime during this nightmare, Bray had become her rock. She looked to him whenever maltreated by the guards. Just locking eyes with him kept her from mentally crumbling altogether. She would sink into the steadfast depths of his irises and wrap herself in emerald, finding that place in her mind where everything was calm and nothing could hurt her.

She perceived the same was true for Bray, that somehow she filled him with hope, as absurd as that might be. What the hell could she do to help their situation? A whole lot of nothing, that’s what!

However, this morning, she awoke sensing a charge in the air. She couldn’t explain it, but…

Today felt different.

Per usual, Bray greeted her with an upbeat “good morning” just as she opened her eyes, as though he’d been watching her while she’d slept, counting the minutes until she awoke—something that should have felt awkward, but was instead comforting.

She had come to accept that without him she would have broken long ago.

Doing a quick calculation, she realized today must be blood-swap day. Each time they came, she would try to escape, to contort her body out of the guard’s grasp, but they were too strong, too quick, and they’d come to anticipate it. She usually only ended up with fresh bruises, set to heal within hours thanks to her regular diet of Bray’s blood.

His bite, though he was always numbed by drugs, had, in a way, turned tender, breaking the barest minimum of skin to get to the blood he deliriously sought.

She had asked him once if he remained conscious when they drugged him and whether he remembered anything afterward. He’d nodded solemnly and said, “Things get fuzzy, though. And the world feels heavy.”

“So you realize when you’re feeding off me?”

He’d responded with another nod and a slow dip of his Adam’s apple. She didn’t need the bond to know he savored her blood, even while despising the ordeal. And she didn’t blame him for that. He was a vampire. That’s what they did. It would be like blaming a human for enjoying a juicy steak.

“Did you sleep well?” Bray’s question roused her back to the present. He always asked her that when she awoke. It was sweet.

“No better than yesterday.” She glanced toward the door, for some reason more anxious than normal, but she didn’t know why. “What’s happening?” she asked.

Bray looked at her curiously, then canted his head to listen. “Are you expecting something?”

She shook her head.

Odd. She couldn’t tell what, but something felt off. Her bones shivered with tension—not that tension wasn’t pretty much a constant at this point, but it was also mixed with a heavy dose of unnerving anticipation and a jittery sensation, like she’d downed too much coffee.

“Maybe I’m just coming off a dream,” she said. It had been exceptionally vivid, and Mace had even made an appearance, though she couldn’t tell if she’d made contact, or if she had just wanted to dream of him, therefore she had.

Bray seemed to accept that, but also appeared nettled. “You’re unusually agitated,” he informed her, and for a moment she had forgot that he could now harvest her innermost feelings. “What was your dream about?”

“Mace,” she replied.

Bray frowned.

“I don’t really remember much,” she continued. “Just that he was there.”

Shivers needled her shoulders. A cold sweat broke out along her forehead and goose bumps whispered over her nape. She glanced toward the door again.

“Are you, you know…”—he lowered his voice—“sensing something with your magic?”

If she was, she couldn’t say for sure. It was as if the very molecules around her were screaming out a warning that she couldn’t decipher. But that was crazy, wasn’t it?

Yet the tingling vibes persisted.

She tried to shrug it off. “Tell me more about your life,” she said, needing the diversion.

He chuckled. “Soon, you’ll know everything about me, whereas you’re still a mystery.”

Not addressing that, she silently urged him on.

“Very well,” he said in a conversational tone. “You know of my brother. My father. That’s the sum of my human family. My mother died when I was too young to remember her.”

Cora’s lips puckered into a frown, instantly identifying.

“Trent essentially became my father in vampire terms. Before their falling out, Cortez and I were his right hands. Mind you, this was before the Revelation and the following uprisings.”

The
Revelation
, as it was widely referred to, Cora understood to be the year vampires revealed themselves to humanity; the year
all hell broke loose
, according to the historians. Armageddon to the overtly religious, who believed they were living in the end times. But history is written by the winners. There weren’t lot of records leftover from those days. A few tattered books here and there, but most of those were written by older vampires who had survived the wars from start to finish, and thus were always skewed in favor of the vampires.

And though a few humans were still in denial, she figured it was safe to say they’d lost. They were no longer top of the food chain.

Without solid documentation in those first few decades of destruction, humans had made due with oral accounts passed on to one another, like a human news chain, which was even less reliable than the vampire’s tales, in Cora’s opinion. Like a children’s game where one child whispered a specific phrase in the ear of another, then that child whispered it to another, and so forth till the last child announced the phrase aloud, which was, without fail, a wild slaughtering of the original verbiage.

Though many would stubbornly disagree, no one could know for sure what had really happened in those days and what was a myth unless they had lived through it.

She gasped as realization hit her. Bray was older than the Revelation. That meant he was upwards of a hundred. Possibly older.

“I’m lucky I wasn’t inducted during the uprisings,” he continued. “Like Mace and Knox were.”

If she could have sat up, her back would have been iron-rod straight. “Oh?”

“Yeah. When you’re turned, emotions run wild at first. Fluctuate. Hard to control. It’s as though every sense is heightened. I had it easy by comparison.”

“Mace and Knox were turned during the wars?”

“They were turned
for
the wars.”

Cora’s mind reeled at this information, greedy for more. Luckily, Bray obliged without her having to press.

“Our numbers were dwindling, and Trent decided he needed new recruits. He started seeking out his blood relatives for added loyalty—”

The doctor’s antiseptic scent wafted in.

Bray’s gaze jerked to the door just as a set of tranquilizers landed in his torso. He cursed and locked eyes with Cora. Their hearts sank together, both of them feeling the other’s dread.

Moments later, his head drooped as the drugs kicked in.

Her pulse slammed through her veins, spurred by adrenaline. She would rather deal with bath time than the doctor.

The heavy cell door creaked open.

A high-pitched clattering preceded the doctor’s entrance as he pushed that familiar rolling cart across the room. Two syringes lay atop the silver tray. One seemed to be empty. The other was filled with that dreaded dark liquid.

Not again!

She sputtered, “Didn’t your boss say no more testing on me.”

The doctor supplied a heartless smile that took on the quality of a demented sneer. “The master isn’t here.”

He picked up the empty syringe, unceremoniously stabbed the vein in her arm, and pulled back on the plunger. She swallowed a cry as her blood filled the shaft—something told her the doctor would enjoy hearing it.

He retrieved the second syringe; the one she suspected was filled with concentrated liquid insanity.

She panicked. “Won’t there be consequences for this?”

“The master believes there’s something in the bond that I can’t recreate through science. I intend to prove him wrong and win my place at his side.”

In went the needle.