A Shade of Vampire 8: A Shade of Novak (11 page)

I
was woken
the next morning by a knock at my door. I got out of bed and looked around. But whoever it was had already vanished.

A black bundle sat on my doorstep. I picked it up and shut the door, then walked over to my bed and unravelled it.

Wrapped up in a black sheet were clothes. Underwear, beautiful gowns, fluffy slippers, and a warm woolen coat.

About time,
I thought.
I’ve been walking around in this apartment barefoot with blankets pulled over me in this smelly old nightgown ever since I got here.

I took a shower and, discarding the old nightgown in a bin, I pulled on fresh underwear. I was relieved that it was the stretchy, comfortable type and not the itchy, lacy kind. Then I reached for one of the gowns and pulled it over my head. It was deep purple and made of silk. I layered the coat on top and looked in the mirror.

Hm. Not too shabby.

I brushed my hands through my hair to tame it.

Now all I need is Kristal’s makeup.

Kristal.
Her name sent a dagger through my chest. I prayed that nothing had happened to her or her brother.
If anything does, it will be all Ben’s and my fault.

I have to get out of here and save all of them.

Putting on the slippers, I decided to leave the room and go for another roam around the castle.

Walking around confirmed that Caleb was my only hope. Apart from Frieda, no other vampire would even speak to me. They avoided me in the corridors. I tried to talk to one of them, and she gave me a funny look and hurried off.

I reached the ground floor and walked from hall to hall until, at the back of the building, I found the entrance to the kitchen Frieda had taken me to.

I walked around, running my hand along the metal counter. The kitchen was huge—as big as any of the other halls.

I wonder where they keep all the humans? If these vampires drink their blood, it would be convenient to keep them near the kitchen. Perhaps in a dungeon. That’s normally where the poor mortals end up being stuffed in fairy tales.

I looked around the room for any sign of a door in the wall, or a trap door, but found none.

Hmm.

And then I heard it. Distant sobbing. I held my breath as I tried to make out from which direction it was coming.

I retraced my steps back out of the kitchen and took a sharp right turn. I walked along the corridor until I reached an open door. I peeped through it. In a hall I’d never passed by before, a woman perched on the windowsill, the window flung wide open. Her whole body convulsed as she cried out against the mountain wind.

The witch? Huh?

Her wailing was so heart-wrenching, I had to remind myself how she had treated me and Caleb to stop myself from going up to her and asking her what on earth was wrong. I had never expected such a creature could experience sorrow and grief. Even the witches back at The Shade were guarded with their emotions. So to see this woman howling disturbed me deeply.

I stood dumbstruck for several minutes. I was knocked to my senses only when footsteps came down the main staircase. I scrambled away in time to see three male vampires descend into the entrance hall and walk straight through to the dining room. I climbed back up the stairs and returned to my apartment.

Shivering, I jumped into bed and curled up beneath the blankets, the witch’s wails still echoing in my head. Her grief reached into the marrow of my bones.

Whatever and wherever this place is, its halls are haunted with sorrow and pain.

I miss The Shade.

I miss home.

T
he noises started again soon
after midnight. I tried blocking my ears with my hands and curling up in a ball, but I couldn’t stop the sounds from trickling through into my ear drums, disturbing me enough to ensure that night would yet again be sleepless.

I pulled on a dress and my coat and rushed out of the room. I crept up the stairs once again but this time, instead of opening the door, I sat down in a corner of the corridor, outside the room, beneath the shadow of a tapestry hanging on the wall. My imagination ran wild with images of what could be going on in there.

When the door handle finally turned, I held my breath as the witch exited, her hair disheveled, her dress awry. Once she had disappeared down the corridor, I stood up and eased Caleb’s door open. I slid inside and closed it behind me.

I crept along the wrecked corridor and peeked around the corner.

The balcony doors were open, the curtains blowing in the wind. I walked over to them and pulled them aside to see Caleb standing in the cold, leaning against the banister, his muscled back bare and scarred with bloody cuts.

I couldn’t help but gasp. But although he must have heard it, he didn’t turn around.

I stood next to him and looked up at his face. His eyes were fixed on the horizon, where the ocean sparkled beneath the light of the moon.

I was at a loss for what to say to him anymore. He didn’t respond to my questions about anything that was going on. I questioned why I even came up here. Somehow, after I’d heard the noises from the witch’s visit, I just couldn’t ignore it and go back to sleep as if nothing had happened. I had wanted to see his face. Look him in the eye. So instead I found myself mumbling, “Did you bring me these?” I indicated to my dress and coat.

“Frieda,” he muttered, without looking down at me.

“But you asked her to?”

He breathed out and shivered. He walked back into the room. I followed him, closing the balcony doors behind us.

He took a seat in his wooden chair, but this time he didn’t reach for liquor.

“Thank you, is what I was going to say if you’d have given me the chance,” I said, crossing my arms across my chest. I paused, then, still eyeing him closely, said, “Would you like me to play for you again?”

From the blank expression on his face, he hadn’t heard. But then he shook his head.

“Oh. OK,” I said.

I sat down on the bed opposite him and dropped the coat down over my shoulders, staring at him. The bloody cuts on his torso and back were beginning to heal.

“Why did you come here?” he said, standing up abruptly and making eye contact with me for the first time.

Maybe he was just drunk last night when he indicated he’d like to see me again.

His eyes were so intense as they bored into mine, it felt as though I might melt beneath them. But I stood my ground. “So you want me to leave? Is that what you’re saying?” I stared up at him, my eyebrows raised in challenge.

He glared at me. I glared back harder.

He sat back down.

“You know, you don’t exactly strike me as the happiest of sorts,” I said, my hands on my hips as I continued glaring at him. “A little smiling never did anyone any harm.”

Whoa. I sound like my mother. She always was Little Miss Sunshine.

A bitter smile curled at the corner of his lips, then he breathed out a sigh and relaxed a little, his jaw becoming less tense.

“So,” he said after a few moments. “You want to play for me again?”

“If that’s what you’d like.”

He nodded. “All right… Rose.” He swiveled in his chair so that he was facing the lounge.

His eyes followed me as I walked over to the instruments. This time, I didn’t sit down at the piano. I rummaged around until I reached a large instrument which I suspected to be a harp. I pulled off its cover and was pleased to see that my assumption had been correct.

Wiping away the dust from the strings, I sat down on the bench and placed the harp between my legs. I began to strum a melody.

His eyes never left me the whole time I was playing. I could have sworn that his foot tapped slightly to the beat. After I’d grown tired of playing the harp, I moved on to the violin. Then the guitar. Then I sat back down at the piano.

As I started playing the keys, Caleb stood up abruptly. Crossing the room, he sat next to me on the bench. I stopped playing and looked up at him.

“No,” he whispered, shaking his head. “Don’t stop.”

Still eyeing him, I continued playing. He stretched out his fingers on the keys of the upper portion of the piano and began playing the perfect accompaniment to my tune. He played as though he knew it by heart. He barely even looked up at the music sheet.

When the piece finished, my hands slid off the keys and I looked at him, my mouth hanging open.

He stared down at the piano, as though he was as surprised as I was by what he’d just done.

“That’s the first time I’ve touched an instrument in a long time,” he breathed.

“Caleb, that was stunning.”

I reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder. He flinched as soon as my fingers touched his bare skin.

“I’m sorry, did I hurt—”

“No. No,” he muttered, even as he shot to his feet and walked back across the room to his wooden seat.

I stood up too.

We stared at each other from across the room.

I don’t know what to make of this man.

Feeling uncomfortable under his gaze, I averted my eyes and looked around the room. It was then, hidden away in a corner, that I spotted something out of place. It was a stereo player. I walked over to it and ran my fingers along its ledge. Beneath it were stacks of CDs.

So maybe this is how he practices his dance moves.

I fingered through the CDs. He had a lot of blues and instrumental stuff. At least, it was more modern than the stuff my dad had brought me up on.
Hmm, but nothing you’d dance to in a nightclub. There goes my theory then.

“You have a lot of music over here,” I remarked.

He nodded.

I picked out a CD and pushed it into the machine. I turned up the volume and stood up once it had started playing.

“So… do you want to, uh, dance again?”

He shook his head, the shadow of a smile crossing his face, and leaned further back in his chair. “I’ll watch you.”

I snorted. “Oh, yeah? I can’t dance.”

“You seemed to dance fairly well before.”

“Because you were guiding my every movement.”

He didn’t seem to have a response to that. He just nodded slightly and looked down at the floor.

I walked back over to his side of the apartment and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“It’s late. I guess I’ll go back to my room now.”

“All right.”

He remained still, his eyes remaining on the floor, his body tense again. I was about to reach out a hand for him to shake it, but recalled the time I’d tried to touch him before and thought better of it. Instead I just said, “Good night.”

When he didn’t even respond to that, I picked up my coat, put my slippers back on and headed out the door.

But just as I was closing the door, I caught him whispering:

“Good night, Rose.”

R
ose Novak was
everything that I wasn’t.

Innocent. Vibrant. Untouched.

She was like a patch of fresh snow among the black ice that was the rest of my life.

I didn’t want anything or anyone to make a mark on it. Least of all myself.

So when she’d tried to touch me with her soft warm hand, I’d recoiled.

When she’d tried to dance with me, I’d rejected her.

Whenever she’d pressed for answers about me and this castle, I’d brushed her off.

I wasn’t refusing to answer her because I wanted to keep her in the dark. I wanted to keep her
out
of the dark.

I’d just wanted to lock her away. Away from me. Away from Annora.

I didn’t want to tarnish her mind with the things that went on in my shadowy world.

But that night, I didn’t know why I was in such a good mood. Perhaps it was because Annora had told me she was leaving to visit Stellan’s island for a while. Whatever the reason, after I was sure that Rose had fallen asleep, I allowed myself to climb down onto her balcony.

As I caught a glimpse of her peaceful face through the curtains, her expression brought out an ache in me. An ache that both disturbed me and made me feel alive.

I recalled the time I had first laid eyes on her beauty, her face sweaty, her hair disheveled, breath smelling of champagne. She’d behaved like any other teenage girl looking for a night out.

Then she’d told me her name.

And I’d dropped her faster than a hot iron.

I’d heard rumors about the princess of The Shade—not just her beauty, but her innocence, her purity, her light. She was like her mother, they said.

I didn’t want to be responsible for ruining that.

I was responsible for enough evil already.

And now that she was on the island, since I couldn’t allow her to leave—at least for the time being—I swore that I would do my best to shield her from her surroundings.

The truth was, I wasn’t so much afraid of Derek Novak as I was of breaking his daughter.

I
’d been injected
with something shortly after Stellan pulled me back into the submarine and I’d woken up in this dark dungeon. I’d lost track of how much time had passed since then.

I looked around the prison at the other cells, all crammed with humans. I was the only one to have been given my own cell.

My eyes fell on Kristal and Jake behind the gate across the corridor from me. Jake was lying on the floor in the corner, Kristal huddled up next to him, trying to get some sleep. The vampires who had come in to leave us water and bread had refused to answer any questions.

I just hope that Rose is somewhere better than this.

“Kristal!” I hissed through the bars. “Kristal.”

A few humans stirred and looked up at me. But Kristal remained lying still. One of the humans nudged her, bringing her to consciousness.

She rubbed her eyes wearily. Terror set in again on her face after her reprieve. She crawled over to the bars and stared at me. “Has anything happened since I fell asleep?”

I shook my head. Her whole body was shivering. It was freezing down in these dungeons and they hadn’t given us enough blankets.

She gripped the bars tighter, leaning her head against them. Tears spilled down her cheeks.

“What are they going to do with us, Ben?”

I’d already explained to both of them that our kidnappers were vampires. They’d had a hard time getting used to that idea—and I was sure Jake still thought I was a raving lunatic. They’d never been exposed to any supernatural creatures before, so I couldn’t have expected a different reaction from them.

Jake suspected that maybe we’d been taken for ransom because of their wealthy father.

“If these people really are…v-vampires,” Kristal continued, “what would they want with us?”

The answer would have been too troubling for her to hear in her already weakened state, so I just shrugged. She, however, wasn’t going to accept that for an answer.

“Is it our blood that they want?”

I breathed out, unsure of whether to answer.

She read my silence and clasped a palm over her mouth, trembling more than ever.

“Kristal,” I whispered. “Look at me.”

She raised her bloodshot eyes to mine.

“What’s that at the back of your cell?” I asked, pointing at something I’d spotted piled up on the floor.

She turned around and crawled toward it, trying not to wake her cell mates who were blocking her path.

“It’s just a pile of chains,” she murmured.

“Can you throw them to me?”

She picked the chains and crawled back over to the bars. Gathering them in one hand, she reached through the bars and swung them toward me. I managed to catch them before they clattered to the floor.

There was a padlock fixed to one of the metal joints, but no sign of the key. This appeared to be the kind of padlock that locked without a key by pushing it until it clicked.

I sat for the next few hours leaning against the bars, waiting with bated breath for the dungeon door opening. A vampire was due to come in at any time now to bring us our daily food and water.

Perhaps it was just my nerves playing tricks on me, but the vampire seemed to come in much later that day. Eventually, the door unlatched and heavy footsteps approached.

A vampire pushed along a trolley, passing out water jugs and bread. I tried to keep my breathing steady as he stopped outside my cell. He bent down low, pushing the water and bread through my bars. He stood up and before he could continue, I reached through the bars and slipped the chain around his neck.

He gasped in shock and let go of the trolley. I yanked the chain back with all the strength my weak, dehydrated body could muster and pressed against the padlock. It clicked as he thrashed about.

His razor-sharp claws caught my cheek, ripping open a gash. I ducked down and removed the cluster of keys attached to his belt.

The whole gate shook from his struggling. I didn’t have long. I fumbled with the keys until I’d found the one to open my gate. Then I rushed over to Kristal’s cell and unlocked it, freeing all the humans who were inside it along with Jake. I did the same with every other cell along that corridor.

“Follow me,” I hissed once they’d all bundled out. “Don’t make a sound.”

I had no idea where I was taking them. For all I knew, I could have been leading us all to our deaths. But something told me that if we didn’t try to escape at the first opportunity that came our way, we’d regret it.

“Wait here,” I whispered, as we approached the dungeon’s exit. I peered around the door to see that it led to a staircase leading upward. There was nobody in sight. “Okay, follow me.”

I paused again once I reached the top of the stairs. We were now in some kind of kitchen—metal tables lined the room and in the corner stood jugs filled with a red liquid.
Human blood.

Kristal’s trembling hand gripped my own.

“What is this place?” she gasped.

I held a finger to my lips. I walked along the edge of the room to the nearest exit.

The door was ajar. As I peeked through the crack, my breath hitched. Two vampires stood talking to each other in the center of a large dark hall.

I gestured urgently at the humans behind me to hide underneath the tables. I needed them out of the way while I figured out the best way to escape. With hindsight, I should have let them out of their cells only once I’d found a way out. It would have been less noticeable in case a vampire went down to the dungeon. But it was too late now for regrets.

Hiding under the tables wouldn’t do much good if they came in. I knew the vampires would smell our blood, but I hoped that it would be masked at least somewhat by the jugs of blood already sitting on the table in the corner of that room.

Once everyone had hidden themselves, I walked back to the dungeon door and pushed it closed as noiselessly as I could.

I walked to the door at the other end of the kitchen. Opening the door, I found myself looking around another high-ceilinged hall. This one was empty.

I crossed the hall and reached the other side, hiding in the shadows of the doorway. The next room appeared to be some kind of library. Bookshelves lined the walls and there was a round table in the center with tall piles of books.

I had just about reached the other side of the room when someone spoke.

“Can I help?”

Behind one of the large piles of books, a tall thin woman stood up. She had long black hair and cold grey eyes.

“Oh,” she said, scowling at me.

I rushed out of the door and into the next hall, only to find the same woman standing there, blocking my path.

This is a witch.

She reached up and gripped my ear, tugging me down to her level. As her fingers touched my skin, a burning sensation rushed through me.

I had to bite my lip to not shout out in pain.

“Where do you think you’re going? Stellan!” she shouted, her voice echoing around the room. “Stellan, come here this instant.”

No.

The ginger vampire who had pulled me through the hatch came rushing into the hall. His mouth dropped open when he saw me.

“What?” he gasped.

“Looks like you need to tighten up on security,” she said.

Stellan’s eyes darkened and he gripped me by the neck, dragging me back through the hallways. I struggled against him, but he kneed me in the gut, winding me. His hold was far too strong for a mere mortal to escape from.

He dragged me back into the kitchen and as soon as we entered, Kristal came rushing out of her hiding place.

“No! Ben!”

“No!” I yelled, pushing her back.

It was too late. She’d just given the game away.

Stellan’s voice boomed through the kitchen as he called for backup.

Five vampires ran into the kitchen and began pulling out humans from under the table. A sixth vampire came running into the room with chains. They lined the humans up against the wall and tied them up.

The witch entered the room behind me, eyeing Kristal, who had tears streaming down her face.

“Hm. Interesting,” the witch said softly.

She grabbed Kristal by the hair and forced her to the floor.

“I say we teach this young Novak a lesson,” she said. “Seeing that he might be with us for quite a while, if he plans to make attempting escape a habit, it will become very tiresome indeed.”

The vampires stopped what they were doing and looked over at us, Stellan’s grip on me unrelenting.

The witch withdrew a dagger from her cloak and held it against Kristal’s neck.

“No!” I yelled, managing to break free from Stellan, only to have three vampires throw themselves at me to hold me down. Stellan lifted my head to face Kristal’s trembling form. Jake shouted and struggled against his chains.

“Watch,” Stellan grunted, holding my head in position.

With one sharp motion, the witch drove the dagger into Kristal’s chest. Her scream was stifled as she choked on her own blood. Both my and Jake’s yells echoed around the kitchen as she bled to death in front of us.

“Now,” the witch said, letting go of Kristal’s hair. “Let this be a lesson to all of you. Stellan. Have your men collect her blood.”