Scorned (24 page)

“
Play with her,”
Perdita’s voice
hissed across my mind. Play with her. She wanted to watch them play
with her food before she came and got me. Or would she have me
brought to her? If that were the case, I was completely
screwed.

The two male vampires laughed evil, cackling
laughs that echoed through the cool room and bounced off the steel
doors of the temporary resting places for the dead. The permanently
dead, not the waking dead, because I was entertaining the waking
dead.

Where are Miranda and Gavlin?

The question wandered through my head before
I could stop it, but Perdita didn’t seem to catch it or didn’t
care.

“Run.” The word came out of nowhere and I
looked up to see the vampire from the elevator standing in front of
me. I gave him quizzical eyes and he stepped to the side with a
grin that flashed more fang than I’d yet seen on Roman. “Run,” he
said again, pronouncing the word like I should have been grateful
to him, and he began to count. “One. Two. Three.”

Hide-and-seek? Are you kidding me?

I needed no other urging. I knew Perdita
wasn’t in the far room, she’d already shown me that she was back at
her lair. I ran for those swinging double doors at the back of the
room and plowed through them like they would save my life.

“Six. Seven. Eight.”

I stopped and took a moment to get my
bearings. It was an autopsy room that reminded me of the one on
NCIS
. There were two sets of autopsy gear sitting out at two
tables. I ran, grabbed the first one, and dumped it onto the
second.

“Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.”

“
Roman!”

I called out for the last person I wanted
help from, but there was nothing else I could do.

“
Help me!”

Roman’s voice washed through me like a wind.
“LeKrista.”

“
Just help me,”
I said. He opened his
mind to me like he’d done only once before, and I had complete
access to his vast repository of knowledge.

“Fifteen.”

The three vampires came through the double
doors. I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and hoped Roman
knew what he was doing.

“
I’m offended, my sweet."

“
Shut up. You’re too sensitive and you’re
going to kill my concentration.”

He shut up.

As the vampires crept closer, I took a
mental inventory of the things I had to defend myself. The metal
instrument tray lay on the table beside me. On the one in front of
me was two sets of prosector’s autopsy tools. I picked up a pair of
scissors in my left hand and a scalpel in my right. The male
vampires laughed, high-pitched and animal-like. There was nothing
human to them at all. In the female vampire’s face I saw nothing
but loathing, disgust, and hate.

The males looked like they were having fun.
They kept scenting the air, licking their lips, and laughing.

“She’s so scared,” the one from the elevator
said.

“I know,” the other replied. He picked up a
bone saw from a table and switched it on.

“We’re not supposed to kill her.”

“I know. I just want to hear her
scream.”

They were in front of me, just like that,
but by seeing through Roman’s eyes, I saw them move. The bone saw
came dangerously close to my face and I felt the air coming off of
it. I turned the scalpel in my hand, leaned back, and swiped. It
bit deep into flesh with a meaty sound, and a scream of pain
escaped the vampire’s lips. There was no blood. The vampire had no
blood in him to lose, but if he had I would have nicked a major
vein.

The other male vampire was shocked. How
could you let a little human hurt you that bad? I watched the cut
vampire as he huddled his arm against himself. Having been an EMT,
he would have been called in to at least one slit-wrist suicide, so
he knew how much those wounds bled and he was expecting a drastic
loss of blood. When it didn’t happen, he pulled back to examine it.
I saw the moment that realization hit his brain and manifested in
his eyes. He straightened, leaned back as if stretching, and
laughed. Not the high-pitched laugh from before, but a mere, almost
human chuckle. He licked his lips and looked dead at me. I looked
down, away, at a spot on his chest.

“Nice try, little girl,” he said in a voice
that was low and deep and could have been seductive if his vampire
powers worked on me. He stalked forward, human slow. He was trying
to catch me enthrall. He wanted to throw me off my game so I’d be
an easier target.

“You’re dead,” the other male vampire said.
“You don’t bleed.” He struck out without me seeing him because I
was focused on vampire number two, and caught me around the throat.
I grabbed his arm with the hand that still held the scalpel as he
lifted me off my feet. “Lizette, over here thinks we should just go
ahead and kill you. Forget the Mistress’s orders.”

“Yeah,” I struggled to say around the hand
gripping my throat. “That’s probably not a very good idea.”

“You’re probably right,” he said. “But,
we’re already dead. What can she do to us?”

“Anything she wants,” I replied, and the
smile dropped from his lips like it tasted bad. I stabbed the
scissors into his shoulder at the joint. He screamed and released
me, but I still had a grip on his arm. With Roman’s knowledge
running through my mind, I knew how to center my weight and just
how much force was needed to toss him. He wasn’t light, and my
lower body strength is much stronger than my upper, so I used my
legs to help propel him far enough away from me that he hit the
wall, hard. His body crashed into the drywall and left an
indentation of his form. He didn’t get up immediately and I’d lost
one of my weapons in his arm.

The other male vampire picked his bone saw
back up. Subconsciously, I saw the female standing across the room,
still just inside the doors, before I picked up the metal tray and
used it as a shield against the saw. It didn’t do much good since
the metal was thin and the saw was used to cut through bone, but it
gave me the leverage I needed to twist it from the vampire’s hands.
It was lucky for me that he wasn’t used to his new strength. I
dumped the tools from the second tray to the table and caught the
vampire across the face with it. He wasn’t a fighter and his
reactions were slow, so I got in a few good blows before he
snatched it away from me and sent it flying across the room. I
still had the scalpel and I reached down to the table to find a
second weapon, anything to use.

He didn’t dodge it when I sliced his
mid-section with the scalpel three times. They weren’t deep cuts,
but they bisected each other so it was deeper in the middle. The
vampire made a gut wrenching sound as his muscles gave way, and his
intestines began to bulge in the middle of his stomach. He just
looked at it, looked at me, and looked back at his stomach like he
wasn’t sure what to do. I took a step toward him, and with all the
strength I could find, I plunged the scalpel deep into his chest
where I hoped his heart would be. It wasn't silver, but he was only
a day old. Roman seemed to think it would be effective. His eyes
widened. I twisted the scalpel, pressed it in farther, pulled it up
through his chest until it wouldn’t go any farther, and pushed it
in some more.

The vampire dropped to his knees. I left the
scalpel in and stepped back. He looked up at me and muttered,
“Behind you,” before his eyes glazed over and he dropped to the
floor limp.

I barely had a chance to turn around before
the other male vampire had his arms around me. I didn’t bother to
struggle much. He looked me in my eyes and his eyes flared.

“Please don’t,” I gasped.

“Why not?”

“
Roman!”

One moment later I was being squeezed to
death by a vampire, the next I was bespelling him with
my
eyes. Roman’s power cut through me like a hot knife. It burned from
the dark place inside me, waking it, and setting it to a life it
had never known before. The power fed it, made it grow, made it
move up through me, made it real until it began to consume me.
Distantly, I felt Roman whisper something like “I’m sorry” in my
head, but I couldn’t be sure. I was so consumed with that darkness
I didn’t realize that the vampire was now on his knees at my feet.
His hands were pressed to my stomach, like a dog begging for love.
I looked into his eyes and I felt Roman eating that thing that made
the dead man live. He consumed everything that the man was to
become, and he did it through me. Whatever the vampire's life force
was made of it sliced through me, just enough to tempt my darkness
but not enough to feed it. I’m not sure if Roman knew he could do
it before today, but he did and he gained power and strength from
it.

Perdita screamed through my head, and I
realized Roman was taking from her what little strength the vampire
offered.

The more vampires one creates, the more
power is gained,
whispered across my mind.

Roman left me suddenly, like he’d pulled my
heart out with him and I felt empty with nothing for my darkness to
feed on. A noise caught my attention and I turned back to where the
female vampire had been. An autopsy table flew across the room and
there was no way for me to get out of the way. I turned and wrapped
my arms around the back of my head, hoping to save something of
myself when it crashed into me, but it never did.

“LeKrista! Get in the corner!”

I turned to see Miranda standing there
between me and the table. She’d caught it and was using it as a
shield.

“Get in the corner!” Then, as if she thought
I wouldn’t listen she added, “Now!”

I scrambled across the room to the corner
and huddled against the wall. Miranda pulled some round blades from
somewhere and threw them at Lizette. One caught her across the
shoulder, and another cut into her side, but the female didn’t go
down. She hissed at Miranda, turned as if called and
disappeared.

Miranda stomped over to me and pulled me up
by my arm. “Where is your cross?” she shouted. “Haven’t you learned
by now to wear a cross?”

“If you had any idea what my weekend has
been like- ”

“I don’t care what your weekend has been
like. I want to know why you don’t have a cross around your pitiful
little neck!”

I stared at her. “Excuse me,” I shouted
back, “don’t you talk to me like that. I had to find some way to
defend myself because you were nowhere to be found!”

Miranda looked around then, noticing the two
dead vampires for the first time. “You did this? All of this? By
yourself?”

I straightened and tipped my chin up
defiantly. “Roman helped me.”

Miranda let out a frustrated growl. “How can
you be so stupid!” she shouted. “You don’t have a cross, you let
the vampires use your mind at their leisure. Why did you even ask
for our help? I thought we told you not to go anywhere without
us.”

I stepped to her and got in her face. That
dark place stirred inside me as if to say, “Yes. Get angry. I’ll
feed on that.” I let my face contort into a snarl and my voice
turned cold.

“Where the hell where you?” I bit out in her
face. I stepped back and frowned, less angry now because I was
concerned, and asked, “Where is Gable?”

“What do you mean, where’s Gable?”

“Gable called Pierce and asked me to bring
him some money to the food court. No one was in the waiting room so
I got on the elevator and was ambushed when I hit the second floor.
I never made it to Gable.”

“We haven’t seen him.” Gavlin’s deep voice
was immediately followed by the sound of metal against tile and I
jumped and screamed. When I looked, he had a gigantic battle axe in
his hands with which he’d used to cut off the head of the vampire
whom I’d stabbed in the heart. The loose head rolled across the
floor and stopped face up. It was a clean cut, no jagged edges, and
I just stared at it because I didn’t know what else to do.

“Are you alright?” Gavlin’s voice bit
through my stupor and I looked up at him.

“Huh?”

“Are you alright?”

I shook my head. “Where’s Gable?”

“I told you we haven’t seen him.”

“Did the vampires get him?” My voice had
gone weak and childish like the other night. I was going into shock
and part of it was from that space inside me that loved the way it
felt for Roman to suck the energy from that vampire. Now, it lay
empty and desperate to feel again, to feed again.

“The vampire told me he wasn’t allowed to
feed until I was dead,” I told them.

“He could be here in the morgue,” Gavlin
said to Miranda.

“We’ll look,” Miranda said and stalked
away.

I wrapped my arms around myself and watched
as Gavlin and Miranda methodically searched each death cubby. I
shivered. The cool air of the morgue was now frigid. Now that the
adrenaline and fear had worn off, I was cold. I began to lose hope
that they’d find Gable as they neared the end.

Gavlin pulled out a table and Gable came out
with it. “Is this him?”

I nodded. Gable’s dark face was pale and
blood oozed from a wound on his head. “Should we call a nurse?” I
asked.

Miranda shook her head. “We need to get out
of here before someone comes down. Gav can carry him up and around
to the ER. Go get your boyfriend and let him know what’s happened.
I’m sure he’s worried by now.”

Miranda walked out, stomping through the
doors that clanged shut behind her. I held the door for Gavlin so
he didn’t have to toss Gable over his shoulder, and went up to the
waiting room where Pierce and Tate were waiting.

“LeKrista!” Tate rushed me and wrapped her
arms around my neck. I just stood there like a stiff board, my arms
at my sides. She pulled away, hurt etched across her features, but
I wasn’t worried about her. I had eyes only for Pierce.