The Dark Side (33 page)

Of course, eating was also a distraction. Except that it led to the more pressing need for a bathroom. I spent a few minutes pounding on the door then settled back down to wait with tightly crossed legs. To take my mind off my immediate dilemma, I tried to focus on what Cilla had told me.

She knew my father.

Had I ever met her?

Her face wasn’t familiar and her being a vampire made things tricky. She might have been younger when she worked with my dad or around the same age she appeared now.

She might have already been a vampire. Dad hadn’t said anything at the time but the Taskforce had discovered that Synotech did have a couple of supernatural employees and, of course, it had to trial its drugs on live subjects. The vast majority of drugs were for humans of course but testing vaccines required supplies of vamp and were blood and

shifters—and to a lesser extent vamps—still needed things like anesthetics and painkillers that worked on them.

Had Cilla been a guinea pig? Was that what this was about?

I didn’t think so but that was, like much of the rest of what I was working with, just a feeling.

For someone who likes figures and cold hard facts, this case was turning into torture.

I dropped my head to my knees, banging it gently.

Think
, Ashley.

What had my dad been working on?

Something about auto-immune diseases. I’d never been really interested—what teen paid much attention to their father’s work when said work was something distinctly uncool like being a scientist geek?

Plus Dad wasn’t really allowed to talk about what he was working on much. I had nothing. Just infuriating scraps of information that refused to join up and form any sort of useful pattern in my head.

When the combination of frustration and fear got too much, I got up and pounded on the door again. This time Smith came and slid open a hatch in the door to peer through.

“Bathroom,” I snapped.

He nodded. “Of course. We wouldn’t like you to be uncomfortable.”

“Heck no, I could tell that by the luxury suite you’ve got me in.”

“If I were you, Ms. Keenan, I’d hold that tongue of yours and save your energy for later.”

I stared him down even as my stomach turned over. “I want to see Rhianna.”

“I don’t think so.”

“She needs a friend.”

“Cilla is taking care of her.” A couple of the vamps appeared behind Smith and he started doing something to the door.

“Great, that makes me feel so much better.” I stood quietly while the door opened. “You know, you sure have a knack for picking the crazy ones.”

He looked at me with cold eyes. “Careful. You’re trying my patience.”

Heat flared along my cheek, a memory of Smith’s hand connecting hard with my face. I had to remind myself that he wasn’t the middle-aged GP he resembled. He was someone not afraid to hurt people to get to what he wanted. But I still couldn’t resist baiting him. I might learn something useful. “Tate, I can understand. He was muscle. What’s she?”

Smith nodded at the vamps and they grabbed me. “Someone you’d be wise not to annoy.” For a moment his expression almost seemed...sad. But that couldn’t be right?

“If you didn’t like Tate, then I suggest you don’t cross Cilla,” he added.

I had a hard time believing that someone who liked floaty peach dresses was scarier than a serial killer but if Cilla had Smith cowed, then I wasn’t going to underestimate her. “Why are you doing this?” I asked as one of the vamps tugged me toward the door.

This time he definitely looked sad. “I made a mistake once.”

I didn’t get a chance to ask anything else before the vamps dragged me off. A mistake? What did that mean? A mistake answering my questions? A mistake getting involved with Cilla, whoever she was?

Just another puzzle piece that didn’t fit.

I ground my teeth as the vamps hauled me down the corridor. They weren’t grabby like Rio and Kyra—Tate’s flunkies—had been but they weren’t exactly gentle. Plus they smelled like old blood and vampire, which was rapidly becoming a combination that turned my stomach.

They pushed me into a bathroom and locked the door behind me. It was another windowless room, so I did what I had to do, then washed up, trying to make myself feel semi-alive with cheap smelling soap and cold water.

I took advantage of the change of scenery to try yelling for Jase in my head again.

When the door crashed open, I jumped, my thoughts cutting off guiltily.

Cilla stood in the doorway watching me with a grin. “Bad dog,” she said. “No calling for help.”

“I wasn’t doing anything.”

“Lying isn’t going to help.” She stepped into the bathroom and I moved backward until I hit the wall with a thump. “I could hear you.”

Dumb. I’d forgotten about the Retreat. She used telepathy on me then too. Crap. Did that mean she could hear me now? Or only when she was trying to? Or only when I was trying to talk to someone?

The look on her face as she stood there, head cocked to one side didn’t give me any clue. Then she reached out and squeezed one hand around my throat. Pain seared up my neck. Like Esteban, Cilla liked silver. Rings around every finger.

“No calling for help,” she said as I struggled to breathe. “There’s no point. And you’ll upset the children.”

Children? Who? Rhi? Did that mean Rhi could hear me too?

“Do you understand?” Cilla asked, squeezing tighter.

I nodded, unable to speak. Even nodding was difficult.

“Good,” she said, releasing me. My knees sagged and I slid down the wall, trying to suck air back into my lungs. My throat burned, my skin felt like it was blistering. Only changing would help ease the pain and the predatory look on Cilla’s face made me certain I wasn’t going to be allowed to do that any time soon.

I closed my eyes, trying to sense whether it was night or day, trying to see if there was any lingering trace of the moon but either it was daytime or I was too tired to feel anything.

“C’mon, puppy,” Cilla said, hauling me up with one hand. “It’s time for the hard way.”

* * *

The hard way apparently involved me being dragged off to yet another room. I figured Cilla had to be the decorator. The walls were painted black and there were heavy black curtains everywhere. It would’ve been funny—the clichéd vampire lair— but the bare bulbs in the ceiling combined with all that black to starkly spotlight the other main features of the room.

A large rack filled with a variety of nasty-looking implements and a whipping post that stood taller than my head. This post wasn’t black like the others it had been my misfortune to see at Maelstrom. No, this one gleamed silver. Somehow I doubted it was chrome plated.

My stomach churned at the thought of being pressed against that much silver. It would be like being dipped in acid.

New goal. Avoid the post.

“I already told you,” I said, turning a nervous circle, trying to keep Cilla and the other vampires in sight as they ringed around me. “I don’t know anything about my father’s work.”

“I think you know more than you think you know.” Cilla’s voice seemed to bounce off the walls, reverberating weirdly in the small room so it came from all around me. More vampire mind games perhaps. The vamps continued to flow around me, the shadows they cast adding to the disorienting effects of Cilla’s voice. Cilla, though, stopped by the rack, one hand trailing over the whips and knives.

She also had a knife in a sheath at her waist. A long sheath. The knife had to be ten inches long.

I shook my head, swallowed as the muscles in my throat tightened and my stomach dropped. “No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. Secrets are sometimes hidden.” She ran a hand along the top of the rack, her fingers drifting over the hooks that held each whip and blade like she was pleased by the feel of them.

“I was sixteen when my father died. He didn’t exactly tell me the nitty-gritty about his research.”

“Maybe not that you remember. Maybe you just need encouragement.” She lifted a bullwhip, shook the long length of it free until half its thong coiled on the floor like a snake. “This one is leather.” She tapped the handle up the row of whips, coming to rest against one that was little more than a length of barbed chain. “This one is silver. Trust me, you won’t like it if we play with this one.”

My stomach heaved. I believed her. I’d seen what silver chains had done to Dan’s wrists—damage that still hadn’t completely healed several months later. And that was just from being bound in the chains. He hadn’t been beaten with silver. “I don’t know anything.” This time it came out shaky and one of the vamps laughed. “Please, you have to believe me.”

Cilla wrinkled her nose. “Believing you is no fun. And it doesn’t get me the information I need.” She began to coil the leather whip up into loops. Like someone preparing to use it. I stepped backward but one of the vamps grabbed me. Think, Ashley.
Think
.

The only thought I had was that it would be less painful to be beaten up by vamps than tied to that post and flogged by Cilla. I should fight.

Or I could stall. “What is it you think I know? Maybe if you gave me a clue, I could remember.”

Cilla pursed her lips. “Maybe you could, maybe you couldn’t.”

“What does that mean? How can I tell you something if you don’t think I can remember it?”

“Maybe it’s something you don’t know you know.”

I laughed, I couldn’t help it. “What, you think my father hypnotized me and hid some secret formula in my head?”

Cilla’s face went still and I knew I’d hit home.

“Oh my God. I’m right. Are you crazy? My dad would never do anything like that.”

“Your father was a cautious man, working on a project that would’ve been a major breakthrough in his field. All scientists protect their data.” She tapped the handle of the whip against her thigh, studying me.

“How do you know what my father was working on?”

The whip flicked toward me, its tip whistling past my cheek with a hiss. “I’m asking the questions, not you.”

“You are crazy,” I repeated. “My dad might have encrypted his data or something but I think I’d remember being hypnotized.” My mind whirled as I tried to work out what it was she wanted. It had to be something to do with the anti-vaccine. Something Dad had been researching. But I really had no memory of him ever telling me anything remotely connected to the vamp and were vaccines. Other than insisting we were vaccinated. I definitely didn’t remember being hypnotized.

“It’s possible to remove memories,” Cilla snarled. “And your father wasn’t trustworthy. He
lied
.”

“No, he didn’t.”

The whip sang again and this time it didn’t miss. My cheek went briefly numb then exploded with pain. Wetness trickled down my face as tears of pain flooded my eyes. The smell of blood told me it wasn’t only tears. My knees buckled, only the vamps’ hands bruising into my arms kept me upright.

“Your father was a liar. And others paid the price for his lies. I will find what he hid.”

“You’ll have to kill me before I’ll tell you anything,” I spat back. The wolf inside me snarled, anger burning away some of the pain.

“Oh, I’m not going to kill you,” Cilla said calmly. “I’m just going to make you wish I would.”

“You’re going to wish you had, if you don’t.”

“Brave words, little puppy.” She considered me coolly for a moment then nodded. “Strip her.”

I exploded upward as they moved toward me, wrenching my arms free of the vamp holding me and using the momentum of the move to spin me and power a blow to the head of the next closest one. An answering blow slammed into my back and I spun again, moving on instinct to punch and kick as four assailants moved against me. But one against four isn’t good odds. Especially when the one is barefoot, half blind from a swollen face and recovering from being drugged. Enough of their blows landed to hurt me. Hurt me a lot and finally a fist to the side of my head made me see stars as I hurtled toward the floor.

Four vamps piled on top of me and by the time I had managed to ride out the pain driving through me in sickening waves, my hands and feet were tied with several layers of rope and leather. They dragged me upright and hung my hands over a hook in one of the walls, so my toes barely scraped the floor.

“That was stupid,” Cilla said as she approached me. She drew a knife out of the sheath and proceeded to cut the clothes from my body. She wasn’t too careful about it either, the blade scoring along my ribs in the process. The burn of silver nearly made me black out. When my vision cleared, Cilla was watching me with the vamps ranged behind her. Hunger shone in their eyes.

“Now, let’s try this again,” Cilla said. She ran the back of her hand along my uncut cheek, touching me just hard enough for the metal of her rings to sting my face like salt water poured on a cut. “You’re going to talk one way or another.”

“I. Don’t. Remember.”

“I know that. So here’s my proposal. I need what’s in your head and you’re going to give it to me. So you can let me thrall you now or the boys and I can hurt you until you’re too weak to resist me. Your choice.”

And after she got whatever it was she was after, I’d be dead. That much was clear. Some choice. The thought of letting Cilla rummage through my head made me want to puke but survival had to be my priority.

“Don’t think too long, puppy,” Cilla said. Her hand slid down my body, her ring lighting little fires under my skin everywhere they touched. She paused when she reached my pubic hair and I twisted away from her. “There’s more than one way to hurt someone,” she said looking pleased. “I could let the boys here fuck you. They like it rough. And we have some lovely silver toys.”

This time, I did retch but apparently there was nothing left in my stomach to come up. God. I wanted to be strong, wanted to tell her to go to hell, but my body overrode my mind, the fear growing and growing until it overwhelmed me. I was shaking now, trembling and ice cold. No one wants to find out they’re a coward. Everyone likes to think they’d be the one to withstand the pain, not give up the information but it’s not so easy when your body is all too familiar with how much it will hurt. The survival instinct runs deep. Deeper than almost everything else.