Page 17 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 2

The boy had a glazed look in his eyes, and a strange slackness to his face, as if he was asleep. It was an expression I recognized all too well. My father was controlling his mind. Whatever this was, it wasn’t good.

The boy’s name popped into my mind. “Toby,” I said urgently, pulling myself upright as much as I could. I barely managed a few inches. I tried to meet his eyes, but they were unfocused. “It’s Toby, isn’t it? I need you to listen to me. I know what he’s doing to you right now must feel inescapable, but you can fight back. You can close your mind to him if you focus. It won’t be easy, but you can do it. Just focus on my voice, all right?”

My father scoffed. “Oh, don’t give the creature false hope, Gabriel. It’s impolite to play with your food. He’s only human. He doesn’t have any experience blocking out this sort of treatment. Even if he did, it wouldn’t matter. After all, I’ve reached into your mind many times, and you’ve never once managed to stop me.”

Snarling, I tugged uselessly at my chains again. I tried to kick out at my father, but he was far out of reach.

My father curled a hand around Toby’s shoulder, claw-like, and steered him over to the side of the bed. Smiling down at me, he picked up a small, wickedly curved knife from the bedside table and handed it to the young man. I watched, horrified, as Toby drew the knife over his own arm. Dark blood beaded from the gash, the smell heady and enticing. My mouth began to water, and I hated myself for it. This wasn’t who I was, not anymore. Not after all the work I had done to pull myself out of that place.

“Your propensity for inferior blood has weakened you, Gabriel,” my father murmured. “Animal blood. Synthetic blood. Pale imitations. A true vampire needs the blood of humans.”

“Don’t do this,” I begged. “Please.”

“Go on, boy,” my father said.

Toby reached out his arm above my head, and the blood dripped down my face. I twisted my head to the side, trying to avoid it, and my father snarled.

“Don’t be stubborn,” he said. “This is for your own good, Gabriel.”

The blood was hot across my cheek, and a droplet trickled over my lips. My nostrils flared, my pupils dilating like a predator who had spotted prey. My father sighed, reaching out to grab my jaw in a viselike grip. He forced my head up toward the ceiling. I clamped my lips together as tightly as I could.

“You’re only making this harder for yourself, son,” my father said. He pushed into my mind roughly, taking control of my muscles by brute force and opening my mouth against my will. The blood flowed into my mouth, hot and tangy with iron, and so fucking delicious. I tried to spit it out, but I couldn’t turn my head, couldn’t regain control of my own body. The blood trickled down, and I could do nothing to stop the convulsions of my throat as I swallowed again, and again, and again.

Toby had cut a long, shallow gash, and blood fell across my entire face. It rained down across my forehead with maddening irregularity, dripping down into my stinging eyes. My father stood over me, watching with grim satisfaction.

“Isn’t this better?” he asked. “It’s what you were meant for, son. You’re a predator. It’s time you started acting like it. All your talk of…” He snorted then took on a simpering tone. “Caring for the weak, outreach programs, harm reduction!” He dropped the affectation like it sickened him. “It’s idiotic. It’s against our very nature.”

My father scoffed, waving an arm at the opulent room around us. “We take,” he said. “We feed off the weak, we do not care for them. If they were worth protecting, then they already would have made something of themselves. Don’t you understand?” He leaned in closer, grabbing my face and shaking me a little. His fingers slipped in the blood smeared across my cheek. “An effective vampire is an apex predator. An ineffective one is simply a parasite. It does us all good if they’re removed from the ranks.”

You’re wrong, I thought at him as loudly as I could. Caring for those who need it is what separates us from animals.

My father rolled his eyes and licked the blood from his fingers. “It’s amazing you’ve survived so long and stayed so naïve. I always told your mother she sheltered you too much.” He sighed, shaking his head wearily. “I’ll be back when the boy’s empty.”

He swept out of the room, leaving Toby and me alone. My father’s hold over my mind was strong enough that he could keep me pinned in place even at a distance. The only sound was Toby’s increasingly ragged breathing and the sound of dripping blood.

Eventually, Toby, pallid and sweating, slumped down onto the edge of the bed. All I could do was swallow over and over again until he finally fell. He landed across my chest, a lighter weight than I would have thought. I lay there, unable to so much as blink as his body grew cold. My face was sticky and itching from the half-dried blood.

My father came back with another human—a tanned woman with the beginnings of crow’s feet and chipped blue nail polish—who followed after him obediently. She smelled like cleaning products and cigarettes. He shoved Toby’s corpse onto the floor and handed the woman the knife. A few hours later, her body joined Toby’s.

They kept coming. A tall, olive-skinned man with a twice-broken nose and a shirt someone had hand-embroidered with little flowers that sprouted out of the breast pocket. He rolled up his sleeves neatly, with perfect photoshoot-ready folds, before slitting his arm. A teenage girl with greasy blue hair and a dozen plastic bead bracelets. One of the bracelets had the name ABBY spelled out in flat white beads with raised black letters. It sat right over the pulse of her wrist, and I stared up at it as she bled into my mouth.

I lost track of time, of faces. The characteristics that must have been so precious to those who loved these people blurred together. I felt drunk on the rich, thick blood in my mouth. The edges of the room felt vague and inconsequential. My body was distant, both mine and not mine. Did one of the people I’d drunk from have something in their system? Or was this what human blood did to me? It had been so long since I’d had the real thing.

I slipped into a hazy, uncertain sleep. I didn’t know if I fell down into the dream, or if it rose up to meet me, but I was in it all the same, and it was warm and safe here. Evangeline was in my arms, murmuring words I couldn’t make out. The slickness around my mouth was from her, not from anything more gruesome. She kissed me sweetly, not caring about the taste of herself on my lips. Our bodies were borderless and shifting, like drops of ink on wet paper. I was inside her then, and she was eager, moaning and pliant. Evangeline smiled up at me, as though we were in on a secret together. I pressed my mouth to hers. It wasn’t really a kiss, just closeness, openness. I could hear her heartbeat. She brought her hands up to tangle her fingers into my hair, and I could hear the thudding of her pulse in her wrists, right next to my ears. I could smell the blood in her veins. I rolled my hips into her, steady and fluid as the tide, then lowered my mouth to her neck and bit down.

7

EVANGELINE

The wind stung my face as we flew, sending my tears streaking back toward my hairline. I was sobbing and furious, but by the time we landed, I had cried myself dry. Now, I just felt hollow and wrung out.

Xarek touched down in a clearing in the forest behind a ridge of hills that separated us from prying eyes in the city. I slid off his back and landed on numb legs, staring blankly at the leaves covering the forest floor. There was a small thunderclap and then the human-shaped Xarek stood in front of me again.

Suddenly, I found my second wind, half-feral with grief and anger.

“Why the fuck didn’t you turn back?” I hissed, getting right up in Xarek’s face, even though he was easily a head taller than me and twice as wide. “We could have saved him! You just left him there!” I hit him in the chest once, then again, but it was useless against his bulk.

He caught my wrist before I could hit him a third time and held it gently but firmly. “I couldn’t risk it,” Xarek said with genuine regret. “Getting you and the artifact away from that place was my first priority. If I turned back, we would have run the risk of not only getting you captured, but me as well. Imagine what Morgana could do with access to a dragon. I’m sorry, but I stand by my choice.”

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