Page 100 of Of Mercury and Mist

“And that’s bad, how?” Something wet tickled my neck and I giggled. “See, not bad. She’ll be my queen yet,” Samuel whispered in my ear.

His lips moved from my neck to my cheek, gently pressing into my skin. They hovered over my own before I felt their warm brush. “Kiss me,” he said, the vibration sending a trickle down my spine.

My body curved toward him and my fingers found his shoulder, holding on. He took the movement as assent and sucked my lower lip into his mouth, a hand trailing down my side.

His touch felt foreign, and my body went cold. I didn’t want him, and everything felt wrong, so very, very wrong.

“Samuel, stop.” I took his shoulder and try to move him away.

“You will deny me?” He growled.

“I can’t do this.”

He gripped me by my hair, bending my neck so I faced him. “I own you—do not forget this.” Twisting my head and pulling me forward, he forced me toward the mutilated body. “You will be next if you don’t give me what I want.”

“Get off me,” I cried out, shoving him away.

All conversation stopped and all eyes turned to me. In a burst of clarity, I saw the corpse with chunks and bites taken out of it, the gorgeous golden-haired woman beside me cutting into a chunk of flesh before delicately placing it in her mouth. Diego’s blood-stained face and tubing running from the sacrifice’s neck and into a carafe by his side. Elijah’s once perfect face and him patting an ivory napkin against an errant crimson dribble.

I panicked, and so I ran.

“Seize her,” Diego called out, nonplussed.

Samuel was another matter. Fire reigned in his eyes as he stormed toward me while I wrestled against the soldiers. “Let her go,” he ordered the men. “I will handle this.”

The second they released me; I whirled around intending to escape the madman heading my way. Before I made it more than ten feet, something wrapped around my ankles and curled upward, paralyzing my muscles until the only thing I could move were my eyes.

“My apologies, this won’t happen again,” he said, glancing at his leader.

Diego gave a curt nod and conversation resumed, my outburst quickly forgotten. “Don’t hurt me,” I tried to say, but no words came out of my mouth.

“You want to act like a bitch, you’ll be treated like one,” Samuel said, lifting me from the floor. “You embarrassed me, and you’ll pay the consequences.”

When we got back to his house, he shut me in a golden cage that must’ve been a perfect five-foot cube. I couldn’t lay down or stand up, and was trapped sitting on bars just wide enough my muscles couldn’t relax.

“Please don’t leave me in here,” I begged him, my vision swimming with tears and my brain seeming to sag as whatever had affected me earlier began to wane. “Please.”

“What part of your situation do you not understand? I will not hesitate to sacrifice you for the good of my people. You can either choose to participate and cooperate, or you can die.”

“I want to go home.” I knew it was impossible to return. There was nothing there for me. If I was going to die, I’d much rather do it somewhere my parents could bury me.

When I was younger, there were many times I didn’t expect to live very long. The idea had always kind of hung out in the back of my mind, the knowledge my lifestyle would eventually catch up with me. I’d made peace with it. It wasn’t a depressing thought for me—the event of my death. But it was a disappointment.

I wasn’t quite ready to go and there were still things I wanted to do. The act of dying wasn’t nearly as scary to me as the idea I’d never accomplish what I wanted to. I wanted to have more adventures, though I could do without the eating of human flesh. I’d been thinking tamer activities, like skydiving or something. Not cannibalism or ripping people to shreds.

And I wanted to fall in love, and have a grand romance, as corny as it sounded. Swept off my feet and all that. Maybe a proclamation on a big screen in Times Square like they did in the movies or something. Something big; something noteworthy I could tell stories about.

Samuel offered none of that and his idea of adventure was a bit questionable. What had that redhead on the table even done?

He crouched in front of my cage. “You are home, prisoner.”

“I’m going to get out of here and I’m going to kill you.” My words were much braver than I felt. He held his hand out and I felt my face press into the bars, whatever power he wielded compelling me forward unwillingly.

“I’m never letting you go. Your only way out is if I kill you myself. You’d do well to remember I hold the power of life and death, and your threat is punishable by execution.”

My mouth rubbed against a gleaming bar. “I meant what I said.”

Samuel stood up and yelled for Mandy. “Get me water,” he ordered when she arrived. She sneered at me, her mouth twisting like she’d sucked on a lemon.

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