Page 53 of Taste of Forever
The Marrower shook his head and clasped his temples with a groan of pain, while the brusang scuttled along the cage wall looking for a way out.
“He hasn’t fed in a while,” Cyan noted about the Marrower. “He’s actually on the thin side for their kind.”
I nodded at the brusang. “And he probably hasn’t fed since he woke up from dying as a human.”
The brusang had apparently just noticed the fangs in his mouth and was touching them with a kind of fascinated horror. Their fangs were smaller than a natural-born vampire’s, but had to feel strange if you’d only had blunt teeth your whole life.
Sadly, his distraction was a costly mistake.
Across the cage, the Marrower inhaled deeply and his mouth watered. His pupils went tiny like pinpricks in burgundy irises. Cyan and I both knew the brusang’s life had ended the moment he was scented.
The crowd went insane, pressing toward the cage, yelling and cheering at the brutality manufactured for their entertainment.
Cyan and I couldn’t watch. We looked at each other instead. His expression matched how I felt—grim, frustrated, and helpless. The brusang’s screams at least cut off abruptly early on in the carnage. Hopefully that meant he died quickly.
When I dared to sneak a peak, it was already over. The Marrower knelt with a large, bloodied bone between his hands,using his lower fangs to dig inside and slurp at the marrow within. Around him, others were picking up the pieces of the brusang.
Someone went to pick up another bone near the Marrower and nearly got their head bitten off. The Marrower lunged, snapping his jaws and clutching his prized bone to his chest. It was probably the first meal he’d had in weeks.
While he was distracted, someone else came up and jabbed him in the neck with another syringe. The Marrower spun around snarling, but whatever drug he’d been injected with was already taking effect. He stumbled, dropped his bone, and shook his head as if to clear a fog. By then, his hands were being retied behind his back, and it took five vampires to heave him to his feet and out of the cage.
Cyan and I shared a long, harrowing look. “I hate it here,” he said.
“Same.”
No wonder everyone was on drugs. This shit was too brutal to watch while in a normal state of mind.
More fighters were dragged into the cage, all of them death matches. None of them had been Kalix, which I didn’t know was a good or bad thing at this point. If that was him in the video, could we have been too late to save him?
“This should be the last fight,” Cyan said numbly. “If your buddy counted to four correctly.”
“Who the fuck knows.” I rubbed my face, feeling disgusting like I’d need to shower for days to clean this place off of me.
The crowd swept into a frenzy that overshadowed all of their excitement from before. Everyone was stamping their feet and chanting. I realized after a while it was a number they were all shouting.5406.
From the way everyone was acting, thiswasthe final fight. The main event everyone had been waiting for. Everything leading up to this had been just an appetizer.
Like all the fights before, the crowd parted to form a corridor leading to the cage. Two escorts led a massive figure between them. I almost thought it was another Marrower. This guy had the height and muscle mass but the fangs and skin tone weren’t quite right.
His wrists also weren’t tied behind his back like the others. This vampire was covered in chain restraints that made metallic clinking sounds with every one of his heavy steps. When he stepped into the overhead light, my stomach dropped. And then my heart dropped into the hole where my stomach once was.
“Oh…fuck.”
“What?” Cyan demanded. “Is it…”
All words became meaningless as we watch Kalix step into the cage.
Chapter 14
Laith
Kalix was unrecognizable.
And yet there was no mistaking him.
He stood at his full, imposing height, like the chains didn’t weigh him down at all. There was some kind of metal mask covering his mouth with chains linking from the mask to a metal collar around his throat. Chains wrapped around his arms, connecting his cuffed wrists to his waist, and then his waist to his ankles.
The escorts got to work on the time-consuming task of unlocking him, which allowed us to take in the friend and mentor we hadn’t seen in over twenty years.
