Page 86 of How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck
Andres almost missed the sun’s rising entirely, its first direct rays across his face catching him off guard. It chilled him to the bone. He was down to the second-to-last location on his list, near the north-west outskirts of the city, just finishing another pointless check in with Natalie, when the text finally came through.
Shane
If you want him, come get him.
It was followed by a map location, one that hadn’t been on Andres’s list in the first place. He felt so sick and hollow at the sight of it that he was certain his insides had turned to a black hole, the dread in his gut slowly consuming what little hope and strength remained. He forwarded the whole thing to Natalie, but based on her last check in, by the time she arrived he’d either have rescued Shane or died trying. With the sun streaming through his windshield as he pulled onto the street, he was sure it would eventually lead to the latter. But sun-poisoning hit slowly, and it had always come for him with pain more than shakes. If he was fast enough… if he could free Shane before his suffering truly set in…
The building was an old Spanish-style place on the last wide lot of the rundown residential neighborhood that clung to the edge of the warehouse district like it was dying from infection. It had fallen into the same disarray and ruin that tainted most of Maul’s properties, its foreclosure sign half buried in the dirt and weeds. A single decrepit tree loomed over the south side, leafless and melancholic.
It looked as ominous as it felt.
Andres abandoned his attempts at stealth, strolling through the open front door with all the confidence he’d learned to feign over the years. The burnt-orange ceramic tile cracked under his feet. No one emerged to stop him. He poked from one room to the next, but it took little searching to find the trap Maul had set for him: the building’s courtyard, Shane encaged in the middle.
His head lolled, his lashes fluttering, but he was clearly alive from the way the blood still dripped from the jagged bites that littered his arms, shoulders, and neck, painting streaks of red across his skin and smearing down the front of his torn white outfit. For all the adrenaline and rage that had already ripped through Andres in waves that night, all the terrible fates he’d expected to find his little swan trapped in, the sight still struck him like a physical blow.
“You’ll put your boyfriend in a cage,”Maul had said,“or I will put you in one instead.”
One of them was clearly meant to end up dead within those bars.
“Maul!” Andres shouted his boss’s name into the depths of the house with a growl so deep it rattled. “I know you’re here.”
Frederick Maul emerged in one of the open windows on the far side of the courtyard, his elbows on the ledge and his face inthe shadows. Andres burned at the mere sight of him, his rage and terror coalescing into a painful fire.
“Lately,” Maul called, “when one of my subordinates grows too accustomed to pushing their luck with me, I give them fifteen minutes in the cage. Many of them even live through it. But your defiance is… peculiar. I thought this would be more fitting. Save yourself, or risk the sun to save your little pet. It’s your choice.” The satisfaction that dripped from his voice was a horrifying thing all on its own. He pulled away from the window with a final announcement. “The keys are in his lap.”
Maul had timed it too perfectly: the blood seeping down Shane’s skin in awful rivulets, his consciousness too far gone to even notice Andres’s approach. He might last another half hour. Or another ten minutes. Or maybe he’d die in the time it took Andres to gather his courage at the edge of the sunlight as his whole body screamed at him that this wasn’t his natural territory anymore.
Andres plunged forward.
It was so bright, beams of blazing sunshine streaming into him from the mirrors on all sides, but he kept his attention fixed on Shane. He could face whatever came after, so long as he knew his little swan was safe. The chains around the cage’s door were so thickly wound, the locks so many, that Andres had the impulse to rattle the thing first. But if other vampires hadn’t broken out that way, he wasn’t breaking in. Maul had designed this as a taunt and a game—one he’d bet on Andres nearly solving, pushing himself to his limit as each lock came away. Locks, like the very first one of Maul’s he’d broken, the night he’d been turned.
If he had the time, he’d have searched for a way around the obvious trap—kill Maul and whoever he’d surely brought to back him up, break the mirrors, return with a blanket and a pole to fish the keys from between Shane’s thighs. But those thighswere already spotted in the dribbles of red from his bleeding arms.
Andres had no time. He had one thing Maul wouldn’t expect, though. The sun-poisoning would make Andres suffer—kill him quick as any—but unlike most vampires, he wouldn’t shake uncontrollably while it ravaged him. At least, not at first.
He could feel the start of the pain as he slid the lightweight tools he carried on all his cons into the first lock, but it was still a subtle ache, a warning that he’d been in the sun too often since it rose. Whatever toxins were forming in his body now, those would need time to take effect. If his hands were sure enough, he could get Shane out before it fully consumed him.
The first chain fell with a rattle.
Shane blinked, his gaze drifting lazily before fixing on Andres.
“I’m here, my love,” Andres said, soft and sweet as anything he’d ever muttered in the dead of night, his arms wrapped around Shane’s sleeping body.
“No.” Shane’s voice was hoarse, and Andres could make out the raw edges of his mouth, the lines where too-tight fabric had rubbed against his cheeks. Amidst his rage, he barely recognized the word Shane spoke. “No,” he whispered again. “The light…”
“I know.” Andres kept working.
He didn’t think about the sun, or the way Shane’s blood kept spreading, seeping across his white fabric until the streams met and darkened, or the bob of his head as he slipped in and out of consciousness, occasional whispers that sounded like, “Leave.”
Andres was not leaving. He was doing his job, setting his love free one chain after the next, calmly dropping each to the ground until the final lock came away gracefully in his hands. He gritted through the pain that tore along his bones and the spears that had begun shooting through his muscles three or four locks ago, and swung open the cage gate as though its solid form wasn’t holding him up.
He was vaguely aware of Maul watching from the courtyard’s entrance, aware too that he wouldn’t be stepping aside to let them pass. But one way or another, Shane was getting out of here alive.
Andres nearly stumbled into him as he hastily knelt, one eye on the cage’s gate and one foot propping it open. Shane’s blood still pumped, sluggish in his veins. Andres licked what seemed to be the worst of his wounds, barely tasting his blood as he gave Shane the tiniest doses of venom, scared to push so far it might turn him instead of saving him. It was the little sounds that Shane made that wrenched Andres’s heart back open: not cries or moans but something in between, like his body was fighting to flee and his soul to stay.
“I’m here, my love.” In pain, and in pieces, but he was here.
He pulled Shane into his arms the moment he was free, lugging them both out of the cage. Beneath the plastered red, he could sense Shane’s smaller cuts still weeping, and he wrapped him up, kissing his wounds with each grueling step they took toward the shaded entrance. His body urged him to bite, as though it knew the hell that would come for him as the rest of the sun-poisoning set in, but he held back.
