Page 9 of How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck
“Smells too good to be anything else.” It sounded almost flirtatious; almost, but for the edge that sent ice down Shane’s spine.
Fuck. Maybe thishadbeen a mistake.
“Someone’s looking for me?” A bald, white vampire slipped from the chalk-marked doorway, wiping his hands on a rag. Apart from the fangs peeking out over his incisors and the dark gleam in his eye, he looked like any middle-aged professional Shane might pass on the street, well dressed but unassuming. He squinted through Shane’s phone light, and his expression tightened. “Ah, you’re the one.” His chin lifted. “Grab him.”
Shane didn’t have time to piece together what that meant before two of the vamps latched onto his arms from behind. A third yanked his phone from his hand. Their bodies moved like blurs in the darkness, their heightened strength obvious from the moment they grabbed him.
The panic finally hit Shane. He opened his mouth to shout, but a hand clamped over it, muffling the sound down to its barest bones. They dragged him forward so fast that he struggled to keep his legs under him. His heart pounded, blood rushing through his ears and the world spun, black on black on black.
A door slammed—he was inside, then—fuck. The light clicked on, too dim for him to make out more than silhouettes. Shane fought to think rationally over the terror. They might simply throw him in a chair, bare their fangs and threaten to find him if he ever said a word; he could walk out of here with nothing but fear and promises. He’d probably even agree to their terms in the moment, with his stomach in his throat and his limbs trembling like this. If he could just tell them…
But the hand stayed clamped over his mouth.
They seemed to close in on him, body and sweat and breath polluting his space, fingers gripping into him hungrily. The oneon his right grabbed his hair. Their nails bit into his scalp as another forced up the sleeve-cuff of his flannel, laughing as they seized his wrist and began playing with his fingers. The contact made his skin crawl and he struggled helplessly against their hold.
Shane tried to scream again, but the hand over his mouth pinched his nostrils closed. He choked, his useless gasp turning to a sob. The air smarted along his face, refusing to creep through the seal of skin on skin that locked off his lungs, trapping them in their panic, forcing him smaller and smaller inside himself. Every touch felt painful, his own body a claustrophobic thing straining and bowing under the weight of the oxygen it couldn’t reach. His vision wavered, the silhouettes of the vampires around him filling with stars.
“You’ll fuck up the taste,” one of them complained, her voice rattling in Shane’s head like a waterfall, and then the hand fell from his mouth.
He gasped. His throat burned as they yanked his head back, his lungs still fighting to replenish. Fangs punctured his neck.
Shane knew, distantly, what this was supposed to feel like—the blissful little rush of venom that had accompanied the prick of his vampire’s fangs at the gala—but all he felt now was the pain and the fear, the stab of the bite sinking in again and again and the cry of his mind as he felt the blood leave him. His chin was shoved to the side, his face pressed to the greasy hair of the vampire feeding on him as the second of them bit down on his shoulder.
A third pinch of fangs at his wrist made his fingers numb. He whimpered, the sound trying desperately to turn to a cry but unable to fully manifest with the twist and tip of his throat.
“All right, enough,” Maul’s voice boomed.
Immediately, the vampires let him go, their tongues dragging roughly across the wounds. The chill of their saliva sent anuncomfortable shudder over him. They didn’t release him, but he was sure his legs would have fallen out from under him if they had.
That was it—that was the end. They had scared him—dear god, they’d scared him—and now, now they’d stop. They’d let him go back to writing fluff pieces and dreaming of his vampire. He’d—he’d be okay.
But Maul made a sound, almost animalistic in its low, gravelly tones, and drew a phlebotomist's needle from a box, setting it delicately on an empty platter. “I want the rest in bags.”
Oh.
Shane felt numb as they moved him to a chair, holding him there by his hair and his upturned wrists. One of them returned with a blood donation kit—a single needle, with far too many blood bags. Oh. His limbs tingled. His mouth felt dry, so dry that when he tried to speak, it came out hoarse and hollow.
“Please…” He managed. “I didn’t mean any harm. I’m not a cop.”
“No,” Maul answered. He squatted beside Shane’s chair and drew out a small pocketknife.
Shane tried to tug away, but Maul’s goons held him in place as the vampire calmly tugged open the shoved cuff of his flannel and began cutting further upwards until Shane’s arm was revealed from mid-bicep down. He could have just rolled the fabric, a slightly hysterical part of Shane’s mind objected. If he intended Shane to ever need this shirt—any shirt—again, maybe he would have.
“You’re the journalist who’s been poking around my territory,” Maul continued, “And see, I’ve been poking around about you, and it turns out you’re what the people who hunt us would call a perfect target.”
“The people who huntus.” So Maul knew about whatever it was that Shane’s vampire had been investigating back at thegala—but Shane was too trapped by his words and the goons literally holding him in place to interrupt with a question.
“You have no friends, no family in the area, all your work is remote, all your hobbies solitary.” Maul kept moving as he spoke, wrapping the tourniquet with steady motions, cleaning the crook of Shane’s elbow, and extending his arm out. The veins bulged. “Which means it will take a while for anyone to miss you.”
“What do you want?” Shane tried not to sound desperate. Tried, and failed. “I’ll help you, I’ll write whatever you tell me to. Or I’ll stop writing. I’ll move to San Diego and you won’t even know I exist.”
“I’d like to believe that.” Maul shook his head. “I’d like to, but I don’t.” Holding tight to Shane’s elbow, he slipped the needle into Shane’s vein with a single prick of discomfort. “Relax,” he murmured. “It’ll be painless.”
Relaxed was the furthest thing from what Shane felt as the first hanging bag began to fill. The first bag in a long, long line.
4
ANDRES
