Page 10 of Fear

“You don’t fear my gaze, and yet you won’t look me in the eye,” I noted.

“Leesa has been a bad little vampire.”

“She has.”

“My New York counterparts had no idea.”

How did the slayer know? I’d telepathed it to Marco, had he told the slayer? Or had he told someone else and the slayer somehow spied on that conversation? I had no idea, but no way was I going to ask, so I merely said, “You’ll tell them, I hope.”

“I will, but I’m surprised you wish for me to.”

“She’s an incubus. She drank down their sex. Fucking children, most of them virgins. She got them hard and she rode them, and then drank them down when they orgasmed. Some, she also drank a few ounces of their blood, but many were on prescription drugs, and those, she didn’t bother with their blood.”

Most of the ADHD drugs do bad things to a person’s blood. It probably wouldn’t poison a vampire, but it made the blood taste terrible. Also, the life force was all wrong.

“And this angers you?” He seemed surprised.

“We don’t have to kill to live, and we certainly do not have to...”

To abuse children. I’m not sure why I couldn’t say the rest of the sentence. Perhaps I was too pissed, and I didn’t trust my anger, or perhaps it was the look in the slayer’s eyes. I sat and looked at his knees because I didn’t particularly want to look into his eyes at that moment.

Chapter 4

Ryan

She didn’t finish her sentence, but that was okay. I got the gist of what she felt. The vampire renowned for killing with fear was full of righteous indignation over a vampire who’d debilitated human children.

Marco was pissed because Leesa had gone against orders to avoid drawing attention, but he didn’t seem particularly outraged about the children she’d sexually molested and then fed from. Or perhaps I was reading him wrong. I needed more time around him to be certain.

This vampire, though, was incensed about the fact children had been harmed.

I looked back to the vampire in the cage. “What will you do to her?”

“Are you asking if I’ll torture her?”

“No, I’m asking how you will torture her.”

“You’re so certain I won’t just drink her down?”

“Yes.”

I turned back to Etta and saw her lift a single brow before I focused on her chin once again.

“Would you like to help me torture her to death, slayer?”

The question caught me off guard and I nearly looked into her eyes, but stopped myself at the last micro-second. She might be able to see my deepest fears if I met her gaze, and that was personal.

I’m immune to most learned vampire powers, but the ones given to them upon turning sometimes work on me. Not always, and not usually at a high level, but I wasn’t willing to take the chance. This vampire had so much power. So much more than I’d expected. In fact, I was certain she’d easily be stronger than Marco if he weren’t Master of a city.

There was much about Etta I didn’t understand, and this was new to me. If she were human, or a Slayer, I’d have wanted to take her to bed. Not my bed, but another bed would’ve been more than welcome. A luxurious hotel bed, for instance.

But she’s a vampire. A monster. I didn’t feel the same about the monsters as I once had, but acknowledging that some are capable of toning down their basic nature isn’t the same as mixing bodily fluids with them.

And yet, I’d found her appealing even when I’d watched her from a distance, and now that I was in the same room with her, talking to her, the attraction was even stronger. It was as if my soul recognized her, when I’d never felt the existence of a soul within me before, and I’d wondered if Slayers had them.

I looked at Leesa while my thoughts wandered, and I kept my eyes on her to answer Etta’s question. “I’d just take her heart and head. Torture isn’t my thing.”

I felt Etta’s power grow, which meant I’d scared the vampire in the cage.