Andres wasn’t coming.
Shane didn’t hold that against him—Andres was one vampire and this was a city of secret spaces just like the desolate, unfamiliar courtyard Shane had been brought to. Dozens of those locations belonged to Maul. Shane knew; he’d wandered into enough of them himself in his search for vampires. For his vampire.
Andres had already found him in a situation far worse than this literal cage, saved him and cherished him for over four incredible weeks. That miracle wasn’t likely to happen a second time.
No one had bitten Shane yet, pricked him with any needles, pressed any blades to his skin, but part of Shane wished they had, that they’d just get it over with. The wait was killing him. His body was so tight that it felt like if he just curled a little more, he could pull himself into a secret place, a safe place between the shadows. Every tiny sound made him flinch.
“We’re saving him for later.” Maul had nearly smiled when he’d said it, the barest turn of his lips and a twinkle in his eye like a cat on the prowl.
Shane felt that look so deep in his bones that it had blurred everything else out—the trip here, bound and gagged, being unloaded from the van like a sack of blood, nails digging into his arms. His outfit had torn. That moment kept coming back to him now, lying curled on his side beneath the cage bars and the distant starlight, like an irrational part of him was just as sad that Andres would have to mend it. As though when his vampire found his body—and he was sure that was the plan, the way Maul skirted his name with a sneer—Andres would see the rip first, and the corpse second.
The early morning air chilled Shane through, leaving him to cycle between the trembles of fear and those of cold. He could no longer feel his fingers beneath the tightness of the bonds, and the glucose monitor on the back of his arm pinched against the hard ground beneath him. He was certain his blood sugar was all kinds of off, and he kept reminding himself it didn’t matter. Andres wasn’t coming, at least not in time. Everything else would be redundant soon.
He could not make himself feel the wonder or acceptance he had when he’d spoken of death with Andres, couldn’t push through the horror enough to find any beauty in a demise like this. It would have been better if his atoms ceased to exist rather than go on to be a part of Maul’s terrible system. His lungs caught, the base of his throat burning, and he tried to picture the shallow grave he was sure they’d toss him in after, the little spring flowers that would soon grow up from it, but he could only see the way Andres’s face would crack when they finally stumbled upon it. That image seemed more certain now than anything he’d seen in his life.
Purple streaked across the sky, then a brilliant orange highlighted the undersides of the fluffy clouds. It signaled the coming of Cygnus’s lover, Phaethon, flying his sun chariot too high, then too low, his reckless ambition blazing across the face of the earth. Maybe this was their fault, naming themselves after a Greek tragedy. They’d just gotten their roles wrong, was all.
Maul waited until the light had begun to stream into the courtyard, creeping its way closer and closer to the boxy, six-foot tall cage the vampires had initially thrown Shane into. It looked built for a mastiff, or a tiger, perhaps, positioned in the courtyard’s center, where the low, tired walls and shadowed openings that surrounded it wouldn’t block out the sun for long. It seemed wrong for what Shane was—pale, but human. He didn’t think Maul’s intention was to give him a sunburn.
Unless he meant to turn Shane, like he had Andres. Leave him to die there one way or another, in agony.
That was a new thought, and it tore over Shane with a fresh wave of terror, so deep and smothering that he barely saw Maul’s goons opening the door. They plunked down a chair just outside it, and Maul straddled it as he stared at Shane. His eyes narrowed.
“Do you like him, really?” He sounded curious, but skeptical, like the answer wouldn’t change anything.
I love him, Shane couldn’t say through the gag, but he ground his teeth into it and nodded. For the first time since Maul’s goons had grabbed him, he felt his eyes moisten. I love him, he wanted to scream, I love him so much that he’s what I cry over, not fucking you.
Maul shrugged. “That’s a pity.”
His goons pulled Shane up by his arms, and Maul thrust the chair into the cage. When they shoved Shane into it, he swore it was the same one he’d been strapped to before. He could almost feel the way he’d thrashed and screamed when they’d bound him then. This time his hands were too numb and prickling and his throat raw from breathing in the sickening strap of fabric pressed halfway into his mouth all night, his lungs too tight to scream and his muscles too cold to fight, but the memory melded into the reliving of it, nothing in his mind but terror and abhorrence. And Andres. Andres.
Maul slapped his hand on the cage door a few times. “Take what you want,” he sneered to his goons. “I just need him alive in the end. Alive and bleeding.”
Shane managed to whimper something that sounded like a protest before one of the vampire’s hands fisted into his hair, holding him as the other three pressed up the layers of his sleeves and pulled down the fabric around his shoulders. His choker came away with a searing tug, leaving his neck bare and stinging for mere moments before the fangs sank in. Through the gag, he sobbed.
He didn’t know if they gave him any venom—didn’t think he’d feel it beneath the pain and the panic. His body, so sluggish and hollow, still fought the touch with everything it had, trembling jerks that grew smaller and smaller with each bite and rip.
Alive and bleeding, Maul had said.
They were feeding, all right, but with every fresh bite their fangs dragged along his skin, no gentle brush of tongue following, leaving the fresh cut to drip. They were tearing him open.
Shane choked, his head spinning, and he could feel himself slip like he had in the blood bank, darkness crashing in around him that could have been blood loss or sheer anxiety.
“That’s enough,” Maul barked.
The vampires let go. It barely helped. The sting of their fangs and the ire of their touch still flared across his skin, ground into his soul. Shane could barely see through the tunneled fog of his fear, Maul’s face floating behind the bars of the cage as it clicked shut.
“I should have told him no, bagged the rest of your blood and been fucking done with you. But then, this is what happens when you give your playthings too much freedom.” He shook his head. “It has to stop somewhere.”
Playthings. It took Shane a moment to understand him through the haze, and then all he could see was Andres’s face crumbling as they’d admitted that Maul had hurt them, that after escaping a childhood of bullying and quiet insidiousness, Maul had taken advantage of Andres’s attempts to downplay the pain in their life and used them like a toy to be manipulated or discarded.
Find me again, my love,Shane wanted to hope, to pray even, though what he’d be praying to he didn’t know. But as the sun slid across the courtyard, the drip-drip-drip of his bites turning the white of his outfit to red, Maul’s goons dropped mirrors into place along the courtyard’s edges, one by one by one, until every bit of light in the space was angled at the cage. A vampire’s death sentence. Shane could see the nail-marks on the cement floor beneath him now, dried blood in the cracks, the deep, near-black color of a vampire’s, and he could wish for nothing but this: Forget me, Andres.
Don’t let the gods throw your body to the stars.