Page 37 of Taste of Blood

Around five a.m. I figure the two assholes have had sufficient time to think about their fate and head for the cell. Both are passed out but the shorter one jerks awake when I throw a bucket of water on him.

“Jesus, what the fuck?”

“Good morning, sunshine. Sleep okay?”

He yanks on the chains around his wrists, then seeing he’s not going anywhere, glares at me. “You’re going to be sor–”

“Yeah, yeah. Consider me suitably terrified. Now let’s talk about your boss.” He glances over at his partner on the opposite wall, who’s starting to stir awake. “He can’t help you.”

“I’m not a rat.”

“You sure about that? I know for a fact it gets mighty painful when you haven’t fed in a couple of days. Your veins start to collapse, your skin shrivels up and shrinks, and the hunger…” I lean closer and meet his eyes. “It’s like your body is eating itself from the inside out.”

He looks a little less confident now. Good. “He’ll find us.”

I’ll give this guy one thing; he sure inspires loyalty. “What is he, psychic? Do you know where we are?”

“Doesn’t matter. You’ll never get to him. He’s–”

“Jer,” his buddy warns from across the room. “Shut up.”

I turn to him. “Look who’s joined the party. The first one to tell me what I want to know gets a bag of blood.”

I pull the bag I grabbed from the emergency refrigerator in the warehouse out of my jacket pocket and toss it on the floor at his feet. “I know it’s not as good as live, but it’ll keep you from starving to death.” I shake my head. “Messy way to die, you know.”

Vampires can’t die from lack of blood. Oh we’ll suffer–horrendously–while still being alive through it all. I’ve personally gone a week without blood as part of my training. It’s not something I would want to repeat. And while it took about a day to recover once I was feeding again, I did still recover.

That’s something I doubt these two know, and I plan to exploit it. I look between them. “No takers?” I shrug. “Suit yourself. We’ll see how you feel after another day here.”

And just to make things more interesting, I toe the bag of blood to the middle of the room then stomp on it, releasing the coppery aroma into the air. It even twangs my appetite, so I know it’s torturing them.

I take a step toward the door and the short guy calls me back. “Wait!”

I turn around. “Yes?”

“You can’t leave us here.”

I snort. “Watch me.” I reach for the door.

“We weren’t going to hurt them.”

“Hurt who?”

“The kids at the restaurant. We were recru–”

“Jerry!” the tall one snaps.

“What? I don’t want to starve to death.”

He’s not making it out of this cell alive, but I don’t want to tell him that. Let the guy cling to his hope…for now. I have a feeling he’s ready to talk, if his conscience on the other side of the room would just shut up. Luckily I have a cure for that in my other pocket. I pull out the syringe and hold it up to the meager lightbulb hanging from the ceiling so they both can see it.

It’s a mega dose of xylazine, better known as horse tranquilizer, one of the many little goodies from Dante’s toolchest. This one is loaded up for just this situation, with enough juice to take down an elephant. Even so, it will only knock your average vamp out for an hour or two, but that’s usually all the time we need.

I approach the tall one and his eyes widen at the sight of the needle.

“What the hell is that?”

“A little something to make you more tolerable.”