Page 17

Ruby

They come to me in the dark.

I don’t know them.

Their voices are unfamiliar to me. They talk to me, pick me up, put me in the chair and ask me questions. I have stopped answering them. They hit me, punch me, smack me. There is blood running down my face and at some point, I spit out a tooth but they have lost the power to hurt me.

I don’t feel anything anymore.

Instead, I go back to the past, revisit my memories.

I think of how Grace and I would drink at the club, after our shift, exhausted from many hours of working. We would drink shooters and get drunk and silly, sing songs and compare notes of the evening. That was our thing, the silly competitions. Who had the worst shift or the worst job. Sometimes, it was who had the worst date ever or the worst sex ever.

It was usually split fairly evenly between us.

The thing about Grace was, she hadn’t given up yet. Even though she had to dance at a club and had to endure drunk customers harassing her, grabbing her and sometimes even trying to force her to have sex with them, she always managed to look on the bright side. She’d say she would get out someday, that we were both going to get married and raise our babies together. The thought of which always made me laugh out loud. I was never going to have children. Why not? Grace wanted to know, she said she wanted a whole messy house of at least four to five children.

But I knew how hard it was to have children, how many things could go wrong. My mother had lost many babies and they never knew why. I was the only child carried to term and for years, she had carefully watched over me, scared that something would happen to me. Especially in a place like Buzzard Creek, where life was cheap and accidents seemed to happen more than elsewhere.

The bond between us had been close from the start.

“You are special,” my mother would tell me every night when she put me to bed. “You are my Ruby, a jewel of priceless value, the most precious of any gem.”

My father loved me too, but he was more distant. I knew that my health and happiness was of paramount importance to my mother. If something happened to me, I don’t think she would survive.

When I was bullied in school, I didn’t tell her. I didn’t know how she’d react if I told her Tammy Sullivan kept shoving me into the dirt, stealing my lunch every day and calling me a little bitch. The school I went to was outside of town, there weren’t that many shifters. Tammy was one of the HH or higher humans, whose DNA had been enhanced and improved. The higher humans were taller, smarter and often, more attractive. Most lived in the Capital but there were some in the rest of the country. They tended to look down on the shifter families as being trash.

I endured Tammy’s bullying for a while but when it started escalating, I decided I needed to fight back. I took a knife from our kitchen and one morning, when I walked to school and found my way blocked by Tammy and two of her friends, I knew what to do. When she told me to hand over my lunch, I refused. When she came closer, warning me to do as she said, I pulled out the knife and warned her to get back. She laughed at me and I never reacted well when anyone did that.

I threw the knife at her, not really taking aim, but it found purchase in her shoulder. She fell down, screaming. I pulled the knife out and ran to school, throwing the weapon away. When I was called in by the teachers and asked about the incident, I denied it, saying Tammy was trying to get me into trouble. They didn’t believe me but there was no proof. I’d warned Tammy’s friends that my father’s shifter friends would come for them if they talked.

That was the end of my bullying.

But there was nothing I could do in my present situation.

I couldn’t fight back in any way. They had the upper hand and they knew it. I only had my mind to hide away in and I found that it had more hidden chambers than I’d thought. Beautiful places I had forgotten about.

I thought of the river trips we’d taken in the air boat when I was younger, out in the swamps, passing the mangrove forests and the birds out there, flapping their wings. We’d felt so free back then, young and strong. I loved being out in nature like that, away from the town. It felt like we could do anything, go anywhere.

I tried to remember my friends’ names, they were kids from school. There was a Frankie and Mungo. What had become of them? Frankie had gone away, I think to the army. But Mungo? He'd always been a free spirit, didn’t like to follow the rules and didn’t exactly respect authority. He didn’t finish school and I hadn’t thought of him in years.

I thought about the food my mom cooked for us when I was young, the songs she sang, the stories she told me and when that didn’t work, I slept. I didn’t know how much time had passed. If days had come and gone. All of that stopped mattering to me.

Then, there was a change.

A light was switched on and some men came in with a table, a table cloth and some chairs.

Food was brought in and put on plates. There was beer, two bottles, opened and placed at each setting. I was helped into one of the chairs at the table.

Someone came in and sat across from me.

“Jesus, Ruby, what have they done to you?”

I recognized the voice, but didn’t know who it was.

I tried to look up but my eyes were swollen shut and my neck wouldn’t move.

“Here, have some chicken.” A plate was pushed towards me but I didn’t want food.

I turned my head a bit and saw that it was Tomás.

I must have reacted somehow because he smiled.

“They asked me to come see you, see if I could get through to you? Apparently they couldn’t get you to talk.” He laughed, “I told them, you’re one of my girls, you’re tough!”

Fuck you, I thought. I’m not one of your girls but I didn’t say anything.

He drank from his beer and looked at me with beady eyes.

For the first time, he didn’t look that dangerous to me. He was closer to me now than he had ever been before. I wondered why I had been so scared of him. He wasn’t that tall, or that strong. After all that I’d been through, what could he do to me now?

He leaned closer. “They’re going to kill you, Ruby. I guess you’ve figured that out and you don’t care, which is fine, but what about your mother?”

I looked at him, wondering if he was bluffing.

“Charlotte Lucas? Aka Lottie Winton?”

I could feel my stomach turning. How had they found my mother?

It was as if he had read my mind.

“We know everything, Ruby,” he said, quietly to me. “We know how you’ve been helping the vampire to get rid of our people, your own people.”

I wanted to tell him that wasn’t true. That the shifters had attacked us, that I was only defending myself, that Luc had merely been fighting back, but it hurt too much to open my mouth to speak.

“This vampire is not just another vampire,” Tomás went on, speaking conversationally while eating, as if we were on a date or having a friendly lunch. The kind of lunch where your partner was covered in dried blood and couldn’t sit up properly. I wondered if he’d had many of these sorts of meetings. He did seem very comfortable doing this.

“This guy is important. He is connected and he knows stuff about us.” Tomás laughed.

“Not that it will help him at all! This time, we have the numbers and we have the advantage. There are not enough of them compared to us. We’re gonna wipe them all out! Imagine! A world without vampires!” he slapped the table, then grew serious.

“We want to catch him, alive preferably, to get information. You’re going to help us do it.”

I started shaking my head, trying to protest that I didn’t know anything.

“Shh… shh…” Tomás said. Then he showed me a picture of an attractive dark-haired woman.

“This is Sister Lola Hunter. She works over at Montrose, where your mom is. Nice lady. Of course, she cares more about her kids than her patients.”

He showed me another photograph, of two children, looking scared, in the back of a car.

“She will give your mother a fatal dose of insulin if we say the word. We are keeping her children until we know you are cooperating. So, it’s not only your mom’s life at stake here, but also those of Sister Hunter’s children.”

He shrugged and came closer, his voice becoming more menacing.

“It’s all up to you, Ruby. Down here, the vampire can’t find you but we’ll take you up, above ground, where he can find you. Then we’ll find him, trap him. All you have to do, is to get him to come to you.”

“How?” My voice was cracked, dry.

Tomás gave a nasty laugh. “Oh, when he feels you’re in trouble, he'll come. Vampires like to bind their victims to them that way. You fuck ‘em, you belong to them,” he sneered.

I thought of Danny and how he had treated me like I had belonged to him. Like I was his property, shoes he could throw across a room if the mood took him. Luc had never behaved that way towards me. We had been equals and he had been respectful and decent with me. More decent than any man I’d ever known.

But I couldn’t let them hurt my mother.

I nodded. “I’ll do it,” I said. I was surprised to see tears dripping onto the table.

I didn’t think I had tears left.