Page 15

Jay

I t wasn’t until Jay got home and started drawing, sitting cross-legged on the floor of his living room, his pencil sketching an all-too-familiar female face, that the bad thoughts and feelings surfaced again.

He considered Soren’s anger toward Jay’s maker, his clear irritation with Jay for his inability to renounce her.

Jay couldn’t help feeling like it was just a bit unfair though.

Jay and Soren were different in that way; they always had been.

They may have been raised in the same toxic den, taught the same lessons: obey your maker, humans are cattle, no vampire makes it alone in the outside world.

But Soren had been brave—he’d always been so brave—and he’d escaped anyway.

True, Soren’s maker had definitely been the kind of vampire to run from; Hendrick had been much crueler, more physically violent, and more aggressive than Vee.

And he’d wanted certain things from Soren Vee had never wanted from Jay.

Vee had wanted a…servant, Jay supposed it came down to.

And not of the sexual kind. Someone to keep things neat and tidy and put on a good face for visitors.

Someone to keep her company—reading quietly or playing the piano concertos she’d taught him—during the long, cold nights.

Someone to never talk back and never contradict her and never look dirty or unkempt or wild.

And as long as he’d done all those things perfectly, she’d been…

kind. She hadn’t yelled or hit. Sometimes she’d even hugged him, or praised him when he’d done a particularly good job. Those were the very best moments,

And if he hadn’t done all those things absolutely perfectly, then Jay had been simply…left alone.

Which wasn’t so bad, right? Not compared to what Soren had been through, that was for sure.

Locked in a room by himself for hours or days, nothing to look at or play with or read. It could have been worse. Jay had learned to pass the time in his head. He sometimes still did, even without meaning to. He sometimes lost hours that way.

It didn’t happen when he was around people though.

Jay’s pencil paused. His throat felt thick, like it was hard to swallow. He wished he weren’t alone now. He wished…

He wanted to call Alexei, to ask the human to distract him with his good smell and his nice hands. But calling someone in the middle of the night, just because he was lonely…that was for boyfriends, wasn’t it? Alexei wasn’t Jay’s boyfriend.

Jay was never going to get to have a boyfriend, was he?

Jay stabbed his pencil back into his paper, running back over the familiar lines, an angry, roiling heat filling his gut. He shouldn’t mind being alone. He should be able to be brave. He should be able to raise his voice at the dinner table without feeling like he needed to be punished.

Jay tried it, tried tasting the words out loud. “Fucking Veronique.” He tried again, putting as much spite and malice as he could into the words. “ Fucking Veronique .”

It wasn’t enough.

He scribbled over his drawing, crossing out the eyes with heavy, repeated strokes. He turned the whole page into a mass of gray-black sludge, then crumpled it into a little ball and threw it at the wall. Fucking Veronique.

He started on a new paper, a new face. A long, straight nose.

Pretty eyes with so many different colors, none of which Jay could capture with just a pencil, but the kindness in them he could.

The way that stern brow turned soft just for Jay.

The little crinkles at the corners of those eyes when they were smiling at him, telling him he was good and perfect and gorgeous.

Jay let the motions of his pencil soothe him.

He was growing. He was changing. He was .

He could be more than what his maker had made of him.

Seconds or minutes or hours later—he couldn’t be sure, really, only knew that his drawing was finished and he’d since been staring at the wall—Jay’s phone dinged with a text.

They grow impatient.

Jay considered throwing his phone against the wall like he had with Vee’s ruined portrait, how satisfying the crunch of it would be. But then how would Alexei get a hold of him? They were going to make syrniki tomorrow. Jay needed to be available.

So he kept his phone intact, sending a reply instead.

I’m learning how to make pancakes.

Then he let himself drift off, back into his own head. Maybe when he came to, it would be morning, and he’d be that much closer to his cooking lesson.

Johann closed his eyes and let the sun beat down on his face, his feet resting up on the fence, his back firmly planted in the grass. Most likely any minute now, his uncle would call him in to help with the horses, but for now he could take a minute to enjoy the warmth of the spring day.

“My, my. Don’t you look comfortable.”

Johann peeled one eye open, startling when he realized there was a woman looking down at him, her face mostly hidden by a large sun hat.

“Oh!” Johann scrambled up, brushing his breeches and doing his best not to stumble as the blood rushed back down from his head. “Can I help you, Madam?”

“I’m not quite sure yet.”

Johann couldn’t see her eyes, but he could tell the woman was looking him over slowly by the way her hatted head tilted.

She had three inches on him at least, and she was really very elegant.

Much too elegant for the countryside, and her German had a slight accent to it Johann couldn’t quite place. Perhaps she wasn’t native to Austria.

“You’re very young, I think” was the woman’s final verdict after her perusal. “How old exactly?”

Johann cleared his throat. “I’ve just turned nineteen.”

She gave a thoughtful hum. “And you still reside with your parents?”

“My aunt and uncle. My parents have passed.”

“No wife of your own yet?”

Johann shook his head, unable to find words, too embarrassed that she’d even asked.

She laughed softly then. And it wasn’t necessarily a mean sound, but it wasn’t necessarily a nice one either. “What do you do all day, then, other than sitting upside down in the dirt?”

Johann resisted the urge to scratch at his neck, running a hand along the fence instead. “I help around the farm. My aunt and uncle don’t have children of their own.”

The woman’s head tilted. “You’re good at following instruction?”

“Yes, Madam.”

She was silent then, studying him some more. It was starting to make Johann uneasy, the way she looked at him. The way he couldn’t quite see her face. “You have a very fine bone structure, under all that dirt,” she mused. “Not displeasing at all.”

“Thank you, Madam.” Johann very much wanted to go home now. He wanted the firm comfort of his uncle’s hand on his shoulder, the warm reassurance of his aunt’s smile at the supper table.

“And you’re very polite.”

His response was automatic. “Thank you, Madam.”

She seemed to come to some conclusion then, nodding sharply. “You’ll do. Come with me.”

That…wasn’t right. Johann shook his head. This woman may have been above his station, but that was taking things too far. He didn’t want to go anywhere with her, this person who studied him like an insect. Or a meal. “Oh no. I’m sorry, but I have to get back.”

“You will come with me now.”

The sharp edge in her voice had Johann’s heart rate speeding. He tried to step back, but the fence was directly behind him, and he only ended up feeling all the more trapped. “I beg your pardon”—she’d liked that he was polite, right? Maybe if he was polite, she’d leave him alone—“but I won’t.”

The woman pushed up her hat then, and Johann caught only a flash of brown eyes before they…changed. It was like her pupils expanded rapidly, the black taking over. And then she smiled, and her teeth were sharp. Like a demon’s.

Like a beast’s.

Jay opened his mouth to scream, but she spoke before he could, those black eyes on his, her voice much rougher than before. “You’re not afraid, little lad. You aren’t frightened of me.”

The tension seeped out of Johann’s muscles in an instant with her words, his mouth snapping shut of its own accord. Of course Johann wasn’t afraid. Why would he be?

“What’s your name, little one?”

“Johann. Johann Barre.”

“You’ll come with me,” she ordered, not offering up her own name. “You won’t complain.”

“I won’t complain.” Of course Johann wouldn’t complain. Why would he?

Her lips twitched into a satisfied smile. “We’ll try you out. If you please me, I’ll grant you a gift. Eternal life. Eternal youth. Would you like that?”

“No, Madam,” Johann answered honestly. He knew how the natural world worked, the ordinary cycles of men and beasts. To live forever would be…wrong. Out of order.

But she corrected him instantly, the smile dropping from her face. “You would like that. Tell me so.”

“I would like that.” And suddenly, just like that, the idea of eternal life sounded completely fine. Not unnatural at all.

She turned from him then, gesturing imperiously with one hand. “Come along.”

So Johann followed the finely dressed woman off his uncle’s property, to the carriage waiting for them on the dirt road.

With every step, he felt…wrong…in his own mind.

Like there was a tiny, dark corner that knew he was afraid.

Very afraid. But he couldn’t quite access it and found it difficult to even want to try.

It was months of that, as Jay learned how to be a proper gentleman under Veronique’s compulsion. Months of hidden, inaccessible fear. A knowledge that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be but that he couldn’t quite find it in himself to care about the way he should.

It turned out Veronique had a very special talent, even for those of her kind. It wasn’t every vampire who could control a human’s mind for such an extended period, with such little effort.

When she finally turned Johann—granting him her unwanted gift—the compulsion no longer worked on him, but by that time, he was in a foreign country, surrounded by bloodthirsty strangers, suddenly quite literally bloodthirsty himself. He simply had to adapt, in order to survive.

As he saw other vampires in the den turn their humans, as he saw the way some of those matches turned out—those newly turned vampires who were too hostile to their makers put down like dogs—Johann realized it could have been much worse.

Really it could have all been so much worse.