"He should be waking up any moment now."
The sun was a spilled egg on the horizon. Clay had been watching it sink for an hour now, his dread mounting as the orb slowly diminished. Waking up with the sun blazing in the sky had lifted his spirits, mostly because it had been the best time for an escape attempt. But to his consternation, the ropes binding them had been tied with a strength his 'ordinary' fingers couldn't unravel. Sure, he could have hopped over to the horses and tried somehow to mount and then ride them, but it would have been a comedy of errors and likely a waste of energy. So now he sat with his back to the butte alongside Mariel, waiting for their captor to awaken and feed from them.
"I'm not going to let him drink from you," Clay stated, even though his skin itched with trepidation at offering himself up instead. "I'm bigger and stronger. I should be able to keep him satisfied until Everton Fort."
"Over a month away?" Mariel's tone was disbelieving. "If you tried, you'd be as weak as though you'd been gut shot. He needs us both. I'm prepared for it."
"Preparing and doing are two different things." He hesitated. Why bother shielding her from the truth? She had a right to know. Besides, she was strong. He had the feeling she would be able to handle it. "A long time ago, when I was still a child, I knew someone who'd been the victim of a vampire. It was a woman. A woman who'd been as kind to me as a mother."
He felt her looking at him, but he continued staring out over the desert. "Not only had the vampire drained every last drop of blood from her body, leaving her skin as dry as paper and as white as milk, he'd torn out half her throat to do it. He'd been a dog, mindlessly savaging a piece of meat. That's how they are, Mariel, even if Vellum seems to be like us. He's not. He needs to kill us in order to live. You can't forget that."
She touched his knee with her bound hands. "I'm sorry for your loss, Clay. I can't imagine what it must have been like to see that."
"It wasn't the best experience I've ever had."
"What if that was an aberration? A vicious vampire, unlike the rest of them, just as a man like Beaufort is unlike the rest of us?"
He had to tamp down his anger. Mariel had struck him from their first meeting as an intelligent woman, smarter than most men he knew, come to think of it. What was the reason for her continual insistence on giving Vellum the benefit of the doubt despite all logic to the contrary?
He shifted sideways so he could face her. "Mariel, tell me the truth. Has something happened between you and him?" When she bit her lip, he added, "You can tell me. I promise I won't be mad at you."
He let her see the truth of it in his eyes. He would never hurt a woman, not even with words if he could help it. She seemed to understand this, for she sighed and nodded reluctantly.
"I was looking for a weapon," she said quietly. "That's why I was in the cargo car. I opened Vellum's crate, thinking it might hold rifles. He was inside. I suppose I woke him. He—He attacked me."
Clay tensed, his blood pressure rising. "Did he hurt you?"
"He—He bit me." She touched her fingers to her neck and looked up at him, wide-eyed. "He drank from me, Clay."
He yearned to surge to his feet and kick the lid off the vampire's crate. Watching Vellum burn would be as satisfying as seeing Rhody Beaufort hang for his crimes.
"It hurt at first," she admitted, making Clay's blood boil, "but I don't think he intended it to. He said himself he'd been in a state of hibernation. I think…he was hungry and not thinking straight."
"Mariel!"
"It's true!" she shot back. "The moment he realized he was hurting me—it changed. It no longer hurt. And then he stopped completely and offered to help me against Beaufort's men."
There was more to it than that. She was a terrible liar. Had Vellum hurt her more than she admitted? Frightened her? Probably he'd intimidated her into going along with him, maybe held the threat of her life over her head. Or Clay's life.
"It wasn't the worst experience I've had," she said, throwing his own words back at him, twisted. "I survived it just fine, which is why I believe you and I will survive this trip to Everton. Vellum knows how to take from us without hurting us or killing us. The vampire attack on your friend…Vellum wouldn't do that."
"You barely know him, Mariel! You don't know him."
"Marshal, are you telling me you never had a gut feeling about a person? That you never looked at someone and knew right away whether they'd cause you trouble or not?"