I stumbled after him, hissing at the pain in my scalp as well as my wounds, as I tried to both keep my dress up and not fall down so I’d get dragged along by my hair.
I made both sets of stairs still on my feet, but when Mop pushed the door to the basement open, he gave me a hard shove between the shoulder blades again, sending my sprawling to the floor.
I landed with a cry, the rough concrete scraping my knees and adding to my injuries.
“Dinner’s ready!” Mop sang. “All nice and juicy. Think she looks more appetizing now?”
A deep, inhuman snarl answered him. It sent goosebumps up and down my arms and made every hair on my body stand on end. It was the sound of a predator.
Sick dread filled my veins like icy lead as I turned my head to look in the direction of the sound.
It came from Warin. Only he didn’t look like Warin anymore. Instead of the handsome young man who’d seemed so calm and so human, a creature taken straight out of a horror movie stood there instead. He still had the same pale features, but his face was twisted in a furious snarl. Long, deadly fangs protruded from below his curled upper lip, gleaming with menace, and his eyes were pure demon black. Dark blood marred his skin and shirt from what looked like multiple stab wounds. He was still restrained by the thin chain, but from the way his muscles bulged, it looked like he was fighting against it with all his might. Like a trapped animal.
“Up you go!” Mop said as he grabbed my ponytail again and lifted me to my feet. “Since you love vampers so much, why don’t you go give him a big kiss?”
He dragged me by my hair toward the cage, paying no mind to my desperate attempts at scrambling backward and away from the furious monster.
I tried to bite, kick, and claw at my kidnapper as he unlocked the cage door, but he was much stronger than I. Mop threw me to the floor and I landed, sprawling and scraping my knees once more.
The cage door slammed shut behind me with a metallic clang. Sealing my fate.
I scrambled on my hands and knees to the farthest corner and curled up in a ball so I could keep my dress up and stem the bleeding form the deepest cut along my collarbone at the same time.
“Here ya go, vamper,” Sack said. “Perhaps she’s more to your liking now.”
And then he cut Warin’s chain with his hunting knife.
“Hope it was worth being a race traitor, deadwhore,” Mop called as they made their way to the basement door. Sack barked a rough laugh before the door shut behind them with a heavy clang.
Leaving me alone in the cage with the furious vampire.
I looked up, only to find him staring down at me, fangs extended and pitch-black eyes glued to the blood seeping between my fingers.
A deep growl emanated from him in unceasing waves.
4
“W-Warin?” I gulped, hoping against hope there was still some shred of humanity behind those black eyes I could reach.
The sound of his name cut his growl short. He stared at me for another second. Then he shook the broken chain off his wrists and forced his gaze away from my blood as he turned his back on me.
“Tie me to the bars.” His voice, so silky smooth before, had turned rough and gravelly—as if he were speaking through an animal’s jaws. “Now!”
I jolted at the sharp crack of his command. “H-how? With that?” I eyeballed the flimsy chain on the floor behind him. It’d been pretty pathetic before, and after the goons had taken pliers to it, I wasn’t even sure it’d reach around his wrists once.
“It’s silver—it’ll hold. Hurry.”
I wasn’t exactly keen on getting closer to him, but I had enough wits about me to realize that I was running on borrowed time. If the silver chain could really hold him, I needed to strap him down with it, stat.
Trembling as much from rampant anxiety as the steady drip of blood from my multiple lacerations, I scrambled across the cage floor to snatch up the broken chain. It felt too light between my fingers as I edged closer to the vampire. But he’d said it would hold, and I had to believe that… because it was pretty obvious it was the only thing that would save me from becoming vampire dinner.
I edged around Warin’s shoulder and reached for his wrists he’d already shoved through the bars. When my fingertips skimmed over his hands, a full body shudder went through him, and I jerked my hand away. “S-sorry!”
He didn’t reply, and he kept his head turned away while I fumbled with the chain. It was very short, but I managed to get it wrapped around his wrists and tie a tiny knot with the ends. As soon as it was done, I backed several steps away. “There.”
Warin’s shoulder moved in a deep sigh, and I realized he’d been holding his breath.
“Do vampires need to breathe?” I asked, confused at the memory of his completely still chest when I’d tackled him in an attempt to perform CPR earlier.
He turned his head to give me an incredulous stare over his shoulder.
“Right. Not the time,” I muttered. Our little vampire Q&A session was definitely over. Something about fighting off the urge to gorge on my blood probably didn’t lend itself to a presentation about vampire do’s and don’ts. I giggled, hysteria starting to edge in.
“You’re losing too much blood,” Warin said. He was probably right—there really wasn’t much to laugh about. With a strength of will, I forced myself to pull it together. I had to stem as much of the bleeding as I could—I might not be hemorrhaging, but goddess knew how long we’d be stuck in this cage.
With a determinedly set jaw, I began ripping strips of the bottom of my dress to act as gauze. My muscles burned from the effort, and I pushed back a wave of panic. I must have been bleeding more than I’d thought.
“You’ll die if we stay here.”
I glared up at him from tying a strip of my ruined dress around my left thigh. “Not fucking helpful, dude! I’m trying to not have a panic attack over here as is.”
He muttered a word I didn’t grasp. Probably nothing particularly nice.
“Let me drink from you.”
My fingers stilled against the cloth scrap. “Um… beg your pardon?” Did he just… suggest I offer up a taste, in the middle of me slowly bleeding to death?
“Your blood. I haven’t eaten in weeks—I can’t break us out when I am this weak.”
I blinked. “You can… break us out? If you have my blood?” My voice was sounding about as skeptical as I felt. About zero percent of me wanted to get close enough to the still feral-looking vampire for him to sink those very sharp fangs into my flesh.
“Yes.” He turned around as much as the chain around his wrists allowed and looked me straight in the eyes. “Do you want to die in this basement, Liv?”
“No.” It came out as a broken whisper, because I knew he was right. Even if blood loss didn’t kill me, our captors would eventually return. My options were pretty much to either trust a vampire, or die.