Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 91636 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 458(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91636 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 458(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
“And your maker will never incarnate again. Because it is his heart,” Kita says, far too cheerfully not to be deliberately annoying. I do not know what she gets out of tormenting this creature. Maybe it is just the satisfaction of striking back against the tyrant in some small way.
“My maker will never incarnate again because my maker does not exist,” Alexander snarls. “You understand that this is not actually a body part, right? It is a dark object, not something that ever resided in a human body.”
“Then why did you always call it your maker’s heart?” Kita is really pushing for information that cannot possibly matter in any way.
“Because it comes from the same place I came from. It is an entity of pure malevolent darkness, and it is mine to guard, not yours to drive around the countryside like you’re on a roadshow of antiquities!”
Tailor sidles up alongside me. “Do you think any of this is true?” He murmurs the question to me under his breath, but vampire hearing is so good he might as well have saved his time and just screamed it out.
“It might be explosive. No way to know. He lies.”
“I do,” Alexander says. “I lie. But don’t forget, I also kill.”
We appear to be stuck. Alexander is not just playing with us, he is training us like animals. He is alternately punishing and rewarding us, he is keeping us at his mercy, and when he lets us go, it will be because he thinks we are going to do what he wants. So why not just give him what he wants now.
“What do you want us to do?”
“I want you to go to the city and retrieve the heart. Then you will give it to me.”
“Okay, well, if you want to get the city open, the first thing you will need to do is back down from the siege. You’re panicking the city folk.”
“I can pull my forces back for a time, or I can send them into the city the next time night falls and have you retrieve the truck containing the heart while my forces feed. They are getting quite hungry.”
“We are on the wrong side of the ocean for all of this,” Kita says, still partially dangling from his grasp because he didn’t make the mistake of putting her all the way down.
“I’ll fly you over.”
“In a plane, or will you get a thousand bats to carry us over the waters?”
“Smart ass brat whelp,” Alexander says. “You will continue to suffer for this.”
I can practically see the energy flowing from her to him. Every time she gives him her cocky little attitude, he seems to gleam brighter. I never thought of being a misbehaved terror as being the equivalent of a battery for a vampire, but here we are.
He puts her down. Carefully. He could simply drop her if he wanted to, but of course he doesn’t. He wants to keep her intact so he can keep enjoying her. I breathe a sigh of relief. Tailor, Damon, and I might be disposable, but she is protected.
CHAPTER 15
Conroy
The plane engine hums deep as we cross the ocean. Tailor, Kita, and I are sitting in the back while a vampire pilots us toward our destination under cover of dark.
“Are we really going to go along with his plan?” Kita looks dubious and concerned. “We’re going to hurt a lot of people if we do that. I mean, I know those people suck, and it wouldn’t be a great loss, but I feel like, with my background, I don’t want to do what was done to me. I don’t want to help vampires kill people’s parents.”
“Not everybody deserves to suffer just because most of them do. We need to get the heart out of there. That is all,” Tailor says, ever the voice of rationality.
“Or we blow it up, and then we don’t worry about any of those things anymore, the bigots in Rock City and the maker’s heart, and the vampire. We could explode all our enemies in one big explosion.”
“Wouldn’t that make us evil?” Tailor says dubiously.
“Was our stated purpose ever not to be evil?” I reply.
“Wait. Are we evil?” Kita cuts in. “Because I have some ideas for if we’re going to be evil.”
“We are not good or evil. We’re largely neutral. We’re trying to look after ourselves. That means we’re going to do what we need to do, and if that means someone else gets hurt, that’s on them. But we’re not going to go out of our way to hurt anyone.”
“Okay. Feels like that’s still an evil answer,” Kita says. She has a slight smirk on her face as she says it, as if she’s enjoying messing with me. “If we’re going to be evil, I think I would be good at it.”