Jess Haines - Enslaved By the Others

The glimmer in her eye took on a sardonic sheen when she cocked a brow at me. “You’re changing the subject. Whatever the gender, it is irrelevant. That thing isn’t here to help you. It’s here to help itself. You’re just letting yourself be used, and in a far more insidious way than Max Carlyle ever intended.”

“I can’t watch them hurt her. I just can’t. I have to get out of here, and if that means letting a necromancer help me, so be it.”

Iana shook her head and turned away, the curl of her lip telling me she was still disgusted with my life choices. Neither of us was ever going to get out if she wasn’t open to using whatever options were available to us, no matter how distasteful they might be.

Gideon might have thought Sara and I were both pawns to be shuffled around at his whim, a means to who knew what end, but I could play that game, too. Who said Others were the only ones who could be manipulative?

Then I remembered that I wasn’t exactly human anymore, and had to swallow down a sick feeling of inevitability. I didn’t want to turn into the kind of monster I’d always been afraid of, but if that’s what it took to escape, I couldn’t afford to be squeamish. I would be as careful as I could be, bearing in mind what Gideon was and what he’d done. He wasn’t just a manipulative asshole. He was a cold-blooded murderer. Letting him help me was a risk I was willing to accept if it meant escaping this place.

“We’ll get out of here,” I said, not sure if I was trying to convince Iana or myself. “Whatever it takes.”

She didn’t answer, padding away on quiet feet to leave me alone with my thoughts of curses, death, and whether I might not be letting circumstances bring out an evil in me that maybe had been there long before I started turning Other.

After the initial meeting with Fabian, Gideon, and Sara (I didn’t think zombie-Tiny or the other zombie guy counted), Max didn’t return for days. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but by the third night, it was getting hard to stay on the razor’s edge of readiness to face whatever evil might be waiting for night to fall.

There were a couple of touch-and-go moments where I nearly flipped out. One was when a trio of suited guards came in. I rolled off the bed I was lounging on and put it between us, looking for something to use as a weapon. They just stood by the door and smirked at me, sharing amused looks at my confusion and panic. A minute or two later, a couple of women in leather collars and, incongruously, neatly pressed maid’s outfits, came in with a cart of supplies to clean the rooms and change the bedding. Apparently this was something they did every two or three days.

Talk about awkward misunderstandings.

The constant, fearful jitters faded by the end of the week. Instead of jumping at every unexpected sound and intrusion of Max’s security team and cleaning crew, it became too commonplace to worry about. Aside from telling us to get off the furniture they needed to clean or to lift our feet so they could vacuum a patch of carpet, they left me and the rest of Max’s captives alone.

It was so odd to see how he had set up his private harem. We were treated relatively well, given pretty much anything we wanted, and left alone by Max’s minions. We weren’t starved, by any means. The cabana I’d noticed on my first tour of the place provided meals as well as drinks. Lots of iron-rich foods, like vegetables, nuts, shellfish, and steak, along with daily vitamin supplements, most likely to combat the frequent blood loss the others suffered from Max’s attentions.

We were supposed to return our dishes through the same slot they were provided through. It was too small to squeeze through and escape, but big enough for plates, bowls, and small glasses to be passed back and forth. I couldn’t see much of the kitchen through the slot, but it looked like the people who ran it were all collared and uniformed. Trapped like the rest of us. The forks and spoons they passed us were plastic, and all our food was already cut up, so we didn’t need knives. The design was clever but chilling in its efficiency.

My presence didn’t change the routine a bit. The other captives might have been a tad nervous around me, but even they didn’t treat my arrival as unusual for long. For the most part, the others avoided me the way they avoided Iana; not making eye contact, scooting away or getting up to move to another room if one of us got too close, keeping responses monosyllabic and hushed, like they were afraid of being punished for talking to us.

Maybe that wasn’t so far from the truth, since they figured from my conversations with Iana that I might be the one to save them. Or maybe they thought that getting too close might make Max furious with them for helping me. Whatever it was, it meant I was left alone a great deal of the time.

Basically, it was boring and claustrophobic as fuck, and never mind that my shoe box of an apartment back in New York could have fit into our prison ten times over. With no human interaction, TV, or Internet, and nothing much but a collection of books to keep myself busy, it was a wonder I didn’t go nutty from all the time I had to spend twisting myself in mental knots coming up with and discarding useless escape plans.

Being bored was infinitely preferable to being tortured, but I was also worried for Sara’s safety. The one time I got brave enough to ask one of the security guards if he knew anything, he told me to sit back down and shut up. I didn’t want to invite trouble or give Max or his people a reason to send me back to my prison in the basement, so I did as I was told.

It might have saved me some pain, but it still left me in the dark. Where had Gideon taken Sara? What else had they done to her? It wasn’t like I could do anything about it, or about my own predicament, but I couldn’t stop worrying about her.

I was also worried about Devon, my hunter friend who was probably still in Fabian’s hands, but Sara was like the sister I never had. The woman had more money than God, and yet she had taught me that it didn’t take money to live a rich life. She was the one who took me on adventures to see plays and improv shows I never would have gone to alone, to view artwork in galleries I wouldn’t have known existed, to attend readings by authors I never would have thought to look up, and to see bands I’d never heard of in dives I wouldn’t have set foot in if I didn’t trust her so much.

That was what killed me the most about her being taken. Devon chose this life of tangling with vampires. He knew the dangers involved and had decided to take the risk. Sara was only in trouble because she was my friend.

Not knowing if she was badly hurt, or if she was even still alive, gnawed at me like a dog worrying a bone. Worse, I was afraid Royce was unaware that I had fallen into Max’s hands. The last time we spoke, he knew about Clyde’s trouble, and that a necromancer was involved. I hadn’t a clue, at that time, that Max might have had anything to do with it.

Though I also had a thread of a blood bond remaining to Royce, just as I did to Max, I didn’t think he could still feel what I was feeling like he had when I was in New York. He’d mentioned once that proximity strengthened the bond. It was a one way street for vampires—they could feel and exert some control over their bonded human servants, but for the most part it wasn’t supposed to go the other way around. I couldn’t be sure what he knew or felt about me or my predicament. Considering I must be at least a few hundred miles away, he might not even be able to tell if I was alive. Did he feel my fear? Did he know how scared I was, not just for myself, but for Sara? Did he know how much I missed him? I couldn’t let it go even though I knew it wasn’t helping to linger on questions no one would answer.