Kate Serine: Along Came a Spider

I was cold. So cold. My fingertips stung with the beginnings of frostbite. I blinked, clearing away the blurry haze from whatever drug Ian had given me to knock me out, and after a moment, the room came into focus. I was lying on the concrete floor of some kind of interrogation room. Chains hung from the ceiling and there was a drain in the center of the room where the floor sloped. I shivered, but I wasn’t sure if it was because of the cold or from imagining what horrific acts might necessitate a drain in the floor.

I pushed up to my hands and knees and shook my head with a groan. My hip and shoulder had been popped back into joint, but they still ached from the trauma. I obviously hadn’t been there very long.

“Rise and shine, Sleeping Beauty.”

I lifted my gaze to where Ian sat in a chair a few feet away, bundled in his coat and gloves, his legs crossed. “Wrong fairytale, you idiot.”

His lips twitched with mild amusement. “Sorry about that. You all pretty much look the same to me.”

“Where’s Nicky?” I demanded. “What the hell have you done to him?”

Ian lifted a shoulder and let it drop. “Nothing. Yet. He’s alive.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, my hatred and fury bringing much needed warmth to my extremities. “Prove it. I want to see him.”

“Of course,” Ian said, getting to his feet. “But first, you and I need to have a little chat.” He motioned to the chair he’d just vacated. “Would you care to have a seat?”

I shook my head, not trusting his sudden politeness and definitely not wanting to put my back to the two-way mirror hanging on the wall behind the chair or to the heavy steel door. I preferred to have as much as possible in my line of sight.

“No?” He shrugged and resumed his seat, crossing his legs again and clasping his hands in his lap. “So, how did we get to this point, Trish?”

“You’re a dick?” I suggested.

He inclined his head, letting the insult roll off. “I must offer you my apologies again. I should’ve handled things differently. Forgive my . . . enthusiasm.”

“Enthusiasm?” I repeated. “You can shove your enthusiasm up your ass.”

He tsked disapprovingly. “Now, now. Let’s not get belligerent. I merely want to have a friendly chat.”

“Bite me.”

“Oh, but someone else already has,” Ian drawled. At this he leaned forward, his forearms resting on his knees, his eyes widening with eagerness. “How’d he do it?”

I frowned at him. “How did who do what?”

“Dracula,” he said, his eyes sparkling with excitement.

My stomach dropped at warp speed. “What are you talking about?”

Ian chuckled, shaking his head. “You always were a bad liar, Trish, so don’t even try to deny Dracula has been stalking you. We’ve been aware of it for a while.”

No, shit, I thought, remembering the asshole who’d taken photographs of Nicky and me outside Happy Endings.

“So, what if he has?” I replied. “What’s it to you?”

“I’ve got to know how he managed it.” A disturbing light came into his eyes, an eagerness that made me seriously uneasy. “How did he bite you?”

My frown deepened. “Uh . . . fangs?” Ian was a dickhead, but he wasn’t stupid. What the hell was he getting at?

“Obviously,” Ian conceded. “But how? How did he get to you?”

“I don’t know. The same way he gets to everyone.” I shook my head, confused. “Why are you asking this? I’m guessing you know as much as I do about Dracula—probably more, knowing you and those other Agency assholes. So, why don’t we cut the bullshit, Ian, and get to what you’re really after?”

If he had been a Tale, such an opening would’ve resulted in Ian spilling his guts in a grand soliloquy. Tale villains really just can’t help themselves. It’s a compulsion. They have to gloat about their plans, hold it over the heroine’s head, thereby providing valuable time to come up with a way for said heroine to take them down in an exciting climax. I guess it’s true what they say: You can take the Tale out of Make Believe, but you can’t take Make Believe out of the Tale. I just hoped Ian was arrogant enough to fall into the same trap.

Ian’s lips curved into a grin. “You’re right,” he said, nodding. “Why screw around? We’ve known all along that Dracula was attempting to contact Tess Little—”

They did?

“—but it was a bit of a surprise when he switched things up and started contacting you.”

“Yeah, it was to me, too,” I admitted, not seeing any point in denying what Ian already knew. “How’d you find out?”

Ian’s smile grew, reminding me of the grin Nicky often wore when conducting business. But Ian’s wasn’t nearly so charming—and was twice as deadly. Nicky’s smile had a conscience. Ian’s . . . well, he’d proven over and over that he had no inner Jiminy Cricket. “It seems starving a vampire has some unintended consequences. Makes them bat-shit crazy, as it turns out.” He chuckled at his pun. “We were hoping only to control him, keep him weak enough not to try to escape again. We never expected him to spill his guts in those rants of his.”

I stared at Ian, my mind racing. They actually had Dracula in custody? All this time we’d been operating under the assumption that Dracula was roaming free, that the vampires Nicky had taken down were somehow his creations meant to exact revenge against the FMA and create the army of undead he needed to claim the power he so desperately sought. God—how wrong we’d been. I swallowed hard, trying to figure out how to play the situation with Ian without letting on that he’d just totally blindsided me. Luckily, for an Ordinary, he was surprisingly forthcoming with the info. Sweet.

“So, how long has Dracula been here?” I asked, keeping my voice even to appear unimpressed with his revelations.

Ian shrugged. “Two years? It was right after the thing with Sebille Fenwick. Happened to catch him off-guard when he was feeding on some whore in an alley. Total fluke. Right place, right time, and all that. Lost two agents trying to take him down, but it was worth it.”

So, they finally had captured themselves a Tale. . . . And not just any Tale—an extremely powerful Tale with the kinds of abilities they’d been dying to carve up and study for decades. I hated to think what they might’ve discovered about our kind in the last couple of years. “When did you realize he was trying to contact someone on the outside?”

“Soon after he turned the first person,” Ian admitted. “It only took a few weeks to starve him into submission. Unfortunately, he was so ravenous when we finally fed him that he drained dry the first woman we gave him, so we sent in another one. He didn’t kill her, but drained her enough that she was near death. And then he gave her his blood before we could stop him.”

Holy shit. So he had been behind the vamps. . . .

“What happened to her?”

“She was useful. For a while, anyway. But being a one-off, she wasn’t as easy to control. We had . . . issues. And that bastard the Spider ended up taking her out before we could bring her back in. Did us a favor, really. But the rest of the ones he killed? Well, we didn’t appreciate that so much.”

“A one-off?” I repeated. “What do you mean by that?”

“They were human—well, Ordinaries, to you,” Ian explained, brushing the leg of his trousers as if he was bored out of his mind. “Our attempts to make Dracula turn a Tale were . . . unsuccessful.”

I blinked at him in dismay. “How many?” I demanded, my throat tight. “How many Tales have you killed in this twisted little experiment of yours?”