I was at the doors, had them open, before Nathan caught me. He got hold of my arm and turned me around to face him, but before he could speak I started screaming at him.
"I'm done! If you want me to learn this shit, I'll learn it, but not like this. I'm not doing this. You sick fucking bastard! What the hell is wrong with you? I am out of here."
I tried to jerk my arm out of his grip, but he held on without much effort.
"Where do you think you're going to go?" He asked me, very calmly. I could barely hear him over the screaming.
"Away from here," I spat.
"Alright," he said. "Let's go."
He leg go of my arm, but took hold of the back of my neck instead. He wasn't gentle.
He led me down the hallway, through the entryway, and out the front doors of the house. There was a small parking lot to the right of the circular driveway with half a dozen spots. My car sat in one of them. Nathan led me straight to it.
Was he kicking me out of the house? I didn't understand what was happening.
"I don't have my keys," I said stupidly. Nathan ignored me.
We stepped around the car until we stood directly in front of it. Finally, he took his hand off my neck. I stood beside him and watched as he hooked his fingers around the front edge of the hood of my car and with a sharp jerk, pulled the hood open. There was a whine as the metal twisted and tore. I gaped at the wound left on my car. I couldn't afford to have it repaired. But he wasn't finished. I didn't know if Nathan knew much about cars. I didn't know anything. But he reached his hands in and tore things away from the engine. Hoses were torn out and tossed on the ground, followed by rubber belts, then what I thought were a few spark plugs. Something else followed, a flat piece of metal that I didn't know the name of. I didn't know if it was important. When he was done murdering my car, he turned to regard me solemnly.
"You murdered my car." I said, still sounding stupid. I wasn't angry yet. I was too confused and surprised to reach that emotion yet. "Why did you do that? You could have just refused to let me leave the house." Okay, the anger was surfacing again. "Dammit Nathan, that was my car. You are paying for that."
"You're right." He said. "I could have refused to let you out of the house."
"Fuck you," I said. Really, I had nothing better to say to him. I was in no frame of mind for coming up with anything else.
He took my arm again and led me back towards the house. I didn't struggle this time. I cried, which was just as useless. As we passed through the front doors, the guard on duty very pointedly did not look at us. He might as well have been a statue standing there, staring straight ahead behind his sunglasses. It was in the middle of the night, and he was human. Why did he even need sunglasses?
Nathan was pulling me back down the hallway towards the ballroom. So, I wasn't getting out of anything. My car really had gotten torn up for nothing.
"I hate you," I muttered quietly, plenty loud enough for him to hear me.
He stopped, jerking me to a halt with him. With surprising gentleness, he pushed me up against the wall. I cringed back, but there was nowhere for me to go.
"I know you do, Eryn. I don't need you to like me. I don't have to be your friend. But you do need to grow up. You need to listen to me, and you need to start doing what I tell you. This is important. Right now you're completely vulnerable. Any one of us out there with the most rudimentary knowledge of compulsion could make you do whatever the hell they wanted. Do you realize how easy it would be for me to make you go in there and do anything I liked? It would be effortless, and you'd enjoy doing it. You'd do it well. But you wouldn't learn anything. You're never going to learn anything by having me force your hand. So I'm okay with being the bad guy, because Eryn? This is the most valuable lesson you're ever going to learn, I can promise you. You learn this, and you have gained the mental strength to keep people out. It's that easy."
I brushed the tears away, but I still wasn't ready to go back in that room. "Okay, fine. But why this? The stuff with Madeline wasn't really hurting anybody. I almost even liked it after I got the hang of it. But this? It's just sick."
Nathan shook his head. "If you can't handle what's going on in that room, then you're not going to survive. Our existence isn't pretty. We live violent lives. And those people in there? They deserve what they get. They're in there with Erik's approval. You think he's the kind of man who'd be that wasteful? They're being punished, Eryn. Don't give them your pity, because they don't deserve it. When you're ready to move past this and do what you're supposed to do, you'll see that. Get in their heads and see for yourself. I guarantee you won't care how much Aris hurts them."
I didn't believe him, but I brushed past him to return to the ballroom anyway. What else could I do? Nathan caught me around the waist before I could take more than a couple of steps. Whether he meant it to be comforting or condescending, I didn't know. Either way, I chose to ignore the gesture, because with Nathan it could also have been meant to remind me that he practically owned me. I so didn't want to go there.
Aris had been busy. The right side of the kid's face was bandaged and most of the blood had been wiped away. He wasn't screaming anymore, but his mouth gaped open and he breathed heavily. His left eye was looking a little glassy.
She stood behind the woman, plaiting her hair into tiny blonde braids. The woman had her eyes closed and she breathed evenly despite her gag, but her hands were clenched into fists. The older man still stared at the floor.
I knelt in front of the kid again and repeated the process of holding my breath and taking hold of the blood inside my body. I'd have to ask sometime why this did anything. I suspected I'd get an answer along the lines of, "Your blood is your power." or some such nonsense, but I was always asking questions. Knowing the details of a thing, especially a scary thing, made that thing less scary. Sometimes.
I only had one eye to lock onto this time and it took me snapping my fingers in front of the kid's face to get his attention so he'd look at me, but it worked. And this time when I met that wall, less substantial this time, I followed Nathan's advice and gave it as heavy a mental jab as I could. It might not have been necessary. The wall broke away as soon as I touched it.
He wasn't as scared as he looked, even with the pain he was in. Not by half. He was, however, extremely proud of the fact that he was good enough to fool the bloodsuckers. He knew they'd figure it out. He thought they'd be impressed. He also thought they would have been impressed by his ability to take those young girls and slaughter them without leaving enough clues behind for the police to figure out who was responsible. He hadn't enjoyed killing them at first. The first couple had been quick kills. Merciful really, but when he saw how good he was at evading detection, it had gotten fun. He'd gotten more creative.
Images flashed through my head like snapshots of his victims. He signed his murders in blood. It was everywhere. He wasn't a vampire. Not yet. He couldn't drink the blood without making himself sick, so he drained the girls and painted the rooms he left them in. He thought of it as a gift, and he thought his generosity would gain him immortality. But really, it was the power that he craved. The never having to die part was just icing.
He worked at the hospital, or had. He'd stolen equipment, and he'd used that to drain the girls. He'd been careful where he inserted the I.V. so that it would difficult to spot. He favored the pubic area, but more than one of his victims had been shaved. He'd been forced to get creative. After they'd been drained, he'd used the canine tooth from a dog he'd killed to make two punctures in their throats. He knew it wouldn't fool anyone, but that wasn't the point.
He'd gotten the attention of the vampires all right. It wasn't going exactly like he'd hoped, but he was still feeling pretty confident. His mom was a werewolf. He'd grown up hearing about how nasty vampires could be. What he'd done couldn't possibly offend them, so he didn't buy that they were so pissed off about the trouble he'd been causing. He didn't buy it at all. This was probably all a test. They just wanted to see how he held up under pressure or something. When they saw what he was made of, they'd turn him.
I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head. As soon as I broke eye contact, the contact with his mind was also severed. I didn't want to see more.
"You were right," I said. "You should snap his neck." My voice was cold and void of the emotion I felt. I really wanted to throw up.
"Too easy," Aris said. "If you can't think of anything better than that, I have some books I could loan you. Human history is full of all sorts of creative ways to kill. Did you know you could keep someone alive for years with nothing more than..."
Nathan waved her to silence, and she huffed at him. I didn't mind. I had no desire to know how to keep someone alive for years with nothing more than... whatever. Something horrid, I was sure. Ick.
"What did you see?" He asked.
I told him, and as I did, the kid lifted his head and stared at me. His mouth slowly twitched into a satisfied smile.
"What are you going to do with him?" I asked.
Nathan shrugged. "Nothing. Give him to his own people and let them deal with him. They'll take care of him."
The kid's smile vanished, and with that, Aris replaced his gag.
Werewolves. The kid's own people were werewolves. I didn't know what they'd do with him, but I was pretty sure the fear I saw in the kid's eyes was genuine this time.
I encountered no walls with the other two, and I was able to enter their thoughts with no trouble. The woman worked (in other words, she was a blood slave) for some vampire that I'd not yet met. Basically she acted as her vampire mistress's secretary. The vampire, a woman by the name of Sabine, had trusted the woman with endless secrets. Years worth of secrets. The woman had been recording them in a journal. Sabine hadn't been pleased when she'd discovered this. The book had been full of damning evidence, and not just about her, but about all vampires in general. Erik hadn't been pleased either. To avoid his wrath, Sabine had turned her servant over to him along with the book. Apparently Erik had a temper that I hadn't seen before. This woman hadn't either. She hadn't met Erik until Sabine had turned her over to him, but she'd heard all about his lapses into a blind rage that usually ended with someone's death. Unlike the boy, she was far, far, far more frightened than she looked. I did feel bad for her. She was stupid for doing what she'd done, but she hadn't had malicious intentions. She just wanted leverage in case anything happened. She hadn't thought it through.
The older man was also a blood slave, but he no longer had a master. He'd killed him. Like the boy, he also wanted to become a vampire. Unlike the boy, he wasn't concerned about power or immortality. He just wanted out. He didn't want to be under someone's thumb anymore, with no life to call his own. As I saw it, he'd had it pretty good. He was a medical examiner, and his master hadn't asked a whole lot of him. He'd been expected to help with the occasional cover-up, but they were pretty rare. The vampires in the area were careful. He'd staked his master, taken a pint of his blood and mixed it with a pint of his own blood. Then he'd consumed the whole lot of it. It hadn't worked.
"You did good," Nathan said with a smile. He actually looked proud. For some reason, that really annoyed me. I was a little proud of myself though. It had been easier than what Madeline had had me do, but it was far more exhausting. My whole body felt heavy.
"I think you've earned tomorrow off." He said.
Thank God. "Thank you," I said. Not that Nathan was God. But I was grateful for a night without training.