Chapter Sixteen

Deal

When I agreed to end my life in order to protect the human race, I didn't quite consider exactly the suffering I would have to go through to just attempt this. I thought before I had an idea on what it meant to starve as a vampire, but boy was I naive.

It started as something of an itch. It caused me to become shifty. I couldn't just sit as a statue as I planned. Again, I began to tap at the armrest under my hands and then start scraping at them. My fangs extended pointedly. It was a familiar itch. Feed, the itch told me. Simple. Then the itch started forming into a burn. When this happened, I began to start trying to tug against my bindings. Being that my blood wasn't being drained from me, I wasn't as weak as the last time I had been tied up. I had to force myself to remember to not struggle.

Perhaps the only thing I was thankful for in the initial weeks of being contained was that the hunter that shared Evanen's face didn't come for me. Something told me if blood walked into the room, I wouldn't be able to fight against it. He would have to wait until the blood thirst had weakened me significantly before he could come. I only hoped he'd know when that would be.

After the burn, things only got worse. The burn intensified and it felt like it began to fry my thoughts. I started to hallucinate, seeing flashes of people I had fed from just walking by me. Then it was hallucinations of my human life, with my father, Kyler, and D.J. spinning soft conversations that struck fear in me. I feared I would hurt them, even though two of the three were dead already.

The hallucinations burned off into pure delirium. Occasionally, I thought I could feel the bond between Jove and me, but only briefly before it was gone once again. I wasn't even sure if I was blocking it anymore, but something told me even if I wasn't that Jove was sure to be keeping his distance from his suicidal lover. At this point in my delirium, I couldn't tell how long I had starved myself or really if I'd be able to even attack a person if they put their cut wrist in front of me.

There was no such thing as time anymore. It was in this timeless twist that the door to the torture room opened and a man walked into the room with a collection of weapons. I hadn't even reacted, slumped in my chair, being that I was sure it was just another hallucination. The man turned and Evanen's face was before me.

"Do you think I have a soul now?" His voice whispered through the air. I closed my eyes, seeing the flash of his face staring dead-eyed at his first and only sunrise. I felt a sharp pain in my arm and gasped, opening my eyes to see that my flesh had been gashed through dangerously deep. I was human again, the pain was so great. But then the wound healed over slowly and I remembered I was more than human as the pain faded.

"We'll try the silver and fangs again," Evanen's voice reached me, causing me to look up. He looked different… no piercings and gothic clothes. But still dangerous. He had a weapon in his hand, but moved away for a different object. The hooked weapon replaced his previous dagger, and he swiped it at my arm viciously. Suddenly, I was human again, and the pain was Evanen biting into my wrist and draining away my life in a silly store called BloodScore.

I screeched in pain, but then the scream was choked by fading images and confusion.

"No. No. No. No. Please, Evanen, I just want to go home," I cried out, back in the Draele mansion.

"You're never going home," Evanen's voice growled in my head.

The pain stopped suddenly, pulling me out of the spin of memories and hallucinations. I rolled my eyes to my arm to see it bloody but healed as if untouched. My eyes moved from my arm to Evanen, but my mind could recognize if only for a moment that it wasn't Evanen… it was Nikolai. He had a blowtorch in his hand now, but he seemed confused or if anything unsure. Only, he shouldn't be unsure. I was here now, I was starved, and I was ready to die. I needed to die. Nikolai's identity was fading back into Evanen's and then back into the hunter's before becoming Evanen again.

"Kill me," I told him, back in the room inside the mansion. His expression was unwilling but hungry. I could feel the fear pulsing through my human limbs. "Just do it, Evanen. You did with the other girls. Just pretend I'm just like them; a pathetic human. Kill me."

"Just like the others?" Evanen's voice drifted through my mind darkly.

"Just like the others," I said before I saw the flame lowering over the skin of my arm sharply. Only instead of feeling the pain of the flame, I felt Evanen's nail digging a sharp and merciless gash into my stomach. I inhaled sharply and then screamed in agony.

"Not deep enough," I couldn't tell if it was Evanen or Nikolai speaking. But Evanen's voice continued regardless, "… one more try and I'm sure that'll be good enough…"

"No! No, I'm sorry! No, please don't!" I cried out, struggling against my bindings. There was a silence suddenly, and the pain faded. I glanced at my arm to find it once again healed and everything untouched. The only thing left was the pulse of my hungry heart. Not hungry, though. I was thirsty. So thirsty for blood. Starved. The thought shifted something in my mind. Someone else was in the room. My eyes struggled to look at him, his sandy brown hair and safe caramel brown eyes. I felt everything at once: joy, relief, security, pain, grief, self-disgust, shame… everything.

"I promised you," I told Mikel sadly, "I promised I wouldn't let myself become this… this monster." I promised him a human life, to grow old and die pitifully. And then I promised once I was turned I wouldn't kill a human. Then I promised that I wouldn't turn another, whether by myself or by allowing my blood to be taken. I failed him in everything.

Mikel only smiled softly; never angry but always a small sadness in his eyes.

"There's still time," his voice whispered to me. I wanted to stare at him forever, but instead I found darkness.

~…~

I awoke to a man pacing in front of me back and forth while someone hollered profanities from nearby. Due to my starvation, I naturally was far too weak to automatically understand what was going on, except that the one pacing in front of me would be the hunter. A glance around the torture room revealed that the one yelling profanities was within the cage, which had its door fixed at some point during my stay here.

"You," Nikolai said, pointing at me, "Good, you're awake."

Nikolai suddenly bent down in front of me, pressing the now familiar fanged dagger against my chest over my heart. "As disinclined as I normally would be about this, I feel it's necessary. Over the time here, I've noticed some things about you… needless to say; I have decided to believe you. We both are interested in the same thing."

I struggled to pay attention and keep the delirious thoughts away. Shadows slipped past tempting me to glance, but I held them off and focused on Nikolai, not Evanen.

"What I'm saying is… I want to strike something of a deal," Nikolai told me darkly, obviously unsure about his decision, "I've heard that your kind can feed on vampires. As a hunter, this is the only thing I will be okay with you feeding on. If you so much as touch a human the wrong way, you'll end up back in this chair starved out of your mind. Understand?"

I struggled but nodded slowly.

"Good. You're going to stay here with me, but only until I can figure out how to kill you. Until then, you'll be helping me kill vampires and feeding only on them. If you decide to change your mind and escape, I'll track you down and again you'll end up here," Nikolai threatened, though the threat was empty to me. I was willing to agree to these terms, though. I nodded again. "Okay. So first, I want proof that you can live on vampire blood only and aren't just agreeing to get out of here."

Nikolai undid my bindings, placing his weapon to the side. He carefully grabbed me from under my arm, pulling me up so that none of my skin touched him and my face didn't get too close. He feared that I would attack him. I thought I might, except that I held any breath I had in order to avoid smelling his scent. He led me to the door of the cage, where the cussing vampire had suddenly gotten quiet.

Nikolai suddenly aimed a gun at the vampire and shot it in the arm with what must have been a silver bullet. The vampire screamed, running to the opposite side of the cage in order to nurse his injured arm. Meanwhile, Nikolai had opened the door and tossed me into the cage without much regard for my landing. I collapsed roughly on the ground, my limbs weak from starvation. He shut the door behind me, moving back uncertainly.

I could have attempted to try to reach the vampire in the cage, but I decided to play dead instead. I didn't move, remaining on the ground harmlessly. This went on for a while, perhaps a little too long, until my mind was all but back into the hallucinations. At some point, D.J. was in the cage with me, starved and newborn looking for answers to his confusion. I could feel him die in my arms all over again with his arms around me.

Then I realized the arms weren't D.J.'s but a stranger's.

"A human?" The vampire asked curiously, looking over my pale but soft skin, cool but still warm to the touch. "You're not so dangerous." He then laughed, bending down in order to bite into my throat. I snaked my arms around his back and shoulders and lunged, clamping my jaws over a nice chunk of his shoulder before devouring the most delicious blood I had ever been granted. Normally, I was sure the blood wasn't actually the best, but being so starved it could have been a hamster and I was sure I'd be happy.

I drank from the vampire, not stopping even though his mind blended into mine. His blood had been drained and his flesh was peeling back until he fell to the ground in bones. When vampires met death, they decomposed to the point of what their body would be if they had died as human. Extremely old vampires would peel back into dust, while fresh ones only stiffened into new corpse. A vampire could die from being drained or starvation… the latter was how Mikel had gone. I obviously was an exception, as always.

I was still hungry, but the burn was gone and the delirium went with it. I kept my eyes closed, feeling the relief of rejuvenation and hating that I was mildly happy at feeling so alive. And then I turned my attention back to Nikolai, who looked rather sickened.

"I hope you're good at tracking vampires," I told him, "If that's going to be my diet."

For a moment, he looked as though he was going to smirk, but he didn't. "I can track easily. I hope you keep up your end of the deal, monster," Nikolai responded.

"Oh, I will, hunter-who-shares-the-face-of-a-monster," I answered sarcastically. Nikolai opened the door to the cage, ignoring my comment, before moving towards the door of the torture room.

"C'mon, then," He said, leaving the room with the door out wide open.

That was something different.