Know your enemy.
“I deal with ... specialty ammunition,” he said, looking at me through narrowed eyes. “Most of it top secret government stuff. I have, for instance, been very successful with a variety of ammunition designed for killing werewolves. I have, among other things, a silver version of the old Black Talon. Silver is a lousy metal for bullets; it doesn’t expand well. Instead of mushrooming, this one opens up like a flower.” He spread his hand so it looked like a starfish.
“And then there are those very interesting tranquilizer darts of Gerry Wallace’s design. Now that was a surprise. I’d never have thought of DMSO as a delivery system for the silver—or a tranquilizer gun as a delivery system. But then, his father was a vet. This is why tools may be useful.”
“You knew Gerry Wallace?” I asked, because I couldn’t help it. I took another bite as if my stomach weren’t clenched, so he wouldn’t think that the answer mattered too much.
“He came to me first,” Blackwood said. “But it didn’t suit me to do as he asked ... the Marrok is a bit larger target than I wanted to take on.” He smiled apologetically. “I am essentially a lazy creature, so my maker used to say. I sent Gerry on his way with an idea about building a superweapon against werewolves in some convoluted scheme sure to fail and no memory of coming to me at all. Imagine my surprise when the boy actually came up with something interesting.” He smiled gently at me.
“You need to watch Bran closer,” I told him. I grabbed a pitcher of water and poured it. “He’s more subtle, and it makes that omniscient thing work better for him. If you tell everyone everything you know, they don’t wonder about things you don’t tell them. Bran...” I shrugged. “You just know he knows what you’re thinking.”
“Amber,” said the vampire. “Make sure your husband and the boy who is not his son eat their dinner, would you?”
“Of course.”
Chad’s cold hand on my knee squeezed very tight. “You say that like it’s a revelation,” I told Blackwood. “You need to work on your verbal ammunition, too. Corban has always known that Chad’s not his biological son. That doesn’t matter to him at all. Chad’s still his son.”
The stem of the water glass the vampire was holding broke. He set the pieces very carefully on his empty plate. “You aren’t afraid enough of me,” he said very carefully. “Perhaps it is time to instruct you further.”
“Fine,” I said. “Thank you for the meal, Amber. Take care of yourselves, Corban and Chad.”
I stood up and lifted an inquiring eyebrow.
He thought it was stupidity that I wasn’t afraid of him. But if you shiver in fear in a pack of werewolves, that’s really stupid. If you’re scared enough, even a wolf with good control starts having problems. If his control isn’t strong—well, let’s just say that I learned to be very good at burying my fear.
Pushing Blackwood wasn’t stupid either. If he’d killed me the first time—well, at least it would have been a quick death. But the longer he let it go on, the more I knew he needed me. I couldn’t imagine for what—but he needed me for something.
My bad luck he was taking it on as a challenge. I wondered what he thought would scare me more than Amber before I caught a good tight hold on my thoughts. There was no future, just the vampire and me standing by the table.
“Come,” he said, and led the way back down the stairway.
“How is it that you can walk in the daylight?” I asked him. “I’ve never heard of a vampire who could run around during the day.”
“You are what you eat,” he said obscurely. “My maker used to say that. Mann ist was mann ißt. She wouldn’t let me feed off drunkards or people who consumed tobacco.” He laughed, and I wouldn’t let myself think of it as sinister. “Amber reminds me a bit of her ... so concerned with nutrition. Neither of them was wrong. But my maker didn’t understand the full implications of what she said.” He laughed again. “Until I consumed her.”
The door to the room I’d awoken in was open. He stopped and turned off the light as we passed. “Mustn’t waste electricity.”
And then he opened another door to a much bigger room. A room of cages. It smelled like sewage, disease, and death. Most of the cages were empty. But there was a man curled naked in the floor of one of the cages.
“You see, Mercedes,” he said, “you aren’t the first rare creature to be my guest. This is an oakman. I’ve had him for ... How long have you belonged to me, Donnell Greenleaf?”
The fae stirred and raised his face off the cement floor. Once he must have been a formidable figure. Oakmen, I remembered from the old book I’d borrowed, were not tall, no more than four feet, but they were stout “as a good oaken table.” This one was little more than skin and bones.
In a voice as dry as high summer in the Tri-Cities, he said, “Four-score years and a dozen and one. Two seasons more and eighteen days.”
“Oakmen,” said Blackwood smugly, “like the oaks they are named after, eat only the sunlight.”
You are what you eat indeed.
“I’ve never tried to see if I could live on light,” he said. “But he keeps me from burning, don’t you, Donnell Greenleaf?”
“It is my honor to bear that burden,” said the fae in a hopeless voice, his face to the floor.
“So you kidnapped me so you could turn into a coyote?” I asked incredulously.
The vampire just smiled and escorted me to a largish cage, with a bed. There was also a bucket from which the odor of sewage was emanating. It smelled like Corban, Chad, and Amber.
“I can keep you alive for a long time,” the vampire said. He grabbed me by the back of my neck and shoved my face against the cage while he stood behind me. “Maybe even all of your natural life. What? No smart comment?”
He didn’t see the faint figure that stood before me with her finger over her pursed mouth. She looked as if she’d been somewhere between sixty and a hundred years old when she’d died—like Santa’s wife, she was all rounded and sweet. Quiet, that finger said. Or maybe, just—Don’t let on you can see me.
Blackwood didn’t see her, even though he had been using the other ghost as an errand boy. I wondered what it meant. She smelled like blood, too.
He put me in the cage next to the one that he had been keeping Chad and Corban in. Presumably he didn’t need to confine Amber anymore. “This could have been so much more pleasant for you,” he said.
The woman and her hushing finger were gone, so I gave my tongue free rein. “Tell that to Amber.”
He smiled, showing fangs. “She enjoyed it. I’ll give you one last chance. Be cooperative, and I’ll let you stay in the other room.”
Maybe I could get out through the roof of the other room. But somehow I didn’t think so. The cage in the Marrok’s house looks just like all the rest of the bedrooms. The bars are set behind the drywall.
I leaned against the far side of my cage, the one that backed up to the cement outer wall. “Tell me why you can’t just order me around? Make me cooperate?” Like Corban.
He shrugged. “You figure it out.” He locked the door with a key and used the same key to open the oakman’s door.
The fae whimpered as he was dragged out of the cage. “I can’t feed from you every day, Mercy,” Blackwood said. “Not if I want to keep you around. The last walker I had died fifty years ago—but I kept him for sixty-three years. I take care of what is mine.”
Yeah, I bet Amber would agree with that one.
Blackwood knelt on the floor where the oakman lay curled in a fetal position. The fae was staring at me with large black eyes. He didn’t fight when Blackwood—with a look meant for me—grabbed his leg and bit down on the artery in the fae’s groin to feed.