16
My arms and legs went dead—absolutely, immediately cold, numb, and dead—but my mind remained strangely clear, and I didn’t lose consciousness. No, I was painfully aware of lying there on the library floor, wanting to kill Randall Dekes more than anything else and not being able to do it. I couldn’t get any part of my body to work, not so much as a finger to twitch, much less point my hands at Dekes and blast him with my Ice magic.
“Prop her up in one of the chairs, and tie her there nice and tight,” Dekes said somewhere above my head. “I don’t want any surprises. Quickly now, before the drug wears off.”
Hands lifted me up and maneuvered me into a chair in front of the fireplace. One of the giants hurried over to the wet bar and reached down for something hidden on one of the shelves there. He came up with a coil of rope, the kind of thick, heavy, almost unbreakable rope that you’d find on a sailboat, the kind of rope that would be a bitch to slice through, even if I’d still had one of my silverstone knives on me. Not that I could have used them, given how numb my fingers were right now.
The giant stepped forward and quickly tied me down to the chair, looping the rope over my chest, arms, and legs until I was trussed up tighter than a Thanksgiving turkey.
Never let yourself be immobilized by the enemy. Fletcher had told me that over and over again, but here I was, tied down to a chair and about to be tortured for the second time in my life. Fuck.
I managed to loll my head to one side to look at Vanessa, but the Fire elemental lowered her eyes. She didn’t want to meet my gaze. Couldn’t blame her for that. I wouldn’t want to watch what was about to happen next either—especially since there was nothing I could do to stop it. Not one damn thing. For a moment, I wished for the blindfold Mab had used when she’d tortured me by melting my spider rune necklace into my palms. At least then I wouldn’t have to see Dekes bite me. But I wasn’t that scared thirteen-year-old girl anymore. I was older and stronger, if not exactly wiser. Either way, I’d face my enemy head-on.
Dekes walked around so that he was beside me and leaned forward over the chair, so close I could feel his hot breath brush against my cheek and smell his spicy aftershave. The floral scent made me want to gag.
“Don’t worry, Gin,” Dekes purred in my ear. “I just gave you a muscle relaxant to make you a little more pliable so my men could get you into the chair right where you needed to be. The effects won’t last more than another minute. You should already start feeling some sensation returning to your arms and legs, while your mind remains completely unaffected. You see, I want you to know exactly what’s happening to you. I want you to feel every last bit of it. I wouldn’t have any fun otherwise.”
He was right. The absolute numbness was already starting to fade, replaced by small, painful tingles. I concentrated and was able to move my fingers, but I knew that it wasn’t going to be enough, that I wasn’t going to recover quickly enough to escape what the vampire had in mind.
Dekes reached down and tilted my head to one side, exposing my throat to him. I couldn’t help but look up into his face. Lust blazed in Dekes’s green eyes, and his tongue eagerly darted out to moisten his lips underneath his bristling mustache. The vampire smiled a final time, letting me see just how long, sharp, and deadly his fangs were.
Then the bastard sank them into my neck.
There are some folks who think that being bitten by a vampire is sexy.
Some people like that first pop of pain, the dizzying rush of their blood leaving their own body, the weak, languid feeling of having someone else steal away part of them. Some folks even get a high off those kinds of feelings, a heady, electric charge that seems to make it all worthwhile.
I am not one of those people.
Being bitten by a vampire is like being stabbed in the neck with a dagger—two of them at the same time. Dekes’s bite was hard, brutal, merciless, and vicious, just like he was. I screamed as he drove his fangs deep into my neck, and I screamed again as he started to suck out my blood in long, agonizing spurts. The last of the numbness from the drug immediately vanished, replaced by pure, pulsing pain. It felt like there was a giant fist wrapped around my neck that was just squeezing and squeezing and squeezing the blood and everything else out of me. The magic, the power, the life.
Some vamps are skilled enough to make their bites feel like minor annoyances, like a veteran nurse knowing exactly how to slip an IV needle into a patient’s hand to minimize that initial prick of pain.
Dekes was not one of those vamps. He didn’t want to minimize my pain or discomfort—he wanted the elemental power in my blood, and he wanted to brutalize me while he took it. The only one getting any pleasure out of this was him, and I could feel his erection pressing against my thigh as he leaned over me. Sick, sadistic bastard. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he was one of the vamps who got a power boost off sex just like he did from drinking blood.
The hot stench of my own coppery blood filled my nose, overpowering everything else. Sweat slickened my hands, my whole body trembled, and white starbursts exploded in my eyes. And still, Dekes kept sucking out my blood. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.
As an assassin, I’d suffered just about every injury big and small that a person could experience over the years. I’d been stabbed, shot, beaten, burned, electrocuted, blasted with elemental magic, and buried alive too many times to count. But this was a different kind of agony altogether because not only was Dekes hurting me, he was also taking a piece of me with him at the same time—the elemental magic that was as much a part of who and what I was as the spider runes branded into my palms.
My hands were tied down to the chair arms so I couldn’t see the scars, but I could feel the silverstone—and the magical metal seemed to be wriggling around like hot worms underneath my skin. I blocked out the agony of the vampire’s bite and concentrated on that strange sensation—and I realized that I could feel my scars burning, burning, burning with the cold power of my Ice and Stone magic, until it seemed like the silverstone was soaking up just as much of my power as Dekes was. I didn’t know if I was consciously doing it or some self-preservation switch had been flipped in the back of my brain, but somehow I was directing my magic into the silverstone that had been melted into my flesh, storing the power there and trying to keep as much of it away from the vampire for as long as possible.
Maybe the blood loss was making me hallucinate already, but it almost seemed like I could feel the silverstone scars stubbornly holding on to my power even as Dekes tried to pull it out of my neck. It felt as if I was playing a bizarre tug-of-war with my own magic deep inside my veins. Every time Dekes sucked at my neck, I could feel the scars yanking back, trying to keep my elemental power inside my own body where it belonged instead of flowing through my blood and out into the vamp’s greedy mouth. Too bad I didn’t know what—if any—good it would do me. I might be an elemental, but there was only so much blood that I could lose and still live.
Finally, just when I thought I couldn’t stand another second of the vamp’s fucking fangs in my neck without going absolutely crazy, Dekes lifted his head and stared at me. I’d thought that his eyes had gleamed like a cat’s before, but now they blazed like two emerald suns in his tan features. It was eerie, sickening, and disconcerting, looking into the vamp’s face and seeing my own Ice and Stone power reflected in his gaze. A small, dazed part of me wondered if my eyes ever burned that brightly when I reached for my elemental magic.
Jo-Jo always claimed that I was one of the strongest elementals she’d ever met, and I’d managed to go toe-to-toe with Mab and survive. But the amount of magic that I sensed in the vamp right now was just staggering—and it was supposed to be mine. It was mine, until the bastard had taken it away from me.