I drew in a shallow breath, to ease the ache in my lungs. I didn’t know if the Fire elemental really thought I was dead or if she was just saying that to convince Dekes. Didn’t much matter. What was important now was what he decided to do with my body—and whether I had the strength to somehow slip out of the mansion before the vamp or anyone else realized that I was just faking.
More footsteps whispered on the carpet, and I got the sense that Dekes was pacing back and forth in front me. I stayed exactly where I was, slumped forward and doing my best to remain completely still. I’d seen more than enough bodies in my time to mimic the loose slackness of death. Yeah, maybe playing dead wasn’t my finest, most inspired, or deadliest moment as the Spider, but Fletcher had always told me that there was no shame in it if it got you out of a bad situation—like the one I was in right now.
The vampire’s hand touched my neck, but instead of checking for a pulse, he started stroking my wounded flesh, dragging his fingers through the sticky blood that coated my skin and clothes. For a moment, I wondered what the hell he was doing, but then he drew his fingers away and I heard a low sucking sound, followed by a long, satisfied sigh.
The bastard—the bastard was actually licking my blood off his fingers, like I was a piece of fried chicken that he’d been snacking on and he just couldn’t resist getting that last bit of greasy goodness off his hands and into his hungry mouth. The thought made my stomach roil, despite the elemental Ice that still coated my internal organs.
“Such a waste,” Dekes said, swiping his fingers across my neck and licking them clean again. “She was even stronger than Jonah thought. I could have fed off her Ice and Stone magic for years, and no one would have been able to stand against me. No one would have dared to. And I was so looking forward to taking Gin’s power for a test drive. Perhaps even using it against Callie Reyes, since she’s been so reluctant to accept my offer for her restaurant.”
“Why?” Vanessa snapped. “Have you grown tired already of using my Fire magic to burn people to death?”
“Something like that,” Dekes replied in a mild tone. “After a while, it’s all the same. The tears, the screams, the flames. You know how I hate to be bored.”
I thought of the photos that I’d seen of the vamp’s arson victims. So Dekes drank Vanessa’s blood and then used the Fire magic he absorbed from her to toast the people who tried to stand up to him, victimizing everyone but himself in the process. He was a fucking sociopath if I’d ever met one.
At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to turn my head, bite off his fucking fingers, and spit them back in his face, but I concentrated on the Ice magic in my ring, using it to make my skin even cooler, as though the chill of death were already settling into my corpse just as Vanessa had claimed it was.
“Very well,” Dekes said. “Since she’s of no further use to me, take the bitch’s body out on the west balcony and dump it into the marsh. Maybe the gators will have some interest in her rotting corpse.”
17
Dekes left the library, ordering five of his men to take Vanessa and Victoria back to their room and lock them away for the evening before returning to their regular posts. I had no idea if the vampire would feed from the other women tonight, but there was nothing I could do to help or save them.
First I had to save myself.
The footsteps faded away, leaving me alone in the library with the last two giants. If I hadn’t been tied down and lost so much blood already, I might have leaped out of the chair, grabbed my silverstone knives from the mantel, and had at the two men. But I was in no shape to do that or anything else, so I kept my eyes closed and my body slack.
“What a mess,” one of the giants muttered. “There’s blood everywhere—her neck, her chest, I think it’s even in her hair. I don’t want to touch her.”
“Yeah,” the other one replied. “Dekes tore her up good, didn’t he? She must have been really strong. I’ve never seen him act like that with any other elemental, not even Vanessa when she first came here.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now because she’s dead,” the giant said. “So let’s dump her body and be done with it.”
The two men got to work. One of them opened a drawer, probably in the desk that I’d noticed earlier, and drew out something with a distinctive crinkly sound. A garbage bag, I thought. The bastards were going to wrap me in a plastic garbage bag so I wouldn’t drip too much blood onto Dekes’s pricey Persian rugs and hardwood floors as they carried me to my final destination. The vamp wouldn’t want me to ruin any part of his house or his precious collections.
“Put the bag on the floor,” one of them said, confirming my suspicions.
More crinkles whispered, along with the sounds of someone smoothing something down. Then one of the giants cut through the ropes that held me to the chair. Since I was leaning forward, I slid off the seat and thumped to the floor, my arms and legs sprawled at awkward angles. I didn’t dare move. Not yet.
I felt hands on my side, turning me over onto my back. One of the giants drew the plastic bag across my chest. By this point, I’d exhausted the Ice magic that had been stored in my spider rune ring, but the giants didn’t notice that my skin wasn’t quite as cold as before. They wrapped me up in the garbage bag. Then one of the men picked me up and threw me over his shoulder as if I were Cleopatra in a carpet being taken to see Caesar.
“I’ll send in Sean to clean up the blood on the chair and rugs,” the first giant said. “Let’s go.”
The two men left the library. I swayed back and forth on the giant’s shoulder as they walked through the house. I didn’t hear anyone else moving around in this part of the mansion besides them, so I cracked my eyes open. But since all I could really see was the floor sliding by and my blood dripping small teardrop-shaped tracks onto it, I shut them again.
Finally, the giants stepped out onto a balcony. I couldn’t tell exactly where we were in the mansion, but I got the impression it was the far side of the house, the one that faced the marsh instead of the golf course. The air was cooler here, and I could smell the whiff of decay that went with the still water and rotting logs. The sun had set while I’d been inside the library, and darkness had already covered the land.
“Grab her feet and we’ll heave her out as far as we can,” one of the giants said. “You know how Dekes hates it when the gators crawl up on the lawn and start chewing on their legs.”
The giant who’d been carrying me dumped me on the stone patio, making even more pain shoot through my body, and I stifled a groan. Then he grabbed my shoulders while the other man’s hands clamped around my ankles. Together, they lifted me up and shuffled forward.
“One . . . two . . . three!”
They swung me back and forth a couple of times before letting go and flinging me out into the darkness as far and high as their enormous strength would let them. I felt my body rise up in an arc and quickly plummet.
My final thought before I hit the water was that I’d done this very same thing to Dekes’s men just last night.
Ah, irony. Going to be the death of me one day.
Maybe even tonight.
The murky, brackish water closed over me, warm, slimy, and disgusting, but I didn’t try to kick my way to the surface. Dekes’s men might still be out on the balcony, watching to make sure that I sank. Instead, I focused on getting one hand, then the other, free of the garbage bag and unwinding the whole thing from around my body. It wouldn’t do to get away from the vampire only to drown in the swamp outside his mansion.