“Vampire,” said the fae woman. “What do you wish most? I can grant you that.”
Freedom, he thought. If only the freedom to die. The bleak knowledge that no one would be able to give that freedom to him until long after the remnants of Thomas Hao had been thoroughly eradicated, and there was nothing to free, made him angry with a rage that did not cloak his despair.
The sun. It had been so long since he’d walked in daylight that the hunger for it nearly eclipsed his growing thirst.
“I have power,” she said. “Just tell me what you want?”
What I want, you cannot give me. And in the hopelessness of the thought, he found that he wanted her equally trapped, equally frantic, if only for a little while.
“You could feed me,” he told her, his long-unused voice sharp and bitter. “I’m hungry.”
“Come, then,” she said. “Come and drink.”
No hunting, was the command. No unwilling victims. Sometimes the Master forgot things or did not word things carefully enough. Maybe he’d never conceived that Thomas would find a willing victim.
If he intended to stay out of fae conflicts he should walk away—but a small part of him made him hesitate. It wasn’t the hunger. It was the boy he had been who wanted the woman freed. He found he couldn’t ignore the boy’s necessities any more than he’d ever been able to ignore the Master’s. It made the monster angry.
He gave her no chance to adjust, to brace herself. He dropped beside her, gripping her head and chin. He jerked her until her neck stretched out and bit down, sinking his fangs deep. He could have made it pleasant for her; his master insisted upon it being pleasant. But he wanted her to struggle, which would force him to stop and give him an excuse not to save her, to be the monster they—the Master and his father—had made him.
Other than a gasp as he struck, though, she was silent and still against him.
Her blood tasted nothing like the Master’s. It reminded him of the taffy he’d eaten when he was human. Not in the flavor, but in the feeling of richness, of self-indulgence and satisfaction.
Feeding with the Master was carnal in its most profane sense—pleasure and pain. When it was over, it sent his senses into a stupor and left him feeling desperate for the bath that never really cleaned the stain from his soul no matter how hard he scrubbed.
This feeding was . . . as he imagined feeding from a dragon might be—sharp and not altogether comfortable, but rich with the bottomless power of fire and earth. The fire cleansed him, the earth restored him, leaving him raw and off balance—but not filthy.
It was the first time he’d fed from someone other than the Master, and it was hard to stop. One more pull, he thought, just one more. And one more became . . . He remembered the eyes of his old Finnish friend as he headed into the opium den. It gave him the strength to stop.
She was limp and unresponsive in his hold. He sealed the wounds he’d made, regretting the roughness of his attack and wondering if he had stopped too late. He lay beside her and listened to her heart beat.
When it continued past the first few minutes, he decided that she’d survive. His hands told him that they’d only chained her feet. He slipped his fingers inside the cuffs and broke them, one at a time. The flesh beneath was blistered, and her feet were bare. His clever hands told him also that she was young, far younger than she’d sounded—thirteen or fourteen, he thought, and clad in her nightdress. They’d taken her from her bed.
Poor thing.
He picked her up and carried her to the elevator shaft. She didn’t wake up until he fed her sweet tea in his father’s dark laundry. She drank two cups before she said anything, her big gray eyes looking at the face of the monster he was.
He felt ashamed, and at the same time better than he had any-time these past twenty years or more, as if she had saved him, instead of the other way around.
He was not hungry at all.
“What is your name?” she asked. “I’m Margaret Flanagan. Maggie.” Her voice sounded composed, but her hands were shaking so badly.
He was pretty sure she was scared of him. He had put his arm around her to brace her while he fed her tea. He expected his nearness made it worse, but he also expected that if he backed away from her right now, she’d fall off the stool.
For all that she was fae, she was a child.
He told himself that her fear didn’t make him sad. He was confused and hid it behind his usual emotionless mask.
“I am Hao’s monster,” he told her abruptly. “Where is your father? I will take you home.”
She tilted her head. She closed her eyes for one breath, heaved a sigh of heartfelt relief. When she looked up at him, she smiled, her face as bright as the sun he hadn’t seen in years.
“He’s coming,” she said. “He’ll be right here.”
“Good,” said Thomas, though he didn’t know if that were true. If she had such power as he’d felt as he drank from her—earth and fire in abundance—then her father likely had more.
“Very true,” said a man’s voice, answering his thoughts—because Thomas had not spoken.
It took all of Thomas’s considerable control not to show his surprise.
“Papa,” said Margaret Flanagan, sounding for the first time as young as she looked. She pulled away from him and ran across the room to the arms of the man who stood in Hao’s Laundry in a flannel shirt and dungarees, though the door was locked and the room had been empty when Thomas had carried her here.
The Flanagan didn’t look imposing—only a few inches taller than Thomas, which made him short by the standards of the Irish in Butte. He didn’t have the shoulders of a miner, though his hands showed the calluses of hard work.
“Vampire,” he said, over his daughter’s head. “I could destroy you, you’re right. Fire is mine, and your kind are particularly vulnerable to it.”
“Yes,” acknowledged Thomas coolly. He might have been frightened, he thought, if he had really been afraid of death. Hell wasn’t a pleasant thought, but then neither was a lifetime, possibly a hundred lifetimes, tied to the depraved thing that was his Master.
If a monster had taken advantage of someone he loved the way he had taken advantage of Margaret Flanagan, he would have killed that one and never felt regret. The wounds on her neck were closed, but his attack had been brutal and it would be a while before the red marks on her skin faded. The Flanagan stayed where he was.
Margaret turned her head until she could see Thomas.
“You have it now,” she told him. “What will you do with it?”
“Have what?” asked Thomas.
“Freedom,” she told him, and then collapsed in her father’s arms.
He hadn’t understood what she had done at first, not when he’d let her and her father out and relocked the laundry’s door, not when he’d gone into the cupboard where he died for the day, not even when what had come to him had been sleep rather than death. He’d awakened and followed his father up the hill to the Master’s house.
Hao Xun took him down the stairs to the basement as he always did, leaving Thomas with a gold coin at his feet.
“Pretty boy,” said his Master. “Come here to me.”
Obediently, Thomas stepped down the single stair. Above them, he heard his father walk out the door and shut it behind him.
“Give us a kiss, my sweet thing,” the vampire told Thomas.
Thomas bent down to kiss his Master’s cheek, one side and then the other. As he did, he reached out with one hand to grasp the long, wooden candlestick that always sat on the little table beside the wing chair, though the candle it held was seldom lit.
“I’m so hungry for your blood,” whispered his Master as Thomas pulled back.
As I hunger for yours, Thomas thought, thrusting the candlestick through the soft beeswax candle and into the old one’s heart. He took two steps back, amazed that at long last he’d been able to do such a thing.