He could smell her from all the way over here. It would be so simple, and he only needed a taste. He could finally lay off the Tabasco sauce, could finally taste his food again. Even if it was only for a week or two, it would be worth it.
She wouldn't even miss the blood. Only a small taste, he reminded himself. He stood up. A voice in his mind shouted that whatever Victor wanted her for, it must be important. There must be a reason she was so interesting, and if he drank her blood she'd never trust him. He couldn't keep her around long enough to find out what was so special.
The hunger was louder.
He wanted it to be harder, for his body to fight himself as he walked across the room. For someone to stop him, for Sarah to wake up, to run.
He was too quiet, too light on his feet for her to hear through the veil of sleep, and then he was standing over her and he realized exactly how easy it was to take what he wanted, not for the first time.
A sound outside made him stop. He was coming. Jason recognized the sound of his footsteps, the way that his shoes scuffed the ground.
Jason breathed a sigh of relief and opened the door. It was hard to do it quietly, with the rust, so he took it slowly. Isaiah wouldn't be in any hurry to get inside.
He'd want to talk. Want to figure out what it was that had brought the shitstorm from before down on their heads. Want to figure out a plan of attack for the morning. Jason had been interrupted before, caught with his hand in the cookie jar when the hunger took him over. He'd been angry. He was angry now, on some level.
More than that, though, he was glad.
Until he saw Isaiah's face.
5
Sarah's eyes didn't feel as if they opened all at once. She thought they were closed, but then there was a whole new level of darkness that she could get when she closed them tighter. It was too bright. She wanted to go back to sleep, she was still tired.
Then she opened them for real. That was a mistake, and she realized it almost immediately. The sun was streaming down into the room through the window in the ceiling and seemed to point directly into her eyes no matter how she rolled over. Eventually she realized that she wasn't going to get back to sleep and sat up.
There was a problem, and the problem was visible right away. Isaiah walked towards her, his body strangely stilted, as if he didn't know how to act around her. He was wearing sunglasses and long clothes, in spite of the ambient warmth. Jason was standing by the door, staring as if he could see right through it.
"You're up."
Isaiah was the one who had spoken, and he offered his hand to help her up off the mattress. She ignored it and tried to stand on her own. Her legs were wobbly, but she wasn't about to accept his help. Not from a—a monster, she mentally filled in. She couldn't bring herself to think it.
Somehow in the light of day the terror that had gripped her the night before seemed less real, as if she had been imagining the whole thing from the beginning. The fact that she hadn't woken up in her own bed, and that these two were here, that was the only reason she didn't think the whole thing had been some sort of surreal nightmare.
"I want to go home."
"You know we can't just let you go home," Isaiah said softly. "It's not safe."
"You should let her go," Jason added, his sarcastic tone sounding almost practiced. "She'll just do what she wants to do, in the long run."
"Exactly."
"Well, we're going to deal with Victor, and you're coming with us."
"No." Sarah felt as if she was gaining steam, and soon she was going to blow her lid and they were going to finally see what she was capable of. "I'm not going anywhere with you. You can't even leave, can you? You'll burn up in the sun!"
Isaiah pulled the sunglasses away from his eyes and blinked the sun out of his eyes. But in the end he was there, looking at her, the way that she realized immediately that she should have expected from the beginning. If he had to hide during the day, then he wouldn't have been standing in the main room at all.
"If you're going to come with us even for a few minutes, to take care of one vampire, you should know at least a little. They heal pretty fast. Faster than you expect. But they can be killed, more or less the same ways as people can be. They don't like light, but don't be an idiot. The stories aren't exactly the most accurate source of information. Unless you think that he'll glitter if you expose him to light, too?"
Jason snorted at the joke, and Isaiah's head turned subtly to acknowledge it.
"Fine." Sarah sighed in frustration, hoping to seem as if she had resigned herself to her fate. If they weren't going to let her go, then it was just a matter of time until she could lose them in the craziness.
The one thing that she was sure of, though, was that they were absolutely crazy, and she needed to get away as soon as possible. Then Isaiah reached out and grabbed her hand.
The feeling of his skin against hers reminded her of the night before. The way that he'd laid her down, then what had come after, the ecstasy that he'd shown her…
She closed her eyes. She couldn't have this kind of craziness. Couldn't deal with the baggage that they came with, no matter how they looked. No matter how they made her feel.
Someone else, some day, would come along and she'd wonder why she had ever thought that Isaiah and Jason were so breathtakingly good-looking. Only… they'd both been interested in her. At least, they'd talked to her, and kissed her, and saved her life. How many other men were going to be able to stand up to that comparison?
She let them pull her into a car and drive her along the streets, but her mind was somewhere else. There had to be a way to have it both ways. Maybe they could be cured? But how? And how would it affect their work? Would they even agree to something like that? Would they thank her?
She tried to stop that line of thinking. There was no future with these two, she told herself. Nothing to look forward to, so there was no reason to try to think too hard about "saving" them, either from their curse or from anything else, for that matter.
As long as she was with them, she was in danger. She repeated it to herself again to make sure that it stuck. The car slowed to a stop and then Jason was coming around to open her door and offering a hand to help her up out of the back seat.
She didn't know how long they'd been driving, but it couldn't have been more than twenty minutes. It was amazing that houses like this existed so close to the city. She'd thought most people lived in those little suburban homes, or apartments if they wanted to live downtown, but never something… this size.
The three of them walked around the estate in a group, Jason's arm intwined with her own. When she followed the line of their eyes, she saw a back door, almost hidden from view. They started to walk, pulling her along with them.
The door was large and heavy. She could tell more from the sound of it when it closed than any struggle on Isaiah's part when he opened it. It seemed to open easily and moved silently until it closed behind them with a dull thump.
If the outside wasn't misleading, the place was at least three stories tall. It looked as if there were two wings of the house, which was absurd. Who could possibly need so many rooms for themselves?
"Should we split up? It'd be better if we caught Victor before he caught wind that we're inside."
Isaiah seemed to weigh the options for a moment before nodding.
"You take the east wing, I'll take Sarah with me to the west wing."
"Wait," she cut in, sensing an opportunity. "What if he's in the basement? You can see the stairs leading down right there."
She pointed them out. Sure as can be, there was a set of stairs leading down into the darkness. It seemed exceedingly unlikely that anyone was down there, she thought. She hoped.
Again, Isaiah seemed to take a long moment to contemplate whether or not it would help, and the expression on his face seemed to suggest that he was going to refuse. Then, at the last moment, he nodded.
"Good thinking." Sarah smiled to herself. That was all she needed. A chance to get away from them both. Once she went down a little ways, and they went their own separate ways, she could double back and be out of there lickity-split. "But you don't have a way to get in touch with us. If you find anything—I mean anything, Sarah—you scream and you come running. Is that clear?"
Sarah blinked to cover her eyes involuntarily rolling. As if she was going to run into anything in a darkened basement. "Of course."
"Good. Be safe, both of you. I don't need this turning into trouble."
"Or what, you'll suck my blood?"
Isaiah's jaw twitched. She'd hit a nerve. Sarah tried not to let her pleasure show on her face. "Just stay safe, alright?"
"You got it, Dracula." Another twitch, this one stronger. She struggled to bite back a smile.
"Get to it," he growled, turning on his heel and not waiting for a response.
Jason's gaze lingered on her for a long moment. He seemed almost like he wanted to say something. Then he, too, was going. She thought she saw him looking back to check on her as she turned to go down the steps, but then she was around the corner and headed down.
It was a long staircase, and Sarah was beginning to realize that this was no average basement. After the first few steps her eyes started acclimating to the darkness, but it was still surprisingly difficult to see. She couldn't make out the bottom of the steps until she was nearly halfway down, and well more than twenty feet into the darkness.