Bound by Night(22)

“Do you even hear yourself? Humans have been doing that to vampires for decades.” He didn’t bother waiting for a reply.
He strode through the darkness as easily as if the place was wired for lights and pushed aside a recliner sized rock that concealed a recess loaded with supplies. His arms shook with the effort, which had been far more work than he’d have liked. His injuries were draining him fast. Too fast.
“What are you doing?”
He lifted a burlap sack out of the hole and returned to Nicole, his gait faltering for the last couple of feet. Not good.
“We might be here for a little while.” He dug matches and candles from the bag and lit one. Nicole looked around the cavern, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the flickering light.
“You stay here often?”
“Let’s just say that we have a lot of hideouts.” He plucked a first-aid kit from the bag. “You never know when some asshole is going to try to poach or enslave you.”
She flushed. “I didn’t realize . . .” She trailed off, rubbing her arms.
“You didn’t realize what? That we live our lives looking over our shoulders? Or that we’re smart enough to be prepared when humans hunt us? Or that your precious humans aren’t always the good guys?”
He tossed a blanket and a bottle of water at her and dug a roll of gauze out of the first-aid kit. “Don’t try anything stupid. The poachers are going to be swarm— ing the area.”
“So we’re just going to sit here? For how long?”
“Until I say it’s safe or until I’m dead. Whichever comes first.” He shrugged out of his coat, trying to keep the pained winces at a minimum. “I don’t suppose there’s an antidote for the poison you gave me.”
“It’s available through our labs. If you can get me to the Norwalk research facility on the west side of Seattle—”
“You’ll save me?” He snorted. Which hurt. “I think it’s more likely I’ll be captured and either experimented on or gelded, defanged, and turned into a slave. Probably yours.”
His fingers found the buckle to his weapons harness, but his right arm wasn’t working right. Pain speared him from his biceps to his knuckles with every movement, and to his utter humiliation, he kept fumbling the leather strap and the buckle. Finally, when his muscles turned to water, he dropped his hands, hating himself for admitting defeat.
Then Nicole shocked the shit out of him by leaning over to unbuckle the harness. Her strong, slender hands eased the straps from his shoulders, and his cheeks heated when she helped him out of his bloody T-shirt. He didn’t like that he needed her help, but he wasn’t so full of pride that he’d refuse it.
“I don’t have vampire servants,” she said quietly.
“Really.” She averted her gaze, and something occurred to him. “It’s not because you think slavery is wrong, is it? The reason you don’t have a slave is that you hate vampires so much.”#p#分页标题#e#
“I admit I don’t harbor any love for vampires.” She handed him the gauze he’d dug out of the first aid kit.
“But I’ve never supported slavery. Believe it or not, there are people trying to end vampire ownership.”
Vampire ownership. Sounded so . . . pleasant. He’d have laughed, but merely breathing was becoming an effort. “That’s a damned joke. Those groups want slavery to end, but they also want to make sure every vampire is either confined or destroyed. Slavery is wrong, but vampires are too dangerous to be loose in the world, isn’t that right?” He tore a strip of gauze off the roll and packed his wound. Why was it still bleeding so badly? It should have been halfway healed by now. “But even those groups are few and far between.
You humans love slavery.”
“How can you say that?” Nicole scooted closer and groped around in the first-aid box. “You’re painting everyone with the same brush.”
“Humans have been obsessed with slavery since the beginning of time,” he said tiredly. “Any group a majority views as inferior—animals, other humans of different race, sex, or religion—has either been persecuted, hunted, exploited, or turned into workhorses.
When you discovered the existence of vampires a century ago, no longer human but able to perform as well as humans, we were your guilt-free dream slaves.”
“Maybe.” Nicole’s long, graceful fingers measured out a length of medical tape, and he had a sudden, unbidden image of her using those fingers on sensitive parts of his body. Clearly, blood loss was making him delirious. “But there have always been other humans fighting for human and animal . . . and vampire . . . rights.”