“I swear to you, one of these days, you’re going to pay for that. Your fucking fangs are never gonna get anywhere close to me ever again, or you’re a fucking dead man.”
Blake’s hand moved behind his back, but Oliver snatched it and grabbed what he’d hidden in the back of his waistband.
Inspecting the offending item, he shook his head, then waved pointedly with the stake that he’d taken from Blake. “And you still haven’t learned that I’m faster than you.”
Then he tucked the stake into his coat pocket and addressed him again, “You should be careful what you bring into this house. If Quinn and Rose ever find out that you’re arming yourself, they’ll be pissed.”
“They have stakes in the house too! And other weapons that can kill vampires,” Blake defended himself.
“Yes, but those weapons are locked up. As they should be.”
“Hypocrite!”
Oliver let the word roll off his back, noticing that it didn’t have any effect on him. “I suggest you go back to whatever you were doing, and let me be.”
“Or what?” his half-brother challenged, raising his chin in defiance.
Stupid!
If only Blake knew how he was provoking him right now. If only he knew how close he was to snapping.
“I’m very hungry,” Oliver answered between clenched teeth. “Very hungry. And if you give me any more lip, I’m going to forget what I promised Quinn and feed right here. And once I’m done with you, you won’t even remember.”
Blake backed away, his single step echoing in the empty hallway. “You wouldn’t!” But despite the words, his eyes showed that he wasn’t entirely sure about his statement. Doubts had crept into his mind.
“Wouldn’t I?”
The way he felt right now, he’d sink his fangs into anything with a heartbeat. Blake’s stupid attempt at trying to keep him from going out had pushed his need too far. Hunger surged. As it crested, Oliver felt his gums ache. He couldn’t stop his fangs from descending, reaching their full length in the blink of an eye.
A snarl ripped from his throat.
His hands turned into claws, the fingertips now graced with sharp barbs that could rip a human’s throat out in a heartbeat.
Blake retreated farther. “Fuck!”
“Run,” Oliver whispered. But the word was meant for himself, not Blake. “Run!”
Finally, his body reacted. Oliver turned on his heels and charged for the door that led down to the garage. He more fell than ran down the stairs and reached his dark minivan just as another wave of hunger pain ripped through his body.
Shit!
He had to get away from here. Far away, or he would hurt Blake, and he knew he couldn’t allow himself to sink that low. Despite the fact that he and Blake fought every occasion they got, they were family. And hurting Blake would mean disappointing Quinn. And despite what everybody thought of his inability to control his hunger, one thing he didn’t want to do was to lose Quinn’s support.
Oliver jumped into the car. When the engine howled, he shot out of the garage and raced down the street.
His knuckles clutched the steering wheel so tightly that they went white. Again he’d cut it too close. One of these nights, he would not be able to pull himself back from the brink and would do the inevitable: kill somebody.
2
Ursula heard the determined footsteps that echoed in the hallway and knew what this meant. The guard was coming to get her. Every time it happened, she dreaded it. After three long years in captivity, one would have thought she would be used to it, but with every time, the disgust for what they did to her grew. As did the fear, the fear that she would give up the fight, that she would finally succumb and lose herself, become a mindless vessel that only existed to serve their needs.
Twice a night, sometimes three times, they called upon her. She was growing weaker, she could feel it. Not only physically, but mentally too. And she wasn’t the only one. The other girls were in the same situation. They were all Chinese like her. Some young, others older. It didn’t seem to matter to them, because it wasn’t the women’s beauty they were after.
She’d been barely twenty-one when they’d captured her one night in New York after she’d left an evening lecture at NYU. It was her last semester, but she would never finish it. How she had dreaded the final exams—how eager she was to please her parents! If only she had those kind of simple problems now. They seemed so trivial now, so easy to solve.
Getting up from the bed, she grabbed the frame and pushed it closer to the wall, hiding what she’d carved into the exposed wooden beam behind: her parents’ names and address and a message, telling them she was still alive. Every day she survived, she added a date to the list, her carvings now covering virtually the entire area hidden by the headboard.