A Shade of Blood (A Shade of Vampire #2)(11)

She seemed to be pleased with my reaction. “You have a high pain threshold. I like that.”

“You bitch.”

She slapped me with the back of her hand, throwing my head grotesquely to the side. The force of her blow was so strong I was surprised my neck didn’t break. I tasted blood on my lips and her eyes popped wide open when she saw the trickle of blood. Her gaze alternated manically between the blood on my lips and the blood spilling from the cut she had just made on my torso.

She took a lick of the blood on both my lips and my chest before making another cut, this time a little above my waist.

My breathing grew heavy trying to keep myself from giving her the satisfaction of a painful reaction as she made one agonizing cut after the other until my upper body became nothing but a bloody mess. The pain was excruciating and I was begging my brain to make me lose consciousness, but my body denied me even that escape. When she stopped cutting me, I hoped that it meant she was done. Wrong. She grabbed my hair and made me look up at the monitor.

“Keep your eyes on your little friend there. She’s a huntress, dedicated to finishing off our kind. I suspected someone was following me back at the beach where I found you. How she found me, I guess I’ll never know. When I sedated you, I could hear her gasp from a mile away. Silly, insipid little worm. It’s funny how out of her own stupidity, she actually thought that she was being stealthy, thinking that vampires wouldn’t notice her follow us all the way here to The Shade, but I let her go as far as allowing you the illusion of escape to test your loyalty to me.” She grinned. “Now, that you’ve proven yourself disloyal, I can commence with punishing you.”

She gave my bloody torso a manic glance. “Oh wait, I already did.” To my surprise, she made a cut on her palm and shoved it over my lips, forcing me to gasp when she pinched my nose shut. I had no choice but to let the blood from her palm trickle down my throat. Her grip on my head tightened. “Of course, your punishment is far from over. I said I want you to watch your friend.”

I shifted my gaze toward the surveillance monitor and saw a man approach Eliza’s unconscious form. She looked so fragile as he lifted her in his arms and pulled her against his body. There was no mistaking the dark expression in his eyes as he looked at her milky white neck. It was ravenous and predatory. I wanted to look away when he bared his fangs and bit into Eliza’s neck, but I couldn’t. Claudia made sure of that as she held my head in position, her blood beginning to travel through my veins. As I was forced to drink Claudia’s blood, I was also forced to watch another vampire drain the lifeblood away from an innocent young woman - one who already felt like a friend in the few minutes that I’d known her. By the time the vampire was done with Eliza, Claudia pulled her palm away from my mouth. She then looked at my body, which was to my surprise, beginning to heal.

I didn’t realize fully the extent of her madness until she said, “Perfect. You’ll be like brand new soon, and then I can cut you up all over again.”

“Claudia was sadistic and insane,” I told Sofia. I no longer wanted to continue the story or paint for Sofia any more of the gory details of the torture and humiliation Claudia inflicted on me, so I simply settled for: “She put me through hell.” Even time couldn’t erase an experience like that.

Silence followed as both of us got lost in our own thoughts. Eventually, I couldn’t bear the quiet anymore.

“So?” I asked with a bitter chuckle. “Was your experience at The Shade anything like mine?” I tried to say the words as lightly as I possibly could. Instead, my words came out flat and unnervingly cold.

“No.” Sofia shook her head, her head bowed, as if she couldn’t bear to look me in the eye. Guilt was evident in the tone of her voice. “Derek was nothing like Claudia. It was Lucas who tried to make my life there a living hell. If it weren’t for Derek, he would’ve succeeded, but Derek did everything he could to protect me from his older brother.”

I found it sickening the way she talked about Derek like he was some sort of hero, but if one thing was clear to me at that point, Derek had done something to warrant her trust. Still, though he might have fooled her, he wasn’t fooling me.

Tears moistened her eyes as she was finally able to force herself to look at me. “I’m so sorry, Ben. If I didn’t wander off that night, you wouldn’t have…” She choked on her words, biting hard on her lower lip. She grabbed my hands and squeezed hard.

I wanted to comfort her, tell her that it wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t have known. She was a victim too. However, I didn’t tell her the things that I should’ve told her, because I was too preoccupied mulling over what I couldn’t bring myself to tell her.

I couldn’t tell her that after what Claudia put my body through, my sense of touch was so dulled I could barely feel Sofia’s hands on mine. I didn’t want any more of her pity.

I also couldn’t tell her that Derek was the vampire who killed Eliza, because in spite of everything we’d been through, I was no longer sure of where her loyalties stood and the idea that she wouldn’t believe me, that she could still choose Derek over me was one that I found terrifying.

CHAPTER 9: DEREK

You shouldn’t have let her go.

I tried everything I could to shut out my sister’s words and keep them from continuously circling in my mind, but it was impossible. They gnawed at me and reminded me of the truth that I already felt so immensely. Sofia was no longer around, and no matter whom I surrounded myself with or what activity I tried to immerse myself in, I could still feel her absence with every fiber of my being.