Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(27)

He put out his hand and touched the damp earth. There was water here, underground. A huge lake, he’d been told, and streams that ran just as the creeks aboveground did. He couldn’t feel the water the way he felt the earth, which spoke to his bones.

Somewhere in the darkness in front of him chains rattled.

“Please?”

A woman’s voice, and Irish.

He froze where he stood. Maybe she was one of the ones who did not pay for her opium—though usually those were left much higher than this. No one but he wandered alone down here. He couldn’t believe that either Mr. Wong or Mr. Luk would waste money on chains for a nonpaying customer.

“Please, help me?”

He hadn’t been walking particularly quietly. She knew he was there.

The boy he’d been, Thomas Hao, would have run to the rescue. But that boy had died a long time ago and left a monster in his place.

“What would you do for me in return?” he said, breathing in for the first time in a long time. He didn’t have to, especially since he didn’t speak. It made his father nervous when he didn’t breathe, so he made a habit of letting his lungs sit empty.

He hadn’t sensed her as he did the miners, and it bothered him. He’d assumed he could sense everyone in the tunnels, in his realm.

The chains rattled hard, agitated, as if the woman had not really believed there was someone else in the mine. “O lords and ladies, you are there,” she said. “Please. My father is the Flanagan. The old one of high court. His element is fire. And I am accounted a power in my own right. Our gratitude will be yours, my word on it.”

Fae. That’s why he hadn’t felt her. Now that he knew she was here he could sense her, but she felt so close to the sighs and groans of the earth that it was no wonder he hadn’t noticed her before she’d spoken.

He avoided the fae when he could, and when he could not . . . well, the fae, unlike humans, knew exactly what he was, and they despised the monster almost as much as he despised himself.

“Please,” she said.

If she were fae, chained down here, no human had done it, not this deep under the hill. He had no desire to find himself in the middle of a fae dispute.

“Sir?”

He could feel her listening. But he made no noise. This close to feeding day his heart only beat if he made it.

“You have nothing I want,” he said, the words coming out hoarse and strange. He turned to go back the way he had come.

“Vampire.”

He paused.

“They say there is a vampire who walks deep beneath the hill.”

They must be the fae, because the humans didn’t know. He didn’t hunt: the Master forbade it. As a fledgling he could only take nourishment from another vampire, anyway. Taking the blood of humans did him no good at all. Every week the Master had him try it. The Master himself was agoraphobic, unable to leave his basement.

“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.