Текст книги "Blood Kiss"
Автор книги: J. R. Ward
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Chapter Seven
“Get up! Peyton, get up—now!”
As Paradise lost the fight with her survival instinct and rolled her friend—or nemesis or whatever the hell he was—over onto his back, she cursed him, herself, the Brothers, pretty much anything that was a noun.
That whole faceup thing didn’t last long. As he began to heave again, she shoved him back over so he didn’t aspirate.
Glancing around, she saw … so many on the ground. As if it were a battlefield.
“I’m gonna die,” Peyton moaned.
In the back of her mind, Paradise noticed that although the noise was just as calamitous, there was more illumination¸ the flashes coming faster and staying lit longer.
“Come on.” She pulled at his arm. “We can’t stay here.”
“Leave me here … just leave me…”
As Peyton vomited again and not much came up, she looked to the far corner of the gym. There were a number of people standing around the dark opening that Craeg had told her to head toward.
“Peyton—”
“We’re all gonna die…”
“No, we’re not.”
And it was a shock to realize she actually believed that—it wasn’t just a line to offer false hope to Mr. Smooth with the stomach issues. The thing was, all this noise and light wasn’t actually producing any debris, smoke or dust, any structure rattling, any sort of real impact on the space or the people in it. It was a light and sound show, like a thunderstorm or a theatrical production—and that was as far as it went.
She also had the sense that the lights were changing, and that had to mean something.
Probably nothing good.
“Peyton.” She grabbed his arm and pulled him over onto his back again. “Get your ass up off this floor. We’ve got to make it over to the corner.”
“I can’t—it’s too—”
Yup, she slapped him. And she wasn’t proud of it or satisfied by sharp contact, either. “Get up.”
His eyes popped wide. “Parry?”
“Who the hell did you think you were talking to? Taylor Swift?” She pulled his upper body off the gym floor. “Get on your feet.”
“I might throw up on you.”
“Like we don’t have bigger problems? Have you seen this place?”
Peyton started babbling, and that was when she decided enough was enough. Straddling his legs, she took hold under his pits and used her newfound strength to walk back and drag him upright onto his pair of Adidases.
“Paradise, I’m going to be—”
Oh, fantastic.
All down the front of her.
And he was weaving so badly that walking in a straight line was going to be a challenge. Running? NFW.
“Fuck this,” she muttered, grabbing him around the waist and jerking him into a dead lift off the floor.
Heavy. Really heavy on her shoulder.
Now she was the one with the whoa-nellies: It was like trying to balance a piano up there—made worse by the fact that the weight was arguing with her—and barfing down the back of her right leg.
Paradise set off, ignoring everything but the goal of getting to that godforsaken door across the way. Her head was wrenched to one side, her neck straining so badly it burned; her shoulder was going numb from lack of circulation; and her thighs were already quivering from the stress on them.
The temptation to get lost in all those physical sensations was strong, especially as they grew ever louder and more insistent. But she wanted to … well, she wanted to get to that door, to the fresh air, to the end of all this shock-and-awe business. Then she could take a deep breath, put Peyton’s whining deadweight down, and sit in a nice, clean classroom.
Maybe share a laugh with the Brotherhood that she had made it through the worst part and now the self-defense and schoolbook training could start.
To keep herself going, she tried to remember the classrooms she’d seen as the trainees had walked from the parking area to the gym. They’d had fluorescent lighting, and banks of tables with chairs in orderly positions facing the blackboard—
“Stop,” Peyton said. “I’m going to die…”
“Will you shut up and stay still?” she said with a grunt.
“I’m going to—”
Oh, for fuck’s sake, she thought as he lost it again.
As she trudged along and panted from the exertion, the maze of athletic equipment was a total pain in the ass, the various stations seeming to have been spaced and angled in a way that made it incredibly awkward to get through, past, around.
Especially with Peyton draped over her.
And then there were people who were scattered along the ground.
Every time she stepped by somebody or had to lift a foot over one of their hands, their feet, their leg or arm, she wanted to stop, ask if they were okay, call for help … do something. The fact that she couldn’t save anyone but herself and Peyton made her scream on the inside, her lungs burning in her chest, a strange anger motivating her.
She kept looking for blood. Obsessively.
But there was no sign of it: no red stains on clothes, no red streaks on skin, no red sweeps across the honey-yellow floorboards. There was also no scent of it that she could detect—although there were plenty of other smells, none of them pleasant.
No blood, though. And that had to be good … right?
“Ahhh!” she screamed, as a white-hot blast of pain shocked her.
Applecart. Over.
The pain in her left elbow destabilized everything, her body becoming like a folding table that had had a leg kicked out—and just like a bowl of fruit on a previously level surface, Peyton crashed to the ground, his limp limbs bouncing like McIntoshes.
“Oh, my God,” she gritted as she grabbed her arm and massaged where the electrical current had licked into her.
She’d gotten too close to a chest-press machine. And as she measured the amount of equipment she still had to work through, she thought … I can’t do this. I can’t …
“Can you stand up?” she said.
Peyton answered in a non-verbal fashion that didn’t just suggest no, but emphatically announced that that was still a negative.
God, how could there still be anything left in his stomach?
“I can’t do this,” she moaned as she looked around and massaged her elbow.
As her eyes bounced back and forth, she realized that she was searching for help, some kind of lifeline, a rescuer. There had to be somebody she could turn to …
For only the second time in her life, she prayed to the Scribe Virgin, squeezing her lids closed, trying to find the proper words against the jarring backdrops of the sounds, smells, sights, and the razor-sharp adrenaline spasms racking her internal wiring. Somehow, she managed to ask the race’s deity to send someone to make this stop, to take care of Peyton, to rescue all the other people who were down, to get everyone out of this hellhole—
Stop wasting time, an inner voice commanded.
It was such a shock, she wrenched around, expecting to find somebody behind her. No one was there.
Maybe it had been piped in from overhead?
Stop wasting time. Go!
“I can’t pick him up again!”
You’d better fucking figure out how!
“I can’t do this!”
You’d better fucking do this!
“Okay, all right, okay, all right.”
She mumbled those words over and over again as she restraddled Peyton and humped him back up into position. The second dead lift was even more uncoordinated than the first, her body loose in places that really, totally didn’t help—but Peyton seemed to be recovering strength, his hands gripping her hips and holding on.
By the time she cleared the obstacle course, she was running out of energy, and she performed a quick calculation on the distance to the door—and then added ancillary factors like how much her shoulder was deforming under the weight, and the fact that, inconveniently, she needed to pee so badly she felt like someone was daggering her lower abdomen.
Breaking into a shuffling gallop, her feet skimmed over the blessedly unobstructed floor, and the less shimmying, the better for her passenger and her whole body.
Wait a minute.
The door was shut.
As she closed in on her destination, she frowned and commanded her eyes to focus through the flaring lights. Shit, the door was shut. But there had been people standing around the opening only moments before?
Coming up to the panel, she let Peyton slide off her back and barely spared him a glance as he sprawled out flat on the floor.
What had happened to the frickin’ door?
No handle or doorknob. No hinges. No glass to break.
Pivoting around, she surveyed—Jesus, there were gym ropes hanging about thirty feet away. The thick lengths had appeared from the ceiling, and there were two people climbing them with the kind of speed that made her want to sit down and give up right where she was.
“Peyton?” she said as she angled her head to watch the pair ascend. “I’m not going to be to carry you up those.”
Hell, she didn’t think she could drag her own weight on the twirling lengths.
Where were the two of them going? she wondered as they disappeared out of sight.
“Peyton, we’re going to need to—”
One after the other both ropes fell to the floor, the slaps of the thick, woven lengths sounding out even over all the other noise.
Where had the two people gone?
Rubbing her eyes, she wanted to scream. Instead, she gritted out, “What the hell are we going to do—”
A fresh blast of cool, clean air had her twisting back around. The door had opened again, revealing a dense black void.
As though it had consumed the other trainees who had entered and was ready for another meal.
Peyton struggled to his feet, his shaking hands wiping down his face. “I can walk.”
“Thank God.”
He glanced over at her. “I owe you.”
“Let’s see if heading through here actually gets us anywhere first.”
“We go together.” His eyes burned as he offered her the crook of his elbow—as if they were going into a ballroom full of silk gowns and white-tie tuxedoes. “I’m not going to leave you.”
Paradise stared at him for a moment. “Together.”
Linking her arm through his, she wasn’t surprised that he used her to steady himself. Still, this was a huge improvement over his comatose-but-for-the-barfing.
They stepped forward at the same time, the doorjamb wide enough to accommodate them both—
The door slammed shut behind them and cut off all light—and she opened her mouth to scream, but then sucked back the sound, holding it in. That feeling of the floor slipping out from under her feet happened again, a lesson on the significance of vision to things like balance and the spatial orientation of limbs and torso.
Beside her, Peyton was panting.
From out of nowhere, rough hands grabbed at her hair, latching on, yanking hard. And she screamed bloody murder as fear made her contort and spasm and fight against the hold.
“Paradise!”
They were ripped apart and something was put over her head and tied around her neck. Forced to the ground, her legs were bound and then used to pull her along on her back. Twisting and turning, trying to kick, to breathe, to stay even partially calm enough to think, she felt like she was suffocating.
She felt like she … might be dying.
Up on the scaffolding, Craeg learned the hard way that you’d better frickin’ balance yourself—the electrical shock he got each time his arms flailed into something metal sent his heart racing and shorted out his mind for a split second that he couldn’t afford to spare.
And naturally, the goddamn platform was as rickety as an old man, shifting this way and that, swinging like a baseball bat.
“Get in a rhythm!” he shouted to Novo. “Follow my steps!”
Strong hands grabbed onto his waist. “Got you.”
They fell into a walking stride that was quick but cautious, lurching from side to side, the heat from the lights and the mass of bodies down below making him sweat. Extending his arms, he counter-balanced himself and her, and began to make even better time, heading for God only knew—
All at once the scaffolding went rock-steady, and that was bad news. What had worked on an unstable surface didn’t fly at all on a stable one, and both of them careened into a series of electrical shocks that sent them reeling, their bodies slamming into each other and then hitting the metal supports, only to get reshocked. Muscles began to cramp up and refuse to loosen, his limbs unable to follow his mental commands.
“Fuck!” Craeg barked as he tried to stop his body from reacting to the stimuli.
“What the fuck!” Novo yelled.
Or some version of that.
Thin air.
Next thing he knew, he had fallen off an edge he hadn’t seen coming and gone into a free fall that left even him screaming at the top of his lungs. All around him, air rushed up, traveling through his clothes and making them flap, streaking his hair and the skin of his face and back, riddling his ears with a buffering sound. He was going to snap both of his legs if he landed feet-first, but there was no time, and no distance—and no reason to even try to broker a landing that wasn’t going to be devastating—
Sploosh!
He hit an unanticipated pool of water on his side, his body getting caught in the safe hold of cold, fresh liquid. The relief as he didn’t end up with both his femurs coming out of the tops of his shoulders was short-lived. His Tasered, tortured, overheated muscles immediately cramped on a oner, everything freezing up, his lack of body fat turning him into an anchor, not a buoy.
The shock of the unexpected bottoming-out had caused him to pull in a tremendous lungful of air, but that oxygen supply wasn’t going to last. He needed to get to the surface.
With clawed hands, and only one leg that had any mobility, he scratched and kicked in what he hoped was the way up. He had no visual orientation at all, nothing but a black abyss that was going to consume him if he didn’t save himself.
The surface of the pool, pond, lake, whatever it was rearrived with the same unexpected, unannounced surprise that he’d plunged into it with. Coughing and trying to suck in air were two mutually exclusive activities, and he had to force his primordial sense of survival to regulate his diaphragm’s spastic responses.
Chlorine. They were in a pool.
He didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about that. The pain in his cramping muscles was unbelievable, like having daggers driven into his thighs and his ass and his gut, and he started to sink back down before he’d caught his breath—and that was a no-go. He was going to die that way.
Fighting against his body’s impulses, he used his mind to override his sympathetic nervous system: Taking an enormous breath in, he stroked his arms out and down, creating an artificial current that swept his torso flat across the top of the water. Then he stopped … fucking … moving.
And let the air in his chest cavity become the life jacket he wasn’t wearing.
It wasn’t a perfect float. His legs continued to sink, and he had to kick every so often to stay on top, but it was a hell of a lot better than hitting the bottom and drowning.
From time to time, he expelled his breath and reinhaled.
He wasn’t sure how long he could last like this. But he was going to find out.
God … his cording muscles were a torture to endure, and to distract himself, he relived being up high on that catwalk. The Brothers were brilliant, he decided. Going from that heat to this cold? After the electrical shocks?
It was an engineered environment guaranteed to put someone exactly where he was: fighting against his body’s natural responses to certain stimuli and environments.
What was happening to everyone else? he wondered.
Where was the female?
Not the one he’d been on the elevation with … but the other one? Paradise?
As water clapped in his ears, it was like the light show from the gym, obscuring and then letting in sensory input. He heard splashing, both close to him and farther away … a lot of shouting and gasping from others in the pool … echoes—they must be somewhere large with a relatively low ceiling and a lot of tile.
Releasing the air in his lungs, he immediately reinflated them …
… and waited for whatever was next.
Chapter Eight
“… pair in the mouth. ETA four minutes. Clear entrance and far right side of pool…”
Pressing the release button on the wire that ran from his earpiece down the side of his neck, Butch said quietly, “Roger that.”
As he strode around the edge of the pool, he tracked the movements of the candidates in the water with his thermal-imaging goggles. Two more had just fallen in from up above; both had surfaced and assumed a dead man’s float so they were tight and relatively quiet. Not always the case. He and Tohr had had to pull four candidates out already, which meant there were only three other males in with the new couple.
Everyone was far away from entry point B over on the right. Good.
Butch checked his watch. Whoever was left behind in the gym was going to be timed out in another six minutes. And all this stuff was just the preamble to what he and his Brothers were referring to as the Final Destination—and that last stop was going to be shut down by the sun at dawn, so it was mission-critical that the group who made it through these early tests had enough time out there.
Doc Jane and Manny’s clinic was filling up. The mild herbal emetic had more than done its duty, and there had been a variety of minor cuts, scrapes, muscle pulls and burns. Two loads of dropouts were already on their way off the property, and there were going to be more.
This was the thing with a meritocracy: Shit had to get real fast, because he and V weren’t going to waste time on anybody who couldn’t make the cut.
“Is it my turn yet?” Lassiter asked over the earpiece. “I was born ready for this.”
“Of all the people who could be immortal,” V muttered, “why are you one of them?”
“Because I’m awwwwwesome,” the fallen angel sang. “And I’m part of your team—”
“No, you’re not—”
“—living your dream!”
Butch’s head started thumping even worse. “Shut up, Lass. I can’t do singing right now.”
“It’s from Despicable Me,” the angel commented. Like he was being helpful.
“Shut up,” V cut in.
“Shut up.” Butch fought to keep his voice low. “We’ve got another four minutes in the gym. I’ll let you know when you can—”
“I’m losing air over here, you know,” Lassiter bitched. “My inflatable is deflating.”
V cursed. “That’s because it doesn’t want to be around you any more than we do.”
“You keep this up and I’m going to start thinking my enmity is mutual.”
“About fucking time.”
Right, Butch didn’t get off on dragging soaking-wet, panicked idiots out of a pool—but, man, he was really frickin’ glad he wasn’t on the back side of the house with those two fighting. “Sit tight, Lass,” he said. “I’ll be in touch—and, V, for the love of God, will you turn off his fucking mic—”
“Ow! Hey! What the fuck, V—”
Annnnnnd everything went blissfully silent.
As his headache tried to kick down the door to his skull, Butch wanted to pop his goggles off and rub his eyes, but he wasn’t about to lose sight of the candidates for even a moment. The last thing the program needed was someone getting seriously hurt, or worse, waking up dead.
Besides, he was distracted enough on his own, even with the 20/20 headset.
Something was wrong with Marissa.
Shit knew he’d spent enough time being a walking zombie back during his human days to recognize the numb preoccupation she’d been rocking.
The trouble was, she was giving him nothing to go on. Every time he asked her what she was thinking about or whether she was okay, she smiled at him and made some BS excuse about things being busy at Safe Place.
Undoubtedly that was true, but that was always the case. And she didn’t always look like she had for the last night and day.
Maybe they just needed an evening off—and not only in terms of not working. The mansion was a great place to live—the chow was good, and the company even better. The problem was, you didn’t get much privacy. Short of retiring to your bedroom, which in their case was a shoe-box-sized enclave with a thin door and thin walls at the Pit, you weren’t ever truly alone. Intrusions happened without warning by everyone from the staff, to other Brothers, to mates.
The Irish Catholic from a big family in him loved that.
The worried hellren part of him was not quite as enthused.
I need to go on a date, he thought.
“Where are we going?” V asked in his ear.
Shit, he’d said that out loud. “Not you.”
“Hurt. Seriously hurt over here,” came the tinny reply.
“Marissa and I need…”
“If it’s sex ed, I could have sworn you two figured that out. Unless all those sounds are just the pair of you thumb-wrestling.”
“Really.”
“You’re saying that shit is origami? Jesus Christ, the paper cuts … can’t fucking imagine, true?”
“Stop it.”
“Says Marissa never.”
“Not been the case recently,” Butch retorted.
“You got problems?”
“I don’t know.”
There was a long period of silence. “I have an idea.”
“I’m open to anything—”
“That’s what she said!” Lassiter cut in.
“V, I thought you took that away from—” The sounds of the two males wrestling on the up-close had him popping his earpiece out and grimacing.
Lassiter was clearly getting the beat-down he’d been begging for, and under any other circumstance, Butch would have found the pair, and not to play referee. But he had more important things to worry about.
Especially as he had two new visitors to welcome to this liquid-ish round of the party.
And when V came back on, maybe Butch would get some good advice. Provided his best friend could think outside of the spiked-collar/black-candlewax/nipple-clamp world.
Shit.
Paradise thrashed against the hold on her ankles, fishtailing her torso back and forth on the floor she was being dragged over, clawing with her hands. Inside the sack around her head, her hot breath suffocated her—or maybe she had just sucked all the oxygen out.
In response, panic gasolined her entire body, spasming up her muscles and turning her brain into a super-highway of thoughts that did absolutely nothing to calm her down or help her out. Part of her wanted to call out to Peyton, but he wasn’t going to save her. They’d gotten him, too. The other half was extrapolating all kinds of bad outcomes.
What next! What next! What next what nextwhatnext—
“Next” arrived with the same lack of warning that everything else had: the forward momentum stopped, a second person stepped up and grabbed her shoulders, and she was flipped off the ground.
Paradise screamed again in the bag, and tried to break herself out of the holds. Not possible. The grips were so strong, she might as well have had vises biting into her skin and bones—
Swinging.
She was being swung left and right, momentum growing, as if she were about to be thrown.
“No!”
Just as she was released at the top of the left arc, the bag was ripped free of her head. She had two incredible gulps of air—and then she was falling, falling, falling, through a darkness marked with strange sounds—
Splaaaaaaash!
Water everywhere—getting into her nose, her mouth, encapsulating her body. Instinct took over, her senses immediately calibrating that “up” was the opposite way she was sinking. Spidering her arms and legs out, she found that the binding on her ankles had been freed.
She broke the surface with such force her torso popped free like a cork, and she coughed so violently she nearly lost consciousness. In between the racking, though, she was able to get air down … and then she was sucking in great hauls of oxygen, the simple luxury of being able to breathe preoccupying her with a gratitude that brought tears to her eyes. That didn’t last long. All around, she could hear people struggling in the water, sounds of them coughing, breathing, paddling to stay afloat.
How many?
Was this the second part?
Treading water, she wanted to call for Peyton, but wasn’t sure that drawing attention to herself was a good idea. For all she knew—
“Paradise!”
The sound of Peyton’s voice was close by and to the right. “Yes,” she choked out. “I’m here—are you okay—”
“Are you all right!”
“I’m right here.” She spoke a little more loudly. “I’m right—”
Next thing she knew, a strong hand had taken her arm and was pulling her through the water.
“I can stand here,” Peyton said. “Let me hold you up.”
“I don’t need—”
“You have to conserve your strength. This is just beginning.”
He sounded so reasonable, like maybe the shock of the water had sobered him up. And then his hands were smooth on her waist as he turned her around so she was facing away from him.
“I’ve got you,” he whispered.
His arm locked around her, and the feel of his strong body behind her made her tense up. When all he did was breathe like he was in recovery, too, she began to relax a little, even though she couldn’t see anything and her legs kept brushing up against his.
She’d never actually been this close to a male before.
Although, given the situation they were in, now was hardly the time to waste a second on that nonsense; Peyton had nothing on his mind other than survival.
With tenuous relief, she sagged in his hold, letting herself go. Her instincts remained on high alert, but at least her body had a brief respite, her heart rate slowing, that horrid burn in her lungs extinguishing—
Splash! Splash!
Two more candidates—or victims—hit the water far, far away, giving her a sense of exactly how big the pool or pond or lake they were in had to be. Except … no, it wasn’t a lake. The water was chlorinated.
A pool. They were in a pool underground—probably not far from the gym, given that she hadn’t been dragged miles.
“What comes next?” she said.
“I don’t know. But you and I are going to stay together.”
“Yes.” She was shocked at how much his presence calmed her—in spite of the fact that there was still nothing to see, and she had no clue as to what they were going to be hit with next—
Splash! Splash! Splash!
“How many are in here?” she said.
“Five just came in. So there are at least seven of us.”
“Out of sixty…? There have to be more.” How could she be one of such a small number to make it this far? “Surely, there are—”
Four more came in—one dropping really close to them, three others entering far off on the other side.
“Am I too heavy for you?” she asked.
“Oh, please.”
As he switched his grip, her body moved in the water, her backside pressing against the front of his pelvis. She didn’t feel anything there … but she wouldn’t have known what to be worried about even if he had been aroused.
Another person hit the pool.
And then …
… for a long period of time there were no more additions. In reality, it was probably just a couple of minutes, but it felt like hours … days.
Her fear kept humming along, but with nothing to immediately feed off of, the anxiety began to cannibalize her rational side, all kinds of craziness running through her mind. What if this wasn’t a training program? What if this was some kind of … social experiment? A body-snatcher routine … or an attempt to … jeez, she didn’t know.
A wave of terror shot through her. She couldn’t see anything, and the roar inside her head was drowning out the sounds in the pool, and her body was too tired to process the shaking that racked her.
“What comes next?” she moaned.
“I—”
Before Peyton could answer, she became aware that something had changed around them. The others noticed, too, the bodies in the water stilling as if they were trying to assess what was different.
The water level was dropping.
The choppy surface had been at her shoulders—but was only now to her upper arms, then her elbows.
Her heart rate ramped up once more, a buzzy, trippy dizziness making her head spin.
“What are they going to do to us now?” she gasped.
Lower … and lower still … until her feet hit the bottom like Peyton’s could. She stayed in the circle of his arm, though—at least with his big body behind her, she knew that her back was covered.
I just want to see, she thought into the black void. God … please, let me see something—
Over in the corner, a brilliant, blinding light appeared.
It was so overwhelming that she lifted an arm up against the glare, and in its lee, she saw that yes, they were in a pool, one that was very clean and had a nice tile border that was pale blue and green. And then there was Peyton, looking wrung out behind her. And other candidates in the water.
Pushing her dripping hair out of the way, she winced and tried to focus—
What the …
“—fuck is that?” Peyton finished for her.
On the far side of the still-emptying pool, a huge male with blond-and-black hair had entered the space—and at first, she thought he had brought the light with him. In fact, his body was the light. He was glowing as if he were a living, breathing incandescent lightbulb.
But the crazy thing was … that wasn’t actually the biggest shock.
He was wearing a scuba mask and snorkel set pushed off his handsome face … a set of flippers that slapped over the slick floor as he approached the pool’s edge … a slingshot bathing suit that was hot pink … and a children’s yellow-and-blue floaty around his waist.
Every single one of the soaking-wet half-deads in the pool stared at him like he was the second coming in a SpongeBob–meets–Magic Mike parallel universe.
Slapping, flapping his way down to the diving board, he stepped up, took great pains to arrange a flesh-covered nose plug on his snoz, and cleared his throat.
After a couple of “me-me-me-mes”—like he was warming up to do a solo—he took a great breath and—
“Cowwww-a-bunga!” he hollered, and ran down to the end.
Springing high off the tip, he held the kiddie floater in place as he executed a perfect tuck-and-roll and nailed the dwindling water with a cannonball that kicked up spray to the ceiling.
As Paradise ducked so she didn’t get hit in the face with the tsunami, she thought … points to the Brothers.
Whatever she might have expected?
That was so not it.
