Chapter Thirteen

 

 

 

“A vampire has to eat, my boy,” Uncle Howard had once told Asher. “You can hardly begrudge them their hunger when you wake up ready to chew the legs off the kitchen table, can you?”

At the time, Asher had believed it. Then his sixteenth birthday came around and no sooner had he finished celebrating that one of Ambrose’s acolytes helped himself to a taste right in the street, in full view of anyone who cared to look.

No one did.

The same neighbors who’d watched him grow from a boy into a man, who’d congratulated him just hours before, now averted their eyes and went about their business as though they couldn’t hear his screams. It had felt as if his throat were being ripped open, but pain hadn’t been the only reason his knees had melted under him. The shock of what was happening and his reaction to the ordeal had shaken Asher worse than any beating.

He remembered how his hands had quaked as he’d washed the blood off his shirt that night. He also remembered the guilty stirring in the pit of his stomach when he’d thought of the vampire’s fangs in his throat, of the sickening, seductive stroke of his tongue over the wound.

Ambrose’s law had kept Asher from discovering his weakness for a bloodsucker’s bite for sixteen years. In the ten that had followed since, Asher had tried everything to cure himself of the affliction.

He blamed his recent stint as Halloran’s prisoner for undoing all that hard work.

He blamed Halloran altogether for the desperate arch of his body into Moreau’s hands, his cock a hard, unwelcome weight straining in the confines of his trousers.

“You are sweet, aren’t you?” Moreau hummed, curled around Asher in bed. “You’ll make your lady very happy.”

That he liked to talk while he fed Asher had already made his peace with. That what he insisted on talking about happened to trigger salvos of panic in the pit of Asher’s stomach was another matter entirely.

“What if—what if I don’t want a lady?” Asher panted, coherent thought rendered somewhat challenging by the throbbing between his legs.

Moreau picked his blond head up, mouth red. When he spoke, it was around his gleaming fangs. “What a queer notion. Sweet as you are, ain’t no vampire master in this town gonna put you in his henhouse.”

I’m not interested, Asher wanted to grit out, in hens. He’d never put his preference into words before and it wasn’t Moreau who would get him to break that vow of silence.

Still, as Moreau went back to feeding and Asher slipped further and further from consciousness, he couldn’t help think he would have liked to at least be given a choice. But that was his lot as bloodsucker bait, wasn’t it? No choice. No say in what happened to him.

He could leave Sargasso but the old rules followed him like a chronic disease.

“You’re still alive. You should count yourself lucky.”

The voice did not belong to Moreau, but it wasn’t until Asher opened his eyes that he saw Halloran in the chair by the window, moonlight gleaming on the satin shoulders of his waistcoat.

Asher blinked in the rest of their surroundings. He recognized the heavy velvet drapes and frayed rug. He’d paced it often enough. The mirror across the bed revealed him to be wearing the clothes he’d been thrust into for Ambrose’s soiree.

“We’re back at Willowbranch.”

“I am,” Halloran corrected. “Wherever you are, you’re sleeping.”

This again. Asher pushed himself up against the headboard, which creaked just as loudly as he remembered. He tried not to dwell on Halloran shoving him up against it and coming as close to ravaging him as any other time before or since.

It wasn’t worth thinking about.

“Are you…well?” Halloran asked at length, scowling as though the question itself offended him.

Or perhaps not the question. Perhaps it was the burden of having to fill the silence with speech that bothered him.

“I’ve been better,” Asher confessed and swept his glance over the boudoir. “But then I’ve also been worse. Chained to a bed in the nude comes to mind…”

Halloran’s scowl didn’t ease at the jape. If anything, it deepened. A curious thing. Asher would have expected him to reflect on that portion of their acquaintance with some satisfaction.

“And you?” he heard himself ask. “Is Ambrose giving you hell?”

“He ain’t best pleased with me at the moment… But no. He needs me.”

“Why?” Asher wouldn’t have dared voice the query while awake and in the same room as Halloran. He reasoned that if Halloran was just a figment of his imagination now, it couldn’t do any harm.

And if he wasn’t, chances were so slim they’d cross paths again that he had nothing to lose by asking.

Predictably, Halloran heaved a put-upon sigh and flattened his mouth into a line.

Asher had given up hope for an answer when Halloran said, “For now, I am the closest thing he has to expendable infantry. He can send me out to do what he won’t waste his men on.”

“And what’s that? Slaying his so-called pals? Raiding towns and farms all over the valley?” Asher had no fondness for the vampires who might have come under Ambrose’s fire—except in a vague, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ sort of way—but he resented Halloran his willingness to wreak havoc on the mayor’s behalf when he wouldn’t even lift a finger for the humans who’d paid to bring him to Sargasso in the first place.

“Who told you that?”

They’d traded enough lies that one more wasn’t about to make a dent. “I ain’t as dim as you think. I know you’ve been wakin’ snakes all over the valley. Hope it’s worth it, whatever it is you sold your soul down the river for…”

Halloran gave a slow shake of the head. “This ain’t about me. Between all the droughts and the Depression, there’s a storm brewing in this desert. Ambrose reckons he can weather it if he’s got everyone else on their knees.”

“I see. And the reign of Ambrose continues,” Asher drawled. “Thanks for your contribution.”

“We’ll see.”

Asher snorted and rubbed a knuckle into the bridge of his nose. The bed mattress dipped. Halloran was suddenly within arm’s reach, propped up on one elbow at the foot of the bed. Asher’s every muscle seized, shock rendering him too slow to react.

“Where are you, Asher? It’s obviously not where you belong.”

“And where’s that?” Asher hitched his eyebrows. “Here? Tied to the bed, at your disposal whenever you damn well please?”

Halloran didn’t take the bait. “In Sargasso.”

“Sargasso’s just another town.” Asher affected a shrug, nonchalant to the point of a lie. “What’s it ever done for me?”

“You could have run away before,” Halloran pointed out, stubborn. “Others have. But you didn’t. You stayed and tried to fight—”

“And this is where it got me!” It took conscious thought, but after a few moments, Asher managed to tip back against the headboard, his legs splayed before him. He was relaxed. He wasn’t going to get worked up about this sorry state of affairs.

He wouldn’t give Halloran that satisfaction.

“You’re right.”

Asher arched his brow. “I am?”

“You’re not built to be anyone’s servant. And you were a lousy goddamn prisoner.”

Despite himself, a reluctant smile tugged at the corners of Asher’s mouth. “You were a piss-poor jailer.”

“Yeah, well…I’m a robber, not a kidnapper. Or I was.”

“Before you started answering to the law?” Asher wondered, mirth leaching from his voice.

Halloran’s gaze slid down his body, but he didn’t seem to be looking at Asher so much as through him. It didn’t prevent a guilty twitch of interest from Asher’s baser instincts, nor the shame that followed.

He shifted, pressing his knees together and locking his arms around them. “Tell me one thing.”

Halloran peered up, his expression at once wary and hopeful.

“Connie’s parents. Are they…?”

“Alive,” Halloran said. “For now.”

“How?”

“Malachi. Don’t ask me why. I can’t tell if Ambrose’s brood is the most calculating bunch of assholes I’ve ever met or just a clutch of spoiled wastrels.”

Asher whistled. “Does the good mayor know what you make of his family?”

“The good mayor,” Halloran said, “knows he’s surrounded himself with vipers. And if he doesn’t, which I very much doubt, then he’s a fool.”

He spoke with uncanny conviction. It was the most passionate Asher had heard him on any subject.

“Why didn’t you talk to me like this when I was at Willowbranch?”

Halloran clammed up at once. “Like what?”

“Like…you have a brain in that head of yours. Like you ain’t just a brute who’s only motivated by his next meal.” Whom Ambrose had gifted him in a rare show of generosity, and who incidentally happened to be a human being.

“What would I talk to you for?” Halloran sneered. “You made your feelings about my kind crystal clear ’fore we even met.”

He had to dredge up the past. He had bring up Asher’s colossal mistake.

Asher’s mood soured with the sharp, acidic burn of grief. “If you expect me to be sorry—”

“I expect you to be sensible. But apparently that’s too much for your species.”

“Sensible? And what’s that look like? Licking your boots?”

“It looks like thinking before you do something as half-witted as run off into the goddamn desert—”

“I’m not in the desert, you son of a bitch!” Asher blurted before he could stop himself. He regretted the admission as soon as he saw the corners of Halloran’s mouth tip up. “You scooped me in on purpose.”

“Did you think you was the only one who could take advantage of a short fuse?” Halloran propped himself up on his hands. “So you’re not in the desert no longer… Where are you, then? The train to Mesa? Some nearby town?”

Asher flexed his jaw, but it was too late. The answer was as good as written on his forehead.

“Ah,” Halloran drawled. “You’ve found sanctuary somewhere.”

“Stay out of my head.”

“Can’t.”

“Bullshit,” Asher snarled. “If this is my dream, then I want you out. I want you gone. You hear me? I want you—”

Halloran’s fangs dropped like two pistols drawn too fast for the eye to see. Asher’s breaths snagged in his throat as their bodies collided. The back of his head slammed into the plaster hard enough that he saw stars.

He came awake with a jolt, pulse racing in his ears. The ghost of a rough kiss lingered on his mouth. Lust surged through him, vindictive and dangerous. Damn him. But wanting Halloran was nowhere as bad as having revealed to him that Asher and his friends weren’t lost in the desert anymore. There were only so many towns a man could reach leaving Sargasso on horseback.

Redemption happened to be the closest.