Chapter Eight
Finn
All the way back to Jax’s lodge, I kept stealing glances at Valerian. Something was bothering him, but I had no idea what was going through that beautiful, complicated, devious head of his. I could easily see what Marco had seen—Valerian knew exactly who the vicious bloodsucker was who had attacked Cade, and he was well aware of what that cryptic message meant too. Why was he lying? And what did he intend to do about it now? I could almost see the little wheels turning inside his head.
I had a feeling I knew what he would do, and I wanted to take him aside and “speak” to him about it. I thought it would only be polite to warn him before I took him by the shoulders and shook him until his brains rattled. If he had any.
I sidled up beside Mason when I got a chance and spoke to him softly. “Valerian and I need to have a talk. Do you want to join us?”
He gave me a sideways, determined look. “Most definitely.”
“Is there somewhere we can go where we won’t be disturbed?”
He was silent for a moment, maybe thinking about it. Finally, he nodded. “There’s a small barn a little way from the house. It’s where Cade keeps his tractor and his tools and stuff. I’ll make sure nobody comes out there to bother us until we’re done talking to him.”
I nodded and dropped back to walk beside Valerian again. He hardly noticed, so lost in thought I was pretty sure his mind was a million miles away. Or else many years in the past. It was a none too subtle reminder that he had been alive for hundreds of years before either Mason or I were even born. How much suffering had he endured over his long lifetime? What awful things had he seen that I couldn’t even imagine? When we got to the lodge, he sighed like he was tired and even made a yawning sound. I wondered just how stupid he thought I was.
“I think I’ll go upstairs,” he said, as soon as we stepped inside the entry hall. He gazed after Mason, who was still chatting with his brother. “Tell Mason…tell him I said…goodnight. I’m pretty tired after not getting any rest last night, and I’d like to lie down.”
Really? Did he think I wasn’t aware that vampires didn’t have a need for sleep? He always lay down with us at night, but I knew he never slept, despite his closed eyes and his attempts at making his chest rise and fall, like he was breathing deeply. He only pretended to do all that for Mason’s sake, but I think he enjoyed lying next to me, wrapped up in my arms. He always protested that I made him too hot when I wrapped myself around him, but he didn’t try all that hard to get away. He’d never admit it, but he was a world-class cuddler.
“Sure,” I said. “Go get some rest. We’ll both be up soon.”
He nodded and looked at me again, lingering a little and giving me a longing look. “I’ll see you,” he said and leaned over to brush my cheek with his soft lips before turning away and hurrying up the stairs without a backward glance. If I hadn’t been suspicious before, that would have done it. I immediately went to the door and gave the nod to Mason, before turning around and slipping out the back. I only had to wait about five minutes under our window in the shadows of the lodge before I heard the sash slide open and he jumped from the second floor to the ground, landing as lightly as a cat. I was on him before he could straighten up, taking him by the throat and pulling him back against my chest. He gasped and tried to pull away, but I held on tight and listened to him cuss me. He’d always been as strong as I was in the past, but since he’d given me some of his blood and saved my life, I’d been just a bit stronger. I knew he hated that.
When I’d had just about enough of his cursing, I tightened my hand around his throat enough to shut off his breath. He didn’t need to breathe, of course, but he needed air to talk, so as a way to shut him up, it was pretty effective.
“Where did you think you were going?” I taunted in his ear. “Off to do something brave and noble and fucking stupid? Like sacrificing yourself to save me and Mason?”
He was so angry he just shuddered like a horse dislodging flies. I tightened my grip a little more. “Before you go, Mason and I want to talk to you. He should have everything about ready by now, so let’s go.” I frog marched him in front of me, as we made our way to the barn. The barn was located maybe two hundred feet from the house, and seemed to be lit by a lantern on the inside, the soft yellow light spilling out of the door as I opened it. As I’d predicted, Mason was already there, leaning with his back against one of the walls and waiting for us. He straightened as we came in, shot Valerian an angry look and swung open the door of an empty stall where the tractor usually went, except Mason had moved it outside while he’d been waiting. I pushed Valerian in there and then stood by the little half-door as he fell down on the hay on one knee. He jumped back to his feet and turned to face us like a dangerous, cornered animal, his lips pulled away from his teeth and snarling in rage.
“Oh, put those fangs away. You’re not going to bite us,” Mason said, glaring at him.
“I’ve done it before!” he shouted, and tried to rush us. Mason met his charge with an outstretched foot and he stumbled over it with an almost comical look of surprise on his face and fell headlong into my arms. I set to work right away, stripping off his clothes. Mason helped and between us, we had him naked in no time, even though he fought us like a wildcat. And Mason was right. Though there was a lot of kicking, swearing and even spitting going on, he never tried to bite either one of us.
Mason—who, for whatever reason, was completely impervious to silver—pulled out a length of silver chain. Valerian recoiled against the side of the stall, looking outraged and betrayed. It took everything I had not to take him in my arms and soothe him then, but I knew I couldn’t. The bloodsucker who was looking for him wanted to take him away from us, and I couldn’t let that happen. I would never hurt him, but he wasn’t leaving this barn until I had secured his promise not to run away from us.
“Don’t come near me with that!”
“Hold out your hands, Valerian,” Mason said, advancing on him. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Then put that away!”
“I’m only going to wrap this around your wrists. It’ll burn a little, but I’m going to put on these leather cuffs first and that will help protect your skin.”
“Leather cuffs?” I asked curiously, peering over his shoulder. “Where the hell did you find those?”
Mason threw me a quick grin. “Cade keeps them in his bedside table. And I don’t like to think about why, thank you very much. Jax is my brother, after all.”
“Really?” I said admiringly. “I didn’t think ole Cade had it in him.”
“Will you two stop this foolishness?” Valerian said. “I’m leaving here—now.” He tried to stride past us, but Mason caught his wrist and flung him over into me. I held him against my chest with his arms outstretched toward Mason and Mason quickly snapped on the leather cuffs and then wrapped the chain around his covered wrists.
I knew the sliver still burned a bit, even through the leather, and he cried out piteously. I kissed the side of his face. “I’m sorry, baby, but we have to stop you from leaving.”
I dragged him over to end of the stall and secured the chain to a metal water pipe that ran along the wall. He could maybe still pull the pipe out of the wall, but it just might bring the wall down on top of him if he did. I jumped away afterward to avoid his vicious kick and stood back beside Mason by the door. The chain was too short to allow Val to sit down, so he crouched on the hay, glaring at us.
“When I get out of this, I’ll kill both of you.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Mason replied flippantly, but he looked pretty miserable. Neither of us liked this worth a damn, but we had to make him listen to us. Valerian was chained to the wall, his gorgeous body bare, but he was on one knee, the other one up and hiding his genitals. Not enough, though, that I couldn’t see the full cockstand he had. So being chained or tied up excited him, huh? Since when? And if it turned him on enough that he got hard over it, why was he shivering like it was the North Pole in here, when it was actually almost too warm. I made a note to ask him about that later on—assuming he ever spoke to either of us again.
It was one thing to playfully ambush me by the stream like the two of them had done earlier and hold me down me for sex with both of them at the same time. I enjoyed the hell out of that. But this was a whole other level. I had no intention of forcing myself on him—not now or ever. I’d learned that lesson with Mason, even though I honestly hadn’t thought of it as forcing at the time. My pack, I had come to learn, were pretty uncivilized compared to these grays. Mason had thought of it as forcing, and that was all that mattered. I’d been lucky enough that he was working to try to forgive me or at least not to hate me for it forever, but I couldn’t count on being that lucky again.
“Val, all we want to do is talk to you,” I told him. “We know what you were planning. We know that you were sneaking out to go give yourself up to that-that bloodsucker who’s after you.”
He laughed bitterly. “Is that what you think?”
“Wasn’t that what you were doing?”
He snorted. “Hardly.”
“You tell us, then. Why were you sneaking away?” Mason asked quietly.
After a long moment, he finally raised his beautiful eyes up defiantly to meet Mason’s. “I was leaving. You were right about that.”
“Okay. Why?”
He shrugged. “I’m bored. You both keep telling me you love me, but I… I don’t love either of you. I never did, really. I was only pretending, out of gratitude for saving me from my coven. But I’m a vampire, damn it. We don’t love anyone—period. So now it’s done. Over. I can’t take it anymore. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, so I figured I’d just slip out quietly and that would be an end to it.”
“Liar,” Mason said, glaring at him. “I don’t believe a word of that.”
“Oh? Then what do you believe?”
“I think you planned to get out of the lodge and go up in the woods to find this vampire who’s looking for you. I think you thought that by giving yourself up to him none of the rest of us would be hurt.”
He snorted out a laugh. “I’m not that noble. I was getting the hell out of here, yes. But I wasn’t about to sacrifice myself. I figured that after I was gone, the vampires in the woods would figure it out and leave too. Eventually. By then I’d be long gone.”
“Who are these vampires?”
“I have no idea.”
“Okay.” Mason turned to me. “Let’s go, Finn. When you get ready to give us some answers we’ll be back.”
“What?” Wait a minute, you can’t leave me here like this!”
“We can and we’re going to. We’ll let you go when you can tell us the truth.”
“I am telling you the truth!”
Mason turned and pulled on my arm to make me go with him. He pulled the door closed and left, Valerian shouting after us and promising to do unspeakable things to us when he got free. We got about twenty feet from the barn when he called out, “Mason! Finn! Please!” I could have sworn I heard a choked sob there at the end.
I started shaking, my protective instincts firing all over the place. I turned to go back and Mason grabbed my arm. “Wait,” he whispered to me fiercely. Raising his voice, he called out to Valerian. “Are you ready to tell us the truth?”
A long silence and then his defeated sounding voice, “Yes.”
Mason nodded, and I ran back to the barn, wrenched the door open and fell down beside him to gather him in my arms. He was covered in a fine sheen of sweat that was tinged with blood. He put his face in the hollow between my neck and my shoulder, his breathing ragged, while Mason quickly unhooked the chain from the pipe and then took it off him. His arms snaked around my neck, as I helped him out of the stall.
“I hate being chained up,” he whispered against my throat, shivering badly. “I hate it.”
He was saying he hated it, but his still rigid dick said otherwise. There was a mystery here I wanted to get to the bottom of. I helped him over to a blanket we’d spread on the floor of the barn and sat him down, keeping my arms around him. Mason knelt down beside him and unsnapped the leather cuffs, taking them off one at a time and chafing his wrists.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. But I had to get you to talk to us. I know that you know more than you’re saying, and you have to trust us enough to tell us everything. Let us help you.”
He heaved a sigh and sat up, scrubbing at his face. “Give me my clothes.”
Mason brought them to him and he got dressed, shooting me a dirty look at the rips in one of his last good shirts. “I’ll buy you another one. Now stop stalling and tell us who’s after you.”
“I think…no, I know it must be Cassius.”
“Who the fuck is that?”
He glanced up at Mason. “I haven’t been truthful with you.”
Mason gave a short, bitter bark of laughter. “No shit. I already figured that out. But never mind about that now. Just tell us.”
“Cassius is my sire. The one who turned me.”
“Not what’s his name…Jacob. The one you told me about?”
“No,” he said softly, shaking his head. “There was no Jacob. It was Cassius who found me in what was left of Ft. Duquesne after the British soldiers left. I was still alive, but just barely. He gave me his blood to drink to save me—he saved me not because of any altruistic reasons, you understand. I think he may have been too gorged on the blood of the others by the time he found me to take in any more, so he gave me some of his blood to drink. That made me his blood slave, you see—I didn’t know what he was at first, though it didn’t take me long to figure it out. I was his thrall for the next two miserable years or so. He fed on me…used me for sex. Depraved, painful things I’d never even heard of before. He had been a Roman once. He told me that he’d been a centurion. Another time, he said he was a senator. I don’t know the truth of it—maybe even he had forgotten by then, because the story kept changing. But after a while he figured out he couldn’t administer the maximum amount of damage to a human and still have him recover, so he turned me. After that, I became his toy, his creature. He could chain me to a wall and beat me until the flesh fell off my bones if he wanted to, knowing I’d eventually regenerate. He carefully taught me to equate pain with pleasure. To crave bondage.”
I didn’t know how much more of this I could listen to. We had chained him too, just like that other sadistic bastard, and it had made him hard, even after all the years he’d been free of this Cassius. It made me sick. “You don’t have to tell us all this,” I said. “I think we got the picture.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “You don’t. After a while, as sick and crazy as it sounds, I came to love what he did to me. To crave the pain and the attention he gave me. He was my lover and my sire and my Master all rolled into one. He tortured me endlessly and then occasionally gave me a few scraps of affection, but I came to crave those scraps. To live for them. You can’t imagine the relationship because humans have nothing like it. Nothing even resembling it.”
“Thank God for that,” Mason murmured, staring down at his lap and not meeting either of our gazes. I wondered if he was angry because Valerian had lied to him again. Time for all that later, if that’s what that expression on his face meant. I needed to cut to the chase.
“So what happened? Why did you leave him?”
“Hunters. Slayers, they’re sometimes called. We were living then in an old chateau in the eastern part of the Ardennes, in what is now Luxembourg. I suppose a few too many of the local peasants went missing in too short a time. Cassius didn’t like to deny himself so we had to move around frequently when our nightly activities began to attract attention. We were about to move on anyway, when one fine morning, the slayers attacked us, driving us out into the sunlight, because they thought that would kill us. When it didn’t, they took out their stakes and went after us, trying to keep us from killing them by brandishing their crosses and throwing holy water in our faces. I don’t know how many of them died—or how many of us, for that matter. I was staked from behind and went down under the combined weight of several men, but fortunately for me, they just missed my heart and only managed to stun me a little. When I woke up, four of them were industriously trying to remove my head. I killed all of them, pulled out the stake and went looking for Cassius.”
“He left you to be destroyed,” Mason said bitterly.
“Yes. I think he got away, along with some of the others. The Slayers had burned some of the bodies already, so I couldn’t be absolutely sure.”
“How long did you search for him?” I asked.
“I don’t remember exactly. A long time. I wandered all through Germany and parts of France, and my mind eventually began to clear. It was only then I realized that I had been under his compulsion for years. I began to question everything I’d ever felt for him and I stopped looking for him. On a whim, I traveled to America again and eventually found the coven in Virginia. I didn’t know if Cassius was still alive or not, but I always felt that he was. I knew that if he ever learned I was still around, he’d come after me.”
“And now he has.”
“Yes.” He sounded resigned, like it was all so inevitable. “And before you ask, I don’t know how. You two killed a lot of vampires when you rescued me from the coven, but some got away. Somehow word must have gotten out. I really don’t know.”
“If this Cassius guy left you, why is he searching for you now?” I asked.
A long silence and then, “Cassius used to say I belonged to him. That I was ‘forever his’. He said no other man would ever touch me.”
“Stop doing that,” Mason said, elbowing me.
“What?”
“Growling like that. It’s annoying.”
I scowled at him and turned back to Valerian. I hadn’t even realized I was doing it. “You planned to go back to him, didn’t you?” I was getting a little loud, and Mason’s head shot up. “Didn’t you?”
“Finn, stop it.”
I jumped to my feet and started pacing. Mason grabbed my arm and turned me around. “What are you so damned mad about?”
“You’re a fine one to talk!”
“I’m not mad!”
“Well, I’m not either!”
“Then why are you still yelling?”
“I don’t know!”
I plopped back down beside Valerian and turned him to face me. “You’re not going back to that fucking monster. Do you hear me?”
He shook his head sadly. “He won’t stop, Finn. Not ever! You don’t know what he’s like.”
“Yeah, well, that goes both ways.”
“He’ll never stop coming after me,” he said again, shaking his head.
“Oh yeah? How about when I rip his fucking head off his shoulders, take a shit down his neck hole and then stick his ugly head all the way up his ass to plug the hole! You think he’ll quit then? Huh? I’ll bet he does!”
Valerian looked startled. Then his mouth started twitching, and I thought he was trying not to cry. Instead of that, he suddenly burst out laughing. Mason did too.
My mouth dropped open. “What’s so damn funny?”
“I’m sorry, Finn,” Mason said as Valerian kept on laughing. He was holding to his sides and he’d fallen over on the floor. I was afraid he’d hurt himself he was laughing so hard. I narrowed my eyes at them both.
“I guess it was the visual.” Mason said, still giggling. He tried hard to stop smiling, biting the insides of his mouth. “I’m sure you could do it though, if you wanted to.”
“Damn right I could.”
I plopped back down beside them and we stayed there in the barn a little longer. We couldn’t come to an agreement so we finally gave up and went back to the lodge to see if we could get a little rest. The bed was too small so we pulled the mattress on the floor and piled a few pillows on the sides, then I slept in the middle of the mattress that night, with my arms around both of them, though Valerian turned his back to me. Still, I slept pretty well, until somebody started pounding on our door a few hours later.