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“I’m not afraid of a vampire,” Rita snorts, bringing the bottle over and setting it down on the table. She doesn’t say anything. Instead she starts sliding the bottle back and forth over the formica surface, creating a weird sense of tension in the room. She reminds me of a cat toying with a mouse.
“I swear it, I have nothing else I can tell you,” he pleads, his eyes staring at the bottle in fear.
“I think he’s telling the truth,” I venture softly. “He ate the herbs. He can’t lie even if he wants to.”
Rita doesn’t acknowledge what I’ve said. She lifts her eyes to Damien. “Are you scared?” she asks. “Does it terrify you, the idea of being forced to drink this?”
“Yes,” he whispers, a tear rolling down his cheek.
“Good. Now you know how Tegan would have felt if you’d taken her to be killed by your bitch of a mistress.”
I let out a relieved sigh, thinking she was only trying to teach him a lesson. She wasn’t really going to make him drink it. But then, just as I’ve started to relax, Rita shoots up from her seat, rapidly uncorking the bottle. She grabs Damien by the jaw, forces his lips open and spills the contents into his mouth. She does it so quickly that he barely has time to react before he’s pulling away from her and trying to spit it out. He’s already swallowed too much of it though.
I pull Rita back harshly by the shoulders. “What the fuck have you done?” I yell at her.
She laughs and gestures to Damien, who’s no longer trying to spit out the poison but is sitting down placidly in his chair with a vacant expression on his face.
“Why are you laughing? Have you gone mad? You’ve poisoned him!”
“It’s not poison,” Rita explains, pulling away from me and walking over to Damien. “It’s a mild hypnotic. See,” she waves her fingers in his face but he doesn’t react.
I put my hand to my heart in relief. “You scared the life out of me!”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. I thought he deserved a bit of a scare and there was no way for me to explain to you what I was doing without giving the game away,” she replies casually, which annoys me a little.
She puts both of her hands on each side of Damien’s head. His eyes follow her in an empty sort of way. “You won’t remember any of this,” she says to him, her voice a low monotone. “You will tell Eliza that Tegan is never left alone, so there’s no time when you could successfully take her. Tell her that her witch friend keeps a constant watch over her and she’s extremely powerful. You will say that even ten of her strongest vampires wouldn’t be able to get past me.”
She clicks her fingers in his face and he blinks, waking up from whatever kind of trance he’d been in. “Now that’s you all done, honey. Let’s hope you get that work promotion you were hoping for,” she says with a big smile.
Damien nods, still a little dazed. He shoves his hand in his pocket, pulls out a wad of cash, hands it to Rita and leaves the RV.
I shake my head at her. “I can’t believe you just did that.” I pause, looking out the window to make sure he’s really gone. “I also can’t believe you took all that money from him.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Since he was here to help kill you I should give you at least 50%.” She divides the bills and shoves half of them into my hand.
“You’re nuts,” I say, shaking my head at her in awe. I really don’t know what to think of her right now. I had been frightened of her actions, but maybe that’s just Rita. You certainly never know what she’s going to turn around and do next.
“Why thanks,” she replies, deadpan, before going to clean up the herbs scattered across the table.
Finn and Ira arrive home later in the evening. Ira goes straight out to the back garden to meditate. He seems happy that the mists have been cleared from the shed, thanks to Rita and the vamps. It’s his favourite place to be, yet he hardly set foot in the garden when those things had been out there. Perhaps they gave off bad karma or something.
I bump into Finn in the kitchen. He’s standing by the fridge, taking big gulps out of a bottle of water. I feel weirdly vulnerable around him after spending last night wrapped up together in his bed. Even though we’ve slept together before, it had always been with an invisible barrier between us. Now I don’t really know where the line is drawn, or if there’s a line at all. More to the point, I’m not sure whether or not I want there to be one.
“Hey,” I greet him, so quietly it’s almost a whisper.
“Hey yourself,” he replies with a small smirk. It quickly turns smouldering, probably because of the way I’m looking at him. He’s all sweaty after spending the day out in the city chasing and killing chaos entities. His t-shirt is stuck to him, providing a very attractive effect.
He takes a small sip from the water now. “You should stop looking at me like that.”
I can’t help it when I answer back with a teasing, “Why?”
“Because it makes me want to throw you over my shoulder and carry you upstairs like a caveman.”
I give him a little smile. “You’re a grown adult. Surely you can have me look at you like this and keep yourself under control.”
“Under other circumstances, yeah I probably could. But it’s been a rough few weeks – it’s also been a while.”
“A while?” I question.
