She glanced at the new, unmoving occupant in her sister’s cage and tried not to think about what his presence there meant for Aida. Her sister was all Mollie had left in this world. Aida couldn’t be dead.
Mollie had worked relentlessly to give Aida as normal a life as possible and to let her sister live her dreams after their mom died. Those dreams couldnotbe lost now.
Aida was going to college in the fall—something Mollie had happily sacrificed doing to take care of their mom after she got sick, and then to finish raising Aida after their mom passed. They’d done the college tours together and chosen the classes Aida would take after she finally settled on a small college in Rhode Island. The school was close to home and reasonably priced. They’d still see each other often, and financial aid would cover most of her tuition. Aida enjoyed the idea of small campus life, and she’d loved the dorms.
They’d both been happier than they’d been in years, but now it could all be gone.
What were any of her dreams, or even herlife, worth if she lost Aida?
Unable to think about the possibility, she studied her new neighbor. The only sign of life he showed was the subtle rise and fall of his shoulders. Judging by the amount of him curled up in the cell, she guessed him to be around six three, and with his broad shoulders, he had a much tougher time fitting into the cage than she did. He was going to be really uncomfortable when he woke.
With his face turned away from her, all she saw was the back of his sandy-blond hair. She was unreasonably disappointed by this fact since she wanted to see more of him.
Her attention returned to the front of the barn when a door shut and the truck pulled forward. The barn doors closed, and darkness descended again.
Chapter Four
“You’re awake,”a gentle voice said from beside Mike as he tugged uselessly at the bars surrounding him. He’d heard of bars that could withstand a vampire before, but he’d never encountered them.
Mike released the bars and turned toward the voice. In the dim moonlight filtering around the edges of the large double doors at the far end of the building, and through the cracks in the boards surrounding him, he detected movement in the cage next to his. Then the sweet scent of apples and the crisp scent of spearmint drifted to him. From the voice, he’d known it was a female; from the smell, he knew she was human and enticing.
“Who are you?” he demanded, unable to make out much of her features, but she probably couldn’t see him at all and only knew he was awake because of the noise he’d made while yanking at the bars.
Mollie opened her mouth to say her full name but decided against it. This guy appeared as screwed as she was, but she didn’t know anything about him, and it was better to play it safe.
“Mollie. Who are you?”
“Mike. Where am I? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I mean that I know nothing about this place and the people who put us here. Yesterday, or at least I think it was yesterday, I was taking an extended road trip with my sister, and today I’m in a cage.”
Mike contemplated her words as he turned his attention to the numerous cages inside what he was beginning to realize was a barn. Glancing at the loft over his head, he picked out bits of hay sticking through the slats. He hated haylofts.
As a child, he’d spent a couple of weeks at his grandparent’s farm in western Massachusetts every summer. When he turned ten, they sold the farm to move to Florida, and he started staying home with his friends. When he was really young, he’d been forbidden to enter the hayloft on their farm. Which, of course, meant it was the one place he wanted to go. At five, he gathered the courage to climb the rickety ladder into the loft.
He’d strode out to the middle of the hay stacked within it before realizing the bodies of a couple dead barn sparrows lay scattered amid the bales. He loved to watch the birds, and his grandfather would often lift him to peer into the nests when the baby barn swallows were born. Seeing them this way stole his breath and his courage.
Suddenly, he was no longer on the adventure to explore the unknown that he’d started out on. He became convinced monsters were up here, slaughtering the birds, and now they were all focused onhim, the far larger, more meaty prey. Those monsters hid behind the bales, and every creak of the old barn was the sound of their approaching footsteps.
Frozen in the middle of the loft, he hadn’t known which way to go to evade the monsters, as he was certain they would head him off before he returned to the ladder. An hour later, his grandfather found him there, still frozen in place and with urine sticking his pants to his legs.
Lifting him, his grandfather carried him from the hayloft and down the ladder. Mike was sure he’d be sent home afterward or spanked for disobeying. His grandparents agreed his imagination had been punishment enough, especially once he started blubbering on about monsters and never going into the loft again.
He learned a couple of years later that if he’d gone ten feet further, he would have stepped on some rotten boards his grandfather was planning to fix. He most likely would have fallen through the boards to the concrete floor below. And it wasn’t until years after, when Beth changed him, he learned monsters were, indeed, real.
Mike tore his attention away from the loft and back to the present. “Who brought you here?”
“I don’t know. I’m assuming the same people who brought you here,” she whispered.
Lured in by the scent and sound of her, Mike found himself leaning closer to her. “Were you at the bar too?”
“The bar?”
“Yes, the bar,” he said impatiently. “Did they take you from the bar too?”
