She glanced toward the sun slanting through the windows as the crackling flames consumed the bodies and the stench of burnt flesh filled the air. She placed her finger under her nose to block the stench, but it did little good.
“I’m guessing it’s maybe seven or eight in the morning now,” she said in a voice made nasally by her squeezed nostrils.
Lucien glanced at the windows and nodded. “Probably. What month is it?”
She blinked at this odd question. “June.”
“June,” he muttered as he tried to contemplate how much of his life he’d spent in chains beneath the earth. “June, what?”
“June seventeenth or maybe the eighteenth.” She bit her lip as she tried to recall the details. “The eighteenth. I think it’s the eighteenth now.”
Lucien closed his eyes as her words sank in. “It’s been a month.”
She preferred not to engage the crazy vampire in more conversation, but curiosity got the best of her. “A month since what?”
“I was in there for a month. They had me locked down there for amonth.”
She wanted as far from this monster as possible, but this revelation caused her heart to go out to him. Her short time in those tunnels had been what she considered the equivalent of a day in Hell. She couldn’t imagine a whole month spent down there and in the presence of thosethings.
But she was free of them, and as of now, she was still alive, which was more than she could say for those other women. Callie glanced away from him as tears pricked her eyes, and their screams reverberated through her head.
She hadn’t known them, but she mourned their loss. If they were anything like her, they’d done nothing to deserve their fate.
“Why did they keep you there for so long? Why did they have you there in the first place?” she asked as she tried to figure out why they were still alive when the others weren’t.
“Because they were trying to make me like them. And they almost succeeded,” he muttered to himself, but when her eyebrows shot up, he realized she heard him. “What’s your name?”
He was unwilling to delve further into his imprisonment. He was too unstable to rehash what they did to him. It would only infuriate him and cause him to unravel further.
Callie hesitated as she debated giving him a fake name, but in the end, she decided against it. With everything going on, there was no way she would remember to respond to any name that wasn’t hers, and she suspected lying to the crazy vampire wasn’t the best way to ensure her survival.
“Callista, but I go by Callie.”
“Callie,” he murmured and tugged at the ends of his grimy hair. “That’s pretty.”
She lifted an eyebrow at this statement; he was the weirdest, ex-inmate, half-deranged, lethal vampire she’d ever encountered. Though he seemed a lot less murderous than those freaks who chased them through the tunnels, and at least he didn’t catch on fire in the sun.
She’d been trying not to do it, but she glanced at the burning bodies as heat radiated off them. The flames were starting to spread to the floor. With as old and rotten as this place was, it would go up in no time.
Uneasiness churned in her belly as she shifted and glanced at the door again. He couldn’t mean to make them stay here for much longer, could he?
“And you are?” she asked as she returned her attention to him.
“Lucien.”
“I’d like to say it’s nice to meet you, Lucien, but I’d be lying.”
A small smile played at the corners of his full mouth as he tilted his head to study her. “Itisnice to meet you, Callie, and that is the truth.”
She didn’t know how to take that, and thankfully she was saved from having to figure it as he continued.
“We have to get out of here. As soon as the sun sets, they’ll be hunting us. We only have a day to put as much distance between them and us as possible.”
Callie gulped. “You could let me go.”
“And where would you go? Home?”
“Yes. And I would never reveal to anyone what happened here tonight or what you are, or”—she waved a hand at the burning bodies—“what they are. I swear it. Besides, no one would believe me if I did try to tell them.”
