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An hour later Shayna sat next to Marius in a quiet part of the Catskill system, in a private room within the complex. She sipped iced tea and kept rubbing her forehead. Rumy sat opposite her, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped together.
She’d been trying to express her concern over Daniel’s activities, but felt her data was too vague to make a strong enough impression on the men. “All I’m saying is that I think Daniel’s been up to something for the past year. I think that’s why he’s been absent so much from the Dark Cave system.”
Marius sat next to her, but shook his head. “The women can’t know that for sure, that he was rarely there. It seems completely out of character for him. The man loves to spend a good portion of his time hurting his slaves.”
“I’m not saying he didn’t do that. All I’m telling you is that the women knew when he was in residence and when he wasn’t. The guards’ behavior alone would tend to confirm their side of things.”
Rumy glanced at Marius. “She has a point.”
Marius met Rumy’s gaze for a long moment, then shifted to stare at Shayna. “So you think Daniel’s in this unknown cavern of massive proportions, but doing what?”
Shayna shifted, angling her body toward him. She even put her hand on his arm. “What if he’s building infrastructure.” She then related what the women had told her about the IQ tests. “Maybe he’s been using the most intelligent slaves to help him do basic accounting, manage projects, order building supplies, that kind of thing. That way he could definitely keep his whole operation on the down-low.”
Marius stared at her. “He administered tests to the women? Why is this the first I’ve heard of anything like this?”
Shayna shrugged. “Maybe nobody thought to ask the refugees.”
Marius laced his hands behind his head and released an exasperated huff of a sigh. She could feel that his head had started hurting and that a kind of oppression had taken him over. She tried to imagine yet again what his life had been like, what it was to be a vampire in this culture, all the ramifications, and to have fought against Daniel for four centuries.
Everything was still so new to her that even with her trained mind, she couldn’t quite fit the pieces together. Of course she’d only been exposed to the most violent aspects of this world for an extremely short period of time. How could she possibly understand either Marius or his world sufficiently to make a real assessment of what she’d learned tonight?
Rumy leaned back in his seat, folding his arms over his chest. His tongue made an appearance, touching the inside edges of his ever-present fangs. “You k
now, I hate to say this, but I’ve always wondered about Daniel. What a waste of talent to build a massive sex-slavery operation when he could have put his abilities to use on behalf of our world. Hell, he could have founded his own university.”
Shayna couldn’t help herself and started to giggle, which turned quickly into full-out laughter the more she thought about what Rumy had said.
“What’s so funny?”
She slapped at the air a couple of times. “I don’t know. Daniel as the founder of a university? What would the classes entail? Basics of Abduction One-oh-One, How to Create Propaganda for the Complete Sex-Slavery Operation, an Introduction to BDSM, Including Tools of the Trade? Of course those sound more like community college trade classes than university-level. Maybe more like, Ethnography and the Use of Torture as a Form of Sexual Expression.” Maybe her fatigue from having been battling in Marius’s world almost nonstop had begun showing or perhaps her youth, because neither of the vampires cracked a smile.
“Shayna, are you all right?” The sound of the slight lisp that Rumy used in her name—and all because of a vampire version of Viagra—set her off again.
She laughed herself out after a few minutes during which time Marius brought her a cup of what turned out to be fairly weak coffee. He sat down beside her again, occasionally patting her knee.
She sipped the warm brew and suddenly missed Seattle and an espresso that had real weight. She sniffed the air. She could smell the water from either a nearby underground river or a waterfall, both of which were in abundance in this world. Seattle was a very damp environment as well because of the city’s thirty-eight inches of rain each year and the proximity of Puget Sound.
After a few minutes, she regained her composure. She apologized to the men, shoving her hair away from her face with her free hand.
Marius rose to his feet and started to pace. She knew that his level of anxiety had grown. He paused at one point and told her about the new uniforms on Daniel’s security detail with the hawk emblem. “Rumy said that there were strange markings above the silver hawk’s head.”
Shayna stared at him. “A hawk? Didn’t you once tell me that besides courage, in your world it’s also a symbol of domination?”
He nodded.
Shayna took out her phone and crossed to Rumy. “Did they look like this?”
He angled his head a couple different ways to get the best view of the photos. “I think so, something like that.”
She looked up at him, then at Marius. “Do you think Rumy could share that with me the way I share images with you—telepathically, I mean?”
Marius got a funny look on his face, something she couldn’t at first define, until his emotions hit her like a hurricane-force wind. He clearly didn’t want her communicating so intimately with Rumy, or any other man.
The way his possessiveness made her feel in that moment weakened her knees. She knew it was a vampire thing, but it was also very male and sudden images flew through her mind of making love with Marius just a couple of hours ago and of Marius lying on top of her, his front to her back, and still connected.
He sniffed the air and suddenly she was in his arms. He held her tight and rubbed his hand up and down her back, something he often did. You smell wonderful.
And the way you think about me, Marius, this possessive thing took me right back to bed. The suddenness of the memories has my head reeling. And Rumy’s grinning like an idiot.
