Susan Squires - [Companion Vampires 0] by The Hunger

Author:The Hunger [Hunger, The]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

John swam in and out of consciousness. It was dark. Jolting hurt his head. He wanted it to stop, but he knew it never would. At one point his stomach rebelled against the pain in his head and he vomited. Someone cursed him. A woman.

Later he woke more surely. He was in a carriage. Lavender water as well as something else, fainter, made his gorge rise again. He controlled it this time. Cinnamon? Beatrix. A glow suffused him. Beatrix.

He opened his eyes. Asharti stared at him from the corner of the coach.

“If you vomit again, I will punish you,” she said, and turned her head to look out the window. Her profile was bathed in moonlight. He was Asharti’s prisoner. He licked dry lips with a dry tongue. He had shot her dead, but she was not dead and neither was Quintoc. She had subdued him casually, without effort, though she was only a woman. He would say he had dreamed it. But here he was bound in a coach with a broken head, the woman who should be dead staring at him. Her eyes . . . her eyes had gone red. Surely that was a dream. Eyes weren’t red! His breath came shallowly. He couldn’t think about that. Escape. He must focus on escape. He tried to move his hands, expecting numbness. But they responded with a clank.

Shackles. He moved his feet and heard another clank. Glancing down, he saw his chains were fastened to a ringbolt in the wall of the coach. The coach was moving fast over good roads. How could he escape when he was shackled hand and foot in strange country? Even if he tore himself away they would hunt him down. A tendril of despair wound round him. He gathered his slender strength. The coach slowed and turned onto a rougher lane.

After what seemed an eternity the carriage stopped. The door was opened. Asharti rose. God, she was bringing him to a place where he could not escape!

She stepped out. Rough hands reached in for him. “Here is the key,” he heard her say. They slid the clanking chain through the bolt and pulled him from the carriage. His legs would not support him. Two massive brutes, one on either arm, carried him bodily up through crunching gravel to the massive doors of a sixteenth-century chateau, all stone gables and rounded Renaissance turrets pushing into the dark.

He mustered his senses and looked around. They had come across a causeway over a lake like a moat. The water was clogged with a tangle of plants, the causeway overgrown with weeds. He glanced up toward the chateau again and saw dark tongues of soot in the slit stone windows of the upper stories from a fire now some years distant. He shook his head to clear it. He knew this place. Chateau de Chantilly, once the seat of the grand Condé, head of the Bourbon-Condé dynasty, looted and brought to ruin by the mob in the first violent rush of the Revolution.

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