3. Knox

CHAPTER THREE

KNOX

The man ... creature? Vampire. The guy was a vampire. I wasn’t some kind of huge reader or anything, but everyone had seen a Dracula movie at some point, hadn’t they? Red eyes, pale skin, long fangs... what the hell else could he be?

And I’d killed his mother, another vampire.

Except, he didn’t look much like me or Pidge when we were eleven and five and our mom had died. He looked more like I might if Mutt fell off a building to his death. Like he’d just been freed from shackles, and he thought he might be able to fly if he tried hard enough.

Could he? Dracula could, in some of the movies.

The notion that the crazy woman who’d screamed at me for trying to help her had been somehow holding him in check was... well, I didn’t know what to do with that. She’d been awful, and I didn’t want to imagine my life if she were the boss of me. But the look on his face didn’t bode well either.

A guy I was pretty sure drank blood wasn’t supposed to look like a kid on Christmas morning, ready to open his presents. Chances were his presents were of the human vein variety.

My human veins, if the way he was looking at me were any indication.

I took a step back, or rather, I tried to take a step back. He didn’t let me pull away from him. His intense crimson eyes were trained on my face, memorizing every line of me like it was his fucking job. A minute ago, he hadn’t wanted me to look at him, so what was this?

Unnatural urges, the woman had said in the middle of her angry tirade. Unnatural urges.

I knew what an unnatural urge meant, to a certain kind of person. I’d never... that was to say, I’d never had much time to give urges a lot of thought, let alone whether they were natural or not. First Mom had died, and then I’d had to get a job, because Dad, hard as he’d tried, couldn’t take care of us. Not between the poor pay he got as a janitor at the factory and the booze he spent most of it on.

Then I’d fallen in with the local guys, and thought I’d found a chance at comfort for the first time in my life, but before I’d had a real chance to start exploring the way I’d felt about my buddy Max, I’d been in prison, and had realized Max wasn’t really much of a buddy at all. He couldn’t even be bothered to check in on Pidge for me.

Then in prison, most of my thoughts surrounding “urges” had been about avoiding them, and more, avoiding people who had them. I’d learned quick how to incapacitate a guy and escape, and since my cellmate had been as much a nobody who wanted to avoid the others as me, it had worked out in my favor.

But now, here I was, facing the human—or inhuman—personification of my own urges. He was beautiful. Yeah, I’d said handsome, because guys tended to get offended by words like pretty. But he was beautiful. Smooth, perfect skin, high cheekbones, sparkling eyes, even if they were red... he was hardly even human-looking. More like a perfectly drawn comic book character, without a single flaw or pimple or anything.

But I couldn’t say any of that to him, because he wasn’t looking at me like he wanted my dick. He was looking at me like he wanted to bathe in my blood and leave my body to burn with his mother’s.

“I... I’ve got to take care of my sister. She needs me,” I said, and my voice came out as a strangled whisper. “I can’t leave her. I can’t. She’s my responsibility.”

That caught his attention, and he cocked his head, considering, eyes narrowed. He blinked slow, like a cat, twice. Then he turned to the open safe, and the money. “You want money for your sister?”

“She... there’s a man who, he says she owes him a lot of money, and if we don’t pay it, he’s gonna make her work it off. She’s real smart. She deserves better than this. And it’s my fault for ending up in prison anyway, if I hadn’t, she?—”

He held up a hand to cut me off, then looked at his own hand, lowering all but one finger, and so very slowly, pressing it to my lips. Just a soft touch, his smooth finger pad to my lips, but it sent a shiver through my whole body, and for some reason, that made him smile.

His fangs weren’t as terrifying, suddenly. I didn’t know if they’d gotten shorter, or if maybe he was drugging me into not being scared of him. Was that a thing bloodsucking creatures of the night did? How the hell would I know? Vampires were supposed to be fictional.

“There is enough money in the safe to pay off this debt of your sister’s?” he asked me, voice lower than before, and it made my pants feel tighter. Like—fuck—like we were lovers, and he was talking dirty to me.

I opened my mouth to answer, but my tongue was too dry, too clumsy to form words, so I just nodded against his finger, still pressed to my lips.

The smile that curled its way onto his lips was... I didn’t know if it was heaven or hell, but it promised both, and some small, horrible part of me wanted to see what came of it. What he would do to me, given the chance. That part was completely separate from the loud, screaming part of me that was screeching to push him into the fire with his mother and run as far and as fast as I possibly could. It pounded against the front of my mind chanting escape, escape, escape. Escape while you still can.

“Well then, Knox,” he told me, bringing his free hand to the top of my head, though he had to reach to get to it, since I was a bit taller than him. Then he shoved me down, down, down, onto my knees before him, and for some reason, I didn’t even try to stop it from happening. “I am Emmanuel, and if you want the money to pay your sister’s debt off, then you can call me master.”