Gamma No More - Book 3

It took about twenty more minutes of small talk, interrupted by a few pain-filled whimpers from Iris, during which neither Leif nor Alaric let their eyes leave Iris for long, before the phone rang once again.

This time Leif didn’t put it on speaker, confident that if Iris woke, Alaric would step in.

“Speak,” Leif listens, his face cold and hard.

“Bring him here immediately. Search his room, then search it again. Any potential methods of communication, broken or otherwise, need to be brought to me.

If necessary, you should destroy the room, but make sure you don’t overlook anything.”

He puts the phone down and turned to Alaric

“Are you in control, old friend?”

“I am, but I hope to god you make them pay.”

Not long after, Willow drags in a snivelling captive with one hand, as a Thrall hands over a file and phone to Alaric, it takes Toni a few seconds for her to place the face of the man in front of her.

“Edwards,”

Only one word comes from Leif’s mouth, but it’s filled with cold threat, causing the human to flinch. His eyes were already wide as he was forcibly dragged further into the room. Tyra is licking her lips in Toni’s head, at his prey like response.

“Lord Leif, I swear ….”

“Silence!”

Slowly he gets up and dismisses Willow before he grabs Edwards’s right wrist, the skin going white under the pressure of his grip, dragging him to the bloodstain on the floor, forcing him to kneel in front of it.

“Did you do this? Did you attack Iris?”

“Never Lord Leif, she…”

He’s cut off by the look Leif gives him, but Edwards’s eyes are darting around the room and his heart rate spikes as he answered with a lie.

Toni can smell the increased sweat response above the fear response, but all he does is lift Edwards by the wrist he is grasping, sniffing his hand before running his tongue along it in a rough, almost vicious way.

“Odd that I can taste blood on you then, isn’t it? Have you perchance cut yourself recently?”

“Y..e..s, Yes My Lord,”

His voice trembling grasps at any chance he has.

Leif yanks his captive’s arm to his mouth and bites down hard, drinking deeply as a yelp of pain leaves Edwards’s mouth before he released it.

His other hand comes up to grasp Edwards’s throat, squeezing so that his breath comes out in harsh rasps, enough to mark and scare, but not enough to kill him, Edwards’s fingers are desperately trying to peel off Leif’s hands from around his neck.

“Odd, I tasted blood type A on your hand, quite sweet and healthy and you, well you are a common, really quite disgusting if I may say so, O, you need to alter your diet if your blood is anything to go by,”

He drops his indifferent tone, sounding far more dangerous now, his mask of civility dropping.

“Let’s try this again.”

He sounds out each of his next words one at a time, as if talking to an imbecile,

“Did… you… attack… Iris?”

Edwards makes a gurgling sound and nods, prompting Leif to release him immediately. Edwards crumples to the floor with a gasp, his hands desperately trying to remove the handprint from Leif’s grip on his neck.

“Why?”

The reply comes out as a barely audible croak, but with two vampires and a wolf in the room, the answer doesn’t need to be loud to be heard

“She found me. I got lost and ended up here…”

His head is hanging down.

Leif grabs his hair, dragging his head back to look him in the eye. His voice is cold and emotionless, the perfect killing machine swinging into action.

“Let me explain what lies ahead of you if you hold information back or lie to me.”

His free hand grabs hold of Edwards’ arm again, twisting it until he yelps in pain, his tone remaining cold, clinical, almost disinterested.

“A thousand years ago, torture was quite the art form and My Liege allowed me to become quite the proficient.”

A twisted smile appears on Leif’s face almost as if he relives a memory

“Learning how to break each bone individually is a skill you don’t forget.

Did you know, that if you spread them out then the victim doesn’t pass out, feeling each break over many hours is far more effective than an all-out assault that lasts less than half an hour causing you to pass out, don’t you think?”

Edwards whimpers in terror at the idea

“The best bit,”

Leif crouches down, never letting up on the pressure, but the changing angle forces a scream out of the human.

“I can force a little vampire blood into your system to speed up your healing. Repairing your bones will be a mere overnight task, although it won’t be pain free.”

Leif smiles evilly, his next words coming out so slowly dragging each one to make an impact as Edwards’s eyes dart between them all, as if hoping to find someone that will stop this nightmare for him, but he finds no compassion in either Alaric’s or Toni’s face.

“Allowing me

…to re-break them,

…over and over again

Until you beg me to listen to your darkest secrets from your childhood, the first time you stole something, what you did at night alone to pleasure yourself.

There will be nothing, and I mean nothing, that I do not know about you in the end; you will beg me to listen to your every secret, anything, just to make me stop.

But for now, I think a lesser injury will get the message across.”

He lets one of his fingers take on a talon like form, digging it deep into Edwards’ biceps, drawing it along his arm as he listens to him scream in pain.

“I’d try not to draw attention to yourself; our newest vampire is going to be thirsty when she wakes again.

It would be a shame if you were between us when she woke. Newborns have sometimes ripped their first live feed apart while searching for their veins and I’d hate to waste my blood on having to heal you, just to get the answers I need.

Now explain to me once more why you were in my office and leave nothing out this time or you will feel pain like you have never, ever, felt before.”

Edwards choked back a sob, Toni had to hand it to Leif, the mental imagery he had just given to the human, had put the fear of his God into him, it would probably have done the same to her, mental torture at its finest.

As someone trained to inflict both pain and fear in people, she had a cold, detached side of her that had marvelled at how Leif had delivered the message, recognising a master at work, before finally drawing blood and pointing out Iris was in the room, was just an extra layer of terror, but underneath it all, she was sure that he could talk so clearly about it because, like her, he had a dark past.

She watched Edwards holding his arm to his body, trying to mask the smell of blood, but as Leif takes a step toward him, he squeals and starts talking.

“Please don’t hurt me again, I’ll tell you everything…

There’s a man

He wanted information on Vampires, specifically the purebloods, but no one had seen one for decades.

He thought that either they’ve left the continent or become too weak to take action, maybe that they were getting too old.”

His eyes are flicking between Leif and Alaric, as his tongue darts out nervously to wet his lips

“He told me, I’d get ten thousand a month if I got onto vampire land to find out what happened to them, but there’s only two ways to do that and I wasn’t about to sign my life over and become a Thrall.

I tried to get someone on the inside, Jessie, a cousin of mine, you may have known him as Slugger, but he couldn’t tell me shit about any purebloods and then you kicked him out and I lost all chance of gaining more information.

Until you made her a protected”

He looks towards Toni

“I was at a loss, but then she stumbled into my bar just after wolves were sniffing around looking for her.

I knew I’d probably get caught, but they offered a lot of cash and it seemed a way to get paid twice.

No one tells you how bad it is here, being fed on… I couldn’t take it for much longer and worse, I still had nothing to give him.

In all my time here, I’ve never seen the Purebloods. I was sure I would.

Then I got a call from a new number… told me if I didn’t get results, then my slate would need to be settled and it didn’t look good for me.

I didn’t think you were in the castle, so I broke into your office, found a file that mentioned the Prince and took it. I was going to read through it and then send images to him.

Hoping that was enough for him to know that the Prince wanted a treaty with wolves, so the purebloods couldn’t be that strong anymore.

But Iris caught me. She was about to call the Thralls, so I panicked.

I didn’t mean to hurt her, I swear.”

“Names?” Leif’s voice demanded a response

“I only know the one in charge as Tane. I swear it’s the only name he’s ever given me. The other, the one that threatened me, was Parker.

But I didn’t have time to read the file after…. Well, I ran back to my room, hid the file and washed the blood away. I knew there’d be an investigation, and I needed to lie low.”

“First or second names?”

“I don’t know. I swear it’s all they gave me.”

“Human, Wolves or Vampire?”

“I don’t know, I was only ever had contact by phone

But Iris, I didn’t mean to hurt her. She had always been polite to me. I didn’t think I’d hurt her that badly.

Then later the alarms went off, and I hid the file. I haven’t had the chance to tell anyone anything.”

The room falls to silence briefly. Something is nagging in Toni’s head.

“What’s your first name and the name of your pub?”

Leif looks at her with a question on his face

“Jim, I own the Nags Head,”

Slowly the wheels turn in her head until the realisation hits her

“JENH, the unknown tenth line….

By the Goddess, he’s good.”

“Care to share?” Leif asked, unable to make any sense of what she just uttered.

“Not with him here” She nods to Edwards

“Don’t worry about him. The moment he killed Iris, his life was forfeit. He will be an old man before he’s released from our control if he makes it that far.

Alaric, take him to your newborn chambers and chain him there. He has no rights to move about the castle, nor communicate with anyone anymore.

He is yours to feed from once we wean Iris onto you, supplemented with blood bags of course, but give him healthy iron-rich food… he doesn’t taste nice, like stale musty blood at the moment, and, when she’s ready, he will be her first live host, newborns find it so hard to use their hormones to make the feeding pleasurable.. and he will deserve everything he gets.”

Leif’s eyes have a mischievous glint in them

“But I need him alive. His punishment has only just started, but Jenna may wish to see him before we agree his last punishment, so he needs to be more than just barely alive.”

Alaric grins, but it’s a satisfied, dangerous one before he answered

“Understood. I will ensure he eats healthy foods. I won’t have Iris’s first feed be a sour one, although I’d still like to feed Iris for the next week, unless you disagree?”

“Not at all. The longer she feeds from one of us, the easier it will be for her. Please raid my personal blood supply, to remove any nasty aftertaste, he may leave.” He nods towards Edwards.

Edwards lets out a keening wail as he’s dragged away by Alaric, who is whispering, explaining exactly what he plans to do to him.

As Toni watches him dragged away, she searches her morals, trying to see if she feels sorry for Edwards, but in reality, she has no problem with the actions that were taken against him.

Driven by greed, he deserved whatever Alaric would throw at him, and she was pretty sure that, like Leif, he had a lot of experience in keeping people alive when they would prefer not to be.

Once they are alone, she talks him through the account information in full, about the top six entries of the payments, all of whom are packs involved in the current unrest, that there were three more on the list they were investigating, then the tenth entry they hadn’t been able to identify, JENH, Jim Edwards, Nags Head.

The person trying to grasp an understanding of the current strength of the vampires is also the person who is behind most of the assassinations she had to carry out and is involved in the werewolf pack unrest.

It’s taken her a while to explain everything she knows so far, but she sits back and watches Leif digest the information.

He paces the office for a while before he speaks

“I’ll have to inform Prince Einar. This is disturbing, to say the least.

I agree, it seems likely that Tane is the person most likely to need to ward their house; your hunch of finding those with enough money is a good place to start.

I can rule out several vampires now, the top three generations all have fairly reasonable access to His Highness or his brother, and a few of the fourth generation as well, none of them would need to investigate their current status, in fact, it makes it less and less likely it’s a vampire, but not impossible.

But what is worrisome is it is all coming to a head. The unrest now cannot be a mistake and is too widespread to be a coincidence. Whatever the plans were, we can assume, he’s deep into execution, not development stage.”

Toni has to agree, they’ll need to work fast to work out what’s happening and put a stop to it if they can, but together, they hash out a basic framework of a plan.