Bloodsong Ch. 03

The look on Jack's face suggested that yes, he'd pondered such horrors at length.

"Fine. I'll confess that the fact that my aunt would have murdered you slowly and painfully if I suggested that I intended to make you my mate weighed into everything going as it did. Not wanting to ruin our relationship was still the deciding factor, however. If anything — if there is anything I regret, it's that I told you too soon. That I didn't wait until I knew beyond any doubt that I'd gotten your feelings to match mine."

"Why would I ever want to match your love, Jack?" Valerie smiled as softly as he'd spoken, words as measured as they were unfeeling. "It's worthless."

The pause that followed would have made a glacier shudder.

"Worthless."

"Is there an echo in here? Yes. Worthless. And useless, since at best it didn't prevent you from becoming a monster, and at worst inspired you to be more of one. You want time with me so I'll understand your feelings, but — I do. I've been aware of them for twenty-five years, and you have yet to give me a single fucking reason why I should care, and are you ever going to let me finish reading in peace or do I need to put a sock in it?"

"No." A smile burned its way onto Jack's face, at first with reluctance but eventually coming to glow like a thousand suns and stretching more grotesquely than if he had shifted his mouth. He cracked his neck, where a sloppy smear marked the spot where she had let the sword take a bite off him. "Now? Now we do this the other way around."

Valerie caught up with what she saw — tendons straining as Jack tossed his head back to expose his neck further, the lack of a cut to go with the drying blood — extracted the meaning of his words, processed it all and, moving with the dreamy sluggishness of a sleepwalker, ran a finger along the sword blade. The skin split cleanly, only to heal just as neatly in instants, as it would if the cut was from an ordinary blade.

Jack leaned forward, further than the chains should allow, and—

Oh.

"Surprise," he drawled.

It was almost worth it to find out that the sword was a fake, since it meant that she could bury it deep in his gut without thinking twice. Jack grunted and looked down with an expression that tried to pass itself off as unflappable. The red metal — admirable work now that she knew it to be a forgery, Valerie had to admit — jutted out of his midsection. Around it, darker red blossomed and spilled onto the chair and floor when she pulled back the sword, like splatter painting gone wrong.

There was no way in creation that Jonathan's shirt would bounce back from this. Oh, well.

Jack still smiled, and didn't look like he planned on stopping. He ripped through the chains as though they were made of licorice strips, proving that the damper had likewise been tampered with, because of course it had. The most damning thing about all of it was how big an idiot she had been. She'd known she couldn't trust him. She hadn't trusted him. Yet she'd gone and relied on the very convenient device which he'd conveniently had in his pocket as her main means of controlling him, as though she didn't know what breed of snake she was dealing with.

Stupid, stupid, stupid . . .

Valerie cannon balled away from the table and still wasn't fast enough. She glimpsed Jack's hand in the corner of her eye before her head got caught in an iron grip and slammed into the floor. It took her a second to wobble her brain back to its rightful place, and by then, he had three tentacles out and was crouching down beside her, eyes shiny with delight.

Shit, Valerie thought. Shit.

He didn't bind her at once. He patted her hair, smug as anything, and grabbed her by the shoulders, lifting her so they sat on the floor facing each other. Valerie tried to headbutt him, though tentatively, since her head was still ringing. Jack evaded her and, gentle as if she were made of the finest china, as if he hadn't just rammed her against the tiles with no warning and without regret, cradled her neck and massaged the point at the back of her skull where the brunt of the pain radiated from. His other hand he lifted to her face.

Valerie tensed, then squirmed. Jack tutted his disapproval and scratched under her chin. She made out the damper's mark, still there, still blue, but fading by the second. Her lips parted to form a question. It went unspoken when he held her hand and she, in trying to snatch it away, realized something that immediately jumped to the top of her list of concerns.

She couldn't. Her arm didn't move as it should. It twitched in his grasp as he turned her palm up and traced the lines there. She commanded it to pull back, make a fist and strike him, make a claw and tear his face off. There was a reaction this time, but one that came in so delayed that Jack had no trouble working around it, and one she had to will and focus on strongly to manage.

"What—" She struggled however much she could as she was forcibly nestled in Jack's arms, since it wasn't just her hand, although her hand was the worst offender; her entire body had become slow to comprehend and obey the orders she gave it. "What did you—"

Jack shook his head, regarding her flailing attempts to break free with a mixture of amusement and annoyance, deflecting her attacks with chilling ease. Increasingly desperate, Valerie ran the events of the last few minutes through her mind, seeking an explanation for whatever this was.

Her eyes fell on the blue cup, sitting innocently where she'd left it.

The coffee. She swore under her breath, half wanting to deny and disbelieve, a quarter angry at herself for not having entertained the possibility of it being spiked, given that Jack had a history of doing exactly that. Then there was another quarter of her that felt nothing other than mystified, since she had searched him, and he couldn't summon poison out of thin air, so where by all the gods had he been keeping it?

"You didn't think I'd allow myself to be — I suppose we can call it 'captured' — without some assurance that I wouldn't remain a prisoner if the position stopped suiting me, did you?" Jack was telling her this as his hands swept wild strands of hair from her face and his palm came to rest under her chin again. He made her look up at him, landing himself on the business end of a death glare. He snorted. "Don't be mad that I outsmarted you, Val. It was bound to happen. Learn to be sporting."

"The sword, a fake." She could still form words, even if she had to concentrate on the motions of her tongue rather than it going where it ought to on its own. "The damper—"

"I'd already keyed it with my blood before you used yours, and they're single use; it's the first drop that counts. Made it easy to will off afterwards." Something seemed to occur to him. He shook his head with wry amusement. "You don't know how worried I was that you'd notice the shower ripped off the wall when you went to get those chains."

"Asshole," Valerie spat. The world couldn't decide whether to wobble or go frightfully still, like a movie that kept freezing and resuming. Her mind, at least, wasn't clouded by whatever she'd been given. "The coffee, poisoned?"

"Drugged," he corrected with an eye roll. "A harmless neuromuscular blocking agent. It should have had more of an effect by now, but I'm stunned it's working to begin with, what with all the sugar you dumped on top."

"So it wasn't in the . . ." she trailed off. Considered what the outcomes for this predicament would be and whether any of them could be turned in her advantage. In an unknown length of time, she'd be rendered incapable of putting up even the palest shade of a fight. The odds that she'd make it away and evade capture in her current state could be said, without sugarcoating or self-deluding, to be nil. She'd be caught and end up at the Mayfly, where Jack would use a functional damper on her to curtail further escape attempts. De-powered and in his power. A worst-case scenario to top them all.

Still, though the hand she'd been dealt was by all metrics a bad one, if she played it right . . .

"No, it wasn't in the sugar. Nor in the water. The blue cup — I thought you'd pick that one. The substance is colorless, so you wouldn't see it coating the bottom. You might have noticed the coffee tasting off, there was no helping it, but then you dumped half a pound of sugar in, so."

"How did you smuggle that crap in here, I went through your pockets—"

He gave her another pat on the head, condescending as anything.

"Not all of them. I confess, I'm glad you aren't acquainted enough with male underwear to realize that, but disappointed that doing a more thorough search didn't even occur to— ah, ah. Stop hitting me." She wasn't hitting him so much as lashing out at her surroundings. Targeting her strikes was a bust, but probability said she could land a blow by accident if she spread the attacks far and wide. Jack put a stop to it by enveloping her in a hug that shared more similarities with an attempt to smother and lifting her off the ground. "Up we go."

Valerie had feared that he would bypass the living room and take her to the jeep, trashing the best among the half-baked plans spinning around in her head. Instead, Jack made a detour towards the couch. He swept a tentacle over it to remove the pillows and remnants of knitting in progress, set her down and sighed when she immediately threw herself off, the movement clumsy and uncontrolled and ending with her hitting the side of the coffee table.

"Really, don't. You'll hurt yourself."

"What, are you jealous that someone is encroaching on your territory?" she snarled, fighting to right herself, to stand. Navigating her body felt like crossing a ship deck while drunk. If she could bring herself to focus, get in sync with the swinging of her disobedient feet, she still wouldn't last two seconds in a fight, but she might coordinate a sprint towards the kitchen.

"Shh." Jack lifted her up and eased himself down on the couch alongside her, so they both lay sprawled with his arms bracketing her and tentacles looping loosely around her midsection. Valerie had seen his next move coming from miles away, but that didn't mean that she was prepared when he trapped her face between his hands and brought his mouth crashing down.

She smothered the urge to bite and kept her lips lifeless under his, thinking of nothing, ignoring how the kiss felt softer, warmer than it had any right to, how it tasted like regret and ancient, unpleasant history. It wasn't a long kiss, thankfully. Jack broke away, not letting go of her face, and combed his fingers through her hair, his expression unfocused, dreamy even. He smiled at her as if she were his lover, lying under him willingly. Like he expected her reaction to be, if not joyful, at least resembling something positive.

"What are you doing?" Valerie posed the question in the tone that a detached bystander might have employed. Carefully void of both accusation and emotion, as though his reply would be just a footnote in her assessment of the situation.

Jack eyed her, expression far from emotionless but so guarded that there was no decoding it.

"Giving you reasons. That's what you want me to do, isn't it?"

Valerie lost her dull facade like it had been torn off. Jack mistook her shock for horror — partly it might be horror, although flavored differently than what he was used to — and brushed his knuckles against her cheeks, his fingertips against her temples, his lips against her hair, with light touches meant to calm the storm he thought he saw brewing.

She sucked in a breath. Prayed that he'd hold off from kissing her mouth shut once words he didn't care for started spilling from it. His left hand — or was it a tentacle? They were pressed together so tightly and his touch so everywhere that she'd lost track of his limbs — drew lazy circles around her belly button.

"This is what you think should make me come around?" It sounded more ludicrous, somehow, said aloud. "One kiss, and I forget the blood on your hands, the lies, your unyielding inability to take a godsmade no? Is that seriously how you believe this will go?"

"Not just one kiss," Jack corrected. Their mouths clashed, his hurried, hers slack, offering no resistance when his tongue sought entry, sliding past her lips, flicking against her teeth, growing bolder when there was no fight from her end. It was like the bit where he'd held and helped himself to her in the jeep, all over again. Honestly, much as one shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth or complain about an excess of trust coming from a foe, Valerie worried about his short-term memory. All my compliance is only ever a smokescreen was a lesson one would think he'd remember.

She waited until Jack had roamed the whole of her mouth, until his priority shifted from exploring to eliciting a reaction beyond lackluster compliance. He prodded her tongue, chased it as it curled back in retreat and there, his tongue was past her teeth.

The noise he made was a combination of a pained gasp with a surprised exclamation, only with the air going in the wrong direction. Rather than blowing his scream into her mouth, it was as though he sucked it inwards as he tried to dislodge his tongue from between her teeth.

Good luck with that, Valerie thought. If he tried pulling harder, he'd leave behind a piece.

Eventually Jack registered that much, since he changed tactics, applying pressure on the side of her jaw to pry it open. She let him succeed, finding that there were other hills more worth dying on.

"When you said you wanted to fix us—" she snarled, while Jack gulped noisily, as though spitting out the blood welled up in his mouth like a normal person were below his dignity. "Was this how you meant to go about it the whole time? You had twenty fucking five years to come up with a strategy and assaulting me was the best you could think of?"

"It was the one thing I hadn't tried already." His voice was rough, whether from the strain of holding back screaming or some more complex emotion. Valerie gave even odds to both. "You clearly didn't care about everything else I offered you, to be able to walk away as easily as you did. You didn't care for my company, our shared past, the comforts I can offer you, the life we could have together, the fact that I love you, every golden memory—"

"Don't forget your cursed fashion sense; I'm fairly certain I never cared about that." Flippant as she sounded, Valerie wanted nothing but to crawl into the couch and disappear from the face of the Earth. Jack responded to her attempt to sink deeper by pushing his full weight down on her until pent up springs dug into her back, leaving no room to avoid him further.

"—so in conclusion, I am left with no resort other than to make you want me for my body." His voice dipped in volume, turning feverish as he held her tighter, pressed all of himself against her. Valerie could close her eyes and still be aware of his shape. She knew likewise that if she could make one of her hands obey her unconditionally, it wouldn't work to budge him off of her. It would go splat against her forehead, or perhaps cover her mouth, which was hanging open in something a bit like horror, a bit like 'what the ever-loving shit?'. "Or, more properly, want me for what I'll do to your body. I'll show you. That's a promise."

Valerie considered explaining, like one would to a small and unrelentingly dim child, that dangling a carrot in front of a horse was only an efficient strategy if the horse liked carrots, wanted carrots and didn't have a host of primarily negative experiences relating to carrots.

In the end she saved her breath, knowing that the argument would fall on deaf ears.

Jack kissed her again. She was past the biding her time stage. Her teeth were digging in his upper lip from the get go, making obvious what she thought of his assurances. To her consternation, he only slightly adjusted his position while murmuring something like approval, and then he emulated her, nipping at her mouth until she stopped adding teeth to her own attack and his tongue could slide in, pushing insistently to goad hers into battle.

Valerie visualized the path laid out before her. Walked herself through steps that in normal circumstances she could have taken in her sleep. She'd have one shot and no more.

She let an arm drop off the couch with enough spasmodic flair that Jack would think nothing of it, if he noticed the movement to begin with. Her fingertips brushed the carpet. Her hand lolled loosely from her wrist, frustrating her to the point of screaming because she wasn't lacking strength; the problem was that the coordination to apply it where needed had gone to the dogs.

Doubts, too many, all inconvenient, bobbed up and down in her surface thoughts like ducks dunking for bread. Did her hand feel heavier than it had moments ago? Did her legs? She'd need her legs, so if the drugs weren't through with incapacitating her, she had to make a move now. By the same token, she couldn't risk failing because she'd hurried.

Jack's tongue was in her mouth. His palms framed her face. She'd have bitten him again if she wouldn't rather keep him distracted. Was she still touching the rug? The pad of her thumb had just brushed against something that registered as cold, not fabric. Yes! One of Jack's hands had left her face and moved to her neck, down, further down . . .

He interrupted his ravishing of her mouth to speak words that Valerie lacked the capacity to mind. She was too busy telling her sluggish neural pathways to please grip, grip. Her arm had somehow fallen just right; she only needed to convince her fingers to contract, the arm to bend at the shoulder and elbow. Grip, bend, swing. Pray her aim was, if not true, then not all the way off. One chance to make this work.

Hardness pressing against her hip. Jack's lips miming the movements of speech against her jawline, soundless, or perhaps there were words and they didn't reach her, what with the world having been put on mute. Grip. Bend. Eyes on the target. Eyes, the target.

Swing, and strike.

Sound turned on again, although Jack was likely having the reverse experience. The piercing noise that tore out of him was heinous. He fell back, off her, arms swinging around in their attempt to pull the knitting needle out of his ear. She'd failed to jam it where she wanted — blinding him would have been more useful than deafening him — but the strike had made up in strength for what it lacked in acuity, and with a bit of luck she'd given his skull a hard enough knock that he'd need a half minute to get himself in shape to chase her.

Valerie slid off the couch, sucked in a breath and made a mad dash, not for the exit that was pointless to reach for, but towards the door on her left that led to the kitchen. Her feet felt heavy, at first as if she were running through shallow, glurge-y water, then increasingly as if someone had strapped leaden weights to them. They tried to split in different directions. She forced them through the steps she'd outlined beforehand, realizing with quickly stifled concern that she was losing feeling everywhere below her knees, and just about tripped through the door and rolled into the kitchen before they gave out under her.

Fine, it was fine. She'd only used ten seconds. Judging from the cacophony behind her, Jack was gathering himself and sending the knick knacks on the shelves to meet their maker. Crash, there went those decorative plates. Still fine. She had a bit of time left, and that was enough to buy herself a little more.