“One more day, and I win our little bet. One more day, and this’ll all be over, anyway.”
“What do you mean?” Maxine took a step back from the vampire masquerading as the huntress.
“Oh, shush. I’m merely saying it will be by the end of day three that I break them down. I promise you.” Bella gathered up the chain that had pooled on the top stair and began to wind it around her hand. “I do think I very much like having you on a leash, little dove. Are you sure you wish to choose the Master over me? I can be so very kind…so giving.”
“Enough.” She glared at him—her—whichever. “The answer is, and forever will be, no.”
Bella rolled her eyes and let out an exasperated sigh. “Fine. Well, we might as well eat with the two fools then get some rest, hm? I get to watch you while you sleep.”
“I dislike you. Deeply.”
Bella grinned, a cruel and feral expression on otherwise sweet features. “I know.”
8
Dinner had been awkward at best. They did not dare use the stove for fear of attracting the creatures they all knew were purposefully avoiding them. But it was better to be cautious, even with the eerie silence and the wards Alfonzo had placed on the home the day prior.
The wards that had clearly been broken by Zadok if he could traipse in and out without worry. She still shuddered at the idea of the vampire coming up through the sewers to invade the house as a swarm of rats. She tried not to dwell on it. Nor did she want to dwell on the fact that he was still sitting there in the room with her, masquerading as the blonde huntress, carrying on idle conversation and eating a plate of dry goods, cheese, bread, and some fruit they had managed to find in the house’s pantry.
Maxine thought it best to stay quiet. No one seemed to care. Alfonzo and Eddie weren’t cruel to her by any means, but neither were they her friends any longer. She had betrayed them, and they had responded accordingly.
So, it was with mild surprise that she was dragged into the middle of their growing debate as to what to do about their current predicament.
“What do you think, Maxine?” Eddie was sitting by the window, a revolver in his lap, watching for any trouble on the streets. But there was none outside but the dead who lay where they had been abandoned. They were not moving. For the moment. She did not fault the man his caution. “Should we retreat? Or keep going?”
“I…” She looked up to see Alfonzo and the false Bella also watching her, waiting for her answer, although for two very completely different reasons, she suspected. Poor Bella. I do hope she’s all right.
“She sides with the vampire,” Alfonzo grunted and ripped off a piece of bread from the partial loaf in front of him. “She can destroy him, but she won’t.”
“I have not decided. I don’t want to hurt him. But this…what he’s done cannot be allowed to continue.”
“What do you plan to do about it, then? Say he were here, right in this moment, what would you do?” Eddie asked. The young man was much less judgmental in his tone, and for that, she was grateful.
She shook her head. “I imagine I would beg him to stop. To take us from this place and go somewhere he and his creatures would not do so much wanton damage. I expect I would fail. Then I would be forced to decide whether I truly stand behind my convictions to stop him. I do not know if I can.”
“Why?” Alfonzo threw down a hunk of bread, and it clattered off his plate and onto the table in front of him. “How can you be so docile? So gullible? You say you wish to stop him, and in the same breath say you do not think you can. You are the first person perhaps since the dawn of our kind who can stop him, really stop him once and for all, yet you waver! Is it because he can touch you? Because you want him?”
“No—”
“Then tell me why, Maxine!”
She shrank back against the sofa cushion at the man’s rage. She understood it. She did not begrudge him. “I am a fool. I understand this. I find myself devoid of all the moral fabric I had