of the stairs, Eddie stood with the length of chain in his hand. He looked at her, sheepish and apologetic as he always was, and held out the shackles. “Sorry, ma’am.”
Shutting her eyes for a moment, she held out her wrists to him. “It isn’t your fault, Eddie.”
“I know. Still feel like shit for it.” He clasped the shackles around her wrists, clicking them into place. He slipped the key into his pocket and picked up the end of the chain to wrap it around his hand a few times.
“I would ask to be set free, so that I might defend myself. But…I have no means of doing so. I am helpless.”
“Far from it.” Alfonzo grunted as he peered out the patterned glass that framed her front door. “Something tells me the monsters that hunt the streets won’t hurt you.”
He was likely right. If the creatures obeyed Dracula, then she probably had little to fear from their claws. But it was, in the end, the same trap.
For something whispered to her that the things that haunted the usurping night were nothing but extensions of the man she would have willingly invited into her bed had the hunters not attacked them. She had kissed him. She had embraced him and had believed, like the child that she was, that she understood him.
No. She had only fallen victim to the lie he had told so many others. He had only shown her a facet of himself, the piece of the whole that she had wanted to see. Or perhaps this is his way of showing you the rest of him. What if you can weather this and love him still? But how would that ever be possible?
Alfonzo opened the door, brandishing his sword, and strode out into the darkness of the night with not an ounce of fear in his step. Bella followed him, the holsters along her body filled with the daggers and knives that on a moment’s notice she could use to fill the air around her. And beside her, Eddie the deadly marksman. Holding Maxine’s leash.
No matter what she did, she would either become a prisoner or a corpse.
It wasn’t until they reached one street over that she pulled up short. It looked as though a river had tried to overtake the cobblestone streets. Liquid ran between the stones, filling the gaps between them like grout. Wet and viscous, the substance shone in the gas lamps that were lit and now burned an unnatural, ghastly green tone.
It was not rainwater.
It was blood.
Bodies littered the sidewalk, strewn where they had been discarded. Some with huge chunks torn from their sides, some missing limbs. Eaten, abused, and tossed aside like broken toys. She covered her mouth with her hand, trying not to be sick, as if by that method alone she could hold back the bile that threatened to jump up from where it belonged.
But the chain was tugged, and she was pulled along behind the three hunters who acted as though the mayhem and slaughter were nothing out of the ordinary for them. Perhaps it wasn’t. She really had no concept of with whom she was dealing.
Step by step, avoiding the rivulets of blood as she walked on the raised portions, they progressed through the city.
They walked from street to street, heading closer to the center of the city. It was slow going. Carriages were overturned, and debris blocked their path. Several buildings looked like they had been demolished by something enormous and torn to pieces, blocking the roads. But everywhere they went, there was death.
He has done this. This is what dwells inside of him. This is what he has unleashed.
After maybe half an hour, they came across their first “living” creature. She could not say that was what it was at all. It was a long, gangly thing. Its skin was purplish in tone, yet sallow and decayed all the same. Its face was distended, as though someone had dug their fingers into a skull made of clay and dragged it forward, uncaring for the pain it might cause the recipient.
She could not even tell if it had eyes or simply sockets pulled out of proportion. Most important was its enormous set of teeth. Fanged, sharp, and rowed like the shark jaws she saw on display in the natural museum of science. Tattered flesh hung from its jaws, stringy and damp.
They had interrupted its meal.
A meal that had once been a man and was now little more than