Moonlit Surrender
Chapter Seventeen

"Wakey-wakey, princess," mocked a shrill voice.

Lucy felt her cheek slapped firmly a couple times and then slowly opened her eyes, squinting through her lashes at the single light bulb swinging from the dingy ceiling. Her blurry vision finally focused on the uneven rhythm of the bulb and then suddenly and without warning, she felt her stomach turn sour and rolled to the side of whatever surface it was she was bound to and retched up what little contents were still inside.

She heard an awful giggle from across the room. It was almost a mechanical sound, and strangely familiar.

She felt a steady piercing pain settle into her skull and tried to raise her hand to rub her temples, but found not just her one wrist, but all her limbs strapped down to a rusted and stained gurney that could've been almost as old as she was. Lucy groaned in pain and fear, trying in vain to break her bonds.

"There's no use in that, Ms. Beckett. You're just going to wear yourself out further," a woman spoke from the direction of the laugh.

Why do I know that voice? Lucy asked herself.

"The master will be here shortly to deal with you."

"What?" Lucy croaked through the scratch of a dry throat and the sour taste of vomit still on her tongue. She fought her restraints again, harder this time, and raised her aching head to replace Doris at her side and the towel she had been abducted in long gone. "Professor Pemberley?"

"Yes, Ms. Beckett. Here I am." She grinned wide and gave a proud twirl, her lanky body wrapped in a red dress far too bold and far too low cut for her awkward frame. "Aren't I glorious?" Lucy was confused beyond words.

"I haven't shown you the best part." She giggled like an enthusiastic child. "Aren't my fangs just beautiful? Look!" She leaned over the gurney and gave a frightful, animalistic hiss just inches from Lucy's face.

She wanted to scream, but her breath caught in her throat and she gasped with a muted flinch beneath her bonds.

"I never thought I'd meet a more wonderful man than John, but oh, what a spectacular being! He is a god among our mortal realm - your mortal realm that is. John led me on for years, dangling his gift like a carrot, but the master welcomed me to the fold with open arms and here I am. I'm what I was always meant to be!" She ran her bony hands up her body and into her faded brown hair as if she were bathing in beauty itself.

"I don't understand," Lucy rasped hoarsely once more. "Where am I? What did you do to me? Where's John?"

"John is probably just now realizing your absence and fluttering about his little apartment like the worried mama bird he is," Doris giggled. "As for your current state, it'll wear off soon enough. A little chloroform never hurt anybody." She shook her head in an attempt to clear her fuzzy mind and focus but the thoughts kept coming. Pemberley. Chloroform? Master? Those fangs! She's a vampire now!

"I know who did that to you, Doris, and you should know he's very dangerous. You shouldn't be helping him. Let me go and we can go get John. He'll help us."

A sinister chuckle bubbled out of Doris. "Oh you have no idea. Silly little girl, trifling with monsters and powers far beyond your limited understanding." She turned to a rolling medical table, blocking its unseen utensils as she organized them. "You just walk in with your little black skirts and your globs of eyeshadow and think you can steal the gift I've been working to get from John for years now. I spent so long trying to figure it out - how to do it - and all this time it was so simple, so easy. All I needed was to drink some of his blood in exchange." She shook her head in disbelief. "Maybe I should be thanking you. If you hadn't wrapped his cold, dead heart around your finger, the master might never have found his leverage, might never have found me. All was well under way by the time John caught a whiff of the master's plans. I told him what would happen if he snubbed me. I told him I would turn him in to whoever would listen." Lucy felt the nausea returning as she tried to focus past the swinging light casting a slow rhythm of shadows back and forth over her captor. "John already knew about Lerexus before he broke things off with you. I don't understand what you're talking about."

She scoffed. "Who do you think tipped the master off? Who do you think brought him here? John found out too late. He's always underestimated me - as an educator, a department head, a woman! And now as one of the creatures of the night." She turned around with a long syringe giving it a couple taps to knock any air bubbles out before approaching the gurney where Lucy was still helplessly strapped. "It's over, child. We've already won. John is a dead man walking, and deservedly so. Make your peace with it. All that's left in your control is to pray to this fallen god for mercy that you might be spared the same fate."

Her eyes widened in fear as Doris approached and she fought harder against the sturdy straps fastened tightly around her wrists and ankles. Finally, understanding the true depth of danger she was in, she screamed. She screamed for help and then in unintelligible shrieks of terror as she convulsed on the gurney and tried in vain to flail out of her restraints.

"Hold still," Doris hissed angrily as she attempted to line the needle up to plunge into a vein in the hysterical girl's inner elbow. "You're just prolonging the inevitable!"

Adrenaline coursed through Lucy, fear pushing her body beyond the headache splitting her skull in half, through the fatigue she could feel in her bones, and past the flop sweat of a sour stomach. She thrashed against her captor and to her surprise, she saw the syringe thrown from Pemberley's skeletal thin fingers to the floor. With a triumphant grin, she watched it roll across the stained and cracked tiles, all the way to a corner of the room cloaked in shadow where the meager light of the swinging bulb could not reach. Before she could celebrate the small victory, out of those shadows she saw the same two glowing animal eyes she had witnessed in John's living room before she had lost consciousness. What emerged from the darkness was not what she was expecting. First, there was a foot stepping into the dim light, pale and bare with long, pointed white nails. The foot soon brought forth the hem of heavy white robes draped over a long and lean frame like an ancient Roman politician, and then an arm reaching down to pluck the syringe out of the dust and grime of the weathered medical room floor with long slender fingers with matching pointed white nails. Another step brought the other foot and arm, and then a long proud neck supporting the regal, yet sunken features of a young man even paler than John or Doris. The skin stretched over his high cheekbones seemed wafer thin and almost translucent, with his piercing violet eyes set on either side of a large aquiline nose beneath a serious brow and the whitest hair she had ever seen on a person, straight and silky, hanging longer than her own where it stopped at his elbows in a stark halo about him. Below his bookish nose was a grimacing mouth with plump lips that seemed out of place set on a broad and powerful jawline. At some angles, there was a soft beauty to his foreign features, then at others a sharp harshness. He was nothing like the lurking demon she had expected to emerge.

For a moment, Lucy thought she was watching a ghost float across the room to her. The strange Romanesque specter stopped at her bedside and she saw now that his luminescent glare was the palest of blue with visible blood vessels mixing in their red hue to create the illusion of an unnatural pinkish color staring down at her.

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"Master," Doris whispered reverently, then retreated to the medical tray to wait silently for his instruction.

"Lerexus, I presume," Lucy stated with contempt.

The ghostly Roman said nothing, not so much as acknowledging her words to him, instead inspecting her like an item on display at a market. His sharp, icy fingers trailed over her skin, leaving a trail of goosebumps and shudders as he looked her over. Finally, he spoke, his voice not at all what she anticipated out of a vile villain. A gentle voice, smooth as honey, commented to himself, "What unholy fruit, said I, could have tempted the proud Johnathan Wright to such demise? What sweet ruin could tempt him out of his cowardly hiding? What specimen could be sweet enough for him to debase himself with and stoop below his godhood to sup?" He mocked incredulously, "Betwixt two thighs of a mere mortal? This is what he chose to risk his livelihood on?" He turned to Doris in utter disbelief, then looked back at Lucy. "Tell me, girl, what gold resides between those legs?" His hand landed roughly on her naked mound and squeezed as if testing her ripeness. "What wisdom did he replace hidden between those breasts?" The hand moved over her clammy abdomen to her exposed breasts. "Did you whisper to him the secrets of the universe as you seduced him from his proud throne? I see nothing of exception before me, no grand temptation that could keep a man from embracing his birthright of immortality. You are nothing and he was a fool to meddle in mortal affairs. It will be his undoing, at long last." Lucy had never felt so violated, had never felt so repulsed by someone before despite his beckoning features. She felt her queasy stomach turn but swallowed the vomit back down so as not to give him the satisfaction of her disgust and fear. "He was just about to give up his running. I could feel it. So lost was he, so utterly alone. He would have sought me out and begged for my forgiveness and I would have restored him to his old greatness! He would've been a god again!" the albino hissed. "Now, he works against me. He curses my name. You have poisoned him against me - against his own kind. You have been a thorn in my side and it is time I plucked you out." He moved to the end of the gurney and unfastened her left ankle.

A flash of hope shot through her and she tried to fight but was quickly crushed by the realization that his strength holding her leg down was far more powerful than any leather strap. "I didn't poison him against anyone!" she shrieked fearfully, struggling in vain. "He hid so you wouldn't kill him!"

The pale Roman paused momentarily to hear her out. "He thinks I demand his life?"

She nodded through the quakes of terror racking her body.

A cruel smile snaked across his plump lips. "Even better." He turned to Doris who was standing to the side with unhidden glee. "We shall let him come to us then. Let us leave a trail of breadcrumbs to his delectable prize." Doris' unbridled joy died in a grimace. "But, Master, you promised," she whispered meekly. "You said she would die." "Silence," he hissed angrily without turning to acknowledge her. "We shall speak later of your disobedience here."

"Yes, Master," she whispered dejectedly.

He unfastened Lucy's other leg and crawled up onto the gurney and held her right leg down with the weight of his knee.

Panic began to hum through her as he pressed her legs open while towering over her, an ancient specter from another age, fearsome and unstoppable.

"P-Professor Pemberley!" she beseeched. "Doris! Help me!" She watched in horror as the woman stood idly by with an amused smile stretching her small mouth and then watched as he began to lower himself to her. She started talking to herself, this isn't happening. This can't be real. You're not really here. You're safely tucked away in John's arms far away from here. Don't look. It isn't real.

She squinted her eyes closed and turned her head away in an attempt to be somewhere else, someone else, to be anything but herself here in this room under this beautiful and terrifying visage of this malevolent immortal violating her vulnerability. A sharp, stabbing pain in her leg forced her back into herself and she looked down her naked body to see him sinking his razor-sharp teeth into the artery tucked away in her inner thigh. He held her down roughly and sucked her lifeblood from her veins with a painful force. Gasps of shock slipped from her, then groans, then all out cries until she was pleading for him to stop. His teeth felt sharper than John's, longer, and the force of his thirst felt like he was ripping her blood from her veins, tearing the wound wider with his fevered drinking as he feasted sloppily, letting her blood pool beneath her. Her protests soon withered away as the fatigue of blood loss overcame her and though she still felt the pain shooting through her whole body, she fell back limp in unwilling surrender.

"Master," Doris' mousy voice spoke over the sound of his slurping and moaning, but he did not acknowledge her. "Master? Master, I think you need to stop. Master, you said you wanted her alive. You'll kill her before your plans can come to fruition!" She lunged forward and grabbed his shoulders to yank him off the gurney.

Her brazen action earned her a backhand that launched her backwards into the medical cabinets across the room.

The Roman's eyes were all pupil, wide and dark like a shark, and his ghostly skin and the neck of his robe were stained crimson as he looked around the room wildly. He licked his lips and slowly composed himself, his eyes fading back to their pinkish hue.

Doris approached him meekly to offer a hand towel.

He snatched it from her thanklessly and wiped down his face and hands as he nodded for her to complete whatever phase of his new plan they were at and left the room without another word.

Lucy lay on the gurney, weak, her pulse slow in her ears, and seeing spots, positive she was floating.

"As if Lerexus would stoop to defiling his body by entering yours, foolish girl," Doris scoffed. "John clings too tightly to his humanity and is all the weaker for it. The master is above human vices. The feeding was to leave a trail, not a prelude to rape." She unfastened the leather straps around Lucy's wrists, no longer worried about an attempt at escape from her, and took her time binding her back up with rope before slinging her over her supernaturally strengthened shoulders to haul down the many stairs of whatever abandoned medical building they had brought her to.