Page 17 of Bought for Blood

Yves has the car door open before my foot leaves the last step. He’s the only one I trust enough to bring somewhere like this. His face asks nothing at all.

“À la maison, mon seigneur?”

“Oui. À la maison.” I settle into the seat as he takes the route home.

The compound passes the windows, armed guards on the fence line and at the gate. I should be paying attention. I don’t.

“Yves,” I say.

“Yes, my lord?”

“I bought myself an amusement tonight.”

“Very good, my lord.”

Floodlights swing past the glass. Then wire. Then trees. A standing appointment, at a figure I’ve already forgotten, for sole use of a vein no one else will touch.

The tremor is gone. The warmth goes with it, mile by mile. I reach after the taste anyway, testing whether it comes back if I approach it sideways.

It doesn’t. Tomorrow at dusk, it will.

Chapter 7

Serenity

The supervisor comes through on morning rounds with her clipboard, stops at my cell, and scans my tag through the bars. I look at her numbly. Jane Brown. She’s the only one who ever wears a name tag.

“You’re off the draw list.” She pushes thick-rimmed reading glasses up her nose as she makes a note on the clipboard.

I sit up on the cot, and a blanket I didn’t fall asleep with slides down into my lap. Second one. Heavier than the ward issue. “Since when?”

“Since today.” She’s already moving to the next cell.

“For how long?”

No answer. Her shoes squeak away down the aisle, and I sit there with my wrist half raised, a blanket I can’t explain in my lap, and nobody to ask about any of it.

“Mrs. Brown.” I get a hand around the bar. “My sister. You said you would take her my message. Did she get it?”

Her pen stops on the clipboard. It’s only a second. Then it starts again.

“I don’t make promises to stock,” she says. “Just be glad you’re off the list.”

Off the list. In a year, nobody has come off the list. The list is the whole reason any of us are fed at all. You go off the list one way, and it’s the way cell six went empty. That should frighten me more than it does.

The last draw was the last normal thing that happened before any of this. Three tubes, same as always. Then there was him.

Is that what this is about?

I lie back down slowly and keep still. I don’t trust any of it.

Don’t get used to it.

Maybe they’re just worried about tapping me out.

I snort at that. The bastards who run this place couldn’t give a damn about my welfare.

The others file out of their cells, and I listen to the ward for a while. One guard at the far end, working his rounds slower than usual with nobody to hurry for. Fewer boots than usual on the concrete. Even the lights hum differently, thinner, like half of them have been switched off down the far aisle.