Page 85 of Skin Trade

There wasn’t far she could go, but she still backed up from him, just a little. Too much and she would end up close to Alexander and there was no way she wanted to use him as a safe base to stand near. As she moved, she knocked into a table; on the floor, near to its wheel was a familiar yellow paw.

“Stuffed monkey.” She bent to pick it up. Its insides were still torn in two. His face was covered in dust. A confused gaze meeting Seth’s. “I don’t understand. Why is this here?”

“You know,” Alexander said. “Deep inside, you know.”

“No. I don’t. I don’t know what any of this is.”

“Let me help you with that.” Alexander walked around the room, pulling sheet after sheet as he did and revealing machines; she had no idea what they were. Silver monsters, scientific computers, apparatus. Canisters of things she had no clue what they were used for. “Oh, this one is still broken.” He pulled the sheet off a table that held a machine with glass tubes on it. Some of them were broken, smashed into pieces and strewn across the table. “You remember how this happened, Sethy? I think it still has some of your blood on it.” He held up a part of a tube, it was streaked with something that was probably once blood.

“I still don’t understand. If you worked for my father,” Payton said to Seth, “how did you work here? My father … we’re not from New Mont. I have never been here before.”

She was under no illusions that the way Seth moved was strategic, the steps of a predator. Someone who could hunt, but at the same time could protect. He put himself on purpose between her and the men, but also close enough he could push her out of the way. “You’re from Montgomery,” he said.

Brows furrowing, she studied Seth and then it hit her. “New Mont … New Montgomery?”

“This is where we lived?”

Alexander clapped from behind her. “And there’s another point for the team. Yes, dear. This used to be your house. You don’t recognise it? I know it’s changed a little since you were last here.”

She let her gaze wander about the room. Above her, to the side of her, to everything that made this what it was. This place was older than she was. It had to be. There had been no place like this in her house. “You’re lying. My house …”

“Tell her, Seth. She’ll believe you.”

“No.”

She could see it in his face. He didn’t need to say anything, but he did. “It is what he says,” Seth said. “This was your house.”

Payton rubbed at the side of her temple, stepped back from all of them. She clutched stuffed monkey to her desperately, no matter how tattered and torn and dirty it was now. It was the one thing that had always given her comfort. That one thing she could bury her face into, hold tight when she was feeling the world slip from under her feet.

“Maybe we should fill in the blanks.” Alexander pulled a phone out from his pocket, dialled and then put it to his ear. “Bring Joseph in, would you? I think it’s time.”

Chapter Forty-Seven

It was Aamon who came in. Big and bold and with a man who was not Payton’s father. He didn’t look like her father, didn’t move like her father. The only thing about him that seemed to resemble the man she remembered from her childhood was his eyes. Those deep-set brown eyes that had peered at her so many times over the top of his glasses.

“No,” she heard herself say. “No. What have you done to him?” It was instinct to go and rush to him, to help him, but Alexander lashed out and grabbed her just in time before she landed right in the path of her father.

“Careful now. Don’t want to lose any limbs there.”

Payton’s arm swung out with the momentum of how she’d moved and the shock of being pulled back by Alexander, and at the same time, her father lunged for her, mouth open, hands grasping at the air. He choked deep in his throat, his voice bubbling from his chest in sounds that resembled nothing like human speech.

“Dad,” Payton cried out to him.

“Not quite,” Alexander said.

Aamon had her father on a lead and a pole at the same time. One to keep him restrained and the other to make sure he didn’t go anywhere he wasn’t supposed to. He gnashed at her, teeth dripping with saliva, eyes not even seeing her now. His once tanned skin now hung in pale floppy bits of flesh.

“Have you ever seen a vampire transition from vampire to thirsty. It is very fascinating. Takes about a month for the full transition, but the process starts after a week or two of not feeling.” Alexander moved to stand near Joseph. He tilted his head as if studying him. “The already dead body turns on itself and starts to devour everything inside. Isn’t that right, Seth? You’ve studied these? Yes? The last to go is the brain of course, but the brain is made up of three parts and only disintegrates until the reptilian brain remains. What would they be with, the basic functions?”

She could hardly look at him. Didn’t want to ingrain this image of her father into her mind. “What did you do to him?”

”Me? I did nothing. You have your Sethy to thank for this one, doesn’t she?”

Seth took a step forwards and the men surrounding him closed in, making him stop. His eyes were a deeper shade of blue as if he was ready to break out of there and kill Alexander. “I did not do this.”

“Oh, but you did. You know you did. You should tell her the truth.”

“I am telling her the truth.”

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