Page 38 of Vampires & Bikers

I thought about the food my mom cooked for us when I was young, the songs she sang, the stories she told me and when that didn’t work, I slept. I didn’t know how much time had passed. If days had come and gone. All of that stopped mattering to me.

Then, there was a change.

A light was switched on and some men came in with a table, a table cloth and some chairs.

Food was brought in and put on plates. There was beer, two bottles, opened and placed at each setting. I was helped into one of the chairs at the table.

Someone came in and sat across from me.

“Jesus, Ruby, what have they done to you?”

I recognized the voice, but didn’t know who it was.

I tried to look up but my eyes were swollen shut and my neck wouldn’t move.

“Here, have some chicken.” A plate was pushed towards me but I didn’t want food.

I turned my head a bit and saw that it was Tomás.

I must have reacted somehow because he smiled.

“They asked me to come see you, see if I could get through to you? Apparently they couldn’t get you to talk.” He laughed, “I told them, you’re one of my girls, you’re tough!”

Fuck you, I thought. I’m not one of your girls but I didn’t say anything.

He drank from his beer and looked at me with beady eyes.

For the first time, he didn’t look that dangerous to me. He was closer to me now than he had ever been before. I wondered why I had been so scared of him. He wasn’t that tall, or that strong. After all that I’d been through, what could he do to me now?

He leaned closer. “They’re going to kill you, Ruby. I guess you’ve figured that out and you don’t care, which is fine, but what about your mother?”

I looked at him, wondering if he was bluffing.

“Charlotte Lucas? Aka Lottie Winton?”

I could feel my stomach turning. How had they found my mother?

It was as if he had read my mind.

“We know everything, Ruby,” he said, quietly to me. “We know how you’ve been helping the vampire to get rid of our people, your own people.”

I wanted to tell him that wasn’t true. That the shifters had attacked us, that I was only defending myself, that Luc had merely been fighting back, but it hurt too much to open my mouth to speak.

“This vampire is not just another vampire,” Tomás went on, speaking conversationally while eating, as if we were on a date or having a friendly lunch. The kind of lunch where your partner was covered in dried blood and couldn’t sit up properly. I wondered if he’d had many of these sorts of meetings. He did seem very comfortable doing this.

“This guy is important. He is connected and he knows stuff about us.” Tomás laughed.

“Not that it will help him at all! This time, we have the numbers and we have the advantage. There are not enough of them compared to us. We’re gonna wipe them all out! Imagine! A world without vampires!” he slapped the table, then grew serious.

“We want to catch him, alive preferably, to get information. You’re going to help us do it.”

I started shaking my head, trying to protest that I didn’t know anything.

“Shh… shh…” Tomás said. Then he showed me a picture of an attractive dark-haired woman.

“This is Sister Lola Hunter. She works over at Montrose, where your mom is. Nice lady. Of course, she cares more about her kids than her patients.”

He showed me another photograph, of two children, looking scared, in the back of a car.

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