Free Broken Souls by Jade M. Phillips Page B

night for another round.
    My left eye was swollen shut, but from my right I watched
the onyx-eyed vampire pace furiously inside of my cell. He pressed a cigarette
firmly between his lips and took a long draw.
    “You are making this harder than it needs to be Captain Stone,” Horus said, and I couldn’t help but notice the disdainful inflection he
used when saying my title. “I could kill you right here and now, but I am a
patient man and always get what I want.” He vanished, then appeared again
face-to-face with me, knocking his forehead against mine; a speedy vampire
trick. I nearly fell sideways from the bench they’d chained me to, but my
restraints helped keep me upright. Horus smiled.
    “What I want from you,” he hissed, “is information.” He lifted
the glowing cherry of his cigarette and pondered it a moment before digging it
into my neck, letting my skin sizzle. I grimaced but held firm, keeping my pain
at bay with reflections of Ruby.
    I’d learned to tolerate the pain by clinging to thoughts of
her. Every time I received a punch or a kick, my mind faded away from the
present, blocking out the grim reality of my situation. Every time Horus ordered
his female vampire to hurt me, all I had to do was think of Ruby. I kept a
picture of her face firmly planted in my mind, pulling my strength from her
smile, and my resistance from her lips. I remembered the night I’d found her
vulnerable and scared, taking shelter with her in the old mission to see her
through her painful transformation. I remembered holding her close and wiping
away her tears.
    I recalled the night I kissed her in the drug store to keep
my FUSE brothers from seeing her fangs. I dreamed of the nights I slept next to
her on Wilson’s floor, listening to her soft breathing. I remembered when I
brought her here to Tombstone and how badly I wanted to take her away with me,
how badly I wanted to feel her next to me. I remembered her tears on my face as
I kissed her, and it broke my heart. But I took solace that I sensed her nearby
and that she was doing better than when she arrived. Her level of anxiety had
diminished and her spirits had climbed a little. That’s all I cared about.
That’s all I wanted. I wanted her happiness and her safety.
    Horus threw me back, my head cracking hard against the wall,
bringing me from my reverie. The skin on my neck blazed from the cigarette burn
and my skull throbbed from the collision.
    “You will break sooner or later, Guy Stone, and I will be
there to watch you beg for mercy,” he hissed. I couldn’t help but think if the
tables were turned, and it was he who was my prisoner, I’d do a lot more than
make him beg for mercy. I’d make him rue the day he was ever born —or in his
case, re -born.
    “Come,” he snapped at his assistant. “Let this worm stew
over what tomorrow brings. Let him wallow in thoughts of his own suffering and
death.”
    The cell door clanged shut and Horus locked it tight with
his metal key.
    “Sleep tight, Captain.” His voice echoed down the hall as he
left. “And remember. I am a Very. Patient. Man.”

 
     
    ELEVEN: RUBY
     
    As soon as I walked into the Crystal Palace Saloon, my
breath caught at the wild scene going on inside. Bodies packed the space like
sardines in a tin can and it was as loud as one of my ex boyfriend’s football
games when the home team scored a touchdown. I grimaced at the smell of stale sweat
and the sickly-sweet aroma of fermented liquor and beer. My eyes trailed up the
tall walls that encased the sizable building, noting the bullet holes that
dotted their way across the top. A collective holler brought my attention back
down and I watched in awe as men— or werewolves rather, from their canine
scent— stood on the bar tops shouting at something below, their fists pumping
in the air. The tables were pushed to the side and a crowd of at least fifty
encircled something I could not see. I nudged my way past a group of onlookers,
my mouth