Retaliation

CHAPTER THREE

Unknown location in Russia

Shen was terrified of the vampire that had captured him.

What had been a profitable deal for the family’s export business had gone well. His personal arrangement had gone horribly wrong.

The person with whom he was dealing had turned out to be a vampire. Too late, he’d smelt the rotting blood odor as he entered the meeting. He had tried to flee, but the vampire had covered all the exits with his own men. Not wanting to risk exposure by changing in the middle of a city, bringing worse on himself, had seemed the best strategy. Even if it led to him being captured.

He’d been wrong. Any death, no matter how painful would have been better than the last two? Or was it three, months of captivity, of being used as a blood source for the monster to try to improve his human lieutenants. Most of them had wasted away within a week, their corpses used to supplement his food. One, the volunteer of two subjects ago, Andrev he had been called, had changed.

Shen’s family wouldn’t even be looking for him yet. They would assume he was working on more of his private deals. They’d never approved of his black market dealings.

He’d been trapped by the rumor of some experimental processors that never really existed. In exchange, he would provide the location of a hidden weapons dump from the fall of the Soviet Union he had discovered. His curiosity had led him to that arms dump as surely as it had into this trap.

Now he was in a cage, a blood bank for this madman’s experiments. He knew his family was unusual. The previous werecat attempts to change others were rarely successful. Before the successful turn of the Russian, Andrev, he would have rated them as rumor alone.

He prayed that he would soon be allowed to die. He didn’t think it likely, though. The vampire still had a use for him. Or at least his blood.