"Help!" I call out, barely able to make any noise from the fear constricting my throat. Am I supposed to go along with this – pretend I’m a hostage? Or is this real?
He shakes me, squeezing my arms tighter.
"Quiet!" His voice is deep now, angered and he’s either really mad or he’s acting. I don’t know what it is, but I do know that a camera is catching everything.
My breath catches in my lungs when he picks me up, throws me over his shoulder, and then carries me up a flight of stairs. I feel cool air against the skin of my legs, and am deposited somewhere, perhaps the back of a vehicle, the floor hard against my ribs. Doors slam shut. An engine roars into life, tires screech. Rapid movement, bumps in the road, muted conversation from the front of the vehicle.
I lie on my side, a hood covering my head, my arms bound behind me.
I wonder what the hell Julien has got me into.
We drive around for a long time – I'm not able to gauge how long. Finally, the van stops, the engine idling. A door slams and I wait for something else to happen. After another much shorter wait, the door opens and I hear a familiar voice. Julien. He and the other man speak, their conversation muted.
"The back entry's open. It's three flights up. I'll carry her."
Next, I'm lifted out of the vehicle and thrown back over his shoulder. Up stairs, I don't know how many, for my heart is beating far too fast. I hear a door close and then am plopped onto a bed.
Some more discussion takes place between Julien and someone else and then another silence after a door shuts. I hear a meow and my heart jumps. The mattress depresses and the hood is removed from my head.
My apartment! I glance past Julien's face through the open door to the living room, to my small upright grand piano, to the cat apartment by the bay window.
"Why are we here? Won't they look here first?"
"Why would they look here? Who'd be dumb enough to take a hostage to her own apartment?" He leaves me on the bed. "I always say, hide in plain sight. People are too stupid to look there. Besides, I wanted to remind them you're not safe," he says and turns to face me. "Ed thinks he can protect you from me and all the other vampires out there. I'm trying to prove he can't so he'll put you in protective custody."
“Can you at least take these off?”
“No can do. You have to look like you’ve been abducted. I have to sever ties to you so you can keep working for the SCU. I need you inside if I’m no longer there.”
"Why did you have to kill that priest?” I say.
"He's very dangerous to the peace," Julien says, pausing to pick up a book from my bookshelf on Freud, then moving to my closet. "He chose the wrong side. That can't be allowed – for all our sakes." He takes out one of my blouses and holds it up to his nose, breathing in deeply.
"Why did he have to die? Wasn't there another way? Couldn't you talk to him, imprison him?"
"Eve, there's a lot you don't understand," he says and turns to face me. "You're a weapon. In the wrong hands, you could be a threat to us all. When one of you is taken to the other side, when you're corrupted, compelled, the only solution is death. We've tried hiding them, but their masters hunt them down unrelentingly. This is the only way."
I shake my head. "It sounds like genocide."
Julien moves to my piano and plays a key. "It isn't," he says. "It's targeted assassination. If Adepts go on the wrong side, we have to kill them."
I frown. "You'd kill me?"
He remains silent.
"You didn't answer me."
"Don't make the wrong choice," he says. "Then I won't have to."
I can't let it go. "So, you would kill me."
He gives me a weary look.
"Eve. I'm a soldier. I kill enemies. Don't become my enemy. Lying psychopaths aren't the best enemies to have."
"You're not a psychopath."
He seems amused at that.