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someone that didn’t feel as strongly about you,” Gina said.
    Between them, they had seventy years on me, and they’d come to fight. It was over almost before it started.
    I turned to run, but Cynthia caught a handful of my hair. “None of that, little one,” she said.
    My head wrenching backward, I saw Gina pull a Union Army bayonet from her Louis Vuitton. We’d used it to drain deer and bears, and the occasional man or woman too. Gina plunged it into the side of my neck.
    Another two or three slamming stabs, and I felt the metal pierce through my back and into my stomach, heart, and lungs.
    Since I was suddenly weakened, it was easy for them to gag and bind me with their superior strength.
    “Nathan wants to have a talk with you,” Cynthia said.
    “You know, back in the ‘80s, when someone said they needed to have a talk, it meant they were going to break up with you,” Gina said.
    “This breakup is going to be very hard on you, little one,” Cynthia said, as they carried me into the darkness.

 

    6
    Dance by Firelight
     
    Back in Nathan’s presence, I wasn’t myself anymore. I was simply his.
    He sat on his throne, and I kneeled naked before him. Cynthia and Gina were on either side of me. My sisters had given me some deer blood so that I’d heal enough not to be disgusting to our master.
    I could hear my predator mind weighing whether taking my punishment like a good girl would ensure I’d come through this alive or I’d be killed faster. For my own part, I didn’t care if I lived or died, so long as I made him happy.
    Nathan was dressed in his usual fashion jeans, no shirt, holding the bayonet Gina had gutted me with like it was a scepter. “Ginny, you disappoint me,” he said.
    The words hurt more than my still-healing wounds.
    “I’m sorry.”
    “I know you are, dear. I regret having to hurt you. There is a lot of regret to go around tonight. Perhaps, however, we may begin regaining one another’s trust. Doesn’t that sound nice?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “The beginning of trust is honesty. I need you to be honest with me. Who is this male you’ve been seeing?”
    There was push-pull inside of myself: my will wanting to tell him everything, down to Jackson’s attack tonight, and my primal mind desperate to hold back what he really was. Their compromise came from me in a languid voice: “His name is Jackson Wheel. He’s a former soldier, Nightfallen new.”
    “An officer?”
    “A sergeant,” I said.
    “I was a major, but here you are slumming with an enlisted man. I thought women generally tried to find better mates. I suppose I should be insulted. Wait! I am.” Then he cracked the back of his hand across my face. “Tell me more about this Sergeant Wheel. Do you find him attractive?”
    “Yes.”
    “Have you slept with him?”
    I heard my sisters behind me tittering. “No.”
    “You wanted to, though?”
    “I did,” I said, then rushed to add that I was a fool. I pled with Nathan, telling him that I only wanted to be with him, that anyone else was stomach turning, begging him to use me now.
    I was silenced with another crack across the face, hard enough that had I been alive, it would have shattered my jaw.
    “Where may I find Sergeant Wheel?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You haven’t any idea where he sleeps?”
    “No. He did say something about a bunker, though.”
    “A bunker? In what context did he say this?”
    “Talking about his guns.”
    “Armament? What kind?” Nathan asked.
    “An AR-15.”
    Nathan sneered. “A mass-produced piece of aluminum to turn a single plebeian into a platoon. Why would the newly undead need such a weapon?”
    I was about to answer, but my response caught in my throat.
    “Answer me,” Nathan said, the words echoing through me like a gunshot in a cathedral. “Answer me, or I’ll pull that pretty head of yours from the stump of your neck.”
    I couldn’t hold back anymore. “To break up your body enough so he can behead or stake