Thrall (A Vampire Romance) (18 page)

There’s a circle in the middle of the room, like the one Mike put in the library. Sitting inside, cross-legged, is a shape. It’s dressed in ragged clothes, and leans forward, long white hair pitched over its face. It doesn’t move, it’s not breathing. The unnatural stillness unnerves me. Then, it moves. Its head lifts and it blinks a few times, rust-red eyes pinched in confusion. It sweeps its hair back and I gasp, covering my mouth.
 

“Victoria?”

“You brought me a visitor,” she says, her voice a dry rasp. “Are you going to let her poke me with a stick?”

She’s wearing a collar like the one I wore, but much heavier, incised with strange runes that make my eyes hurt when I try to follow their lines. She’s gaunt and pale, her skin waxy, pulled tight against the bones of her face, but there’s a disturbing, aquiline beauty to her features. She stares at me hard, and blinks a few times, a totally conscious gesture. A look of naked surprise stills on her face and her mouth falls open.

Finally, she murmurs, “What did you do?”

“Mike,” I say, glancing at him.

“You’re not
nosferatu
anymore,” she says, rising to her feet. “What did you
do?”

Mike swallows.

Victoria hurls herself at the edge of the circle. She hits the invisible wall and throws herself at it again, and again.
 

“What did you do?
What did you do?”

I swallow, hard. “Victoria…”

She scratches the invisible wall and I wince as one of her nails bends back, tearing from the bed. She doesn’t even notice.

“Give it to me. I want it.
Give it to me
.”

“Victoria,” Mike says, in warning.

“You,” she snarls, “Let me out of here. Look at me…” she looks at nothing, as if searching for my name, “Christine. Yes. That was it. Christine. Look at me. You have to help me.”

Her eyes lock on mine.

I feel it, like a push. It’s like rubbing pencil erasers together, or trying to jam the wrong sides of a magnet against another. Nothing happens and she winces like something hit her face.

She was trying to use the mind whammy on me. My hands tighten into fists.

“Please,” she pleads, her voice trembling. “Please help me. He won’t feed me. It hurts, Christine. You know it hurts. I feel myself drying out inside. I can’t
sleep
. He used some… some
spell
. If you won’t help me, burn me. Kill me. I can’t do this anymore,” her voice rises to a shriek, “I
can’t.”

Mike grabs my arm. “It’s playing you,” he says.

“It?” I snap back.

“That’s not a person in there. It’s a thing that looks like a person. If we let her out, she’ll attack us.”

I shake my hand loose from his grip and turn to face him.

“A few days ago someone could have said the same thing about me.”

“That’s different.”

“Why?”

“Because… because you’re you…”

“Mike,” I say, softly. “Have you been keeping her locked up in here and… what? Experimenting on her?”

“I had to make sure the collar would work. I did this for you.”

When he sees my face he wilts. “Chris…”

“Give her some blood.”

“
My
blood? No, I won’t. I can’t.”

“Fine, then.”

There’s an altar table nearby. There’s a
 
bowl, and a knife. An
athame
, that would be called, now that I think about it. I grab it and before Mike can stop me I slice open my palm and let the blood drip into the bowl. Victoria stares at it, utterly silent.

I take a deep breath and walk to the edge of the circle.

“Christine, listen to me,” Mike says, gripping my arm. “She’s dangerous.”

“I know,” I say, softly. “So am I.” I turn to Victoria. “You want this?”

She nods, slightly, staring at the pooled blood in the shallow bowl.

“There’s not much time. It’s going to congeal.”

“Give it to me.”

“No.”

“Please.”

She blinks, her eyes pleading.

“I don’t have time to argue with you, so promise me now. I’ll let you drink. Then you answer my questions.”

“Anything you want.
Please.”

I hand the bowl over the edge of the circle. I feel a subtle pressure on my arm as the barrier reacts against me, like it’s not sure what to do. Victoria snatches the bowl from my hand and tips it back, slowly drinking every drop, her throat bobbing. She does everything but lick up the dregs, then tosses the bowl aside. She twists in pain and clutches her throat. I know she’s not faking it.

She’s trying not to throw up from swallowing the blood, struggling to keep it down even as the heat infuses her body.

I watch her relax a little. When she looks up her features aren’t so severe, her face not so gaunt.

She touches her chest and blinks. Her whole body trembles.

“What did you do?”

She hurls the bowl at me and I duck aside, on pure instinct. It shatters on the wall behind me.

“What did you do?
What did you do to me?”

“I don’t… it was just blood…”

Mike says, very softly, “it’s never just blood, Christine.”

“My heart is beating,” Victoria moans, then her face goes slack. “It’s not stopping. My heart is beating. It… it hurts,” she murmurs.

She looks at me.

I see, like looking through cracked, hazy glass. Her eyes lock on mine and she goes as still as a statue, and murmurs only
no
.

All at once I’m not me anymore. I’m still me but I’m not me, I’m
her
. I can feel it, feel her behind my eyes, screaming. I don’t know where I am except it’s a dark room, an old room. It’s the odd details that hit me. No electrical outlets on the walls, candles in the chandelier over my head, oil burning in lamps on the sideboard. I move, but it’s not me moving, it’s her, her legs, her body.

“Vincent?” my mouth works, and her voice comes out.

A terrible, grinding sense of dread settles heavy in my stomach. I call out his name again but the house is empty, and dark. Something moves behind me but when I turn to glimpse the motion from the corner of my eye, nothing is there. A presence behind me makes me turn.

“Brother,” I say to a grinning Vincent. “Is this a game? Where are the servants? Why have you doused all the lights?”

He reaches over and snuffs out one of the remaining candles between his fingers. I feel another presence behind me.

I turn and see my father. There’s something wrong with him. There’s something wrong with both of them. Vincent’s hands clamp on my arms like iron, and I scream and struggle and kick my legs but it doesn’t matter and then I’m on the floor, and he’s holding me down while father kneels beside me. He bends down on all fours and Vincent forces my chin back, his grip so strong I think he’s going to break my jaw, pushing so hard I feel bones grinding in my neck. With my free hand I try to push my father away but his lips are on my throat like a kiss.

Then his teeth. It hurts, it hurts, the pressure builds and builds and then his teeth sink into my flesh and the skin
bursts
…

Victoria shudders and tears her eyes away from mine. She curls into a ball, tucked up against the invisible barrier, and weeps softly to herself, but there’s nothing for her to make tears.

“No more,” she pleads.

“Let her out.”

“Christine,” Mike says, insistent. “She’s playing you. You don’t know what this thing is capable of.”

“Yes I do,” I say, very quietly. “She’s not going to hurt us.”

He swallows hard, and stoops, murmurs a word and the barrier just blinks away. When I kneel in front of Victoria and slip my hands around her neck, the clasp on the collar is easy to find. It snaps apart in my hands, and I drop it on the floor like a dead snake. She doesn’t attack me or leap away. She sits there and hugs her knees and rocks forward and back.

“It wasn’t the pain that was the worst,” she says, so softly. “He was my father, and my
brother
.”

I put my arms around her and pull
 
her to me, and she sags into my shoulder.

“Christine,” Mike says, his voice heavy with warning. “She’ll bite you the first chance she gets.”

“She can’t. I made her my thrall.”

I take a deep breath as I hear Mike suck in his.

“I’m not like you,” I say. I feel it in my hands, creaking between my bones when I make a fist. “I’m not like her, either. I’m something different. I’m new.”

I lower Victoria to the floor, rest her head on my hand, and lightly touch her eyelids closed with my fingers.

“Somnari vampiris,” I whisper.

Something in me crackles and she goes limp under my touch, still and lifeless as a corpse, but when I take her wrist in my hand I can feel the faintest hint of a struggling, irregular pulse.

“I didn’t hurt her,” Mike insists. “I needed to know it would work…”

He doesn’t look at me as I stand up. He shakes his head.

“You could have killed her but you didn’t. Even when you didn’t need her anymore.”

“No, I didn’t.”

I slip my arms around him. “You’re not a monster.”

“Yes, I am. We all are.”

He hugs me back and lets me go.

“It’s time,” I say. “I want to go outside, and you, we, me answers. Quid pro quo, Mike. I have questions.”

He nods. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Sixteen

The sun. The
sun.
I want to stare at it but I can’t, it burns my eyes. I keep looking back anyway. The sunglasses help. I’m still sensitive to it, still feel it burning into my skin, but it feels good, a welcome sensation. I breathe deep and taste the shivering cold air. I should be cold. I feel like I
need
to be cold, but I’m so warm I slip out of my jacket and stand shivering in the chill and look out into the woods. The sun on my skin, a breeze in my hair and the stiff fingers of the cold gripping my arms.

When I look Mike in the eyes it’s all there. There is nothing in the world for me but him. My hero, my savior, the love of my life.

It’s all here now, all of it. I just have to look in his eyes and remember the first time we met. I came from money, he was at the school on charity. I was fourteen years old, he was fifteen, just barely. A girl named Sally Sackweather of all things mocked my baggy sweater, my buck teeth and limp, oily hair and pimples. It was Mike who stepped in and saved me. Mike who noticed I had a battered copy of
The Lesser Chronicles of Conan
in my locker. I remember the time I talked Andi into playing a tedious and boring game of Dungeons and Dragons with us, just the three of us. We needed more people, eventually found them. Andi might have still had the sheet for her character tucked away somewhere when she…

Mike sits on the bench next to me and looks at his feet.

“You want to know about Andi.”

I nod.

“They found her six months after you disappeared. Her body, I mean.”

I suck in a breath, and my chest heaves. I don’t want to think about it like this.

“They found her in a landfill. Even with the wounds to her,” he swallows, “throat, the cops wrote it off. Out of town girl gets drunk, gets high, walks down the wrong alley and never goes home. After they found Andi the officially canceled the search for you. They stopped looking. Everyone gave up on you.”

“Everyone but you,” I say, and squeeze his hand.

“I identified the body,” his voice lowers. “I mean, Andi’s. Her mother couldn’t do it, so I did it for her. They took my word for it. It was awful. She’d been out in the heat in the garbage for months, and they stripped her before they dumped her.”

He stops when I choke up and cover my mouth.

I can compose myself. “I need to hear this.”

After the paperwork was done I talked with the medical examiner, one professional with another. I told him I was studying to be a doctor, told him our whole situation, about you. Somehow I managed to convince him to meet me for drinks. I think he wanted to unburden himself to somebody.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I know that feeling.”

Another squeeze of my hand. “He told me they had cases like this all the time. No pattern, no discernible motive, except that maybe two thirds of the victims were female, young, sometimes younger than you were. A few as young as fourteen or fifteen. Runaways.”

“God.”

“They write them all off. The injuries they put down to decomposition, or animals. The official cause of the wounds to Andi’s neck was a coyote scavenging her remains. The examiner told me something interesting, though. It caught my attention.”

“What?”

“The bodies. Bugs won’t touch them. He never found so much as a maggot on any of them, even Andi after they found her in a dump. One time, he took one of the Jane Does and tried something. You know those beetles they use to clean bones?”

“Beetles?”

He rolls his shoulders. “When they want to clean
 
specimen, museums use these beetles that eat dead flesh but don’t touch the bone. They clean it so thoroughly that it’s more efficient than boiling and bleaching them. There’s even beetle services. Hunters mail them remains, and the beetles clean the skull or whatever and send it back to be mounted by a taxidermist. Anyway, this examiner gets some of these beetles and he takes a severed finger from one of the bodies.”

“Jesus,” I whisper.

He shakes his head.

“They refused to touch it. Eventually they starved, the flesh untouched. The decomposition was all natural. See, the human body has all these systems that keep it functioning, repair damage, make new cells. When the body dies, that stuff all stops and the body falls apart because there’s nothing keeping it together anymore. Rotting, consumption by pathogens, is a whole separate process. One that doesn’t occur in these victims of these weird throat ripping attacks. It got me thinking.”

“Thinking what?”

“All kinds of things. Then I started thinking something very, very
 
crazy. There was something else about the bodies. They were all drained of blood. Not completely, not perfectly like a movie, but they were bled and then deposited somewhere else. Somebody was taking out the blood and dumping them. So it hit me. What if it was a vampire?”