Vicious (20 page)

My smile widened, and I suddenly felt the urge to cry. Crying was an act of pure emotion, and one I rarely felt the urge to do. I held back the feeling and suddenly realized I could easily break and crush his frail hand if I lost control of myself. I was once this man’s daughter, but not anymore. Now, I was a beast. I was filled with infected blood that made me capable of terrible things. I had done terrible things.

Would this man have accepted his daughter back into his life if she had come back so very altered? If I’d come back tortured, covered in blood and shying away from the dawn, would he have taken me in or cast me out? I did not know, because I honestly did not know this man. Maybe it was better we never remembered where we came from. I remembered being the young vampire I had been before I learned to control my immediate desires and wants. I imagined that version of me escaping from the prison and coming home to a pair of relieved parents. How long would they have lasted with me before the blood lust took me over? I shuddered internally at the thought, and I gingerly put his hand down to rest on the bed unharmed and untainted.

“Oh,” he started as we turned to exit the bedroom, “I just remembered something. This might help your project. We kept her room exactly the same as she left it. It’s at the end of the hall on the left. You can see if you like.”

“You kept her room the same as she left it for thirty-two years?” asked Grant.

“Yes. When your child is gone, all you want to do is keep everything the same in case they come back. After a while, it becomes the only thing that keeps the memories alive. Time takes everything away, but when I walk into that room, I’m transported back over thirty years to a time when I had a daughter. Go on. Take a look.”

We nodded, thanked him over and over again and exited the room. Thankfully, Betty didn’t follow us, and we were alone in the hallway together.

“Are you okay?” Grant asked as he took my hand.

“Yes, I think so. This is all so overwhelming.”

“Overwhelming good or overwhelming bad?”

“Overwhelming I don’t know,” I answered honestly.

He looked thoughtfully at me as we walked silently down the hall and towards the door at the end that was closed and ominous looking. We paused at the door, and he squeezed my hand as I reached for the knob.

“Anna. If this is too much, we don’t have to go in this room. We can walk away and go back to the hotel. We’ve already learned so much.”

The hotel felt like a million years ago or a million years in the future. I could not tell which one seemed to be true. What I did know was that I wanted to know, and I was going into that room no matter what happened. I took a deep breath, exhaled and entered the room, determined to know.

Grant followed me in, still holding my hand, and we gasped as we took in the space that seemed to exist in another dimension. The curtains were opened, but thankfully the sun had almost set and only hints of purple and orange bans of light were cast lazily around the pale-blue room. It was painted blue all over, and there were white fluffy clouds painted on the ceiling in a style that pointed to the clumsy brush strokes of an amateur child artist. I wondered if I had been the one who painted them.

There was a queen-sized bed in the corner with an antique white headboard and footboard. The dresser and chest of drawers matched the distressed French look of the bed. There was an oval-shaped full length mirror in the corner and a small writing desk off to the side of it. The walls were littered with posters of various bands and movies that must have been popular thirty years ago, and there were a few Picasso prints in simple plastic frames over the bed. On the dresser, there were lots of pictures and postcards. Most of the postcards were from New Orleans and were addressed to me from various friends and acquaintances. I looked through the framed photographs and marveled at images of a young me standing beside a much younger Howard and a woman who I assumed to be my mother, Beth.

I moved on to other pictures and stopped dead when I got to a frame that had the word
friends
written all over it in different languages. The picture was of two girls with their arms around one another and smiling happily at the camera. It was Lea and me, and we looked to be maybe seventeen or eighteen, almost the age we were when we were taken. My hair was long, and hers was only just beyond her shoulders, but both of us had our hair pulled back in ponytails and out of our faces, so there was just no mistaking who we were. We were wearing graduation gowns and beaming as we held up our high school diplomas for all to see. She and I looked happy and innocent and completely unaware of what horrors might be laying ahead of us.

“We were
friends,” I said as Grant looked at the photo with me. “We were actually friends. I thought she had come from the prison since she was wearing the orange clothes, but she didn’t. She came from here, and we were friends.”

“I swear I didn’t know, Anna. I knew you were taken with a friend, but I was so intent on you, I just didn’t make the connection.”

“We were the same. She and I came from the same place, yet the experiment changed us so much,” I whispered blankly, ignoring his explanation.

He only nodded at my observation and was silent while I processed this new information in shock and wonder.

Betty came in after a while and politely made excuses as she shooed us out of the room and through the hallway. She offered us some coffee and a biscuit, but we both said we had business to get back to in Dallas. The three of us exchanged pleasant words of “thanks” and “take care” before Grant and I were free to get into the car and make our way back to I20.

After we had successfully entered the onramp for the highway, I reached under my shirt and pulled out the photograph of Lea and me at our high school graduation. I felt a little guilty for stealing it, but I figured that originally the picture had belonged to me, so I could take it with a clear conscience. I had put another loose photograph I’d had found in its place in the friendship frame, so the emptiness would not attract attention. I stared at the picture of these two much happier best friends and decided I would not show this to her. Not just yet anyway.

Chapter Twenty One

Grant

We had been driving for hours and were finally reaching the very outskirts of Midland, Texas. By outskirts I mean the normal mesquite trees and cacti that we could barely see in the dark were now being replaced with a few clusters of suburban communities. Anna and I had driven back to Dallas to meet up with the others without a word about our little trip down Anna’s memory lane.

The only thing she had said to me was, “Don’t tell them where we were yet. I need to figure out a story until I’m ready to talk about it.”

I had nodded and held her hand, and we hadn’t uttered a word since.

She seemed perplexed and torn as she sat in the passenger seat, staring at the old photograph of Lea and her happily smiling for an invisible photographer. Anna only looked up now and again to remind me where to exit and where to turn. I felt lost.

Had I done the right thing? I kept telling myself if I were her, I would have wanted to know. Even now, with the weight of that news on her shoulders, she still looked irrevocably lovely. The silence and cold suspense was unbearable, like a three-hundred-pound monster living in the car with us and taking up all of the oxygen.

“Anna, I’m sorry,” I blurted out.

She looked up at me.

“Why?”

“Because what I did made you unhappy.”

“No, I’m glad you did what you did, Grant. I apologize for the silence. It is more natural for us to remain still and silent without feeling uncomfortable than it is for you humans. While I have been silent, I have been thinking. I have been staring at this picture and trying to remember knowing Lea before that horrible night we were turned side by side. But I remember nothing of her before that night. It’s like when I looked into that old man’s eyes and tried to remember him as my father. I just couldn’t. There is no memory there, yet it was once so.”

“He’s telling you the truth,” I said.

“I believe he was my father, and I believe everything he told me, but it feels more like a story than something I experienced. Although this explains my odd attachment to Lea and her attachment to me. She has done so much wrong, yet I continue to try with her. I keep thinking she will someday respond to my efforts and abandon killing people, even if she doesn’t show any signs of wanting to change. Perhaps knowing her and being attached to her as a child has something to do with me not wanting to let her go?”

“Maybe. Why do you think she was in an orange jumper when you met her?”

“I’ve thought about that, and I think her clothes must have gotten ripped or damaged during the abduction, and that’s all they had to put her in. It makes sense. Won’t Cat be glad to know she might not have been a prisoner after all?”

“Yes, I imagine. Anna, why do you think that the change has affected you two so differently? Why did Lea come out so evil?”

She shot me a quick glance.

“She isn’t just simply evil, Grant, but I can see why you think that.”

“She is evil, and you are so good.”

“I have done things just as terrible as she. Never forget that. When they turned us, all we knew or ever knew went away. The Anna and Lea in this photograph vanished, and we had a terrible brutish life to teach us everything from then on out. We all did horrible things to survive and some things just because we could. When all your ingrained morals go away, and torture is all that you know, things change about you. A life of pain changes people and molds them differently. Lea chose one path, and I chose another. That’s all.”

“Yes, but you and Marshall and everyone in your group are reformed now.”

“This is the life we chose with the morals we made for ourselves. Lea, Bridgette and Jackson discovered their own morals. Whether I agree with them or not, they do have them. We don’t know what may steer people one way or the other after they turn vampire because there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. Most seem to hang onto enough of their humanity to follow our path, but some don’t, and they seem content to live in Lea’s wake. Either way, we are all blood thirsty, and we are all evil.”

“I still don’t think you are evil.”

She looked down at her hands just before she pointed to the neon signs that blared advertisements for various beers in front of the little dive bar that was supposed to be our destination. It looked just like a double-wide trailer turned into a bar in a very haphazard way.

“This is it, “she said blankly. “Roadies Bar and Grill. Park there next to Marshall’s car.”

The gravel underneath the car tires crunched as we rolled off of the main paved road and onto the graveled one for the bar. Once I killed the engine, she began to speak again.

“Be careful in there. We should go in, see what the locals think about the prison and then promptly leave. No direct questions that might make anyone suspicious. Above all else, stay clear of Lea.”

“You really are afraid of her, aren’t you?”

“Not for my sake, Grant, but for yours,” she said earnestly. “Lea and I are the oldest, but she is a better fighter than I am. I have more self-control and I can hold my own with her, but in the end she is stronger. She is suspicious of you and me. After our trip earlier, that suspicion will get worse. One moral Lea does possess is the idea that we shouldn’t make anymore of ourselves. Gabriel was a life-and-death situation, so we had to turn him, but I can tell his existence sits heavily on her shoulders. Even if she knew how to turn someone, I doubt she would. She doesn’t want to condemn anyone to this life any more than I do. Please just promise me you will avoid her and be careful.”

Her eyes pleaded right along with her words, and I had no choice but to hold her hand and say, “I promise.” What else could I do?

With a newly found determination, we both looked across the parking lot at the ramshackle of a dive bar. The others were already getting out of their respective vehicles. They gathered by the door and turned to look at us as though they were waiting for us before they proceeded. Anna was a born leader through and through, and even her enemies recognized the trait in her enough to wait for her command. I drew in a deep breath as I looked at the impossibly beautiful crowd. She narrowed her eyes in concentration.

“Are you ready for this?” I asked her with a steely resolve. Well, it was as steely as I could muster under the circumstances.

I thought my heart might leap into my throat and choke me to death, and I shuddered in response to my own internal trauma. Anna sat motionless like the pillar of resolve and strength that she was.

“Yes,” she replied simply and without a hint of emotion.

“Okay then. Let’s go.”

Chapter Twenty Two

Grant

It smelled faintly of rotten eggs and overwhelmingly of ashtrays and human sweat in the dingy little trailer park bar. There was a grayish haze of cigarette smoke that floated lazily over the heads of the patrons as they sucked down their beers and mixed drinks under the dimmed fluorescent lights provided. Anytime anyone opened the door to the outside, you could see a billow of haze and smoke filter out of the doorway as though even the smoky air needed a breather from this place.

The patrons were the salt-of-the-earth types. The men all had disheveled facial hair that grew scraggly and uneven, and you could definitely tell denim was the all-time favorite color, fabric and lifestyle choice here. The women didn’t fare much better with chunky girls sporting belly shirts, and thin girls sporting even shorter belly shirts and jean shorts that would make Daisy Duke herself blush with modest dignity.