Seth dropped the unconscious girl into the trunk of his sedan and returned to the apartment through the front door he had torn open. He wasn't interested in subtlety; all of this was done to send a message to his true quarry that he was deadly serious. Minions were not supposed to run away, especially in daylight. It wasn't very sporting.
He scrawled on the white door in red pen:
We have Roselyn. You know who and where. Come get her while she is still worth playing with.
It was inelegant, but what wasn't when taking a hostage? That bitch Roselyn let it slip that Dryden -- what a god awful stupid name -- had been there and was expected back. What was Seth supposed to do when confronted with such a lovely clue? And Dryden hadn't even done the typical fledgling courtesy of shredding open a major artery, anointing himself in the viscous gore, and desecrating her body -- possible sexually. The order was as flexible as she remained postmortem. She looked lithe enough to be a fair amount of fun until her heart gave out, but he would have to wait. No mortal girl held a candle to a vampire lover but, like masturbation, sometimes it was just less complicated. Then he could dispose of his spent nymphets like so much wadded up tissue.
He returned to the farmhouse to see what Ash would give him for bringing her a hostage.
Dryden returned hours later to find the front door torn open. He rushed up the staircase in a moment, practically one leap. He could feel the borrowed blood echoing through his veins and the hunger grew sharp and focused for a moment. It stung him, but what hurt worse was what the urges made him want to do. He couldn't think about it any longer. Then he saw the message left for him.
He struck the door again and again, his fists leaving impressions until the door broke from its hinges. He smelled the faint chemical odor but nothing organic or feminine. He cursed loudly, hurting his own ears with the volume. He should have stayed with Shane, waited with her until Roselyn returned home. But no, he had to run off and now the vampires, his makers, had his only true love. In a better mindset, with his dark clad friends while sitting in a diner, he might have called it Byronic. Now it just felt moronic and he had no reasonable plan to get her back from what was certainly a trap.
He would find a way, but nowhere in him did he know how he would do it. He was new at all this, thus both inexperienced and weak. Seth and Ash had told him next to nothing about what he could do, though much more about what he could not. There were two of them, maybe more. He thought he had heard others moving around the farmhouse now that he considered it. So an army of the soulless undead against him.
The black bird -- Shane's pet, Dryden remembered -- flapped about his head, growling and mumbling to get his attention. So an army of the soulless undead and some annoying crow against him. That seemed fair.
He gave up and decided he was simple screwed. He would go to them and see if they would trade his life -- or what was left of it -- for Roselyn.
But first, he needed to find the Ghouls.
"Honey, maybe this is for the best," Arden tried to reassure Roselyn at the campus café.
Roselyn winced and wiped from smudged mascara from under her eye. It wasn't so much that Roselyn hadn't been thinking precisely the same this as that she didn't care to hear anyone -- even Arden, the de facto high priestess of her campus coven owing to her levelheadedness - echo her thoughts. "It is just that he isn't answering my calls. I'm worried about him."
"Because he hasn't done this sort of thing before?"
"No," she admitted. There had been a week in June where he vanished for a few weeks because Shane and she had gone to a water park without him, what Dryden claimed to believe was her attempt to meet boys and dress like a whore. But he had called after a few days, from Branson, Missouri, where he had been clearing his head. He even brought her a t-shirt for an Andy Williams concert and a key chain for a censored version of a popular Broadway play. Then things had gone back to normal again and they had a whole summer together filled mostly with kisses and really good sex. It was only now that classes were beginning again that he jealousy reared its very ugly head. But this wasn't just jealousy, she thought. He hadn't left a single angry or apologetic message on her voice mail. Silence terrified her more than any yelling ever could because it was the one sound to which she had never become accustomed. "But not even the Ghouls have heard from him."
"So, if I may recap, Short Dark and Broody has a habit of vanishing after fights but this time it is different?" Arden asked. The way she said it wasn't accusatory and Roselyn didn't feel stupid nodding her head to affirm this. "Then here is what I am going to do for you, since I don't think you believe most people do: I'm going to believe that something is definitely wrong because I trust your judgment." Arden paused, smoothing out her short auburn hair. "At least, I trust your intuition that something is wrong," she amended. Roselyn got the point, grateful to have someone who said more in one minor correction than most could in a paragraph of explanation. "So, what do you want me to do, aside from listen to you?"
"Just… could you read for me?" Roselyn asked.
Arden bit her lip. No one knew why she didn't like reading tarot cards, a fairly simple skill in the standard bag of Pagan tricks. Her demurring, her polite refusals, had given her the reputation for being startling accurate in the few predictions she was willing to make. Roselyn instantly and keenly felt ashamed for asking her this, for forcing something she knew Arden would decline. Arden seemed focused on something distant and out of focus.
"I can't… I can't really promise I'll have any luck reading for you. I can't be responsible if it isn't what you want to hear."
"No, I know," Roselyn said instantly. "Thank you. Just, thanks so much."
Arden, brown eyes far away, pronounced. "Don't thank me yet. I don't have my cards or anything. Can you meet me tomorrow, around six?"
Roselyn promised she would and started for home.
Roselyn did not stop when she saw the destroyed front door, though she did begin wondering if its destruction was covered under their security deposit. When she came to the front door and the message that claimed that someone - the handwriting looked male - had her, she began panicking. Only deep breathing kept the terror from reaching her as she ran from the building to prevent the scribbled prophesy from coming true.
She ran across the street to the gas station, a glowing beacon against the inkiness of the night. She tried explaining her plight to the attendant on duty, but he only looked fretful, fully grasping maybe half the words she was saying. Beyond that, she just looked distressed, maybe crazed. He didn't need that tonight or any night. It was bad for business. Hearing the word phone and police, he shooed her outside to the payphone.
She dialed the number with unsteady fingers and, almost before she could say what she needed and return the phone to the cradle, there was a police car pulling up to the pumps. Surrounded by men with guns, she felt much more secure. They took her statement, as limited as it was, and some other officers went up to check out her apartment.
"You did the right thing," one of the men told her. "A lot of people, they see something like that, door off the hinges? They go in. Bad move. Usually whoever broke it off the frame like that is still inside, waiting. There isn't anything you can't replace except for your life, you know?"
Roselyn nodded, thinking it was easy for the cop to say this. His name wasn't written on a door, claiming he'd been taken by who knew what. The threat was crude, too, and that worried her more.
"Any idea who might've done this, Ms. Jacobs?" the officer said, returning her from wondering exactly that question.
"What? I don't know who would have, no."
"Well, it wasn't just a simply burglary, we've got the message on your door. Any trouble with a boyfriend maybe? You get into a fight with someone? Usually in cases like this, it's a domestic situation. I mean to say, it is a husband or boyfriend, something like that. They get drunk and then they do something stupid like this. That sound familiar?
"Ye… no," Roselyn corrected. "My boyfriend, I haven't seen him in a few days. We had a fight. But this isn't like anything he would do." She knew the look the officer had on his face, of doubt and familiarity, of disappointment that another woman was letting her aggressive spouse off because she didn't know how not to be abused. She just looked to the silhouette of an officer inspecting her apartment, pawing through her things in hopes of finding a clue to this home invasion.
"All the same, we'd appreciate if you could give us his name and home address, just to be on the safe side."
She gave him the information he wanted, actually a little grateful with the idea that the police department would look for Dryden. She knew he wasn't guilty of this crime, of course, but it was a pretense she was more than willing to exploit.
Red Hook is a serialized novel being written by Xen, also known as Thomm Quackenbush. It didn't happen to you, your best friend, or his cousin. Why? Because it didn't happen. All persons, living, dead, undead, or unliving are purely coincidental. Any real persons are used fictiously. What you are about to read is not a news broadcast. No portion of this book may be distributed without the expressed written consent of Xen. Feel free to rope your friends into reading it, though. Do it or I start shooting PuppyOrphans.
He is published by Cave Drawing Ink and syndicated throughout the internet.
