Shane awoke to Seth smoothing back her hair. Shane thought he looked almost avuncular, were it not for the gleam in his eye she most associated with Roselyn looking at breakfast after a long, drunken night.
"I don't suppose you could loosen these shackles a little?" she asked without conviction, rattling them against the metal bedposts. She tried not to move too much because the cuffs dug into her wrists, seemingly by design. She didn't mind the pain, it was duller than the ropes had been. She minded that she has truly screwed up her chance for an easy escape, one that would not present itself again now that he'd caught and thoroughly imprisoned her.
"No, of course not. You would be surprised how often people ask me to do that. Now you could just smash your hands against the table's edge for a bit until you break enough bones to slide it out again. I imagine that would turn out better for you than for me. You could do that, but I promise that we will hunt down everyone you have ever loved -- you mother, that insufferable boyfriend of yours, and especially Roselyn - and kill them in front of you. Slowly, until they beg for the relief death would bring. Now, I know what you are thinking, 'isn't that always the kind of threat vampires use in movies to keep their victims in line?' Yes, it really is, but it happens to be effective. And it isn't an idle threat. We will do it and I somehow doubt they are as blessed as you. We might already have Eliot - see, we know his name - and Roselyn in cages in the other room. You do not know, do you?" Seth took obvious pleasure in the thought of Shane's ignorance. "Oh, kid, don't take it too personally. I like you. I don't really want you dead. Oh, parts of me do, sure. Parts of me want to see you strung up like a side of veal, nude, blood running from your major arteries to cover you in gore so I can lick you clean again. I'm not going to deny that. But that isn't sensible and civilized, is it? And there is something about you. You are my type."
Shane's bottom lip quivered. She could sense exactly how much he meant these things and that was worse than not knowing. "Tell me this isn't leading up to a blood type joke," she said, trying to keep her composure.
He frowned slightly and rolled his eyes. "It isn't now."
"You sure you couldn't just loosen them a little? I'm not going anywhere again. I believe what you are saying, really."
"I know you do, kiddo. And it isn't just your blood," he brought his face closer to hers, within inches. She could smell his breath, rank and salty, almost metallic. "I've always liked girls like you."
His amber eyes considered her as though expecting her to swoon or scream. When she didn't, he receded to his chair. "But you are off limits by order of Ash. I should not even be speaking with you, but we hardly get girls like you."
She wanted to keep him talking, to see if she could turn her power on again and grasp his thoughts. "Does it hurt being a vampire?" was the first thing she blurted out.
He scoffed. "Ever do drugs, princess?"
"I can't say I have, though I used to know a girl who was partial."
"Neither did I, back when it counted, but I hear killing is better than heroin. I've got to admit, tearing open a tart's femoral when she is chained down like you are, that first geyser that hit the back of my throat… that's magical, right there."
Shane's breath grew shallower as she realized the wetness beneath her legs and sincerely hoped it was because she lost bladder function while she was unconscious, but she knew she lay in the remains of some girl's life. Maybe more than one girl. Death soaked into her jeans and polluted her skin, she marinated in cruor, perhaps literally. She couldn't be revolted because it would please Seth so and because it would extinguish this potential chance.
"Not killing," she slowly corrected. "Actually being a vampire. What's that like?"
He glowered, taken from his pleasant fantasy. "It's fine. It's nothing. I don't remember what is was like to be human, but this must be better. You aren't really human anymore yourself, are you, princess?"
She felt what chance she had snap. "I'm human."
"You are about as human as I am. Hell, you probably belong here. That's why we're not killing you, you know. Because you aren't one of them."
"Yes, I am," she insisted, distantly knowing he had to be right because she was alive here.
"Then why do I think you aren't worried? Why do I have the sneaking suspicion you think you are the bad ass in this room?"
"If that were true, do you think I'd still be locked in here?"
"I didn't say you were right, just delusional," he crooned
She fidgeted in the gore, trying to lift her head enough to see the darkness on her legs. "Do you really have Rose and Eliot here?"
He laughed warmly. "Why on earth would I tell you that?"
"Please tell me."
He kissed her on the forehead, the stickiness of his lips remaining on her skin. "Princess, you are soaking in them." Before she could open her mouth to scream, Ash entered the room and silenced Shane utterly.
Someone knocked at the door and it continued rattling a moment longer than usual. Eliot had done the best job he could repairing the front door of Roselyn and Shane's apartment enough. What the cops had done earlier was a stopgap measure at best and, while Eliot was more adept at repairing torn books than doors, he felt the principles were similar enough and made certain that it would at least be noisy should anyone try to break in again. That was really the best that he could hope for, some advanced warning that would allow him the liberty of a minutely more leisurely fight or flight.
He had spent most of the night looking through the book on vampires, Roselyn's mostly or loans from Dryden. The more he read, the more utterly ridiculous he felt that he was even doing this, that he was not searching for Shane himself rather than letting Roselyn do the footwork. He thought about calling Shane's parents, but he realized that he had no real concept where they lived or how to reach them despite the lateness of the hour. He glanced at the clock again and revised this thought to "the earliness of the hour." The knock came again, more insistently.
"Coming," he shouted, stepping over the few remaining books he had not filed away. When he pushed aside the detritus he had stacked before the door to support it while some Crazy Glue dried around a few nails and screws, he opened it onto two men in blue shirts and black slacks.
"Can I help you?" Eliot asked, casting a quick glance around the apartment for something offensive should the occasion demand. He passed up a silver star paperweight for a hunk of pointed wood that had come off of the door.
"That depends, do you reside in this apartment?" the short of the two men, the one with the moustache and spare tire, asked.
"No, not exactly, but my girlfriend does," Eliot answered as calmly as he could.
The taller man looked onto a pad of paper. "Would that be Roselyn Jacobs or Shane Valentine, Mister…?"
Cops. Of course. "Kaspar. Eliot Kaspar," he answered, wishing it sounded more like "Bond, James Bond." "Shane is my girlfriend. Why? Have you found her?"
The men exchanged glances Eliot imagined were supposed to be significant, but he began to see that he was just playing a part in their play. "Yes, you tried calling earlier and we were dispatched. Are you agitated, Mr. Kaspar?"
"Yes!" he exclaimed, then realized what that might signify to these two. "I mean that I am just worried about her safety since she went missing."
"Of course. And when would you say she went missing?" the shorter one asked.
About the time that someone broke through this door, idiots, he thought but did not say. He had infrequent dealings with police, mostly when caught at playgrounds after hours or when around his friends who were engaging in illicit substances, but had grasped the main lesson that the best way to get what you want (which was usually out of immediate trouble) was to be utterly civil and defer to their authority. "Officers, I'm not sure when she went missing, but you can both understand how this door being broken down would concern me. Roselyn called me a few hours ago and informed me that she couldn't find Shane and that is when I called you. Sirs," he added as an after note. He searched their faces for a sign of how well his speech went over and saw that he had tipped the scales from being a suspect to just being a concerned party. They alternately asked questions as to his location throughout the night ("at my apartment alone, but I was chatting online."), where Ms. Jacobs was ("Staying with her parents," he half-lied), and the full name of the person called "Dryden" (Eliot honestly didn't know, no one referred to him as anything else but he acknowledged that this was plainly not his real name) but he could tell that their hearts weren't in it and their minds were already wandering to a cup of coffee and a few doughnuts. They dismissed him after he answered their questions, though they assured him that his statement had been "noted."
Eliot returned to Shane's bed without resetting the door, picked up an encyclopedia of the undead, and promptly fell into a deep and penetrating sleep as dawn covered him. He dreamt fitfully of terrors he could not clearly see, dark figured in his periphery that he was certain watched him. He could neither move nor scream. Eliot lay still and looked into the darkness as the darkness looked into him, watching his paralysis breed the sharpest terror.
This half wake, scared half to death state lasted for hours or maybe only a handful of minutes. Time in dreams is ever an ephemeral concept. Eliot's eyelid opened to the fuzzy figure of a girl next to him on Shane's bed and for a moment, he could forget it all as a dream, the mist of that reality melting in the sunlight. But she was a little too dark, a little too long, to be his wan lover.
"Roselyn?" he croaked, clearing his throat. "Why are you here?"
"I didn't… it felt safer to sleep next to you. I'm sorry," she apologized, a little abashed. It had been years since she had coed sleepovers that which were not explicitly sexual in nature. She had played a few dozen games of Truth or Dare and Spin the Bottle, but that part of her life was eons different from lying in a bed next to her roommate's worried boyfriend because the universe seemed utterly without comfort and the quilt with which she covered his fully dressed form chased that back too deftly not to be shared.
He rose on his elbows. "No, no, don't be. I understand. I appreciate it. What'd you find out?"
"Not much. He went to Convenient and talked to his friend Louise. She covered for him, though I don't think he asked her to. He broke a metal rack there, so she pissed him off."
His eyes flashed. "Broke it how?"
"He is definitely a vampire," he replied, cutting to the core of his question. "It was bent like it would be if you punched one made of aluminum. No human short of Bruce Lee could have done that."
"Did he take Shane, do you think?" He suddenly felt very strange having this conversation in her bed, and left it, pacing to Shane's dresser. He ran his hand over the frame of it, spray painted black with soft purple drawers, a forgettable boy band CD behind each knob. It was something Roselyn and Shane had made together over the summer and it seemed simply too normal to be under his hands as he discussed vampire kidnappers.
"No, I don't. Whoever does have Shane wants Dryden, thinking she is me. She is the bait, so he is apparently not doing what the kidnappers want, right?" She had no qualms about staying in Shane's bed a little longer, lingering in a cozy world of bed sheets while her brain raced through scenarios she didn't care to imagine in full color.
"Well, it is daylight now, we can find them safely," he commanded.
"Find who?"
"The… the vampires, right?"
Roselyn tittered and promptly covered her mouth, aghast. "I'm so sorry, I didn't mean…"
Eliot nodded, aware that some distant part of him found this as inappropriately funny. Perhaps this all still was a dream from which he would awake in a few moments, thrust back into a kindly world with his half dressed, half chaste nymph in her bed awaking a flourish of his kisses. He shook his head then, aware only of the nightmare in which the dark witch wearing his lover's bed sheet as a cloak.
"Where first?" Roselyn prodded.
"We see if Dryden paid a visit to any other Ghoul."
"Of any sort," Roselyn added with a sigh.
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.
