Paranormal After Dark: 20 Paranormal Tales of Demons, Shifters, Werewolves, Vampires, Fae, Witches, Magics, Ghosts and More

by Rebecca Hamilton

  Sebastian shook his head sadly and reached out to touch the side of Lenny’s throat, between the tendon and the voice box, right where it twinged. It was a gentle touch, like a lover. Lenny didn’t dare move, even though he thought he might be sick again.

  “Control a part, control the whole. You can use stuff like hair, spit... fingernails... But what works the best is...”

  He smiled and nodded, watching Lenny’s face. His hand came away and he stood up. The bed frame squeaked.

  “There you go. Now you understand.”

  He left the room and closed the door, taking the light with him, all but the two or three tiny specks from the pinpricks in the window foil.

  Lenny knew what could be done with someone else’s blood. With enough power and the right learning, Sebastian could have him dancing like a puppet on strings. It was too much to hope that he did not really know what he was doing, that it was nothing but show.

  That left Lenny little time. The back of his throat was burning, and his limbs were shaky, and if he did not get out soon, he would lose the capacity for rational thought. That was always the first thing to go. The human brain – even if not precisely human, anymore – eats up a huge amount of energy. It was much easier, much more economical, to shift into low gear, switch off the cerebral cortex, and let instinct take over. It freed up all of that energy for more vital things, things like finding more energy. It would also leave Lenny with one all-encompassing goal and the IQ of a very dumb dog or a very precocious squirrel. If he stopped thinking, Sebastian would have free rein inside his head. He was not sure what that would mean, exactly, but his guesses were anything but comforting.

  Then, miraculously, he heard the chains rattle and the deadbolts slide back, and the front door opened and shut. The bolts slid back into place. Faintly, he heard footsteps in the hall outside, receding down into the stairwell.

  And why should Sebastian stick around? His prisoner was about as stuck as he could possibly get, too weak to break through duct tape, which meant that he must have been bled nearly dry. Lenny tried not to think too hard about that. But Sebastian had to have forgotten something. He was older than Lenny, physically stronger than him, and Lenny got the feeling that Sebastian had a lot more handy extras also. Like a working knowledge of contagious magic. He kept trying not to think too hard about that.

  Lenny’s only advantage, as far as he could tell, was that he might possibly be smarter. Might. Possibly. If he was going to get out of there, he was going to have to get creative. That was easier said than done when he was drugged and hemorrhaged and busy imagining all the ways the situation could get worse.

  Creativity would not come, and trying made his head pound even more, so he did the only thing that came to mind. Slowly, slowly, he edged around, a fraction of an inch at a time, until his legs hung over the edge of the bed, and he could use a combination of gravity and momentum to swing himself up to sitting. The movement made his chest cramp, and the sudden change of position made him dizzy. He felt so smart for taking advantage of that momentum, but that same force nearly flung him face-first into the floor, where he would have been even more stuck than he was already. He closed his eyes and waited for the sickness to pass, and when he opened them again, he had a better idea of his situation.

  His arms were taped behind him. He knew that already. There was no way he was getting out of that, no convenient sharp object fixed to a wall at the appropriate height. Even if there had been, he could feel nothing past his shoulders except for the occasional shooting pain, and trying to saw through tape was more likely to injure him than to free him. His mouth was taped shut. A few hours of spitting and blowing might be enough to work through the adhesive, but he could not count on having a few hours to try it. He could not count on having much voice, either, with the way his throat burned. Certainly not enough voice to attract attention and call for help. His legs were taped together, too, at least two visible layers from knee to ankle, wound liberally over his khakis.

  There had to be something sharp somewhere in the apartment. Even a purely decorative kitchen had to have some kitchen knives, or at least a pair of scissors, though using either without hands would be an exercise in contortionism. Even a pencil would help, or a chipped edge on a table. There had to be something.

  Lenny leaned forward and slowly worked himself up to standing, but his bad balance worked against him, and he almost fell. Hopping from the bed to the door would be impossible, and that was before he even considered getting the door open. If he did get through the door, he would have to get through the living room, too, then past the locks, out the front door, down the hallway, down who knew how many flights of stairs...

  No, what he needed most was help. Getting away would not be possible until he was unbound, and he could not do that on his own.

  His legs trembled, and he sat back down before he could pitch forward onto the floor. A thin ray of light from the covered window fell on his knee.

  The window.

  He vaguely remembered thinking about going out the window, but now that it seemed like his only option, it also seemed like a very bad idea. He had no idea what was outside or how high up he was. If he fell onto something sharp, he could kill himself. Even if he did not kill himself, he could knock himself out, which looked like the same thing to the uninformed. He had heard horror stories about vampires getting themselves hurt and waking up in the middle of their own autopsies.

  On the other hand, he could wait for Sebastian to come back and find out where all of this was going. It no longer looked like Sebastian planned to kill him, and it was hard to think of that as a good thing. How long would it take him to rearrange a mind to his liking, and what would the end result look like? Sebastian obviously had skills, even outside of his magical expertise; either he had some sixth sense to let him know that Lenny the only vampire around who was still susceptible to trance, or he was the only vampire around capable of forcing a trance on his fellows. Or some combination of the two. It would figure that Lenny, the easily-bent, would run afoul the super hypnotist.

  He ended up breaking the window with his shoulder, and it took several tries. He could not get the leverage he needed, and twisting his torso to shove his side through the glass nearly ended with him on the floor and helpless. He only meant to knock the glass out, get a look at the ground below, and then decide whether or not to let himself topple out. Gravity won, though.

  Something hard broke his fall and made a noise like a drum. He bounced off, hit asphalt, and rolled. The sun was blinding, but the air was frigid, and it felt as though there was ice underneath him where he had come to rest. Nothing hurt especially more than he had expected it to, after falling from a considerable height. His shoulders might have been dislocated, but it was possible they had been dislocated before he had fallen. The fact that they hurt a little bit more than they had before meant that his spinal column was intact. Bits and pieces of him stung, presumably because he was full of broken glass.

  He spent a few minutes trying to get used to the light so he could open his eyes. The thing he had hit was the plastic lid of a dumpster. He thanked God that the lid was closed, because the dumpster itself was full of construction debris, and falling on the splintered ends of two-by-fours would have been the end of him. If he had rolled another foot or so, he would have hit a chain link fence. On the other side of the fence was a little girl, maybe seven or eight years old. She had a pink basketball under one arm and a big stick in her hand.

  He tried to ask her to find him some scissors, or at least a responsible adult who could both get him loose and deflect the police that were bound to arrive sooner or later, but he was still muted by duct tape.

  The child looked him in the eye, paused long enough for him to see her face go slack with horror, and took a slow step backward. Then she turned and ran into the building across the street.

  He hoped that she had gone to find a parent, but no one came back out, and no one else walked past. He heard cars a fe
w streets over, and the screech of a semi truck’s brakes, but no voices.

  And after a while, he froze. The sun went down, and no amount of wriggling would get his legs free, and it was dark and cold, and he was tired, and his eyes froze shut when he closed them.

  He woke up on Sebastian’s couch, where at least it was warm. His limbs had been freed, just to let him know how truly trapped he was, and when Sebastian saw that he was awake, he paralyzed him with those snake eyes and drove his teeth into Lenny’s wrist and took everything he had left.

  Chapter 3

  HE SHOULD NOT have been able to hold on to lucidity as long as he did. Maybe being bled is different from starving, he thought. Starving, you use up everything you’ve got until you’re dry. Not even a vacuum pump can really suck all the blood from a body; there will always be something left in the tiny capillaries, something in the tissue.

  So there had to have been something left. If there hadn’t been, he would have stopped feeling it quickly. But it didn’t stop.

  He couldn’t remember hating anyone, prior to that. There were people he had disliked and people he had feared and people he knew he couldn’t trust. But he felt Sebastian’s teeth on him and in him, and he remembered Kate, pulling at his skin in the way the dead show love, and he hated him.

  When he was drifting, too limp in body and mind to really care anymore, Sebastian whispered in his ear and sent him down, and the hate dissolved along with everything else. Whatever Sebastian did, it took a long time, but Lenny listened, because the first thing the good ones do is make you want to listen.

  He remembered Sebastian thinking aloud, wondering about things that didn’t matter, and then he slept.

  He woke, and he burned, his veins empty. Sebastian whispered, and Lenny fell, and he slept. Repeat.

  He didn’t know how many times that happened. By the time it was done, he could hear Sebastian whisper even before it happened, and he could see eyes even when he slept. He was cold through and through, but he burned all the same.

  “What’s your name?” Sebastian asked finally, as though that had only just occurred to him. “I don’t remember.”

  The whispering was too loud. Lenny looked away.

  Sebastian shoved his hands into Lenny’s pockets, complaining that he should have waited to sell his wallet. He came up with a crumpled piece of paper, encased in plastic, with a safety pin on the back. Part of it was soaked with dark, dead blood. He squinted and held it up to the light.

  “Something Hugo?” He spat the name like an insult. “You know, you’re not exactly presentable. You make it hard to have people over.”

  That sounded like an excuse to get rid of his victim. Lenny thought he should have felt something, maybe relief, but he didn’t. It was all he could do to understand the words. The name didn’t sound familiar. The blood on the name tag had his full attention.

  Fast forward.

  The sign said “Rocky Heights Self Storage,” and that was Lenny’s only clue. He could not remember how he had come to be there, though Sebastian’s death grip on his arm seemed a pretty solid indication that it hadn’t been his idea. Sebastian pulled him along, but not hard and not painfully, just inexorably. It might have gotten painful if he had tried to go in the other direction, but that idea did not interest him. The only thing he found interesting was the lingering scent of something alive. The windows of the office building were boarded up, and the front gate was padlocked, but something warm and fresh had passed that way recently. His veins ached.

  Against Lenny’s weak protests, Sebastian picked him up and tossed him over the top of the gate like a sack of flour. Lenny had never been the sort to land lightly on his feet, but before, he might have been able to react fast enough to catch himself before the pavement got him. No more. His cheek hit first, and the zygomatic arch gave way with a feeble crunch like a snapping pencil. His shoulder followed, and then his hip, and while he tried to make it back to his feet, Sebastian touched down beside him with a gymnast’s grace, utterly silent despite his size. He pulled Lenny up by his collar and pushed him out ahead, past the first set of buildings and toward the second, what looked like a block of climate controlled storage units. There was no buzz of an air conditioner and no rumble of a furnace, evidence that the place really was as abandoned as it looked.

  Rocky Heights. Rocky Heights. Lenny didn’t know the name. He didn’t know where it might be in relation to that apartment complex, or to his hotel.

  My hotel? Why am I in Austin, again? He should have been home, with Mara tucked up against his side where she fit like a puzzle piece made just for him.

  Sebastian pushed him down into the dark. His eyes worked better, there, but it wasn’t the friendly sort of dark that could hide him from his enemies. It was a cold dark, an old dark. It had been dark down there for years, and it swallowed them. If there had ever been any ghosts down there, they had long since crossed over or faded away. There were no echoes embedded in the walls. No one had ever lived there, and no one had ever died there, and the air inside the concrete was empty and hollow.

  Sebastian pushed him down again. They were underground, then. Lenny could feel the earth beyond the walls.

  It was a cellar, a little square space where the air was cool and dry, maybe intended for wine or paper or art. Sebastian knocked Lenny’s knees out from under him and sat on the stairs to watch him scramble. Lenny’s face hurt, and his throat burned, and every pulse point stung, and it only took him a few seconds to give up and sit still on the floor.

  And Sebastian watched him, still as stone, elbows propped on his knees and his chin resting on balled fists, waiting for something. Lenny did not know what he wanted. Whatever it was, giving it to him was undoubtedly the smart choice. If he wanted questions, Lenny could do that. If he wanted begging, Lenny could do that, too, though he was too dry for tears already.

  Lenny dragged himself into the corner, as far from Sebastian as he could get. There was only one exit, and Sebastian was in the way. The secret hideout smelled like cement, that sour and dusty smell that all unfinished cellars have. It covered that live, sweet smell, whatever that had been. Lenny focused on his extended eyeteeth and tried to make them go away.

  “I’ll bring you some blankets,” Sebastian said at last. “This shouldn’t take long. You’re weak, but I can free you from all of it. You’ll thank me someday.” And the door slammed shut and disappeared.

  There had been a door. That was simple fact. Both perception and logic demanded that it still be there, but it wasn’t. Lenny could barely tell; the darkness was nearly complete, and everything needs at least a little light to see. But if there had been light coming from around the edges of a door, even a few stray photons, he could have seen that. There was nothing.

  He forced himself up to his knees and crawled across the tiny space and up the stairs to run a hand across the wall. It was smooth, the dusty grain of the cement unbroken by a single groove to let him know how the hell he had gotten into the place to begin with. No door.

  He slid down the stairs on his back, wary of falling, and tried to apply reason. Sebastian had left. He meant to come back, but he had left, and when he came back, he would bring... what? Amenities? That look on his face, waiting for something, the same look he had worn for his patient explanation, calmly waiting for Lenny to understand that he had him, owned him. Waiting for him to understand. Waiting for him to realize. Sebastian had left.

  Lenny had a sudden morbid vision of Sebastian padding out an enormous hamster cage and stuffing him inside. Click. Giant aquarium. Terrarium. Click. The lizard Mrs. Hernandez kept in her biology classroom. Click. Sebastian in shorts and knee socks, pulling Lenny’s wings off.

  A horrible sound reached him, a cracked, shrieking laugh that bounced off the walls. He begged. He cried.

  And finally, at last, something let go in the back of his mind. It felt like a tightly-wound elastic band coming loose, going slack. He relaxed and stopped thinking.

  * * *
<
br />   THE EMPTINESS DIDN’T last as long as he might have liked. He had no idea how long it did last – it was impossible to form memories very well when most of his brain was shut down – but it wasn’t nearly long enough.

  Sebastian was there again when Lenny came around. It was that voice that brought him back. Sebastian’s voice was lovely. Warm enough to bring some feeling back into his limbs and cool enough to cut through the burning inside him. Sebastian had brought blankets. Lenny was wrapped snugly, which gave a tiny twinge of sensation, something like security. He didn’t feel any better, but he didn’t feel substantially worse, either, so it couldn’t have been too long. Or perhaps... Wait.

  Something gave when he tried to push himself up. It was soft and warmer than the air, warmer than Lenny’s skin. It was a man, or what was left of him.

  “Well, well,” Sebastian said, smiling, “take a look at what you did. Feels good, doesn’t it?” That was wrong, but Lenny could not remember why.

  He went down again, and eventually, the band went limp again, and he went still inside.

  The emptiness didn’t last as long as he might have liked. He had no idea how long it did last – it was impossible to form memories very well when most of his brain was shut down – but it wasn’t nearly long enough.

  But that happened already, didn’t it? It felt like a recurring dream, but it might have been recurring reality. Sebastian’s voice brought him back, warm and smooth, and the bastard looked ridiculously pleased with himself. The body was younger, the second time.

  He went down again, and eventually, the band went limp again, and he went still inside.

  The emptiness didn’t...

  The third time, it was a woman, very old. At least, he thought that was the third time.

  And the pile of bodies grew, and Lenny weakened until not even Sebastian’s voice could pull him back, and he fell into the whispering.