Or they could find out that he was actually in league with Duran, and the hypnotist would show up and murder everyone.
Or he was actually Duran’s progeny, in which case the hypnotist would be completely within his rights to do whatever the hell he wanted with the poor little guy. That would also explain the outrageous level of control he had.
Or the little guy was some sort of anomaly, a mutant vampire who was naturally unable to feed and had been shut away so he could disintegrate quietly and not pass on his freakiness to some other poor creep.
Or they would be unable to fix him up and would never know what was going on.
Or...
“Crap,” Kim grunted. “Okay, muscle men. You guys hold him down. We’re force feeding him.”
It took some cajoling, but she finally got the vampire back on the couch with Zeb on his left arm and Coyote on his right. He bucked, and he cried, and then he fell still with his eyes squeezed shut, as though resigned to whatever torture was coming.
“That is kinda sad,” Zeb admitted, his voice soft.
Kim grappled with the vampire’s jaw, wedged his teeth apart with a pencil, and began the tedious and messy process. It was awkward, and she found herself apologizing every few minutes as he seized again and again, but whatever mental block prevented him from sitting up and taking over the procedure did not seem to prevent him from swallowing what was already in his mouth.
And it worked.
There was a crackling noise as his veins engorged, bulging beneath his shriveled skin. The flesh beneath the swollen lattice of veins began to fill in, pressing outward as the skin began to soften and smooth. It was like watching a time lapse video in reverse. Suddenly, the skull had a real face, and the skin had a tinge of color, and the eyes brightened from dead maroon to flaming scarlet.
But the dusty cracks had concealed other things, and as they smoothed over, Kim could see puncture marks. Hundreds of them clustered around his throat and wrists, crowning the thick scar tissue left by older wounds. Blood escaped from broken arteries and pooled beneath his skin in vast expanses of dark bruising. The corner of his mouth blackened and swelled.
Kim kept going. She finished off the bags from the backpack and yanked the cooler over to start on those. The face rearranged itself as broken bones shifted and started to knit back together.
She paused for a moment to lean around Zeb and watch the vampire’s crushed left hand straighten. A shard of bone pushed out of his palm and turned to dust, and the hole closed behind it.
When she looked back, the red eyes had gone blue, and they saw her, and she had never seen that much terror before in her life.
“Guys,” she said quietly. “Guys, get off him.”
But Zeb and Coyote had seen, too, and they both shook their heads. Coyote leaned down, braid snaking over his shoulder, and glared into the vampire’s face.
“I get up,” he growled, “and you are going to stay right the hell where you are. You got that?”
The vampire’s head jerked in what might have been a nod.
“You get up, or show fang, or try to look anyone straight in the eye, and I will whoop your sorry white butt so hard they’ll be finding your teeth in Norway. You got that?”
His head jerked again.
Coyote narrowed his eyes and reached out to pluck one dirty blond hair from the vampire’s head. Then he shifted and stood up. Zeb followed suit.
The vampire curled up around his healing hand and pushed himself as far back into the couch cushions as he would go.
“Oh, nice.” Kim made a face. “Very diplomatic, Coyote. Way to make everything that much worse.”
Coyote shrugged and nudged aside some textbooks to plant his cane on the floor. “No one’s dead or eaten. That’s a good thing.”
Zeb cleared his throat.
“What he meant to say,” he clarified, “is that we won’t hurt you ‘less you’re askin’ for it.”
He raised an eyebrow at Kim, who nodded. The words didn’t seem to make much of an impact, though; the man on the couch shrank further into himself and watched the floor intently, unwilling to meet anyone’s eyes.
“So,” Kim started, when the silence started to take up space. She took a step back and sat on the edge of the coffee table. “How long have you been living at Rocky Heights Self Storage?”
The vampire’s gaze moved from the carpet to Kim’s tennis shoes, and his forehead wrinkled in concentration, but he did not answer.
“You’re welcome, by the way. Sorry about almost setting you on fire.”
Nothing.
“Or maybe you’ve got a name? I’m Kim Reed. My lovely assistants over here are Deaf Coyote and Zebedee Davis.”
His frown deepened, becoming an expression of intense distress, and he shook his head.
“No? No what? You don’t have a name?”
Again, nothing.
“You know someone called Sebastian Duran?”
The vampire twitched and looked up, his eyes huge, the prohibition against eye contact apparently forgotten.
“B-b-bastian? Here?”
It came out as barely more than a whisper, part dread and part hope.
Kim shook her head slowly.
“Not here,” she said. “You’re out. I helped you get out.”
She smiled at him, expecting relief or perhaps gratitude, but he met her smile with a tremor.
“Can’t,” he insisted in a low voice. “C-can’t. I have to g-g-g-go b-back. Now.”
Kim exchanged a look with Zeb and Coyote, but neither of them had any suggestions. Coyote scratched at the side of his nose, and Zeb rested a hand on the grip of his revolver.
“No,” she said. “You don’t have to. He won’t find you here, I promise. He’ll be dead long before he can figure out where you went.”
That didn’t have the effect she anticipated, either. He flinched and shook his head frantically.
“N-no. Nonononono, I have to. I have to.”
“Okay. Why?”
“I have to. I have to. I have to.”
“Important witness,” Coyote muttered. His lips thinned. “Duran’s in his head. He won’t have anything to say. Doubt he could even if he wanted to. Which he won’t.”
“Or he could just still be woozy,” Zeb put forward.
“Woozy?”
“Woozy,” he confirmed. “It’s gotta take a while to soak up that much juice, right? He’s recoverin’ from a serious case of brain-raisin. Might take a while to get him workin’ again.”
Kim blinked at him in mild surprise. He shrugged one bony shoulder and hooked his thumbs into his belt.
“I’ll work with him,” Kim said. She leaned down to smile at the vampire. “Okay, No-Name of Rocky Heights. How about we wait a couple of days to see if you remember anything? It’s kind of important. Then if you still want to go live in a hole, you can.”
His face crumpled like a paper bag, but he nodded. He seemed to have realized that he didn’t have much choice.
“While he stays where?” Coyote demanded.
“Here,” Kim replied. “I can handle him, and if it turns out I actually can’t, I think he knows that you guys would pulp him. But I seriously don’t think that’ll be a problem. Like, at all. Will it, Rocky?”
The vampire had curled up into a ball so tight it looked like he was trying to disappear.
“Besides, he’s already made friends with Vickie. Maybe now she’ll stop bugging me to bring boys home.”
Coyote left reluctantly, and Zeb followed him out. They left the full cooler, and Zeb left his pistol over Kim’s objections that her little semiautomatic fit her hands better. She accepted it in the end; she had always had a sneaking suspicion that Zeb’s guns were more than naturally lucky.
It was only after both men were gone that she remembered she had wanted to ask if they happened to have any spare clothes sitting around. Lacking for male clothing, she dug through her chest of drawers and came up with an old pair of flannel pajama
pants. They had belonged to her uncle and were just barely too long on her, which she hoped meant they would be just barely too short on her houseguest.
When she came back into the living room, the vampire hadn’t moved. He watched the door fixedly, and Kim couldn’t tell whether it was because he was thinking about making a break for it, or was terrified of what might come through it. His eyes snapped back to her when she kicked a set of headphones.
“Thought you might want to clean up some,” she said, holding up the pants. “This is all I’ve got. Sorry. No offense, but you kind of stink.”
He averted his eyes and mumbled an apology, but skittered backward across the couch when she approached. She stopped.
“Look,” she said. “I know you’re scared, and I’m really sorry. I can’t imagine what you’ve been through. But I’m not going to make the first move, here. So if you don’t make the first move either, neither of us gets hurt. I think that’s the best plan, don’t you?”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why am I here?”
Kim considered the possibility of a vampire questioning his existence and decided that here meant her apartment, rather than the universe in general.
“Because the guy who did this to you has been hurting a lot of other people, too. All of those people that were down there with you aren’t even the tip of the iceberg. And there are some really powerful people who want to make him stop, but they want proof, first. I was kind of hoping you could tell them what happened.”
He shook his head and wet his lips with the tip of his tongue.
“B-bastian k-k-k-keeps me safe.” It had the sound of a mantra, something he had repeated to himself until it sounded true.
“Bull,” Kim told him cheerfully. “Come on. You’re going to take advantage of my shower and put on something clean, and I’m going to set you up on the couch. Then I’m going to shower, and you’re going to stay right where I put you until I come out. Then I’m going to scrub the tar out of my couch and probably go to bed, and you’re not going to try anything funny or run away, because Coyote literally found a needle in a haystack once, and he can find you wherever you go. Sound like a plan, Stan?”
He followed her instructions precisely, either because he was scared to do otherwise, or because obedience had become reflex. He came out of the shower whiter than he had been, blond hair dripping, with the brown pajama pants on backward. Kim planted him on the cleaner end of the couch, and he was still there when she emerged five minutes later with a towel on her head. He was watching Vickie channel surf with unnerving intensity.
“He’s creeping me out,” Vickie complained. “He won’t stop staring. I even went invisible, and he just kept staring like he could see me anyway.”
A ripple passed through her translucent form, something like a shiver.
“He can also hear you, and he’s sitting right there. Did you ask him to stop?”
“Well... no.”
Kim turned to the vampire with an apologetic smile. “You’re creeping out my roommate,” she said.
He blinked and turned around obligingly, then curled up with his head propped on the armrest and his face turned toward the back of the couch. Kim dumped a pile of blankets on top of him, silently signaled for Vickie to keep a weather eye open, and went to bed.
Chapter 6
THE MEMORY CAME again. He had begun to forget that she wasn’t real, but nothing else seemed real, either, so he could be excused for grabbing at one delusion among many. The ghost, though, was more real than anything else, and she did not react when the memory appeared, so it followed that the memory was probably not real.
“Rocky,” the memory said with a laugh. “You know, she’s going to keep calling you that if you don’t tell her your name.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and burrowed deeper beneath the blankets the wizard – Kim Reed – had left.
“Or perhaps you’ve decided you like it. Or...”
He imagined he felt a phantom hand through the blankets.
“Or have you forgotten that, as well? Lover? Can you even remember my name?”
He dared to peer out from beneath his cover, and found that the memory had no face. She had the golden hair and a woman’s shape, but looking at her face was like looking through a scratched lens. He reached out to her, but she had no substance, and she faded away as he grasped at recollections that wouldn’t come. He knew that he knew her, but he couldn’t remember.
The ghost looked at him with an expression of nervous contempt.
“Weirdo,” she said.
He turned away from her rejection and closed his eyes to try to sleep.
Someone else was there.
Or rather, he was somewhere else. Someone else. The sun was not yet fully set, and the flames had died down to an orange smolder, belching a pillar of dense, black smoke that stood out against the purpling sky. He could see it clearly, and the red bodies of fire engines, surrounded by small yellow satellites bearing hoses. The sign still stood there, faded from years in the Texas sun: Rocky Heights Self Storage. It was only slightly scorched. He could feel the faint heat on his face, and under his hands the gritty stickiness of asphalt shingles.
I feel you there, medium. I know you didn’t burn.
Miles away, he struggled to open his eyes, but could not. The voice was familiar, even if it wasn’t a real voice.
Can you hear me? Did someone steal you, poor baby? Don’t worry. I’ll find you.
The shingles fell away and he dropped lightly to the hot concrete below, landing with feline grace. He could feel his lips distended against elongated eyeteeth, and fought harder to disentangle his mind from Sebastian’s body. There was an old man watering his yard in the twilight, easily lured away...
The vision melted into a dream, which wasn’t any better.
His brain liquefied and seeped into his veins, and each time Sebastian gulped him down, he took a little more memory, a little more self. When there was nothing left, he rose and found himself huge, looking out at the world through someone else’s eyes. He thought that he was Sebastian until he realized he was made of stone. His hands crumbled. Not stone – concrete. He was smooth, flat concrete, and he merged with the wall behind him and became part of it, part of the cellar. He could taste the rot leaching into his skin from the pile of composting corpses. The door opened, and Sebastian stood there in the dark.
Not so easy to run away now, is it? he asked. He held up a lighter and vomited yellow flame. It’ll hurt, but you’ll be clean after. No offense, but you kind of stink.
The bodies on the floor crackled and popped as they caught fire, and one of them screamed and reached out for help. He recognized the shaggy black hair, small frame, broad hips. The wizard’s bracelets jingled as she was engulfed, and there was nothing he could do, because he was cement. Cracks appeared across the surface of the world, and he could feel thirst pulling at him like a whirlpool, drawing him back down into chaos and white noise. After so long submerged, it felt like home. He could not remember how to be lucid.
There was a piece of chalk in his hand, and he knew that he was expected to do something with it, but he could not remember what. He stepped back and his legs hit wood, the corner of a desk, and he realized that he was naked.
I’ve had this dream before, he thought, when he heard teenage voices laughing behind him. He turned around to find thirty-five high schoolers with Sebastian’s face. Their eyes widened, escaping their sockets, until they filled the room and he could see nothing else. Their laughter echoed inside his skull, making it so hard to stay awake...
The apartment was dark. The television was still on, but its screen was filled with snowy static, and its soft, electrical hum cut through the fug of interrupted sleep. Rain tapped gently on the window. It all felt soothingly familiar for a moment, but the feeling passed quickly. His chest ached as though he had been breathing hard or his heart had been racing. The dream was already fading, but the adrenaline it ha
d released was still going strong.
He was alone. Alone in a strange place. He sat up quickly, half expecting that he would be unable to move, though he couldn’t have said why. The digital clock on the microwave in the kitchen told him it was one in the morning. Alone.
But not entirely. Somewhere nearby, a pulse thudded in the slow rhythm of sleep.
* * *
SOMETHING COLD AND heavy curled up on top of Kim’s foot, and she damn near shot it. The only thing that stopped her was the half-asleep thought that it might be her mom’s cat, Bud, despite the fact that her mom lived in New England and Bud had been buried for more than twelve years.
Two points of white light shone at her from the other end of the bed, then winked out, and her fuzzy brain was momentarily convinced that Bud had come back from the dead. Keeping her semiauto trained on her feet, Kim reached over and turned on the lamp. The vampire’s bony back was almost blinding in the sudden light.
“Son of a pig,” Kim growled. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”
He wasn’t close enough to be overtly threatening, and she supposed that if murdering her in her sleep was his goal, he could have done that without waking her up, so she dropped her gun back onto the bedside table and silently vowed to have words with Vickie whenever the ghost should choose to show up again.
“You scared the crap out of me. Whatever happened to staying where I put you?”
The white back shook, and he croaked out a noise that might have been the start of a word, if only he’d been able to get in enough air to finish it.
Kim rolled up onto her knees and crawled closer.
“Hey? Something wrong?”
She put a hand on his shoulder. He flinched, and she took her hand away. He was bitterly cold.
She thought a moment, then rolled out of bed and went to dig through the bottom of her closet. After a moment, she came up with an old and stained electric blanket, plugged it in, and cranked it up to its highest setting. She draped it over the man who had invaded her bed. He was still too dry for tears, but his eyes were puffy. The heat seemed to make a difference, though; his lips relaxed, and his pupils dilated. She bit her lip and brushed the hair out of his face. He recoiled.
Paranormal After Dark: 20 Paranormal Tales of Demons, Shifters, Werewolves, Vampires, Fae, Witches, Magics, Ghosts and More Page 392