Thrall (A Vampire Romance)

by Abigail Graham

  Mike sits on the bench next to me and looks at his feet.

  “You want to know about Andi.”

  I nod.

  “They found her six months after you disappeared. Her body, I mean.”

  I suck in a breath, and my chest heaves. I don’t want to think about it like this.

  “They found her in a landfill. Even with the wounds to her,” he swallows, “throat, the cops wrote it off. Out of town girl gets drunk, gets high, walks down the wrong alley and never goes home. After they found Andi the officially canceled the search for you. They stopped looking. Everyone gave up on you.”

  “Everyone but you,” I say, and squeeze his hand.

  “I identified the body,” his voice lowers. “I mean, Andi’s. Her mother couldn’t do it, so I did it for her. They took my word for it. It was awful. She’d been out in the heat in the garbage for months, and they stripped her before they dumped her.”

  He stops when I choke up and cover my mouth.

  I can compose myself. “I need to hear this.”

  After the paperwork was done I talked with the medical examiner, one professional with another. I told him I was studying to be a doctor, told him our whole situation, about you. Somehow I managed to convince him to meet me for drinks. I think he wanted to unburden himself to somebody.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I know that feeling.”

  Another squeeze of my hand. “He told me they had cases like this all the time. No pattern, no discernible motive, except that maybe two thirds of the victims were female, young, sometimes younger than you were. A few as young as fourteen or fifteen. Runaways.”

  “God.”

  “They write them all off. The injuries they put down to decomposition, or animals. The official cause of the wounds to Andi’s neck was a coyote scavenging her remains. The examiner told me something interesting, though. It caught my attention.”

  “What?”

  “The bodies. Bugs won’t touch them. He never found so much as a maggot on any of them, even Andi after they found her in a dump. One time, he took one of the Jane Does and tried something. You know those beetles they use to clean bones?”

  “Beetles?”

  He rolls his shoulders. “When they want to clean specimen, museums use these beetles that eat dead flesh but don’t touch the bone. They clean it so thoroughly that it’s more efficient than boiling and bleaching them. There’s even beetle services. Hunters mail them remains, and the beetles clean the skull or whatever and send it back to be mounted by a taxidermist. Anyway, this examiner gets some of these beetles and he takes a severed finger from one of the bodies.”

  “Jesus,” I whisper.

  He shakes his head.

  “They refused to touch it. Eventually they starved, the flesh untouched. The decomposition was all natural. See, the human body has all these systems that keep it functioning, repair damage, make new cells. When the body dies, that stuff all stops and the body falls apart because there’s nothing keeping it together anymore. Rotting, consumption by pathogens, is a whole separate process. One that doesn’t occur in these victims of these weird throat ripping attacks. It got me thinking.”

  “Thinking what?”

  “All kinds of things. Then I started thinking something very, very crazy. There was something else about the bodies. They were all drained of blood. Not completely, not perfectly like a movie, but they were bled and then deposited somewhere else. Somebody was taking out the blood and dumping them. So it hit me. What if it was a vampire?”

  “That must have gone over well with everyone.”

  He rubbed his hands together and looked down. “They thought I was nuts. I kept it to myself. That medical examiner told me about another body he saw once, though. Like none he’d ever seen. The head was torn off. Not cut, torn, ripped right off the base of the neck by something strong. He said it was like a car accident, but it wasn’t right, the other kinds of damage weren’t there. The body was fine otherwise, except something punched right through its ribcage and pulled out its heart. Neither the head nor the heart were ever found. The city wrote it off as an organized crime execution, the head removed to make identification more difficult, but they left the hands and feet attached. That makes no sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “The weird thing was the body itself. The organs were soup, except for the circulatory system, but the rest of the body was dried out, almost like jerky under the skin. He’d never seen anything like it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I laid it all out to your mom. She believed me. I needed more information and I started tracking it down.”

  “Where?”

  “I had to go to Oxford. To England. See, nosferatu are outcasts, they’re all over the place. I didn’t know what I was looking for yet, just tracing down some leads. I read anything I could. Folklore, mostly. Since vampires aren’t real there aren’t many serious books on them.” He sighs. “I ended up in Italy. That’s where the lamia made her move. She watched me doing research and moved to take care of me. They have rules, these things. One of them is that they keep quiet, keep things secret. Even the nosferatu do that. I was looking at the wrong things, and it attracted a lamia.”

  “What did she do to you?”

  “She tore me up. I was badly hurt, but she did something. Looked in my eyes. Then she changed her mind, I think. She bit her finger and stuck it in my mouth, and it hurt. It was like swallowing acid. She said if I was strong, I would make it. If I wasn’t I would die. I made it.”

  His hands flex in his lap. “I knew you were still out there. I couldn’t just abandon you. Never.”

  I take his hand.

  “When I woke up I was different. The lamia came back. She taught me things. She was impressed with me. She taught me how to fight, how to tap into the strength I draw from drinking the lifeblood of other people.”

  “The lifeblood of other people,” I say.

  “If the blood bank found out they’d kill me,” he says, nervously. “It was the easiest way. When a nosferatu uses the mind power, it’s brutal, crushing. Domination. When a lamia uses it it’s seductive, suggestive. A nosferatu dominates with hate. A lamia controls with love. It was easier just to steal blood from a convenient supply. I needed a lot. I knew I’d need power for what I was going to do. You don’t remember, do you?”

  “Remember what?”

  “The first five times I tried to help you. You kept getting away. You were strong, and you didn’t know who I was.”

  I shift closer to him on the bench. “How did you find me?”

  “Police reports. I knew you’d have to feed. So I started looking for signs of vampire activity. It’s mostly concentrated out West. They like warm, dry places. I started seeing reports that looked like attacks on the East Coast and went to check them out. You were working your way East, trying to come home.”

  I stifle a small sound and he puts his arm around me.

  “The worst pain was when I saw you the first time,” he whispers, “you looked through me like you’d never seen me before.”

  “He did that,” I snarl, my voice thick with fury. “He stole you from me. He ripped you out of my head. He…”

  I can’t help it. The tears burst out and I hug myself, sobbing.

  “He made me kill Andi. I killed her, Mike. I ripped out her throat and drank her blood. She was looking at me the whole time. I could see it in her eyes. She wanted to know why, why, why are you doing this to me.”

  I sob into his chest for what feels like hours while he rubs warmth into my arms.

  “What happened to her was not your fault.”

  “Yes, it is. If I’d just gone with her to that stupid show…”

  “He’d have taken you anyway. He had you marked from the minute you walked into your hotel.”

  “Why me? What did I do? What did any of us do to deserve this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I hate him. I hate him so much.”

>   “I can feel it coming off of you. Christine…”

  He trails off as I stare into the distance.

  Andi watches me from the trees, her eyes burning.

  Help me.

  “Why do I keep seeing her?”

  “It’s him,” Mike says, softly. “He’s coming here.”

  I tense. “What do we do?”

  “We wait for him. Then we kill him.”

  “If he dies, what happens to Andi?”

  “In the books I read, it says if the master is destroyed, the shades bound to him are set free.”

  “Can we do that? Can we kill him?”

  “I don’t know, but we’re going to find out. You were still his thrall when I brought you here. He felt it when I severed that connection. Whatever you did to Victoria, he felt that, too. He won’t be able to stay away.”

  “I can feel him,” I murmured. “It’s like I swallowed a fishhook and it’s tugging on me.”

  I look off to the West and I can feel him there, approaching.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Kill him,” Mike says, flatly.

  “How?”

  “I have a plan for that. Let’s go inside and talk.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  As I watch my first sunset, the snow begins to fall in earnest. The sun was gone a while ago, but now it’s a pool of red on the horizon, like blood welling in a cup. It turns the sky a brilliant pink as the snow falls in thick, wet flakes, already turning the front lawn white, sticking to the trees and painting them into bones. As I stand on the front step I can feel it reaching for me, a touch almost on my skin. A darkness swirls in the light.

  “He’s already here,” I say. “Out there. I can feel him.”

  “On the wind,” Mike says, softly. “He can’t take physical form while the sun is up. Come on.”

  Back inside, he leaves the door open. Snow swirls in and cold air blasts into the house. He finally closes it, and I unfocus my eyes a little. Once he showed me how, it was easy. My third sight opens fully and I see. There’s lines of crackling energy flowing all through the house, sunk into its bones. The web of energy is strongest over the door itself, and the windows. They’re called wards. They make a wall, like the wall around the circle that bound me.

  “What do you mean he can’t take physical form?”

  Mike sighs. “He came on the wind, mist.”

  “You mean fog?”

  “Yes,” Victoria says, curtly. “Some time after he discarded you he killed Elizabeta and consumed her. All that she had became his. He’s like the stories, now. He can fold into shadows, turn invisible, change his form to mist, and walk in his own shadow in daylight. Why do you think I ran away?”

  She’s awake. She’s changed her clothes, into my things. It’s odd seeing her wearing a color besides white. I can feel her standing behind me, like an invisible string tied between her wrist and mine. Victoria is tired, bone tired, and confused, her head swimming. She glances at my mother and I feel the hunger stir inside her.

  “Sarah, go to the library like we talked about,” Mike says.

  “Are you sure this is going to work?”

  “No,” he says. “You know what you have to do.”

  She squeezes my hands and kisses my cheek, then walks upstairs. Victoria goes with her. I feel nervous watching her stalk behind my very human mother, but she can’t hurt her. I won’t let her. Besides, mom is locking herself in the library with dad’s shotgun. I don’t know if that can kill Victoria, but it will ruin her day. It’s better than being out here.

  “Are they going to hold?” I say, tracing the invisible lines of crackling energy with my eyes.

  “They’ll do their job,” Mike says.

  I nod.

  All we can do now is wait.

  When I see it, I shiver. It creeps in around the trees, a mist too low, too heavy, and it floats and curls and swirls around itself, ignoring the wind. It flows across the lawn and just stops, a solid line curling back on itself, like a smoke ring.

  It’s him.

  The mist swirls there as the last light of day dies away, then rolls back, like a wave on a beach.

  Something moves in the dark, in the trees, and I feel a restless moth in my chest.

  Here he comes.

  I cover my mouth when he steps out of the trees. I’d know his cruel, aquiline face anywhere, but he’s changed, different. Bald, for one. Not a single hair on his egg-shaped head, and his ears have shriveled into little black husks, like dead leaves clinging to the smooth slope of his skull. No more bleached white finery. He’s dressed in filthy coveralls and a sweatshirt, the hood pooled around his neck. Part of me wonders if the clothes became mist too, if they’re somehow part of him.

  When he moves forward in a shambling slouch, it triggers something in my memory. A flicker of recognition.

  “He’s dressed like the thing at the party,” I murmur to Mike. “The thing in the filthy clothes, that they told me not to look at or talk to.”

  Mike nods.

  Vincent stops. He stands to his full height, and looks all the more like some hairless white rat, but the rusty red in his eyes is the same as ever. I just stare at him, my feet frozen in place.

  His voice is a low rasp and carries on the wind, like a slick of rancid oil on dirty water.

  “There you are. I forgot about you.”

  “Go away,” I shout back, my voice wavering. As a tiny smirk twists his pale bloodless lips, my resolve grows. “I don’t belong to you anymore.”

  “You will always belong to me. You and my bitch sister. She’s here too. What did you do to her?”

  “I took her away from you. Leave, Vincent.”

  I know he’s not going to. Nor do I want him to. I spent most of today draining a major part of Mike’s supply of stored blood.

  Come and get me.

  Mike takes my hand. We stand in the open doorway and wait. Vincent sniffs, his lips curling into a sneer, moving along with his nostrils like some kind of an animal.

  This disgusting dead thing made me into this creature. It killed Andi. I hate him. I hate him even for holding Victoria down while the other one, their father, ripped out their throat. That’s why she wasn’t cruel to me. She knew what it was like. To have someone you trust, someone you love do that to you.

  “You want us? Come and get us.”

  Mike squeezes my hand.

  Vincent laughs, like a rustling of dry papers in a stiff wind.

  “I am going to eat your heart,” Vincent rasps, moving forward. He stops, and his eyes trace the same lines of energy criss-crossing the front of the house, the ones I was staring at earlier.

  “Curious,” he says. “Curious and curious. Well.”

  He raises his hand and snaps his fingers. Long, bony fingers, like dried waxy leaves wrapped around sticks, with bits of bones showing through. When he does, more shapes move out of the trees. Shambling things, dressed like him.

  Thralls. Like I was.

  “How?”

  “He carried them with him somehow. I wasn’t expecting this.”

  Mike pulls me back as a pasty, half-rotted shape in filthy clothes storms up the brickwork path to the front steps and charges at the open door. Mike pulls me out of the way just in time. The thrall comes screaming inside, but it is not a whole shape that enters the house. He collapses into a spray of charred bone and ash, a fine gray dusting spreading across the carpet.

  The wards thrum with energy, like invisible guitar strings. Each bend of energy is just a tiny bit thinner now, just a bit smaller.

  The next one explodes just the same, crashing apart in a flash of smoke and ash, bones tumbling across the carpet, still glowing from the heat, and the wards fade a little more. Mike clutches my hand, squeezes.

  “Like we said, up the stairs. Stay behind me.”

  We back up the staircase to the second floor while the next thrall throws himself, itself, through the door.

  Before it does, I catch a
glimpse of its eyes.

  It’s not like the other times I’ve tried this with another creature. There’s just nothing. It’s hollowed out, empty.

  There’s nothing there.

  When the next thrall passes the threshold, it staggers into the house for a few steps before collapsing, exhaling a puff of flame as heat glows in its chest. The next one and the next one make it a little further.

  There’s a twang as the wards wear down. Vincent walks inside, his pinched rat face sneering as invisible lines of heat cut into his papery flesh. The wards give with a final twang.

  “Now,” he shouts.

  We join hands, standing side by side, and each of us thrusts our free hand into the air. I’m still shaky, unsteady, but it comes naturally to me, like when I put Victoria to sleep. I just did it, without thinking about it. In a world of shimmering gold and flowing energies, Vincent is a dark black void, just like the things behind him. Four or five of them slide into the house behind him before the second set of wards go up.

  Not keeping him out, trapping him inside.

  Mike explained the pig latin to me, why he mumbles in another language when he uses his power. Something to do with controlling the flow of energies, keeping it in check. When he shouts now it’s in plain old English and I lend my voice to his, and throw the power singing in my veins at Vincent.

  “Burn!” Mike roars.

  I join my voice to his. “Burn, motherfucker, burn!”

  There’s fire. It just sort of folds out of the air in a wave and rolls down the steps, slams into Vincent and throws him back against the ward on the walls and door. The flames lick over him from the front while explosive lines of coal red fury burn through him from the back. The thralls go up like candles, running screaming around the foyer, their voices hollow, empty, a reflection of Vincent’s cry of agony.

  He topples forward and lands on charred hands, crouching on all fours. Blackened, broken, Vincent lurches forward, looking more animal now than ever before.