Bag of Blood - Vampire Mystery Romance (11 page)

"It's ok, Gabriel!" she told him, turning to his legs. "I'll leave the tape on your mouth and hands, but let me undo your legs. We'll get you some help…" he smelled absolutely, eye-wateringly horrible, but within moments it became clear that the smell wasn't coming solely from him. Remembering the other shape, she turned to it, scooting forward to see who it was.

Thick red hair smeared with a crusted brown, a white face featuring glassy eyes. The skin looked strange, swelling unnaturally. As Lena watched, an ant crawled onto the open blue eye of the dead girl.

Scrambling backwards and harshly bumping Gabriel as she did, she let out a high-pitched sound of alarm, too tiny to be considered a scream. Dropping her head, she wretched, shoulders heaving.

"Oh my…" she whispered, shivering. She couldn't find words to describe how she was feeling. "Gabriel…" her voice was hoarse. "We need to get out now." She rapidly tore at the tape at his legs, hard enough to drag him into the wall; as he turned his head she saw that the hair on the back of his head was completely matted with blood. "Come on, come on!" she gripped him around the middle, bracing her feet on the floor and trying to pull him into a standing position. "I'll take you to my dad; we'll call the police, but we need to get out…"

"Mmm!" Gabriel mumbled urgently to her, eyes wide and fearful. Turning to what he was staring at, Lena saw the room door swing shut with a loud slam.

Lena shrieked, a primitive, terrified sound, and threw herself at the door, pounding her fists against it.

"Hello?" she yelled out the small slot in the door. "Who's there? Let me out, please!" through the thick door, she heard a jingling and clanking; it took her a moment to realize that she was being locked in. She screamed again, so loud she could feel it tearing at her throat, causing her ears to pop. Footsteps faded in the distance as whoever it was walked away. "Let me
out
!" she howled.

A somewhat soft
thumping
sound caused her to whirl around on her heel; Gabriel, who had been standing awkwardly against the wall, slid slowly back to the floor, with a sorrowful hopelessness in his eyes. Beads of sweat lay on his forehead, and it took Lena a moment to realize that he was sick;
really
sick. His eyes were slightly glazed with fever.

Pounding on the door a few more times, she was struck with desperation when it didn't even budge. She hit it with every ounce of strength in her body, but nothing changed. It was completely solid, almost eleven inches of pure cement. She let out a dry sob, terrified to the point of losing her mind.

Gabriel's shoulders shuddered and it took her a moment to realize that he was coughing behind the tape.
Is he dying?
With another glance at the door, she made her way back to him.

"Look at me," she told him, but he ignored her. "
Look at me
," she demanded again, and this time he did. She gasped at what she saw in his eyes; misery, desperation, sickness, and a burning, unending
hunger.
Even through the tape she could see the bulge of his fangs.

"We
will
get out of here, do you hear me?" she said severely. Grabbing his shoulders, she shook him. "You have to believe that we'll get out, too! We
have
to get out!" He seemed barely phased by her words.

"Look," she said, trying to calm the animal-like panic gnawing at her insides.
You can't panic now,
she sternly told herself.
You need to keep your head on straight.
"I'm here with my father; when I don't come back, he'll look for me."

But how will he know where to look?
She tried to ignore the nasty voice crooning in her ear.
This campus is massive; why on earth would it even
occur
to him that I'm locked in the multi-purpose sports area room number eight
? She bemoaned leaving her bag with her father; it had
everything
. Their lunch, the car keys, her cell phone and Taser...
Stupid
! She berated herself.
How could you be so
stupid?

Looking up where the sun was filtering into the room through the chicken wire, she searched for a weakness, and she had an idea. Returning her hands to the tape that bound Gabriel's arms to his chest, she anticipated his drawing away from her even before he did it.

"I won't untape your hands," she said, gesturing to the tape that covered his fingers like mittens. "That way you can't take the tape off your mouth. But if you can stretch your arms out, maybe you can help me." He allowed her to peel the tape from his arms.
At least he's wearing long sleeves,
she found herself thinking.
So I don't have to tear it directly off his skin
. This thought was emphasized as a tiny square of fabric from his shirt sleeve was ripped cleanly off along with the tape.

Finally she finished, discarding the extra bindings into the corner of the room as she once again hauled him to his feet and propped him against the wall with difficulty. He panted through his nose, swaying, and it seemed as if he were having a hard time standing.

Well, obviously
, she fumed.
He's been stuck on this floor for who knows how long… Of course he can't stand!
It only served to make her plan that much more precarious, but what choice did she have? She adjusted him so that he was completely leaning against the wall, supporting barely any of his own weight. She bit her lip, trying to plan this out.

"Alright," she told him. "Hold your arms out like this." She held her own arms out to demonstrate, pressed together at the wrist but bowed in opposite directions at the elbow. He mimicked her, looking confused, and she leaned into his arms, doing her best to clamber onto them and sit in the basket that they made. He fell forward from the sudden extra weight, but caught himself in time and strained to hold her body up.

Using the top of his head as a brace to rest her hands as she pulled herself into a standing position, one foot on each of his arms, her legs trembled underneath her like those of a newborn colt, coupled by the shaking of his own arms, she swayed violently.
I should have stayed in gymnastics,
she thought frantically, remembering several lessons she had gone to as a child. She had hated them at the time, but now…

Standing up fully and shifting from side to side in order to keep her balance, she stretched her arms over the head, reaching for the ceiling.
Almost… almost…
together, they were about nine feet tall… she just needed a little
boost…
he lurched forward, sending her up towards the ceiling, and her fingers automatically linked into the chicken wire under the ceiling. Unfortunately, his arms fell from underneath her legs as he collapsed to the ground, leaving her dangling from the ceiling by her fingers. The chicken wire sagged underneath her weight and she whimpered, legs kicking frantically.
Ow…
she could feel the wire ripping into her skin.
Ow, ow…
she couldn't keep this going for long.
If only the ceiling would break, then maybe it'd be worth it…

It didn't, and down she fell. Her plan was to break the ceiling, offering them a possible route of escape if they managed to both get through it. It was a weak plan but the only one her frazzled brain could come up with at the moment. Mercifully, something soft padded her head as she landed with a sickening crash on the ground, knocking the wind out of her. Her left arm twisted painfully, stuck underneath her body, she let out a shriek of agony.

Turning her head to focus her streaming eyes on what she landed on, she saw that her head rested on the stomach of the corpse. She let out a little wail of dismay, and two bound hands appeared to loop around her head, dragging her backwards. Gabriel managed to haul her to the corner even as she wheezed loudly for each breath, her ears ringing. He shook his head at her and the point came across clearly;
don't do that again.
Lena almost laughed through her tears;
duh, Gabriel. I may be dumb but I'm not
that
brain-dead. Yet.

A thought entered her mind, an extremely dangerous one, and she tried to push it away. Looking down at her hands she saw how the blood seeped from the deep cuts on her fingers. It seemed Gabriel had noticed, too; he couldn't tear his eyes away from her hands.

What if I let him drink my blood?
She thought, shuddering even at the idea.
Then
he
might be well enough to get us out of this mess.
But seeing his eyes, the ravenous starvation looming in them, the desperate way his body was now shaking even as the bulges under the tape on his mouth lengthened, spikes of fear shot through her heart. Fangs were significantly longer and thicker than any needle; they left huge gaping holes in their wake, spilling more blood then the vampire ever managed to drink. It was why you hardly ever heard about
survivors
of vampire attacks. And with him so unstable, it really seemed like a deadly gamble. She'd try to think of another plan once the pain in her arm faded.

"How long have you been here?" she babbled to Gabriel, not even waiting for any form of an answer. "Were you here when school was still in session? Did nobody even notice?"

She didn't dare ask what she most wanted to know:
who put you and that girl in here
? Speaking it out loud would only egg on her hunger to know, and she knew there was no way she could get a response. Instead, she said, "It was the killer, right? The person who killed Rebekah and that girl on Halloween. Wonder what that monster's deal is; killing all the red-head girls in town? How the crap did
you
get mixed into all this?" He didn't even blink at her, he was still so focused on her sluggishly bleeding phalanges.

"Seriously," she told him. "If I could help you, I would. But I'm afraid… I'm afraid if I let you, you'd kill me. And I really don't want to die." She risked a glance at the girl in the room and shuddered; now that she noticed, the girl, too, had dark purple rings around her neck; she had been strangled like the rest of them. "She probably didn't want to die either," she murmured, overwhelmed with sadness.

Suddenly flinging herself at the wall, she raked her fingernails down the smooth cement surface. "
I don't want to die
!" she howled. "
Let me out, let me out…
" she had gone straight out of her mind, wearing her nails into bloody stubs before beating her fists into the wall, smashing them over and over. "Let me out…" she whispered.

Gabriel pulled her away, maneuvering her so that she rested against his side.
Stop
, his eyes told her.
You're not helping anything
. Hot tears tracked down her face, seeping into the fabric of his filthy shirt. The dull throbbing of her arm returned as she slowly sank back into her head.
Ow…
The chill of the room began to permeate into her bones, and she wondered how cold Gabriel must be feeling right now, trapped in a concrete room that sucked the warmth right from your skin.
We
are
going to die,
she realized.
If we don't starve to death, we'll freeze to death.
She hadn't realized until now how each breath emerged from her nose in white puffy clouds.

Lena and Gabriel sat like that for what felt akin to an eternity, Lena crying uncontrollably but also silently, each tear making Gabriel's clothes more and more wet. Her mind began to drift away, thinking of her father; was he wandering alone in the snow in search of her, worried or angry? Would he walk until he tripped or collapsed, lying in the snow completely unnoticed? Or would he be smart and call home using her cell phone, wait to be picked up?

A creaking caused her ears to perk, and she looked to the door; a blast of sunlight silhouetted a huge dark figure as it made its way into the room. With a thunk the figure set a small black pistol onto the floor and slowly approached the two as they huddled against the wall.

"Oh, Lena," Robert sighed miserably. "Why did it have to be you?"

Lena was absolutely
floored
by the sudden appearance of her best friend. Mixtures of confusion, relief, and alarm blew like a snowstorm through her brain, and she found herself holding out her arms in a gesture of astonishment.

"
Robert
?" she didn't understand; was he here to save her? How did he know where she was? He slowly approached her, and Gabriel cringed against her side, making a loud sound of fear. Bending down, Robert took Lena's hands in his.

"You're hurt!" he remarked, looking at the multiple cuts disfiguring her hands. "How did that happen?"

"I tried to escape through the ceiling," she explained. "I fell on my arm; I think it might be broken. It hurts so much…" Gently, Robert ran his hand up her arm, searching, until Lena cried out in pain.

"It hurts here?" he asked, rolling up her sleeve as high as it would go to examine the skin there; dark purple bruises transformed the flesh as he rotated her shoulder. She shrieked, flinging herself backwards. "
Stop
; it
hurts
!"

He slid his hands underneath her legs, lifting her to his chest. She noticed he was shaking his head, talking seemingly to himself. "Why is it Lena?
Why Lena
? Lena, Lena, Lena… is this my punishment, God?"

"What are you talking about?" she asked him, even as he carried her to the center of the room. He sat down on the floor, cradling her in his lap, gripping her tightly as he rocked back and forth. "Lena, Lena, Lena…" he continued to murmur. His fingers knotted in her hair as he held her to him.

"Robert," she told him. "That hurts. We need to get out of here; don't you see that dead girl?"

Suddenly, he flung her away from him, shoving her on the floor where her head smashed against the concrete. She gasped for breath.

"Don't you get it, you
stupid moron?"
He screamed in her face. "
I
was the one who killed that girl!
I
was the one who
put
Gabriel in here.
I killed all of them.
Rebekah, Valarie, Anastasia…" he pointed to the body in the corner. "I squeezed their necks so hard their eyes popped; Valarie spit blood all over me."

Lena was shaking her head, flabbergasted. She must have hit her head harder than she thought. "What are you talking about?"

Frustrated, he pulled his clothes over his head, standing bare-chested in front of her to reveal long, scabbed-over scratches carved deep into his chest and arms. Striding to the dead body, he grabbed the girl's hands, showing Lena dried blood and flesh dangling from the dead girl's fingernails.

"Anastasia tried to fight me," he told her. "Fat lot of good it did her; she still ended up in here."

Lena continued to shake her head.
This can't be happening; there's no way. No way on heaven or earth would gentle, kind Robert…
she was sickened just at the thought.

Finally seeming to calm down, Robert returned to where he had thrown Lena, scooping her into his lap once more and holding her. Her cheek was pressed against what he claimed were the claw marks of a frightened, dying woman, fighting for her life like an animal and losing. Bile rose in Lena's mouth, and she shuddered. "God must hate me," he laughed bitterly. "He's always hated me. He's making me do this to the person I love most in the world." Rocking back and forth with his head buried in Lena's neck, he breathed heavily.

"I love you, Lena," he told her. Once he said it, it was as if he was unable to stop. "I love you, I love you, I love you."

"What about Megan…?" she asked, still feeling as if she understood nothing of what was happening.

"Screw Megan!" he shouted. "That's not my fault!
She
kissed
me
.
She
was the one who started that whole thing.
That's not my fault
!" With the back of his hand, he struck Lena in the face so hard that she was seeing stars. She trembled. "
Robert
!" blood trickled from her mouth where her tooth had sunk into her own lip.

He laughed, but it wasn't a happy laugh. It was almost as if he was crying, the hiccupping and shoulder-trembling rocked his entire body. Trying to get up from his lap to hurry to the door, he grabbed her left hand, forcing her back down on the ground with him and ripping at her hurt arm in the process. She screamed.

"You've always been such a
baby
," he sneered at her. "Did you know that? You cry at the drop of a hat. You're always whining;
oh, woe is me, I have a family who loves me and friends who take care of me
. You can never do
anything
by yourself, and you're so goddamn
stupid
. You even
look
like a baby." Snatching the glasses off her face, he ground them underneath his foot, snapping the frames and crushing the lenses into dust. He yanked at one of her braids. "
Grow up
."

When Lena stared at him, her eyes glassy, he laughed. "You look pretty stupid
now
, Lena, all covered with blood and dirt."

"Why are you doing this?" she asked him, her bloody lips trembling. "I don't understand! The police said it was a
vampire
who had killed all those girls!" As soon as she said it, she looked at Robert's body, really
looked
at it in the first time in what had felt like in forever. Thick muscles branched off, his arms and chest looking like the glossy photographs in a wrestling magazine. He was so tall, so big… big enough to be stronger than even a vampire?

"You look like your father," she said, before she had time to think. His reaction was as vicious as it was instantaneous. Burying his hands in her unraveling hair, he shook her back and forth, causing her whole body to swing into the wall. "
Shut the hell up
," he boomed. "
I don't have anything to
do
with my father."
She screamed in pain, crying. "
Stop,
Robert,
please, stop.
" Her hands scrabbled for his wrist, trying to peel him away from her.

As soon as it had started, it was over, with him dropping to his knees and wrapping her up in his arms. "I'm so sorry, Lena," he sobbed into her shoulder. "So sorry. I do love you… I love you…"

She had had enough. "You have a pretty screwed up idea of what 'love' is!" she told him, snarling, trying to pull away. His iron grip on her prevented her from struggling more than a few inches back. He looked her in the eye.

"Maybe so. Did you know my mother killed my father?" he said it so simply, so matter-of-factly, that it took a few moments for his words to register in Lena's pain-addled brain. "
What
?"

"Might as well tell you, since I'm going to have to blow your brains out in a minute. Yeah; I was eleven years old. Dear old dad was sitting on the sofa, watching television, when mom walked behind him with a stone statue he had bought her to decorate the porch with. It was a bunny holding a 'welcome' sign, I think. Didn't look much like a rabbit when she was done crushing his skull with it, though."

It was too much, too much… Lena trembled in his arms. "Why would she do that?"

"Never told me '
why
', he explained patiently. "Just made me help her get his body into his car; we did a pretty good job of making it look like he drove off a bridge. Police never questioned it, anyway."

"Then why did you kill the girls?" she whispered, hardly able to say it. "Why did you take Gabriel?"

"Different reasons," he replied, still speaking in the calm tone anybody would use when describing the recipe for their favorite pie. "I was walking by Rebekah as she was practicing that stupid dance routine she was doing for cheer. She fell on her butt and I started laughing, and she scowled at me and said 'what's your problem, brat?' Reminded me of something my father had said once. Before I knew it, my hands were around her neck and she was limp like a fish in my arms."

Lena gawked at him, trying once again to weasel out of his grip. This time he let her and she ran to where Gabriel was, crouching beside him. He looked at her, a dull hopelessness in his eyes.

"Valarie," he continued speaking, "wasn't an accident... You have no idea how
great
I felt after Rebekah, I was walking on water for days. It was like, after killing her and getting away with it, that I was some great king; I got to decide who lived and who died when I felt like it. It felt
wonderful
. But the good feelings started to wear off pretty fast."

Lena's hands fluttered to Gabriel's, and the vampire glanced at her. To Robert, who was standing a few feet away, it must have looked like she was searching for comfort, for something to hold on to. Her fingers found the tape that was binding his hands together, and slowly she began to tug on it.

"Trunk or treating ended pretty quickly," he told her, warming into his story, probably having been unable to tell people about his overwhelming feelings for so long. "Most of the kids were too little to be out pretty late. So I went home and Claire wasn't there! I was so pissed that I didn't even bother to take off my costume; I just went looking for her. And as I was walking, I saw Valarie and just
knew
, she had to die next."

Trying to buy herself time as she ever-so-slowly picked at Gabriel's bindings, Lena asked "How did you know?"

"It was her hair," Robert replied. "It looked
just
like my Dad's. I'd never seen anybody with the same hair, but she had it; long and thick and curly… the color was exactly the same. It had to be a sign; she needed to die. She even had his freckles!"

He took a moment to breathe, before reaching to where he had laid his gun. Though Lena's vision was extremely blurry without her glasses, she could still see the rapture on his face while he gently rotated the black metal weapon in his hands.

"And Anastasia," he said quietly, looking at the dead woman. "I went looking for her when the buzz from Valarie wore off. I knew what I was looking for; someone,
anyone
, who reminded me enough of my father that I'd get the same feelings from killing them. And it worked, a little." He held up one of Anastasia's dark locks. "It really isn't good enough," he grunted. "I wonder if Valarie has sisters? That might do it. Mom told me not to just leave bodies lying around anymore; said that way, sooner or later I'd be caught. And she was
right!
I heard a noise behind me when I was done with Anastasia, and when I turned around," Robert continued, standing up and approaching the two against the wall, still holding the gun. He gave Gabriel a sharp kick in the ribs. "
This
guy was running away; he had seen
everything
and was going to tell!"

Lena was beginning to understand, although the more and more Robert spoke, the sicker she felt.
How could I not have noticed?
She thought, distressed.
I spent so much time with him, and I never even got the impression…
She had to remind herself to focus.
Just get Gabriel's hands free; don't think about anything else.

"So I tackled him," Robert began pacing the room looking riled, unable to sit still. "Smashed his head into the wall a couple of times and took him and that girl home; my mom helped me hide them in our basement."

So he is stronger than a vampire,
Lena thought in dismay. She hoped this wouldn't hurt her plan; it was her last hope. "She helped me tape him up while he was still unconscious, but when I tried to kill him,
I couldn't do it.
It was the most obnoxious thing… even when he was out of it, every time my hands got anywhere near his neck or nose, he'd do that vampire thing… what do you call it? Pheromones? And I would drop to the ground, not able to move. They really have a strong instinct to live. So as soon as school got out, I hid them here."

Lena mentally counted; school had gotten out six days ago.
Six days, he was trapped in this freezing concrete room? How is he not completely insane? I lost it after only a few minutes!

"I've been waiting and waiting for him to die; mom told me to just let him stay out here until he died of thirst or something. But he
hasn't.
And I can't wait any more." Lifting the gun until the barrel was pointed directly at Gabriel's head, he said "And so I found a way to kill him without getting close to him. I don't really
like
it, of course; I like to feel them die underneath my hands. I love it when they kick. Even when they hurt me," he gestured to his scarred chest, "while I'm killing them, even
that
feels good."

Has he been this crazy the whole time?
Lena thought to herself, devastated.
How come nobody caught on?

He lunged at Lena then, so suddenly she shrieked in fear as he hoisted her into the air, once again holding him in his arms and pointing the gun to her temple. In his momentum, she had been forced to rip the entire remaining piece of tape from Gabriel's hands, leaving him free.