Paranormal Anthology With a TWIST (24 page)

I slowly opened my eyes. I was so groggy and the room was still
spinning. Turning my head, I realized I was lying in my bed.
How the hell did I get here?
I lifted my
head and peered around the room—everything
seemed
in order. Was I that tired that I just stumbled into my room
and fell asleep? I guessed it was possible. I tried to swing my legs over the
edge of the bed to sit up but they felt like two lead weights. I tried again
but I couldn’t make them move. I lifted my head again and it was then that I
saw the ropes binding my legs to each post of my bed.

“What the fuck?” I asked as I tried to sit up. My shoulders were
barely off the mattress when I figured out I couldn’t move any further—my
arms were bound as well. I yanked on the ropes but couldn’t break loose. I
yanked harder to no avail.

“Oh good, you’re finally awake.” I snapped my head towards the
sound of the voice to see Jules standing in the doorway. “I’ve been bored out
of my mind. Two hundred and fifty channels and not a damn thing to watch.”

“Jules? What the hell are you doing?”

“Playing a game, Marc. Isn’t that what you like to do? Play little
games?”

“Did you drug me?”

She held her fingers up. “A little bit”

“Why?”

She walked slowly, deliberately, into my room. Stopping at the
foot of the bed, she gazed down at me. She held onto the post to my left and
swung herself around so she was near my head. Leaning down over me, she
whispered in my ear, “Because I know who you are, Marc Keary, and I know what
you’ve been up to.” My eyes grew wide with surprise as she slowly rose to her
full height and crossed the room to stare out the window at the twilight of the
city.

“How?” was all I managed to whisper.

“We’re alike, you and I.” I was stunned into silence. I had never
met another vampire before. I was self-taught; my sire made me leaving
immediately after turning me. I bumbled my way through most of my existence. I
felt an odd sense of relief knowing another had found me yet it was mixed with
fear since I was, after all, tied up.

“How did you know what I was?”

“I’ve been watching you for a long time. I wanted to be friends
until you decided to make me a victim. Rule number one that you must never
forget with me—I’m a predator, Marc… not prey.”

I had sensed something was off the day before and now I knew it
was because she had been on to me. The jig was up and I hadn’t realized it.
“Jules, I’m sorry. Had I known you were a vampire too, I never would have…” Her
high-pitched laugher cut me off before I could finish.

“If you had known
what
?”
I had her full attention as she turned away from the window and back to me.

“That you were a vampire too.”

“I’m not a vampire, Marc. Is this one of your games? Because
you’re kidding—right?” Her laughter began anew and I couldn’t for the
life of me figure out what the hell she was finding so amusing and,
furthermore, why the hell she kept calling me just Marc? She was trying to
catch her breath before she asked, “Wait… did you say
too
? Do you believe
you’re
a vampire?”

“I know that I am.”

Her laughter came to an abrupt stop and she looked down at me with
what appeared to be sympathy in her eyes. “I thought it was just part of your
game—I didn’t know you actually believed it.” She blew out a long breath.
“Wow, that’s kinda sad.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” My anger and frustration
were starting to boil over. “I
am
a
vampire. My name is Marcus Keary and I was born in 1813—brought to
darkness in 1842.”

She crossed the room and picked up her messenger bag, which had
been lying on a chair near the bed. She produced a large, well-worn scrapbook,
sat down on the chair, and began thumbing through it. “Marcus Keary, also known
as Marc—you were born in 1990 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You were the
only child of Scott and Marie Keary. You grew up in a small town in Colorado
where you attended Washington Elementary School and Snow Peak High School.”
Jules held up picture after picture with each new detail to illustrate her
story. She was clearly off her rocker but continued on with no regard to me—even
though I was her captive audience.

“The part you told me about being a college drop-out is in fact
true. You were studying for a degree in plant biology, dropping out after the
tragic death of your parents a little over three years ago. Your family was traveling
in your father’s private plane when you crashed in the mountains. You were the
only survivor and you were trapped with your parent’s mangled bodies for days
before rescue.” At this she held up a newspaper clipping that pictured the
twisted wreckage of a small prop-plane. I was holding her gaze until she shook
the paper and drew my attention to it. She held it out to me as if it was
supposed to mean something. I shook my head. “Really, you don’t remember any of
this?” She shrugged her shoulders and folded the article back into her
scrapbook.

She pulled a worn picture from the album and got a strange look on
her face. “Maybe you’ll remember your high school girlfriend, Amy. After the
accident you moved to the city to be closer to her.” At this, she held up a
picture of a beautiful young woman with short brown hair and an illuminating
smile. I had seen her before—she was the woman from my dream, the woman
covered in blood. That was when everything clicked back into place and the
memories overwhelmed me. I gasped and quickly diverted my eyes from the
picture. Jules continued to hold it out to me and I felt as though all the air
had left my lungs. How could I have forgotten?

It felt like an eternity before I could speak again, “Who are you
and how do you know all about me?” I asked, my mouth dry, the words hard
pressed to leave my lips.

“I’m sad that you don’t remember me, Marc. After all, we did grow
up together.”

 
I had no memory of
her. Other pieces of my life were falling back into place but nowhere did I
find her. I closed my eyes tight and shook my head, trying to clear the cobwebs
in hopes that something might surface—but there was nothing.

“We went to school together?”

“Not exactly. I was homeschooled but I saw you every day. I lived
three doors down from you and I used to watch you from my window. I thought you
were so handsome. After your parents died I wanted to know more about you and
to take away your sadness. So I did some research. It wasn’t very hard. The
media was broadcasting every tiny detail of your life after the accident. I’ve
been keeping tabs on you ever since. You moved here to be closer to Amy and
that broke my heart, but I followed you anyway.”

“You followed me here—how?”

“Again it wasn’t all that hard. I just got your forwarding address
from the people who bought your parents’ house. I really lucked out when I
moved here and there was a vacancy in your building though. It made keeping
track of your comings and goings a lot easier.”

I was having a hard time following—her ramblings were
obviously those of a complete lunatic. I remembered moving here for Amy but
then nothing seemed coherent after that. It was this jumbled mess of what I
thought had been reality. “If I moved here for Amy—where the hell is she
now? Why isn’t she here?” The vision of Amy covered in blood seeped back into
my mind and I tried to shut it down, lock it out, and make it go away.

“Don’t you remember?” she asked and I shook my head. “Oh. Well,
things were great with you two for a while but then about a year ago, you
caught her with another guy. I wasn’t all that surprised—I always thought
she was a whore. I had already known for a while what she had been up to. On
days when you were being dull, I would follow her around. I was there the night
you caught her, well not in the apartment, which would have been awkward, but I
was waiting outside. The pain on your face was horrible. I knew I had to do
something. I couldn’t let her get away with breaking your heart like that. I
was determined to set things right for you and I did what needed to be done.
You found her body the next day but it must have broken your already fragile
psyche. You must have gone bat-shit crazy and created this new persona. Some
kind of weird coping mechanism, I guess, because a month later you made your
first kill.”

She had killed my Amy and in return, I had killed others. I turned
my head to my bedside table, to my little keepsakes—specifically the
panda necklace. Jules followed my eyes and nodded her head, lifting the
necklace as I turned away. “Yep, that’s right. That was from your first victim.
Although… how in the hell you never got caught is anyone’s guess. You were so
sloppy that first time around.”

I stared at the ceiling as the memories began to rush back to me.
I remembered each of them—their fear and my excitement. There were no
words that could adequately describe my thought process at that moment.
Everything she was saying was true. I felt the bile rising in my throat. “If
you knew—why didn’t you turn me in?”

“What? Send you to jail? I could never do that—I felt
responsible for you. I was protecting you. You seemed to enjoy your first kill
and, as I’ve already told you, we’re alike, you and I. Besides—what was I
going to tell the police?
Oh hello
officer, Marc killed someone because I killed his slut girlfriend and it drove
him mad?
C’mon,” she snarked at me as she laid the necklace back down. “As
we both know, you didn’t stop after that first one, you killed again. It was
fascinating to watch but I didn’t like being a bystander—there’s no fun
in that. So I learned your patterns, which wasn’t hard after following you
around for three years. I watched you hunt your victims and I’d hunt alongside
you—and every time you killed, so did I. Although, I had no idea about
the vampire thing… just when you think you know someone… It was still a fun
game though.”

She winked at me and my stomach clenched again. I knew why she had
seemed so familiar after our meeting in the coffee shop,
Witchy Woman
. “That night in the club, when I left with Lyd... Katherine,
that was you. You were there.”

She nodded. “Of course.”

“Did you kill that guy you left with?”

She shrugged casually. “Duh! Didn’t you watch the news the next
morning? Our stories were back to back. It was so awesome!”

This girl was a genuine psychopath but then again—wasn’t
that the pot calling the kettle black? Twelve people were dead by my hand. I
had been killing people and drinking their blood because I believed I was a
vampire. She was doing it to what, impress me? “Jules, why? Why would you do
all this?”

She seemed insulted that I would even question her motives “I
already told you. I wanted to make your sadness go away. I thought we were
kindred spirits; but then you decided to kill me, feed off me, or whatever. You
were going to make me your thirteenth victim. Not cool Marc, not cool at all.”
I turned away from her and resumed staring at the ceiling, attempting, in vain,
to process the events of my life. She rose from the chair and I heard her
shuffling around. She had her back to me but, out of the corner of my eye, I
could see her pulling something from her bag. “That day at the coffee shop, I
orchestrated the whole scene so we could finally meet, face to face. I thought
we had something really special and we could have had more—but you had to
go and ruin it.”

She turned and walked slowly back to my bedside, clutching a large
dagger. I couldn’t take my eyes off it; it was so like a weapon one might find
at a Renaissance festival. It was garish—silver and gold with red jewels
encrusting the handle. “Are you going to kill me?”

Her shoulders slumped and she sighed heavily before responding.
“This isn’t an easy decision for me but you forced my hand, Marc. You tried to
make me your thirteenth victim. The poetic end to our relationship would be for
you to become
my
thirteenth instead.”
She climbed up on the bed and straddled me with the dragger still clutched
tightly in her hand.

I knew I should have been begging and pleading for my life but I
just couldn’t find the strength, not after all I had done. Maybe in her own
insane logic she was right. My death could be poetry. I had nothing left to
live for—except for one thing. I looked into her sad blue eyes and asked,
“Would you do one favor for me after I’m gone?”