RBVS 19

The Runaway Dream

 

Chapter Eight - Anamorphosis

"The call of death is a call of love." – Hermann Hesse

 

I was asleep, and I knew that because my parents were still alive. We were in the car with the darkness all around, as if we'd entered a long tunnel and we had to drive through it. I didn't want to, but in my dream I didn't seem to care as I sat in the backseat, buckled up tight and holding Edgar. I smiled in my sleep I think, because I'd forgotten him completely. Edgar the Bear, soft and stuffed and in my arms.

What a nice dream, except for my shoulder. It hurt and when I looked down at it, I could see I was bleeding. I was bleeding in the back of the car and my parents were in the front. My dad drove while my mom slept with her head against the glass, breathing fog on the window as we sailed through the night.

I thought I should wake Mom up and tell her about my shoulder, but I sat there because I knew I couldn't. I had to sit very still because it was coming and I held my bear tight, Edgar, even though I knew I'd never hold him tightly enough. He'd fly out of my hands forever in a minute. I'd never see him again, except when I dreamed.

And the car grew dark, inside that tunnel, and cold now. The wind was in my hair, howling in my ears, and there she was. Angela, standing in the road, standing in the light in front of us. Looking at me, smiling with her arms wide. It was her and it had always been her, appearing out of the dark.

My dad didn't yell. He didn't make a sound, he just jerked in his seat, his strong arms turning the steering wheel, too hard, too fast. Yanking us around and over and the whole world turned upside down. I wanted to stop him. I knew her. We couldn't hurt her, she was already dead and already moving out of the way, stepping aside to let us pass like a ghostly matador.

The car went one way, and then the other, throwing us all left and right and left again. My mom's head hit the window she'd been resting against and it shattered suddenly and silently. All those broken pieces of glass flying through the air, glittering like diamonds. Shining like stars in the dark. And for a second everything was quiet until we hit that big tree and Edgar was gone. Ripped away and flying out of my arms to heaven.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"How do you feel?" Angela asked gently, washing my shoulder and trying to smile.

"It hurts," I said, blinking at the lights. We were in a kitchen, a tiny one, and I was leaning against the refrigerator and sitting on the dirty linoleum floor.

We were in a small apartment, an ugly place, one of those two room flops you could rent by the day or week. I'd been there before, they were all the same, and the people who lived in them were ugly and stupid and poor. There was someone living here, in this one, a man I thought, judging from the pornography that littered his small kitchen table. The empty bottles of cheap liquor and overflowing ashtrays. A mess everywhere. Dirty. Greasy. Stained and stinking of a life less lived than endured.

A man was dying here and he was out for the moment. Working maybe, or more likely stalking the video arcades, looking at women he'd never know, that didn't even exist except in cellophane wrappers and digital video. He'd spend his last dollar on dreams, jerking off or getting drunk. Dragging dead smoke into his lungs. No one lived in places like this, they just died here.

There was another man there too, and he was not gone. I could smell him and that alone was enough to tell me he didn't belong in that place. He smelled foreign and alive and I turned my head to see him at the sink, washing his hands, or maybe something else. He smelled human and dressed like a doctor, with the white coat and the funny green pants, the scrubs that doctors wear. He didn't look at me, not yet, but he moved like he knew I watched him.

He was frightened.

"I'm hungry," I breathed, staring at his shoulders as they rocked back and forth.

"Not yet," Angela told me, whispering. "We need him."

She was hungry too, famished as Angela hadn't fed in many days now, and she was feeling it. Bringing me here had taken a lot of her strength, and finding the doctor while I'd slept, convincing him to leave his hospital and come with her, that would have drained much of Angela's reserves as well. She wasn't very good with the thrall.

"The girl…" The doctor turned around, holding a plastic plate with some instruments on it, medical tools, and he froze when he saw me awake and hungry. I didn't look like a girl.

"Do whatever you have to," Angela told him, her voice soft and soothing, telling him it was okay. Working on his confused mind.

I sat naked from the waist up, with a hole in my shoulder, just above my right breast and my flesh had been bruised, turned dark by the wound. The rest of me had taken an unnatural hue, very pale like chalk with a wax-like texture to my skin. My mouth was open, showing him my fangs while my red eyes stared into his. I needed blood. I wanted him. I couldn't help it and I felt my hands making fists, digging razor sharp nails into my palms.

"The bullet is still inside her," he said slowly, the fear that had filled him to overflowing a moment before evaporated. He suffered now only the urge to do as Angela told him. "And, uh…her shoulder is fractured. We'll have to set it."

Angela sat with me and held me as tightly as she dared, wrapping her arms around me so that my own arms were trapped against my body. She kissed my cheek and whispered soft words to sooth us both, the doctor and me. He was young and handsome and oh, so alive! I could smell his blood beneath his skin. I could hear his heart pumping in his chest.

"We should give her something for the pain, um..." The doctor looked around like there might be a bottle of morphine handy.

"No. She'll be fine," Angela suggested reasonably. "Just take out the bullet."

I sat still, as much as I could, while the man used his steel tools to dig into my shoulder. It hurt a lot, worse than anything, but I didn't scream. My tolerance for pain was a hundred times what it had been as a human. I just set my jaw, staring at that pulsing vein on the man's neck as he bent over me, working to remove a small bit of metal, dropping it on the plate.

"Is that it?" Angela asked.

"No…It fragmented," the doctor said, going back into me for more. Deeper this time and I hissed at him, jerking violently for a brief second in Angela's arms, but then I calmed.

He found the bullet, a misshapen lump of copper that looked very big to my eyes and it landed on the plate with a heavy sound. He looked for other pieces, pulling at the wound, using a penlight and saying we should get x-rays and all of that business. At least I wasn't bleeding, but only because I didn't have enough blood in me to waste that way.

"I think I got all of it," he looked at Angela. "But you should get her to a hospital."

"It's okay. She'll live anyway. Fix her shoulder now," Angela told him and the doctor looked unhappy, but he had little choice. 

He was strong mentally, and his ego was a powerful thing, as you'd expect from a physician, and so Angela's power over him was weak at best. She'd had to work hard to get him this far and her control was wearing thin. It seemed to me that his professional interest was keeping him close to us now, more than anything Angela might say to him.

"This is going to be difficult without a decent picture, an x-ray. We could…" the doctor was trying, but he knew we weren't going anywhere. Not to a hospital certainly. The police would be looking for a girl with a gunshot wound, not to mention the fact that we were vampires. 

"How do we do it?" Angela interrupted him. "Just tell me, I'll help."

It wasn't very complicated, just a matter of pushing and pulling my shoulder into the right spot again. I'd heal quickly enough, in just a matter of days really. Angela wasn't worried about that so much, but more the fact that I'd heal even if my bones were crooked, and obviously I didn't want to be hunchbacked or lop-sided, or anything else. We needed to get everything where it belonged.

That involved a lot of pain, as it turned out. Surprisingly though, once my shoulder was set, most of the real pain went away. There remained only an ache, really, like a deep cramp. My shoulder throbbed as my flesh slowly but surely knitted itself back together and I sat back in Angela's arms, flushed and damp and breathing heavily as I'd wished to scream briefly in the middle of it all.

"We need to dress that wound and immobilize her arm, isolate her shoulder as much as possible." He was speaking confidently now, like a real doctor who's really in charge. Angela's control was gone, he was free of her now and yet he stayed. He was foolish in his ego and curious as all good doctors must be, I suppose. They're like gods to regular people and forget their place in the real world.

Angela was going to kill him, any second now. We'd feed on him together and wait for the man who lived here, we'd kill him too. And hide ourselves away as much as possible from the daylight when it came. Waiting for my body to heal, waiting until I could travel more easily and we could return home.

"I won't tell anyone," the doctor said softly, standing up, away from us slightly. He looked rather sad to me.

"I know," Angela whispered and she grew tense and moved so quickly then. I doubt he saw her coming until she'd taken the man as if she might a lover, in her arms and kissing his neck.

The doctor struggled briefly, fighting for his life, but he would die quickly. Angela fed on him until his heartbeat was just a rumor and then brought him to me, so that I could draw the small bit of life that remained from his limp form. His blood was rich and warm and even those few swallows that I had seemed to revitalize me somewhat, pushing the pain away completely.

I didn't tell Angela about my dream. She made a place for us to sleep during the day and I could hear her in another room, moving things, doing whatever she could to cover the windows. Dawn would be coming and we had to hope the person who stayed in this apartment would be home soon. It wouldn't do if he opened the door at noon and found the dead doctor on his kitchen floor and two vampires sleeping under his bed. Angela had a high tolerance for sunlight and I'd inherited some of that, but even healthy I wasn't strong enough to withstand a full day of it. I was injured and Angela exhausted, once we went to sleep we'd be vulnerable and nearly helpless.

And the dream was for me alone, for the moment. I remembered it now, I remembered all of it. It wasn't just a dream, it was a real memory. I remembered finally and I remembered everything. We'd crashed and my parents had died because Angela had been there. Standing in the middle of the road, for just a second, just long enough to make my dad swerve the car and hit that tree.

She'd killed them as easily as if she'd bitten them, and perhaps she had, because I didn't remember anything after that. Not until I woke up in the ambulance. So Angela might have come to the car, to the wreckage of our lives, and made sure I was an orphan. Had she done it because of me? Or in spite of me, I wondered. 

I didn't understand it yet, not completely. Angela had dreamt of me, she'd said, and I tried to remember if she'd told me when her dreams had started. Had they led her to kill my parents, to make me vulnerable that way? Or had I been a surprise when she'd found me? Maybe she'd only dreamt of me after the accident, after she'd killed my parents and let me live. Like I'd haunted her.

I was too weak to think about it, too innocent perhaps to understand the way a mind as old as Angela's would work. The only thing I knew then was that she was my enemy. The murderer of my mother and father, the agent that God had sent to punish me. He was in her, I was certain of that. God lived inside Angela, evil and corrupt and He'd killed me too, turned me into this thing I was.

So I just sat there, against the refrigerator with my eyes closed and tasting the dead man's blood on my tongue. I imagined how I was going to open her up, look inside Angela and search for that cancer she carried. He couldn't hide forever and He wasn't perfect, I knew that now. He should have killed me when He'd had the chance, because I was getting stronger.

Angela would explain to me why she'd done what she had. Explain and apologize and die. All I needed to do was get healthy, get strong, and I would take her. I'd have my small revenge, if not on God, then at least on her. That seemed a good thought and it warmed me as much as the good doctor's blood.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

The person who lived in that small apartment came home just before sunrise. He unlocked his door with jangling keys, huffing and puffing after climbing two flights of stairs. He was tall and overweight, carrying a bottle of something, a jug of cheap wine, and half a cigarette burned between his thick lips, the smoke making his eyes water.

He closed the door automatically, the way people do, slamming it behind him with little regard for his neighbors, and then he dropped his wine as Angela killed him. The bottle didn't break, it just rolled briefly, coming to a stop close to where I sat, watching them. 

Angela fed for a few moments and then dragged him to me, leaving a thick trail of smeared blood on the floor and I had my fill of him. I'd become very tired by then, and my shoulder seemed to hurt less, but it still ached. Angela had made a sling for me and I wore it over my left shoulder, with my right arm across my tummy, but it seemed strange, almost silly that a vampire should have to be dressed like that. Bandaged and nursing her shoulder. They didn't do that in the movies.

In the movies the bullets went right through the vampires like they weren't even there. That would have been pretty nice, I thought. At least I'd gotten a good lesson in the reality of my situation. Bullets could kill, like a knife in the heart, or a long fall from a high place, or a thousand other things. I wasn't immortal or invulnerable, I was physical. I had some abilities, skills that seemed like magic that I couldn't explain, but I had weaknesses too.

Being a vampire wasn't very much like I thought it would be, but sometimes it was exactly as I might have imagined. The feeding, the drinking of blood, that was like I'd expected, but only the basic fact of it. The reality was much different. The way even a filthy man's blood warmed my body, giving my skin a healthy color and the illusion of real life. The sexual thrill that came from feeding, that was always strange. How even the smell of blood could make my nipples hard and my sex damp with anticipation.

Every time I drank blood, I craved sex, as if the two things were linked for some reason. And if I had sex, even with just Angela, I'd feel the hunger grow, like teeth gnawing at my belly. Whether I was truly hungry or not, and I rarely was, having sex filled me with the desire to kill and drink human blood.

Angela felt the same, I knew, and I thought it must be something that affected all vampires, although I had no idea why. It didn't make sense, considering we couldn't reproduce. I hadn't had a menstruation since Angela had turned me. My womb was empty, barren, and so why all the desire? But we were only nature's stepchildren, not completely of the universe, but partially something else. Something beyond the normal and so all my thoughts and speculations hardly mattered at all.

They just put me to sleep mostly, closing my eyes in the dark, feeling Angela's hand on my bare tummy. And I hadn't forgotten about her.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"The car's gone." Angela shrugged. She'd gone out after sunset, planning on coming back to get me for the long drive home. 

There were roadblocks on the highways still, the local news showed state policemen stopping cars to check for the suspects in the biggest crime to hit Sacramento in forty years. A triple homicide, including two cops. They weren't going to give up the search easily or quickly, but that would have been little problem. Angela was strong again, she'd fed well and all she had to do was talk to a man, touch his hand maybe, and he'd wave us through and forget about it five minutes later.

But the car had been towed, probably. Or the cops might have gotten it. There would be nothing in it to lead them directly to us. It was the Honda, with Utah plates and registered to Nancy Parker in Salt Lake City. That would come to a dead end, which would be suspicious, but hardly helpful. If anything it should draw the cops away from who we really were and where we truly lived.

"So…" I looked at her, across the ugly guy's dead body that we'd left sprawled in his little living room.

"So, we need a new car," Angela smiled. "Maybe someone willing to give us a ride."

"Do you know someone?" I asked her.

"In this town?" Angela grinned. "Not yet. I need to find you some clothes too."

I looked down at myself. All I had on was that red vinyl skirt, spattered now with old blood. A pair of small pink panties, and some sandals. I definitely needed some clothes, and decent ones, I hoped. My shoulder was healing fast, the bullet hole was white and pink and puckered closed already, with just a little bruising still evident. But my bones, my shoulder bones, they were still weak and I couldn't move my right arm very much yet. It had only been a day though.

"I guess I have to wait here," I made a little face.

"I won't be long." Angela stepped close, kissing my forehead and stroking my good arm. "Any preference?"

"You know what I like," I gave her a little smile. "I'm hungry again."

"I know. It's your shoulder. Healing takes a lot of blood," Angela nodded. "You can probably take a bath if you want."

"Have you seen the tub?" I laughed and shook my head. "I think the guy was growing something in it."

"Well, later then. I'll be back soon." Angela kissed me again, on the lips this time and I returned it. I wasn't going to give her any reason to suspect that I knew the truth about her now.

I had doubts though, too. She loved me, I know she did, and I loved her too. More than I'd ever loved anyone else, except my parents maybe, I loved Angela. But there's a thin line between love and hate and once crossed it's almost impossible to go back. But what if I was wrong? What if it had been an accident? What if I wasn't really remembering it the way it happened, but somehow putting Angela in my memory because I wanted to, or needed to? 

It could have been my fear that Angela had been involved somehow, that my confused mind was making it seem that way. Guilt could do that, right? I mean, my parents were dead and I'd gone on living, so maybe this was how I punished myself for it. Did I blame Angela for being the only good part of my life I'd known since my parents had died? Did I resent her for bringing me a happiness that I didn't deserve?

I frowned, wishing I was smarter; wishing I had someone to talk to about it. I went into the bathroom, just to make sure my opinion of the bathtub wasn't going to change, and it didn't. The porcelain was dark and dirty with fungus and mold and who knew what else. I had no clue where the dead guy had bathed, but it couldn't have been in that tub.

I looked through his bedroom, looking for clothes, but I didn't find anything I'd ever want to wear. Mostly his clothing seemed too big or too ugly, or just too dirty. I found more pornography in one of the drawers, along with stretched out, yellow stained underwear. Child porn, hidden away, with pictures of little girls and boys doing the bad things with grownup men.

I'd seen that stuff before, up in Seattle. There was a guy who sold it, along with some good heroin once in awhile, and I'd gotten my fix from him usually. He'd lived in a place like this and the first time I'd jacked in his bedroom, he'd tried to fuck me, thinking I'd be too fucked up to stop him. But he wasn't much, even for a 13 year old like I'd been at the time, and I'd skipped out of his place, bouncing off the walls and down the stairs, not laughing or crying, but just wrapped in that mind numbing fog.

I missed the dope sometimes. It had made the world almost bearable.

That's what Angela did for me now, but maybe not anymore. My head hurt, and my heart too. A lot more than my shoulder. I sat down in front of the little television, but I didn't turn it on. I just looked at the chair reflected weakly on that dull black tube. The empty chair that I was sitting in, because I was invisible and I wondered how science would ever explain that. It was magic.

But everything is magic if you don't know why.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

"In here…" I heard Angela's voice and I smelled the girl she was with. I didn't even have to turn my head to know she was there.

"Okay…You weren't kidding, huh?" she had a soft voice, kind of nasal without a trace of accent to my ears.

"Are you going to be alright?" Angela asked her, and then I did look because that sounded like a strange question to ask someone who was about to die.

"Oh fuck…" she said and then giggled, "…Yeah, it's cool. Is he dead…?"

"Yeah," Angela nodded and then she looked at me, giving me a smile while the girl stared at the fat dead guy.

"And she's the one you were telling me about?" The girl stared at me for a second, not really waiting for an answer before walking over and I realized Angela hadn't played any tricks on her mind at all.

She was tall, one of those willowy sort of girls and thin, like she had some kind of eating disorder. Her skin looked pasty white, almost anemic it seemed, and I could see her blue veins clearly inside her arms and the tops of her breasts. She had a pretty face, but way too much makeup. Her eyes were painted black and her lips as well, black with lipstick all moist and glossy. She had black hair, short in the back and sides, like a boy's, but her bangs were long and parted in the middle, streaked with crimson. She had a garnet stud in her nose.

The girl was a total Goth, a vampire wanna be, I thought, wearing what looked like a wedding dress more than anything else, except it was black. The crinoline was old and hardly stiff, and covered with a gauze of satin lace that rustled like old dead leaves. It had been cut short and properly hemmed to the knees and it actually looked nice on her, but a little too funeralish for my tastes.

"Wow, yeah…" the girl said as she knelt in front of my chair, "...I've been looking for you guys my whole life."

She smiled at me, completely unafraid, and I found that almost refreshing in some strange way. Her eyes were blue and barely dilated at all. She wasn't high. I licked my lips, taking in her slender neck and the swell of her breasts barely contained. The white flesh rose and fell with her breathing and she had the posture of someone offering herself, sexually or otherwise, and I smiled.

"Do you want to bite me?" she asked softly. "Angela did already." 

The girl held her left arm out, palm up so I could see her wrist, and she had small bruises across her vein were Angela had tasted her blood. 

"Natalie's going to help us," Angela said, moving behind her and putting her arms around the young woman as she kissing her neck. "Aren't you?"

"Oh yeah. Anything you guys need," Natalie nodded, staring into my eyes. "Take me with you. I'll do anything you want."

I wanted to bite her badly right then, and not just her arm, sampling her sweet blood, but Natalie's neck. I wanted to drink her dry, but Angela hadn't brought the girl here for that, I understood. She would be more valuable to us alive. And Natalie was so willing, so eager, and I could satisfy myself with her in so many other ways. I'd been looking for her as well and now Angela had found her for me.

"Lick me then," I said, pulling up the hem of my skirt, showing the girl my slit outlined beneath my tight panties. "Show me."

"I've never done that," Natalie said, but it wasn't a refusal or an excuse, just her desire to let me know that I would be the first girl she'd ever make love with.

Her mouth fell on my sex quickly and Angela pulled the long bangs from Natalie's face as we watched her pull the crotch of my panty aside. I'd grown wet already. I'd gotten aroused the moment I'd smelled her, and she wasn't very good, but Natalie was desperate to prove herself and Angela was right there to kiss her neck and play with her tits. To give the girl gentle direction as she worshipped my pussy.

I moaned softly, lifting my butt slightly as the young woman's pierced tongue played across my hardening clit. She couldn't have been more than twenty, I thought, maybe even still a high school girl, but I doubted it. More likely just graduated, I thought, but it wouldn't have mattered in any case. She licked me hard at first, using all of her soft pink tongue across my clit and I told her to use her fingers, to spread my pussy so she could get inside.

Angela had lifted Natalie's dress, pulling it up to her hips and I could see her arm moving, obviously rubbing and fingering Natalie's cunt while she licked my pussy. We both wanted this, Angela and I. We even needed it in much the same way that we needed blood. This was some other form of feeding, an emotional vampirism maybe, where we drank pleasure instead of blood.

I held Natalie's head in my left hand, pulling her mouth against my pussy as I watched her stiff tongue work between my moist, pink folds. She was getting better, and truthfully it turned me on a little more to know that this girl had never sucked pussy before. Natalie had never wanted to, but she'd gone down on me in a heartbeat. She seemed devoted, at least for the moment.

Angela had knelt with her head low, licking Natalie's pussy from behind with the girl's long legs spread wide as she knelt there. Angela was probably biting her as well, just sinking her long sharp teeth into the girl's sex here and there, drawing sweet blood to join Natalie's growing wetness, the juices of life and love mixing so that Angela could lap them up with her tongue.

The girl came before I did, Natalie lifting her mouth briefly to cry out with her eyes tightly shut. Her body was flushed and shaking, that deathly pale skin taking on a warm, pink glow briefly and I let her have it, stroking her hair for a long moment until she'd regained her breath and could put her lips back on my cunt.

I moved hard against her finally, ignoring the dull pain in my shoulder, it was barely noticeable beneath the pleasure I felt. I was cumming good, my sex trembling around Natalie's tongue as she worked it over and inside my pussy. I pulled her open mouth tight against me, holding her there so she could kiss my sex as a lover should. She French kissed my vagina, staring up my body with lidded, shining eyes and drinking my ripe orgasm, swallowing my juices eagerly until I sat back, smiling and nodding.

Natalie smiled as well, licking her lips and wiping her glistening cheeks and chin with her hand. Angela had already sat back on her heels, having finished with Natalie a few minutes before. She'd nursed on several of the girl's orgasms and Angela's mouth was stained with cum stained red with blood. She'd pierced Natalie's vulva repeatedly with her teeth.

"Did I do it okay?" she asked me shyly, eyes cast downward and I just giggled with delight, as if I'd received a new puppy for Christmas.

"You'll learn," I told her, reaching for the girl's face and turning her eyes towards mine. I rewarded her with a deep kiss and she moaned softly when I bit her tongue, shivering as my mouth with Natalie's sweet flavor.

"We'll go to your place," Angela told her after several minutes of watching us. "You have an apartment, right? That's what you said?"

"Yeah," Natalie nodded, seeming confused as she wiped at the blood that had spilled down her chin. "But I have a roommate, she's…"

"Do you love her?" I asked, pulling Natalie so she could put her cheek on my cunt and kiss the inside of my left thigh.

"She's my friend…"

"Do you love her?" I demanded softly, holding her between my legs and stroking her soft, black hair.

"I love you," she whispered.

"I'll kill her," I said, and Angela merely watched us, smiling at me.

"I know," Natalie nodded weakly.

"I'll make you watch," I promised cruelly.

"I'll watch," she replied.

"Who do you belong to?" I asked.

"You." Natalie turned her face and kissed my clit softly. "Only you, Mistress."

I smiled at that and looked to see Angela grinning at me. She had her Petra, Angela did, her loving and obedient slave. A girl who needed no control or coercion, but gave herself completely out of love. Perhaps this girl, this Natalie person, would be mine. As I'd wished Audrey could have been. I didn't know yet, although perhaps Angela did as she had much more experience than me, but I hoped it would be so. 

I needed a friend, and even a girl like Natalie would be better than nothing, for I couldn't trust Angela, not anymore. And so Petra would also be my enemy eventually. I needed someone, a human, that I could trust to care for me, to watch over me while I lay vulnerable during the day. A companion during the long cold nights ahead. 

=-=-=-=-=-=-=

I had little choice but to put on one of the dead man's shirts. I chose a button down flannel shirt in red and black, and much too large for me. I just wore it buttoned over my shoulders, keeping my arm in the sling beneath it. The cotton smelled of dust and cockroach eggs, but I would wear it just long enough to get to Natalie's apartment, which was away from downtown, near the junior college she attended.

Natalie drove us in her car, a Volkswagen Beetle, one of the real ones, the old ones, and it was in surprisingly good shape. A gift from her father, Natalie had told us, when she'd graduated high school the summer before. She was just 19 and she'd been in love with vampires since she'd been born, or so the girl claimed. I wouldn't dispute it, and neither did Angela, who was of the opinion that there were people born to serve us. 

Persons born into the world with corrupt souls.

Natalie would soon have her opportunity to prove it as we parked outside a small apartment complex. It was a two story building, U-shaped, with a small swimming pool and barbecue area in the middle. Potted plants guarded it behind a short chain-link fence and Natalie used her key to get us through the gate. 

There were people there, a few couples, young like Natalie, college kids drinking beer and splashing, and they paid us little mind as we went up the stairs and to her apartment.

"Hey Friskers," Natalie said, opening the door which was unlocked and being greeted immediately by a large white Persian cat.
She picked him up, so he couldn't escape, and I could hear the animal purring softly as we entered the place. It was nice sized, larger than it appeared from the outside, with a kitchen and small dining room to our left and the living room in front of us, expanding to our right. There was a hallway a dozen feet or so directly ahead of the front door, and the bedrooms and bathroom would have to be back there.

"Uh…Hi," a girl looked up at us from a sofa along the right wall, the coffee table in front of her littered with papers and books. She seemed to be doing homework, dressed in shorts and a t-shirt. She looked a little Goth too, with her bottom lip pierced and her pale skin, but she wasn't dressed up for it the way Natalie was, and her long blonde hair made her look more like a farm girl than anything else.

"Hey, Beth. These are some friends of mine," Natalie turned her head towards us for a moment. I'd started taking off that shirt, which probably seemed pretty strange to the girl on the sofa.

"Okay…" Beth bit her bottom lip for a second. "What happened to her?" 

She was staring at the wound in my shoulder and the sling holding my arm. I smiled at her as Natalie just looked at me, unsure of what was going to happen. Angela ignored everyone, walking through the apartment like she owned it, leaving us as she went to the hallway, checking the rooms there to make sure they were empty. Deciding where we'd lair when dawn broke in the morning.

"Where's she going?" Beth asked, following Angela with confused eyes. "Natalie? What's going on?"

"Shhh…" I smiled at the girl, pulling Natalie behind me as she held the cat to her breasts. "You're very pretty, aren't you?"

I wasn't going to use anything to subdue her, this Beth girl. I wanted her to be afraid and struggle, just so Natalie would see it. I couldn't play mind games now, it wouldn't prove anything. I walked over slowly, holding Natalie's hand, and sat down beside Beth. I let Natalie go, so that she stood there, close by us, watching as I reached for Beth's head with my left hand.

"What are you doing?" Beth licked her lips. "Get away from me!" 

She started to move then, her confusion finally giving way to fear as my eyes grew red with lust. The change happened quickly as my disguise fell away, and perhaps the changes were more subtle than I give them credit for, but obvious to the girl, as they are to every victim.

I took her with my good arm, pulling Beth close to me easily, even though she was somewhat larger and struggling then. Her legs kicked, banging the large heavy glass of the coffee table, jarring it loose from its metal stand. Beth's hands pushed at me, and she turned her face and opened her mouth to scream.

"Hold her legs," I told Natalie. None of this was necessary, but it made me happy that I could make the girl an accomplice in the murder of her friend.

I clamped my hand across Beth's mouth, muffling her screams before they really got started, and I found her neck quickly then. I bit her carefully, so that I opened her carotid neatly, rather than tearing through it as I so often did with other victims. It would keep the mess to a minimum and prolong the girl's life and struggles.

Natalie had let the cat go and she watched with rapt fascination as I pressed myself hard to her friend. She held Beth's legs tightly too, and I think Natalie actually became aroused as she witnessed the death of someone she had known and been close to.

I ignored the ache in my shoulder. I had to hold her and so I tore the sling loose and used my right arm to cradle Beth while my left hand held her head. I'd let go of her mouth, she wouldn't scream now, not anymore. I fed deeply, swallowing the girl's blood quickly and with hardly any of the precious fluid escaping me. What little there was trickled slowly down her neck to stain Beth's heaving breasts as her lungs labored to feed oxygen to less and less blood.

Beth's heart had been pounding at first, but after a few minutes it had slowed, growing weary of its precious labor. She was sleeping, her brain deprived of enough air to keep her awake. But Beth was alive, barely, and dreaming perhaps. 

"Drink from her now…" I told Natalie, grabbing the girl by the hair, neither roughly, nor gently, but enough so that she had no choice.

I pressed Natalie's human lips to the wound in Beth's neck, urging her to suck and swallow the blood. It wouldn't do anything for her, of course, but it was a symbolic gesture that I liked, seeing her willing to drink what small amount of life remained in her friend. 

"Feel her heart," I took Natalie's hand, pressing it to her friend's breast. "Can you feel it?"

"Mmm…uhmph…" Natalie nodded, still sucking softly, swallowing while I caressed her throat.

"Drink until it stops…" I told the girl, "…Drink it all."

If Natalie would serve me, she would have to make this willing sacrifice and murder her friend. It was the only way and she didn't hesitate as I kissed her neck and shoulders, rewarding my new slave with whispered praise. It was good I'd been shot, I decided, everything happened for a reason, if I would only be patient enough to understand it.

 

        Chapter 9