Chained by Blood

by Holly Hook

  Biting him was satisfying. Time dragged out as he struggled against my grip and the woman screamed. Feet thudded through the house as people freaked out, but there was nothing but the relief of my hunger. That was all that mattered. The guy seethed in pain and thrashed, but I was strong enough to hold him there.

  I wondered if he'd ever abuse people again.

  "Janine!" Alyssa shouted. She wrapped her arms around my torso.

  I released the guy, and he staggered away, grasping the space between his shoulder and his neck. Blood seeped around his fingers. His girlfriend had fled. The back door slammed.

  Uh, oh.

  "Why did you do that?" Xavier asked. "I could have knocked him out first!"

  "You wouldn't have," I said after swallowing the last of my meal. Strength flowed into my body. The guy slumped onto the table and lay across it. I had done a number on him even though he was bigger than me.

  "Yes, I would!" Xavier shouted.

  Alyssa seized the abuser by the other arm and bit the other side of his neck. He screamed. I turned away from the sight. The reminder that I'd done the same thing burned. "Where's Brendan?"

  "No!" the abuser shouted, trying to pull away from Alyssa. "Leave me alone. It hurts!"

  "In the other room," Xavier said.

  Then I heard him feeding. A woman struggled in his grasp. He had no other choice.

  "They'll call the cops," I said. "This was a bad idea. They saw us." Now reason was coming back, and it was screaming. The four of us had broken into a house and hurt people. The abuser would have to go to the hospital. After Alyssa finished, he might even need a transfusion to save his life. The guy was big but getting bitten twice would drain him.

  Xavier seized my arm and dragged me into the living room. Brendan let go of a young gamer woman. She clutched her neck, screaming and staggering for the back door. The other gamers had already fled. Only the abuser remained. A pause screen for a shooter game glowed. Paper plates with pizza sat everywhere.

  These people had just been enjoying a game night and we crashed it because of one dude.

  They would never feel safe again.

  But they sat by while the guy was hitting his girlfriend—

  "Crap," Brendan said, watching the young women stagger out the door. She screamed for help. "We need to go. I didn't want to do that." He had blood on the corner of his mouth.

  "Alyssa!" Xavier roared. "Come on!"

  She did. Horror filled her eyes. "The ATC will be on its way."

  Already, sirens started. This was the fate that had befallen the missing vampires.

  "I'll Transpose us," Xavier said. He extended his arms.

  "But we're four," I said.

  "Yes. Transpose us," Brendan said. "I need to get out of here. One guy—I knew him."

  I'd ask questions later. Alyssa hugged Xavier, leaving his arms free. I grabbed one and Brendan seized the other. This would be the first time he had Transposed us since gaining his god powers. Alyssa said something once about not being sure how it would affect us all—

  It wasn't fun. The world snapped away and a magenta hurricane took its place. Wind threatened to rip me away from Xavier, landing me in a strange place. I closed my eyes as heat whipped against my body and I was sure the others were doing the same. It was the most terrifying form of transportation I could imagine.

  So I held on, leaving our unfortunate victims behind.

  Chapter Five

  We landed in the Underground, right in front of Xavier's underground mansion. The faint scent of marble filled the air. Our footfalls echoed off the walls of the wide hallway. I could tell from the way the sound bounced that there were pillars nearby.

  Even with my feet on the ground, I didn't dare open my eyes at first. Things might not get as much now, but no one should be able to stand jumping miles in a War Magic tornado.

  "Janine. It's okay," Alyssa said.

  "I hated that."

  "You can let go of Xavier's arm now."

  "I've never moved four people before," Xavier said. He shook my grip off. "I can't believe it."

  "That was intense," Brendan said. I could tell from his tone that his mind was elsewhere.

  He had known someone in the house.

  Was that place his neighborhood? There must be a reason he'd run away from home. Brendan had been sleeping in the park before Bathory found him. Beyond that, I didn't know the guy.

  I opened my eyes. Afterimages shook up my vision for a moment before fading. The lion statues that guarded the entrance to Xavier's place gave us stone snarls. Xavier eyed them and rolled his eyes. He hated being from his family.

  "Come on," he said. "Well, we know that I won't kill anyone I transport now. That's good."

  "As long as they're not Normal," Alyssa said. "We almost lost Janine."

  "I would have landed somewhere else if I'd let go," I said. "It wouldn't have killed me."

  "Yes," Alyssa said. "But where would you have landed?"

  We had to enter the underground mansion since it was the middle of the night. Strength continued to flow into me from my, um, meal. Now that it was over, I didn't even feel good about hurting that abuser. Sure, he deserved it, but when people screamed from bites, it made the experience different afterwards. Now I knew why Alyssa tried to avoid feeding from the source. She looked down at the floor as we entered the quiet house. Even though she accepted herself for what she was the guilt might never go away. And now I knew how it felt.

  Xavier did a check to make sure his aunt wasn't awake. The rest of us waited in the round entryway, surrounded by paintings of Primrose. He returned a few minutes later. "Why don't we go to our ridiculous tea room to look at the brochures?" he asked. "You still have them. Right, Janine?"

  I had tucked the folder inside my shirt to keep it safe at some point. It was still there, and I pulled it out. "The tea room," I said.

  Xavier was trying to get the subject off him and what we had done in the house. He'd failed to knock people out, and I knew why. He feared his power and letting us down. He had no way to win.

  "The tearoom?" Brendan asked.

  "You'll see." I had been inside it once, and it was an amazing piece of magic.

  Xavier led us down the hall to the final door. I smelled paints from the art room as we passed a closed door. But my thoughts drifted back to the abuser. Alyssa and I must have taken a lot of blood. What if he didn't make it?

  Alyssa looked straight ahead. Tension punctuated her breaths.

  We'd know when we checked out the morning news. The media loved to report on it when Abnormals did something wrong.

  Only this time, we deserved our bad reputation. It didn't matter if it was because Bathory was forcing us to attack people. We still hurt gamers inside their own house. Now she'd know we'd been there. They'd give the ATC our descriptions.

  What would we do next? In a few days I'd need to bite someone again.

  Was this worth all the extra studying time, and the improved strength?

  Was being something more than a useless human useless after all?

  Xavier opened the tea room door. The room was glamoured to look like an open field on a perfect day, complete with waving fields and distant trees.

  "Whoa!" Brendan shouted, jumping back from the light.

  "It's fine," Alyssa said. "Fake sunlight won't hurt you. I've sat in here myself. Look." She stepped into the room.

  I think we were all glad for the distraction. There was a round table with chairs in the middle of the room, and when Xavier closed the door, it looked like we were in a vast field. It was hard for me not to cringe in the light, but Alyssa was right. It didn't hurt. I also couldn't help but check out the room we sat inside of. Awesome magic created the illusion, but my enhanced vision picked up the lines between the walls and the floor. The outline of the door even popped out, faint in the blue and green. I doubted that anyone else could see it.

  We sat in a space half the size of my bedroom.

  I set the broch
ure on the table once I was certain this fake light wouldn't hurt me. I didn't want to repeat the experience outside the bunker. "This," I said, "is the most expensive paper in the world."

  Brendan picked up the shiny folder. I hoped that I had lost none of the papers inside. "Looks cheap, if you ask me," he said. He grinned, and I blushed. Why did he have an infectious smile?

  "You didn't jump down three stories onto the sidewalk to keep it," I said.

  "I don't think I could have done that," he said, putting it back on the table. Brendan read the title on the folder. "Abnormal Treatment Centers. Finding A Cure One Case At A Time."

  The folder didn't fit the theme at all. A happy family posed for a camera at a park, and all of them were Normal. A mom, a dad, a son and a daughter wore fake smiles like people in a commercial.

  Xavier motioned like he was puking. "It should show ATC agents dragging people away in chains."

  I opened the folder. We had all night to read the contents. If the ATC hadn't wanted to risk an Abnormal getting this, they wouldn't have hired ninja receptionists with guns. There had to be something important. If not, I would slap myself. I'd never gone through so much effort to get a brochure. Even the attendance lady at the school wasn't this strict with paperwork and excuses.

  The folder contained more fancy printed brochures. One of them read A Cure For Lycanthropy? The cover showed a guy standing under a full moon on a camping trip with his friends. He smiled, untroubled, in front of a fire and some tents. A few others behind him sat on logs. I tried to imagine my second cousin, George, in that position. He would kill for it, but then I noticed the question mark on the title. The ATC must not have real cures yet. They might never find them at all.

  But I paged through that one first. I figured that the ATC would have the same treatment centers for everything and I didn't want a reminder of what we had done earlier that night.

  Xavier grabbed a brochure labeled Trouble With Magic? He looked through it with a serious expression.

  "You're not thinking of getting rid of your powers," Alyssa said.

  "We've all seen what I'm dealing with," he said. "Something's wrong with me since the mayor's rite."

  "The ATC isn't the answer," she said, opening a third brochure. "Look. It's the same crap that people say can fix us, but doesn't."

  I stopped paging through the lycanthropy brochure. That was fine because the pictures of the forced vegetarian diet made me want to roll my eyes. Alyssa held a brochure titled Time in the Sun? A picture of a young couple on the beach with sparkling water spread across the front of it. I knew what this one was about: curing us.

  Alyssa slapped the open brochure on the table. "Eating regular food fixes vampirism. That's why the cake I tried when I was little just made me throw up."

  Like the werewolf brochure, this one had pictures of salads and fruit smoothies. We read it together. The ATC program for curing vampires included daily transfusions of human blood and a gradual shift to normal food. The patients would start by switching to the blood of donors who had eaten vegetarian meals only. Then they'd work up to meals of actual food as the transfusions continued. Then the ATC would expose the patients to increasing levels of sunlight, building up tolerance. Maybe, with hope, they'd turn Normal.

  Small print on the bottom of the treatment page told us that this information was based on studies that suggested, but did not prove, that such a program might reduce the symptoms of vampirism. This wasn't a cure at all. It was a band-aid.

  "I hope they aren't doing that," Brendan said. "Transfusions don't feel good."

  I knew what he meant. The Mother had transfused him with vampire blood until his body had no choice but to Turn. He was the first successful experiment.

  "I doubt that would work," Alyssa said. "I knew about the feeding program that people think will make vampires want to be Normal, but not the transfusion and the exposure to sunlight part. Those poor victims."

  "That's why we need to break Trish out of there," Xavier said. "If they're doing this to her--"

  "Where's the facility?" I turned the page to the brochure.

  A map of a treatment center spread out. Each room was color coded and labeled, including three blocks of patient suites. It had a basement Transfusion Area and a cafeteria. There was also a yellow square called the Sunning Room. The image reminded me of the apartment layout schematic that Mom showed me before we moved.

  And it included a map of the nearby roads and directions on how to get there.

  "Bingo," Alyssa said. "That's it."

  "So they won't treat Abnormals in the ATC Tower at all," Xavier said. "That's why they gave Janine a hard time. All the missing vampires are in this place."

  The title of the page read The Richard E. Grimes Treatment Center For Abnormals. The subtitle: Compassion. Care. Cure. You could tell that the guy also owned hospitals. It was located off Cherry Road outside of the city limits, and from the looks of the map, nothing but farmland and forests surrounded it. A tall fence closed in the facility and people could visit by appointment only.

  Xavier jabbed his finger at the map. "That doesn't look too bad to infiltrate. I can put a hole in that fence. We should attack tomorrow."

  "I agree," Brendan said. He shifted in his chair. "We have to get the captured vampires out of there before Bathory gets to them. There must be a way in if she got them captured by the ATC first. And then there will be lots armed ATC agents she can use for her experiments and turn to her side."

  "And the vampires will get weak from what the ATC is doing to them," I said. "They'll be easy for her to control. There's no way they'll fight back. I hate Bathory. She plans things too well."

  "Except for us breaking through that fence," Xavier said. "She didn't plan on that." He turned the page to the booklet.

  We only had to glance at the final page to realize that yes, she had planned for that.

  "Crap," Alyssa and Xavier said at the same time.

  It seemed like the ATC had included this last page as a warning to people like us who wanted to break inside. Exclamation points and skull signs decorated the shiny paper.

  "They have motion detectors all around," Brendan said.

  "For a mile outside the facility," Xavier added.

  "That will alert the military if anyone tries to trespass," Alyssa added.

  Chapter Six

  Xavier grabbed a coffee. Those of us who didn't need much sleep had no trouble staying up the rest of the night, arguing over what to do next.

  "We can't mess with the military," Alyssa said.

  "Well, maybe we can ask our dragon friend," Brendan said. "He might get past them for us. We freed him from Bathory. He seemed like a cool guy."

  "He's my distant ancestor," Alyssa said. "We've never even talked to each other."

  "And how would we get a hold of him?" I asked. "It's not like we have his cell phone number, if he even uses one. And he doesn't speak our language well."

  "The military might have the guns to take down a dragon," Xavier said. "I don't think Gaozu survived all these years by flashing his powers. The guy's low key and bothers nobody now that he's not enslaved by a demon baron."

  "Then we're on our own," I said. "Primrose won't want to launch an attack on that facility, even though it's her people in there. I wonder if I can still summon rain?" I had drank the dragon's blood to get the ability when we escaped the bunker. But Bathory mentioned that she needed top ups often to keep the ability. Dragon blood wasn't like god blood. It didn't give extra abilities for long. I doubted I could make rain happen anymore.

  It would have helped. Rain might cloak our motion and stop the detectors from seeing us. Maybe. It would have to be the most epic downpour in history and I was sure that Grimes had prepared for that.

  "As usual," Xavier said. "At least we heal fast. I still don't get what's wrong with me."

  "Your increased power made our bond strong," Alyssa said. "You heal because we're Bound."

  "That doesn't explain why m
y eyes turned violet."

  "The increased power."

  "The god we freed—never mind," Xavier said. "I'm done talking about this. The facility. We need a way inside."

  "Walking up to the gate is out," I said. "The ATC already knows what I look like." The fact crashed down on me like a ton of rocks. I'd have to be careful.

  But if we didn't act, Bathory would capture the place, murder doctors and agents, and recapture everyone else. She might even kill other Abnormals trapped in the facility, including any Mages or werewolves. The monster wouldn't want any competition. Or worse—she'd use her stolen medical equipment to steal their blood and their powers. And after that, she'd turn her aggression on the world.

  Alyssa checked her phone. "It's getting close to dawn," she said. "We will talk more about this tomorrow night. We need to get home and hide from the daylight before our parents figure out we're missing."

  I sighed. My mom was still sleeping in the apartment. She slept until nine or ten on weekends to catch up from missed sleep during the week. I'd have to be back inside before then. Even cloudy days made me feel cruddy. If it was full sun—yikes. I never wanted that experience again.

  "How close is dawn?" Brendan asked.

  Alyssa frowned. "About an hour and a half. The forecast predicts sun for the first half of the day."

  Brendan groaned. "Then we'd better end this meeting. At least I don't have to hang out at the park anymore." He shifted and glanced at me. "Do you want someone to walk home with you?"

  I sucked in a breath. "Walk home with me?"

  "It might be a good idea," Alyssa said. "We can all go together. We shouldn't be alone."

  Brendan was offering to walk me home.

  "Um, okay," I said. He made me feel funny with that smile of his. Besides, it wasn't a good idea to go home by myself with Bathory's people out, even if I had fought two of them. She'd get tougher on me.

  "I'll go with you," Xavier said.

  The four of us left Xavier's place. Sure, we could defend ourselves against any Normals who bothered us (other than the ATC and the others with heavy duty weapons) but other threats existed. We weren't invulnerable.