Chronicles of an Extraordinary Ordinary Life

by Aurélie Venem

  I’d made it through the first step.

  I didn’t want to sit down on a chair close to the two lovebirds, who were getting pretty heated up and handsy with each other, so I found a corner near a woman around sixty years old who seemed to be asleep.

  I pulled out a bottle of whisky wrapped in a brown paper bag and swallowed a mouthful.

  Ugh, I hated whisky, but I didn’t have a choice. My breath needed to smell like alcohol for my performance to be believable, even if I spit the subsequent swallows back into the bottle.

  “Do you have some for me?” The voice behind me made me jump.

  The woman who seemed to be sleeping had suddenly woken up, maybe at the smell of whisky vapors. I hated to drink straight from the bottle after someone else, particularly a stranger who wasn’t in the best of circumstances, but I had to keep up appearances. Reluctantly, I passed her the bottle.

  “You’re a saint. Bless you.” She started to gulp down the contents of the bottle.

  It didn’t matter. What she said made me uncomfortable because I didn’t think that God, whoever and wherever he was, would condone me leaving these people ignorant of what was in store for them. I didn’t like it either. But for these murders to stop once and for all, we absolutely had to find the ones responsible, which meant not being able to save everyone. It wasn’t easy.

  I checked my watch: it was two thirty. What were they waiting for? I was going completely nuts, but it was the stress caused by the wait that was truly unbearable. I imagined it was worse for Phoenix and François, who were watching from above; my boss wasn’t a model of patience.

  The exhibitionist couple was rattling my nerves with their slobbery and noisy kissing, and the young man’s high-pitched whining. The girl, visibly thrilled by the effect she was having on her partner, deliberately wriggled against his pelvis to excite him even more. For Pete’s sake! The whole show was sickening.

  When they started to tear their clothes off, I reached over to get my bottle back from the old woman to throw it at them. But I didn’t get a chance.

  Suddenly, six hooded men, dressed in black and armed with tranquilizer guns, burst into the room. As the only sober person there, I noticed them before anyone else, and I reacted by throwing myself to the ground.

  The couple, still in full frolic, were the first hit. They collapsed quickly, tranquilized. In the chaos that followed, while the ones who weren’t too drugged or drunk tried their best to escape, I managed to crawl toward a bureau behind the already tranquilized old woman. It was very important that I be the last to be found so I could see as much as possible, and this was a decent hiding place.

  The vampires had put the ones who were too weak to move out of harm’s way and set to work catching the last escapees, including the man who had coldly interrogated me earlier.

  Suddenly everything was calm again. The shabbiness of the room when I first arrived was nothing compared to the mess now. Some of the people had fallen onto chairs that couldn’t take their weight. From where I was hiding, I had a good view of the bodies lying motionless on the ground and the men who were approaching them.

  One by one, the men removed their hoods, and I suppressed a sigh of relief when I saw Heath wasn’t one of them. All six were Asian, and when I heard them speaking Chinese with each other, I knew that these were the men we were expecting.

  The one who had to be their leader came forward then and started inspecting each person lying on the ground. I shivered when he looked in my direction, and I pressed myself against the bureau. I made a huge effort to stay calm, to keep my heart from racing so loudly that it would reveal my presence there as surely as sounding an alarm.

  Holding my breath, I waited for him to finish looking at my whisky thief and move on to someone else. I didn’t know what he was doing, because the bureau obscured my view of him, but then I heard a gun safety clicking off. A quarter of a second later, there was a shot, and my hiding place was spattered with blood.

  Despite my training, a drum was beating in my chest, and there was nothing I could do about it. In a flash, the bureau flew from my field of vision and crashed some distance away from me. In its place was the leader of this pack of monsters, and he was staring at me with a predatory smile, his fangs out and his eyes bright yellow.

  “Well, well . . . we almost forgot one. Is there a woman under all that grime?”

  I didn’t need to pretend to be afraid, because I truly was at the sight of the cruelty in his face. He grabbed me roughly by the arm and stood me up to face him. Getting my wits about me, I tried to look distraught.

  “Please . . . don’t kill me.”

  “A sweet little face like yours?”

  His men laughed.

  “I . . . I’ll do whatever you want,” I tried.

  “Really?”

  Before I even saw it coming, he swooped down and pulled me against him to kiss me fiercely. He held me in an iron grip that was impossible to escape. So this would be my first kiss? The magic moment all girls dream about had been ripped away from me by a sadist whose hand slid from my neck to my right breast, which he squeezed painfully.

  No, I wouldn’t let this happen to me. While he tried to force his way through the barricade of my lips with his tongue, I struggled against him like a she-devil, trying to hit him. Since that was pointless, I did the only sensible thing: I opened my mouth.

  The second his tongue inserted itself there, I bit it with all my strength. Caught off guard, he pushed me away so forcefully that I flew backward and crashed into a big wooden table, destroying it in the process. I got up coughing. The impact with the table had cut off my breath, and I had to spit out the blood of that vermin who had attacked me. I had a horrible cut on my arm, and I saw points of light dancing in front of my eyes. I knew that I’d completely failed and Phoenix was going to come interfere because the guy, whose blood was running from his mouth abundantly, was going to want to take his vengeance and kill me immediately . . .

  However, none of that happened. Instead, he said, “Ha-ha-ha! It’s even better when they resist. The blood makes it better. The boss will be pleased,” he shouted, laughing, wiping away the blood with his sleeve. “You know exactly what you want, my lovely, but that’s not enough to stay alive. Tie her up!”

  Two of his friends quickly pulled me from the debris and tied up my feet and hands and gagged me for good measure. Lying on the ground like that, I couldn’t move. One of the men said something, informing me of their leader’s name: Huan. The leader looked at me and offered a big smile from his bruised mouth.

  “Just you wait and see what I’m going to do to get back at you for your stupidity, gorgeous. If you and your friends all shoot up, it’s to go to a dream world, right? Welcome to the world of vampires!”

  At an unbelievable speed, the leader seized the young woman on the sofa and sunk his fangs into her throat. He drained her in front of me, his eyes on me the whole time, as if to say, I’m killing her because of you.

  This guy was a monster, and I swore that, like Heath who was at the top of my list, I would kill him myself.

  Full at last, he threw his victim aside as if she were light as a feather and shouted new orders in Chinese. He tossed his gun to one of his men who took over the process the leader had started: disposing of the bodies whose blood had no market value. Within the next minute, three shots were fired, spattering more blood against the walls of this tomb.

  Phoenix’s training may have toughened me up, but seeing those corpses, including that of the whisky thief who was lying there, a bullet in her head, not far from me, I felt dreadful. I was sweating, blood was rushing back to my pale face, and it took a supreme effort to not vomit. Disgusted, I turned my head to the ceiling, and my eyes widened when I saw Phoenix looking at me from the gaping hole of the roof.

  Finding comfort in seeing him there, I stared back to escape from the carnage that surrounded me.

  “Bring them, and then burn everything,” the leader said.

 
; Before those pigs could take me away, I shook my head almost imperceptibly so that my boss wouldn’t come to my rescue. When powerful arms grabbed hold of me, I still felt the burn of his look of disapproval.

  Without any regard for the poor people they were condemning to die, Huan’s men tossed their unconscious victims into the back of an ordinary white van. By chance, I was the last to be thrown in, and my fall was cushioned by the other bodies. While I was waiting for my turn, the vampires took care to burn everything so there wouldn’t be a single trace of their activities. Five cadavers were left inside. Five anonymous bodies whose gruesome fate no one would ever know . . .

  I couldn’t see anything at all inside the van, but considering the fact that I was risking another confrontation with Heath, it would be better if I weren’t the first to get out. I managed to drag myself to the back to hide among the victims, deciding to feign unconsciousness to go unnoticed, a performance that my arm wound made credible.

  The bumps in the road were unbearable, and the air quickly became stifling in the vehicular prison. Rather frightened by the idea of dying of asphyxiation, I was desperate to arrive at our destination.

  Finally, the van slowed down, and the jolting became much more pronounced; I took it as a sign that we’d turned onto a dirt road. When the van stopped and the engine was turned off, I let myself sigh in relief before lying down again and pretending to be unconscious.

  The doors creaked open, and I came close to a heart attack when I heard someone say in English, “This isn’t the number I was hoping for.”

  Heath. He must be looking in my direction . . . Luckily I’d hidden in the back and turned my face away.

  “I know, but our informant guaranteed there would be more.”

  “I hope you enforced all our security measures.”

  “We took take care of him.”

  So they’d killed their informant, the Chinese gang fence. That imbecile should have been suspicious when they proposed a meeting in a deserted area.

  “Good. Put him with the others. We’re taking care of a batch now. These will have to wait their turn.”

  “Whatever you say. Will the boss be here tonight?”

  “He’s already here. He’s supervising the first batch.”

  By the silence that followed, I realized that Heath had gone off to take care of more important business, and I could breathe again. If I wasn’t discovered or killed before I met his boss, we would still have a good chance of discovering his identity. Reenergized at the prospect despite the danger I was in, I didn’t flinch when someone threw me over his shoulder like a slab of meat. I risked half opening my eyes for a quick glance at where I was being taken.

  From the little I could see, I knew that we weren’t in a warehouse at all: we were in a country manor house. That seemed logical: since Kerington’s industrial zone was being watched, the blood traffickers weren’t taking the risk of draining their victims there anymore.

  Once inside, I could make out the great hall, blocked off from the outside by closed shutters, and I saw the same exsanguination setup as at the Kerington warehouse. Once again, people were lying down on stretchers, their blood being drained.

  I was brought into the wine cellar, a very large room with several spacious alcoves that were used to store barrels of wine before metal gates had been added that divided the cellar into prison cells.

  No one was shouting or begging to be freed. All I could see were faces, all terrified by the vampires who were hurling people into the last cell, which was nearly full.

  My porter was checking his grip on my hips, and I could tell that he was about to throw me like a sack of potatoes. Prepared for the shock, I managed to not cry out in pain when I crashed to the ground and continued to feign unconsciousness.

  “How much more time up there?”

  “Another fifteen minutes, I would say. Then we have these to take care of.”

  “They need to get a move on. I’d like to go have some fun for a chance. Tired of having to hide like rats because of that damn angel.”

  “From what I’ve been told, it’s better to not cross paths with him.”

  “Anyway, won’t be long before he’s not a problem, believe me.”

  I heard them laughing as they went back upstairs and locked the door. Their conversation puzzled me. Were they aware of the Elder vampires’ imminent arrival and what that meant for Phoenix? How?

  I didn’t have any answers, and I needed to stay focused on my situation. It didn’t look like any vampires were watching us, and there were no security cameras. At the same time, there was no way to escape. Even if I got past the metal gate, twenty or so vampires were waiting upstairs; anyone who managed to escape wouldn’t get very far. I looked at the other cells and counted about thirty people waiting in the cold, moist, and horrible death corridor. I was amazed by their calm. Of course, they all seemed driven to despair and some of them were crying, but none were panicking or crying for their mothers.

  I took note of some of them in particular, recognizing the ones mentioned by journalists on the news only several days ago, before looking around my own cell again. Apart from my unconscious fellow prisoners, there were three men and five women. One of the women, a blond, was lying down on the other side, and I couldn’t see her face. But something made me look at her more closely, because her silhouette seemed oddly familiar . . .

  “You’re not unconscious like the others?”

  I didn’t answer the question, asked by a man who, judging by his clothes, must have been taken while he was out jogging at night, and headed for the blond woman.

  A strong sense of foreboding took hold of me as I approached her; it was telling me I was about to discover something truly horrific.

  Slowly, I kneeled down beside the sleeping woman and reached out a trembling hand to turn her toward me. When I finally saw her face, my blood froze in my very veins.

  Angela.

  Panicked, I took her by the shoulders and shook her violently to wake her.

  “Angela!” I whispered.

  I knew that I was attracting attention from the other prisoners, but seeing my friend in that hell was unbearable. I had to save her. Shaking her wasn’t helping, so I slapped her hard, which got me several disapproving looks and one “You’re crazy!” from the man who had just spoken to me.

  “Shut up!” was what he got in return for his attempt at playing the Good Samaritan.

  Angela opened her eyes and woke up with a start. Still groggy, she didn’t seem to be reconnecting with reality, and she wobbled as she sat up. I held her firmly and stopped her from slumping over. Then she stared at me and frowned, searching her memory to figure out who this dirty woman trying to help her was.

  “Sam?”

  I nodded my head solemnly. Angela looked at our prison and started to shake.

  “Where are we? What are you doing here? And why are you dressed like that?”

  She was utterly terrified, and I feared she wouldn’t pay attention. I clapped my hand over her mouth and signaled that she should stay quiet, making her understand that we had an audience whose indiscreet ears were making me uneasy.

  The other prisoners finally turned away and lost interest in us, refocusing on their own despair.

  “Who brought you here?” I murmured to Angela.

  Understanding that I didn’t want us overheard, she answered in the same tone.

  “I don’t know . . . all I remember is that I went home after eating at Danny’s and the door was open. All the lights were off . . . before I could find the switch, I felt someone sticking a needle into my neck, and I woke up here . . . What about you? Who brought you?”

  I couldn’t lie to her, not after what she’d been through . . . not with what was awaiting her . . . Anyway, there wasn’t time for explanations.

  “It’s complicated, but you’ll have to trust me . . . Listen. Roughly, I got myself taken on purpose and made sure that, in the very likely possibility that I’d be searched, my ce
ll phone was in a place they wouldn’t think to check.”

  I was really lucky that Huan had grabbed my right breast, because I’d hidden my phone in my bra, on the left, taking advantage of my loose clothing to cover it. Three cheers for modern technology and smaller devices!

  “Are you going to call the police?” she said, full of hope.

  “You must understand, the police can’t do anything for us, and they must not interfere if we want to avoid a bloodbath. I have to call my boss.”

  The look of betrayal that passed over Angela’s face chilled me to the bone.

  “Good heavens, who are you?”

  I had trouble meeting her gaze.

  “Even if I’m not quite who you think I am, I’m still your friend. Hide me.”

  Knowing that I was her only chance of getting of there, she complied. I pulled out the phone and called Phoenix, who, I hoped, would get us out of there alive. He picked up on the first ring.

  “Sam. What is going on?”

  There was worry in his voice, but I couldn’t really reassure him.

  “Phoenix, we have a problem,” I whispered, knowing that he would hear me as though I were right next to him.

  “What kind of problem?”

  “Angela. She’s here.”

  Silence. Angela had jumped when she heard me use the name of ex to address my boss.

  “That changes nothing.”

  Oh, really? For me, that added a whole new dimension to the situation. It was out of the question that I would sacrifice my friend.

  “And what does François think?”

  The tone of my voice was distinctly cool.

  Another silence. I knew that François had truly felt something for Angela, and she jumped again at hearing the name of the man she was cherishing in secret. He would want to protect her.

  “We cannot interfere for now. Our enemies are too numerous. We are looking for a way in without being noticed.”