Chapter Seventeen
“Oh, God, no. Stop! Please, stop,” my mother cried out.
“Mam!”
I heard Sully grunting, some noises I didn’t recognise, but loudest of all were my mother’s sobs, and that had me wild with craziness and desperation. I struggled against the chains, but it was pointless. There was no escape.
Sully had won.
A couple of minutes later, he returned, a fanged grin on his face.
“I need you to help with the unexpected company. I believe I saw him at your house once. You’ve managed to drag yet another one down with you. I’m almost impressed,” he said, and then held up a finger. “But first, I’m thirsty. Dragging that oaf around was more tiring than you’d expect. I need a top up.”
Gazing at him in horror, I felt a mild modicum of relief as he turned to Aoife rather than me. Guilt overwhelmed that sensation, and I cried out to him to take me instead.
“Oh, I’ll get around to that,” he said, his scarlet eyes burning into mine. “But I need your hands first. It won’t be half as entertaining if you’re too weak to stand.”
Grimacing at the ideas of what that could mean, I watched helplessly as he roughly yanked Aoife’s hair out of the way to expose her neck, his fangs sinking deep into her skin. To my surprise, he let her go and looked up at me, his eyes half-crazed, and his now obvious fangs covered in Aoife’s blood.
“See, it isn’t just the blood. That was never enough for me. You might be surprised to learn that I never wanted this for myself. The bitch who turned me drew me in with an act, and when she saw what I became, she left me there. Abandoned me to deal with the idea of immortality alone. And while I revelled in the blood for a time, it became tedious after a couple of centuries. I actually contemplated suicide before I discovered what I could do, Devlin. I was so bored that I wanted to die. But then I found a way to make it exciting.” He sucked his teeth, his eyes half-closing. “It became satisfying in ways I had never experienced before. I chose the right girl, and I took in her pain.”
Aoife cried out a little, and he smiled as if with pride. “See what’s happening to her? She’s remembering. Every fear, every awful moment in her pathetically short life. She’s reliving it all now. And that’s what I’m living for. The nightmares, the memories, the pain. Yours will be so much sweeter though. She was too hopeful, too ready to move on. But you, you’re still in the past. I saw it in your nightmares. I promised myself I would savour you, Devlin O’Mara.”
He sank his teeth into Aoife’s neck ferociously, shaking her like a small dog might shake a rat. Her body jerked with pain, and I couldn’t look away, couldn’t stop watching my own inevitable fate. She gasped a little, and he withdrew, the slurping sound thankfully ending.
“I’ve always wanted a companion,” he said. “But there just isn’t room for two of us in a place like this. Too small, too close. Maybe I’ll take Aoife along for the ride though. Or maybe I’ll turn you and make you feed on your own mother.”
I gaped at him. Could he do that?
He checked his blood splattered watch. “Ah, but I don’t have the time. Oh, well. Let’s speed this up, shall we?”
He leaned over me, his bloody breath on my skin making me want to vomit. He took the chains from the walls so that I could move, but my hands were still linked together. He made me stand, but my knees refused to stop wobbling. I walked as best I could as he pushed me out of the room, taking one last look at Aoife, but he slapped the side of my head to make me face forward.
He pushed me into a room right next door. Mam was chained in the corner, feral in appearance. With caked blood sticking to her hair, she shivered and shook, barely recognising me as I entered the room. When she did, she straightened and held up her chin, and hope blossomed in my heart.
Until I noticed Tom, strung up to the ceiling by the rope tying his hands together. The ceiling was high, but his feet almost touched the floor. Almost, but not quite. His face had turned purple, and his stretched arms had to feel as though they were being wrenched from his body.
“What the hell?” I whispered, seeing a tray with small knives and scalpels, and an axe and a shovel against the wall, too.
“Sometimes I make them remove their own body parts,” Sully said, sounding proud of himself. “Or I force them to dig their own graves. It’s surprisingly entertaining, but when you’ve lived this long, you really have to find the little joys wherever you can.” He stared at a shovel as if contemplating. “I think I’ll find Base after this and make him dig all of your graves. That’s if he doesn’t turn up himself.” He narrowed his eyes at me, and I flinched away, unable to bear looking at him.
“What are you planning on doing to me?”
“Oh, I’m going to make you kill these two. I could do it. I could even compel you to do it. But I think I’d prefer to watch you suffer through knowing exactly what you’re doing. I’ve had some fun with them, but you’ve cheered up a lot recently, thanks to Base. What an awful creature by the way. Between him and the other dolt, it’s apparent you have quite poor taste. Regardless of this, he’s made you happier, and I prefer you completely desolate. I think killing your own mother might achieve that. Maybe you’ll even enjoy torturing them. You never know what will happen when you discover a taste for something... darker.”
I swallowed hard a couple of times. Tom tried to say something, but I couldn’t understand it. My mother wept in the corner.
“I don’t…”
Sully picked up the axe and cut Tom down. “I want you to amputate those legs of his so he can’t run away. If you do it nicely, I might even let your mother live.”
I retched a little, shaking my head. “I’m so sorry, Tom. I’m so sorry.”
Tom made an awful sound, his eyes pleading with me.
“It’ll be quick,” I promised. I turned to Sully. “You promise you’ll let her go?”
He looked absolutely delighted. “I’ll unchain her and let her run. I might hunt her down afterward, but it depends on how much I enjoy our fun here, little Devlin O’Mara. Can you lift the axe?”
I had carried my mother to bed on more than one occasion. Even moved barrels in the store room at work. I was stronger than I looked. Then again, so was he. I lifted the axe slowly, feeling the weight of it in my arms. I wished my hands were free.
“I think it’s too big for you,” Sully said. “Sorry, old man. Guess it won’t be quick after all.”
I lifted the axe over my head, struggling to keep my balance, my heart racing in my chest. Tom whimpered at me, and my mother kept talking, but the words were just a buzzing in my head, and all through it, Sully kept on whispering to me, telling me how much I was going to enjoy hurting my friend.
With a scream of pain, I threw everything I had into that swing. I angled it, swung my body around and buried the axe into Sully’s hip, pushing my own weight along with it. Blood bubbled from the wound, but it wasn’t fatal. Not even close. I didn’t care. I wanted him to know he couldn’t force me to hurt anyone. I didn’t care what it meant for me. If we were all going to die, he could do his own dirty work.
His fangs glowed in the dull light, and he pushed back, fighting to get me off the axe so he could take it out. I hung on with the strength of someone drowning and clutching for help. I couldn’t let go, even if I wanted to. He threw himself forward, knocking himself on top of me, and the wooden handle of the axe pressed against me so hard, I couldn’t breathe.
That wasn’t the danger. The danger came from those snapping fangs, so deadly close to my throat. He was so wild with anger that he had forgotten to savour the moment, and my hands were caught on the axe; I couldn’t even defend myself. His teeth sank into my skin, and the world changed colours. The nightmares began anew.
But in the midst of the pain, of the never-ending memories, a voice whispered my name, and I clawed my way back to reality, determined not to let them take me down again. It took everything I had, but I gasped a breath in the real world, shrugging free of the fear, breaki
ng away from Sully’s possessive control.
Tom, crawling over to us, used his one good hand to reach up and stab a scalpel into Sully’s eyeball while he was distracted with me. Blood spurted as Sully reared back to pull it out. I kicked out at the vampire, pushing with all of my strength, and he stumbled back, probably unbalanced by his injuries.
I scrambled to my feet, but too soon, he ripped the axe out of his side and flung it away, only to leap up to the ceiling, blood pouring from his side. He hung there, glancing from one of us to the other as if wondering who he should kill first. I grabbed a knife and flung it across the floor to my mother, hoping to give her some way of defending herself. The chains were too short. It was useless.
Sully leaped at Tom, knocking him out with a blow to the head, and then he zoned in on my mother, ready to make good on his promise to force me to watch her die. I used the chains linking my wrists together and threw my arms around him, trying to tighten them around his neck right before he bit a chunk out of her throat. I dropped to the floor, pulling him on top of me and struggling to hold him there, but it was no use. He snapped the chains with ease and whirled around to face me. I crawled back, but one clawing swipe of his hand had me flailing on the floor.
He crept up to me, swearing to himself, bleeding all over me, and I heard a sound to my right. He was so caught up in his bloodlust that he didn’t see Base run into the room, didn’t see Base raise his hands, didn’t see Base strike my precious bat against the back of Sully’s skull until it was too late.
Enraged, the vampire sprang around, barely unsettled by the blow. Base stared at him calmly, the bat secure in his hands. He struck again, but Sully blocked the bat and punched Base. Base fell back, but he scrambled to his feet as I searched for something else to attack Sully with. I grabbed something sharp from the vampire’s tray of playthings, but inside, I knew it wouldn’t be enough. Nothing would.
I turned back, but Sully had Base by the throat, and Base was choking slowly, his face turning purple. I ploughed the knife into the side of Sully’s throat as hard as I could, and he made a slurping sound. He dropped Base like a ragdoll and turned back to me yet again. He jumped around me, and I felt dizzy as I waited for the end to come. He threw himself at me, sending us both crashing into a wall, and I could see all of his control was gone.
I waited for his fangs to pierce my skin, for all of the memories to flood before my eyes as my life faded away, but Sully froze, fangs still poised for attack, his one remaining eye widening in shock. His jaw shook as blood flooded out of his mouth and onto my chest. I hurriedly backed up out of the way as Base pulled his weapon back out, his face still awash with colour. He kicked a withering Sully away from me as the vampire made one last ditch effort to take my life. It was too late. It was over.
For him.
“Screw you,” I whispered as Sully disintegrated right in front of me in a congealed mess of blood and who knew what.
“I soaked it with holy water,” Base said, shrugging. “I knew something would work eventually.”
“Is that a stake?”
“Technically, it’s a stick from his neighbour’s back garden, but it did the job.”
“Oh.”
He knelt next to me, catching his breath. “Do me a favour, Dev. Stop offering yourself to vampires. This is gonna take some clean-up crew.”
I gazed around the room, only truly seeing the blood-splattered walls for the first time. “How do we explain all of this?”
“Serial killer?” he said in a laughing way, but there were tears in his eyes. I could tell. He glanced around urgently, whilst exhaustion cloaked me.
I crawled over to my mother, slipping in Sully’s thick, black blood, and pointed at the door. “Aoife’s in the next room. Probably should call an ambulance or something.”
Base ran, and Tom was so still that I felt sure he had died. My mother held out her hands, her bloody hands, and I let her try to embrace me. I lay my head on her lap, curled up into a ball, and waited for someone to come and help us.
Base came running back in, but I couldn’t raise my head. He picked up the axe, ran back out of the room, and, from what I could hear, hacked the chains holding Aoife to the wall. He carried her back in and cradled her in his lap, sinking to the ground. I crawled over to Tom—for some reason, my legs didn’t feel like working properly—and felt for his pulse.
“He’s alive,” Base assured me.
“Help my mother,” I begged, holding Tom’s hand.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think,” he said, sounding flustered. He laid Aoife on the floor as gently as possible and picked up the bloody axe. I didn’t flinch as the axe freed my mother, but she yelped as though it might hit her. She hurried over to me, kneeling on the floor next to me, and I leaned against her for support. How was she staying so strong?
“Tom, wake up,” I whispered, shaking him as much as I dared.
After a few terrifying moments, he opened his eyes, unable to focus. “We okay?” he mumbled.
“Everything’s okay, Tom,” Mam said. “Did you call the ambulance or police?” she asked Base.
“They’re sending both,” he said, still holding onto Aoife.
“They aren’t going to believe us,” she said firmly. “So we need to tell them what happened, but leave out the unbelievable parts. He really was a serial killer, or at least intended it that way, and that’s how it’s going to be told. Do we all understand?”
All of us muttered our agreement, but all I could think about was Aoife. What did she remember?
A siren in the distance alerted us to company, and I waited with bated breath for them to arrive. I shook so bad that they took one look at me, wrapped a blanket around my shoulders, and led me out of the room. Tom and Aoife were both taken in an ambulance straight away. The rest of us were held in the kitchen as our lesser wounds were patched up, away from the bloody rooms.
I couldn’t catch Base’s eye, couldn’t reclaim the old territory, and even though I had witnessed Sully’s death, even though I had seen everything, I couldn’t relax, couldn’t comprehend what had happened. That it was over. That we were safe. I needed someone else to talk through it, and I felt as though I had lost in the end.
We told similar stories as we waited for another ambulance to arrive, and our stuttering and confusion was thankfully put down to shock. Of course we were in shock. A vampire had tried to kill us. I couldn’t stop seeing the way he disintegrated into the ground. A lot of him had eventually evaporated, but there was still blood over all of us.
“He pretended to be a vampire, and when we tried to fight him off, he ran,” I explained tearfully, but any questions after that were met with blank stares on my behalf. My mother was the only steady one, the only one who showed strength, and I had to wonder about that as well. She spoke for us when we couldn’t. The person I had always thought of as weak had turned out to be the strongest of us all.
The three of us were taken to the same hospital as Tom and Aoife. Mam and I had superficial wounds, and the doctors couldn’t explain the sheer volume of the blood loss, but apart from a lot of dizziness and some scars, we would be okay. When we heard Aoife and Tom were well enough to see us, I couldn’t resist going to see them. I crossed paths with Base in the hallway as he headed to Aoife’s room.
He stopped short when he saw me, and a tiny part of me wanted to fall apart just so he would comfort me instead of looking so uncomfortable himself. And I hated that part of myself, so I acted as rock steady as I could.
“You going to Aoife?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He looked anywhere but at my face. Screw him, I thought.
“Cool. Tell her I’ll see her later then.”
I walked in the opposite direction, not quite sure where I was heading, only certain I wanted to be as far away from Base as possible.
“Dev,” he called out once. Just once, and I kept walking. I ended up finding Tom instead of Aoife, and even though I was afraid to see him too, afraid to know that he
blamed me, I walked straight in to avoid Base.
Tom was badly hurt, but he was tough, and when I stepped into the room, I was the one who cried. “I’m so sorry,” I whimpered.
“Hey,” he said. “Don’t cry on me. It’s over. We’re all okay.”
“You got hurt because of me.”
“I don’t regret it. I’m just sorry I didn’t take you seriously at first.”
“Then why did you come?”
He tried to smile, but it looked more like a wince. “Honestly? I thought you were high or something. And when he answered the door, covered in blood, with actual fangs showing, I went for him. But he bit me, and it was as if my entire body was paralysed. I kept seeing things I never wanted to see again, and even though he was hurting me, I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”
“Oh, Tom.”
“You did good, Dev,” he said. “Mark will be proud you managed to keep both of us alive.” He grinned then, and I fell apart at his bedside. “It’s okay,” he kept saying. “It’s over.”
So why did I feel like it was just the beginning? The nurses took me away before I could upset Tom, but I felt so terrible for dragging him into it all. Nothing had happened the way I expected it to, but Sully was dead. It was over.
Mam comforted me when the nurses led me to her, and when we were alone, she kept whispering things to me. How she was going to change. How everything was different now.
“All this over a vampire,” I tried to joke, but my breath hitched.
“No. All this is because my daughter gave me a wakeup call. We need to change our ways, Dev. I’m far too dependent on you, and you’ve enabled me all of the way. We need to make sure that we start as we mean to go on. With you being honest and upfront, and me being the mother I was always supposed to be. I feel like we’ve grown up together, Devlin. But it’s time for things to change.”
“I don’t know how to change,” I whispered, and she squeezed my hand.
“It’s going to take a lot of work,” she said. “But we can do it together. Our relationship has been so unhealthy, and it’s all of my fault for letting the past swallow me up. I’m going to make it up to you. I promise you that much.”
For the first time in a long time, I managed to believe her.
I didn’t see Base again, but I was allowed to see Aoife alone later on.
“I’m so confused,” she admitted, sounding exactly like herself again. “I remember Sully invited me over, and I can’t really remember much after that. They’re saying I’ve blanked out days, but I don’t know… Is it true what Base told me, Dev?”
“What did he tell you?”
“That…” She gulped. “That Sully wanted to kill us all.”
I nodded. “All because of me,” I said. “I’m just… I’m so sorry that this happened to you because of me. I never imagined—”
She reached out to hug me. “How could this be your fault? You can’t control what other people do.”
“If I had been—”
She interrupted me again, telling me things like it wasn’t my fault. Things I wanted to believe. But I couldn’t. The hospital kept me in for a few days, but I went home as soon as they let me. I wanted to be miserable at home. I wanted the time and space to feel sorry for myself and get over Base yet again.