Red Hook: 21

Last...

The way Shane figured it, she had already missed her classes. Last year, when all this began for her, when she lost normality, she missed most of a semester. No one noticed, because no one realized she existed then. She was erased, aside from a few items and memories that drew Roselyn to her. She'd since made up the classes and a friend had pulled some strings to give her a semester full of high marks in contrition.

Now it was all happening again. She was imprisoned in a basement rather than an attic and was unable to move around, but the conventional life she had tried to lead had been sacrificed because some supernatural bastard was trying to make her something she had no interest in being. Though, she reflected, she'd rather be some "protector" of her college than hot and cold running hemoglobin for a bunch of vampires. Gideon, the man who pushed her into being something other than strictly human last year, had wanted an heir, someone to train and shape to keep Annandale from falling to chaos. Granted, he tried to take over her body when she refused and had killed a hundred people to prolong his life but, purely from an utilitarian perspective, it would have been better to be his hench-minion than a seven course meal. Instead, she picked the life she had left off, the life she most wanted to be leading, as a perfectly average college student deeply in love with her boyfriend. That's about the only thing on earth she could imagine sacrificing anything for.

Seth brought her a television and movies, as well as soup. He gave her no say as to what she would watch and seemed to enjoy the sadism of leaving her powerless against the curse of Disney musicals, but it kept her from going completely crazy for a little while longer. And now, if she did, she could at least do it while thinking about the plight of unfortunate, if whiny, princesses. At least the more modern princesses had the guts to do something aside from clean and wait to be rescued. They armed themselves and tried to prove good role models to impressionable girl tykes. It riled some innate feminist in Shane that the princesses only were strong when they were acting like the men, however. One could be strong and female, though the irony of thinking this while chained in place was not lost on her.

Seth could not even be persuaded to release her arms to let her feed herself, having learned that lesson well. She was to be allowed the bare minimum of trust and autonomy because Shane would already be planning a way to escape using these. Any trifling pleasure was only hers so long as it ended in the goal of keeping her as a source of blood on tap. Vampires reveled in the cruelty they could inflict, so kindness had to be beneficial or it was ignored.

Slowly, it dawned on Shane that Ash hadn't come down in a while. "Is Ashlei okay?" Shane asked Seth when he brought her clam chowder. It was the white kind, which she despised but ate anyway because she wasn't given any more choice than a baby in her force feeding.

"Quite. I haven't seen her this excited since she was first made. Her cheeks are so rosy you'd think she was alive again. About at rosy as your cheeks, actually. Funny coincidence," he smirked and plied her with another spoonful, which wasn't as bad as the condensed New England chowder Shane's mother used to feed her.

"She just doesn't have your nurturing instinct?" In retort, he shoved another the spoonful between her lips and cut open the roof of her mouth. With the salty cream, she swallowed a mouthful of her own blood. The next spoonful was gentle, but her mouth had already sewn together again.

"What do you know about lions, princess?"

The thoughts flickered into her head instantly. "Predators, genus Panthera, indigenous to Africa and Asia though not so much with India anymore… Hmm… What are you looking for, exactly?"

"Who hunts?"

"The females do, while the males… oh. Vampires are like lions?" Shane hadn't considered they would be like any animal, but quickly disabused herself of thoughts of bats and wolves as the likeliest candidates.

"In that we have packs. We don't all hunt, that would be messy and unnecessary. Just a couple go out and bring the kills, if we can't buy blood somewhere."

"Buy?"

"Doll, if we killed every time we were hungry, we'd decimate the human population," Seth assured her.

"Decimate actually means to kill one tenth of," Shane automatically corrected. Bad grammar and misused words annoyed her and she'd had a lot of time alone to think about it.

He sighed and Shane saw him glaring at her in the light of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. "I know what it means," he stated, "I used to be a social studies teacher. It came from executing soldiers, every tenth one in a Roman unit to dissuade mutiny among the ranks. I have you trapped in a basement at my whims, don't pretend I'm stupid."

Shane wouldn't apologize, but took his chiding to heart. She couldn't underestimate her enemy, just as he had made certain not to take her too lightly. Seth stopped spooning the soup into her mouth and Shane realized that he'd become transfixed by the song of the dwarves on the screen.

"You don't need to hunt," Shane said.

"No, Ash is hunting."

"No, I mean, neither of you needs to hunt anymore, right? You have all the blood you could want now. The Shane vintage, a very good year."

"We don't have to hunt for food," he answered. He switched off the television and room went dark. He walked out the door and she heard it lock behind him. She was left alone in the dank basement, smelling the remains of the soup cooling beside her head, wondering what clue she was to gain from this new bit of information. She was almost grateful for the respite from saccharine singing. Almost, but not quite, because all her mental effort was now to a steady, upbeat meter.

"Why didn't you tell me any of this?" Dryden asked, sitting on the floor of Roselyn's apartment.

"That's a popular question recently," Eliot answered, a little bitterly. "Roselyn says knowing this changes you, that it makes it easier for the dark things to see you. The girls apparently agreed to keep quiet about this last spring and... well, here we are now."

"But it would have explained so much and then, maybe, I wouldn't be a vampire right now. You could have told me, I could have taken knowing that vampires were real."

Roselyn heaved a sigh at them both. "We – or at least I – didn't know there were vampires, exactly. Just that the supernatural is real in an objective, physical, occasionally obnoxious way. We weren't exactly out playing vampire hunter." Roselyn caught Noah's look. "Fine, some of us weren't. I didn't know, at least. Can we just emphasize that in twenty point underlined italics please? I didn't know."

"Well, I did," Noah snarled. "At the risk of sounding like that guy in every horror movie ever, you have been playing with things you don't understand and now they are biting you in the ass. Hopefully not literally." This last remark was directed at Dryden, who, after a facile reassurance that Shane wasn't bat food, did his best to leave marks on Roselyn's chocolate skin that had nothing to be with vampirism.

Noah had not let his guard down yet and had been trying every oratory trick he remembered from high school debate class to convince Roselyn that Dryden was certainly not to be trusted and, if he could help it, at least not to be lusted after. Roselyn was more utilitarian and romantic, alternating between espousing Dryden's usefulness as an information source and sex toy. Noah finally acceded to testing the former assertion.

"Tell us about the vampires to killed you," he insisted.

"They kept me locked in a room for a little while and then—"

"Not about your imprisonment, about them. We need to know their habits, their methods."

Eliot broke in. "With all due respect, I thought you were this big bad vampire slayer? Shouldn't you already know their habits and methods?"

Noah did not cease watching Dryden as he answered, "Not all vampires are the same. I've encountered at least twenty discrete species of these monsters and a few dozen assorted other demonic beings. Knowing exactly what kind Dryden is now will make it easier to destroy hi-" he hesitated "-his makers."

Dryden told what he remembered of them, with the generous caveat that he was locked in a room for most of it. Noah made interested sounds through the descriptions, most interested that Dryden's captors seemed to fear sunlight while Dryden only found it painful. Finally, Dryden noted the dawning light none of this companions could see and said that he ought to get some sleep.

Eliot and Roselyn yawned and suggested that this sounded necessary for them as well, if not desired. Noah didn't move.

"You're going to just let Dryden sleep?" he asked.

Roselyn raised an eyebrow. "That had been the plan, yeah."

"He should at least be restrained," Noah insisted, his voice unnaturally even.

"Come on, he isn't dangerous," Eliot stated. "Besides, how are we going to restrain him? I think it is a fair bet that he's stronger than us and I'm not exactly packing handcuffs."

Roselyn walked from to her bedroom, opened a drawer and returned, a pair of sturdy metal cuffs in her hands.

"Why do you--" Noah began, but realized the answer.

Dryden took the cushions off the couch and made a suitable nest in the corner of the kitchen that got the least light. He took the handcuffs from Noah, fastened one around his wrist and another through the grate of the radiator. "Satisfied?"

Noah pulled on the cuffs and nodded his head.

"Warren."

Warren lay in his bed, murmuring in sleep.

"Warrrrren," the voice whispered again, almost teasing his name out.

Stupid dreams, he thought. Dreams shouldn't wake him up, that was exactly the opposite of what dreams should be allowed to do. He hugged the pillow in his arms tighter and started drifting back to a dream about the tri sigma sorority and a greased up manatee.

"Warren, wake up."

Okay, that wasn't a dream. He didn't move, but took stock for a moment. He didn't get drunk last night, just a little buzzed. It was an early night, in bed by two. He opened his eyelids slightly to proceed with his accounting. He was still in his bedroom, an Annandale Devils pennant staring back at him. If he brought someone home last night, he had no memory of her and it was definitely a woman almost chanting his name.

"Warren, I'm at the window. Let me in."

He opened his eyes fully, letting all available light in. Why would there be someone at his window? His turned off the radio he kept on when he was sleeping, not wondering why he had heard a whisper over its roar. Some people could do with white noise, but he needed the constant mutter of sports in the background. "Who's there?"

"It's me. Open the window. Come on! You know you want to!"

Warren made his way to the window, managing not to trip over a men's magazine on his floor. He didn't see anyone at his window, but opened it anyway. The worst thing that could happen would be that his friends jumped out of the bushes and pelted him with water balloons full of ink again. If that happened, he always had a wiffleball bat and a water gun full of his own urine, kept on hand by the window for just such occasions. He poked his head out and felt the small hand on his throat. He grabbed for his real bat and swung wildly. It connected and the hand released him. He felt confident until he looked and saw that the heavy bat, an ash one used by his uncle in the minor leagues, now featured the deep imprint of fingers, as though the bat were nothing more than dough that a child had squeezed.

He backed into his room and searched effetely for something more offensive. He grabbed for his hockey stick and screamed until his housemates ran into his room, calling him a douchebag for waking them.

They saw the bat, but didn't put it past him to have fabricated it as a prank. Only his genuine terror and the wish — called "gay" by his housemates — that he sleep in one of their rooms convinced them of his sincerity. He finally settled for the living room couch, though he would not get anymore sleep until sunrise.

It was an hour after Roselyn fell asleep that she felt the pressure of a body in her bed. She reached out, caressing his back and urging her to join her under the covers. Only when she felt the tense rope of muscles in his back did she realize that this was not her lover and drew back her hand.

"Noah. Hey. What's up? Why aren't you sleeping?"

"Someone needs to stay awake in case something happens. Besides, I don't need much sleep anymore, a couple hours a day will do it."

"You were guarding Dryden," she said.

"Yeah. He's not human anymore, Rose. He's gonna turn."

She shut her eyes again and nodded. This had occurred to her already, listening to Noah and Dryden bicker back and forth. Touching Dryden, being touched by him, was lovely and hot, but it wasn't the same. As he kissed her neck, she couldn't repress the feeling that she was a lamb making time with a wolf. "I don't know what is going to happen, Noah, but the vampires wanted him bad enough to try to take me as bait to lure him back. And he's strong and on my side, so there's no use in casting him out, right?"

"He's gonna turn," Noah repeated.

Roselyn adjusted her posture and lay on her back. Noah didn't say anything else for a long time.

"Hey, the sun's up. Is Dryden--"

"I covered him in a blanket," Noah answered. "It didn't look like much light could hit him. Sometimes, when the light hits vampires, they go up like Roman candles. It wasn't safe to leave him uncovered."

"Right," Roselyn murmured back, grateful. Still, Noah was silent and unmoving. "So, why are you here?"

"Something is going down and it looks like Red Hook is the epicenter. There are signs and signals. I've got to think this vampire flare up is--"

"Why are you in my room?" Roselyn clarified.

He turned to look at her. "Because I missed you and I haven't missed anyone in a while. We were close, you know? I mean, after we almost--"

"I know. What about your parents? They're still around. You could see them, sleep in your old bed."

He shook his head. "About a year ago, I sent them a newspaper clipping that told them I was dead."

"Why would you do that?"

He shrugged. "Because it's going to be true one of these days and, when it does, they won't know. They deserve a chance to mourn and for that part of their life to be over. What I'm doing is too important to have those sorts of attachments."

"But you missed me?"

"Yeah, I really did. I've had some people – friends, I guess – people I traveled with for a while, people I learned from. It wasn't the same, they didn't know me."