To do that would have been death to me...and to my sister.
I told myself to relax, to calm my mind.
Finally, finally, I was able to clear it. Enough to cast my thoughts out. Casting my thoughts into an ever-widening gyre was my ace in the hole. My edge. Without it, I was walking into a death trap.
Except I wasn’t as calm as I would have liked. The images that were returned to me were fuzzy and incomplete. Still, good enough. There were three of them in the massive room beyond. Three living, that is. Three moving. There were others. Many others...hanging. Dripping blood.
The dripping sounds I’d been hearing.
Sweet Jesus
Calm down, Sam. Relax. You can do this. Your sister needs you. Hell, you need you.
I breathed deeply, filling my useless lungs with useless air. Useless or not, it was a technique that still worked to calm me down. To help me focus.
From somewhere far down the hallway to my right, I heard a distant sound. It could have been anything. Rats. Earth shifting. Or someone approaching. Hard to tell. Either way, whatever or whoever it was, was still far away.
The others I couldn’t recognize, although I suspected the tall one was Robert Cash. The other was smaller, thinner. Stood straight. Impossible to know who she was. At least, for the time being.
I would know soon enough.
I continued my remote search through the massive room beyond. The room was set lower than this hallway. Down some steps. I saw earth everywhere. It appeared to be a cavern...but an unnatural one. Long ago it had been dug out. By whom and for what reason, I didn’t know. Maybe it had always been used to kill and drain and feed the local vampires.
I continued searching the room, looking for anything that would give me an edge, anything that would help me not step into the world’s most obvious trap. The tall man I assumed to be Robert Cash was standing very near the door. He was holding something. I assumed it to be another crossbow.
The smaller figure was standing nearby. He or she was unarmed as far as I could tell.
I continued mentally scanning the big room—the room of horror—until I saw what appeared to be more doors. No surprise there. I was certain there were many ways into this underground chamber beneath the theater.
A balcony high above. Accessed by a door to my right.
Another door? Oh?
My eyes shot open. Indeed, behind more junk and behind where the dead man now lay at my feet, was a barely discernible door.
I quietly moved toward it. It was locked. A quick flick of my wrist took care of that.
It opened quietly enough. I slipped inside and headed up.
* * *
The stairs were narrow and suspect.
I kept to the far edges, never stepping in the middle, and swept up them as quickly and quietly as I could. I wasn’t alone on the stairs. A steady procession of faded entities appeared and disappeared. These chambers and tunnels, hallways and stairs were easily the most haunted locations I’d ever seen.
No surprise there, I thought. This was, after all, a human blood factory. A death factory.
At the upstairs landing, dim light spilled over the railing, illuminating a loft-like area filled with crap. I stepped past shovels and filthy buckets and weird-looking glass containers. The scent of blood was everywhere. New blood. Old blood. My stomach growled.
Great.
I ignored the growling, hating myself all over again, but releasing the hate immediately. It was, after all, time to save my sister.
I stepped as lightly as I could through the mess, until I found myself at the balcony I had seen in my mental scan. Once there, I looked down at the scene below...and gasped.
The sight was overwhelming, but not unexpected. Human corpses filled the room. They hung from the rafters, many chained although some were suspended by thick ropes. All were naked. All hung upside down. All with slit throats.
My knees threatened to give. Hell, my whole world threatened to give. If I had to breathe normally, I would have been gasping. I probably would have fainted.
But I held onto the railing, searching the area below until I spotted my sister near the far wall. She was alive. Mercifully, she faced away from the carnage.
Some corpses twisted gently, as if blown by a breeze. A few of the freshest corpses had buckets beneath them to catch the dripping blood.
Many of the men looked like local bums. One of them I was sure I recognized, a bum I had seen near the post office. Some of the women, if I had to guess, were prostitutes. Career prostitutes. Banged up and used and abused. Some had fake breasts. Many were still wearing make up. All had their throats cut so bad that I could see all the way to their spines.
Many of the corpses were frozen in rigor mortis. Some had begun bloating. Most had been hanging for quite some time, the flesh having long ago peeled away from the ankles, revealing bone and rotting muscles. I counted twelve corpses. No, fourteen. There were two stacked on top of each other along the far wall.
If there was a hell, this was it.
A woman stood next to Chase?. A woman I had seen in my scan of the room, but who had not been distinct enough to recognize. Well, I recognized her now. Detective Hanner of the Fullerton Police Department. A fellow investigator...and a fellow vampire.
Here at the blood factory.
I began removing my clothing.
* * *
I had to be careful.
These people had made a business of killing. An industry. They were good at it, and they knew how to get away with it, too. Especially with Detective Hanner on the force. Perhaps she influenced the reports. Redirected evidence. Controlled minds. I didn’t know, but I suspected perhaps all of the above.
The room was vast and obscured by the hanging corpses. I knew by my initial scan that there were at least two men in the corners waiting with crossbows.
Two men, Robert Cash and Detective Hanner.
And my sister.
I had to act fast. I had to surprise them. And as I climbed up to stand carefully on the wooden railing overlooking the macabre scene, naked as the day as I was born, I suspected I would very much surprise them.
The single flame appeared in my thoughts. Unwavering, bright, dominant. I focused on it...and saw the creature within the flames. The creature that would be me.
And with that, I leaped from the railing.
* * *
The loft was thirty or so feet from the ground. Plenty of room to make my transformation.
Or so I hoped.
I spread my arms wide and, as the dirt floor rapidly approached, a huge set of thickly-membranous wings appeared from my arms and legs. As I plummeted, they snapped taut and, instead of slamming into the floor, I swooped parallel to it, just a foot or two from the ground.
It was as if I had always been this giant winged monster. As if I had always had its instincts and talents and appendages.