Mitch (3 page)

“Yeah, look how well that worked out for me.”
Steele laughed, and Mitch looked at the woman again. “I’ll talk to her. I don’t
know why she has this thing for me when you and Nick are the heavy workers
here.”

“Maybe she just loves the way you look, all tousled
up and all.” Mitch put his hand to his hair and tried to smash it down again. He’d
seen himself in the mirror when he’d gone in the house and he was sort of a
mess. Like he’d gotten laid recently and had enjoyed it a great deal. “Go and
see what she wants. Then later we’ll talk about this business with your
mother-in-law.”

“Yeah. Right.” As he moved toward the woman,
he thought of his mate. Mate? Who would have thought he’d find someone to love
him. Of course, she could kill him with just a bite, but there were worse
things to think about.

The woman pointed to the house again, and he
nodded. Going into the house, he followed her, without going through the walls,
until they were in a room he’d never seen before. He looked at the small dark
space and asked her if there was a light. When she pointed again, he walked to
it and flipped it on.

“Christ.” He looked around the room twice
before his mind let him take in what he was seeing. He looked at the woman
again. “Is this where you’ve been? Where you met your death?”

It was a chamber of sorts. Not a house of
horrors, because this place was much worse. Someone had set the place up to
kill, and to take their time with it. And they had too, if the things on the
walls were any indication…body parts, fingers, toes, even a few things he
thought were tongues. Knives hung at different points in the room. A chainsaw was
sitting on the makeshift counter with blood, old and dried, on the chain.

He looked at her and she pointed again, then
moved to a wall that looked like it was just that, a simple wall. But when she
moved through it, he walked to it too, careful where he stepped. There
was...this place was a playroom of major proportions. But unlike the one he
enjoyed, this one had been set up for death and not pleasure. Pulling out his
cell, he wasn’t surprised to see he had no service. But he did need the others
to come and help him. When the woman came back, he told her what he had to do
and moved to get the others. But she stopped him again.

“I don’t know what you want of me.” She
pointed to the wall again. “I can’t go in there without help. I’m sorry.”

She took him. She didn’t just move into his
body, as had happened to Nick and Steele. This was...well, pretty fucking
sickening.

He could feel her pain…not of her death,
though from the looks of her it had been pretty tragic, but of her sadness, her
missing her family, and of her sorrow of what she could no longer do. Mitch
felt his belly churn and had to hang onto the wall before he felt they could
move.

He stood still, trying to get his bearings, till
she made him move until they got to the wall across from them, and she lifted
his hand up. He watched in both fear and fascination as she moved the doorway
open after working the mechanism.

There was no way he’d have been able to find
this opening without her help. It was buried within the fabric of the wood
perfectly. He had no idea how he could tell anyone where he was even if he
could reach any of them.

I can help you
. Her voice sounded drowsy
and full of the promise of sex. His cock hardened painfully with just that
sound.
Behave or I’ll leave you to...what’s going on
?

A woman, a client, is here and she’s taken my
body, and I have no way of knowing what’s going to happen should I go into this
room. I...my cell doesn’t work
. She asked him what he needed.
Can you
call out to Steele or one of the others
?
Let them...I don’t know, tell
them to come and find me
?

Sort of. I can go to him and tell him what
you need. But we’ve never exchanged blood, so he’s not on my network. Can you
fight her off
?
He told her he wasn’t even sure how she’d done this to him.
Great. I’m with
him now. Try to...try not to piss me off by getting killed, all right
?

He thought that was excellent advice all the
way around. As the door opened, he tried to fight the woman who held him, but
all it did was make her angry, and that heated her up. His body burned just
enough that he finally backed off. No point in hurting himself if the others
were coming to help. Moving into the room, it was all Mitch could do not to scream
in horror.

Vinnie
?
Will you please tell him to bring the
police
?
It’s bad
. She told them they were on their way.
It’s...it’s
bad. Really bad
.

The first thing he could see was the parts. Not
car parts but people parts, large body parts that were hanging from hooks and
nails all over the room. He supposed that was the wrong name for them, but
right now he was straining just to cope. There was a...what was left of a
person hanging from what looked like a fishing hook in front of him, the sharp
end of it sticking from their neck. Blood was still dripping from the person,
and he reached out blindly to hold onto something. That was when the woman left
his body.

He dropped to his knees, his entire being
simply unable to hold him up any longer. Mitch closed his eyes when he could
see the rest of the person that had been hanging up just to his right. The
voices behind him had him yelling for them to hang on.

“I want in now, Mitch, or so help me I’m
breaking this fucking wall in. Where the fuck are you?” He told Steele to give
him a minute. “Mitch? Fuck, fuck, fuck. Mitch?”

As Steele’s voice got stronger, he did as
well. Staggering to his feet, he more or less fell to where he’d come through
the wall, than stepped to it. He slid a little in the stickiness on the floor
twice as he tried to get the wall opened. Mitch felt his belly rebel at the
thoughts and tried to think of anything else. Even a train wreck would have
been less horrid than this was, he thought.

Vinnie came in first.

Mitch didn’t have a lot of experience with
vampires. Just a few, and that had been to royally piss them off, but he could
see right now that Vinnie was not just mad, but she was going to kill someone
soon if her fangs down and her eyes red were any indication. As she pulled him
into her arms, he heard Steele yelling at someone to get the police.

“He said he wanted to make sure you were all
right first.” Mitch nodded and stopped. It was too much right now to make his
head move like that. “I’m going to help you. Will you take it?”

“Drugs? Alcohol? Anything that will make me
pass out for, oh, I don’t know, a month or two?” She told him her blood. “No
thanks. For now. I’m all right. It was quite a shock to my system.” He laughed
a little.

“You’re hurt, did you know that?” He looked
at his arm where she’d lifted it to show him. “Did she do this? Maybe when you
came through the doorway?”

“I don’t know.” But he could see it was a
long, deep cut. He’d not felt any pain and didn’t really now. He looked up at
Drew when he said his name again. “I’m really okay. I am. I don’t feel so well
after being taken, but I’m okay.”

“You look like shit.” He was being handled,
he just realized. They were all distracting him while the room was
being...whatever they did when the police came into a scene they were on. His
mind wasn’t working properly, and he held onto Vinnie as she stood there with
him. When she lifted his arm to her mouth, he watched as she licked along the
wound while keeping her eyes focused on his. Then when she moaned, it was all
he could do not to pull her to his body and kiss her. Someone said his name
behind him and he turned just enough to see the police officer standing there.
He didn’t want to see the room again.

“Did you touch anything, Mr. Riley?” He had
to think a minute before he could answer the officer. He was decidedly pale
too, Mitch realized. “The body, did you touch it at any time? Or any of
the...the other things, like the blades?”

“No. I did touch that...I’m not sure what it
was, but I think a table? I was falling over and I might have grabbed it to
keep from hitting the floor.” The officer nodded and wrote something in his
books. “And I fell to my knees there, as you can see. There were no living
people in here when I arrived either. If that was your next question.”

“Right. Can you tell us how you got in here?”
He started to tell him about the ghost, but looked at Ray, who was standing
right behind the officer. His short shake of his head had him telling the man
he just found the door and came in. “But you shouldn’t have been able to see
the doorway to get in here. Not unless someone showed you.”

Alarms went off in his head, and when his
hand was gripped tighter by Vinnie, he knew she could feel his nervousness as
well. When she moved closer to him, Mitch looked over at Drew and spoke
directly to him, hoping that he’d understand.

“There was a door if you knew just where to
look, as you just said.” The officer said something, but Drew was watching them
both now. The officer’s anger was apparent, his knowledge scary. Mitch thought
to make him madder, hoping he’d say something more that would prove what his
mind already knew. This was the killer. “I mean, any moron could tell there
wasn’t any kind of secret to the way it was set up. This place was a piece of
cake to find, really.”

“No, it was not.” Drew took a step back and then
moved out of the room as the officer stiffened. Drew was going for the police,
the real ones this time. Relief was profound, and the man in front of him was
going to be in a world of serious hurt if he tried anything with them all
standing there. At least, that’s what Mitch was hoping anyway. “You been spying
on me, ain’t you? Think you got it all worked out, don’t you, city boy? Well,
you ain’t even scratched the surface of my plans.”

“You’re responsible for all of this?” The
officer, or whatever he was, just smiled. “Whoever did this is an amateur, if
you want to know the truth of it. I’ve seen worse. I mean, even last month we
had a woman...Steele? You remember that mess we had to go to in Indiana,
right?”

If Steele was confused, he didn’t show it.
Instead, he just nodded and started going on about the worst scene that they’d
been on and how a woman had done it. The officer turned to him now, and Mitch
tried to push Vinnie back. But she either didn’t get that this was the killer
or she didn’t care. As the noise in the other room got louder, so did Steele
and the officer. He knew Steele was masking the sounds of the cops coming to
help.

Mitch tried to think around his fear of
Vinnie getting hurt, but he was tired still. His body and mind didn’t want to
work the way he was used to. He’d had no idea that having someone take you that
way could be so draining. He looked at Vinnie, and she smiled at him. A
thought, nothing to do with what was going on, popped into his head.

“What is Vinnie short for?” She flushed
brightly, and he smiled. “Now I have to know. There has to be a story about it
as well.”

“My name is Victoria, Victoria Alexandra
Millicent Graham.” He started to ask about the other Millicent, but she
continued before he could. “My mother and father were into another one of their
separations at that time, and my aunt, my dad’s sister, was staying with us.
I’m not really sure why because mom and Aunt Millicent rarely get along under
normal circumstances. But she was there, and the story goes that had she not
been, my mother might have lost me. So mom, in a fit of what she calls pure
stupidity, named me after her. I think she regrets it more than I do. And to
get my father pissy, Mom started calling me Vinnie. I have no idea why, as she
won’t tell me.”

He might have said something, but both of
them were shoved back when the police, the real ones this time, arrived in the
room. It was over, the murderer being killed almost as soon as it began.

The fake officer, Jimmy Bob Madison, turned
and fired even as the first officer came through the opening. Jimmy Bob, known
to the people he killed as Bob Bobby for some reason, joined those in the
afterlife, and they gave him the same treatment he had given them. Mitch was
glad when they took his ghost with them when they left the building. His
screams were going through his already befuddled mind.

As he and the rest of them finished up the
job, making sure the police had all the information they needed to end this,
Mitch moved over to where Connie, Steele’s grandmother, was standing. She
didn’t say anything for a long time, and he was content to just be with her. Vinnie
had left him again for rest.

“You’re going to be hurt.” He started to tell
Connie he’d been checked out when she continued. “That girl you’re seeing, your
mate, she’s got a person or two with her that is going to hurt you and the
others if you don’t let her go. I don’t know about one of them, but the other—”

“Who? Her father?” She nodded, then shook her
head. “This Millicent person then? Are you saying she’s in with her brother and
out to hurt me?”

“No. Her father is out to kill her, and
you’ll be hurt by it too. If not killed.” She looked at him then, and he could
see the fear in her eyes. “He’s been gone for some time, and his powers are
huge even now. His sister, Millicent the horrible we call her, is...well,
different than he is. And from what I can gather, she’s much different than she
was when she was alive too. It’s said they’re not even speaking to each other. And
that she avoids him as much as she can living here in the same area.”