Phoenix Dead (New Adult Dark Romance) (The Vampire Years) (2 page)

“Army's going to take care of us.”

I caught a glance of Army's face as she said this. His sunglasses had slipped down. In the dim light of the garage, his eyes were a dull black, malicious. There was no mistaking his intent. Army was taking care of himself.

With my free arm, I pressed on the steering wheel, searching for the horn. I found it, pressed. No sound came out.

Army tilted his head, a smirk sliding across his face. My stomach flipped, sick dread sinking in. I needed to get out of the garage. I screamed, yelling for help at the top of my lungs.

Sandy's hand closed around my mouth. “You're going to ruin it.”

You're going to ruin it
. Her words were like a hard slap against my face or a knife pushed into my chest. I could almost feel the flesh splitting, the blade nicking the bones of my rib cage before finding my heart.

You're going to ruin it
. It wasn't the first time she'd said that.

I don't want to be alone. He'll leave me
. She'd played that over and over again with Paul, with each grope and fondle reported.

Army brought down the final blow to my resistance in the garage -- a sharp chop to my left knee. Tendons snapped. I screamed from behind Sandy's hand and then my leg folded.

He slammed me onto the concrete floor. I heard the door into the house open and a man laughed. “Didn't think you were going to get her out on your own, brother.”

“Ain't no bitch I can't handle,” Army grunted and kicked me in the ribs.

My body bounced from the impact. Pain radiated from my knee and ribs, settling over me like a blood red cloak as I passed out.

Chapter Three

I woke to the flicker of candle light. I could smell incense and pot mixing with equally heavy odors I couldn't identify. My arms and legs were tied down. I'd been to church maybe six times in my life, but the voices around me seemed to be praying, the sound a low, monotonous hum of men.

Army leaned over my head. He had a lit joint between his lips and he pulled a drag on it. Exhaling, he blew the smoke in my face.

“I can't wait to see the look on Elliot's face when I tell him what we did to you.” He blew more smoke at me, his lips hovering less than an inch from my mouth and nose. His breath stank like meat gone bad.

“You're dead, you just don't know it.” There was no strength to my threat. Every word was weighted with the pain still radiating from my knee and ribs.

The chanting stopped cold. Laughter erupted. Then the voice from the garage cut through and the laughter ended as abruptly as it had begun.

“Strip her.”

Army flicked open a knife and began to cut my clothes away. He went slow, creating a show of it as my worn t-shirt quickly shredded. He ran the blade down my right side, trailing it over the skin without cutting me. Then he ripped through the beltline and down the side of one pant leg.

I tested the ropes at my wrist and at my right foot. Every twist I made to free myself only seemed to pull them tighter.

The chanting started up again and I tried to look beyond the candle flames to the shadows that clung to the wall. I had the sense of black robes, the impression confirmed when my eyes at last fell upon Sandy. She was naked, her bloated body pale and slowly arching as robed arms passed over her.

A needle slid into her arm and she quieted.

“You won't be so lucky,” Army warned as he brought the blade up the other pant leg and peeled the fabric away until I was clothed only in my bra and panties.

“You're going to feel everything that happens to you, no escaping with a needle.”

I knew this moment was long overdue. I'd been dodging it over half my life -- from the weekend before Sandy announced she and Paul were getting married. I just never expected that my eventual rape would also end in my death. I could feel the tears pooling in my eyes but I wasn't afraid. Instead, I felt a sort of shocked, calm relief, maybe even gratitude as fucked up as that sounds.

I had been shaped to only one purpose my whole life, or so it seemed -- Sandy's crutch, conceived as soon as she had entered adulthood. Tonight, she had finally thrown me into the fire.

When I was stripped completely nude, Army threw the knife to the floor and the owner of the garage voice came forward. He was slight, stringy and greasy in the same way as Army. Just another biker-dealer, small-time killer. A low-end contemptible, but he had me completely in his power.

He bent low, stroked my neck with one dirty-nailed finger. “Army tells me you're something of a rarity nowadays -- untouched.”

I swallowed hard, silently cursing Paul and his compulsion to tell every man that came in contact with me that I was still a virgin and off limits.

“Don't worry, Lee,” the slim one said, baring his teeth and shifting closer to my throat. “We only want your blood.”

They slid from the shadows then, too many for me to count. Mouths fastened to my arms and legs. They pushed at one another, crawled over their brothers like piglets against a sow's underbelly.

Teeth sank into my flesh. Thoughts flashed through my mind, Chris getting his new car, me riding with him, the roof down, my long black hair billowing out behind me like an impossible length of black silk. Sandy's hand over my mouth, her voice whining in my ear.

“This is how it ends?” I wondered.

But it wasn't.

They drained me almost to the point of my death and then they untied me. There was talk of dismemberment and cremation, “Just to make sure.”

I heard the truck in the garage, the engine starting and then the vehicle being driven out onto the driveway.

I heard it all between the slow dying beats of my heart.

They dragged us, Sandy, looking like she was already dead, and me. They dragged us to the garage with its concrete floor. I could feel nicks in the ground and I heard an electric saw blade start up, and suddenly I sensed that the tool had been used in this fashion -- and in this place -- before.

Awareness penetrated the dark curtain that was my impending death. I realized they were drunk, high on blood, high on the endorphins that were pumping through my body and on the drugs they had injected Sandy with that must now be coursing through their systems.

They were too drunk, jostling with one another for the fun of cutting up their latest victims. Army, the night's procurer, won the first cut and he brought the saw blade down on Sandy's neck. Shattered tendons and bone flew like small pieces of shrapnel. I could feel sharp bits of my mother cutting into my cheek like broken glass.

I was beyond hearing at that point, deaf even to the sound of the blade less than a foot from my head. But I saw the lights, blue and red through the gaps of the garage door. Later, I would learn that one of the neighbor kids heard my single scream as I was being dragged from the truck. He waited until his mom came home to tell her.

It was too late for Sandy, but I was still alive, barely, as panic set in among the men in the garage. I was still alive as the saw blade made its next slice, cutting through Army's wrist.

I was still alive as blood spurted from him, onto my face and naked flesh, onto my open wounds.

I was still alive.

Chapter Four

The feel of blood flowing out is familiar to most people. Covering the skin, it begins to dry, to pull at flesh. It cools, hardens and cracks.

But I'd never experienced the sensation of blood flowing in. Really, who has?

I felt it then. My body seemed to suck it in. My cut flesh yearned toward it. Skin that had grown cold became flushed with warmth.

I experienced all that, there on the concrete floor. Through Army's shrieks and the sound of sirens, I felt life flow back into me and sensed my body's welcoming sigh.

With the blood came pain and hunger. It wasn't my stomach that twisted. Every pore screamed with a famished want. I rolled to my side. Too weak to raise my head, I saw only the boots and tennis shoes of the men that had done this to me.

One screamed. “Grab his hand!”

Someone reached down, scooped it up. The fingers seemed to flex at being touched.

“Down the hole!” Another one shouted.

They fled the garage seconds before its door was torn off with one quick yank from breach hooks. Light flooded the room, blinding me so that I squeaked like a rat that had come up from the sewer.

Later, after the cops had cleared the empty house, they covered me in a blanket and rushed me to an emergency room. Only once they stuck a needle in my arm and started pumping whole blood into me did I finally find peace and drift to sleep.

When I woke, there was a cop waiting in my room. He was young -- or one of those baby-faced narcs. He was dressed in street clothes but he had his badge out on a chain around his neck. His jaw tightened when he realized I had opened my eyes and then he tried to smile something short and reassuring.

“Hey, I'm officer Daniel Gutierrez, Maryvale PD.” He touched the hospital mattress, close to my hand, and then pulled back. “Call me 'Danny' when you're ready to talk, okay?

I looked down at the arm he'd almost touched. Bandages covered most of it. Staring at the skin, I realized how clearly I could see the pores and hair, each so distinct I could count them. I looked at Officer Danny, getting the impression that he had a strong, beautiful face with a neatly trimmed goatee at the end but getting lost in the same details -- the separate dark brown lashes that protected deep blue eyes veined with gray. The lines in his curved bottom lip, the rise and fall of his chest as shallow breaths whispered through his body.

Beyond the closed door, I could hear nurses talking, the buzz of television voices in other rooms.

Again he reached forward, stopping just short of touching me. “Do you want me to page a nurse or a doctor?”

I gave one shake of my head. Lifting my right hand, I pointed at a pitcher beside my bed, hoping it was filled with water.

“Right. You're thirsty.” There was a cup and straw I hadn't seen. He filled the cup and then patiently held the straw to my lips while I slowly sucked down a mouthful.

When he put the cup down, he finally touched me -- just three fingertips against my arm while he looked into my eyes. “Lee, when you're ready, I need to ask you some questions about…”

“I'm not really sure what I saw inside the house.” The words came out cracked. “I think they drugged me.”

They had said they wouldn't -- but with the things I thought I saw, I couldn't understand at the time how I could not have been drugged. How else to explain Army still standing -- screaming with blood squirting from his arm, but still standing. And details about the men, what I'd seen in the flickering candle light, their sharp smiles, their oddly contorted bodies…

“Tox screen -- I mean…” His three fingers danced lightly against my arm. “It doesn't look like they did.”

“Sandy.”

“They pumped her full of heroin.” He drew his hand back, gripped his leg with it. “You know your mom…”

“Sandy's dead. I know. She was next to me when they took her head.” Remembering the flying bone fragments, I raised a shaky hand to my cheek. The skin was smooth, unblemished.

How much had I imagined?

“Do you remember how you got to the house?” He had drawn out a touch phone and was tapping his finger at the screen as he asked me questions.

“This guy, Army, he told her my uncle was there.” That was a lie, of course, but how could I say the truth out loud? Sandy, broke and realizing Paul had probably abandoned her for good, went looking for another protector and paid him with the only currency she had left -- me.

Only her protector had been a complete predator and now she was dead, too.

“They picked me up at school…a white truck, Ford I think. The house was a couple blocks away from Elliot's.” I turned away from him, onto my side where I curled into myself. “I don't remember anything after that.”

Only, I remembered everything, even details I couldn't recall noticing in the first place. Like the tattoo across the back of the skinny guy's hand that said “Nestor” and the small scar that ran from the “r” to the webbing between his thumb and index finger.

“Truck was stolen and the house was empty, bank had foreclosed on it.” He touched my shoulder, again three fingers, each one transferring their warmth through the thin hospital gown to the skin beneath. “Lee, we're going to get these guys, but we need you to remember everything you can.”

I nodded. I wanted him to stay, wanted his fingers warming me. I felt so cold right then.

“They were chanting something, I think.”

His hand left my shoulder while he put the information into his phone. “Was it English?”

I managed a weak shrug. “There was something else.”

“Lee, any thing, the smallest fragment.”

I shook my head, drawing it out. It was a small thing, wasn't it? Not like the tattoo on the guy's hand, a detail they probably had in some police database somewhere. Still, I didn't want to tell him.