The Medium

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

There was a voice, and he wanted it to be Mara. He was home, and she’d invaded his half of the duplex again. He could smell the coffee. It would be dark out, and they would talk as they got ready for work. She would make fun of his sweater while she pulled her hair back. He would find her keys, because she was always losing them, and he would wait until after school to tell her all the things he’d planned to say. He would tell her everything, so if she kissed him again, she would know what she was getting herself into.

And she would know him inside and out, the way it should have been since the first time he realized how much he liked to hold her. She would know the truth of him, know all of him. They would sit in the dark with a bottle of cheap wine and laugh about his crappy weekend.

But it wasn’t dark out. A tiny bead of light shone through his eyelid, agonizing before he’d even opened his eyes. He turned his face away from it. Carpet scratched his cheek. It smelled faintly, but he couldn’t tell what it smelled like and didn’t care to spend energy trying to figure it out. Breathing made his entire body burn, so he stopped. Considering that revelation, he decided that trying to move would be a bad idea, too, so he stayed still. His throat burned, and he felt weak, and he knew what that meant, even though it was something he hadn’t let himself feel for a long time. He couldn’t feel much, though. Everything was numb, apart from the acute sensation of hangover. There were knives in his skull and something big trying to climb up his esophagus. He swallowed to keep it down, but it was having none of that, and he heaved at the musty carpet. His back screamed in protest. Nothing came up, but the nausea didn’t go away, so he kept heaving until the muscles wouldn’t contract again. It took him a few goes to figure out that his mouth wouldn’t open, either. Duct tape.

It had been too hard to be afraid, before, but now it was impossibly easy. The worst part was the realization that Sebastian hadn’t killed him, which could only mean there was more coming. He couldn’t guess why Sebastian could want him. Lenny wasn’t the standard model, but he had no illusions that he was anything special, either. As a vampire, he’d always been a miserable failure. As a medium, he had skills, but nothing that could give someone else an edge. Besides, if Sebastian wanted a medium, he could look one up in the phone book. He would have to filter through some charlatans, but media were hardly rare. Lenny could only assume Sebastian was planning to make someone suffer one way or another, and Lenny happened to be the one in his way.

He heard the voice again, but only the one. Sebastian was on the phone. The receiver clicked into the cradle, then footsteps approached.

Finally, Lenny opened his eyes, pretty sure he should make an effort to defend himself, or at least get up. He was lying on his face halfway under a bed. The bead of light had come from a small window opposite the door, taped over with foil like the one in the other room. Two or three tiny holes let in thin needles of sun, and even that was enough to make his eyes ache. From underneath the bed, on the other side of the room, he could see the closet door. A shiver started at the base of his spine and worked its way through the rest of him.

He tried. He did try, but his arms wouldn’t move, and they were too numb for him to be able to tell why. His legs moved, but not well. It didn’t feel the same as before, when it was drugs and trance keeping him still. This felt tangible. More duct tape.

He could do nothing but wait and count the steps.

Four. Five. Six.

Behind him, where he couldn’t see no matter how much he twisted, a door opened. Light spilled into the room, and he had to close his eyes.

Seven. Eight.

A huge hand closed over his shoulder, rolling him onto his side, and then two bulky arms worked their way underneath him, lifting him up. A short drop onto the bed, and he figured out where his arms were—pulled back behind him as far as they could possibly go, bound together from elbow to wrist. His shoulder popped quietly. He would have screamed, but his mouth was taped shut, and he was pretty sure his jaw was broken, and he couldn’t get a decent breath in, anyway.

The bed creaked and tilted as Sebastian sat on the edge.

Lenny opened one eye to see Sebastian looking at him. The light was behind him, and Lenny’s vision was weak, so he couldn’t see his expression, but he could still see his eyes.

“Are you for real?”

Sebastian wanted him to be for real. He wanted a friend, so Lenny nodded, ignoring the pain in his shoulders and in his head, even though he wanted nothing more than to be somewhere else.

And Sebastian saw him lying and reached down to grab his throat. He couldn’t strangle a vampire, but it hurt all the same. It stung, like he’d grabbed an open wound. Lenny felt the skin around his eyes tighten until they could get no wider. Sebastian pulled him up close to his face.

“Do you know what contagious magic is?”

What?

Lenny knew he did, but he was too scared to remember, and far too scared to risk lying again. He just looked at him.

“There are three forms of external magic. There’s symbolic—spells and words and circles and crap. Then there’s sympathetic—using a representation of something, like a doll or something that looks like what you want to mess with. Then there’s contagious. Contagious is controlling the whole thing by controlling part of the thing. Do you understand?”

Hard as he tried to think, Lenny had no idea what Sebastian was getting at. He shook his head as much as he was able, and fortunately, that seemed to be an acceptable answer. Sebastian didn’t hurt him, just dropped him back down onto the bed, which hurt enough when it wrenched his arms.

“Contagious magic is part of what goes into turning a human into a vampire. I assume you’re familiar with the process.”

He looked down and grinned to show that was a joke. Lenny quivered.

“Mutual exchange. They take your blood, you take theirs. It forms a link. That’s intrinsic, by the way, not external. Anyway, once they’ve got yours, they assimilate it, see? Your blood they’ve got turns into theirs. And that goes back through that link and touches all the rest, touches the source, and all of your blood turns into theirs. Instant vampire. You understand?”

Lenny knew all of that but still didn’t see how it was relevant. It had to be relevant somehow, and he twisted his brain to try to find the meaning, desperately hoping to do something right, but found nothing. If Sebastian’s plan was to keep him as a captive audience for magic lessons, it could’ve been much, much worse.

Sebastian shook his head sadly and reached out to touch the side of Lenny’s throat, between the tendon and the voice box, right where it twinged. It was a gentle touch, like a lover. Lenny didn’t dare move, even though he thought he might be sick again.

“Control a part, control the whole. You can use stuff like hair, spit… fingernails… But what works the best is…”

He smiled and nodded, watching Lenny’s face. His hand came away and he stood up. The bed frame squeaked.

“There you go. Now you understand.”

He left the room and closed the door, taking the light with him, all but the two or three tiny specks from the pinpricks in the window foil.

Lenny knew what could be done with someone else’s blood. With enough power and the right learning, Sebastian could have him dancing like a puppet. It was too much to hope that he didn’t really know what he was doing, that it was nothing but show.

That left Lenny little time. The back of his throat was burning, and his limbs were shaky, and if he didn’t get out soon, he would lose the capacity for rational thought. That was always the first thing to go. The human brain—even if not precisely human, anymore—eats up a huge amount of energy. It was much easier, much more economical, to shift into low gear, switch off the cerebral cortex, and let instinct take over. It freed up all of that energy for more vital things, like finding more energy. It would also leave Lenny with one all-encompassing goal and the IQ of a very dumb dog or a precocious squirrel. If he stopped thinking, Sebastian would have free rein inside his head. He wasn’t sure what that would mean, exactly, but his guesses were anything but comforting.

Then, miraculously, he heard the chains rattle and the deadbolts slide back, and the front door opened and shut. The bolts slid back into place. Faintly, he heard footsteps in the hall outside, receding down the stairwell.

And why should Sebastian stick around? His prisoner was about as stuck as he could possibly get, too weak to break through duct tape, which meant he must have been bled nearly dry. Lenny tried not to think too hard about that. But Sebastian had to have forgotten something. He was older than Lenny, physically stronger than him, and Lenny got the feeling Sebastian had a lot more handy extras also. Like a working knowledge of contagious magic. He kept trying not to think too hard about that.

Lenny’s only advantage, as far as he could tell, was that he might be smarter. Might. Possibly. If he was going to get out of there, he would have to get creative. Easier said than done when he was drugged and hemorrhaged and busy imagining all the ways the situation could get worse.

Creativity wouldn’t come, and trying made his head pound even more, so he did the only thing that came to mind. Slowly, slowly, he edged around, a fraction of an inch at a time, until his legs hung over the edge of the bed, and he could use a combination of gravity and momentum to swing himself up to sitting. The movement made his chest cramp, and the sudden change of position made him dizzy. He felt so smart for taking advantage of that momentum, but that same force nearly flung him face-first into the floor, where he would have been even more stuck than he was already. He closed his eyes and waited for the sickness to pass, and when he opened them again, he had a better idea of his situation.

His arms were taped behind him. He knew that already. There was no way he was getting out of that, no convenient sharp object fixed to a wall at the appropriate height. Even if there had been, he could feel nothing past his shoulders except for the occasional shooting pain, and trying to saw through tape was more likely to injure him than to free him. His mouth was taped shut. A few hours of spitting and blowing might work through the adhesive, but he couldn’t count on having a few hours to try it. He couldn’t count on having much voice, either, with the way his throat burned. Certainly not enough voice to attract attention and call for help. His legs were taped together, too, at least two visible layers from knee to ankle, wound liberally over his khakis.

There had to be something sharp somewhere in the apartment. Even a purely decorative kitchen had to have kitchen knives, or a pair of scissors, though using either without hands would be a challenge. Even a pencil would help, or a chipped edge on a table. There had to be something.

Lenny leaned forward and slowly worked himself up to standing, but his bad balance worked against him, and he almost fell. Hopping from the bed to the door would be impossible, and that was before he even considered getting the door open. If he did get through the door, he would have to get through the living room, too, then past the locks, out the front door, down the hallway, down who knew how many flights of stairs…

No, what he needed most was help. Getting away wouldn’t be possible until he was unbound, and he couldn’t do that on his own.

His legs trembled, and he sat back down before he could pitch forward onto the floor. A thin ray of light from the covered window fell on his knee.

The window.

He vaguely remembered thinking about going out the window, but now that it seemed like his only option, it also seemed like a bad idea. He had no idea what was outside or how high up he was. If he fell onto something sharp, he could kill himself. Even if he didn’t kill himself, he could knock himself out, which looked like the same thing to the uninformed. He’d heard horror stories about vampires getting themselves hurt and waking up in the middle of their own autopsies.

On the other hand, he could wait for Sebastian to come back and find out where all of this was going. It no longer looked like Sebastian planned to kill him, and it was hard to think of that as a good thing. How long would it take him to rearrange a mind to his liking, and what would the end result look like? Sebastian obviously had skills, even outside of his magical expertise; either he had some sixth sense to let him know Lenny was the only vampire around who was still susceptible to trance, or he was the only vampire around capable of forcing a trance on his fellows. Or some combination of the two. It would figure that Lenny, the easily-bent, would run afoul the super hypnotist.

He ended up breaking the window with his shoulder, and it took several tries. He couldn’t get the leverage he needed, and twisting his torso to shove his side through the glass nearly ended with him on the floor and helpless. He only meant to knock the glass out, get a look at the ground below, and then decide whether to let himself topple out. Gravity won, though.

Something hard broke his fall and made a noise like a drum. He bounced off, hit asphalt, and rolled. The sun was blinding, but the air was frigid, and he felt ice underneath him. Nothing hurt more than he’d expected it to after falling from a considerable height. His shoulders were dislocated, but it was possible they had been dislocated before he fell. The fact that they hurt more than they had before meant his spinal column was intact. Bits and pieces of him stung, presumably because he was full of broken glass.

He spent a few minutes trying to get used to the light so he could open his eyes. The thing he’d hit was the plastic lid of a dumpster, and thank God the lid was closed, because it was full of construction debris, and falling on the splintered ends of two-by-fours would have killed him. If he’d rolled another foot or so, he would have hit a chain link fence. On the other side of the fence was a little girl, seven or eight years old. She had a pink basketball under one arm and a big stick in her hand.

The child looked him in the eye, paused long enough for him to see her face go slack with horror, and took a slow step backward. Then she turned and ran into the building across the street.

He hoped she’d gone to find a parent, but no one came back out, and no one else walked past. He heard cars a few streets over, and the screech of a semi truck’s brakes, but no voices.

And after a while, he froze. The sun went down, and no amount of wriggling would get his legs free, and it was dark and cold, and he was tired, and his eyes froze shut when he closed them.

He woke up on Sebastian’s couch, where at least it was warm. His limbs had been freed, just to let him know how truly trapped he was, and when Sebastian saw he was awake, he paralyzed him with those snake eyes and drove his teeth into Lenny’s wrist and took everything he had left.