Chains of Jericho

Chapter 2

Chapter 2Against her better judgment, the rocking of the moving van lulled Maya into sleep. She was hardly comfortable—apparently her abductor didn’t believe in heating—but her exhausting hours and poor sleeping patterns had trained her body to catch slumber whenever it could, and this time was no different.

She woke when the van stopped moving, bleary-eyed and sore from the awkward position she’d assumed against the wall. A door slammed, and then there was a moment of silence before the back of the vehicle opened to reveal the same man watching her intently.

“What?” she demanded after an interminable minute in which he didn’t even move.

“You never screamed.” Surprise colored his deep voice.

“Yeah, well, it would’ve been a waste of energy, now, wouldn’t it?”

“That doesn’t stop most people.”

Her blood chilled at his words. His statement betrayed him. This was a man accustomed to people screaming when he was around.

In spite of the return of her fear, Maya lifted her chin and stared him in the eye. It wouldn’t do her any good to give him what he was looking for by crying and begging for mercy. She’d done that once and it hadn’t worked. She wouldn’t try it again.

“I’m not most people,” she said to him, her tone as austere as she could manage.

He responded in a way she never would have imagined.

He smiled. And it seemed to wipe a century of malice from his eyes.

Without a word, he climbed into the van, the vehicle sloping slightly from the added weight. He crouched at her side, a key appearing from his jeans pocket to slide into the handcuff around her wrist. There was a moment of hesitation before he turned the key, however, and Maya looked up to see him regarding her again.

“You can’t run. You know that, right?” he commented. “But if I undo this and you try and make a break for it, I’m not going to have a choice but to hurt you, and…I don’t want that.”

For some reason, she believed him. She nodded.

“Am I ever going to find out what it is you want with me?” she asked as he unlocked the cuff.

“Soon enough.” His fingers were cool where they brushed over her skin, sending an involuntary shiver down her spine. Immediately, his head jerked up. “Are you cold?”

“No, I’m just…” Her voice faded away. His eyes were blue. This close, and with the light filtering from the open doors of the van, Maya could finally discern that tiny detail. “I don’t want to die,” she said faintly. Somehow, it seemed important to get that out there.

His gaze was inscrutable. “I don’t want you to die, either.”

He held her firmly by the wrist as he pulled her from the van, and she blinked against the sudden change in light. They were on a narrow street she didn’t recognize, steeply sloped with a spectacular view of the bay. The lights from the bridge twinkled brighter than the stars that had finally decided to come out, illuminating the rows of houses that lined the street. Before them, though, stood a tall, narrow church, its spire reaching to point an accusatory finger at the heavens.

“This way,” he said, but instead of leading her into the church, the stranger pulled her to the alley that ran alongside it, more silent than the deserted road behind them.

“Where are we going?” she asked as he stopped before a set of trap doors that seemed to burrow beneath the church.

He didn’t reply. He tugged the nearest door open to reveal a narrow set of wooden stairs leading downward. Maya had no choice but to follow him as he began to descend, and when light disappeared after the fourth step, she was forced to place a nervous hand on his back so she wouldn’t stumble and fall.

It occurred to her she’d never considered screaming once she was free of the van. This was a residential area. People would be home, tucked into bed, impossible for them not to hear her. But the inclination to scream and try to run had faded.

The stairs seemed to go on forever, the faint sound of scratching echoing around her, the air increasingly cool and damp. His stop was abrupt, causing her to collide with his broad back, but the man’s grip on her wrist remained sure and strong, tugging her to her feet without even a glance. His strength surprised her. It was obvious he was in great shape, but there was a grace and confidence in his every movement that spoke of more than hours spent at the gym. It seemed to be a part of his very marrow.

A door opened into a dusty hall. Maya sneezed before she could stop herself. The musty air didn’t seem to bother her abductor, and he continued to pull her along, ignoring the closed doors they passed on the way. Bare light bulbs dangling from the ceiling revealed empty corridor after empty corridor, grime and the occasional spider the only things to spy, but from behind the walls, from behind the closed doors, came the unmistakable sounds of life. A radio. Running water. Muted voices.

“What is this place?” she asked.

“Where I live.”

Farther and farther they went into the maze, until Maya had lost all sense of depth and direction. More stairs, more doors, and each step had her increasingly confused about what exactly she was doing in this bizarre place, with this very strange man. There was no doubt in her mind that he was dangerous, and there was still a chance that all of this was just some diabolical scheme on his part before he chose to rape and dismember her. But with every foot they traveled, Maya found it harder to believe there wasn’t something a little less sinister about this whole arrangement.

He finally stopped in front of a door. This one looked like all the others they’d passed, with the exception of a padlock dangling from a latch near the upper casing. Releasing her wrist for the first time since leaving the van, he reached into his jeans pocket to extract his key ring, and then paused, realizing that she was unmoving behind him. Their eyes met.

“I hope you’re always this surprising,” he said softly.

Maya’s mind whirled as he turned back to open the padlock. He didn’t really expect her to try and run away down here, did he? Where would she go? Then again, why hadn’t she tried to get away? But she already knew the answer to that last question.

Because she wasn’t convinced anymore that he meant her any ill will.

Pushing the door open, he stood aside, indicating she should enter first. She did so, hesitantly, and came to a dead halt as soon as she crossed the threshold.

It was a bedroom. More than that, it was a studio apartment, all contained within four walls. A king-sized bed with thick quilts in disarray atop it. A black leather divan, overstuffed and comfortable-looking. A wall of books that took advantage of the vaulted ceilings to demand a sliding ladder in order to reach higher shelves. There was even a small table and chair set in the far corner with a mini-fridge to cater to it.

Where the hall had been dim and dusty, this room sparkled all the way down to its natural hardwood floor. Lamps illuminated every corner, bathing the room in soft, golden light, and as Maya took another step inside, she smelled the distinct scent of a man’s cologne.

“You live here?” she said, incredulous.

The soft click of the door was followed by his heavy step across the wood. “That’s one word for it.”

He wasn’t paying her any attention as he went to the refrigerator to take out a sports bottle and begin gulping down its contents. After a moment, Maya turned to the books and stepped closer, tilting her head in order to better read some of the titles.

“These are all medical texts!” Her head jerked around, her brows drawn into confused line. “Is this your idea of light reading?”

“More like research.” Carefully recapping the bottle, he set it on the counter without taking those unwavering blue eyes off her. “For you,” he added.

Her mouth opened to finally demand what exactly was going on, when the door slammed open and the young woman from the hospital’s alley burst inside.

“Danny escaped again,” she said in a rush.

Any calm that may have composed her captor’s demeanor vanished at the mention of the new name. “How many dead?” His voice was so low and tight, Maya had to fight to hear him.

“Two so far.” Katie held out her arm, pushing up her sleeve to expose a series of still-fresh puncture wounds near her elbow. “He tried making me his third.”

Turning his back to them, the man reached behind the refrigerator and pulled out a long scabbard. “Gather the younger ones,” he said as he pulled the long blade it contained free from the simple leather. “Hide them in the great room.”

“But, Dec—”

“Do it!”

Maya shrank away at the fierce roar in his voice. His jaw was stone, his eyes flashing, and while he held the weapon with practiced ease, the grip he had on its hilt proclaimed his agitation all too loudly.

Katie’s mouth opened to argue again, but something in Dec’s face made her snap it shut, whirling on her heel to race from the room. He followed immediately after, no glance toward Maya, no sloth to his step, and she was left in the echoing chamber wondering just what in hell had happened.

There was only one way to find out.

Follow him.

Her feet carried her to the doorway, but the hall was already empty of both her captor and the mysterious young woman from the alley. The sounds were louder out here, screams in the distance repeating like ripples on a river’s surface through the air. Their direction was obvious, and she turned toward them without a thought about her own escape.

They were screams of pain. Someone, or someones, was hurt. She had to help.

She ran into Katie pulling a pair of young teenage girls from a room and propelling them down the hallway. Katie’s blouse still hung in tatters on her slim frame, but the blood that had flowed from her wounds had long since dried. In fact, Maya could’ve sworn the cuts looked smaller somehow, and echoes of her captor’s assertions that she would be better by morning rang through her head.

“Where…?” Maya started to say, but stopped when she realized she was talking to empty air. Katie and the girls were already gone, fled to the left at a T-junction in the labyrinth.

Pausing, Maya took a deep breath as she assessed the situation. There were children here, and someone her captor considered dangerous was apparently on the loose and hurting them. If Katie had been instructed to get the girls to safety, that meant the threat was in the opposite direction.

She took off in a dead run down the right-hand corridor.

The sound of crying now accompanied the intermittent screams, ripping through the dust motes to make Maya clumsy in her flight. More than once, she stumbled over her own feet, so that by the time she encountered another person and not a disembodied voice shrieking at the top of its lungs, both her palms were bloody and torn, the scrapes she’d received in the alley refreshed from the rough floorboards.

The young girl brushed her aside to try and flee past her, but Maya’s hand shot out and grabbed her arm, desperate to stop her.

“Where is he?” she asked even as the pale teenager slipped from her grasp and kept running.

Maya didn’t need an answer. The door through which the young girl had just exited suddenly exploded into the hall, and a slim body crashed into the opposite wall.

It was male, shirtless, skin pale where blood didn’t streak it with a vicious war paint. Baggy jeans hung from his lean hips, and there were distinct chafing marks around his wrists and upper chest where something had been rubbing tightly against him. They looked like restraint marks; she’d seen them once or twice when she’d done her psych rotations in school, and Maya’s heart ached for the boy as she crouched down to see to his wounds.

Until he lifted his head to stare at her.

He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Dark hair fell across his forehead in a tangled mop, edges jagged as if he’d attempted to cut it himself without a mirror. It didn’t hide his eyes, though. Those gleamed with an unnatural light as they fixed on the hands she had outstretched to him. Her chest tightened, choking her, when his lips parted to allow his tongue to lick at them.

Instead of regular teeth, the boy had fangs. Razor sharp and deadly looking. The analytical part of Maya’s brain automatically compared them to the puncture wounds she’d seen on Katie’s arm, and found them more than commensurate.

A grip of steel shot out and grabbed her wrist, yanking her forward and onto the teenager’s lap. In spite of his frail appearance, his strength was incontestable, painful and unyielding as she felt the fragile bones in her wrist start to give, and she could do nothing as he lifted her palm to his mouth.

First, he inhaled deeply. Then, his tongue darted out and lapped at the beads of blood that tangled with the broken skin of her palm. A gurgle of delight escaped his throat, and Maya cried out as he bit into the fleshy pad below her thumb.

The heavy tread of footsteps thundered into the corridor behind her, but it wasn’t enough to break the seal he had on her hand. When she twisted to see who was approaching, the silvery whisk of metal went flying past her, and the knife with which Dec had left his room suddenly embedded in the boy’s shoulder.

He shrieked in pain, releasing her to grab onto the blade. Strong hands took hold of Maya and pulled her away, but then dumped her unceremoniously off to the side while Dec took her place in front of the boy.

“Danny!” he growled, taking him by the shoulders and pinning him to the wall.

Something inside Maya winced when Danny’s fingers began fumbling with the weapon that was still stuck in him, every shake from the bigger man obviously aggravating the injury. Before she could think otherwise, she was crawling forward and pulling at the strong arms to try and break the hold, fear and confusion forgotten in the face of her need to stop Dec before it was too late.

“You’re killing him!” Maya said.

He didn’t look at her, nor did he loosen his hold. “Not today,” Dec said in a low voice.

“She bleeds,” Danny whined, and there was his tongue again, licking at his lips as if he hadn’t had a drink in months. “Please, Dec, let me have her.”

The faint words were what it took to tear Dec’s eyes from the boy, and he tilted his head to see the smears of blood Maya’s hands were leaving on his forearms. “Damn,” he muttered.

“Dec, please, I’m so hungry…”

She couldn’t move. Every word he uttered shifted an already nightmarish situation into a horror beyond anything she’d envisioned. The blood from Danny’s injury flowed down his chest in skinny rivulets that joined with the other drying streaks. With that much blood loss, he should’ve passed out long ago. What had she stumbled into?

The young girl who’d fled the scene on Maya’s arrival reappeared with a clang, chains that should’ve been too heavy for her to carry bundled in her arms. She dropped them at Dec’s side, and then pulled a small black bag from her pocket to hand it over to him.

“There’s only one more left,” she said apologetically.

He nodded, as if he hadn’t expected to hear otherwise. While he kept one hand firmly planted on Danny’s shoulder, Dec tore the bag open with his teeth, spitting out the plastic as he extracted a filled hypodermic.

“What’re you giving him?” Maya asked, her curiosity automatic.

“A sedative.” He plunged the needle into Danny’s arm, heedless of making it easy for him, but the muscles in his tense jaw twitched when the teenager screamed at the contact.

Danny reacted almost immediately, slumping against the wall as his eyes rolled back into his head. As she watched, his fangs retracted, his jaw hung lax, and he looked again like the teenage boy who’d come crashing through the door.

Pulling the blade with a sickening squelch from the shoulder, Dec tossed it aside before grabbing the chains. It seemed to take only a moment for him to wrap them around Danny’s chest, looping them around his wrists as if they were tissue paper, and when he straightened with the boy now unconscious in his arms, Maya clambered to her feet to follow him down the hallway.

“Which hospital are you taking him to?” she asked, having to walk twice as quickly as she normally would in order to keep up with the pair.

“I’m not.”

“What? But, he’s bleeding. And if you have to sedate him—”

“I know you’re not stupid, Dr. Sheldon. You know he can’t go to the hospital.”

“At least let me bandage that stab wound.”

Stopping before a closed door, Dec turned eyes the color of stormy oceans and almost as violent to gaze at her so intently that Maya shivered. “You’ve done enough damage for one night,” he said, and pushed the door open to step inside.

Hovering in the doorway, she watched as he dropped Danny onto a single bed that was shoved awkwardly against the wall. The room looked as if it had been a bedroom of some sort at one time, but time and neglect had left a layer of dust on the Spartan furniture that made her nose tickle. Were all the rooms like this?

Gradually, Maya became aware of a growing presence behind her, and stole a glance down the hall to see a group of pale faces staring back. Not one of them could’ve been over twenty years old, but more than half had eyes that glowed with the same silver gleam that had radiated from Danny’s. It wasn’t fear she saw in them. It was hunger, and Maya instinctively took a step back.

The solid wall of a powerfully muscled chest prevented her from moving further. Before she could skitter away, Dec’s arm snaked around her waist to pull her flush against him. “I didn’t want to do this.” The velvet baritone of his voice so close to her ear made her shiver. “But you let Danny get a taste of you. I don’t have a choice anymore.”

She felt a cool tingle where his mouth trailed down the side of her neck, and the swift memory of the slice of Danny’s teeth into her hand made her start struggling against Dec’s hold.

“Forgive me,” he whispered.

The sharp prick of fangs sinking into her neck tore the scream from Maya’s throat.