Enslaved Heart Ch. 1

I can't remember clearly, but I think there was a car, then a train, then another car, then a boat, a train, a car, a plane, until it all blended together into a single blurry forward motion. I may have been in a limo at some point, but that would have been later in the trip, and by then those little bottles of liquor all begin to look and taste the same, and you only distinguish between brown and clear. There was an astounding amount of booze, and there may or may not have been a helicopter involved.

Regardless, when I woke up what could have been the next morning, or quite possibly the next week, I was in a cheap motel in Las Vegas with a woman who looked like she could suck the titanium off a golf club. She might have been a hooker, she might have been the woman behind the counter in the rental office, but God, she was ugly, and I would have eaten off my own arm to get away from her, so I dropped twenty bucks on the bedside table and took off into the blistering heat of Nevada summer.

What I did the rest of the afternoon is inconsequential, which is just as well because between the liquor and the coke I scored from one of the shiftier residents in town, I don't remember much. But that night, oh that night when the sun went down and the dizzying neon lights of Vegas went up, it was my kind of town, Baby. The craps tables were hot, and my wrist was not, so I blew ten Big Ones alongside my new buddies, a group of Japanese businessmen who were there less for the gambling and more for the American women.

So, I took those boys down to one of the hotter titty bars I knew, where if you threw in an extra hundred bucks or so, the girls would take your slacks off before they gave you a lap dance, if you know what I mean. I didn't understand a word of what those little bastards were saying, but between the Hot Sake and Naked American Girls, I knew they were having one hell of a good time.

For some reason, about halfway into--God only knows--my hundredth or so drink of the night, I decided I was no longer having a good time. One more shake of a g-stringed ass, one more naked tit, one more dollar shoved into one more unmentionable, it didn't make a difference, not even if I dropped another ten thousand at the tables. One more drink and I would fly away, one more line of the good stuff and my head would explode. I was charging fast and headfirst down my intended path of self-destruction, and I hated myself. Self-destruction had turned out to be masturbation without the pleasure at the end.

So I got up from my table where my new friends were shouting in Japanese at a stripper named Mary Quite Contrary and stumbled off through the darkness of the club. My head was spinning, my synapses firing in every direction, my brain trying to make my body fall down. I remember falling halfway across some fat guy's table, knocking over his drinks, and hearing "Fucking asshole," and I responded with "Fuck you, fatty," knowing he wouldn't do anything about it. He stood up to me, but when I didn't back down, he mumbled something like "Coked up motherfucker," and then sat down again.

In all honesty, I wanted to fight him; I wanted him to whoop the Living Shit out of me. There's nothing like getting knocked around by a couple of greasy ham fists you don't stand a chance against to make you feel alive. But he was just like most of the self-proclaimed tough guys I'd met in the bars and the casinos and the flop-houses: all talk, but pussies deep down, because in the end, they all had something to live for, and anyone with something to live for will instinctively avoid pain.

I invited the pain, that bitch, I invited her into my life with open arms.

I was outside catching a much-needed whiff of fresh air, wishing I could get the noise and stink of the city out of my head. It was impossible for me to stand still, it was cold, I was shaking, I was full of booze and drugs, I could only pace and wish the shit would pass through my system quickly. I hadn't actually slept in months; only passed into fits of alcoholic unconsciousness. My rest would come in blackouts or it wouldn't come at all, but who needed energy when you could get it in a bottle of pills? I was in brutal need of sleep, real sleep, natural sleep, if there ever was such a thing.

I felt sick for a moment, and goddamn it, if I didn't think I was going to puke right there in front of the club like the rest of the drunks. But I was no regular drunk, I was an exceptional drunk, and I'd kept my liquor down under the direst of circumstances. When it passed, I was cold. It gets cold in the desert at night, but this was different, like an icicle driven right through the top of my head to the base of my spine. Christ, it hurt, but that was good. I was still alive, I hadn't destroyed myself yet.

I don't know what compelled me to turn around, but it was like I knew she was there. How long she'd actually been there watching me was the big question, and why. But when I turned, there she was, standing in darkness by the club, and I could see her eyes, those piercing gray eyes cutting through the night, locked on me. When she stepped out of the shadows, those eyes shifted, from gray to blue, then back again. I don't know how they did that, but they did. It was cool in a terrifying kind of way, or terrifying in a cool kind of way.

Gorgeous, head to toe. Long, straight raven black hair, pale skin, almost too pale, but she didn't seem sick or weak, she looked quite healthy, as a matter of fact. The long, black coat she wore looked to be entirely silk, or some other material that slipped through the air like a breeze as she moved. Her every movement, even something as simple as walking, was graceful and deliberate.

"Can I help you?" I asked her a little more impatiently than I intended.

"I can help you," she said quietly, with the slightest hint of some kind of accent, the tone of her voice almost too perfect to be human. It was light and sultry, the kind of voice you imagine on all those quit-smoking self-hypnosis tapes, except better.

"I'm a little fucked up right now," I said, "and I blew all my money at the tables..."

"Money?"

"Yeah, money, you know, the green stuff, dead presidents? I don't even have enough in my pocket for a hand job, so scram."

Then those lips, those luscious crimson lips, they smiled at me. They turned up in the most righteous grin I'd ever seen, and the cold surged back through my body again. I knew she wasn't a hooker, I don't know why I said what I said. There was no way she was a hooker, and if she was, she was some special new breed of hooker created in a lab solely for the purpose of breaking men's hearts, emptying their bank accounts and draining their souls.

She tilted her head a bit and that smile seemed to be frozen on her face, that smile that was sending through me...what was it? Fear? God no, it couldn't be fear, because in my state of mind, I feared no one, not the cops, not the bouncers in the clubs, or even the fucking fatty whose drinks I knocked over. I didn't fear pain and I didn't fear death. I feared nothing or no one except this gorgeous young girl in black whose smile was making me tremble.

"What's your name?" I heard myself ask.

"Victoria." Her accent, what the hell was it? Some kind of western-European thing, but fuck it, there were like three thousand countries over there, and they all had their own languages.

"Victoria, Victoria..." I said absently.

Silence. The smile had faded, replaced by the intense stare of those gray eyes, the eyes that were staring straight through me, deep down into the little place where I kept my soul. They burned away at the defenses I'd developed over the years all throughout my being so that no one would be able to get to the real me. But here was this girl, who appeared out of the darkness, and I could tell she could see straight through my bullshit, all of my precious, precious bullshit.

"Victoria?"

"Yes?"

"How can you help me?"

The smile came back as she seemed to float towards me; if her feet were touching the ground, they sure weren't doing it very hard. With her came a scent I couldn't quite place, it reminded me of roses and red wine, or wild flowers, or long passionate kisses, or sex by a fireplace, or...something...

Victoria raised her hand, and a single long, black nail trailed down my face from the corner of my eye to the edge of my mouth, and as an adoring look came over her face, her eyes turned a light shade of green. I looked into them, deeply, hopelessly lost inside her.

"I can give you what you want," she said simply.

"You know, I was busy before you interrupted me."

"Busy? Doing what?" She asked, and I could tell she was just asking; either she knew already or she didn't care.

"I was very busy basking in my self-destruction."

"Self-destruction is impossible when you have no self to destruct."

"That's very clever, but what the hell does it mean?"

This was going nowhere, that smile was going nowhere. She only leaned forward ever so slightly and kissed me on the lips, and for a single moment when I felt the coldness against me, I could hear nothing in the world except the sound of my own heartbeat. I could feel it, she was so cold, not like normal people, but like she was missing something. After a moment, I felt her hands slip up around the back of my neck, drawing me closer to her, her nails running down my skin, around to my throat, sending a violent shiver down my spine. I had to pull away from her; I couldn't take any more.

"Okay," I said angrily, "let's cut the shit here, Victoria. What exactly do you have that you think I need?"

"Life," she answered.

"Life?"

"Yes."

I was getting angry; I didn't understand a goddamn word of what she was talking about. It was rather often I met beautiful women outside of clubs, and the nice part was that they were usually too stupid to formulate a sentence with more than three words, which I can deal with. Victoria was different; every cryptic word out of her mouth seemed to be a piece of some puzzle she wanted me to figure out. And by God, it turned out the roles were reversed, and I just wasn't smart enough to get the job done.

"God damn you," I sputtered drunkenly, "can you give me some idea as to what exactly the fuck you're talking about, because I don't-I'd like you to get the fuck away from me, I'm sick-"

It seemed like an instant from the time she grabbed me to the time we ended up in the alley beside the club. I remember seeing her hand lash out towards my neck, thinking how black those nails were, how do you get nails so black? Then her eyes flared red, and the force that carried my body away was beyond anything I could even imagine, I could only envision being tied to a commercial airplane and being yanked away as it flew by. Everything turned into a blur and I could feel my body take flight.

In a second, she had me down on the cold, wet concrete with her hand wrapped firmly around my neck, choking the life out of me. The impact must have broken some kind of important thing in my body, because I couldn't move an inch no matter how hard I tried. Fingers, toes, legs, arms, nothing. It seemed appropriate that it should end for me that way, being drilled into the ground by some wicked broad with super powers. I remember as a teenage boy that being my greatest dream, getting my ass whooped by a beautiful woman, it was the only way I'd ever wanted to die. Now it didn't seem like such a hot idea.

Victoria clamped down harder on my neck, and in a split second of madness, I actually let a laugh slip through my lips. There was a moment of complete elation as she glared down at me with her red eyes and I knew she was going to kill me violently, probably tear me to shreds right here behind the club. I would have probably had more of a chance if I hadn't accused her of being a hooker, but how's a guy supposed to know?

The chuckles didn't last long as I watched Victoria's red lips draw back over her teeth, revealing two sharp, elongated canine teeth, which were just simply the longest, most dangerous looking teeth I'd personally ever seen on anyone in human form. I had a funny feeling that what she planned to do with those teeth was something I didn't want to be involved with at all. A choked off mumble escaped my lips in an effort to tell her so, but she only grinned at me in amusement.

"You're not changing your mind, are you? Isn't this what you wanted?"

I'd have loved to answer her with a string of choice expletives punctuated with a phrase similar to "you fucking cunt" or some such conclusion, but the lack of oxygen wasn't helping with my communications skills. There was a dull tingle creeping back into my body reminiscent of pain, and pain was good, it meant my spine wasn't snapped in two. I managed to raise an arm, which Victoria easily pinned back to the ground and held motionless.

"Fuck you," I managed to croak.

"That's not very nice," she whispered, "you have to be sweet to me if you're going to be my boyfriend."

"Be your-" My words were cut off as she wrenched my head to the side, exposing my neck, putting my flesh in seemingly more convenient biting position. I felt her lean close to me, felt that sharp coldness on my skin, and then the fear surged through me again. It was less plain fear and more sheer horror, because her plan for me suddenly became clear.

She wasn't going to kill me at all.

"I'm going to give you a gift, my love," she said quietly, "I'm going to give you the gift of a life you never imagined."

Without warning, she was on me, and I felt the stabbing pain of her teeth piercing my flesh, digging deep into me, punching through my jugular, and almost immediately I became dizzy with blood loss. Being drained felt almost cleansing, and it occurred to me that with the levels of alcohol and drugs in my blood, poor sweet vamp Victoria might not even survive her feeding without having to get her stomach pumped. Apparently it doesn't work like that.

It was cold, getting a lot colder, and a whole hell of a lot darker. I kept waiting to fall asleep or pass out or something, but my eyes managed to stay open through the whole thing. I wanted her to disappear, and promised myself that if she did, I'd fix everything. But it was too late for that now, she had me. The unbelievable had become believable, and I was lying in a puddle in the street with a vampire sucking away my soul.

My head was spinning wildly, and my ears filled up with the deafening sound of my blood rushing through my veins and out of my body. My heart throbbed like a bass drum pounding in my head, and as I listened, it slowed, and as it slowed, my life, or at least the life I had known for so many years, slowly faded away into nothingness.

Truth is, there was no flash of my life before my eyes, no looking back, no regrets. There was no light at the end of a tunnel, no open arms of dead relatives. There were no clouds, no pearly gates, and I had no curiosity as to what God looked like. When I died, there was nothing, simply nothing. Just silence, sweet silence, the kind of silence I waited my entire life to hear, the kind of silence I never could have gotten with all the drugs and alcohol in Vegas.

Then, in the darkness, there was a warm, bitter taste in my mouth, and she brought me back.

It was her blood dripping on my tongue, reviving me, filling me up with life, a different life than what I had known. In my hands I took the wrist that was dripping blood into my mouth and pressed my lips to it, ravenously sucking at the warm flesh, taking as much of the hot fluid into my mouth as I could, the hunger almost unbearable, insatiable. I glanced up at her and those smiling red lips, those eyes, now so light only the pupils stood out, making her look almost maniacal.

But she fed me; she fed me well.

When it was done, she pulled her wrist away, and then she held my hand. The pain that surged through my body during the following minute felt like it lasted a lifetime. My veins were on fire, and they pumped flames through every organ in my body. My heart felt like it would sooner explode than pump another drop of blood, my vision went red, then blurred, then there was darkness.

God damn.

When I awoke, I felt...good. Spectacular, as a matter of fact. I was hungry, but that was to be expected not having eaten a solid meal in three days. Regardless, I couldn't think of anything in particular that would satisfy me. A nice steak, maybe, extra rare. Whatever. First thing I had to do, however, was figure out where exactly I was.

The place was cold and dark, looked like it was carved out of one giant piece of marble. I was laid out on some kind of table that held a disturbing resemblance to an altar. All around me were enough candles to throw dancing shadows throughout the room. The most disquieting part of the room, however, was not its bareness or the fact that it looked very much like a mausoleum, it was that there didn't seem to be any way out, no doors, no windows, nothing.

I kicked my legs off the table, sending several candles to the floor in the process, but not paying them much attention.

"You're making an awful mess, aren't you?" The sound reverberated through the room, echoing off the walls like some otherworldly voice. I glanced around and saw nothing, the room was still empty.

"Hello?" I said in a choked off whisper, grimacing at the burning sensation in my throat. "What the hell's going on here?"

Somewhere in a corner, I detected the slightest bit of movement, and then she was there. I don't know where she came from, I don't know how she got there, but she appeared out of the darkness and approached me with her gliding walk, a black silky robe that almost seemed to be a part of her body trailing out behind her.

"Victoria..."

She came close to me, a little too close considering the creepy feeling I harbored in my gut after seeing her magical appearing trick. Her hands, those pale hands with the deep black nails, made their way to my face and stroked my cheeks gently. They no longer felt as cold as they had before, thank God.

"How do you feel?" she asked me.

"My eyes are burning."

"It's the first time you've really opened them-it'll go away."

"The first time-who are you? Where am I?"

"So many questions," she said in amusement.

"Yeah," I said, a tone of vicious sarcasm creeping into my voice, "why don't you fucking trying answering a couple of them? Like where the fuck am I? And what the fuck did you do to me?"

Her fingers suddenly clamped over my mouth, it felt like she was going to rip my jaw out. Her eyes flared a deep red color, a color I recognized. "How dare you talk to me like that, you little swine," she growled, her fingers digging into my skin, my jawbone feeling as if it could splinter at any moment. I could feel hot tears streaming down my cheeks, and I was pissed because the bitch was making me cry. I hadn't cried in almost ten years, at least not since my golden retriever died.

Victoria eased her fingers from their vice grip. "You're an insolent dog," she said calmly, almost affectionately as she stroked my sore cheeks tenderly.

"You're a vicious, life-sucking bitch," I replied without the same amount of fondness in my tone.

She laughed a cold humorless laugh that echoed through the room, off the marble walls, through my skull making my teeth hurt. When she smiled I could see that cold row of pearly white teeth. There had been fangs in there before, but they were gone now, and I hoped they never came back.

Her fingers ran down my cheek to my chest and popped one of the buttons off my best Egyptian cotton shirt. I wanted to say something, but thought it would be in my best interest to keep my mouth shut. She began circling the altar I was sitting on, watching me like a prowling animal watches its prey.