Reign of Blood

Chapter Twenty-one

Dream in Peace

It had all happened so fast. Was it all just a dream? He hadn't meant to try and hurt Amy, if he even did. He wasn't sure anymore what was real and what wasn't. Had he dreamt waking up on top of her, too? Her screams and chokes and gasps for air still clung to the inside of his skull.

Seth awoke, after what seemed like no time at all, a blink after falling to the floor in the hotel lobby. He had felt cold, freezing, all of his muscles tightening at once. He couldn't move an inch, and could hardly yell to Amy as she ran away from him. Real or not, he deserved it for what he had almost done.

His vision slowly came into focus, a white, fiery blur that blinded him. Seth squinted, and tried to lift his arm in front of his face to shield his eyes from the light. His arm's wouldn't move.

As he slowly came to, he could sense the feeling in each of his limbs coming back. His head felt heavy, and burning hot. He felt as if he were on fire. Had he died?

The light that forced its way into his head died down as his eyes adjusted. He was looking at a room from behind a metal-wired cage. The white light was a lamp hanging from the ceiling, pointed directly at his face. It was so close he could have touched it if he could move his hands. It was then he felt the sweat run down his face. No, it didn't run down his face, it ran up. The beads of sweat were dripping up towards his hair, getting it damp and sticky. As Seth looked past the light he saw an upside-down room. His head was throbbing from all the blood rushing, the rest of his body felt weak and hot. It was an odd transition from freezing to burning, and Seth felt like he had missed something in between.

He tried to pull his arms free again, but they were chained out to his sides as if he were crucified upside-down. His legs were tightly chained outwards, too, though not as spread out as his arms. He doubted they would stretch that far. Judging from how much it hurt the muscles in his legs, the only reason his legs hadn't been pulled to the sides any further was because they refused to bend any more than that. He craned his neck to see around him. He was trapped in what appeared to be a metal cage, a few inched wider than his body on all sides. If it were any smaller the cage would have been pushing against his body, pinning it in place. The chains seemed kind of like a waste.

"So you're awake?" a throaty feminine voice chuckled. "I thought I'd accidentally killed you. Can't let that happen without a bit of torture first... How's an eternity sound to you?" Her voice filled the room; it was an evil, harsh voice that resonated throughout the darkness. Her voice danced in circles around him, engulfing him with its madness.

A woman walked out from the shadows cast by Seth's eyes, the blind spot just behind the bright light. She had short black hair and a wicked smile on her face. She was a lot shorter than Seth had imagined her; for someone with such a powerful and scary voice she seemed small.

Wait... Seth had seen this girl before. As he racked his brain to try and think through all the blood rushing to his head, something clicked. It was the girl who had responded to his mad kicking of the cell wall when he found himself inside the padded room... She was the girl who had such a sad face when she had told him that he had to stay there... Now she was the epitome of evil.

He tried to speak, to talk to her, but his heart was pounding furiously in his throat. He swallowed hard a couple times, but he couldn't swallow the throbbing in his neck. No sound could force its way out of his mouth.

The girl laughed again at his failed attempts to talk. "Maybe I should just rip out your vocal cords now... Save you the trouble," She found herself quite humorous, and ambled slowly closer to Seth. Something gleamed silver in her hand. His face would have been pale with fear had the constant rush of blood to his head not kept him flushed with a light pinkish red. It was getting harder to breathe.

The woman's fingertips slid along the silver blade, drawing blood. Her smile never faltered. She didn't even blink, no signs of pain showed on her face. She continued to run her fingers along the knife, until they were covered in blood that dripped all the way down to her knuckles in thin crimson lines.

Seth blinked and she was mere inches away from his face. He gasped, choking on his pinched throat, and tried to back away but couldn't move. The blade was too close for comfort. It caught the dim light in the room just right and almost shimmered, a flawless, pure silver. "I'll give you a choice... Would you rather see no, hear no, or speak no evil?" Her words danced off her tongue playfully, but the look in her eyes showed she would slit his throat faster than he could blink again.

She waited patiently for his response, playing with the knife until both her hands were evenly coated in blood. It took Seth longer than it should have to realize that most of the blood was his. He responded to the pain spreading across his chest by wincing, he couldn't get a sound out to scream. "If you don't decide, I will..." With each passing moment the knife dug deeper into his flesh, the blade so cold it burned.

"...No... none..." Seth choked out through gasps of air. The woman's eyes got slightly bigger for a split second, then her smug look returned as if it had never quivered. She laughed out loud, a harsh bark. Her eyes told him she was not impressed by his boldness, and her laugh hurt Seth's ears and sent stabbing chills through his body. But that could have been partly because of the knife, he couldn't tell.

This time he didn't even blink. She moved so fast he couldn't even see it, when she stopped there were more blades and torture devices in her hands. "Okay then, smartass..." Her voice scared Seth more than anything else in this town. "How 'bout all? ...I'll take each one... each one you took from me..." Her face showed nothing but vengeance as she stared him in the eyes. "...since you can't decide." She was too close again, and Seth couldn't do anything about it. Her voice was as cold as ice, surrounding him and freezing his muscles so tight it was painful.

Seth didn't remember being dropped out of the cage. When he could feel his body again, he was on the floor. The blood was no longer pounding in his head. He tried to get up, but she slammed into him so hard he felt like he was spinning. His head crashed onto the hard floor, and before he could stop her the knife was held high above her head, racing down towards him.

He screamed. It didn't last long. It felt like she was jamming something down his throat, something cold, sharp, hard... In a second the thing blocking him from breathing felt as if it were trying to burst out from inside of him. He couldn't scream, he couldn't move. Her body was no longer holding him down; but a blanket of ice; pure and paralyzing, freezing him solid. But when he stared up at her, she was still there, smiling as she twisted the object in his throat. She yanked it out with excessive force, and Seth began choking on blood. His mouth was instantly filled with the warm liquid.

Not even skipping a beat, she dropped the thing she had jammed down his throat on the floor. It clanked, deep-pitched and metallic until the cold numbness blocked his ears. She reached onto the floor next to him and picked up the knife she had mutilated him with, holding it tauntingly close to his face.

Seth couldn't scream. He could even move to push her off of him. He could only watch her on top of him, her laugh high-pitched and maniacal, as if she were enjoying this more than sex. Maybe to her, this was sex. The look in her eyes told him he might be right.

"Are you ready, Vincent?" She cackled, for lack of better word, high and ear-splitting. Seth couldn't even speak to ask her who the hell she thought he was. But he was so terrified that even if he could have talked, he wasn't sure if the fear would allow it. "Oh, that's right. You can't answer me," She found herself hilarious. Seth wanted to strangle her.

A sudden noise, faint and almost inaudible; almost, sounded in the back of Seth's mind. It happened again, and was a little closer. The strange, muffled noise somehow managed to tear his attention away from the girl for a split second. She had heard it, too. The look on her face showed it plain and clear. The sound echoed again, and sounded like a gun being fired underwater.

She yelled loudly, a long string of curses without any breaks in between. The gunshots were getting louder, closer...

"Son of a bitch!" She screamed. Her eyes filled with more rage than Seth could even grasp, so much rage that it filled the room with a burning heat that somehow made the ice enveloping him even colder. She tore at his face with the knife, digging the tip into his eye. She had moved so fast he didn't even have time to blink in a reaction. With one swift motion she had done what she set out to do. Seth's mouth hung open, gaping in a silent scream.

The gunshots were so close now Seth could hear them. Voices accompanied the shots, so many voices, noises... "NOOO!" The girl screamed it as if the gun was firing at her. She had dropped the knife and was clutching her head. "No, no no! I'm not finished yet!" The ice melted. Seth's vision went black and it was as if someone had just thrown him against a brick wall, or a horse bucked him in the head with it's hoof.

When he came to his arms were wrenched back at an odd angle, pulled so far back it hurt almost as much as the rest of him. A screaming voice and wailing guitar sounded so loud in his ears he thought he would surely go deaf. That girl would be very pleased. His body twitched and writhed with unimaginable pain. It was as if there was so much pain his body didn't know what to do with it all. Screaming sounded like a good outlet, but he couldn't make a sound. If he had managed to make a sound he couldn't hear it over the blaring music.

The gunshots fired again, so loud he could make it out over the music, and in the few seconds that felt like eternity his body fell limp to the cold floor. It was as if he had just dove into an ice lake; the tiles on the floor were as frozen as the girl had made him feel.

Suddenly someone was next to him again. He curled up in the fetal position, his muscles still cramped, pulling his legs to his chest. Something cold held his arms behind his back. He didn't want to see who was next to him. He didn't want to see anything. Once he realized how close he had come to that actually happening, Seth wished he hadn't thought that.

The music was ripped away from his ears so fast Seth thought he had gone deaf. It was when the blindfold around his head was pulled off he actually realized he had been wearing one.

Amy's scream filled the cell block, bouncing off the walls. Seth could hear the excitement growing in his cellmates screams and howls. Nothing got them more eager to sink their teeth into some flesh then a victim's pure fear.

Seth tried to tell Amy to stop screaming; his ears hurt enough. But the feel of blood quickly shut him up. He realized why she was screaming and wished he could scream more than ever.