CHELSEA

She was still trapped in the dark, had been for an indefinite period of time that seemed to have lasted forever.

She sat against the boulder of her imagination and wept tears, but when she took her hands away from her face, the streaks on her hands were of water, not blood. Something had happened since she came to this dark and strange land. Either she wasn’t a vampire anymore, or she had become mortal for however long she was trapped behind the wall of her mind.

She lowered her head into her hands to think of a way to escape. What could she do? What could she do? It was just so hopeless.

That’s when she saw it, the light at the end of the tunnel, and she didn’t even have to wait until she was dead. With trembling fingers she brushed her shoulder length brown hair out of her face. Even her hair had reverted to the way it had been before her undeath. She was now mortal, and even if that wasn’t quite as strong and wonderful as being a vampire, it still offered her a way out of her predicament.

She smiled a grim baring of teeth that would have frightened anyone that had seen it. She would show her other self what she was made of, and she would do it in such a way that that other would never have control of her body again. Not ever.

CHRIS

He was trapped in some kind of nightmare. That was the only explanation for what had happened to him and the way he had acted toward both Lianndra and Dezi.

He sat hunched in the chair Phang had tied him to. The ropes were made out of some weird metallic fiber that not even a vampire was able to break--especially not such a weakling as he was.

Though he had gorged himself only hours before, for some reason his veins called for the warmth of blood. He needed to Feed, but he didn’t want to ask anyone. They were probably all mad at him for the things he had said and done. He stared disconsolately at a spot on the wall across from him.

He was in some kind of security room. There were monitors all along one wall showing all the stuff that happened in the club. That might have been interesting, but he was sitting in such a way that he couldn’t see what was happening in the monitors. He had tried to see at first and had almost broken his neck by twisting it in such weird and uncomfortable angles, angles that no neck was supposed to turn to.

Now he focused on the dartboard with all of the darts sticking out of the center of it. It had taken whoever the dart thrower was a long time to figure out how to get the darts to go into the center, because the wall all around the board was dotted with holes. The holes were of varying size depending on how hard the darts were thrown. One hole was so big he could have fit his hand through it. The dartboard was obviously in use as some kind of anger release valve. He hoped he never got that mad.

He heard a crackling sound toward one corner and turned his head toward the sound. There, sitting in a chair, was the thing that he had tried so hard to ignore. The one mortal on the mostly vampire security staff that he had seen so far, or that he had gotten this close to.

Even from across the room he could smell the scent of blood flowing through the man’s veins and was getting incredibly excited by that scent. What he wouldn’t give for a little nip of what that man seemed to take for granted.

Just thinking like that made him feel like some kind of monster, but he couldn’t help it. He was starving. He needed to Feed and he needed to do it right now, regardless of how polite he was trying to be.

The man seemed to sense his staring because he lifted his head slowly from the sandwich he was stuffing into his mouth to face Chris. The tinfoil crackled one more time as he slowly stood up, his movements uncertain and a little fearful of what might happen to him if he got too close.

It took Chris a moment to realize that the man wasn’t moving slow, it was just that he was so excited and Hungry that time seemed to have stopped. Everything had gone into slow motion. He wanted so badly to leap out of the chair that he could feel what was left of his mortal body clench itself tightly.

It made him think of what he had seen out of the corner of his eye in the monitor. That vampire trying to put worthless body parts back into his body. From what Lianndra had said, there was a whole sect of vampires that after they were Made, picked up all of the parts that came out during the change and put them back in through an incision in the abdomen. They refused to give up their old lives and carried them around with them forever.

Just thinking about all of those dirty pieces of flesh hitting the floor and getting covered by muck being lifted up and placed back inside his body made his flesh creep. He was glad he hadn’t been Made by one of those crazy vampires.

Thinking of Lianndra made him feel ashamed again. How could he have acted like that toward someone that had been nothing but good to him? It was puzzling.

The whole time he had been in Sonny’s room, he hadn’t really been sane, hadn’t really been inside his head. It was as if he had been someone that was watching what was happening, but hadn’t been part of it or what came after.

When Lianndra and Dezi had shown up, he had been on the edge of going crazy forever. He had said some stuff he shouldn’t have and hurt his friends’ feelings. Dezi would probably never want to be near him again. She would hate him and scream at him and push him away. It was a horrible thought. How could he live out the rest of his eternity without her by his side?

He sighed and looked up to find the man stopped in front of him, his mouth slack and his sandwich forgotten in one hand. Chris had somehow hypnotized the guy without even noticing he was doing anything. It was pretty weird, not to mention rather disconcerting.

"What do you want?" he asked irritably. He was Hungry, but not so much that he would risk eating one of Lianndra’s men. He had seen a bit of Lianndra’s temper and he didn’t want to experience it firsthand.

The man smiled distractedly and proffered his sandwich. "You’re hungry, aren’t you? I can feel it like a burning in my veins. How do you make me feel it too?"

He had spoken with the simplicity of an idiot, giving Chris his first clue about how much control he was exerting over the man without any conscious direction. He had caught the man’s attention, made him walk across the room and had even managed to put across how Hungry he was into the man’s brain. Now if he only knew how he’d done it.

"Do a flip," he said simply, looking directly into the man’s eyes.

The man smiled again, drool sliming its way down the side of his mouth.

Without changing expression, he did the impossibly complex flips only a gymnast could have accomplished without running into any of the furniture.

"How did you do that?" Chris was enthralled with what he could do. It gave him a sense of power he had never experienced before.

The man was happy too. He was getting the attention of a beautiful vampire lord. "All I did was flex the muscles in my thighs and…"

"Stop! Wrong question, wrong answer."

"Wrong answer?" the man asked in a heartbroken voice and began to cry, tears streaming down his face and streaking his skin with red tear lines. He had the kind of look about him that only the smallest child would wear. It was rather scary to see.

Chris looked at the man helplessly for a minute. Was the guy some kind of wimp or something? Then he realized what he was doing. He was messing with a man’s mind. The man had no control over what he did or said.

"Wait, I’m sorry. No, you didn’t do wrong, I did." The man immediately stopped crying as soon as he heard that he hadn’t been the one to mess up. He gave a big foolish grin and cocked his head to hear what Chris might be about to say to him.

"What I really wanted to know was how you learned to do that. Can you tell me?" Chris asked, carefully forming his words.

The man still grinned that stupid, idiotic baring of teeth, not at all the expression of a trained professional. "Of course. I took three years of gymnastics, two years of boxing and eighteen years of Aikido to keep the muscles limber. My teacher always said that I was the best in the…"

"Stop!" Hm, if he didn’t post firm guidelines, whoever he was trying to control would just ramble on and on about so much nothing. He would have to watch that or it would get out of control.

The man froze as if a shaft had been shoved through his spine. His face was clear and innocent as he looked at Chris out of eyes totally free of any guile or vengeful thought. He was as a child before the first sin tarnished his soul. It was as if he had no worries and no fears, yet at the same time had all of the experiences of a man, all of the knowledge that comes from a lifetime of life.

He was also beautiful, in a male sort of way.

Chris had noticed that all of the people that worked for Lianndra were incredibly attractive, the feeding stock especially. Most of the vampires were at the very least a small bit attractive before they were granted the BloodTouch, and after they became vampires they became ethereally beautiful, all physical imperfections wiped away without a trace.

In his mortal life, Chris had been a handsome boy in a plain sort of way. His limbs were well formed, he wasn’t too skinny and he wasn’t too fat, his face was pleasant, and his body held all of the promise of a somewhat handsome man. In his immortal life, however, his looks had taken on a whole new dimension that he had never realized before. He shone with an almost eye-searing beauty that transfixed mortals even before they viewed his eyes, which had a sort of hypnotic intensity of their own.

He was everything he had ever wished to be--handsome, smart and powerful. He had the power to get anything he wished and all he had to do was suck blood for the rest of time. He thought it was a good deal. Who cared what the regular people would have thought--they didn’t have the incredible intensity of beauty that he did. They didn’t feel and see the things that he could without even really trying. They were nothing.

He reveled in the glorious creature he had become. If he could control the mind of one man, he could control the mind of two. And if he could control the mind of two men, who knew what limits there were on someone like him? He could rule the world if he wanted.

He knew that he could have anything he wanted if he thought about it hard enough. The world and all the people on it were in his grasp. He could rule the universe. He could be the Ruler of Everything!

And that was the clincher, that was the trap that so many people fell into, even if they weren’t vampires and they couldn’t live forever--they just thought they could. In their own minds, they are invincible, unstoppable; the ultimate person to do whatever it is they do. Hitler too thought he was immortal. He was not a vampire, but he didn’t need to be--he was bad enough. He was powerful enough to twist the minds of the people around him, the people that didn’t understand or see the things that he saw.

Hitler had the power to change the world and all he had going for him were the words he spoke and the ideas in his head. Chris had something more than that. He had ideas and those ideas had a voice, but he also had the power to enter into peoples’ minds and make their decisions for them. He had the power to alter their very base natures. He had the power to change the very core of their beings.

The only thing that kept him from becoming a true monster was when he looked into the security guard’s face and realized what he was doing to a man innocent of any crime. The man was in pain, even if he didn’t know it in his conscious mind. He was being twisted and changed even though Chris didn’t really mean to do it--it was something that happened without conscious will. That didn’t make it any less wrong a thing to do, however.

As he looked at the man, Chris knew that he was doing a Bad Thing. He was affecting the basic structure of a man that had done no harm to him, a man that had had the simple misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and of having gone into the wrong profession.

"I’m sorry," he said, suddenly guilty, and turned his eyes away from the man, blocking the urge that told him to wrest control and never let go.

He would not allow himself to contribute to wrongness, no matter how badly he needed to Feed or how badly he wished that he could scratch his nose. He would just have to wait for Lianndra to come and make a decision. He would have to act like a normal human for a little while. It was not his place to affect the natural way of things, no matter how much he wanted to.

The man’s eyes cleared of the spell that had held him trapped for the long minutes while Chris had looked deep into his soul. The man was suddenly aware that he was no longer in his chair and that he was standing in front of the prisoner that it was his job to protect and keep from escaping.

He looked terrified for a second, then covered it with his usual professional expression of non-expression. He would not allow whatever had happened to him to affect the job he was being paid to do.

He looked down at his hand to find his sandwich smashed into an unrecognizable pulp against his palm. He had squeezed it so hard that the tinfoil had scratched his skin, leaving a trail of red across his palm. He grimaced and tossed the balled and twisted mess into the trashcan by the wall of monitors. He would not allow even this strangeness to deter him from the duty he had been hired to perform.

He turned back toward his chair and the quietness of his corner where none of this strangeness had anything to do with him. He would not allow curiosity to win control of his mind. He did not want to know what was to happen to the boy or what the kid had done to deserve such strange and lasting punishment as he knew was coming.

He had not lasted so long at his job without learning a few of the secrets that the people that entered the club carried, but he had also learned that it was safer not to know too much. No one asked him what he knew, and he didn’t volunteer any information about it. It was none of his business, no matter how young this boy was.

Chris saw all of this reflected on the man’s face and relaxed back into the confines of the chair. He would try to make the best of a bad situation. Who cared if the strange material that the ropes were made of chafed? It was something that he could ignore if he wanted to, and he did want to ignore it.

He was just about to go crazy and break his silent promise when the door opened and Lianndra, Dezi and Phang ghosted in with the usual silent grace of vampires. He could barely hear the tread of their feet, but if he had been mortal he would have been unable to hear them at all.

"Where have you been? Why did you leave me tied to this stupid chair?" he demanded in a more querulous tone than he meant to use.

He saw that he had been a little sharper than he intended; he could tell by the way Dezi’s lower lip trembled slightly before her face turned into the decorously complacent mask that she usually wore. It was an expression that he had grown to recognize, the face that she showed to strangers, chillingly calm and yet still delicately questioning, the face of someone that doesn’t wish to be bothered by silliness, but who is willing to help if it is absolutely necessary.

He felt sad as he saw her wearing that expression with him, but what could he do? He had been the one to set the mood and it was too late to change it, everyone had already changed themselves to match it, even the mortal guard who wore a blank expression that showed not a whit of what he was really thinking.

Lianndra stepped forward to face Chris’ chair squarely, his young face looking old and wise with all of the years that he had lived and all of the knowledge and ideas that had ever passed through his mind. He at least was not wearing his mask of innocence, a mask that was almost impossible to breach with any real measure of success.

"We left you tied to the chair so that you would have time to calm down and not do anything rash or just plain stupid. We were busy elsewhere and wanted to give you time to regain consciousness and think over the things you did and said and to think of what you might do to rectify the situation.

"You said some pretty hateful things to Dezi here and I thought you might want to apologize for any hurt you might have caused her. Anything else you want to know?" Lianndra said. Even if the face held an ageless wisdom, the voice did not.

Lianndra had the high treble of any child, delicate and interweaving with the frailty of a child’s lungs. Yet Chris knew that Lianndra was not weak. If he wanted to, he could blast the eardrums of everyone in a room the size of a high school gym, no matter if they were mortal or vampire, it was all one to a being as powerful as Lianndra had become over the years of his life.

Chris studied Lianndra intently and saw that he seriously expected an apology for Dezi. It was almost scary to see such expectation on a face so young. The features were both young and old depending on the emotions and the mood Lianndra was in. At the moment, Lianndra was not pleased and it showed in the age that reflected out of his eyes and the weariness that hovered like a cloud over his head.

"I’m sorry if I said anything that hurt you Dezi," Chris said. "I wasn’t exactly myself at the time." The apology was grudging, no matter how sorry he really was. It was as if his voice had taken over and was trying to make him out as some kind of mean-spirited grouch that didn’t have a clue when he was in the wrong.

He wished he could apologize for his apology, but he knew it was already too late. Lianndra’s eyes were already shielded and Dezi had drawn close to the smaller vampire as if for comfort. He had wounded her and hadn’t even really wanted to, it had been done for him by his stupid big mouth that didn’t seem to know when it was time to shut up.

What was wrong with him? He hadn’t always been like this. Just last night he had been a kind, generous sort of boy that had known when to keep his mouth shut and what kinds of things were appropriate for any given situation, the things that would fix anything wrong.

Now he was a dundering-Neanderthal that had no idea of what to say, and whenever he did say anything it came out hurtful and wrong. Was he sick? Had something been changed irrevocably when he was turned into a vampire? Or was something making him act like he was behaving?

He may have only been a vampire for a short time, but he had learned his lessons well.

From the things Lianndra had said, powerful vampires had a way of taking over the bodies of those weaker than themselves or of just affecting their minds. Maybe that was what was happening? But how could he tell?

Without really thinking it through, he leapt up, the chair breaking free of the bolts that locked it to the floor, and heedless of the cords that bound him began to yell as loud as he could at someone or something not in the room.

"What are you doing this for? Who are you?" He stared at a spot about six feet away from him in the middle of the room. He figured that it didn’t matter where he looked, that wherever he trained his eyes was as good a place as any.

The others looked at him strangely, as if silently asking if he had lost his mind. Then they too felt the strange feeling that he had been suffering from ever since he had woken in Lianndra’s apartment earlier that night. A subtle pressure pointing toward a destination of both physical and mental nature. The touch on his mind had been so light that he hadn’t even noticed it, had thought that it was just another outlet of the confusion that had filled his mind ever since Lianndra granted him the BloodTouch.

"What is that?" the overlooked guard asked, his eyes frightened.

Without even turning to him, Lianndra pointed at the man’s throat. "Silence!"

The vampire boy’s eyes grew distant as he stared into a point somewhere in front of him, his face draining of what little expression there was. When he spoke, his voice was slow and deeper than usual: "There is a presence in this room, a presence that has been binding Chris to some kind of task that is very hard to see. The eyes of the person can see the things that we do, and the mind behind them knows the actions that would most disrupt the plans which we lay to stop them--the things that we might do to help each other. The mind behind those eyes is dark--it hates and fears us and is prepared to do anything in its power to keep us from finding where it hides and vanquishing it."

He called whoever was controlling Chris an "it," a person without sex, only with a kind of controlled anger that it was using to its own ends--to hurt them.

"The mind is familiar to me, but from where I do not remember," Lianndra said. "All I know is that it’s very old, much older than any mind I have ever touched, older than the trees, older than the very desert. It is a mind that saw the Earth when the Earth was young."

Chris watched as Lianndra’s face twisted in a horrible rictus of some kind of mental pain. His small hands rose to the sides of his face and he pressed his fists against his skull as if trying to squeeze the terrible thoughts from his mind.

"Who is it? They’re blocking me, blanking my memory so that I will not know who it is. I must break their shield of silence, must see who it is, must see, must see, must see, must see," it was a chant that became more and more tortured as he became more focused and pressed his fists harder against the sides of his head.

His eyes squinted shut as he concentrated, his face twisting further. A cold breeze began to flow through the room, slow and easy at first, but gaining strength with every passing second.

Suddenly his hands came away from his face and his eyes opened wide in horrified recognition. "No, oh no." He threw his head back, his legs braced and his thin shoulders set under the expensive fabric of his clothes.

"Tispith!" Lianndra screamed. "She is trying to turn us all against each other!"

The wind that filled the room seemed to intensify as its source’s identity was revealed and named aloud. A scream seemed to reverberate off the walls as the vampire Queen threw all restraint and subtlety to the winds and tried to blast them where they stood.

The wind tore at their clothes, shredding cloth and skin. The poor mortal security guard could only huddle down in his chair in the corner and pray for deliverance from this madness. His skin was getting whipped so badly that it was starting to blister and peel off to reveal the flesh beneath. Blood ran down his cheeks like some kind of horrifying Halloween mask. If he lived through the Queen’s fury he would not be as handsome. He would be unrecognizable to his own family and friends and would probably not want to be seen by them anyway, not the way he was going to look.

For now, all he could do was hope and pray that he wasn’t going to die, that his mortal life would not be ended very soon.

Chris had a moment to feel sorry for the man before the wind knocked him off his feet and onto the floor where he slid across the rough and hard cement surface to smash into the wall with bone jarring force. If he had been mortal he would probably be suffering from broken arms and legs and most likely internal injuries at the least. As it was, his skin was scraped raw and he was in great pain. The missing skin made him feel as if he were on fire. The exposed flesh was not used to the sharpness of regular air.

He groaned, glad that he was a vampire and the pain would be gone soon, healed as quickly as it had been dealt.

Dezi was not so lucky. The wind whipped at her with steadily growing force, and at first she successfully resisted. But suddenly her legs gave out and she dropped to the cement floor with a loud "crunch" that echoed through the room. Her legs were broken, one bent clear backward while the other was broken forward, the leg bent so far that her foot touched her shoulder and the bone showed white through her torn jeans. She made no sound as she fell to the ground, limp.

Lianndra held up to the building pressure better than any of them, most likely because he was built closer to the ground, but also because Phang huddled against his legs to keep him from falling. The Chinese vampire had his lips drawn back from his teeth in effort and concentration as he made sure to keep Lianndra firmly grounded. It would not do to let his lord and master fall in an undignified heap on the floor.

Lianndra’s eyes seemed to glow with a kind of blue flame as he glared at the spot in front of him that he was using as his focus point to battle Tispith. Slowly, the wind trying to stop him, he raised his arms in front of him, his hands flat out as if they were against a wall.

"You may be Queen, but you do not rule one that knows your full identity. Sister to Donal, who was my vampiric father, I let you know that I am of direct blood and am thus related to you not only through the relationship of being a vampire and our animosity, but through the blood I shared with Donal. The blood that even now runs through my veins.

"I ask politely that you stop what you have started before I start to get mad at what you’ve already done and are trying to do."

The scream only went higher pitched until eardrums began to pound with the pain of holding off such horrible pressure as was trying to seep its ways into their very skulls.

Where he lay, Chris pressed his hands against his ears in an effort to drown out that sound that seemed to go on forever, a sound that felt as if it would never stop. Not until his eardrums burst and fluid ran down from his ears, blocking that awful sound out.

He could only hope that Lianndra would figure out a way to stop Tispith before she brought the roof down on top of them. Cracks were already started to appear at the base of the walls, a warning and a sign.

He looked at Lianndra where he stood and saw something he had never seen, a Lianndra that didn’t have the features of a boy that never aged, but a man with the features of a boy. He truly realized for the first time that even if Lianndra looked the part of a child, he was not. Even if he was two hundred and twenty-one years old, there was something about him that was older. Something that was beyond the counting of years. Something that went beyond normal human thought and human jealousies and petty foolishness.

It was something that, even as a mortal child, he must have had about him. Something that was both unreachable and untouched, something that would never be washed away in all of the years of forever. It was something that drew people like flies to amber, something that was both amazing and frightening, something that was never ending and would always be wonderful and enlightening no matter how long a person knew him. It was like the thing that drew people to a messiah, something that, no matter what kind of person the messiah is, draws people to him or her. Something of the greatness that is glimpsed when a person sees a deer in the woods for the first time. Something of the magic that was lost when people ceased to believe in the wonder of Never-Never Land and the reality of fairy dust and Peter Pan. It was something.

Even as he saw it in Lianndra, Chris turned away. It was something too big for him, something that would eat him alive. It was an unattainable something that, even as it drew people, made them realize how insignificant they really were.

Chris turned away from whatever it was he saw in Lianndra’s face, never thinking about why he turned away from it, only knowing that he had to, that he couldn’t see it anymore. It would consume him completely.

Maybe if he had stared into Lianndra’s face at that moment of realization, he would have attained something of what Lianndra had. He would have shone with that same brilliance and idealistic intensity. He would have been more than what he was, more than a seventeen-year old vampire that had had a very hard and trying day.

As it was, he looked away, and when he eventually looked back Lianndra was as he always was, that something had retreated back into the façade of innocence he wore like a mask. When he looked back, Lianndra was again the vampire boy he had first met just two and a half months before. When he looked back and saw that his perspective was back to normal, he was very relieved. The unknowing fear that he had momentarily experienced was gone again and things were back on track. He was glad, no matter what he might have lost to his unthinking fear.