Torn Asunder

Chapter 17 Dante

I’d screamed my throat bloody and gone slightly mad but still the horror continued. Long after Salvatore left and took the zombie Luca with him, I still lay chained to the bed, bloody, sticky and in shock.I couldn’t adapt to this, I couldn’t accept what had just happened to me, and it was more than just the rape. All of this, I just couldn’t handle it anymore. I wanted to die, and I guess because this wasn’t really my body, I could feel it start to happen.

My grip on reality, the input from my Valentine’s body, it all started to get weak and fuzzy. I’d taken sleeping pills once and it felt disturbingly like that. Would death be this easy? Could I really escape from the horror that my life had become? But then I felt the rage. Not my own, my Valentine’s and it burned away the numb cocoon of death I’d wrapped myself in. I wasn’t sure if her anger was directed at me, for giving up or if it was aimed elsewhere. It didn’t matter though, because it worked to shame me into survival. I wasn’t allowed to give up, not if my Valentine was still fighting, I owed it to her to endure. However I now faced an unexpected dilemma; I’d lost my anchor into Valentine’s body and couldn’t seem to reestablish control over it. I was suddenly terrified, cut adrift and I couldn’t even reclaim my own flesh back from my twin. Although I could still feel her rage and a swell of fiercely protective possessiveness, I couldn’t trace it back to where she was with my body.

I could feel my awareness drifting, not really pulled anywhere but instead flowing and pooling into eddies like a river as this strange zephyr moved me around. And even though I didn’t have eyes, I could see the rooms I passed through.

The zombie Luca was chained from his neck to the wall, a short length that would have been deadly uncomfortable for someone who was alive. He was mewling pitifully and even though I’d never been psychic I somehow knew that he was suffering, being a horror that craved warm flesh and yet the longer he was ‘alive’ like this, the more his own memories tried to surface and the two were not reconcilable. He wasn’t even allowed the mercy of death, instead paraded around as this new, tortured form.

If I could have shuddered I would have, but I was still incorporeal. Instead my discomfort just propelled me from that room to see the maker of the monster. Andros was curled into a ball on the dirty floor, facing away from where I was. It allowed me the chance to see the ruin of his back and the mess they had made of his feet before they had broken him. They had tortured him into compliance to make Luca. The man himself had been relatively decent to me while I tried to figure out wearing my Valentine’s flesh, and I felt bad about the predicament we now found ourselves in. He was as much a victim as Luca and I were and for the first time I realized that I wanted to get us out of here. Luca should be buried properly, not left to suffer and Andros needed medical attention even more than I did.

Before the sense of his broken ego could stain my strange formless self, I was sucked out of the room and sent rushing towards one up several hallways. The sensation made me panic, convinced that nothing good would come of this, I was supposed to be untouchable like this! The big, heavy door at the end of the hallway was the first thing I encountered that I didn't immediately just skim through. I could feel it blocknig me, a thick, sticky surface that felt nothing like a door and everything like a blanket of maggots crawling over my skin as I was sucked through, particle by painful piece until I was through and to the other side.

Inside the room I think I expected to see Caleb and Salvatore sitting together and celebrating their victory over drinks. The kind of thing I'd see in University surrounded by all the guys who thought that they were the greatest thing ever and that their shit didn't stink. But instead I saw that although I hated the man, he was as imprisoned as the rest of us were. I circled the room, staying up near the ceiling and watching from a bird's eye view. Caleb was calmly sitting on the floor, legs crossed and with a lit cigarette dangling from his fingers. He was uninjured, which made me hate him a little more, but he wasn't exactly living in peace; the tame vampire that Salvatore had been bleeding was in the room with him. And the vamp wasn't chained down, he was just too weak to Feed from the calm Irishman. I had to give Caleb some grudging respect because there was no way I would be as easy going in the same situation. Although I had thoroughly enjoyed the Feeding process as a vampire, I wasn't too keen on signing up to be a buffet again, I think I'd given enough of myself when Luka stole a toe.