“Chief!” Lucy’s whine was high-pitched and piteous. I heard a few more muffled words, a quieted howl, a scuffle. Then a gunshot rang out through the night. I blinked in the darkness of my pillowcase, felt the cool heat as all the hairs on the back of my neck pricked. I felt my heart thumping wildly in my chest and made a mental note that if I were to ever get out of this situation alive, I’d keep a cardiologist on speed dial. And also surgically attach my cell phone to my hand.
I worked to sit up, then scooted myself across the bench seat, leaning my pillowcased head against the cool glass of the window. Not surprisingly, I couldn’t see anything except for a splotch of yellowish street light and a single dark figure standing in the night.
My heart continued to thump, and my mouth fell open as the figure slowly lumbered toward the car. I pressed the soles of my feet against the car door and launched myself across the seat, cowering against the other locked door. I was breathing hard and sucked in a mouthful of cotton pillowcase while the tears spilled from my eyes. Was Lucy dead? Was I next? The chief had murdered before—horrendously murdered—three innocent people, and now Lucy’s foot stomping and demands had gone deathly silent.
I pinched my eyes shut and waited for my life to flash before them. I waited for the split-second feeling of calm that was supposed to come when you accepted fate.
Neither came.
So I went with the next best thing: spastic movements. I had learned in a self-defense class (or by watching Oprah) that a moving target was hard to hit, so, when escaping an attacker with a gun, you should run zigzag. I wasn’t going to let the fact that I was trapped in the coffin-sized backseat of a police car hamper my best defense so I threw myself spastically around the backseat the second I heard the click of the car door open.
“What the hell are you doing back there?”
I kicked. I thrashed. I bobbed. I weaved. I panted a little and wished I’d spent more time at the gym working up my cardio. I heard the groan of the leather seat and I cringed, imagining Chief Oliver as he leveled the gun and shot me dead, too. With a second burst of adrenaline I dove for the floor mats, and then heard the jangle of the key as it slipped into the ignition, the groan of the engine as it turned over.
“You’re fucking nuts,” I heard the chief mutter. “You’re all fucking nuts.”
I lay still on the floor of the car, the industrial carpet scratching my bare arms as the chief kicked the car into gear and headed down the drive. I wanted to ask him about Lucy. I wanted to ask him if I’d be next. Instead, I lay with my cheek pressed against the car seat while the tears rolled down my cheeks.
I’m going to get out of here, I told myself, I have to.
I stiffened and scooted forward, pressing one ear against the car door. As we rode, I struggled to listen to every sound, to count every jerking movement of the car—turns, stoplights, anything that could be used to identify where he might be taking me. But there was a sickening, sweet scent inside the pillowcase that I hadn’t noticed before and it was making me tired, making my eyes so heavy.
I wonder if this is how it happens on CSI, I thought, before falling off into darkness.
Chapter Twenty-One
I woke up to a soft voice calling my name.
“Sophie? Sophie?” I heard.
I stirred, and realization hit me. “Mr. Sampson? Mr. Sampson, is that you? I can hear you in my head.” I had to work to move my dry, heavy lips.
There was a soft hand on my shoulder, and then I heard the jingle of metal, the clank as it brushed against concrete. “Sophie,” Mr. Sampson said, “I’m not talking to you inside your head. Can you open your eyes for me?”
I tried, wincing at the star of pain that blossomed above my right eye, that stung my swollen, dried, blood-caked lips. Mr. Sampson came into focus looking disheveled and broken, his face marred by fresh pink scratch marks. He smiled softly at me, and I noticed that his usually perfect teeth were replaced by a mouthful of heavily pointed incisors, that a thick shock of brown fur was circling out of the tears in his shirt.
“Oh my gosh.” I lifted both my wrists, grimacing at the thick chains encircling them. “Oh my gosh.” I gaped at Mr. Sampson. “What the hell is going on here? What is this?” I rattled the chains. “I’ve got a whole Jacob Marley thing going on. And you!” I gingerly touched the heavy cuff around his neck, and he pulled away, ashamed.
“Sophie, do you have any idea where we are?”
I scanned our concrete enclosure, frowned at the pentagram etched out in chalk dust on the floor. “Hell?” I asked weakly. “Although I think if that were the case, the pentagram would be a little cliché.”
Mr. Sampson tried to smile, and I felt the tiniest bit of relief at being alive. “I’m not dead, right?” I confirmed.
Mr. Sampson shifted his weight, the clank from his chains reverberating in the silent, cement room. “No, you’re not.”
“I was attacked by a fake vampire, and now I’m here.” I looked around, incredulous. “This doesn’t happen,” I continued softly. “This shouldn’t happen. This is real life.” The words were out of my mouth before I had time to stop and consider that I was crying to a man halfway through a werewolf transformation, chained to a metal wall in what looked like a giant kennel.