Rise of the Dunamy (16 page)

32

S
ofia recounted everything that had happened regarding the case right up until the moment that she awoke in her current position. She faltered a little as she went over what happened in the alley. It was all that she could do to get through without completely breaking down each time she mention Lucian’s name, much less during explaining his death. The scene played itself over and over in her mind as she neared that point, and it continued once she finished. The darkness provided by her blindfold made it nearly impossible for her to keep from seeing Lucian crawling across the alley floor to reach her. She now sat in silence and darkness behind the filthy, dry blindfold; unaware of what might come next, and once again unsure whether or not she cared. She had told him everything that she knew. She had even allowed herself to let slip that some of the officers were in favor of the swift brand of justice that he had been inflicting. It was at that point that she felt she had done herself the most good as she mentioned how the death of an officer would quickly change the minds of every single man and woman on the force that had sympathized with their vigilante efforts. Now all she could do was wait in the darkness and the silence.

After a few minutes, the voice finally returned, although it was now much more apprehensive and far less confident. “I need for you to remain calm. I am very sorry for all of the stress that this evening has caused you, but I had to make sure that I knew everything. I’m going to remove your blindfold now. Again, I’m so sorry, this was just something I thought I had to do.” Caught off guard by his comments, Sofia sat in silence as the man approached.

Sofia’s muscles tightened in anticipation of his intentions as he drew near. Reaching behind her he pulled the knotted portion over her head and removed the stale rag from her face. The light attacked her unprepared and overanxious pupils as she attempted to look directly at her captor. Wincing from the burning pain that overwhelmed her eyes, she peered through the tear induced haze, finally staring directly into the face that had caused her so much pain.

A knot formed in her throat so tightly that she could neither swallow nor breathe. As he moved away from her, Sofia was able to see him more clearly. Lucian was still wearing the jeans he had been wearing when he was shot, but his shirt was different. He had been wearing a blue button up when they left work, but now he had on a fresh t-shirt. Sofia had no idea how long she had been out, but from what she gathered from the conversation they had been having, and knowing that passing out from a simple lack of oxygen alone wouldn’t have taken too long to recover from, she had deduced that it could not have been more than a few hours. Regardless of whether it had been two hours or two days, there was no way that he should be standing before her; much less standing there showing no real evidence of having just been through such a traumatic event. Sofia swallowed the painful lump in her throat just long enough to squeeze out the words “It was you?” Lucian looked into her eyes and nodded his head.

“Not like you’re thinkin’, but yeah,” was all that he said.

Her head swirled with questions. Sofia wasn’t sure if it was terror, relief, or confusion that caused the tears to well up in her eyes, but they came nonetheless. She had been dealing with the loss of Lucian during this trauma of this entire event and now he stood before her, relatively unscathed. There was not an explanation that she could come up with that would not only keep him alive after the shooting, but also allow him to have walked away from the incident with such insignificant wounds. She sat in awe of what she was seeing when suddenly she realized what this meant. There was only one scenario that allowed for him to live through the attack; for her to have been spared from unthinkable events after losing consciousness; and for them to have just had the conversation they had just finished having. Lucian had to be leading the gang responsible for the attacks and had to have staged the event in the alley.

How can that be? She wondered. Could he be the leader of this gang that was responsible for the vicious, heinous crimes we’ve had been tracking? How could that be the case? How could the man with whom I’ve had spent so much time, that I’ve learned so much about, be capable of carrying on two completely opposite personalities?

Lucian had been so tender and caring with her in the time that they had spent together, but the man that was responsible for carrying out such brutal murders could never have been capable of anything other than hatred and evil. She wanted so badly not to believe it. She wanted nothing more than to jump to her feet, run to him, and hold him pretending nothing had happened, but she knew that she would never be able to live her life with him with these sorts of questions looming between them.

Lucian wiped away the tears that were now flowing freely down her cheeks. It did little good as they weren’t about to stop. He gently stroked her face, hoping to offer some level of comfort; terrified of what she would think of him when he had told her the truth. Sofia continued to stare at him with unwavering eyes. She was silenced by her utter dismay at what he had just said to her. The man that she loved was not dead, but he was no longer the man that she loved. As she sat there crying, she wondered if she should even be happy that he was alive. Wouldn’t the world be a safer place without him in it? The thoughts and emotions continued to churn inside of her until she felt as though she would be sick. Finally, she was able to speak. In a quivering voice she replied, “I don’t understand.”

“I know, baby. I’ll explain, but I need for you to keep an open mind and I need you to know that I’m not what you think. I’m not gonna ask you to promise me anything, but I do want you to listen with a very open mind. Now, you know I’d never hurt you, so when I untie you, just be cool. Okay? I’m gonna untie you now. Just relax, and I’ll try to make it all make sense.”

The idea that he expected her to remain calm and “be cool” was ludicrous but she had no plans to leave that room without an explanation. She was both physically and mentally exhausted from the attack and the emotional drain of her situation. It was actually very likely that she would not do anything. She knew that Lucian wasn’t lying when he said that he would never hurt her, so she remained “physically” calm as he began to release her from her binds.

Lucian finished removing the tape from her wrists and tried to rub them gently for her. Sofia pulled her hands away from him quickly, handling them herself before addressing her tear soaked face. Slowly rising to her feet, she paused a moment to let her aching knees and backside adjust to standing. Lucian was completely unsure of what to expect. As he awkwardly attempted to help her dust herself off, Sofia punched him hard, squarely in the ribcage. Recoiling in pain, he retreated and gave her plenty of room to address her needs. After finishing dusting herself off and stretching for a moment, she looked around the room for a place to sit comfortably while she listened to Lucian’s explanation. She noticed a stack of crates that showed some potential and walked over to create a makeshift chair. It pleased her ever so slightly that she had been correct regarding a few things about her surroundings. They were in fact in large wide open room with poured concrete walls. It appeared to be the basement or bunker of an abandoned house. She had gotten that right as well as clearly knowing her captor. Sofia laughed a little to herself at the thought of this. It came as no surprise to her that she found something humorous about the situation. She had told many women that had been victimized over the years that in high stress situations your emotions are at the surface and any one of them could present themself. She positioned herself so that she was facing Lucian, eased her sensitive back-side onto the crate, crossed her arms and waited.

Lucian approached her cautiously. The look on her face told him that he needed to get on with the explanation or things were going to get ugly. She had clearly moved from concerned about the situation to angry and impatient. Lucian had tried to prepare himself for this moment, but these were not the circumstances he had hoped for. In the short amount of time he had to formulate a plan, he had decided that the best course of action was to come right out of the gates at full speed.

“I’ll get right to it because I know you probably just want to leave. First of all, I don’t consider anything I’ve done as wrong.”

Sofia’s expression did not waver.

“You know from your investigation, from the work that you and Bishop did, that those men were evil. I never led you in the wrong direction when you came to me, and I never tried to stop your progress. In all honesty, I wanted for you to find me, I just never anticipated that it would be this way.”

He was not wrong. Sofia knew that each of the men that had died had been accused of terrible crimes multiple times but each had found a way to use the system to their advantage. Their crimes had been varied but each victim had at some point committed at least one violent or reckless act and had shown no signs of remorse. Several of them had been gang members that had steadily escalated in their brutality with each crime for which they were accused. Nearly all of the men had served time at some point, but all of them had repeatedly slipped from the grasp of the police.

These were the exact areas that had caused so much dissention amongst the officers at her precinct lately. Sofia had stayed firm in her belief that the system was the way to get justice. She had never seen death as the way to deal with a criminal. She truly believed that people should try their hardest to rehabilitate criminals, and she believed deeply that everyone deserved a second chance. Regardless of these opinions, she listened as he continued.

“I can’t imagine that’s your biggest issue right now, though. I figure it’s a toss-up between why I’m not dead, and the stuff that’s been goin’ down with the bodies.” Lucian could tell by Sofia’s aggressive body language that he needed to get to the point quickly. Even when exhausted, Sofia was able to put off an utterly terrifying vibe.

“Well, the answers are really one in the same. Yo u see, I have a unique body makeup that requires a few things of me in the ways of maintenance and at the same time that makeup affords me a few very unique benefits.” Lucian was very uncomfortable with trying to explain the situation to her and it was becoming very clear as he fidgeted about as he spoke.

This type of behavior was not something that Sofia was used to seeing from him. He was always so eloquent and sure of himself when he spoke. His discomfort and inability to get to the point was now beginning to make her very uneasy as well. Even still, Sofia offered him no help nor did she attempt to make herself appear any less agitated to allow him any level of comfort.

“What I did to those people wasn’t me tryin’ to make some disgusting statement or establish some sort of territorial thing. I was just doin’ what I had to do…” Lucian trailed off as Sofia’s puzzled expression gave him some idea of just how odd what he was saying, sounded. “I guess that doesn’t really make enough sense, huh? See, what you have to understand is that if I get into a fight or overexert myself, I use up an exorbitant amount of energy. I use so much energy, that I gotta replenish it real quick or my body starts to feed on itself. When that happens, I got very little time before it starts causing me a lot of discomfort. So in order to keep myself from having to deal with that, I take advantage of the situation that I have before me. I need to give my body something to burn to replenish my energy, and…you know… they’re dead… so….” Lucian moved on quickly, knowing that he had not given her anywhere in the vicinity of a reasonable excuse.

“Plus, when I’m fully enraged, I get a little frenzied. When I get like that there’s little that is going to keep me from finishing my task. Do you understand what I’m getting at?” She did not, and that was no surprise to Lucian. He knew exactly the words he had to say in order to get her on the same page with him. Knowing all too well what her reaction to the words he was about to say would be, he began pacing back and forth in front of Sofia.

“Okay. Don’t freak out when I say this, because it’s really not what you think. You also might like to know that I really like you and care a lot about you. You may not want to hear that right now, but it’s the truth.” He began to wring his hands a little.

“Alright…. Here it is… And understand that there are a great many things involved with this that are completely inaccurate and that have been taken completely out of context throughout the years.” Sofia was growing impatient with his fumbling and was becoming very confused.

“Okay. Now, I’m not a vampire, per se….” Sofia’s eyes opened wide at his comments as she drew in a deep breath through her nose. This was not the way that a valid explanation started. Even at this, she maintained her silence, although at this point it was more from the shock than her stubbornness. Placing her thumb and forefinger against her eyebrows, she closed her eyes tightly and began rubbing them. Seeing her reaction, Lucian began to try and explain things much more quickly.

33

“D
on’t freak out! Just listen! Just listen!” He coaxed, pumping his hands to try and calm her.

“Now, what I mean by that is, my body makeup is the common thread between me and all of the others before me that the myths of the vampire are based on.” He spoke quickly, but paused to let her absorb what he was saying. Lucian had not had to explain this to someone in this way before. He had only actually explained it one other time, and it was nowhere near this difficult. He knew from experience that if she was going to understand what he was trying to tell her, she would have to comprehend each component independently.

“What I mean by that is, throughout history many other people have actually experienced the same body composition that I have. Those people have struggled with coming to grips with their body’s abilities as well as its demands. They learned to cope with the demands as they experienced them. Many times, their actions were witnessed by others and when that happens, the explanation is rarely sought out and is more often created in the minds of the witnesses.”

“Stop.” Sofia interjected calmly, holding her hand up in the air at Lucian. “Are you being serious?” she asked in disbelief. Lucian’s face was filled with a look of weariness as he realized how difficult this was going to be. “I can’t believe you!” Sofia blurted, instantly becoming more aggravated at Lucian’s expression. “I cannot believe that you are trying to explain away murder by saying that you’re a vampire!”

“Not a vampire. You’re not listening. I know what you think of when you hear that word, and that’s not what I am. It’s crucial that you understand that!”

“This is too much, Lucian! This is too much for me to listen to! You expect me to believe that you killed these people because you needed to feed your overexerted body so that you wouldn’t experience some discomfort!? Does that sound like a reasonable exchange rate to you? Someone loses their life so that you don’t have to be uncomfortable!”

“Well, it’s really uncomfortable.” In an unadvisable attempt at lightening the mood, Lucian opted to take a shot at some oddly timed humor. Sofia’s unwavering stare let him know that his shot had missed.

“Plus, that’s not what I said.” He quickly rebounded.

“I killed them because they were evil. Make no mistake about that. I knew what I was doing when I killed them, and I will not deny that. They were evil and the world is a better place without them. I fed on them because of the discomfort.”

“You’re unbelievable! This is unbelievable! I cannot believe that you’re trying to get me to buy this crap, and you are trying to make jokes!” She stood, fuming, for several moments until she could no longer hold it in.

“You let me think you were dead, you son of a bitch!” She shouted angrily, her voice cracking with emotion. Lucian lowered his head, ashamed of how upset she had become throughout the situation.

“I think I made a mistake with that, and I’m sorry. The way things went down, I just kind of thought things up on the fly, and I thought I needed more information…..It was just a bad idea.” He watched her wiping her face from where he stood, wanting nothing more than to console her, but he didn’t dare approach her. He stood just out of arm’s reach from her and waited patiently as she took a minute to catch her breath. Unable to do any good, Lucian decided to press on to try and get her to understand what was going on.

“I truly am sorry for upsetting you, but I need to try and make you understand. I know how hard this is to believe, and I know you don’t want to hear it, but I’m not the monster you think I am. The thing is, nearly everything that you believe about what I am, is wrong. I can explain most of it, but some of it is still a mystery even to me. I’m not really sure where to start, so why don’t we do this; ask me whatever you want and I’ll answer it with 100 percent honesty.”

Where could she even begin? So many things had just happened. Beyond believing that he was dead, he was now clearly insane! He was expecting her to follow him down this ridiculous road that he had laid out for her. She could only assume that Lucian was about to tell her some twisted tale about being involved in some “vampire” cult and how all of this had been a part of an initiation or some other warped nonsense! Nothing was making sense. This sort of thing would have happened before if it were some sort of initiation. There would have been a rash of similar killings, but there had been nothing even remotely similar to what he was doing. While she didn’t want to indulge this ridiculousness, she felt compelled to dig further for the truth.

Sofia continued to bounce the information around in her head, trying to make some sense of it. She wasn’t able to come up with a single explanation that could hold water. As she continued considering ideas, she grew more and more anxious. As she grew more anxious, her foot began to bounce on the floor. The excessive bouncing of her foot had drawn Lucian’s stare as he sat waiting for some response. As she glanced up at him, she noticed that he had focused his gaze on her rapidly bouncing foot.

“Oh! I’m sorry! Is this bothering you?” She stopped the bouncing and slammed her foot down. Lucian’s focus remained on the spot where her foot had been bouncing. “Um, no. It wasn’t bothering me at all. I just happened to focus on it because there was nothing else to look at. Are you ready to calm yourself and have a conversation?” Lucian’s mood had hardened and he spoke very firmly. He was more serious than he had been before, in fact he had a more serious look on his face than Sofia could ever remember having seen before. His directness caught her off guard, but only caused her to grow more annoyed with him.

“Are you under the impression that you are in a situation to demand anything of me?” she growled.

“You know me pretty well at this point, with the exception of a few things that have just come to light. You know full well that I’m not about to sit here all night while you mull things over. I don’t like for problems to sit, unresolved. I’m ready to tell you anything that you wanna know, you just need to ask. If that’s not gonna happen, I guess we need to figure out the next step.”

Furious, but all too aware that he was being perfectly honest about ending the conversation if she didn’t make a move, Sofia took a second and figured out what she needed to know first.

“Well, I guess the first thing that I want to know is, what makes you think that you can take the law into your own hands and go all ‘vigilante justice’ on these men?”

“Oh!” he said with some level of surprise as he took his attention off of the floor and finally looked up to meet her gaze. “So you don’t have any questions about the other thing?”

“The vampire thing? Well, I assume you are going to feed me some garbage about being in a group with some lunatics that think that they can drink blood.” She countered sarcastically. “So, no. I’m not wasting my time on that.”

Lucian was visibly becoming frustrated, and made no attempts to hide it. He had known that this was going to be difficult, but had hoped for some level of cooperation. A subject as touchy as this one mixed with an attitude like Sofia’s was going to add up to a difficult situation every time.

“Well” he said with a deep sigh “That’s why I told you to listen and then ask questions. So, rather than wait for you to ask, I guess I’ll just tell you what I need to tell you and hope I remember to cover everything. What I am is not so easy to explain, and even harder to understand. I should’ve figured you would think something like that. I mean, that’s a very logical explanation. But, I’m not in any group. It’s just me. Like I said, I am what the legends of the vampire are based on. I’m not the person that they are based on, but I’m just like the dudes the legends were created about. See, my genes cause my body to create a larger amount of testosterone and adrenaline among various other chemicals in my body. When I’m injured, my body’s response is quick and exact. It finds and fixes the problem. Boom, done. I don’t know how far I can go before my body gives out, but I can tell you that nothing that I’ve run into up to this point has killed me, of that I can assure you.” This was another small attempt at humor that failed to land even the slightest smile on Sofia’s face. Instead, she reached out and scratched him as hard and as deep as she could on his arm. He had given her the perfect opening, and she had plenty to be angry about.

“What the hell!” Lucian cried out, reaching for his forearm.

“Go ahead vampire man, heal away.” She mocked sarcastically.

“That ain’t how it works, woman, damn!” She had taken a layer of his skin with her in the attack and left deep scratches that ended in four perfect crescent shaped holes where the skin was now peeling back. Sofia hadn’t actually meant to dig in quite so deep and was a little nervous with how he might react. When he turned his attention down to his arm, she cringed at what she had done, but returned to her icy stare seconds before he looked back at her.

“What did I tell you?” Lucian’s demeanor had quickly reverted from anger back to his usual calm self. “Are you going to work with me or should we just end this conversation now? I know you well enough to know that you’re going to need to hear the story. So why don’t we cut the bullshit for right now?” He had not been wrong. Sofia would never be able to leave without hearing enough to satisfy her curiosity, especially knowing that he had been behind the murders. She maintained her heated demeanor, but allowed him to continue.

“See, you have to know the answers. You can’t sit through half a movie and switch to something new. Hell, you can’t even give up on a bowl of cereal. It’s what makes you a good cop, Sofia. So, do you want to ask me some questions and hear things at your pace, or do you want me to let it pour out like an open faucet again?”

Rather than waste any more time with his feeble attempts at explaining himself with no direction, Sofia determined that it was time for her to just go along with his game. He clearly had a great deal to say which is why he was struggling to figure out where to begin; but where were you supposed to begin with such a topic? She refused to let him think that she was buying in to this garbage, so she unloaded sarcastically. “So, you want for me to believe that you’re a vampire? Alright. But what about the fact that you go out in the sun all of the time? I mean, you have a tan for God’s sake!”

“There we go!” Lucian shouted back. “That’s one of the things that I’m talking about. That’s actually one of the stupidest things that I’ve ever heard. And what you see in the movies, where they burst into flames as soon as the sun hits ‘em; how the hell does that make any sense? That’s actually one that I do have an answer for, though. Like I was saying before, most of what’s been said about us is what was witnessed by others. Those accounts were probably accurate at some point, but over time they got all jacked up and formed the myths that go around now.” Lucian began growing more enthusiastic as he spoke, ecstatic that Sofia was listening.

“Now this goes way back, so hang in there. See, the earliest of our kind weren’t worried about hiding what they were ‘cause for all everyone knew, they were just the baddest of the bad. They were just really powerful, smart, crazy talented people. Being that they were so highly functioning, they were often the subject of many peoples’ fascination. Think of them as the top athletes of their day. Being so visible in daily life, many of their habits were witnessed by locals. The idea that we cannot exist in sunlight actually came from the fact that many of them would do a full day’s work and then go stay up, and often out, all during the night. The reason being, with the high levels of chemicals that course through our veins, we sleep far less than normal people; as in almost never. So, some of them would remain out all night and inside working all day. As the people began to form stories of their exploits, this became more embellished and became the myth about being “creatures of the night.”

“Worked all day, huh? What happened to all of the riches that vampires are supposed to have?” she quipped sarcastically.

“That one is probably closer to fact than most of the myths, but not really the case anymore. See, broods were the reason for the great wealth. These guys would group together and form small communities, pooling their wealth and resources. The fact that we sleep very little leaves a great amount of opportunity to make money. But ever since the ‘Ancients’ were formed and our race was thinned out, that’s not really the case anymore. Well, it’s not exactly the case.”

“Garlic, Silver, Crosses! Do they kill you?” Sofia was becoming very frustrated with Lucian. She realized that she was far more frustrated because he was able to give logical explanations for everything she was asking than anything else at this point. She had hoped he would make it much easier for her to debunk his lies than he was doing.

“Well, garlic has some truth to it, in a way, but not directly. See, what causes our bodies to operate on this high level also magnifies our personality traits. Think about it like this; your allergies are your bodies physical and chemical reactions to a foreign substance. Our bodies operate on the same basic principles, just a higher level. So, when we have an allergic reaction to something, it’s intense to say the least. The thing about garlic killing one of our kind may be completely factual, but it’s not the norm. Imagine a peanut allergy only magnified exponentially. The cross thing is a flat out fabrication and so is holy water. That one is based on the idea that we’re some kind of demons that can be dispelled with holy talismans or relics. When the stories started gettin’ out of whack, people that didn’t know the truth needed ways to feel secure. Those ideas were created by churches to help the members of their congregations feel safe, as well as to increase attendance I would imagine. It was a commendable effort, but completely false.”

“How about fangs, Lucian. Do you have some wonderful little explanation for that one? Did some guy just have larger than normal teeth and that’s what that comes from? Or no, wait. It was the churches, again. They decided to tell people that your people were descendants from Satan and that he spawned them while disguised as a serpent? Am I close?” Sofia was more than frustrated, she was angry at this point. She was shouting at him as she flailed her arms around, illustrating her thoughts.