He rolled me onto my back and kissed me, fusing his body to my own.
***
I didn’t want to go inside. I hesitated, my hand refusing to turn the doorknob.
“He’s not in there, Red,” Thomas said from beside me.
Gabriel’s hand tensed against my back. “She has every right to be afraid of going inside his room,” Gabriel said.
I listened as hard as I could, tuning out the million sounds around me so I could better concentrate on what was inside the room.
I picked out a slight draft making the edges of the drapes move, the dripping of the bathroom faucet, and a spider crawling over its web underneath the nightstand.
“Let’s get this over with,” I said, tightening my other hand on the stake I carried. I opened the door, and we went inside.
Thomas went straight for the desk. “Good thing no one has bothered to clear this place out yet,” he remarked casually.
Gabriel grabbed Elias’s laptop and turned the power on. “Just do not get your hopes up about finding anything. It is unlikely he was careless enough to leave behind information about her.”
I tried to move to go help them, but I found myself rooted in place.
I had almost expected the room to be without personal touches, but that was not the case. Bookshelves covered almost every inch of the walls. There was a typewriter on the table. Notebooks and leather-bound journals were scattered across the bed. There were ink stains and wadded balls of paper on the floor.
“He’s a writer,” I said, surprise in my voice.
In the murkiest parts of my memory, I remembered the desperate flashes of Elias’s humanity in the wooden room. I once again felt the fragile hope he had extended to me; a part of him had truly wanted more than anything to be free of pain and hatred.
It was difficult to picture Elias as anything but a monster, but I had felt otherwise, and his room was even more proof that shreds of humanity remained buried in darkness within him.
But Elias was dangerous and unstable, and he deserved to die. He had killed my dogs, and my heart was still broken because of it. Even Gabriel’s strength could not hold back the tears that would randomly form and fall from my eyes.
And Gabriel and I would never know peace as long as Elias was still alive.
Gabriel looked up at me, his face taking on a strange tint because of the light of the laptop. “Yes, he is a writer. A very successful one, actually. He’s had various pen names over the years, but his most popular works were under the name Lias Lucy,” Gabriel said.
“Lias Lucy? He’s like the king of the horror genre,” I said.
Thomas shuffled through some papers on the desk. “I thought you hated to read,” he said.
“I do, but I had to read one of his books my sophomore year in literature class when we were covering the horror classics. I specifically remember reading In Blood And Wings because the book was long and . . . disturbing. It was about vampires.”
“Imagine that,” Thomas said, grinning.
I finally could move my limbs. I went to the desk to help Thomas look.
“A book about vampires that was written by a vampire,” I said. “What a liar he is. We can’t turn into bats, and you made garlic bread yesterday.”
“Elias likes bats,” Thomas said. “He used to leave fruit out for them near the greenhouse. And you could tell that writing was a form of therapy for him; it was why his works were so dark and groundbreaking. The guy is messed up for sure, but he can write well.”
I stared at Thomas. “You like his books?”
“Hey, I can’t stand the guy. If I could get my hands on him, I’d happily set him on fire for what he did to you, Red. But that does not mean I can’t appreciate his work.”
Gabriel’s frustration leaked into me, making me turn toward him. I could feel his fingertips pressing the keyboard as if I were the one doing it.
Gabriel indicated the laptop. “It is password protected. I doubt there is anything on here, but it could take me weeks to figure it out,” he said.
I held my hands out. “It’ll probably take weeks just to go through all this stuff anyway.”
“Most of it is probably useless, or he wouldn’t have bothered leaving it behind,” Thomas said, feeling underneath the desk. “Drafts and notes for his books. Stuff like that.”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Feeling for this.” Thomas grabbed my hand and held it to a button. “Press it,” he commanded.
“Is it going to shock me or something?”
“Always so paranoid. Is that because you were kidnapped and followed by vampires, or have you always been this way?” Thomas teased, applying just enough pressure to make me press the button.
A click resounded throughout the room, making all three pairs of our eyes go to the middle left drawer.
Gabriel rushed to my side and opened the drawer.
“I don’t see . . . ,” I began, but then I saw what he saw. The false bottom was now accessible. The smallest crack was visible at the edges.
Gabriel removed the wood.
A crinkled picture stared up at us. It was of the girl I had seen in the dream, only she was much older in the picture.
Olivia. Her resemblance to Gabriel and Lucy was eerie.
Pain cracked through Gabriel like a whip, and he took a shuddering breath. I rubbed his arm, trying to comfort him as his agony shredded my heart.
“I do not want to involve her. I do not want you in danger,” Gabriel said, the pain making his thoughts cloudy.
I picked up the picture. “I will not live out my life afraid of him any longer. I will end what he started. With your strength, Gabriel, I can do this.”
“Even if it means she dies in
