Lewis pushed his hand into his pocket and brought it back out. She held her hand out and that was when she realized it wasn’t a cell phone Lewis was holding out to her. He was clutching a white rag. He dropped his white cane and grabbed Rachel, pressing the rag across her nose and mouth before she had a chance to react.
She tried to push him away as an acrid smell filled her nostrils. Her head began to spin dizzily and she felt her limbs going weak. Her knees buckled and she knew she was falling, but she blacked out before she hit the ground.
* * *
Rachel woke up, blinking to clear the slightly fuzzy feeling in her head. Instantly, the memory of Lewis pressing the white rag to her face came back to her and she tried to sit up. She couldn’t do it. Am I paralyzed? Rachel thought to herself. She blinked a few more times and her vision cleared and she saw why she couldn’t move. She was strapped down, affixed to what looked like a hospital gurney, her arms, legs, and chest strapped in place.
She felt panic welling up inside of her and she took a few deep breaths, trying to calm herself down. She knew she was in the Bellevue Hotel, but she had no idea why or what was going to happen to her. She had no idea how long she had been unconscious for, or if it was long enough for anyone to have noticed she was missing. Even if it had been days, no one had any idea she was here and she couldn’t think of any reason why anyone would come here looking for her.
She lifted her head from the gurney to look around, needing to take in as much information as she could in case an opportunity to escape presented itself. She found she was in a large room, and she assumed it was some sort of function room within the hotel. The more she saw, the more she thought escape was unlikely. Not only was she strapped down to the gurney, the gurney was locked inside of a large cage, metal bars on all sides of her.
She whimpered as fear overwhelmed her. What the fuck was Lewis planning on doing to her?
She heard a door slam to her left and she turned her head that way. Lewis came striding toward the cage, no longer using his white cane. He smiled at Rachel and she whimpered again.
“What do you want from me?” she whispered. “Are you going to kill me?”
“Kill you?” Lewis said. He laughed and shook his head. “On the contrary, I’m going to do the exact opposite. I’m going to make you immortal.”
Oh great, Rachel thought. He’s some sort of crazy scientist. He’s going to experiment on me and do who knows what to me.
“We have a little bit of time before you have to leave. I’ll tell you a few things that will make all of this make a bit more sense,” Lewis said.
He smiled at her, a smile that would have looked reassuring under other circumstances, but under these circumstances, just convinced Rachel he was really crazy. She decided that for now, she had no real choice but to listen to him, and maybe if she listened and asked the right questions, she could find a way out of this mess.
Lewis pulled a wheeled chair over to the side of her cage and sat down.
“Firstly, I should apologize for lying to you. I’m from right here in Texas really and I own this hotel. I guess I can drop the accent now.” He laughed and when he went on, his accent was the full-on Texan drawl. “I’m guessing you’ve worked out that I’m not really blind and I apologize again for that deception, but you have no idea how hard it is to get young women to accompany me up here under other circumstances. Somehow the blind thing makes them assume I’m harmless and they are only too happy to escort me up here. Of course, I could just grab them and bundle them into a car, but that brings with it a certain risk of being spotted. You know what I mean?”
Rachel nodded. She knew exactly what he meant. He was a lunatic who regularly brought women up here.
“And now that I’m here, what? You’re going to do some crazy experiments on me? Make me immortal?” Rachel said. She attempted to put immortal in air quotes, but in her current position, it didn’t really work.
“There’s nothing crazy about it and there’s nothing experimental about it. You will become immortal,” Lewis said, like this was obvious and Rachel was the crazy one for not believing him.
She decided to play along with the craziness for a moment.
“And then what? You’ll just let me go?” she asked.
“Not exactly,” Lewis smiled. “I know this is a lot to take in, so why don’t I start at the beginning? Have you heard the term shifters before?”
“Like werewolves? Sure,” Rachel said.
“Not just wolves. Bears, lions, foxes, the works. In this case, bears, but before I go into that, let me take you back hundreds of years. A nasty old witch got pissed off with a shifter—I won’t bore you with all of the details, but the gist of it is that she created a curse. The curse meant that when two shifters mated, they could no longer produce female children. You see how that would stop the population of shifters from growing, right?” Lewis said.
Rachel nodded. Despite her fear and the fact that Lewis’ story had to be nonsense, she found herself engrossed in it all the same.
“What the witch didn’t bargain for was that shifters could turn human women into shifters—and those
