"TURNING POINTS"
EDITED BY:
Miriam Belle
CREATIVE CONSULTANT:
Simply_Cyn
***
Michael and Lydia slowly rounded the corner of the complex, taking great care to be quiet as they neared apartment where Maricel was. It had only been ten minutes since they had both seen the mental image of the creature stalking her. The vision had been violently planted in their heads and brought them both to their knees. It compelled them to go to Maricel, to try and save her. The creature wanted them to come.
Apartment number seventy-seven was the one that they had seen in their shared vision.
Michael drew his gun and motioned for Lydia to watch his flank. The night grew dead silent they quickly moved through the rows of apartments Michael hoped no one was watching. He looked at the windows and found drawn curtains both lit and darkened. If anyone was watching, he couldn't tell. As they approached the block of apartments numbering seventy through eighty, Lydia heard the sound of rushing water. It was the sound of a broken pipe hemorrhaging water uncontrollably.
'I can feel him', Michael thought as they approached apartment seventy-five.
'As can I', Lydia replied, her thoughts focused and precise, so unlike they had been no more than a half hour ago when she had revealed her secret to Michael.
They had joined telepathically, and she showed him her true nature, the heart of an unwilling vampire. The joining had fused them together somehow, and they could now talk to each other with just a simple thought. Lydia had not wanted Michael to see the whole truth, and she had done her best to block him from seeing everything. She had wanted him to see all the little details of her life to better understand why she was the way she was. The decision to share her soul had not come lightly for her, but she finally committed to it only under the condition that she keeps hidden the truth about who killed his brother.
She knew he could never forgive her if he found out.
But she had been weak.
In that weakness she had slipped, and the fact that she was the one who had killed Stephen Wolverton. Michael had seen that it was her who had not only took his life, but somehow had cursed him with this new existence. Lydia had feared Michael's wrath and hate, but strangely, she hadn't been able to read his thoughts or sense his emotions when it came to Stephen. It was like he had turned himself off to her, he had somehow found a way to block her connection to him when it came to his brother.
Michael stopped in front of seventy-five.
"Here," he whispered as he put one gloved hand to the doorknob.
It opened with a barely audible squeak and swung wide. Lydia stood beside Michael and gasped, almost loosing her grasp on her twin blades as she beheld the sight within. The living room lights were bright and cheery, casting a warm glow over the massacre piled on the floor and furniture. A man lay crumpled on the beige carpet, his back broken and turned so his feet were touching the side of his head. His eyes were wide and glassy, criss-crossed with hundreds of bloody vessels that had burst in the climax of his death. A pool of blood had soaked into the carpet from the back of his skull, his dark hair matted and sticking to the fibers.
"Oh Jesus," Lydia whispered.
She looked to the couch and saw a woman's body sitting there. The body looked so relaxed that Lydia imagined she never even saw the attack coming. After her head had been severed it landed on the opposite end of the couch and came to rest on the left cheek. The woman's eyes were shut, thankfully (she might have been sleeping), but the mouth was popped open in a silent scream. Thick, bloody tangles of auburn hair surrounded the decapitated head and spread wildly in all directions.
The once blue couch was crimson and angry in the warm light. The smell of urine and feces filled the air of the room making it hard to breathe through the nose. Michael knew that it was typical of a recently deceased body to let loose of the body functions. There was something else though, something more potent than the stink of death floating around the apartment. There was a strong smell that reminded him of concentrated ammonia.
"Come on," Michael whispered.
Michael closed the door gently, his hand slipped into his jacket in his effort not to leave finger prints, and moved onto seventy-six. The door was unlocked and unnervingly ajar. Michael opened it hesitantly and found another body. An old woman had died in her wheelchair, apparently losing her head from behind. Blood had sprayed all the furniture in front of her in a high-tension spray. Her body was still in the chair for the most part. Her legs laid on the floor just as useless in death as they apparently had been in life. Her thick, brown house shoes had been knocked off her feet. The wheel on the over turned chair was slowly spinning, losing it's momentum and winding down.
Michael looked down. A pair of bold, horn-rimmed glasses rested at Michael's boot tip.
"Stephen didn't want anyone to know what he was about to do," Michael muttered as he closed the door, "He made sure when finally went after Maricel, no one was close enough to hear."
"God forgive me," Lydia said quietly as the door to apartment seventy-six closed.
"You're sure he's in here?" Michael asked as they reached the door of apartment seventy-seven.
Seventy-seven was at the end of this row, so there had been no one to kill on the other side of the apartment. Michael thanked God for small miracles.
Lydia closed her eyes and felt inside the apartment, stretching out and feeling what lay beyond. She shivered and felt Stephen's icy cold presence in the room just behind the door. He was waiting and not at all afraid of them. He was like a cold slab of obsidian in her mind, impenetrably black and sleek and yet possessed of some irresistible attraction. He wasn't just in the room. His anger filled the entire apartment like some thick smoke.
She could sense Maricel, still alive but somehow different. Something had happened to her. Lydia took a breath, "They're both in there."
"And the other two women?" Michael asked grimly.
