Ben was gone.
Chapter 2: River
I rushed to the bathroom. That too was empty. My mouth became parched as my eyes fixed on the dressing table. The note and the bottle of my blood still sat on the table, untouched.
Fear gripped me as doubts began to flood my mind. Where is he? Did he change his mind and just leave without me?
A bloodcurdling scream stopped me short. It came from downstairs. Panic coursing through my veins, I shot out of the room and hurried back down the stairs. The screaming continued. It was coming from the room behind the empty reception desk. Racing around it, I forced the door open and barged in.
It was all I could do to not scream too.
The room looked like a scene out of a horror movie. The bodies of three men lay strewn about the room, one of whom I recognized as the man who’d sat at the desk. There were deep puncture marks in their necks, their bodies splattered with blood.
And in the far right corner of the room, Ben was sucking the life from a young woman before my very eyes. His hips crushed against her thin frame, holding her in place against the wall as he took deep gulps of her blood.
“No!” I croaked. “Ben!”
I threw myself across the room at him, sliding my arms around his neck and pulling myself up onto his back. Holding him in a choke, I tried to force him to release the girl. That was not the wisest idea though because even if I managed to pull him away, his fangs would rip through her jugular. Instead, I placed one palm over his forehead, holding his head steady, then positioned my right wrist directly beneath his nose.
“Let her go,” I begged, whispering into his ear. His eyes narrowed, and I could feel shudders passing through his body as he drank. But then the scent of my blood, so close to him, began to take its effect. Apparently I smelled so disgusting that I was spoiling his appetite. After four more gulps, his jaw loosened, and he released the girl.
Her face was frozen in utter terror as she collapsed on the floor.
Afraid to step away from Ben in case he launched another attack, I pulled him down to the floor with me as I checked the girl’s pulse. It was so faint, I could barely feel it.
“You need to heal her with your blood,” I hissed to Ben, having no idea whether vampire blood could even heal a person at such a desperate stage.
He still seemed to be in a daze, his whole face now contorted with some kind of pain of his own.
“Ben! Give her your blood.”
Extending a claw, he cut his palm and held it to the girl’s lips.
“Drink,” I urged, clutching the girl by the shoulder.
But she didn’t.
I shook her hard. But as I checked her pulse again, it became clear that I could shake her until her neck came loose. She wasn’t going to respond. She was gone, as gone as the other ravaged corpses in this room.
Standing up with Ben, I placed both palms against his chest and pushed him back against the wall.
“What the hell were you thinking?” I asked through trembling lips. “I left my blood for you!”
Ben’s eyes looked unfocused, blood still dripping from his lips, onto his soaked robe. His voice was low and hoarse as he responded. “You shouldn’t have left without warning me.”
Ding! Ding!
The shrill sound of the bell at the front desk pierced the atmosphere.
My hair stood on end. I looked in panic from Ben to the corpses scattered around the room.
“Excuse me,” a high-pitched voice called in Arabic. “Excuse me!”
Shooting to the door, and wiping the blood that had gotten on me onto my black robe on the way, I stepped out of the room and back into the reception area, closing the door behind me and standing there, holding the handle in place. Now that I had distanced myself from Ben again, I was half expecting him to storm out and attack the middle-aged Arab woman standing behind the desk.
“What was all that screaming?” the woman complained, her black eyebrows knotting. “It woke me from my rest.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry, ma’am,” I replied, trying to act as though I had just returned from a toilet break rather than from witnessing a bloody massacre. “It was coming from the street outside. I am not certain what happened, since I have been busy with paperwork.”
“Hm.” The woman eyed me curiously, then her expression turned back to annoyance. “Anyway, I also came down to tell you that the flush in my toilet has stopped working.”
“Oh, dear. That is… entirely unacceptable. If you return to your room now, I will send someone up in the next hour. Okay?”
“In the next hour? I can’t wait that long!” she grumbled.
“Okay,” I replied. “How about in the next fifteen minutes? I will try to get hold of our caretaker.”