Chapter 12: Helpless Witness
The van hummed, a metallic cocoon of stale coffee and nervous sweat. The only light came from the monitor, painting Maria’s face in sickly blue tones. Her knuckles were white where she gripped the edge of the console.
“Linds? Lindsay, can you hear me? Say something. Anything.” Her voice was a tight wire, stretched to breaking.
The feed was a nauseating, tilted view of the grotto. She’d seen it all. Viktor’s hands, the whispering concubines—Katy, Shannon, Jennifer, Aubry—their faces no longer just photographs in a file but living, smirking nightmares. She’d watched them circle Lindsay like beautiful vultures, their promises a poisonous melody. She’d seen Lindsay’s body arch and tremble not in struggle, but in surrender.
Then the bites. Five sets of fangs sinking into pale flesh simultaneously. The raw, shattered sound of Lindsay’s scream—not of pain, but of pleasure—would be etched into Maria’s memory forever.
The image on the screen wobbled. Lindsay’s skin was bleaching to the color of old ivory. The faint constellation of freckles on her arm vanished as if wiped away by an unseen hand. Her eyes, those warm, intelligent brown eyes Maria had known for a decade, rolled back, showing only whites.
“No, no, no,” Maria chanted, a useless prayer. She slammed her fist on the console. “Lindsay, fight it! Goddammit, fight!”
The feed stuttered, Lindsay’s newly pale face freezing in a rictus of ecstatic agony. Then, with a final, silent flicker, the screen died, plunging the van into near-darkness save for the weak glow of the city lights filtering through the tinted windows.
Silence. Thick and heavy.
Maria couldn’t move. She stared at the black screen, her mind trying to catch up to the horror her eyes had just witnessed. It wasn’t a kidnapping. It wasn’t a murder. It was a conversion. An unraveling. And her best friend, the most stubborn and morally grounded person she knew, had begged for it.
“I want it. Please, Viktor. I want to be yours. Turn me.”
The words echoed in the silence of the van. Maria felt a cold that had nothing to do with the night air seep into her bones.