Chapter Text
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
H.P. Lovecraft
Getting kidnapped is starting to become an alarming pattern in Spencer’s life.
The sensations that slam into Spencer upon awakening—a splitting headache radiating from the right side of his head, the cloying scent of blood clogging his nostrils, and a cold that seeps deep into bone—make it all too easy to deduce his current predicament. Recent memory is soon to follow, providing a helpful image of hooded figures pulling him into the back of a van, and the subsequent burst of pain in his head, followed by unconsciousness.
Great.
It’s only Tuesday. Kidnapping feels like more of a Thursday or Friday activity.
“Think the blood bag’s awake,” comes a rough voice from in front of him, prompting Spencer to flinch back and wrench open his eyes. One blink later and Spencer’s already assessed his surroundings: ramshackle wooden basement, likely isolated, two mid-thirties white men towering over him, and best of all, fucking cage bars in front of him.
Jesus.
Spencer drags himself into a seated position. “You—” A cough racks through him, and he doubles over, wrapping his arms around his midsection.
The men in front of him snicker. “Aw, does the meat bag’s head hurt?”
When the cough runs its course, leaving his eyes watering, he raises his gaze to them once again. Both are clad in ragged, rust-stained flannels, brazen grins suggesting a large degree of enjoyment at Spencer’s compromised state—sexual sadists, then. “You should let me go,” he intones as evenly as his scratchy voice will allow. “I’m an FBI agent. My team will find you.”
Their laughter builds to guffaws, and they gasp for air in front of Spencer, one slapping the other’s back. “Hear that, Jerry? The big bad FBI is gon’ get us!”
“Oh, I’m shakin’, Randy.” Jerry’s strangely yellow-tinted eyes swivel to Spencer, and he cocks his head, teeth bared in a sharp grin. “Look at ‘im. All scrawny and raggedy, tryin’ not to shit his pants. Ain’t he the stuff of nightmares?”
Faces and names. Spencer tries to keep his expression blank even as his gut plummets; if an unsub shows you their face and name, they don’t intend to let you live.
“Stuff of dreams, maybe,” Randy corrects, leaning his forearm on the bars above Spencer’s head and sneering at him. Despite his best efforts, Spencer can’t help but shy away a little, skin prickling with discomfort. “He’s pretty, for a human. Let’s hope he tastes as good as he looks, eh?
Tastes…?
Spencer’s mind whites out with panic.
Cannibals.
Spencer’s gotten himself kidnapped by fucking cannibals.
Before he can react, Jerry reaches out with a lightning-fast arm, snagging Spencer’s wrist and tugging it towards the bars, pulling it all the way through until his shoulder collides with the metal. An anguished cry breaks free from Spencer at the man’s bruising grip and the pressure on his shoulder, and he braces his other hand against the bars, trying in vain to pull his arm back.
Jerry tugs his arm warningly, and Spencer bites back a whimper at the fiery strain in his muscles. He stops struggling, and instead watches wide-eyed, ice filling his veins.
Jerry turns his arm so that his palm is facing upwards, then grasps the fabric of Spencer's shirt sleeve and yanks. In a display of almost inhuman strength, the fabric tears away easily, leaving only a jagged edge coming a fraction of the way down his bicep. Soft flesh left exposed and all too vulnerable.
Spencer’s breaths come faster and faster.
“Ladies first,” Jerry says, gesturing to Spencer’s exposed inner arm.
Randy rolls his eyes with a soft, “Fuck you,” but indulges, opening his mouth in a facsimile of a grin. Something altogether unexplainable and even more terrifying happens then—in front of the man’s yellowing teeth, a set of sharper, monstrous ones emerge from his gums, faded stains dying the tips a dull red.
Spencer thinks his heart might have stopped.
Before he has a chance to gather his thoughts or try to rationalise what he just saw, Randy leans down and buries the sharp teeth into the crook of Spencer’s arm, and from there, all he knows is pain. A hacked-together scream pours out of his mouth, and he curls his fingers into a tight fist, unable to comprehend anything other than the fire spreading up his arm.
And oh God, he can feel it, under the haze of agony—the blood being sucked from his veins into a waiting mouth, lips sucking at the surrounding skin, tongue lapping up any drops that spill free. Spencer writhes, but the grip on his arm is iron; there’s no escape from the pain.
Spencer’s best asset, his mind, has been rendered entirely useless by the bombardment of pain. He can barely string two thoughts together, consumed by an unforgiving awareness of his body, thoughts rooted in the animal instinct to pull away, fight back, escape.
And he tries, he really tries, but it’s for nothing.
Finally, after what seems an eternity of mind-buckling pain, the man’s teeth detach with a wet sound, and he smacks his lips contentedly. “Ohh, that hit the spot.”
Sluggish blinks are all the movement Spencer can manage, slumped against the bars, vision swimming. How much blood did he lose? The average adult male body only contains twelve pints, and can safely lose about one. Mild side effects such as nausea and anxiety arise when 15 to 30% of blood volume is lost; any more than that is very dangerous.
Reality knits itself back together as his mind parses over the relevant information, and he feels just barely alive, managing to suck in a gasping breath. His awareness of the world around him is oddly fractured, whittled down to a slideshow of the important things—the gleam of Randy’s teeth, the red of Jerry’s flannel. He tries to crawl away from them, but he can’t figure out how to get his limbs to work.
Then Jerry bites him, and it all starts again.
Spencer would’ve written off the terrifying and painful experience as a dream upon waking, if only it weren’t for the relentless throbbing nestled deep in his elbow. He pries open his eyes at great effort, scanning the room for his tormentors.
Empty.
Feeling only slightly relieved, he turns his attention to his arm, wincing at the torn flesh circling it in two crescent moons. He must’ve passed out while they were… doing whatever they were doing, because his arm is still dangling outside of the cage, his face pressed against the bars.
He extracts himself from the bars with a groan, manoeuvring his injured arm gingerly through the opening and cradling it by his side. Agony pulses through it at the movement, hot and fierce, and he bites back a sound of pain. Even if his captors aren’t here, he doesn’t want to seem any weaker to them.
“It’s worst the first time.”
The words come from behind him, and Spencer whirls around, heart lurching. There’s a dishevelled woman curled up in a corner of the cage, both sleeves torn, blood trickling from layers of intersecting bite marks on her arms, varied stages of healing suggesting that she’s been here a while. Her eyes are dull, and they don’t settle, like they barely see him.
Then, it hits him: this is Lisa Danvers, one of the missing people.
“What’s your name?” he asks anyway, to establish rapport.
She just keeps staring for a few long moments. “Lisa,” she finally offers.
“Hi, Lisa,” he says, careful to keep his voice soft. He falls back on his FBI training in talking to victims, trying to ignore the fact that at this current moment, he falls under that category, too. “My name’s Spencer. Do you know where we are?”
She shrugs. It looks like the movement pains her.
“Okay, that’s alright. I’m with the FBI, and my team is the best of the best. They’ll save us.”
A rueful smile flickers across her face. “This… this is out of their league.”
“Do you know how many of them there are?” he presses instead of acknowledging her ominous statement. “Just Randy and Jerry?”
“Dunno. I don’t look at their faces.”
That sends a bolt of dread through Spencer’s heart. “If you had to guess?”
“Maybe… eight. Ten. I don’t know.”
“Ten?” he echoes, the word leaving a bitter taste on his tongue. This is so much bigger than he thought. “Are you sure?”
“No, I’m not,” she shoots back, frustration setting into her face. “I told you I don’t know.”
“Okay!” He attempts to raise his hands in surrender, but the wound reminds him of its existence with a stab of pain, and he abandons the motion. “Okay, I’m sorry, Lisa. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“It’s okay.” She seems far away again, eyes misting over. “I’m glad I’m not alone anymore. The last ones didn’t last long. I hope you do, Spencer.”
Ice washes over Spencer. “The… last ones?” he parrots, voice shaking. “What… what happened to them?”
Her eyes slide away from Spencer. “Sucked dry.”
That seems to be the end of her energy for conversation, because her eyes glaze over and her face goes blank, as if she’s retreating somewhere deep inside her mind. Spencer is itching to do the same.
He can’t stop thinking about their teeth. Unless he was suffering an extreme stress-induced late-onset schizophrenic hallucination (something that is almost preferable to the alternative), there must be something… unnatural about their captors.
He tips his head back against the bars, a small burst of pain shooting through it at the collision, then presses his palms so hard into his eyes he sees stars. He just can’t stop reliving it. The bruising grip, the monstrous grin, the teeth…
Spencer doesn’t like not knowing things.
“What—” he starts to say, but something clings to his throat, and he clears it loudly. He licks his lips. “What are they?”
Spencer’s voice breaks with the question. He hates himself for asking it, for even considering the question lurking in the dark recesses of his mind, but he can’t ignore it any longer.
Lisa barely stirs at his speech, leaning against the corner with her eyes shut. “Isn’t it obvious?”
No, it isn’t, he wants to say, but he can’t quite get his voice to work. Tell me.
She sighs. “You’re gonna have to face the truth eventually. Those things out there… they’re not human.”
“But that’s not possible,” Spencer argues, but the words ring hollow, even to his own ears. “They can’t be—it’s not—”
Suddenly Lisa laughs, a bitter, pained sound, one that eventually devolves into a hacking cough. “They’re vampires, Spencer.”
“No,” Spencer is already saying, shaking his head side-to-side, the cage spinning around him. Shit, he probably has a concussion, but he can’t think about that right now. “No, that isn’t possible. Vampires aren’t real.”
“What else do you wanna call them?” she asks, finally opening her eyes and pinning them on him. “They have fangs, they suck blood, they do things humans can’t.”
“They—they could use prosthetics,” he suggests, voice pitching up in desperation. “They could’ve surgically implanted them into their… their gums or something, and somehow they can retract them. Or—or they could’ve drugged us! So we hallucinate… vampires…”
She doesn’t answer, leaving Spencer to stew in the fading ramblings of denial.
They can’t really be vampires, can they? Spencer can’t believe he’s even considering the woman’s words, but they don’t seem so far-fetched when he’s lying curled up in a cage, head pounding incessantly with the effects of blood loss from what they did to him. There’s no way. There’s just no way.
Randy’s earlier words flash through his mind, and the pieces click into place, with the finality of a funeral bell tolling:
“He’s pretty, for a human. Let’s hope he tastes as good as he looks, eh?”
For a human.
For a human.
“Oh, God,” Spencer whispers to himself. “I’ve been kidnapped by vampires.”