Scarlet Prison

Chapter 13

              The concert was located just outside the city, right where the landscape started to become more rural. Dominik and I rode there in a limo, much to my embarrassment, but I forgot about the limo, as soon as we got close enough to hear the screaming and cheering of the crowd. I grinned in anticipation.

            "You seem excited," Dominik observed. He glanced uncomfortably, in the direction of the concert. At this distance, the people appeared as one, cohesive teeming mass.

            I was beyond excited. I had always dreamed of going to a big concert like this. I had seen videos of them, but my town had never held a concert to these proportions in my lifetime. I didn't dare tell Dominik that I had never been to something like this. "How can you not be excited, when you hear how excited all those people are?!" I asked. And then something occurred to me. That wasn't a teeming mass of people. It was a teeming mass of vampires. This could end very badly. "We don't have to go, if you don't want," I added quickly.

            Dominik fabricated a smile. "No, if you want to go, I want to go. It seems...interesting."

            "Interesting" was definitely the word for it. There was no going back, now.

            The driver dropped us off at the entrance to the concert. It was outside, but the area was gated off so that people without tickets couldn't enter. Some people were milling around the perimeter, sipping from bottles of blood, as they gazed upon us ticket holders with envy.

            Dominik showed the security guards our tickets, and we slipped into the crowd of vampires, through the gate. Before we got very far, a stark naked vampire, with white paint covering his entire body, jumped in front of us and screamed, "Music sets you free!", before disappearing into the crowd.

            I overheard the security guard behind me speaking into his radio. "We have another nude. He just passed by the east entrance."

            "Roger that. We'll send Christof over."

            I grinned at Dominik, unable to contain my amusement.

            He returned my grin with a skeptical gaze, hesitating to continue into the crowd. Then a small smile slipped onto his face, and he looked away, shaking his head. "You have a strange taste in entertainment, Nova," he said.

            "You're just afraid that if you stick around here long enough, some of that guy's nakedness will rub off, and your true crazy nature will be exposed, for the world to see."

            He gave me a steamy look. "Why would I be afraid of this night ending in nakedness?"

            I whacked his rock-hard abs with the back of my hand, before leading him further into the crowd. I wanted to get as close to the stage as possible. I didn't let on that my hand kind of hurt from the impact.

            He acknowledged the whack with a light-hearted "Ow!", but he was just being polite. There was no way I had actually caused him even a small amount of pain.

            As we made our way closer to the stage, we encountered a mosh pit. The vampires in the center of the pit were moving too fast for me to track their movements, but this mosh pit seemed a little more aggressive and violent than the human mosh pits I had watched on video clips. I thought I saw black blood oozing from their flesh, but I couldn't be sure. The vampires around them were cheering in morbid delight.

            I widened my eyes in horror and prepared to obey my instinct to run away.

            Dominik wrapped his arm around the back of my shoulders, preventing my escape. "Relax, they're just playing." He gave me a reassuring smile and pulled me in protectively.

An image from a memory popped into my head. Two dogs wrestling, at the park. Aryan had taken me there to play catch because he was stuck babysitting me. I was afraid that the dogs would hurt each other. Aryan rubbed my back and told me not to worry. The dogs were just playing. He told me he could tell because their tails were wagging. I remember thinking that my brother was really smart. I wanted to grow up to be just like him. Smart and sweet. Then he tied me to a tree and ran off to join his friends.

I looked at the vampires fighting before me now and saw that Dominik was right. They were smiling. I absently wondered if the robot dogs had been programmed to engage in that kind of behavior or if smiling vampires had been remotely controlling the fight, using the dogs as avatars to fulfill their own desires.

I pulled my gaze away from the fight. "Look, there's a good spot to stand over there." I squirmed out of Dominik's embrace and headed for the small pocket of space amid the crowd.

"You're just afraid their feisty spirit will rub off on you," Dominik said into my ear. The cheering was pretty loud over here, so proximity was necessary for communication. I wondered if we should have stayed at the edge of the crowd. Oh well. Too late now.

"I've already got one of those!" I shouted back.

He smiled mischievously, but any hope for further communication was extinguished, as the Barbaric Careeners began to blast their skull-shattering music.

As the concert went on, I was almost able to tune out the instinctive fear that came with being surrounded by a mass of vampires, and Dominik seemed to forget that he wasn't at a more exciting event, like a poetry reading. You could almost say that we had fun. Almost.