Vampire Boys Of Summer (Completed!)

Episode 68: In Pursuit

I heard Haru’s voice in my head. “Get down. Don’t look,” it commanded, and I couldn’t help but obey. I lay on the floorboard and covered my head with my hands.

I heard a snarl, followed by a scream. A loud growling sound, born of rage and enough to chill me to the bone, followed by more screams. A tearing sound, ripping, cracking…even more screaming. Something big hit the back of the car and I dared to look up. There was a thudding sound on the roof and a splatter of blood cascaded across the passenger’s side window. The car rocked again as one of the jock’s bodies came slamming down on the trunk, with Haru attached to his neck. I turned my head and buried my face in the floorboard again. I didn’t want to see what my Haru had become. This was why he didn’t want me to come on a hunt with him. It wasn’t pretty, nor was it the Haru I wanted to know. Still, I loved Haru more than anything, and if I were going to be his girl I would need to accept who and what he was. After all, he wasn’t being brutal and destroying our attackers for no reason. He was doing exactly what he said he would always do: protect me.

Someone yanked open the driver’s front door and got in. They plopped down hard in the seat and began to repeatedly beat the steering wheel. “Shit, shit, shit,” they cried and I realized it was Chi. I heard her tearing up something in the front of the car and I dared to sit up. She was fumbling with wires under the steering column, touching some loose ones together. The car jump started to life, the engine revving under her heavy foot.Chi looked at me in the rear view mirror with fear in her eyes. Her face was streaked with tears. “They got Luhan,” she babbled. “Damn it, we should have known!”

“Should have known what?”

The front passenger door was flung open and Haru got in.

“What the hell happened?” He asked Chi.

“They took Luhan!”

“Drive! We got to get him back!”

Haru looked back at me. His face was covered in blood, but I knew it was not his own.

“What about Ryo?” I asked.

“We can’t help him now. Luhan is more important.”

Chi put the car in gear And we took off after the police car that had taken Luhan. I looked back. Ryo was nowhere to be seen. We may not have always got along but I feared for him. Did the jocks beat him to death? Was he still laying in the grass back there?

Haru looked at me as if he understood my thoughts. “I’m sorry, Nora. There’s no time.” He climbed over the seat to join me in the back. “Listen, I know you think we are being cold to Ryo, but he can handle himself.”

“But…”

“Yeah, I didn’t see him either. But listen, when his time comes he’s not going out under a pile of kids or from a couple aspiring football players. Whatever has happened to him, he’ll rejoin us. But he would want us to get our priorities straight. And right now, the thing to do , the most important thing to do, is get Luhan back.”

Chi took a sharp turn. The wheels screeched on the pavement and Haru slid into me. He put his hands lovingly on my face. I loved the feeling of his palms gentle against my cheeks. Any other time and I would be throwing myself upon his beautiful lips. Again, he sensed my thoughts and kissed me.

“I know you have seen some things today that are hard to take. I never wanted you to see me as anything other than your devoted boyfriend. I don’t want to be a monster to you.”

The image of him, teeth sunk int the neck of the footballer, blood spraying across the window, made me shudder inside, but I tried not to show it. “You’re not a monster, Haru. Never.”

“When the rage overcomes me the bloodlust rises. And when the bloodlust rises, I become something else entirely. Chinatsu has more control, but mine is…crazy.”

An uneasy look must have been on my face because he kissed me again, soft and tender as if to say, there’s no monsters here. “Don’t worry. I’ll never hurt you. Or turn on you in a blind rage. I don’t get that crazy. I will always protect you, Nora. Even from myself, if need be. That I promise you.”

“We should have been protecting Luhan,” Chi said from the driver’s seat.

Haru sighed. “We can’t blame ourselves, Chi. We got distracted, split up and divided. We’ll get Lu back.”

“I can’t believe we got beat by high school football and little kids.”

“We were too confident. It won’t happen again.”

I looked at my Haru. He had a determined look on his face, but beneath that was worry. Perhaps we’d all been bolstered by Ryo’s cocky attitude of revenge and everyone let their guard down. But I knew that was a mistake that wouldn’t be made twice.

“There they are,” Chi said, taking another crazy turn, pouring on the gas so much the back end of the car slid for just a moment. I grabbed the door handle to hold on. Up ahead I could see the police cruiser. It was pouring on the gas too, doing its best to keep a good gap between us.

Haru patted my knee and looked straight ahead. “It’s going to be alright,” he said, but I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or trying to convince himself.

“What if they kill him…?”

“They aren’t going to kill him, Chi,” Haru replied. “They need him alive just as much as we do.”

She nodded and tried to urge the car to go faster. The cruiser still had a lead on us, but it seemed we were closing in.

“I want to know where the hell they got the cops from,” Chi mumbled.

“I don’t know. I just hope they don’t have more than that.”

We took a curve, then another. The hills rolled out before us. “Damn it, they are surging ahead again. We’ll never catch them like this.”

The cruiser went over a small hill. When we topped the rise there were at another hill and going over. Our car left the road, airborne over top of the hill. We landed with a bump and screech of tires and kept going. But they were still gaining ground away from us. They went up another rise.

“Push it,” Haru yelled, and Chi pushed the gas pedal all the way to the floor. We climbed the rise so fast my stomach lurched. Then came the crash. There was the sound of tearing metal, car parts breaking away and scattering across pavement. The tumbling of a vehicle turning end over end on the other side of the hill. The police cruiser was under attack.

We came over the rise and the wreckage lay before us. Though we had just heard the sounds mere seconds ago, it appeared to be all over with in devastating ways. The cruiser was in pieces, debris of metal and fiberglass scattered everywhere.

Chi slammed on the brakes. Haru and I both braced for impact, but our car went into slide and avoided the crash. The vehicle came to a stop right in front of the blue suited officers. He was lying in the road. Arms and legs were twisted in uncomfortable directions, probably broken. His neck was a mass of exposed sinew and blood.

We all jumped out of the car. Haru and Chi ran to the police cruiser, but I hung back. I didn’t know what had happened, but whatever had destroyed their car I didn’t want to mess with. It looked like they had run into an invisible brick wall, for their was nothing else in the road they could have hit.

I watched as both Chi and Haru hurriedly sifted through the wreckage in search of our kidnapped friend. Chi flung a door out of her way. There was a body underneath. It wasn’t our companion. It was the other officer and he seemed to have suffered similar injuries as the first guy. Even from where I stood, I could see his throat also appeared be nothing but a horrible mass of ripped tissue and blood. I put my hand to my mouth to keep from getting sick.

“What’s going on,” asked a voice from beside me. It startled me and I jumped as I turned towards the sound. The figure standing right beside me was also covered in blood. It was on his face, dripping down his shirt, splattered on his pants, and even across his cute purple painted nails. Luhan looked up at me. “Looks like someone made a boo-boo.”