Ashanti

Chapter 14

"So, you say you're...An accountant?" Dr Roland smirks, taking a sip of his wine while staring at his date. A beautiful blonde woman, green eyes, long blonde eyelashes covered by mascara.

"Yes...I also help my company with marketing, recruiting new clients, as well as..." The woman talks about her career, Dr Roland watches her lips, a soft mauve color with red lip liner still lurking around her cupid's bow. He hears the woman speak, but all he can think about is how they met. Dr Roland was at a family reunion, he met his date while talking to his aunt that lives in Connecticut but the entire family was from Alabama. Suddenly, the aunt mentions her daughter, to whom he's never met. She goes on about how she wants to keep the good looks and cognitive genes in the family, with no other dominant traits from other blood lines.

Dr Roland found out that his aunt wants him to pursue his own cousin without telling her that they are related. The guilt starts to slowly eat Dr Roland alive, but he continues to stay quiet. This is his first date since he was sworn in as a doctor, so he didn't want to risk the perfect opportunity to get laid.

The girl's voice starts to overlap with his aunt's voice, asking him to pursue his cousin. The voices get more and more intense, the girl's eyes start to bleed, blood runs down her cheeks, Dr Roland watches in horror, but tries his best to keep his composure.

Until Dr Roland eventually had enough, "Would you like to go up to my suite and have a drink?" Dr Roland swallows his fear, the woman agrees and follows him to the high-end elevator.

"I must say, I've never had someone take me back to a hotel room before...Is it because you're ashamed of me?" The woman jokingly asks, Dr Roland takes offense to the question.

He walks over to her side of the elevator and he proceeds to kiss her while saying, "I cherish you, I cherish your company..." He moves down to her neck, he opens eyes and sees a bite mark tearing into his date's neck. He immediately releases her, she falls to the ground, dead, practically blue. Dr Roland screams and backs himself into his side of the elevator, frantically pushing the buttons while whispering: "What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck?"

The elevator remains still, Dr Roland eventually turns his back to his date's body, he feels someone breathe down his neck., practically growling, "Open your eyes." The voice echoes away, Dr Roland looks down to see that he was in the morgue, standing over a corpse that looks almost identical to his date.

Both share the same bite mark in the right side of the neck, both have the same red liner lurking around the cupid's bow.

"They found her dead in an elevator, witnesses say that she was on a date with some hot shot at that fancy hotel down in main street. That poor sap just ran away... " Marcus, the manager of the hospital morgue, chuckles in disbelief as he prepares to cut her open.

"This isn't real..."Dr Roland grips at his small amount of hair while backing into the wall where the other bodies are kept. "You aren't real, she isn't real, none of this is real, I'm dreaming! I have to be! Lucky for Dr Roland, he was right, it was a dream.

He wakes up in his hotel room, the woman, still by his side. Dr Roland stares at her until he gets a phone call, it's Ashanti. "Hello?"

"Dr Roland, you must come to my grandmother's ward immediately! Something's happening!" Ashanti shouts from the other line, she only speaks formally when she's upset.

"What's uh...What's going on?"

"She's...She's...shouting...She keeps telling me to burn it, I don't know what it is..." Ashanti gets interrupted by Esther's yell once again, demanding, begging her to burn it. "Come, please..." The line cuts off, Dr Roland swiftly changes into a nice hoodie, he puts on some black baggy jeans and a hat. That's when he sneaks out of the hotel room, leaving his date all by herself.

He arrives at the address to the ward, given by his new assistant, a nurse who just graduated from nursing school. Nothing looked wrong with this assistant, she just seemed quite...odd.

The "ward" looked like an abandoned building, not a place to keep people who are struggling mentally. The door suddenly swings open and Dr Roland carelessly walks inside, the assistant who gave him the address was standing inside. She was different, dramatically shorter, she had darker, more dehydrated skin, and most of all, she didn't wear the usual scrubs, only a faded nightgown, covered in dried blood.

The assistant mumbles, "Ding...dong...The witch is dead..." it chuckles, the most distorted laugh creeps out of its mouth before it lunges at Dr Roland, killing him before slamming the door shut, Dr Roland dies in the dark, never to be seen again.