Criminal (1D)

Chapter 32

Niall

We crashed through the front door of a perfectly crafted white house with a manicured lawn. Three men sat in the living room with cards in their hands, cigars hanging from their lips, and booze littering the floors. They jumped as the door slammed down and we stormed the place. I could smell that they were vampires. Ever since an hour ago, all my sense had returned to me. My healing, my speed, strength, smell, hearing. Everything. And now I was filled with a sense of rage and vengeance. Alena must have done something to Jenna. I wouldn't tell myself that she could be dead. No, it has to be something else! The three guys rushed forward and I was the first to get my hands around the biggest ones neck. I slammed them to the floor and locked my fingers, squeezing as hard as I could manage. And being a vampire meant that I could manage a lot.
"Where is she?!" I scream into his face, digging my nails in and causing his blood to leak onto the floor. I can feel his flesh trying to heal around my fingers. The lads around me are fighting the two other vampires, but they quickly snap their necks. We have at least two hours before they'll wake. They guy beneath me squirms and manages to spit blood onto my face. I wipe it off on my shoulder.
"Tell me where she is! Or so god help me I will bite off every one of your limbs piece by piece!" I snarl, extending my fangs to bare in his face. I was older than him, it was clear. Much older. His eyes were a bright blood-red while mine was more pale. That's how you tell a vampires age. By how faced the red in their eyes are. There's only ever been on vampire who's gotten old enough to have white eyes. The first vampire. Nobody knows where he is now. The fledgling beneath me writhes in pain, his mouth open but no breath being drawn.
"Niall!" Liam warns from behind me. I shake the guys neck, smacking his skull hard against the floor. Instead of crying in pain his body makes a flat basketball noise.
"Niall! Let him go right now! He's no good to us unconscious!" Liam shouts to me. I growl and drop his neck. He gasps for breath as I lick him into the wall.
"Don't try anything, fledgling. We're stronger and faster!" Louis warns as he pulls himself from the hole in the wall. He's smiling with blood dripping down his forehead and neck.
"You can't kill me, we all know that. No matter what, I will always survive. It's who I am! I won't tell you anything!" He laughs crazily.
"You're right." I turn to Jenna's parents and quickly wipe the rest of the blood off my face and hands. "But we can lock you up and torture you every waking moment. We can make your eternal life your only prison!" Jenna's mom says, stepping forward and holding a black pistol towards him. I can smell the contents of the gun from her. Steel bullets that explode on impact and spray toxic liquids into any vampire that comes to pass. They call it nightshade. It's a medically enhanced drug that shuts down all the organs in a vampires system except the heart and lungs. It renders us completely helpless for hours, even days based on how many times we're shot. The vampire becomes scared and his features return to normal.
"Alright! Alright! The boss took her to this ancient torture prison, but nobody knows where it's located other than in a big wildlife reserve!" He puts his hands up in surrender. Suddenly, a flash zooms through the room. In the next moment, Alena is standing in the doorway holding the vampires heart. It's the color black, the color that human blood turns when they become a vampire. I try not to let the fact that I barely have any of my human blood left distract me.
"Hello, boys! Oh, and Jenna's precious parents!" She drops the heart to the ground. It turns to a liquid the minute it touches the ground and begins its slow travel back to its owner, staining the wood floorboards with black.
"Tell us where the prison is!" I demand, clenching my jaw. She tisks her pointer finger at me like I was a stray puppy.
"Now, now, now! That's no way to ask your mummy for something!" She says in a high pitched baby voice. I growl, but Harry holds me back. I glance around the room before my eyes land on something shiny next to the brick fireplace. It's a long metal stick that ends in a triangle holding two more triangles within it. The branding iron. It glimmers in the low light, but I can still catch the writing scrawled on the side in cursive. Whickery. I turn back to Alena, my creator, my enemy, my friend.
"You seem tense, Alena! Are you missing something that your having trouble finding?" I ask in a low voice that lacks any emotion. Alena glares at me, but then, ever so subtly, her eyes twitch. I grin mischievously at her.
"And we have it, don't we?" I question. Harry's grip on me loosens Alena stands awkwardly, trying her best to remain firm and keep making eye contact, but the look on her face is priceless. Anger, hatred, but also sadness, despair.
"Nothing that I can't take, little men." She eyes all of us sternly. "Besides, I-" I cut her off by dashing forward and launching myself on top of her. She shrieks and hisses as we both go down. She pins me on my stomach with my arms behind my back.
"You can't beat me, Niall." She leans down and I feel her tongue behind my ear. "But you definitely are hot when you break a sweat!" I fight viciously beneath her, grunting with the effort. The lads are moving into action now. They spread around us and all close in at once. Alena seems annoyed, but not for long since she can't attack more than three of us at a time. We take her down and I shoot her three times with Jenna's moms gun before handing it back.
"I know where she is! Look!" I show everyone the words written on the branding iron.
"What? There's nothing there." Louis says. I look back down and to my surprise, the words had disappeared. I stare at it in shock.
"But there was something there! I saw it with my own eyes! It said Whickery right here!" I point my finger to the tiny stretch of space.
"Wait a minute, did you just say Whickery?!" Jenna's dad gasps. We all turn to them expectantly.
"What, do you know where it is?" I question. Jenna's mom steps forward, spinning the pistol on her finger and tucking it into her waistband. She gives me a studious look.
"Oh, we know exactly where that is." She says.

A few minutes later the lads and I were standing in the center of a green field.
"The entrance to Whickery is somewhere in this field. We just have to find it and press this into the ground above it." Jenna's dad pulls up the branding iron. The look on his face was enough to put us into silence. We spent the next hour scouring the field, listening for any sounds that Jenna would make, and trying to catch her scent. Finally, Harry thought she caught her scent below him at the edge of the field.
"Stand back! We don't know how large the entrance will be!" Jenna's mom warns. We all step back as her husband pushes the branding iron as deep as he can into the grass. The ground rumbles and then hisses as it slides into invisible folds in the earth.
"Jenna?!" Her parents scream into the gaping dark hole below us. At first nothing responds, but then we hear a soft son of an answer.
"Mom?! Dad?!" I'm quick to drop down into the darkness and scoop her up as fast as I can. I jump the three feet to the surface and place Jenna in the grass. The hole closed with a hiss behind me. Jenna stares up at me like she's seen a ghost. Her eyes are so blank. So fragile and weak, that something inside me flutters with sadness. She looks like she was when we first met. Her hair has turned back to brown and it is tangled atop her head. She's lacking any sign of makeup, and her beauty is masked by a sheen of sweat across her brows.
"Jenna!" Her parents scream again and launch themselves at her. She wraps them into her arms and begins to cry. Fat tears roll down her face and her cheeks flush. Every movement she makes is slow and painful. I wished with all my heart and soul that my strength could once again flow through her. I gasp when I notice that her stomach no longer extends ever so slightly. I can't hear a second heartbeat on her. I gulp down a cry and rub my eyes before she can see me cry. I bend down beside her, but her parents glare at me and refuse to let me close to her.
"I'm so sorry! I should've found you sooner, but you were just... Gone! Please forgive me!" I ask her softly, lifting my hand to push past her dad and caress her cheek. But before I can even get close, she flinches away and grips her mother tightly.
"W-Who are you?" She asks, her eyes clouded with confusion. Her amazing green eyes. And then I register what she had said. And then my body freezes.