Chapter Eleven #2
“No, you don’t understand,” Theodore responded, his voice frantic. “Running only makes things worse. Leave... leave me alone.”
He shrugged off my arm and waved to a group of young ladies, power-walking in their direction and calling out greetings.
I was pretty sure forcing my presence and causing a scene wasn’t going to help the matter so I stayed away and hoped I could catch him alone when he left the party.
But, at the end of the evening, he was escorted out by his father and when I tried to follow them I was stopped when I reached the family wing.
Defeated, I skulked back to Tristan.
Tristan
“It’s not really about construction materials,” Matthias blurted out when I was driving us home.
Ah, so he finally was going to explain his newest fixation.
“Is it maybe about a certain young man?” I asked.
“How did you— Nevermind, I wasn’t subtle, was I?” Matthias slumped in his seat. “Tristan, something is very, very wrong in that household.”
I listened to Matthias explain what he discovered and, in light of the new information, I had to re-contextualize several comments Mr. Feliciano had made about his son when he was speaking with me.
“Theodore never makes mistakes,” Feliciano said about the flawless violin performance. “I trained it out of him.”
“Oh yes, I picked out my son’s suit. Isn’t it lovely? My dear late wife loved to dress him up so I’m continuing the tradition,” Feliciano laughed.
“College? Theodore doesn’t need it,” Feliciano waved a careless hand. “He will stay here and help me with the company. Right, son?”
Now I was glad I decided to ask those questions about the young man after I saw Matthias pull him to the side.
“Are you sure you want to involve yourself in this?” I asked seriously. At Matthias’ determined nod I shot him a reassuring smile. “Then it’s good I know Feliciano is going abroad for the next month. If he doesn’t take Theodore with him we can try to get in contact. And if he does...”
We discussed plans through the two hours long drive and I only hoped Matthias wasn’t going to get too attached. I could spare money and time and use my contacts to get Theodore out of trouble but we could not keep him. Doubly so, because of our vampiric status and the secrecy surrounding it.
Soon, I learned Feliciano did take Theodore with him to Turkey.
We decided to focus on gathering information about the millionaire and his son.
Feliciano’s stays abroad and the rumors of his connections to the party that stood in opposition to Turkey’s current ruling power looked like a promising venue for blackmail.
As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one thinking so.
“Arrested?” Matthias asked with disbelief. “He was arrested there?”
“Apparently, he was being a pain in the ass of a local politician. I don’t know if the charges are real or made up but my contact says they are going to keep him at least for a week or two to teach him a lesson,” I explained what I have learned.
“And Theodore? Was he arrested too?”
“No. And Feliciano refuses to say where he is,” I put a stack of paper on the table. “My contact faxed me the transcript of the interrogation. I had to pay through the nose for it, so let’s hope it will prove helpful and we can use the situation to our advantage.”
Matthias grabbed a few pages of the transcript, eager to be able to do something, and I started reading the rest.
My blood froze as I found what I was looking for.
“Matthias,” I called and we studied the conversation between two police officers and Alfredo Feliciano together.
AF: You should let me go. My son won’t survive without me.
PO1: Ha! Did you hear that Luis? My son is useless like that too. Kids those days.
PO2: But his kid isn’t a kid. He is twenty-one. He can take care of himself. And he can be tried as an adult too, so if you care for him better work with us and tell us...
What followed was more pages of the interrogation going in circles as Feliciano refused to cooperate but I was stuck on that first line.
My son won’t survive without me.
“He wasn’t joking or using a hyperbole, was he?” Matthias asked with the quietness of a volcano about to explode.
“I fear so as well,” I nodded.
We had to find Theodore.
I poured everything I had into the search. Used both human and supernatural contacts to find every last scrap of information. Feliciano owned several buildings in Turkey and was connected to even more. We made our way to Turkey as quickly as possible but getting there took nearly a whole day.
Finally, after three days of searching, we found Theodore.
And we were too late.
The house was set on a small property in the middle of nowhere. You could have missed that anybody was there if not for the smell.
We followed our noses and the faint, so faint, beat of a heart and it led us to a large wall to ceiling wardrobe. I pushed the sliding door open with trembling fingers.
My son won’t survive without me , echoed in my mind as I looked at the doll in front of me.
A sheet of plastic separated me from the man we searched for.
A man who was kept in the standard position of a Barbie doll, standing with his arms at his sides, kept still by rings of cuffs bolted to the cheerful yellow wall.
Theodore’s ankles, wrists, neck... he was pinned.
And around him clothes and accessories were presented as if it was the trendiest new set for a doll, all neatly packaged in a box.
Matthias tore the plastic partition down with a furious shout and cupped Theodore’s face. I let the frantic babble of assurance fly over me as I assessed the damage.
At some point Theodore realized no one was coming for him and started struggling. The blood around the cuffs and his bruised neck could attest to that. After over three, or maybe four, days without food and water, forced into the same position he looked...
He looked like he was dying.
I found a way to free Theodore. It was as simple as pushing a button on the outside of the wardrobe.
The cuffs retreated into the wall and Matthias supported the fragile body as we took him down and laid him on the bed.
Theodore was unconscious. A quick assessment proved my worst fears: organ failure has started.
When a seizure wrecked the young body I wasn’t even surprised.
“He’s not going to survive this,” Matthias said through tears. “I have failed him. I have failed. He’s going to die.”
“Yes,” I confirmed softly. We both could hear his heart missing beats, slowing down. “He’s going to die. But maybe it doesn’t have to be the end.”
Hope bloomed on Matthias’ tear-streaked face.
“Please, please, Tristan, please,” he begged me. Silly man. He didn’t have to. No matter how much I protested I had a feeling Theodore was going to join us, one way or the other, from the start.
“I want you to have a future. To have a choice if you want to truly live or die for good,” I said to the unresponsive blond man as I took a knife to my own wrist and watched as my blood dripped into Theodore’s mouth as his heart stopped.
“Please, don’t hate me for this,” I murmured as red eyes snapped open and a cry of agony ripped from Theodore’s throat.
Matthias cradled the emaciated body as it contorted under the change, familiar with the gruesome process from his own willing shift into a vampire. It wasn’t pretty or pleasant but after several hours of this torture Theodore went unconscious once more, and this time I knew he was going to survive.
Theo
I liked talking to people.
You would think that would be something I knew before I died but no, I had learned that about myself only after I became a vampire at the age of twenty-one.
Only then could I talk to others because I wanted to and not because it was an elaborate performance that was going to be harshly judged. Only then did I stop being a doll.
It all started with my mother. She adored dressing me up and I loved spending time with her.
We had little fashion shows and I left my hair to grow long just so that she could play with my hair.
Sitting together and creating increasingly silly stories about wizards, robots, and dragons while she brushed or braided my hair was one of my fondest memories.
My father looked at us playing dress-up fondly and even brought miniature traditional costumes for me to wear from every country he visited for business. He loved my mother with all his heart.
My mother died when I was eight and my father’s heart broke.
“Take care of our beautiful doll,” she said with a trembling smile before she breathed her last.
Those last words broke my father’s mind.
After that, he didn’t have the heart to care for a son but he could care for a doll.
At first he did what mother did: dressed me up and tried to help me with my hair, even if he didn’t know how to style it he was willing to learn. But, one day, I came back from a playdate with local kids, which was overseen by my nanny, with dirty clothes and scraped knees.
Father freaked out.
“You are a doll, Theodore. You have to stay pristine,” he said, patting my hair.
I wasn’t permitted to play with other kids since that day.
When the school year finished I didn’t go back to school.
Instead, I got homeschooling and private tutors.
Father systematically isolated me from anyone I knew and prevented me from creating new friendships.
At least I could speak to the house staff and my tutors.
Some of them were nice. Sometimes too nice.
Miss Angela, who was responsible for teaching me French, fretted over how I was treated.
“What your father is doing is wrong,” she said. “I’m going to help you.”
She reported father to the police.
The officers came and talked to father. They didn’t even look at me. Miss Angela left our house in cuffs, arrested for false accusations and wasting the police’s time.
After that, no one in the house was allowed to speak to me, outside of necessary tasks or my scheduled lessons.
I felt so lonely it was a relief when father started taking me with him to parties, showing off his heir to the other millionaires, rising entrepreneurs, and famous people. The relief lasted only until I learned my every mistake was going to be severely punished.
My fingers fumbling the piano keys got me a day without food. An old money matron commenting on how sad I looked resulted in father cutting power to my room, which prevented me from seeking solace in reading books under the light of a lamp. The one time I cried...
I didn’t want to remember the time I cried. I never did it again.
Slowly but steadily, father chipped away my humanity and replaced it with behaviors he wanted to see.
One day, I looked in the mirror and realized I didn’t see myself there, just a product of my father’s imagination.
The cut of my now short hair was ordered by him, the clothes a set he chose and put on me that morning, even the book I was holding was one he had told me to read.
I realized there was going to be nothing left of me if I didn’t escape when I was sixteen.
I ran. When a squad of men came for me they were exceedingly gentle as they pressed a chloroform-covered rag to my nose.
“No bruises! Don’t grip him so tightly or we won’t get the premium for perfect condition,” I heard one of them hiss.
Perfect condition. As if I was a collector’s item.
Afterward, I woke up in The Box for the first time.
“Dolls don’t run,” father said from behind the sheer plastic of my display cage as I shook with fear when I realized I was pinned to the wall.
In the two days since my running away he had remodeled my room, changing one side into a Barbie-like display box.
“You will learn how to be a good doll, but for now I’m going to put you away. ”
He left the room. And he left me in silence and darkness.
I think something broke in me at that moment because afterwards I was too scared to run and I did the only thing I could to survive.
I became a perfect doll.
Until Tristan and Matthias allowed me to feel human again.