Vamped by Lucienne Diver

morsel, the voice in my head continued to whisper, blowing tendrils of inky, multi-legged invasion through my brain.
    My lips curled. “Ew, ew, ew!” Everything in me shrieked that we should turn and run, put the pedal to the metal. “We’re supposed to go toward that?”
    “Toward what?”
    “That,” I answered, wanting to beat at my own head to stop the psychic infestation, which was still skittering through my brain. The whispers seemed to slip into all the dark pathways, opening the Pandora’s box of fears I locked away.
    “Turn,” I said through gritted teeth.
    “Which way?”
    Back , I wanted to tell him. “Left,” I said instead.
    Rick took the next left, into an abandoned industrial site blocked off by an iron gate gone to rust. The headlights swept it, and with a “Holy crap” Rick stopped short. “This is as far as I go,” he said.
    I was guessing the place had finally gotten to him as well. Maybe he was getting some hint of the whispers that were now so loud, so overlapping, they nearly drowned out the sound of his voice.
    Against my will, my hand reached for the door handle and I stumbled onto the cracked drive before I could stop myself. Whatever this thing was, I couldn’t just shake it off like I had Connor’s little compulsion. It was more primal and powerful than that. Than me.
    If I lived through this, Connor was dead meat. “You’ll wait!” I called back to Rick.
    “For a while,” he agreed—sort of.
    It was going to have to be enough, because my feet were already carrying me onward. I couldn’t help but wonder why Connor didn’t just grill the boogeyman himself if it was so important to him. Maybe he was afraid Melli would notice his absence, though I’d bet he just didn’t want to get within spitting distance of the psycho-psychic.
    I discovered that if I fought the compulsion really hard, I could stop myself from skirting around that gate, from going farther up the walk toward the building that was a mere blocky shape in the distance … if I wanted to shake, sweat, and generally jitter like a junky. But I was a ma’am on a mission, and I would go on. The T-bird’s headlights illuminated my path to hell—which, contrary to popular belief, was completely unpaved.
    Between lack of food and the free-for-all going on in my head, I was really shaky by the time I neared the building, which looked like it should probably be condemned. Come on, bit bit bit. Come, morsel . I’d never been so creeped out in all my life, not even when Larissa’d had that Halloween slumber party where we watched the Nightmare on Elm Street marathon and her boyfriend jumped out at us in a Freddy Krueger mask.
    “Get the hell out of my head!” I screamed, mentally and physically. Maybe I had some vain hope that our psychic connection ran both ways and I could somehow make him recoil, but mostly I just couldn’t take it any more. I wanted to drown out the whispers, if only for a second.
    Hysterical laughter filled my head. The mind of a teenaged girl is indeed a terrifying thing.
    Steam didn’t actually come out of my ears, but it was a very near thing. I was eager now for the showdown, and the anticipation propelled me the last few feet toward the warped warehouse door. It stood ajar, like nothing within the building had anything to fear from without. Boarded-up windows gave no clue of what beckoned.
    The knob I reached for had been painted in the same flaking black as the door itself. Even with the compulsion on me, it looked totally too grody to touch. I grasped at the bottom of my cami—the thing was destined for the incinerator at this point anyway—and used it to pull the door toward me. It groaned at the movement, paint flecking off the whole way.
    Inside it was pitch dark, except for the light I was letting in from outside and a weird glow off to the right. My eyes adjusted in, like, no time flat, but they needn’t have bothered. There was nothing to see here unless abandoned warehouses