My Halo Slipped Down to Choke Me 4

"How long are we going to be gone?" was the first thing he said while packing his clothes up. I didn't really know...

"Uh..." I shrugged. He looked at me incredulously. Time for last minute actions!

"Less talking more packing, move, move, move!" I rushed him. He picked up the pace, and as I requested, stopped speaking. Even though he had like... three bags worth taking.

"The first thing we need to do is go to my uncle. He won't ask questions. We need to get you a birth certificate, a drivers license, we can say you were homeschooled, and an apartment. That will be the easy part."

He stopped packing. "So you're telling me," he looked up, "that getting me a fake ID is the easy part?"

"Yes. Exactly. The hard part... getting my dad to let me see you outside of school..." And I wasn't kidding. It would be near impossible.

He blinked. "Can't you just... you know, say you're going to a friend's?"

"Oh please. My dad probably put a tracking device in my phone, and then he'd make me take it with me. Anyways, he knows where all my friends live. He also knows when I'm lying..." My dad was over-protective of me to say the least. I couldn't say I'd be going to a friends house, because that would be lying...

He chuckled. " Well, you are a bad girl now, remember? Sneak out. if it's while he's sleeping, he'll never know."

"...he comes into my room in the middle of the night to check on me..." Okay, so my dad was worried...

"How often?"

"Once at like, 2 AM." Coming out of my mouth, I realized how stupid my parents were.

"That's painful," he winced. Tell me about it.

"So what's the plan? You must be good at them for killing so many people and kidnapping me." Unless he didn't make plans and acted on a whim, which was a possibility with him.

"I believe it was your idea, dear."

"We could tell my dad the truth? Not the whole truth, just that I'm dating you? I mean, he doesn't even like me to be friends with guys."

He shrugged. "It's odd how, after you've been kidnapped... that's it," a devilishly evil grin spread across his face.

"I find it odd how you offered to let me go. Aren't murderers supposed to be, you know, evil? Torturous?" I smirked and raised an eyebrow at him.

"I honestly considered stabbing you to get you to wake up," yeah, I like how he said that with a huge grin on his face (no, you don't detect any sarcasm).

"Yeah, thanks for not doing that!"

"You were a bit tied up at the time, it was tempting." Okay, now he was just messing with me.

"You watched me sleep? Such a creep."

"No, I was actually watching the TV screen, but it had the same effect."

"You have a T.V. in your basement, why- Nevermind. Let's just go."

He smirked. I wondered if I missed something, but he shook his head, following me.

"Well, you obviously know where I live, Mr. Stalker, my uncle lives in town."

He smiled. "I know." I threw him 'the look' and he smiled even wider. "I do my research on my murder victims. I need to know if I'm gonna have to watch my back for hitmen afterwards."

"You know where my uncle lives? Nevermind that too." I walked into the garage and hopped inside his 1974 Ford Mustang. Of course the windows were tinted darkly, but a nice car.

"You're not asking; smart choice."

"Shut up and start driving," I grumbled. This time I would be awake, so maybe I could find out where he lived.

"Oh, no you don't. Back seat." He jerked his thumb toward said back seat. I looked back. The windows were even darker. So he was paranoid!

"Please, Damien? I won't rat you out," I pouted.

"It's nothin' against you," he said. "It's just so that, in the event they interrogate you, you technically won't be lying if you say you have no idea where I live. Now get in the back seat before I knock you out with liquid Benadryll."

"I understand." I crawled into the back seat and closed my eyes. I didn't know how far away it was, so I might as well catch up on some well-needed rest. "Wake me when we get there."

[such a beautiful line here. . . no line]

"Gwyn... Gwyn..." I awoke to Damien poking my shoulder. "We're there. You gonna sleep the rest of the night and leave your cousin-"

"Uncle."

"... uncle... standing at the door?"

"He's at the door?" I jumped up and, forgetting I was in a car, hit my head on the roof. "Oww.."

"Well, if you were watching football and a car pulled up in your driveway, wouldn't you go to the door?"

"Yeah..." I leapt of the car and to the door. "Uncle!" I practically screamed.

"Gwyn?" He asked, squinting into the dark. "Where the hell have you been?" His eyes darted over my shoulder before I ran into his arms and he chuckled, hugging me. "So, you been out with a boy, huh?" He shook his head, grinning. "I guess it's expected. You can't restrain somebody from freedom like your father has, and not expect them to rebel." He held me at arms length, looking at me.

"Well, technically, I got kidnapped by a serial killer." I smirked slightly. "And yes, I have rebelled." I looked at Damien over my shoulder and he waggled his eyebrows. I was most likely blushing.

"Well, you're alive, grinning, and blushing like a madman as you-who over there raises his eyebrows. I'm assuming you're alright?"

"I'm perfect." I smiled widely at him.

"Then I don't really wanna know why you've been kidnapped and let go. Unless it's some amazing story about you getting rescued by Prince Charming and the Baddie ends up in a cage. I'd like to hear a real life fairy tale," he chuckled. "So what brings you here?"

"We need you to get him some fake ID. Birth certificates, drivers license, anything that an eighteen year old would need. We have to get him an apartment and enroll him in my school too. Then I go home." Home? What was home? Was home where I was controlled like a robot, with no say in anything?

He put his hand to his chin, thinking. Damien raised his eyebrows at the fact that he really didn't ask any questions. "An eighteen year old?" he said, turning into the house. I motioned for Damien to follow. "And might I ask what alias this eighteen year old is going by?" he sat down at a rather large desk, switching on a computer and shuffling through some papers. "I assume you're using an alias?"

"Derek Marks, sir." Damien replied easily. He probably used an alias a lot, and it wasn't a problem for him to come up with one.

He nodded, motioning for him to come over to the desk. "Could you sign right there, how 'Derek' would sign it?"

"Of course." Damien wrote a fake signature, that looked nothing like his.

My uncle raised his eyebrow a fraction of an inch. "You go by fake names a lot?" he asked absentmindedly as he typed something into the computer.

"More than you know," Damien muttered.

He nodded and fluttered through some documents, grabbing what looked to be a stamp. "I see," he said as he pulled out a particular paper. "Is there a particular state Derek was born in?"

"New York." Damien sure replied fast.

"Mm'kay," he mumbled around the lid of a stamp, which he had in his mouth, as he stamped something on the lower right corner of a yellowish page. I could barely make out "New York Hospital" among other words, but I couldn't quite read them.

"So, Damien, anywhere particular you want to live, since you know this area so well?" I asked absent-mindedly.

"I'm thinking an apartment," he responded easily.

"Okay, Derek Marks, are you planning on looking exactly as you do now for the driver's licence?"

"Actually no. That would be a bad idea."

"I see. Do you have any, uh, disguise, in mind?"

"Yes. Pale skin, black hair, but I'll keep my eyes the same."

"Alright. Gwyn, I trust you're good with makeup?"

"Yeah, I'm pretty good."

"You'd better be. You're the one who's gotta teach him how to put white-out on his face. And various other areas that will be exposed."

"I think I can do that."

"And another thing," he added as I led Damien to the bathroom to apply several shades of makeup, "Damien-Derek here'd better not plan on wearing shorts. White out's expensive."

"That's fine," Damien said, not caring.

I led closed the door once we were in the bathroom (so I could open the drawer... last time I spent the night here, my uncle let me get a drawer dedicated to nothing but my stuff, since Dad wouldn't let me keep half the crap I bought) and patted the counter. Damien hopped up on it and started swinging his legs like a little kid.

"Alrighty then." I began applying the make-up to his face. Good-bye to his evenly tanned, bronze skin.

When I finished, he turned around to look at the mirror. "Whoa!" he exclaimed. "I look like an Emo," he examined the way his eyes looked if he tilted his head so you would have to look through his bangs to see them.

"Stereotypical," I shook my head and chuckled.

He looked different, by far. Who knew skin shade could make someone look so... "Lets go show Uncle."

He nodded, and hopped up from the counter. "Uncleeee," he called, obviously comfortable enough with himself to call my uncle 'Uncle'.

"Hey, Damien- I mean Derek, how am I going to get home?"

"By car, of course, silly whim."

"What if my parents see your car, or, what are they going to think when I walk up and ring the door-bell? 'Hey mom and dad, I'm back! I've been freed by the murderer and I'm not dead!' Really?"

"... kay. We'll work on a plan. You somehow get covered in blood, and I'll 'find you' on the side of the road, therefore taking you to the hospital and they call your parents. I disappear and you vaguely have a memory of what I look like, but your fear of the murderer mingles it with the vision of Damien DeMau. You see me at school, feel some kind of unjustified pull to me, because you subconsciously know I'm the one who rescued you, I feel like I need to have some kind of protectiveness over you, and nobody know 'our little secret' but us." Did he just lay out an entire soap opera plot to me?

"That..." I stood to contemplate it for a second. "That might actually work. But even if you saved my life my dad still wont let us date." Damn, my dad makes everything complicated by doing nothing.

"Oh, I wasn't putting dating into the equation. I'm talking more of a 'you're okay with me following you around like a dog following a floating bone'."

"Hmmm... that will work. Okay then, our next few months are planned out."

"But until we figure something out, you have to play the innocent girl who doesn't realize I'm getting a dangerous infatuation with you." Well, looks like Mr. Plotsome needs to get a job as a creative writer.

"That's a role I've been playing my whole life. The whole, 'Innocent girl who doesn't understand,' part." All because of father.

"Then it shouldn't be too hard..." his eyes, were cold, calculating. He had sat down, his hands folded in front of his face. The scary part was that he was seriously thinking. Was I witnessing a murderer use his mad brainpower to plan a feat as simple as returning me home? "The question is when to inject the fear..."

"Fear? What fear?" I didn't know whether to be concerned or joyous over how he was coming up with the plans.

"Well, you notice you've attained a stalker who may or may not be concerned with your life. You're not just gonna kick back and relax with a flatscreen." He looked triumphant. A thought flickered on his face. "Oh, and by the way, you're not allowed to say 'I know it's you, I'm not scared'." He stuck his tongue out at me, grinning.

"I have to pretend to be scared of you? Now that's going to be tough. While I'm sure you can be terrifying, its still going to be hard. Oh, since we're coming up with plans now, tell me how I'm going to leave forever. Without my parents putting up posters and having detectives try to track me the rest of my life?

He quirked an eyebrow. "We stage a death." He said it so obvious, I felt like I should be ashamed for not realizing it. Not everybody has the mind of a murderer!

"My death? And fool all the doctors? This isn't Cirque Du Freak."

"How opposed are you to using decoys..?"

"Damn you smart people," I pouted.

"So you're fine with it?"

"... pretty much..."

"Good. I was prepared to defend my reasoning for using another person... I'm thinking burned beyond recognition, roughly your size..." he must have noticed how I stiffened, because he shut up and thought about it silently.

So maybe I didn't like the idea of having someone killed just for me but, hell. Thats a good idea.

He paused his contemplating (and I say pause and not stop, because knowing Damien, he's nowhere near done thinking), and looked up at me. "Gwyn, it's nothing to me. Seventeen can easily turn to eighteen. It's you I'm worried about."

"What about me?"

Last time I checked, helping a murderer hand select people who resembled you so we could slaughter them doesn't exactly fall under the category of normal, Gwyn."

I blinked. "It's fine. I threw away normal a long time ago. Wait, that was last night."

He raised his head and looked at the ceiling, shaking his head. "You are so strange!"

"And you're not?"

"I'm a killer... I can't afford to be normal," he chuckled.

"Well, now that I'm helping you with a murder, I'm technically your accomplice."

"... Touche..."

Uncle chose that precise moment to walk in. "Gwyn, I think you might want to see this."

I looked up at my uncle. "See what?" Damien perked up, curious as to what could be going on.

Uncle led me to the television where they had to be showing a picture of Damien. And my parents. "Care to explain about him, Gwyn?" He gestured to the Damien standing by me with his arm draped casually over my shoulder.

Damien coughed, taking his arm off my shoulder, turning away. I was formulating a plan- ridiculous, but a plan nonetheless.

"That's-"

"Lemme get this straight." Damien's hand appeared over my mouth before I could say anything. "She raped me."

"Well you kidnapped me. And you're the one who tore their shirt off! I mean, don't say 'It was hot in there with the smoke from the pancakes.' Uncle, it's-"

He threw his arm over my mouth, pleading with me to be silent. What was I supposed to do, bite his arm?

"Please, sir, this means a lot to us. To her."

"Should have known you'd rebel. It runs in the family. I mean, I'm wanted all over the country," Uncle turned around and walked back to his computer.

He dropped his arm. "For what?" he was immediately interested.

"Fake IDs like yours. Dealings, hiding criminals from the police..."

".. Dealings?" he tilted his head. I would have been worried, if it weren't for the fact that he seemed kind of alarmed.

"Kid, I'm in the drug dealing business. I also deal other illegal things."

"Alrighty." I could tell he was a little disturbed. He had a twitch. A tiny, barely detectable twitch.

"Look. If you're going to be a murderer, you gotta get used to a lot worse. Same goes for you Gwyn."

"How'd you-"

"I listened in on your conversation."

"Oh, no, I'm fine. I just have an unreasonable phobia of certain drugs," he said, completely ignoring our exchange.

"And that would be why?"

"Chloroform incident gone wrong..."

"I see." He handed Damien all his papers and stuff. "Take care. You too Gwyn. Hope I see you before your funeral." He winked and laughed hoarsely.

"Next stop, my home."