Blood Ties Book One: The Turning

Blood Ties Book One: The Turning Jennifer Armintrout I am no coward. I want to make that perfectly clear. But after my life turned into a horror movie, I take fear a lot more seriously now. I finally became Dr Carrie Ames just eight months ago. Then I was attacked in the hospital morgue by a vampire. Now I’m a vampire and it turns out I have a blood tie to the monster who sired me. And of course he’s one of the most evil vampires on earth.With my sire hell-bent on turning me into a soulless killer and his sworn enemy set to exterminate me, things couldn’t get much worse – except I’m attracted to them both. Drinking blood, living as an immortal demon and being a pawn between two warring vampire factions isn’t exactly how I'd imagined my future. But, as my father used to say, the only way to conquer fear is to face it. So that’­s what I’ll do. Fangs bared.Love Sookie Stackhouse and Bella Swan? It’­s time to meet newly turned vampire Carrie Ames. Jennifer Armintrout was born in 1980. She has been obsessed with vampires ever since the age of four and her first crush was on Vincent Price. Raised in an enormous Roman Catholic family, Jennifer attributes her interest in the macabre to viewing too many funerals at a formative age. Jennifer lives in Michigan with her husband and children. Also by Jennifer Armintrout BLOOD TIES BOOK ONE: THE TURNING BLOOD TIES BOOK TWO: POSSESSION BLOOD TIES BOOK THREE: ASHES TO ASHES BLOOD TIES BOOK FOUR: ALL SOULS NIGHT Blood Ties The Turning Jennifer Armintrout Much love and thanks to: The FNMS. Michele, for eye rolls and encouragement. Chris, for loving my characters (and me) enough to read revised scenes for the nth time. Cheryl, for your advice on shameless self-promotion. Marti, for the [expletive deleted] advice from that [expletive deleted] book. You know which one. Derek, for keeping the adverbs and alliteration at bay. And Mary, even though you weren’t part of the crowd then, you deserve a mention for being Cyrus’s biggest fan. Peggy, who let me pretend to be a writer on her typewriter when I was four years old. Shannon, for still liking the book after viewing my lame attempt at dancing. My editor, Sasha Bogin, and my agent, Kelly Harms, for being enthusiastic about this book and me. Joe, for believing I could do this and subjecting yourself to the ups and downs of living with a writer. Prologue Welcome Back He didn’t know how long he’d been dead. There was no time, no season, no change, only eternity. Shadows stumbled around him on the other side of the veil. Two in particular caught his attention. He knew what they were. He’d been one of them. The life he craved was accessible to them. Now, as in his living death, he wanted to leech it from the mortals who couldn’t protect themselves. If he could envy this undead pair, he would, but there was no time. They had no life, so they were none of his concern. On the other side, they couldn’t see him. When he was of the world but not alive, he couldn’t see the ones who’d gone before him, either. Despite their sightlessness, they appeared to follow him. He moved away. He wanted life. It was a fool’s errand, his never-ceasing search for that mortal energy. It throbbed in the people and animals he passed every day, but he could not touch it. Thin though the veil was, it separated him from what he craved. He could reach for it, hold it in his hands, but the film of the shadow curtain always kept him from it. Jennifer Armintrout Color, alien to this existence, would have shocked his senses, if he’d had any. The lifeless pair held something between them, shimmering and frightening like the fiery sword the angel held at the gates of Eden. It drew shadows to it like moths to the flame, though he hated such clich? description. He hated more that the thing drew him, as well. The shining rift split wider, and a hand, not full of life but real nonetheless, thrust through. The other shadows clamored for it, sliding over it. Like water on oil, they rolled off the corporeal skin. As if searching specifically for him, the intruder pushed the others aside and grasped him. He stuck. He hadn’t felt panic since he’d died. Hadn’t felt despair since her betrayal. He felt it now as the rough, real fingers pulled him through the rift. Thick and heavy, feelings he’d almost forgotten happened all at once. Slippery and hot, sensations he remembered being pleasant at one time engulfed him. His formless being squeezed and conformed into a shape at once familiar and horrifyingly foreign. Too bright. Too cold. Too real. Too loud. One of the pair laughed like jagged glass. “We fucking did it! I can’t believe we fucking did it!” The light stung his eyes. He blinked, but his vision didn’t clear. In his chest, he felt a thump that hadn’t been a part of him for centuries—the beating of a human heart. Alive. He was alive. He dropped to the floor, screaming and clawing at his mortal prison. The one who’d done it leaned over him and slapped him on the back. The connection of flesh against flesh drove needles of sensation to the bone. “Welcome back, Cyrus.” One The End I read a poll in the newspaper once that said the number one fear of Americans aged eighteen to sixty-five is public speaking. Spiders are second, and death a distant third. I’m afraid of all these things. But most of all, I’m afraid of failure. I’m no coward. I want to make that perfectly clear. But my life turned from nearly perfect to a horror movie in a matter of days, so I take fear a lot more seriously now. I’d followed my life plan almost to the letter, with very few detours. I’d gone from plain old Ms. Carrie Ames to Dr. Carrie Ames just eight months prior to the night I now refer to as “The Big Change.” I’d broken away from the sleepy, East Coast town I’d grown up in, only to find myself in a sleepy, mid-Michigan city. I had a great residency in the E.R. of the public hospital there. The city and surrounding rural communities provided endless opportunity to study and treat injuries inflicted by both urban warfare and treacherous farm equipment. Living my dream, I’d never been more certain that I’d found the success and control over my destiny that had always seemed to elude me in my tumultuous college years. Of course, sleepy mid-Michigan towns get boring, especially on frozen winter nights when even the snow won’t venture out. And on a night exactly like this, after only having been home for four hours from a grueling twelve-hour shift, I was back at the hospital to help deal with a sudden influx of patients. The E.R. was surprisingly busy for such a forbidding evening, but the approaching holiday season seemed to affect everyone with a pulse. Thanks to my rotten luck, I was charged with attending trauma cases that night, patients with serious injuries and illnesses that put them in imminent danger of death. Or, more specifically, carloads of mall-hoppers who showed up in pieces after hitting black ice on 131 South. After I’d admitted three patients, I found myself in great need of a nicotine fix. While I felt guilty for sticking the other doctors with a few extra cases, I didn’t feel guilty enough to forgo a quick cigarette break. I was heading for the ambulance bay doors when John Doe arrived. Dr. Fuller, the attending physician and most senior M.D. in the hospital, ran alongside the gurney, barking instructions and demanding information from the EMTs in his nononsense Texan accent. Distracted by the fact that Dr. Fuller’s smooth, Southern speech had been replaced by an urgent, clipped tone, I didn’t notice the patient on the gurney. I had never seen my superior lose his unflappable calm before. It scared me. “Carrie, you gonna give us a hand here or are you on a one-way trip to Marlboro country?” he barked, startling me. The cigarette between my fingers snapped in half when I jumped, reduced to a fluttering shower of dry tobacco. My break had been officially canceled. I brushed my hands clean on my lab coat and fell into step beside the gurney. It was only then that I noticed the state the transport was in. The sight of the patient paralyzed me as we entered the cubical and the EMTs were squeezed out to make way for the R.N.s who rushed in. “Okay ladies, I want splash guards, gowns, goggles, the whole space suit. Quickly, please,” Fuller snapped, shrugging off his blood-smeared white coat. I knew I should do something to help, but I could only stare at the mess on the table in front of me. I had no idea where to start. Blood might be the one thing I’m not afraid of. In the case of John Doe, it was not the blood that made working on him, touching him, even approaching him unthinkable. It was the fact that he looked like my dissection cadaver on the last day of Gross Anatomy. Puncture wounds peppered his chest. Some were small, but four or five were large enough to fit a baseball in. “Gunshot wounds? What the hell was he shot with, a goddamned cannon?” Dr. Fuller muttered as he probed one of the bloody holes with his gloved finger. It didn’t take a forensic-science degree to tell that what had caused the wounds in John Doe’s torso had not caused the wounds in his face. His jaw, or what was left of it, hung skinned from the front teeth to the splintered end, where it had been ripped from the joint to dangle uselessly from the other side of his skull. Above the gaping hole in his cheek, one eye socket stood empty and crushed, the eye itself and optical nerve completely missing. “I’d say someone used an axe on his head, if I thought it were possible to swing one with enough force to do this,” Dr. Fuller said. “We’re not going to get a tube down this way, his trachea’s crushed all to hell.” I couldn’t breathe. John Doe’s remaining eye, clear and bright blue, fixed on mine as if he were totally alert. It had to be a trick of the light. No one could endure this kind of trauma and remain conscious. No one could survive injuries of this magnitude. He didn’t cry out or writhe in pain. His body was limp and completely void of any reaction as the attending staff made an incision in his windpipe to intubate him. He never looked away. How can he be alive? my mind screamed. The concept destroyed the carefully constructed logic I’d built over three years of medical school. People did not live through something like this. It wasn’t in the textbooks. Yet, there he was, staring at me calmly, focused on me despite the flurry of action around us. For a sickening moment, I thought I heard my name from the mangled hole of his mouth. Then I realized it was Dr. Fuller’s frantic voice cutting through the haze of my paralyzed revulsion. “Carrie, I need you to wake up and join us! Come on, now, we’re losing this guy!” I could continue to stare at John Doe or turn my face to Dr. Fuller, to see him silently lose his faith in me. I don’t know what would have been more distressing, but I didn’t get to make a decision. I mumbled a feeble apology, turned swiftly and ran. I had barely escaped the grisly scene before I noticed the sticky splotches on the floor that stained the pristine tile a deep, glossy red. I was going to be sick. I fell to my knees in the congealing blood and closed my eyes as the bile rose in my throat. I rocked back and forth on my knees, my vomit mixing with the blood on the tiles. A sudden hush came from the cubicle behind me, followed by the insistent whine of the heart monitor protesting the cessation of pulse. “All right, he’s gone. Pack him up and get him to the morgue,” I heard Dr. Fuller say. His cool, Texan confidence crept back into his voice, though it was tainted with weariness and resignation. I scrambled to my feet and ran to the staff locker room, unable to face my failure. I was still in the locker room an hour later. Fresh from a shower, dressed in clean scrubs from central processing, I stood before the mirror and tried to smooth my wet, blond hair into something resembling a ponytail. My mascara had run in the shower and I wiped at it with my sleeve. It only served to darken the circles under my eyes. My bone-pale skin stretched sharply over my cheekbones, my blue eyes were cold and hollow. I’d never seen myself look so defeated. When did I become so pathetic? So cowardly? Cruelly, I taunted myself with memories I couldn’t push aside. The way I’d snickered with the other students when the skinny foreign guy had tossed his cookies on the first day of Gross Anatomy. Or the time I’d chased Amy Anderson, the queen bee of the eighth grade, from the bus stop by sticking earthworms in her hair. It appeared that I’d become one of those people I’d despised. To the entire E.R. medical staff at St. Mary’s Hospital, I had become the squeamish nerd, the shrieking girl. It cut so deeply, I’d need emotional sutures to heal. A knock at the door pulled me from my self-pity. “Ames, you still in there?” The door swung open. Steady footsteps carried Dr. Fuller to the end of my narrow bench. For a moment, he didn’t say anything at all. Without looking, I knew that he stood with his head hanging down. His hands would be in the pockets of his crisp white coat, his elbows tucked in at his sides, giving him the appearance of a tall, gray stork. “So, hangin’ in there?” he asked suddenly. I shrugged. Anything I said would have been a lame excuse for my poor performance, one akin to those uttered by countless med students who stopped showing up for class soon after. “You know,” he began, “I’ve seen a lot of doctors, good physicians, crack under pressure. You get tired. You get stressed, maybe you’re having personal problems. Those things happen to all of us. But some of us leave it in here—” he pointed to the lockers behind me “—instead of taking it out there. It’s what makes us capable doctors.” He waited for me to respond. I only nodded. “I know you’ve gone through a lot this year, losing your parents—” “This isn’t about my parents.” I hadn’t meant to cut him off, but the words were spoken before I had a chance to think about them. “I’m sorry. But really, I’m over that.” He sighed deeply as he sat next to me on the bench. “Why do you want to be a doctor?” We sat there for a long time, like a coach and a star player who had fumbled the ball, before I answered. “Because I want to help people.” I was lying. Badly. But even I didn’t know the reason, and he didn’t want a real answer, anyway. Real doctors lose the capacity for humanity and understanding before they grab their diplomas. “And because I love it.” “Well, I love golf, but that doesn’t make me Tiger Woods, does it?” He laughed at his own joke before he became thoughtful again. “You know, there comes a time in everyone’s life when they have to carefully examine the goals they’ve set for themselves. When they have to admit their limitations and look at their capabilities in a more realistic way.” “You’re saying I should be a dentist?” I asked, forcing a laugh. “I’m saying you shouldn’t be a doctor.” Fuller actually patted me on the back, as though it would take the edge off his harsh words. He stood and walked toward the door, stopping suddenly as if he’d just thought of something. “You know,” he began, but he didn’t finish his thought. Instead he shook his head and walked out the door. My fists balled with anger and my breath came in noisy gasps as I struggled to regain my composure. I’d failed the Great One’s test. I should have told him I liked the money. It was considerably better than a stick in the eye. Though they were both reasons people entered the field, neither financial security nor desire to help others were my true motivation for becoming a doctor. It was the power that drew me to it. The power of holding a human life in my hands. The power of looking Death in the face and knowing I could defeat him. It was a power reserved for doctors and God. I’d pictured myself a modern-day Merlin, a scalpel for a wand, a clipboard my book of spells. I cringed at the ridiculous thought. I could have changed into my street clothes, slunk out of the hospital and never come back. But then I thought of my dead father and remembered one of the rare pieces of paternal advice I’d ever received from him. “If you’re afraid of something, face it. Fear is irrational. The only way to conquer your fear is to put yourself next to it.” Just as quickly as it had come, my self-doubt subsided. This was a test of faith in myself. I wasn’t going to fail. I got onto my feet and made my way through the packed E.R., blind and deaf to my coworkers and the patients that crowded the cubicles around me. I left the emergency and trauma ward altogether, pushing through the doors that led into the central part of the hospital. The offices I passed were closed, their windows dark. The main lobby was empty, with the exception of one custodian who leaned on the deserted information desk, idly reading an old newspaper while his cleaning cart sat neglected in the middle of the room. He barely glanced up as I elbowed the cart in my reckless flight and knocked a stack of paper towels to the floor. I continued to the elevators, pressed the button impatiently and tapped my foot. After what seemed like an interminably long time, the dull metal doors slid open and I entered. I pushed the button for the basement. An irrational determination took me down the long hallway to the morgue. I had only been through there once, during my orientation tour. It was a simple route, though, and I located the unlabeled door again without much difficulty. I ran my hospital ID through the badge reader and heard the sharp click of the releasing lock. I grabbed the handle and stopped, wondering for the first time what I intended to prove to myself. I feared I was a bad doctor, and I had come to confront my fears and view John Doe in all his mangled glory. What if I couldn’t handle it? Terror gripped me at the thought that his body might not be as damaged as I remembered. I recalled Amy Anderson’s horrified face as she’d held the wriggling earthworm in her palm, her fear making the harmless thing a monster. Had my panicked brain exaggerated John Doe’s wounds? No, you weren’t hysterical. You know what you saw. I entered the cool, antiseptic room before I could change my mind. Hospital morgues are much different from morgues in the movies. They aren’t cavernous spaces with stark lighting. In fact, the morgue at St. Mary’s was small and cluttered. The on-duty attendant had left a rumpled fast-food sack on the desk, a reassuring sign of life in a room devoted to the indignities of death. Before I approached the task at hand, I walked the perimeter of the room. I examined the cabinets, the plastic tubs of all sizes that held murky shapes of organs preserved for further study, and the autopsy tables. I avoided the one that appeared occupied. “Hello?” I called. I winced at the volume of my voice. The room was so quiet you could hear the buzzing of the fluorescent lights. The phrase “wake the dead” sprung unpleasantly to mind. I expected to see an orderly emerge from one of the back rooms, but no one came. The lucky SOB was probably on a smoke break. I would have to do the dirty work of locating John Doe myself. The morgue freezer held six gurneys. With the high volume of patients today, it would be full, maybe even sleeping double. Not a pleasant thought. I stepped into the cooler and immediately wished for a jacket. The thermostat on the outside read thirty-five degrees, warm compared to the temperature outside, but it hadn’t occurred to me just how cold thirty-five degrees really was. Shivering, I looked over the six shrouded gurneys before me. They all faced the same direction, their occupants’ feet pointed at the back wall. I glanced down at my shoes and saw a dark stain on the sticky, unwashed floor. My skin crawled as I speculated exactly how long it had been since someone disinfected this room. Not that these particular patients were in any danger of disease or infection. I started with the body farthest to the right, not bothering to uncover them to search for their toe tags. I opted instead to read the more detailed tag on their shrouds. The first body was a female, age sixty-eight. The second was male, age twenty-three. So it went, each tag displaying the one thing I wasn’t looking for: a name. I didn’t see any bearing the big, red “unidentified” stamp, and it seemed that my field trip would prove useless. I rubbed my hands across my face, stretching tired skin as I pondered my next step. Where had he gone? It was unlikely that the medical examiner would have come at night for an autopsy that could wait until morning. Even if they had identified him, they couldn’t have released the body before the police finished with it. He has to be here somewhere. But as I doubled-checked, I had to accept the fact that he was gone. I would have to go back upstairs and face my embarrassment much to the delight of my colleagues. I’d missed the opportunity to confront my demon, but life would go on, as it always had. With the same resolve that brought me there, I left the cooler without a backward look. Someone would make a snide comment, or even pity me no matter what I did. I’d had enough experience with criticism that I could shoot down my detractors without actually having to go through the experience of looking at what was left of John Doe’s body. My hand was on the door handle when I stopped again. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the sheeted figure on the autopsy table. For all my bravado, I’d felt some relief upon finding John Doe’s body missing. To look or not to look. It had been an easy call with no body to see. An uneasy feeling crept over me as my initial relief fled. There was no doubt in my mind that John Doe lay beneath that sheet on the autopsy table. If you leave now, you’ll always wonder, a tiny voice nagged from the back of my mind. For a fraction of a second, it seemed the gnawing fear would win. I would just walk out of the morgue and forget the whole incident ever happened. But my father’s words and Dr. Fuller’s hurtful evaluation of my abilities bounced around in my brain. I didn’t want to be the failure I’d been in my father’s eyes. The failure I’d become in Dr. Fuller’s. It spurred me toward the table. I was no coward. Before I gave myself a chance to change my mind, I whipped the sheet completely off the cadaver. Every second passed in slow motion, frame by frame. The very instant I pulled the covering off the body, I saw a brightly colored sole of an athletic shoe poking from under the sheet. There wasn’t time for this to register as I ripped away the shroud, revealing hospital-issue scrubs and the face of the morgue attendant, his features frozen in terror. I didn’t scream right away, either from shock or the fact that the scene didn’t make sense. John Doe was supposed to be here, not this young man. The sight transfixed me. His neck had obviously been broken. The flesh of his throat had been torn the way it would look after a dog attack. Extreme blood loss left his dark skin ashen, though the table and most of his clothing were spotless. His eyes were open. One was missing. I saw the telephone perched on the gleaming steel counter, but it seemed miles away as I ran to it. My hands shook so badly that I could barely punch the numbers to issue a code blue. But no reassuring calm came over me when I hung up. I was still stranded, still isolated in this weird nightmare. I picked up the phone again. I was dialing the number for the night security office when something brushed my shoulder. The touch was so light I barely noticed it, but I wound up inexplicably on my back. The force of my landing knocked the wind out of me. Confused and frightened, I scrambled to my knees, but that was as far as I got. In the next instant, I was airborne again. Shattering glass crashed, the consequence of my impact against the cabinets. I had flown into the glass with enough momentum to break it and splinter the wooden doors. Pain ripped down my spine. The shelves collapsed and the plastic tubs within slipped to the floor, overturning and spilling their contents. I fell to my hands and knees in a mire of formaldehyde and human livers, unable to efficiently crawl through the slippery mess. A hand grabbed my hair and dragged me upward. When I tried to regain my footing I slipped to my knees again and writhed painfully in the grasp of my attacker. I looked up. John Doe looked down at me. His once-mangled face showed only the faintest remnants of injury in the form of purplish scars. His pale chest bore no marks at all, save for a long, straight scar that bisected it, obviously an old wound. His jaw was no longer torn, but had twisted, along with the rest of his features, into a demonic visage with a crumpled snout and weirdly elongated jaws. Dried blood stained his long blond hair, though his skull had neatly closed. The clear, blue eye that had stared so intently at me as he lay helpless on the gurney in the E.R. was piercing and ruthless. The other, formerly empty socket held a brown eye, the white occluded with blood. The missing eye of the morgue worker. John Doe bared his teeth, revealing needle-sharp canines. “Fangs,” I whispered in horror. Vampire. He laughed then, the sound distorted by his changed facial structure as though it had been slowed on a tape recorder. Everything about the creature suggested the calculated fury of a predator who killed not from necessity, but from love of carnage. He stroked my cheek with one talonlike fingernail. He was a cat playing with a mouse, a thief admiring his stolen prize. I would not be that prize. My hands groped the floor and seized a piece of broken glass, and I stabbed the shard into his thigh. His blood sprayed across my face. I tasted the coppery wetness on my lips and gagged. Howling in rage, he wielded his free hand like a claw and slashed my neck. The burning pain followed seconds later, but I didn’t care. I was free. I held one hand to my throat, desperate to stop the warm blood that flowed between my fingers. It was hopeless, and I knew it. I would bleed to death on the morgue floor before anyone found me. Then I saw the white shoes of the code team as they entered. I raised my free hand weakly to signal them. Only one moved toward me. The rest stood petrified by the scene. “You’re going to be all right,” the young nurse said as he pried my fingers from the wound at my neck. It was the last thing I remembered. Two A Few (More) Unpleasant Surprises I spent nearly a month in the hospital. Detectives visited me on several occasions. They took down my description of John Doe, fangs and all, but no doubt wondered what kind of painkillers I was on. The first to arrive on the scene didn’t see him. The last police interview was short, and though they assured me the case was still being investigated, I didn’t hold out much hope for justice. Whatever John Doe was, he was probably smart enough to evade capture. A few nurses from the E.R. came to see me. They looked uncomfortable and didn’t stay long. We joked about the Day-After-Thanksgiving sales I’d missed and the frantic shopping I’d have to do if I got out in time for Christmas. I didn’t bother mentioning I had no one to buy gifts for. The bright side of the interminable visits were the newspaper clippings that people brought. While I wasn’t about to make a scrapbook of them, the articles offered more details of the crime and investigation than the vague answers I’d been given by the cops. According to the press, the morgue attendant, Cedric Kebbler, had been attacked and killed by an unknown suspect, possibly an escaped mental patient. I had walked in on the murder in progress and had been attacked myself. I’d struggled, and the murderer fled through the morgue’s only window. I wasn’t interviewed due to my “critical medical condition” and “acute anxiety and post-traumatic stress,” the latter affliction diagnosed in a rush interview conducted by the staff psychiatrist while I was in a morphine-induced haze. None of the articles mentioned John Doe’s missing body or the bizarre way the attendant’s body had been found. Either the police had neglected to mention these details, or the hospital had a crackerjack P.R. staff. The most uncomfortable visit had been Dr. Fuller’s. Apparently, it wasn’t enough for him to have written me off as a doctor. He had to write me off as a living person, too. He’d come to the end of my bed, my chart in his hand, barely acknowledging me as he read the details. Finally, he snapped the chart shut with a deep sigh. “Doesn’t look good, does it?” He was right. In the first week after my encounter with John Doe, I’d needed two surgeries. One repaired my damaged carotid artery, and the other removed the shards of glass embedded in my skull. In the recovery room after the first surgery, I flatlined, something my doctor noted later with a breezy wave of his hand, as though his disregard for the seriousness of the situation would somehow put me at ease. I’d also endured a delightful course of precautionary inoculations, including tetanus and rabies vaccinations. I didn’t think John Doe had attacked me in a fit of hydrophobia, but no one asked my opinion on the matter, and I certainly hadn’t been in a position to argue. During my lengthy hospital stay, I began to suffer strange symptoms. Most of them could be explained by post-trau-matic stress, others as common side effects of major surgery. The first malady to show itself was a body temperature of one hundred and four degrees. This struck the night of my heart failure and subsequent resuscitation. I was still heavily sedated, and I can’t say I’m sorry to have missed it. After forty long hours the fever broke and my body temperature lowered beyond the normal range, leaving me a cool 92.7 degrees. It wasn’t until I read over my medical files that I determined this was the first indication of my change. It baffled the doctors. One doctor noted such a thing wasn’t unheard of and cited evidence of low resting temperatures in coma patients. It was the equivalent of throwing his arms up in defeat, and it seemed to be the end of the matter as far as they were concerned. The second symptom was my incredible appetite. A nasal-gastric tube fed me without disturbing the repairs made to my throat. Still, every time the pharmaceutical fog lifted, I requested food. The nurses would frown and check their chart and then explain that while I received adequate nourishment through the tube, I missed the chewing and swallowing that accompanied the act of eating. And when the tube was removed, my voracious appetite didn’t show signs of decreasing. I ate astonishing amounts of food and, when I was sent home, smoked nearly a carton of cigarettes a day as though I’d been possessed by some nicotine-craving demon. Conventional wisdom held that smoking after major soft tissue repair was a bad idea, but conventional wisdom wouldn’t sate the maddening hunger. The masticating emptiness that plagued me was never satisfied. And the more I consumed, the wider the void became. The third sign didn’t become apparent until I had been discharged. After weeks of being immersed in the submarinelike interior of the hospital, I expected natural light to irritate me. But nothing could have prepared me for the searing pain that burned my skin when I stepped, blinking and disoriented, into the blazing white sunlight. Though it was mid-December, I felt as if I’d been tossed into an oven. My fever might have returned, but I wasn’t about to spend another night in a hospital bed. I took a cab home, shut the blinds and obsessively checked my temperature every fifteen minutes. Ninety, then eighty-nine, and it kept falling. When I realized my temperature matched the one displayed on the thermostat in the living room, I decided I’d lost my mind. Whether it was a subconscious need to protect myself from further shock or a conscious decision to suppress the reality of my situation, I refused to acknowledge how odd these things seemed. It became necessary to wear sunglasses during the daylight hours, inside or out. My apartment turned into a cave. The shades were closed at all times. I stumbled around in the darkness at first, but I eventually adapted to it. After a few days, I could easily read by the flickering blue light of the television. When I returned to my duties at the hospital, my strange habits did not go unnoticed. Because of my sudden light sensitivity, I requested night shifts. But focusing on anything amid all the beeping monitors and endless intercom pages proved impossible. But too many things defied explanation, too many questions science couldn’t answer. I wasn’t sure I wanted the most obvious explanation, either. I couldn’t hold out forever, though. It would only be a matter of time before I exhausted the knowledge available in medical journals and textbooks. Eventually, I came to accept the conclusion I’d dreaded. I paced in front of my computer for a full hour. What was I thinking? Grown people didn’t believe in the things that went bump in the night. Maybe I really did need the psychologist my doctor recommended. As a child, I’d never been allowed the luxury of watching Dark Shadows reruns, and any reading I’d done was strictly of an academic nature. Flights of fancy were discouraged in our household. My Jungian-analyst father considered them a warning sign of an underdeveloped animus and they were a red flag to my career-feminist mother who taught these things would lead me to become another foot soldier in the unicorn-lover’s army. I sat down and fired up the modem. If they were looking down on me from the heaven they’d insisted couldn’t logically exist, I’m sure they shook their heads in disappointment. In a bizarre way, it was their fault I had the courage to explore the possibility that I was a vampire. Occam’s razor was a theory my father constantly spouted around the house. God forbid an expensive item in our museum of a home ever be broken or misplaced. I’d always lie and say I wasn’t there, it was a statistical anomaly. Whenever I did this, my father would fix me with his best stare of paternal disapproval and quote, “One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.” In other words, if it looked like a duck, etcetera, I probably broke that lamp. Or, in the current case, if it looked like I’d become a vampire… “Thanks, Dad,” I muttered as I lit another cigarette. I’d accepted the fact they did nothing for me physically, but the routine soothed my jagged nerves. I typed vampire into a search engine and held my breath. Marginally more reliable than tea leaves or a magic eight ball, the Web offered possibility and anonymity, two crucial components to my quest for knowledge. Still, I felt a little silly as I clicked the first link. The number of people interested in—and even claiming to be—vampires astounded me, but the amount of information their Web sites offered was negligible. I found one promising lead, a professional-looking site with an area to post messages. Figuring it was as good a place to start as any, I began to explain my predicament to the dispassionate white text area. I’d never been good at expressing myself with the written word, and I felt sillier with each one I wrote. After several frustrated drafts, I gave up and shortened my entry to two fragmented sentences. “Attacked by vampire. Please advise.” I didn’t have to wait long for a reply. Before I could get up for a bathroom break, my e-mail program chimed. The first response informed me I was a psycho. The second suggested I might be watching too many late-night movies. Another tried to lovingly counsel me away from my obviously abusive relationship. For people who were supposed to believe in vampires, they sure didn’t seem very open to the possibility one might actually exist. I began deleting responses as they rolled in, until one subject line caught my eye. 1320 Wealthy Ave. I recognized the street. It wasn’t far from where I lived. Just outside of downtown, it was a street where the college students spent money from home on Georgia O’Keeffe prints in poster stores next to bodegas where migrant families bought their meager groceries. I’d driven through the neighborhood, but I’d never stopped. The content of the e-mail was simply this: after sundown, any night this week. The digital clock in the corner of the computer screen’s display read 5:00 p.m. After sundown. I didn’t have to go to work for six more hours. I only had to get in my car and drive. But it seemed a dicey proposition. Curiosity had nearly killed this cat already. The sender could be a deranged groupie or vampire fanatic. Sure, he or she might be perfectly harmless and just having a bit of fun, but I didn’t relish the thought of spending another month in the hospital. How could I go to an unknown address at the advice of an anonymous e-mail? Well, it wasn’t exactly anonymous. [email protected] wasn’t exactly the most common e-mail address I’d ever seen. I logged on to usmail.com in hopes of finding a user profile, a Web page, something to give me a line on who had sent the message to me. I came up with nothing. That sparked another, more terrifying proposition. What if the sender was John Doe himself, quietly monitoring my activities? Though it seemed a long shot that the creature of my nightmares would give himself such a ridiculous online moniker, I didn’t exactly know what he was. He could have been cleverly crafting a trap for me, finding out where I lived, how to contact me and lull me into a false sense of security. “Fuck it.” I vigorously stubbed out my cigarette in the ashtray beside the keyboard before entering the address into the search engine. The Crypt: Occult Books and Supplies. There was a phone number and driving directions. Nothing could happen to me in a public place, in a busy neighborhood. I used that line of reasoning as I grabbed my keys and headed out the door. Though it was an hour after sunset, the sky was still bright enough to make my skin feel tight and itchy. I wore a baseball cap as a disguise. If John Doe was waiting when I got there, I wanted to see him before he spotted me. I popped a painkiller and one of the pills prescribed for my light sensitivity, then wrapped up in my wool trench coat to guard against the December cold. The 1300 block was only about five miles from my home. It was in the middle of three crisscrossed streets and housed a cluster of eclectic storefronts and trendy restaurants. There were women in broomstick skirts and crocheted coats scurrying through the snow next to men in Rastafarian hats and corduroy pants. Most of the footprints on the sidewalk were made by Doc Martens. I found a place to park in front of a crowded coffee house. With my jeans, cap and ponytail, I felt rather conspicuous. I stepped onto the sidewalk and tried to ignore the stares of the ultrahip art majors huddled behind the steamy windows. I must have looked like a mascot for the capitalist culture they all gathered to complain about. It proved difficult to find 1320 Wealthy. I passed it several times before I spotted it. A vintage clothing store and a corner grocery, 1318 and 1322 respectively, jutted up against each other with nothing but a sandwich-board sign between them. Had I been patient enough to read the sign in the first place, I would have saved myself much frustration. “The Crypt: Occult Books and Supplies, 1320 Wealthy,” the silver lettering fairly shouted at me from the sign’s black background. A large red arrow pointed to a staircase that descended below the sidewalk in front of the clothing store. I peered down the dubious-looking hole. The steps were wet but not icy. I took a deep breath and started down. The door at the bottom of the stairs was old and wooden, with a window in the top half that bore the name of the shop in gold paint. Bells jingled when I entered. The sights and smells of the place immediately overwhelmed me. Incense burned, a particularly noxious scent, and the air of the place was hazy with it. New Age music played softly, some peaceful Celtic harp composition punctuated with birdsong. I didn’t know if it was the smoke or the flaky music that made me gag. The shop wasn’t horribly bright, but enough candles were lit to cast flickering shadows along the rows and rows of bookshelves. I covered my nose with my sleeve to avoid the heavy smell of incense that rapidly formed a metallic taste in my mouth. I looked toward the sales counter. The shop seemed empty. “Hello?” I heard the heavy thunk of the door scraping shut. When I turned toward the sound, something struck me hard in the chest. Lifted off my feet, I landed flat on my back on the unfinished wooden floor. Muscles all over my body that still weren’t used to movement after such a long recuperation screamed in agony, but an instinct completely foreign to me forced me to move. I quickly rolled to my side just as an axe blade splintered the floor right where my head had been. With strength I hadn’t realized I possessed, I arched my back and pushed off the floor with the palms of my hands, springing to my feet in a move like something out of an action movie. Only then did I come face-to-face with my attacker. If I had to guess, I would have placed him at about fifteen years old. But the tattoo on the back of his hand and his multiple ear and eyebrow piercings told me he must have been at least eighteen. His long, greasy-looking hair was shaved into a thin strip down the middle of his head, and despite the temperature in the shop, he wore a heavy overcoat. I held my hands up to show I meant no harm, but he swung the axe again, this time breaking the glass display window of the counter. “Die, vampire scum!” Like any sensible person would, I ran. Though he was fast on his feet, I managed to get past the baby-faced psycho and gained the door just as it swung open. I couldn’t raise my hands in time to protect myself. The heavy wood door smashed into my face and knocked me off balance. I hit the floor again in time to see the axe sail through the space I’d just inhabited. “Nate, look—” Two thoughts went through my mind when I saw the man who’d stepped through the door. The first was holy crap. He’d stopped the axe that was just centimeters from striking his very broad chest, catching the blade between his palms before the juvenile delinquent who’d thrown it could finish his shouted warning. My second thought was also holy crap. The man was sex walking. Wide shoulders, flat stomach, wavy, dark hair…I suddenly realized the appeal of those firefighter calendars that the nurses ogled in the coffee room. “I’m so, so sorry,” he said to me. I took the hand he offered, nervous electricity zinging up my arm at his touch, and got to my feet. I almost said “It’s all right,” before I realized it definitely was not. My hands shook as I reached for the door. “What the hell were you thinking, Ziggy?” he raged at the younger man before turning back to me. “Are you hurt, do you need anything? An ambulance?” He put his hand on my shoulder, and I shrugged it off angrily. “Do most customers leave in an ambulance?” Ziggy pointed his finger accusingly at me. “She’s a fucking vampire, man! Don’t let her out of here!” With a ferocity that startled me, the man yelled at the boy. “Get her a compress for her head!” Ziggy sputtered in disbelief. “Maybe I should get her a cup of my nice warm blood, too? Sprinkle some marshmallows in it?” “Upstairs, now!” The kid pushed past us as he mumbled furiously under his breath, slamming the door behind him so hard the glass in the window rattled. “I don’t think he’s coming back with the compress,” I observed dryly. “No, I don’t, either.” The man laughed quietly, holding out his hand. “I’m Nathan Grant.” “Carrie Ames.” Get out of here, you moron, my brain screamed. He’s still got the damn axe! Yet my feet stayed rooted to the spot, completely under the control of the morbid curiosity that had brought me this far and the ruthless attraction that urged me to stay as close to this man as possible. Nathan cocked his head and regarded me with sparkling gray eyes. Clearing his throat, he leaned the axe against the doorpost and crossed his arms over his chest. “Ames. You’re the doctor from the newspaper?” His voice was deep and seductively masculine, his words pronounced with a distinctly Scottish accent. I had a hard time concentrating on his question, distracted as I was by his perfect mouth. “Uh…yeah. That would be me.” He smiled, but it wasn’t the friendliest expression I’d ever seen. It reminded me of the way the dentist looks right before he says you have to come back for a root canal. “Then we’ve got a lot to talk about, Doctor. I apologize for Ziggy. He’s got it in his head that he’s a vampire hunter. How’d he find you?” “Find me?” Zigmeister69. I’d been set up. “E-mail.” Nathan chuckled. “Figures. Nightblood.com?” I coughed deliberately to hide my answer. “Yes.” He shook his head. “Rule number one, don’t go public.” “Rule number what? What are you talking about?” As if he had all the time in the world to explain himself, he turned away. He stepped behind the counter and pressed a button on the CD player, cutting off the annoyingly soothing New Age droning. “What are you talking about?” I demanded, tagging after him as he walked through the shop and snuffed the candles. “Would you stop and talk to me?” He sighed and dropped his head, bracing his arms on a table that looked far too dainty to support his weight. “The rules you have to follow. The rules every vampire has to follow.” My hand was on the door before I realized I’d intended to run. “Wait!” he called after me. He caught my arm and gently turned me around to face him just as my hand found the lock. “If you run out of here, this will only end badly.” His grip on the sleeve of my coat unnerved me, as did the tension in his voice. My words sounded thick and strange as I spoke. “Is that a threat?” “Listen,” he began, some of the urgency of his tone gone now. “I know you have some questions. Otherwise you wouldn’t have run into Ziggy.” “Yeah, I have questions.” I spat the words in my anger. “Who the hell are you? Why did I get attacked when I walked through that door? And what the hell makes you think I’m a vampire?” I yanked open the shop door and stepped into the pitiless cold, fishing in my pocket for my half-empty pack of cigarettes. He followed me to the threshold and let me get halfway up the steps before he spoke again. I was struggling with my lighter when he called after me. “What makes you think you’re a vampire? That’s why you were trolling the vampire message boards, right? That’s where Ziggy found you. It’s his M.O.” He moved up the stairs with a grace I’d thought reserved for animals and put his hand over mine. His skin was ice cold. “No matter how many you smoke, you’ll never feel satisfied. The food you eat no longer fills you up, and you can’t understand why.” The cigarette suddenly looked ridiculous where it rested between my fingers. I trembled, and not entirely due to the cold. Nathan spoke again, but he sounded disconnected and far away. “Come upstairs,” he said. “I’ll try to explain.” I took a few more steps and tried to convince myself to keep walking, to get in my car and never come back, to avoid this side of town altogether. If I never saw this place again, I could pretend none of this had ever happened. There was always the hope that I’d never actually woken from surgery, and that I lingered in a coma in the ICU. As much as I wanted that to be true, I knew it wasn’t. I dropped the cigarette and watched it roll to the next step. “No chance I’m dreaming here, huh?” “No,” he said quietly. “We can, uh, tell our own kind.” I looked up sharply. The blood drained from my face, and I could tell by the way his expression softened that my fear was visible. “You’re a—” “Vampire, yes,” he finished for me when my voice trailed off. “Well, that settles it,” I said, feeling oddly relieved despite the fact I stood in a dark stairwell with a guy who claimed to be a vampire. “I’m crazy.” “You’re not crazy. We all go through this, when we change.” He looked up nervously as a pair of feet shuffled across the snowy sidewalk above us. “But this really isn’t the place to discuss this. Why don’t you come up to my apartment and we can talk.” “No—thanks though,” I said, unable to help my laughter. “It was really nice meeting you, Mr. Vampire, but I’ve got to go. I have to work tonight, and I just might be able to get a call in to my psychologist first. With any luck, he’ll give me a nice, fat prescription for some antipsychotics so I can get back to my normal life.” I turned away, but Nathan caught my arm. Faster than I could think to scream, I was pinned between his hard body and the harder brick wall. His hand clamped firmly over my mouth, muffling my terrified cry. “I didn’t want to have to do this,” he said through gritted teeth. Then he dipped his head, and his body went rigid against mine. When he moved his head back up, my heart stopped. The chiseled, handsome planes of his face were twisted, the skin stretched tight over a sharp, bony snout. Long fangs glinted in the dim light. He looked the way John Doe had, just before he’d ripped my throat open like a birthday present. Only his eyes held a glimmer of control. Until the day I die, I will remember Nathan’s eyes, so clear and gray and heartbreakingly honest behind that horrific mask. “Now do you see?” he asked. My heart pounding, I nodded. He pulled away and covered his face with his hands. When he looked up again, his normal features had returned into an expression of kindness and compassion. It disturbed me more than when he’d been a monster. “Come on. Let’s go inside and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.” Numb with cold and fear and hopelessness, I let him guide me up the steps to the sidewalk. “Anything?” “Sure,” he promised, pulling a set of keys from his pocket. “Okay.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Why me?” Three The Movement Nathan’s apartment was small, with too much furniture. The walls were lined with bracketed shelves, the kind you’d buy in a home-improvement store and put up on a weekend. Some were so laden with books that they bowed in the middle. Notebooks and legal pads, all scribbled on in barely legible handwriting, littered the coffee table. It was cluttered but not dirty. “Excuse our mess,” he said with an apologetic smile. His gaze flitted to the hall. A Marilyn Manson song blasted at full volume behind one of the closed doors. “Turn it down, Ziggy!” The music dropped a few decibels. Nathan and I stood awkwardly by the door for a moment. I suspected he was as uncomfortable as I was. “Kids,” I said with a shrug, looking in the direction of what I assumed was Ziggy’s room. “Let me take your coat.” I watched Nathan’s face as he helped me out of the garment. He looked awfully young, in my opinion, to have a son Ziggy’s age. But then, for all I knew, Nathan could be hundreds of years old. After he’d hung my coat on a hook by the door, he seemed to suddenly animate. “Have you fed?” He started for the kitchen and motioned for me to follow. “I’ve got some A pos.” I lingered in the doorway and watched as he retrieved a plastic collection bag of blood from his refrigerator. Then he lifted a teakettle from the dish rack next to the sink and ripped the top of the bag with his teeth as though he were opening a bag of chips. Snapping on the burner of the gas stove, he emptied the blood into the teakettle and set it over the flame. The process seemed so natural that I had to remind myself normal men didn’t keep blood in their refrigerators. Of course, most normal men didn’t own teakettles, either. “You’re not going to drink that, are you?” Med school warnings of blood-borne pathogens flashed through my mind. Though he didn’t look at me, I saw amusement on his face. “Yeah, you want some?” “No!” My stomach constricted. “Do you know how dangerous that is?” “Do you know how dangerous I am if I don’t drink it?” He leaned against the counter and wiped his hands on a kitchen towel. For the first time, I noticed how truly tall he was. According to my driver’s license, I stood five foot eight, and though my hospital stay had stripped some pounds from my frame, I was no wilting flower of a woman. Still, Nathan looked like he could easily rip me into pieces with his bare hands if he got the inclination. But his voice held a note of sadness. His eyes met mine briefly, but before I could understand the pained look in them, he turned away. “I’m sorry. You haven’t had anyone explain all this to you. Blood-drinking is just one of the realities of being a vampire. You’ve got to do it sometime, and there’s no time like the present.” His voice was hoarse. “Besides, if you hold out too long, you’ll snap and do something…regrettable.” “I’ll take my chances.” The kettle had begun to give off a warm, metallic smell. To my horror, my stomach actually rumbled. “So, am I going to live forever?” “Why is that the first thing everyone asks?” he mused. “No, you probably won’t live forever.” “Probably? That doesn’t sound reassuring.” “Wasn’t meant to.” He tossed the towel over his shoulder. “We’re not susceptible to the ravages of time or disease, and we have a healing ability that increases with age. But the list of things that can kill us is a mile long. Sunlight, holy water, hell, even a bad-enough car accident can take us out.” He poured some blood into a chipped ceramic mug and motioned toward the dinette table. “If you don’t want this, can I get you something else?” “No, thanks.” I sat in the chair he pulled out for me. “Do you keep human food in here?” “Yeah,” he said as he sat across from me. “I like it every now and then. I just can’t live off it. And Ziggy needs to eat.” I frowned. Ziggy had clearly lured me to the shop in order to kill me. It didn’t make a lot of sense, considering he lived with a vampire himself. “Um…does your son know you’re a vampire?” “My son?” Nathan looked confused for a moment, then he laughed, a deep, rich sound that warmed me. “Ziggy’s not my son. But I can see where you’d get that impression. He’s a…he’s a friend.” A friend? I was hip. I could read between the lines. It figured that the first decent guy I’d met in this city was gay. “He’s a little young for you, don’t you think?” An embarrassed smile curved Nathan’s lips. “I’m not a homosexual, Carrie. Ziggy’s my blood donor. I watch out for him, that’s all.” That was the first time he’d used my name instead of addressing me as Doctor or Miss Ames. In his thick accent—I was fairly certain he was Scottish—my generic, first-pick-from-the-baby-name-book moniker sounded exotic and almost sensual. I wondered if he could sense the attraction I felt, the heat coursing through my blood. If he did, he had the courtesy not to comment on it. I was grateful for that. “So why did he try to kill me? I mean, if you’re a vampire, and he knows it and gives you his blood and everything, what’s his beef with me?” Nathan sipped from his mug. “It’s complicated.” I glanced at the clock on the wall. “I’ve got a few hours.” He seemed to consider his response for a moment. Setting his cup aside, he braced his elbows on the table and covered his face with his hands. “Listen, you seem like a real nice girl, but there’s something I have to ask you, and it’s a little personal.” Despite the ominous tone of the question, I nodded. At this point, I wanted answers. I’d fill out a complete medical history if he asked. “Shoot.” “I followed your story in the papers very closely and I have some concerns. Namely, why you were in the morgue that night.” When his eyes met mine, I saw the real question there. “You think I did this on purpose?” He shrugged, all compassion and friendliness gone from his face. “You tell me.” I had spent the past month in a haze of depression, deprived of normal life by a mysterious illness I couldn’t shake. My bones ached twenty-four hours a day. My head throbbed at the faintest glimmer of light. If I was indeed a vampire, I certainly wasn’t living out the posh existence of a Count Dracula or a Lestat de Lioncourt. I was in a living hell, certainly not by choice. “Please,” he said quietly. “I need to know.” I could have slapped him. “No! What kind of freak do you think I am?” He shrugged. “There are some people out there, sick people, who want to escape their lives. Maybe they’ve had some sort of trauma, an illness, the loss of a loved one.” He looked me dead in the eyes. “The loss of your parents.” “How do you know about my parents?” I asked through tightly clenched teeth. I hadn’t spoken about them since the car accident that had killed them. They’d been on their way to visit me at college. Guilt had kept me from opening up about them. No one, save my distant, remaining relatives in Oregon—many of whom I’d met for the first time at the funeral—knew anything about them or the circumstances of their death. “I have connections,” he said, as if we were discussing how he’d obtained courtside Lakers’ tickets instead of how he’d invaded my privacy. He actually had the nerve to reach across the table and take my hand. “I know what it’s like to lose someone. Believe me. I can see why you’d want—” “I didn’t want this!” I hadn’t meant to scream, but it felt good. I wanted to do it again. The ugliness and horror of the past month seemed to swell inside me, pushing me beyond the limits of my self-control. “Carrie, please—” he tried again, but I ignored him. My knees bumped the table as I stood, and Nathan’s mug toppled over, splashing warm blood across the tabletop. The sight held a sick fascination for me, and in a flash I saw a clear image of myself leaning over and licking it up. I shook my head to destroy the vision. “I didn’t want this!” Jerking the collar of my sweatshirt aside, I jabbed a finger at the barely healed scar on my neck. “Do you think someone would ask for this? Do you think I went down to that morgue and said ‘Hey, John Doe, why don’t you rip my fucking neck open? Why don’t you turn my life to absolute shit?’” The volume of the music from Ziggy’s room drastically lowered. Good. Let him hear. “Do you think I wanted to sit here and watch some guy I’ve never met fucking drink blood? I just want my life back!” No, what I wanted was to scream until my throat was raw. I wanted to stamp my feet and throw things. I wanted to be empty of these feelings of despair and frustration. Instead, I cried. My legs buckled and I slid to the floor. When Nathan knelt beside me and put his arms out to comfort me, I pushed him away. When he tried again, I didn’t fight him. I couldn’t control my sobs as I cried into his firm chest. His wool sweater pricked my cheek. He smelled good, distinctly male and slightly soapy, as if he’d just gotten out of the shower. So what if he was a complete stranger? I’d never been able to cry and let someone comfort me like this before. “I know you didn’t,” he said softly. “Do you?” I demanded, looking up at him. “Because you were sure acting like the vampire police or something.” He gently took my face in his hands to force my gaze to his. “I know because the same thing happened to me. At the hands of your John Doe.” His words seemed to magically patch the dam that had broken within me. My chest no longer heaved with sobs, and my tears miraculously dried. Nathan helped me to my feet. I took advantage of the moment, resting against him as long as I could without seeming weird. I pressed my hand just below his rib cage in the guise of steadying myself and felt the solid ridges of a perfect stomach beneath the wool. He picked up my chair—a casualty of my sudden rage—and helped me sit. Then he got me a glass of water and began cleaning up the spilled blood. The silence between us was stifling, but my questions overwhelmed me. I started with the obvious. “How did it happen?” Nathan stood at the sink, rinsing the blood from the kitchen towel. “He took some of your blood, you took some of his. Then you died. That’s the way it happens.” “No,” I began. I’d meant to ask how he’d been made a vampire, if John Doe had attacked him without provocation, as he had me. Instead, I focused on his statement. “I didn’t drink his blood. I don’t think he drank mine.” “Did his blood get in your mouth? In your wounds?” He leaned against the counter. “All it takes is one drop. It’s like a virus, or a cancer. It can lie dormant for decades, waiting for the heart to stop beating. Then it corrupts your cells.” “Yeah, but I didn’t die. They got me to surgery to stop the bleeding—” But that wasn’t exactly true. “Oh, God. I went into v-tac, in the recovery room. I flatlined.” “That’s when it happened.” He pointed to the living room. “Let’s go in here. We’ll be more comfortable.” I sat on the couch while he went to the bookshelves lining the wall. He pulled a volume down and handed it to me. “This should answer some questions.” The book, bound in burgundy-colored leather, had gilt-edged pages and seemed incredibly aged. The cover was bare, save for small gold lettering stamped in the lower righthand corner. “The Sanguinarius,” I murmured, running my fingertips across the letters. I recognized the root word, Latin for blood. I opened it, but the usual publishing information wasn’t printed. The title page lent the only clue to the age of the book. The Sanguinarius, it read in large print. Beneath that, in smaller type, A Practical Guide to the Habits of Vampyres. The font was uneven, as though the pages had been printed on an ancient press. The book must have been at least two hundred years old. I flipped a few pages. “A vampire handbook?” “Not exactly. More like a training manual for vampire hunters.” No sooner than he’d finished his sentence, I came across a graphic woodcut of a man sinking a pitchfork into the round stomach of a raging she-demon. “Oh.” I slammed the book shut. “Roughly translated, the title means ‘The Ones Who Thirst for Blood.’” He smiled. “This is complicated. I’ll start from the beginning.” I nodded in agreement, though it didn’t seem I had a choice. He sat beside me, a little closer than I’d expected. Not that I was complaining. “For more than two hundred years, there has existed a group of vampires dedicated to the extinction of their own kind for the preservation of humanity. In the past they were known as the Order of the Blood Brethren. Today, they are known as the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement. “There were fourteen clauses under the Order. But the Movement enforces only three. No vampire shall feed from any unwilling human. No vampire shall create another vampire. And no vampire shall harm or kill a human.” “Those don’t sound like such bad rules,” I observed. “Vampires today have it easy compared to the old days.” He sounded nostalgic. “The Movement headquarters are in Spain in some refurbished Inquisition dungeons, but Movement members are spread all over the world. I’m the only member on this side of the state, but there are assassins in Detroit and Chicago. The Movement has a fleet of private jets, in case a member needs to travel abroad. Otherwise, it would be pretty hard to get around.” “So, I take it they’re not a non-profit organization if they can afford jets.” That brought a small smile to Nathan’s face. “Most of the Movement funding comes from generous benefactors, very old vampires who’ve had centuries to amass their fortunes. The Movement has been around a long time, and those donations add up. Plus, I believe they dabble in real estate on the side.” “I’ve always said my landlord was a monster, but I never thought it might be true.” I tried to hand back the book. “Okay, no eating people, making other vampires, or murder. I’ve been able to follow those rules great up till now, and I don’t foresee any problems in the near future.” “Good,” he said, pushing The Sanguinarius toward me again. “Because if you do, the penalty is steep.” “How steep?” I tried to sound unconcerned. “Death. Cyrus, the vampire who sired you—” I snorted. “Cyrus? Is that his real name?” Nathan looked mildly annoyed at the interruption. “Cyrus has been on the run from the Movement in America for more than thirty years, longer in other parts of the world. The injuries that brought him to your emergency room were incurred during an attempted execution.” I sobered as I remembered John Doe’s horrific injuries, and my mouth felt dry. “Which of the rules did he break?” “All of them. Long before he attacked you. We just haven’t been able to finish him off.” “No one deserves that.” I tried to force the image of John Doe’s maimed body from my mind. “If you’d seen him, what they did to him…” “I did see him,” Nathan said matter-of-factly. “I was the one sent to execute him.” “You?” The wounds in John Doe’s chest. The missing eye. The splintered, destroyed bones of his face. The man sitting beside me had done it all. “How?” “I started with a stake to the heart, and when that didn’t work, I thought I’d chop him into little pieces and bury him in consecrated earth, but he got in some good hits. I’m lucky to be sitting here right now. Someone must have seen us fighting, because the police showed up. The rest—” “Is history,” I whispered. Nathan shifted uncomfortably beside me. “Not really. He’s still out there. That’s why Ziggy’s been on the prowl for vampires. We know Cyrus is in town, and he’s the only outlaw vampire in the area. I keep an eye out for any new fledglings that pop up. I find them, kill them and report back to the Movement.” He stretched his legs to get comfortable. “They give me six hundred dollars a head. Figuratively, of course. I don’t have to bring them actual heads.” I had to remind myself he was talking about ending people’s lives, despite the casual way he mentioned it. “You kill them? Why?” He looked at me as if I had antennae growing out of my head. “Because they’re vampires.” “So are you!” “Yes, but I’m a good vampire,” he explained patiently. “Good vampires get to live, bad vampires get a one-way ticket to wherever it is we go when we die. It’s not rocket science.” I shot to my feet. “Did you ever think maybe some of them might be good vampires? I mean, do you even check first or do you just go all kill-happy on them?” “I give them a chance to change my mind but they all turn out the same way. It’s just not possible for them to be good vampires,” he insisted. “And why not?” “Because they weren’t made by good vampires.” Releasing a huge sigh, Nathan picked up The Sanguinarius. “Every fledgling I’ve encountered so far has gone the way of their sire. The blood tie is incredibly strong, which makes it nearly impossible for a new vampire to fight the will of the blood in his veins, the will of his sire. The book will explain it a lot better than I can.” “Well, I’m here now, so why don’t you give it a shot?” I arched a threatening brow and put my hands on my hips to show I wasn’t moving until he answered my question. “You’re a very aggravating person, you know that?” He set the book on the table. “The Movement doesn’t want any new vampires made. We’re trying to whittle our species down to nothing. Hence the extinction part of the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement. Some vampires aren’t so into the idea. So they start creating new vampires. “When a vampire exchanges blood with a human to create another vampire, their blood stays in the new vampire’s veins. Forever. It builds something called a blood tie. For the sire, it’s a way of controlling their fledgling, like an invisible leash. The tie weakens as time goes by, but the fledgling and sire will still feel each other’s emotions, physical pain and hunger. The fledgling will always be ruled by the sire’s blood, and most of them don’t want to change. It lasts after death. Even if the sire dies, he can still wreak havoc on the world through his fledglings. The fledgling, forever influenced by his or her sire’s blood and whatever bent morals were handed down to them, could go out and keep making new vampires. Pretty soon, it’s goodbye human race. The way the Movement sees it, the only way to keep somebody like Cyrus from making his own vampire army and taking over the world is to kill his progeny. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is.” I swallowed. “You sound like you’re pretty hard-core about the Movement.” “I have to be. When I was turned, I swore my allegiance to them in order to keep my life.” He stood and advanced on me, though for what purpose I couldn’t tell. “It sounds like these Movement guys hold a lot of sway. How do you know they’ve really got your best interests at heart?” I was tempted to take a step back, but I held my ground. I was not going to let him intimidate me. Not after all I’d been through. If he wanted to kill me, he’d have to…well, he’d have to go through the new me first. He didn’t answer my question, but he didn’t try to grab me or shove a stake through my heart, either. He pushed my hair aside and gently touched the scar Cyrus had left. “He really got you.” A chill raced up my spine at his touch. I leaned into his hand. I couldn’t help myself. Something changed in his eyes, as if an iron gate were slamming shut. He dropped his arm and turned away. “You’re going to have to make a choice, too. Whether you want to pledge your life to the Movement, or lose it.” I snorted. “Where do I sign in blood?” “This isn’t a joke.” He turned to face me, and I saw from his irritated countenance that it certainly was not. “I can’t guarantee the Movement will even accept you, but it’s your only shot at surviving. Your sire’s death sentence extends to you.” My heart pounded and my legs tensed in anticipation of running. I took a step back. “You’d really kill me, wouldn’t you?” “Yes.” He looked away, then sank onto the couch. “It’s nothing personal. But I don’t know you well enough to tell whether you’re going to play loyal fledgling to Cyrus or not. You seem like a nice girl, but I’m not willing to take that chance.” “Nothing personal.” I laughed bitterly in disbelief. “You know, it is personal. When I get lured into a trap and almost get decapitated, it’s personal. When some guy I just met tells me he’s going to kill me, it’s personal. Because it’s my life. You’re out of your mind if you think I’m going down without a fight.” The corner of his mouth twitched and I thought he was going to laugh. I would have punched him in the face if he did. Good thing he didn’t. “I can respect that. But it doesn’t change my position. You need to make a decision. Ask the Movement for mercy and hope they grant it to you. You won’t get it from me.” “Why not just kill me now?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t take this as an invitation. He merely shrugged and said, “Because without a kill order, I don’t get paid.” “A kill order?” How much more like a bad horror movie could this possibly get? “If you decide not to ask the Movement for membership, I’ll report you. You’ll be processed in their system and a kill order will be issued a few days later.” He shrugged again, as if he couldn’t care less about the conversation. “I suppose you could make a run for it, but until I have that order in my hand, I’m not going to do anything to you. I don’t work for free.” I was about to argue that he could just kill me, then report me. Luckily, the common sense which seemed to have deserted me in the past few weeks found its way back, and I held my tongue. “How very Han Solo of you.” He didn’t smile or laugh. In fact, he looked even more grave than before. “It’s up to you. Petition for membership or die. I can get them on the phone right now.” “Fine.” I ground my teeth over the words. “Can I make an informed decision at least?” He frowned and cocked his head, studying me from the corner of his eye, as if this were a trick. “What do you propose?” I chose my words carefully. “Give me a chance to read The Sanguinarius and have some time to let all this sink in. I didn’t believe in vampires or monsters before tonight, and I’m in what we in the medical field call ‘a state of shock.’ It’s only fair to know what I’m getting into. Besides, I’m a smart girl. I’m not going to join up with some organization just because you claim they’re the good guys.” “They are the good guys.” There was no amusement in his tone, just absolute conviction in the truth of his words. I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, well that’s what the Nazis said about themselves.” He slowly rose to his feet. Power, dark and barely leashed, emanated from him. And that, combined with his physical presence, made him more terrifying than John Doe had been as he’d sunk his claws into me. Of course, John Doe hadn’t been this hot. Somehow, my physical attraction to Nathan made him seem more dangerous. But he didn’t attack me. He just invaded my personal space and shattered my comfort zone. He leaned down so our noses practically touched. “How do I know you’re not stalling so you can get back to Cyrus and gain his protection?” “Because until you mentioned it, the thought hadn’t crossed my mind.” I don’t know if he expected me to cower or cry or melt into his arms, but I could tell by the pronounced blink of his eyes that I’d surprised him. “Give me a couple of weeks. You can even check in on me. I’ll give you an answer at the end.” “Or you’ll run screaming.” He tried again to frighten me, but I was confident he wouldn’t kill me tonight. Something in the way he raked his eyes over my body, like he did now, raw and hungry, told me he had something of a soft spot for women. Or a hard spot, depending on how you looked at it. A deliberately slow smile played across my lips. “Do I look like the kind of girl who runs away from trouble?” He folded his arms across his chest. “You ran away from Ziggy.” Touch?. “Yeah, but Ziggy had an axe. Are you going to kill me with your bare hands?” He grinned. “I’m good with my hands.” Holy hormones, Batman. The door to Ziggy’s room burst open, and Nathan instantly stepped away. The teen stalked angrily into the kitchen, middle finger raised toward Nathan as he passed. “I know, I know, I’ve got an early class, I should get my rest,” the boy called. “Psych 101, I so need to be awake for that. I’m just making a sandwich before bed.” “Bed?” I asked stupidly, checking my watch. Ten after ten. “I have to go.” Nathan followed me to the door. “Have you thought of what you’ll do should Cyrus come looking for you?” I hadn’t. “I’ll tell him to go away, that I gave at the office,” I said, my uneasiness at the prospect betrayed by my forced laugh. I couldn’t stand the thought that I shared a plasma-level connection with the monster who’d attacked me. It was bad enough he’d invaded my nightmares. His blood had become part of me, too. Nathan studied my face for a moment, and I stared back, unable to discern a single emotion. He’d probably practiced hiding his feelings for so long that even he couldn’t find them. He looked away and handed me my coat. “If you need anything, you have my number. And this,” he said. He held out The Sanguinarius. I took the book in one hand and awkwardly tried to slip into my coat with the other. He moved behind me to help, and it took all my self-control to keep from leaning against him. What could I say? It had been a long time since I’d engaged in threatening, pseudo-sexual banter with anyone. “Thanks,” I said quietly, putting my hand on the doorknob. “One more thing,” Nathan said. “If you need blood, please come to me. I always have some to spare. Just don’t go outside afterward. In the daytime, I mean. In fact, you should probably start avoiding it entirely. I’m sure after a while, even if you hold out from feeding, the change will complete itself on its own. I’m always here, if you need…help.” “Thanks, but I don’t have any desire to drink blood.” “You’ll feel it soon,” Nathan warned as I descended the stairs. “Feel what?” I was more concerned by the prospect of the snow on the ground outside than his ominous tone. “The hunger. You’ll feel the hunger.” Four When Carrie Met Dahlia I didn’t give Nathan’s warning much thought until the night the hunger came over me. I’d spent the week doing my best to live life as though nothing had changed. Faced with what might be the last fourteen days of life before submitting myself to the Movement’s judgment, I was going to savor them. Of course, I read The Sanguinarius. It was as dry and Victorian as Lord of the Rings. I reminded myself that the course of my existence was dependent upon finishing this particular book. Nathan called to check in on me every night. I cursed myself for having a listed number. Sometimes his call came after I’d gone to work, and soon I found myself actually looking forward to the end of my shift so I could hear his voice on my answering machine. But by the end of the week, my spare thoughts—no, my every thought—had turned to blood. To get through my night shifts at the hospital, I snacked constantly. Coffee, pizza, popcorn, anything with a substantial aroma that covered the smell of blood. A few nurses made envious remarks about my ability to eat so much and never gain weight. I barely heard them. The obnoxious thumping of their pulses was all I could hear. Blood became an all-consuming distraction. I took numerous, drastic measures to ensure the safety of everyone around me. On my frequent breaks, I locked myself in the staff bathroom and used a razor blade to make small, shallow cuts on the inside of my arm. Then I licked away the blood that welled up. It did little to slake my thirst, but the resultant marks piqued the interest of the psychiatry resident. I spent a great deal of time avoiding him and his softly spoken invitations to talk about my “recovery.” Despite my hunger, I couldn’t stomach the thought of drinking human blood. Once or twice, in desperation, I’d snuck a vial drawn from a patient and brought it home with me. But the threat of tiny viruses just waiting to take up residence in my body made my skin crawl. I poured the blood down the sink and destroyed the vials. My weight dropped dramatically. I lost ten pounds in three days. I was tired and sick. Everywhere I went, the sound of human hearts pumping blood through fat, blue veins absolutely maddened me. The Sanguinarius recommended feeding captive vampires raw steak. Whoever wrote it had obviously never seen a 20/20 expose about slaughterhouse contamination and E. coli. My nights off were almost worse than the nights I had to work. At least at the hospital I had to force myself to concentrate on something other than the hunger. I was struggling through a particularly bad night at home when I finally gave up and went back to Wealthy Avenue. Tears streamed down my face as I shook uncontrollably behind the wheel, like a drug addict in desperate need of a fix. Nathan hadn’t called me that night, and it hadn’t occurred to me to call him before I showed up at his doorstep. I needed blood. I needed it badly. My hands trembled as I rang the bell to his apartment. There was no answer. The window of the shop was dark, and no one responded to my frantic knocking. Young men and women hurried up and down the sidewalk. The pumping of their blood drowned out the words of their conversation. Most of them looked young enough to have a curfew, but some could have been college students. College students from other states, perhaps, with few acquaintances in their new surroundings. Like me, if they went missing, no one would look for them for days, possibly even weeks… I was horrified at the thought, but I needed blood. Since I wasn’t up to hijacking a bloodmobile, I would have to find a donor. I didn’t go back to my car. I needed to walk in the fresh air and open space. I don’t know how long I searched. I was selective. One bar looked too dank and blue-collar for my tastes. It would be crowded with middle-aged men in flannel shirts watching sports on television. I wanted someone young. Someone beautiful. I spotted her on the street. She crossed against the light. Her pale, blond hair flew behind her like a banner in the wind. The way she clutched her coat to her chest accentuated her skinniness. I had never felt this sort of attraction toward anyone before, let alone a woman. It was not an attraction in a sexual sense. It was an animal instinct, as pure and natural as breathing. I wanted her blood. The girl in the black coat pushed through a small cluster of young men and women loitering on the sidewalk. As I approached, I read the name of the building she ducked into. The covered windows of Club Cite were framed by blue neon tubes. The brick building had been painted black, but the paint job had not been kept up, revealing flecks of the original red brick. The place was dirty and run-down. Once inside, I followed her down the stairs. The walls around us vibrated with a muffled bass line. She pulled open the door at the bottom and the entire corridor flooded with noise. The club was packed with young people, all dressed in black. Some were Dickensian, with top hats and walking sticks. More were swathed in torn fishnets patched with electrical tape. They all looked at me as though my blue jeans and freckled face disgusted them. I couldn’t have cared less. I’d lost sight of my prey. Finding her tragic figure in this writhing mass of self-pity would be impossible. “She went into the bathroom,” a voice said close to my ear. “But I wouldn’t go after her if I were you. She doesn’t know what you are.” My heart could have stopped beating. My chest tightened, and the excitement of the chase vanished. I was caught. I turned slowly, expecting to face a uniformed officer. Instead, I found myself looking down at the smirking face of a very confident young woman. She wasn’t slender by any means, and she swayed to the music with an innate grace that erased any notion she found her body bulky or unwieldy. The standard Robert Smith make-up of heavy eyeliner and deep red lipstick decorated her pale face, and a thick riot of red curls hung to her shoulders. “You’re surprised?” she asked, putting her hands on her ample hips. “You were being so obvious.” “Obvious?” My mouth felt dry. She looked me over with her head cocked to one side. Her curls bobbed as she laughed. “Yeah, obvious. But don’t worry, most of the kids here wouldn’t know a real vampire if one came up and bit them on the ass. They’re here because their parents just don’t understand.” The pulsating music, combined with the sound of beating hearts all around me, made me feel as if a speed metal drummers’ convention was getting into full swing in my frontal lobe. I squinted against the swirling light and movement of the room. “How did you know what I am?” “You must be new to this whole vampire thing, huh?” she asked. She smiled a perfectly mischievous smile, as if she’d practiced it in a mirror for years. “That girl over there, she’ll scream like a banshee before you get two drops out of her, and then where will you be? In a whole heap of trouble, that’s where.” Before I could protest, she grabbed my arm. Under her hand, my skin felt warm and alive, as though I’d absorbed her energy. Over the din of a hundred human pulses I could hear hers loudest of all, but I didn’t feel compelled to feed from her. She was warm and alive, but she didn’t seem wholly human. Danger was here. Tension seethed beneath her sweet words. She moved like a dancer despite her round shape, her every movement charged with urgency. The hunger gnawed at me, so I followed her. As we walked, she told me her name was Dahlia. She led me from the club and down a few alleys, through an abandoned rail yard adrift with snow. “There.” She pointed to a squat stone building that had been gutted by fire some time ago. A cement barrier separated the area from the expressway. I heard the cars racing past. “The cops never come here,” she explained. “And if they did, they wouldn’t come back.” The interior was large and open, as though the space had once been a warehouse or factory. In the very center, the ceiling had caved in. Someone had been industrious enough to cover it with plastic tarps. It was dark and cold. Ominous shapes huddled in every corner. I heard heartbeats, coughing and quiet moans. The smell of fear in the room was as thick as the unmistakable odor of hopelessness. “What is this place?” I whispered. Dahlia shrugged off her coat and spread it on the ground. “A donor house.” I must have appeared not to understand her, because she rolled her eyes and sighed as though I were incurably stupid. “A place for vampires to go and get a quick bite,” she said. “A quick bite, get it?” I nodded dumbly. “I get it…but who are these people?” “The donors?” She plopped down cross-legged. “Who knows? Maybe they’re homeless and just need some shelter. Maybe they’re freaks that get off on the thrill of it. Or maybe they’re like me.” “Like you?” I asked. A skinny girl with a dirt-smudged face and greasy brown hair pushed past me. One of her bony shoulders slipped from her threadbare jacket as she shoved me aside. “I need the money,” Dahlia said as she motioned for me to sit down. “The point is, these people are desperate enough to give you what you want. Those Goth freaks at the club don’t know shit. You’re better off trolling under bridges for homeless people than going back to that hole.” I wanted to leave. The place reeked of sweat and smoke and despair. But I needed blood, so I knelt beside her on the crumbling cement. My heart beat faster and I shuddered in anticipation of sinking my teeth into supple pale flesh. “Fifty dollars, cash.” She produced a wooden stake from the pocket of her coat. “And you stop when I say, understood?” The stake quenched the animal fury building inside me. I didn’t know specifically what would happen if that thing touched me, but my imagination was fueled by the memory of the gaping wounds in Cyrus’s chest. My numb fingers fumbled for my purse, and as I tugged on the zipper, the contents spilled onto the floor with a clatter. A compact fell open as it dropped to the ground. Through a miniature mushroom cloud of powder dust, I saw my eyes reflected in the mirror, wide and scared and excited. I thought vampires didn’t have reflections. It struck me as hilarious that I hadn’t thought of that before. I handed Dahlia the money with shaking hands. She counted it, smirked in satisfaction and tucked the bills into her bra. “Okay, then.” She placed the point of the stake above my heart, swept her hair back and bared her throat. I traced the line of one blue vein down her neck to her collarbone with my finger. My breath came in gasps. I thought my heart would explode the way it beat so wildly in my chest. I felt the point of the stake as I leaned down to fasten my aching mouth to her skin. Her neck was warm and soft. I bit down. The flesh yielded crisply like the skin of a ripe peach, and her blood gushed into my mouth so fast I nearly choked. The reality of my situation suddenly overwhelmed me. A moment ago I had not been a vampire. At least, not as far as I was concerned. Now, as I greedily gulped down the blood of this strange girl, I was truly initiated. She moaned, and the sound vibrated through me like an electrical current. The implications of what I’d done made me nauseous. The possibility that I might not really be a vampire at all flashed through my mind. Maybe I made the whole thing up. Tearing my mouth from her neck, I struggled not to vomit. “Hey! What’s wrong?” Dahlia shouted. I didn’t answer her. From the shadows, someone ordered us to keep quiet. I couldn’t control my sobbing. I frantically grabbed the spilled contents of my purse and tried to stuff them back inside with shaking hands. “Where are you going?” Dahlia asked, one hand on her neck. I expected to see blood flowing from the wound, but when she moved her fingers there was nothing but a faint bruise. I wiped my nose on the back of my hand and winced in pain. My whole face was sore. My compact lay innocently on the ground. I picked it up and checked my reflection. My face, usually pretty by most people’s standards, was twisted into a vision of horror. Cruel eyes peered out under a flattened brow. My cheekbones sloped down, forming a snout with my bizarrely elongated upper jaw. I pulled back my lips. My teeth were unevenly spaced in their roomy new setting, my canines lengthened into sharp points. I’d seen Nathan transform this way, and my nightmares were filled with visions of John Doe’s monstrous face, but I’d never considered such a thing could happen to me. I screamed and scrambled to my feet. I fled from the donor house, gulping the fresh air as if it were water and I a lost traveler in the desert. Dahlia followed me. She leaned against the scorched cinder blocks and watched me check and recheck my face in the mirror. The demon was gone. A frightened woman stared back. My breath escaped in great white puffs of steam. “Poor baby.” She put on her long black coat and hugged it tightly around her waist. She wore the same coat, I realized, and used the same gesture as the girl I’d followed into the club. But I hadn’t followed Dahlia… She shook her head, laughing. “You guys never learn. You think you’re so smart. ‘Oh, we’re at the top of the food chain.’” She pulled out a pocketknife and idly ran it up and down her neck. “The fact is, there’s power out there your kind can’t understand.” I stared at her in fascination. “What are you talking about?” She smiled. “Poor baby. Daddy didn’t bother to tell you anything, did he? Just ran right out after he got what he wanted.” Her mouth formed a momentary picture of disgust. “That’s so like him.” With a flick of her wrist, she punctured her taut skin with the knife. A drop of blood welled and shivered on the surface of the wound before it broke and rolled down her neck. My tongue grew thick. My body ached for more blood, though the thought repulsed me. I forced myself to look away. “Who are you talking about?” I wanted to watch her face when she answered, but the scent of her blood was too tempting. I feared what would happen if I looked again, so I fixed my gaze on the streetlights above the highway. “Cyrus, you silly goose. Don’t you know your own sire?” I’d known something wasn’t right when we left the club. Maybe I’d known from the moment I saw the phantom girl on the street. But instead of following my intuition, I’d followed Dahlia. Right into a trap. “I can’t believe how stupid some of you can be,” she shouted, suddenly agitated. “Your stories are splashed all over the papers, and yet you have no clue that someone might recognize you. I don’t even know why he let you have his blood.” She let out a sigh and appeared to calm herself. “Now you’ve made me lose my temper, and that really pisses me off.” I watched her as she slapped her forehead with the palm of her hand and muttered to herself, pacing back and forth. She stopped and faced me. Her expression was blank. “Your little bookstore friend took care of the last one for me. But sometimes, if you want to do something right, you have to do it yourself.” She pointed at me with the knife. Suddenly, I was so weak I couldn’t stand. I fell to my knees, wincing as I hit the dirt. “Good girl.” She threw the knife at me. It pierced the frozen ground inches from my knee. She took another deep breath, laughing. “I just don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight. Do you ever have days like that, where you just feel—” “Crazy?” I eyed the blade. It was so close. I should have been able to grab it and get to my feet before Dahlia could reach me, but my body was limp and heavy. “What do you want?” “What do I want, what do I want?” she singsonged, scooping up the knife before I could stop her. “You sound just like the last one I took care of. You guys always try to bargain.” She held the point of the knife to my throat. “I want to kill you.” “Why?” It was barely a whisper. I imagined the tip of the knife puncturing my skin the way my fangs had split hers. She leaned closer, twisting the blade against my neck but never breaking my skin. “Because you took what’s mine.” “What? What did I take?” I wanted to swallow, but I was afraid it would kill me. “I don’t even know you.” “You’re right. You don’t know me, bitch.” She lifted the knife and, without hesitation, plunged it into my stomach. I gasped from the pain. I’d seen numerous stab wounds in the E.R. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined they felt like this. The burning and tearing, coupled with the invasion of an object all my muscles tensed to reject. I couldn’t think. Couldn’t breathe. Dahlia pulled the blade out of me and wiped it clean on the front of my shirt. “I don’t know why he keeps doing this. He knows you all die.” “You’re not making any sense,” I wheezed, clutching my abdomen. It was the wrong thing to say. “I’m not making any sense?” She brought the weapon down again, piercing my side. “No! He’s not making any sense! He says he loves me. He promises to give me power. But it’s not time, Dahlia! It’s not time! Then he wastes his blood on a piece of trash like you! Look at you. You can’t even stand up.” She kicked me. It was a dangerous thing for someone to do to a wounded vampire, and this knowledge was apparently as much of a surprise to her as it was to me. Leaping to my feet, I lunged for her, fueled purely by agony and instinct. I wrestled the knife from her hand and brought it to her throat. “I didn’t take anything from you,” I whispered into her ear. “He didn’t mean to make me. I was an accident. I’ve got no interest in you, your vampire boyfriend or any of this fucking vampire crap.” I threw her to the ground. She peered up at me through her disheveled hair. Her eyes were hard and furious. “Yeah, you were an accident all right!” she screamed. “But it doesn’t matter! You’ll be dead by morning!” My anger deserted me, and the weakness returned. Dah-lia’s voice was too loud, too shrill. Blood flowed freely from my wounds. I knew I needed to stop the bleeding, but I could think of nothing but getting away from Dahlia. I staggered through the rail yard. Every step I took felt as though I were descending into a dark, warm pit. My pulse thrummed in my ears. It was slowing. The impact of my footfalls on the uneven ground jarred my ankles and sent shock waves of pain up my legs. When I reached pavement, my body seemed to know where to go on its own. I moved in slow motion, but I must have been running because I reached Nathan’s apartment in a matter of minutes. I stood stupidly on the sidewalk, unsure what to do as I pressed my hands feebly against my torn flesh. I knew my car was parked nearby, but I didn’t have my keys. I looked helplessly up and down the street, shivering. I yearned to be at home in my bed. I settled for Nathan’s doorstep. At least there I would be shielded from some of the biting wind. Dahlia might have followed me, but the more pressing desire for warmth and sleep outweighed my fear. If she did come to kill me, my exhausted brain reasoned, I would finally be able to rest in peace. I don’t know how long I lay there before the snow began to fall. Big, fluffy flakes, straight out of a Christmas movie, floated to the ground. I watched a few land in my palm, where my lack of body heat allowed them to gather without melting. I started counting them, but when the storm picked up I couldn’t count fast enough. I contented myself by watching the swirling patterns of snow and wind on the sidewalk. My eyelids grew heavy. Unable to fight sleep and not sure why I’d tried in the first place, I closed my eyes. A familiar voice woke me. It was Nathan. It took a moment before I realized he had hold of my shoulders. He shook me frantically. He shouted at me and clapped his hands in front of my face, but I was too exhausted to respond. My head lolled to the side. A brown paper bag lay forgotten on the sidewalk. The contents rolled across the snowy concrete. “Your shaving cream…it’s getting away,” I mumbled, trying to follow the canister with my eyes. “Don’t worry about that.” He turned my face to his. “What happened?” “I don’t know,” I said as I tried again to give up and sleep. Nathan shook me the moment my eyes slid closed. “What?” I whined, and tried to push his hands away. He cursed and gripped me tighter. “Wake up!” he yelled. When I didn’t, he slapped my cheek. My eyes flew open and I sputtered in shock. “What? Just let me go back to sleep!” “I can’t! You’ve lost a lot of blood. If you go to sleep, you’ll die.” Then I felt the pain, a twisting, pinching feeling in my gut. As if I’d eaten broken glass. I clutched his arm, writhing in misery. He shrugged off his coat and quickly wrapped it around me. “I’ve got to get you inside,” he murmured. He scooped me into his arms and carried me through the door, up the stairs to his apartment. Five Decisions, Decisions I woke to the gentle sound of someone humming Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage.” My eyes snapped open in alarm. Judging from the clutter around me, I was in Nathan’s apartment. I couldn’t remember how I got there. My stomach growled, and my memory slowly returned. I’d been hungry. I’d gone in search of blood. Then I’d met Dahlia. Being stabbed, now that’s something I definitely remembered. I lifted the blanket that covered me. My wounds were carefully bandaged. Dried blood stained the gauze wrappings, but I resisted the urge to poke at them. It didn’t take much to upset a fresh wound, and I didn’t want to start bleeding again. I reached up and gingerly felt my face. Completely monster-free. Aching all over, I sat up. My torn sweatshirt had been carefully folded on the arm of the couch. I pulled it over my head quickly, trying not to dwell on the fact that Nathan had seen me in my ratty, laundry-day bra. “Feeling better?” he asked as he entered the living room. I could smell the blood in the mug he carried. My throat was a desert and my stomach was trying to digest itself, but I turned my face away. “Drink,” he said, holding out the cup to me. He must have sensed the reason for my reluctance. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve seen a few vampires in my time.” “Not like me.” “Exactly like you.” He knelt in front of me, and I hid my face. My bones shifted under the mask of my fingers as he pressed the cup against the backs of my hands. “You need to drink this.” I heard the resolve in his voice and knew I wasn’t going to win. “Don’t look at me,” I whispered. “Okay.” He moved to the farthest corner of the room and turned his back. The blood was warm, as Dahlia’s had been, but thicker, as though it had already begun to clot. It coated my tongue and left a faint taste of copper in my mouth. It was like drinking penny-flavored Jell-O that hadn’t set. This repulsed me, but instead of gagging, I gulped half of it down. I felt gluttonous. If I were drinking straight from someone’s neck I probably wouldn’t have thought of manners, but it was much different sitting in Nathan’s living room, drinking from a mug like a civilized vampire. I sipped the blood self-consciously and studied him. It was my experience that people weren’t nice to strangers. In med school it’s every student for his- or herself. In fact, most of us went out of our way to intimidate the “competition.” The eat-or-be-eaten attitude had become so ingrained in my psyche, that I’d come to expect such behavior from everyone. But Nathan had been nothing but helpful from the start, which was surprising considering he was a week away from killing me if I didn’t join his vampire cult. It didn’t seem right that a man so attractive would be such a complete stickler for the rules. He must have worked for the IRS in a past life. Of course, I didn’t know much about Nathan’s current life. In the brief phone conversations we’d had during the past week, he’d revealed only generic information about himself and hadn’t given me much room to ask questions. If I was going to trust anything he told me, I needed some answers. There was no time like the present. “How old are you?” I asked. “Thirty-two.” “I meant including…” I didn’t know how to phrase the rest. “Oh, that,” he said, and it sounded as if he didn’t care to dispense that information. “I’ve been a vampire since 1937.” I tried to conceal my disappointment. I had expected to hear he was hundreds of years old, that he’d walked the battlefield with Napol?on and discussed the mysteries of the cosmos with Nostradamus, like the vampires in the movies. “That was the year ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ became the national anthem, you know.” “I didn’t know that. I wasn’t an American at the time.” He glanced over his shoulder, and I immediately covered my face. “It’s okay,” he assured me. “You’re back to normal.” I leaned over a clear patch of the glass-topped coffee table to check my reflection. “It’s the hunger,” he said as he straightened up the room. “The worse it is, the worse you look. The same goes for anger, pain and fear. It’s very animalistic.” How anyone could be blas? about his entire head morphing into a Harry Hausen-esque special effect was beyond me. “The scary part is that it gets worse with age. Some of the real old vampires even get horns when they change, or cloven feet. But you can control it, with practice. You just have to calm yourself, find your center, all that New Age crap. It’s very Zen.” He took the empty cup from my hands and headed to the kitchen sink. New Age crap? This from the guy running the witchcraft minimart? “Now, how about telling me what happened tonight?” he called over the sound of running water. I shuddered. “Can’t we start with what the weather’s been like?” “No.” “It was nothing, really,” I said, trying to sound casual. “‘Nothing’ rarely stabs people.” He came in and sat next to me on the sofa. The scent of him teased my nostrils, and I rather seriously debated whether or not to lean against him and inhale deeply. I really need to get out more. “I needed blood.” Nathan frowned. “You didn’t hurt anyone, did you?” “Okay, even if I had, did I look like I won that particular fight?” He looked relieved that he wouldn’t have to chop off my head. “I followed a girl into a club downtown. One of those…Goth clubs.” I lowered my voice, as if Goth were a dirty word. “Club Cite?” he asked, and I nodded. “That was very dangerous. Clubs like that are full of all kinds of undesirables. People who think they’re vampires, wannabe vampires and vampire hunters. Amateurish vampire hunters, but with enough knowledge to kill you, even if it is just a lucky accident.” “I know that now,” I said bitterly, remembering the metallic taste of Dahlia’s blood on my tongue. I took a deep breath. “I met a girl there. She told me she’d let me—” I stumbled over the words. “Drink her blood. I paid her.” Nathan sighed and shook his head, reaching for one of the notebooks on the table. “What was her name?” “Dahlia.” I looked over his shoulder as he flipped through the pages. There were crudely drawn diagrams and notes in the margins. A paper clip held a Polaroid in place at the top of one page. He handed the photo to me. “Is this her?” I looked at the photo. The woman did look like Dahlia, but a black Betty Page wig covered her red curls. The eyes were the same. Hard and crazy. I wondered how I hadn’t noticed that before. I told him it was her and returned the picture. He stood, cursed and threw it down on the table. I shrank away, surprised at his sudden vehemence. “I told you to come here if you needed blood! Why didn’t you come to me?” he shouted. “I did! You weren’t home!” “You should have waited!” He glared at me and braced himself for my next retort. Raising my voice had calmed me considerably. When I didn’t respond, he swore and turned away, running a hand through his hair. “Are you finished?” I asked. He sighed angrily. “Yes, dammit. But you should have waited.” “Maybe I should have. But I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time.” I scooped up the picture. “Do you know her?” “Who?” I rolled my eyes and held up the photo. “Dahlia.” When he sat beside me, he seemed to take up more of the couch than before. I didn’t want to give him the impression that I was intentionally trying to be close to him, so I moved to the armchair. “I know of her,” he said, examining the notebook. “She’s a very powerful witch.” “A witch?” I laughed. Nathan stared at me in annoyance before turning his attention back to the notebook. He laced his fingers together and brought them to his mouth, and his eyes glazed in deep concentration. Watching him, I realized why I’d been so disappointed to hear he wasn’t centuries old. Everything about him seemed anachronistic, as though he’d stepped from the Middle Ages into the present. He would look less out of place standing on a blood-drenched battlefield than sitting on a secondhand couch in an apartment full of musty old books. I imagined him charging into battle, face grim with purpose, his strong arms wielding a sword with both hands, his muscular thighs— “See something you like?” His voice jolted me from my lusty historical imaginings. I was caught. Nathan smiled that arrogant, knowing smile all males produce when their ego has been thoroughly stroked. “Sorry, I guess I just zoned out.” Even I wasn’t buying that lame excuse, so I quickly changed the subject. “Why do you think she attacked me?” He pushed the book aside. “I have no idea. She’s been trying for years to hook up with different vampires in the area, without much success. She isn’t someone to be trifled with. She has a lot of power.” His grave expression worsened my growing unease. I didn’t know just how powerful Dahlia really was, but she’d been violent and dangerous enough without the aid of any spells or tricks. “She was really pissed at me. For taking Cyrus’s blood. Do you think she’s, you know, with him? Or just bat-shit crazy?” “I’ve known Cyrus for a long time. He likes people who are easy to manipulate, and she definitely has powers he could exploit.” His brow furrowed as he considered his statement. “But I don’t think he would turn her. He’s not that stupid.” “She said it wasn’t time. Or that he said it wasn’t time.” I threw up my arms in frustration. “So, how, exactly, do we proceed from here?” I glanced nervously at the window. “Can you kill her? Or is she off-limits because of that human thing?” “Off-limits,” he answered automatically. “Besides, I don’t have any reason to kill her. I keep an eye on her, sure, but nearly every vampire hunter around here does. I’ve seen her around, but the vampires I’ve seen her with usually disappear after a while. As long as they don’t turn her, I don’t care where they go.” “She kills them!” I triumphantly jabbed my finger in the air. “She said she’d killed Cyrus’s other fledglings before, so you’ve got to be able to—” “No, Carrie, the goal of the Movement is to rid the world of vampires. She’s actually doing us a favor.” He looked away from me. “But it does trouble me to hear he’s been making fledglings we haven’t heard of. If Dahlia were a vampire…but I can’t imagine Cyrus would be foolish enough to turn her.” “He was foolish enough to turn me,” I reminded him. “Yes, but you’re not a witch.” His tone was the vocal equivalent of a condescending pat on the head. “A vampire’s blood is very powerful. Combine that with a witch’s abilities and you’ve got spells to raise the dead, summon armies from hell, etcetera. But as it stands, I think it would be safe to assume Dahlia merely wants to become one of us for her own selfish reasons. Is there anything else she said that might give us a clue why she targeted you specifically?” I thought hard, but the entire evening was still a blur. “Just my ties to Cyrus.” He looked helplessly around the apartment, as though an answer hid in the bookshelves. “Well, if she assumes you’re dead, at least she won’t come looking for you. That’s something.” Cold, sick realization made my stomach constrict as I remembered everything in my purse spilled all over the dirty floor of the donor house. “She has all of my identification. I left my purse behind.” Nathan frowned. “Well, that was careless of you.” “Yeah, I guess I should have gone back for it after she stabbed me!” I snapped. I was too tired to keep up the sarcasm for long. “What am I going to do now?” He went to the window and lowered the shades. “The sun is going to be up soon. I don’t think you’ll make it home before dawn, and I’d rather have you where I can protect you. Why don’t you stay here until dusk?” I looked doubtfully around the cluttered apartment. There was one dead bolt on the door. It seemed a far cry from the safety and security of a building with a night watchman. Especially since a crazed witch was out to get me. His eyes darted to the door, then back to me. “I swear, nothing will happen to you as long as you’re here.” As if to reassure me, he stood and opened the door of the coat closet, revealing an impressive array of medieval-looking weapons. “Beats a night watchman,” I said in awe. Nathan suggested I take his bed. “I’m going to wait up for Ziggy, make sure he gets in okay.” Glancing at the couch, I realized I shouldn’t argue. It didn’t look comfortable, and since it lived in the company of two men, it didn’t look very clean, either. I didn’t mention that. “You look out for him, don’t you?” “Ziggy?” he said the name with genuine fatherly affection. “Yeah. Well, he hasn’t got anyone else.” “Neither do you.” I’d said the words without thinking, but their impact was visible. Nathan’s faint, unguarded smile faded. I glimpsed a flicker of pain in his eyes before the emotionless mask was back in place and he returned to being the polite acquaintance that held me at arm’s length. I had no idea why it bothered me, but it did. “Listen, you’ve had a rough night, and those wounds aren’t going to heal without some rest.” He pointed toward the hallway. “The bedroom’s straight back.” I knew a dismissal when I heard one. I was halfway down the hall when he spoke again. “There are some T-shirts in the bottom dresser drawer. You can borrow one if you want.” I went mechanically to the bureau. I’d just met Nathan. Spending the night in his bed was intimate enough. I didn’t need to wear his clothes, too. But the thought of sleeping naked didn’t appeal to me, either. I undressed, grimacing at the pain that tore through me when I moved. When I eased into the bed, I hissed in agony. Loud footsteps charged down the hall, and Nathan burst into the room just seconds later. “Are you okay? Do you need something for the pain?” His immediate reaction to a sound I didn’t think he’d been able to hear unnerved me. So did the sincere concern etched on his face. He didn’t give me a chance to answer him. With a speed that surprised me, he left and reappeared with a large metal toolbox. Sitting on the bed, he placed the box in his lap and sprung the latches. “Okay, what do you want? We’ve got morphine, meperidine, Vicodin…I’ve got local anaesthetic, but I’d really like to save that.” As he continued to rattle off drug names, I peeked around his arm. The man’s first aid kit was better stocked than the Pyxis medicine cabinet in the E.R., but I was willing to bet he didn’t come by the stuff legally. “How’d you get all this?” “Connections in the Movement.” He lifted out a bottle of pills and squinted to read the label. “I thought you guys were all about the extinction of your species.” I reached for a syringe and the vial of meperidine. “This should put me right to sleep. Got a tourniquet?” He handed me the stretchy strip of latex. “The rules state we can’t save a vampire’s life, not even our own. If our healing abilities don’t take care of things, that’s the end of it. Nothing in here is going to save me if I get in a bad way. There’s no rule against keeping yourself comfortable for your last few hours. Do you need a hand?” I had the tourniquet between my teeth and tried to wind it around my arm the way I’d seen them do it in Trainspotting. I’d started enough IVs in my time that it should have been a piece of cake, but doing it yourself wasn’t as easy as it looked. When I shook my head no in answer to Nathan’s question, the stretched length of rubber shot from my lips, snapping me painfully in the face. “Here, let me.” He chuckled as he deftly tied the tourniquet and thumped the fat vein on the inside of my forearm. “That looks like a good spot.” I watched as he carefully filled the syringe. This obviously wasn’t the first injection he’d given. “Did the Movement teach you how to do this?” I asked. He tapped the air bubbles toward the needle. “I picked it up somewhere. Now, hold still.” I felt the needle slide into my unsterilized arm. I remembered what I’d read in The Sanguinarius regarding disease: The humors that delight in causing sickness and death will not touch the vampire. He will not be affected by the plagues of Pandora. I could only assume the same went for modern-day germs and bacteria. The medicine stung as it entered my vein, but Nathan’s touch was gentle and reassuring. Even so, I fixed my gaze on his face to keep from looking at the needle in my arm—I was never good at being the patient. “So we can heal from serious injuries on our own?” “The depth of severity is determined by age. If someone had done to me what I did to Cyrus, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. I would’ve healed from your stab wound in an hour, whereas you’re lucky you didn’t need stitches. By the time I found you, though, you’d already started to heal. It’s a good thing you’d fed some.” He held his thumb over the injection site as he withdrew the needle, then reached for a Band-Aid. “There. That should take the edge off, and it will help you get to sleep.” “What about me? How long will it take until I’m completely healed?” I really hoped the answer wasn’t two months. “You’ll be fine in the morning,” he said as he recapped the needle. I snatched it from him. “Don’t do that. It’s a universal hazard.” He looked amused. “A what?” “A universal hazard. It’s been in contact with body fluids, which transmit diseases that cause death. You could stick yourself in the process and end up dead. It’s a universal hazard, and not recapping needles is a universal precaution.” Realizing I sounded like one of my old professors, I pinched the bridge of my nose in embarrassment. “I can’t believe how easily I just rattled that off.” “It was very educational.” Nathan laughed. He had a great laugh, deep and genuine. It was the best thing I’d heard all day. He shrugged. “But I’m not worried about diseases. I’m more worried about a stake to the heart or an axe to the neck.” “Is that all?” I teased. “I would have thought a strapping lad such as yourself would be concerned about his cholesterol levels.” Suddenly serious, Nathan caught my chin in his hand and forced me to look at him. “Your heart and your head. Lose either one and you’re dead.” How will you kill me? I thought. “What about burning? Can you die from burning? Or drowning?” As if horrified by the morbid conversation—or the realization that he’d started it—he removed his hand apologetically. “The short answer is yes, you can die from anything that causes more damage than you can heal in a feasible amount of time. But let’s not talk about this now. You need to rest.” I wanted him to tell me more, but I just cried gratefully. “Thank you. You didn’t have to do all this.” He didn’t look at me as he began gathering up the medical debris from the bed. “No one ever died from being too polite. Besides, you need help. The next couple of months will be rough.” “I can’t imagine it will be any worse than it already has been.” “You’re going to have to say goodbye to your family, your friends. Everyone.” He stood. “It’s lonely being one of us.” “I don’t have any relatives I talk to anymore. I mean, my parents are dead, and I haven’t seen any of their family since I was little, except for at their funeral. I only moved here eight months ago, so I haven’t had time to make any friends.” I stopped myself. “Well, except for you, I guess. You’re the closest thing to a friend that I’ve got so far.” He didn’t look pleased to be drafted into the role. “You’re going to have to quit your job. You can’t continue to work at the hospital. The people there are too vulnerable to you.” I couldn’t argue with that. I’d stolen their blood, not exactly a move in the best interest of patient care. But the thought of giving up being a doctor was, well, unimaginable. After four tedious years of college and three grueling years of med school, I’d finally gotten the prize I’d been striving for. I’d sacrificed my personal life in pursuit of my goal. If I let it go, I’d have nothing. I wasn’t about to let fate, or anyone else, take away the one thing left that I cared about. “I’m not even going to discuss this. It’s not your call to make.” He sighed. “You’re right. It’s not. But how are you going to explain to them that you can’t work day shifts or attend morning meetings? How are you going to play off the fact that in twenty years you’ll still look…how old are you?” “Twenty-eight.” “In twenty years, you’ll still look twenty-eight. What are you going to tell people?” “Botox?” I yawned. The drug was taking effect. “Can’t I wait and work this out in a week? If I join your club they’ll tell me to quit, anyway, and if I don’t, you’re going to kill me.” The words appeared to surprise him, as though he’d forgotten he wasn’t yet on my side. He opened his mouth to speak but turned away and snapped off the light. “Get some sleep. We can talk about this later.” Like I had a choice. Within minutes of Nathan leaving the room, I dropped off and slept like a log. When I woke, I blinked sleepily and tried to remember when I’d gotten a goldfish. The creature stared expectantly at me from his little castle in the bowl on the bedside table. An odd feeling of loneliness swelled under my ribs. As messy and small as Nathan’s apartment was, it boasted homey, lived-in touches that were decidedly lacking at my place. I imagined going home to my high ceilings and bare walls, and the idea was too awful to contemplate. I buried my face in the pillow and pulled the covers over my head. It had been a while since Nathan had laundered the sheets. They smelled like him, and I shamelessly took a deep breath. I visualized him lying naked where I lay now. Did he bring women here? I couldn’t see the Nathan I knew forming a relationship with anyone. Yes, he cared for Ziggy the way a father watched over a son, but familial love came with ready-made boundaries. I’d only met him a week ago, but it didn’t take a genius to deduce that emotional intimacy and Nathan were not terms that went hand in hand. It was probably a miracle he even had a fish. The sun hadn’t set. No sounds of life came from the living room. Forsaking my bloodied sweatshirt, I slipped my jeans on under Nathan’s T-shirt and padded quietly to the bathroom. Despairing at my lack of a toothbrush, I brushed my teeth with my finger before venturing into the rest of the apartment. Nathan was sprawled across the armchair with a book in one hand and a loaded crossbow in the other. A thin line of drool hung from the corner of his mouth. On the floor at his side were two wooden stakes and the axe Ziggy had attacked me with. “Expecting company?” He startled awake. “I wasn’t sleeping!” I jumped aside as the bolt shot from the bow and stuck in the door. “For Christ’s sake, I could have killed you!” He leapt to his feet. “Do you always sneak up on people like that or just when they’ve got a deadly weapon in their hand?” I stepped back. “I’ve never happened upon a sleeping person with a weapon before.” He stretched his arms wide and yawned loudly. Apparently, he’d slept well enough when he was supposed to be protecting me. “How’re the stab wounds this morning? Healed?” I rolled up the edge of the T-shirt. Nathan pulled the tape from the gauze pad over my belly to reveal a faint pink scar. “Holy crap,” I breathed, poking the spot with my finger. The tissue wasn’t even bruised. My body had mended while I slept. “How the hell did I do that?” “The Sanguinarius says that humors in the blood we drink sustain our tissue and imbue it with a potent healing ability. I’m sure that’s not very scientific, but it’s the best answer we’ve got so far.” He paused as an idea came to him. “You’re a doctor. If you join the Movement, maybe you could work in their research department.” If. It hung between us again, destroying the friendly truce of the morning. We stood, staring at each other as potential enemies instead of a host and houseguest. A knock at the door broke our awkward silence. Nathan grabbed one of the stakes and motioned for me to stand back. Just as he reached for the dead bolt, the door burst open. Nathan lunged forward, tackled the intruder and brought him to the ground. His arm was raised, poised to thrust the stake into the man’s heart. “Hey, hey!” the trespasser shouted. He rolled out from under Nathan. Ziggy got up and brushed off his clothes. He smoothed back his long, greasy hair and looked me over. “Sorry, Nate, I didn’t know you had company.” Nathan snapped at his young ward with barely restrained anger. “Where the hell were you?” He turned his puzzled gaze to the door. “And I could have sworn I locked that.” “So much for protection,” I snorted. Nathan’s warning glare stifled further comment. “Hanging out,” Ziggy said, answering Nathan’s first question with a shrug. “I slept in the van and went to class this morning. I’m just here to donate, then I’ve got an art history night class. So, what’s up with her? Is she like, your new girl or something?” “New girl? What happened to the old one?” I asked Nathan, raising an eyebrow. He wasn’t amused. “There hasn’t been an old one for a while.” I couldn’t imagine somebody who looked like Nathan going without a date for long. Then again, most women I knew—the nurses I overheard gossiping in the break room, anyway—weren’t looking for vampires as potential mates. Nathan hung up the heavy overcoat that Ziggy had discarded on the floor. “I don’t like you going out all night, especially with Cyrus in town. And you forgot to use the special knock. I could have killed you.” “That’s a phrase you seem to be using quite a bit today,” I interjected, but Nathan ignored me. Ziggy went straight for the kitchen, with Nathan and I trailing behind. He pulled a can of soda, marked with a territorial Z in black marker, from the refrigerator and swallowed it in one long gulp. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and coughed. “Once, then twice, then once again. Yeah, I know. I did it. You just went all Rambo on me.” “You knocked four times,” Nathan said. “That’s not the same thing.” While Ziggy consumed another soda, Nathan retrieved sterile packets of IV tubing and needles from the cupboard. The younger man sniffed the air and made a face. “Damn, Nate, you reek.” Surreptitiously, I leaned a little closer to Nathan. He did smell a bit like the bedsheets, but I’d thought it was a sexy smell. There’s pheromones for you. Nathan looked mildly offended, but his expression quickly changed to amusement. “I’d value your input a lot more if you hadn’t just admitted to sleeping in that crusty old van of yours.” He handed Ziggy the medical supplies. “If you have any trouble, Carrie here is a doctor.” Ziggy’s face blanched as he looked from Nathan to myself. “Oh, yeah, new vampire, fresh, tender Ziggy flesh. Like I’m going to let her near me when I’ve got an open vein.” I rolled my eyes. I wouldn’t shake hands with someone who looked like Ziggy, let alone suck blood from him. “You’re totally safe, I assure you.” Nathan headed toward the bathroom. “I paid for two pints, I want two pints.” “Two pints!” I exclaimed once the bathroom door was closed. “You can’t give him two pints of your blood!” Ziggy settled comfortably in a chair and tied a rubber tourniquet around his arm, much in the way I’d tried the night before. He was a bit too proficient at it. “Sure I can. In case you get hungry, you should know I’ve got a stake in my pocket with your name on it.” He took a few trial stabs with the needle, missing the vein each time. I didn’t know what to say. I was a little insulted he thought I was some wild, uncontrollable animal. “Here,” I said gruffly. “You’re turning yourself into a pincushion.” I took the needle from him and slid it smoothly into the only undamaged vein I could find. “Heroin?” I asked, casting a disapproving look at the track marks on his wrists and the backs of his hands. “Not that it’s any of your business, Doc, but no. I’m the cleanest donor in the city. And Nate’s not my only customer.” In my opinion, his cleanliness was debatable. I didn’t say so and resisted the urge to wipe my hands on my jeans after I touched him. “You should be more careful with the needles,” I said, trying to sound as concerned as I possibly could. “You can’t just poke around in your arm like that.” “Duly noted,” he replied, too distracted with the intricacies of plastic connector tubing to pay my warning much heed. I dropped onto the couch and averted my eyes. I didn’t trust myself to catch sight of his blood. I heard the water running in the shower and muffled singing. “So are you and Nate like special friends now or something?” Ziggy asked. “No,” I replied, “and if we were, I don’t think it would be any of your business.” He laughed. “Hey, no offense or anything. I just wondered because you’re, you know, wearing his clothes and all.” I looked down at the T-shirt and wrapped my arms around myself. “My shirt had blood on it.” “Listen, I don’t care. I was just trying to make conversation.” He lit a cigarette then, and noticed my expression of utter longing, he held the pack out to me. “No, thanks.” I waved them away, knowing I’d get no satisfaction from them. “It’d be a waste.” “Suit yourself,” he said, tossing them on the table. “But a lot of vampires smoke, you know. It doesn’t matter much what you do when you’re dead. You can’t get cancer or anything.” “Yeah, but you can’t get anything out of it, either,” I said, my voice wistful. The acrid smoke smelled better than baking cookies. “Not true.” He held the cigarette out. I took it and inhaled experimentally. He was right. “It’s the blood,” he said. “Blood rules all.” I passed the cigarette back. “But it didn’t do anything for me before.” “Because you were craving blood,” he explained, prodding his arm where the needle entered his skin. I cleared my throat noisily, and he jerked his hand back with a grin. “It’s like if you were craving chocolate cake, and you just kept eating SpaghettiOs. The SpaghettiOs aren’t going to do it for you, you know?” I hadn’t even known that vampires existed until I suddenly became one. Now some smart-assed kid was telling me, a doctor, the ins and outs of my own physiology. The collection bag filled. He kinked the tubing and switched to an empty one. I motioned to the bag. “Do you want me to put that in the fridge?” He nodded. “So, how long have you been a doctor?” “Less than a year.” I hesitated. “I’m not sure I’m going to be a doctor much longer. Because of the vampire thing. After I worked so hard for it…I can’t believe it’s over.” “That’s a bitch.” He sounded genuinely sympathetic. The sound of the water stopped, and my mind briefly diverted to a vivid flash of Nathan emerging from the shower. I tried in vain to force the image from my thoughts. A loud crash, followed immediately by a yelp and a dull thud, snapped me back to reality. For a moment, I thought Nathan had fallen out of the shower. Then I noticed the brick rolling awkwardly across the floor. The window behind the armchair was broken. Sunlight streamed in, and Ziggy slumped to his knees, unconscious. Nathan rushed from the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist. He hurried to Ziggy’s side and felt frantically for a pulse. “What happened?” he shouted, looking from Ziggy’s lifeless form to me. I tried to focus on the emergency at hand, but it was hard to ignore a half-naked man standing in front of me, regardless of the circumstances. His chest was well defined and droplets of water still clung to his broad shoulders. I felt heat rush to my face as I imagined gripping those strong arms and raking my nails across his back. Yelling from the street snapped me back to the present. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” I knew that voice. “I know you’re up there! So does Cyrus! If I were you I’d come down here and burn before he gets to you!” She laughed. It was the same crazy sound she’d made the night before. “Nathan?” I whispered, paralyzed with fear. Ziggy tried to stand. As soon as he was upright, he crashed back to the floor and clutched his head. “What the hell happened?” He looked the room over through barely opened eyes. Nathan raised a hand, shiny with blood, and motioned frantically for me to help him. “I don’t know where he’s bleeding from.” “Oh, shit!” Ziggy’s eyes grew wide at the sight of his blood on Nathan’s hands. He struggled to his feet. The window shade had nearly been torn down during the brick’s dramatic entrance. A few rays of sunlight spilled into the room. Ziggy was careful to keep those beams of light between Nathan and himself. When the smell of the blood hit me, I understood his reaction. I felt the muscles and tendons of my face rhythmically clench, and my fangs began their aching descent. “Not now, Carrie!” Nathan snapped. His sharp tone surprised me, and my transformation stopped instantly. Ziggy looked from Nathan to me, as if trying to judge the best escape route. Nathan approached him cautiously. “Remember who you’re talking to, Ziggy. I would never hurt you. I know you’re not food.” Dahlia was still in the street, but she appeared to be running out of steam. “Are you waiting for sunset so you can come out and kick my ass? I’ll have a lot of backup by then.” “Get out of here, Dahlia, or I can’t be responsible for my actions!” Nathan roared. “Oh, I’m so scared,” she yelled back. “What are you gonna do, bookstore man? Read me to death? I’m going. I was just supposed to deliver the message.” “What message?” Nathan asked. Just then the shade fell completely from the window, flooding the room with sunlight. Nathan cursed and dropped to the floor. My reflexes weren’t as good. Words can’t accurately describe how sunlight feels when it hits vampire skin. The worst sunburn couldn’t compare with the searing pain that rocked through me. My skin bubbled then burst into flame anywhere the light made contact with it. My shirt caught fire from my incinerating skin, spreading the flames to the rest of my torso. The only thing I could think of was that my burning flesh smelled like hot dogs. Nathan leapt up and grabbed me, smothering the flames as we tumbled to the floor. Ziggy grabbed the blanket from the back of the couch and draped it across the window. “I’ll try to rig this up so it doesn’t fall again.” “Are you all right?” Nathan asked, his face hovering mere centimeters above mine. “I’m fine,” I wheezed, unable to take sufficient breaths. “Except for the third-degree burns.” Nathan actually smiled at that. He didn’t seem in much of a hurry to move, and despite the fact that I couldn’t breathe, I didn’t really mind. Until I remembered Ziggy had an open head wound. “And I can’t breathe. Will you let me up?” I squeaked, shifting slightly beneath him. I realized too late what effect my wriggling might have on a half-naked man. He looked embarrassed and apologetic as he rolled off me, clutching his towel closed. While Nathan tended Ziggy, I sat up and gingerly inspected the burned patches on my arms and chest. The skin was blackened. When I ventured an experimental poke it flaked away, revealing tender new flesh beneath. “Why didn’t I burn up?” “Because I saved your ass with my mad blanket-throwing skills,” Ziggy answered. Nathan made a sound in the back of his throat. I couldn’t tell if he was annoyed at Ziggy’s comment or upset by the gash in his skull. “This is going to have to be stitched up,” he said with a sigh of resignation as he examined Ziggy’s wound. “I can do that,” I offered, but Nathan shook his head. “I don’t have the supplies on hand, and you don’t have enough control yet to be around this much blood.” He turned to Ziggy. “It’ll be safer if you go to the hospital. Do you mind?” “Better than hanging around here,” he said with a shrug. “It’s like swimming in a pool of sharks with a paper cut in here.” Nathan went to his room. He returned with pants on his body and a roll of cash in his hand. “Take this,” he ordered. “Go straight to the E.R.” Ziggy stuffed the money in his jacket. “Where else would I go? Denny’s?” “Knowing you, anything is possible. But I’m not kidding,” Nathan warned. “Stay off the street tonight. I want you in by curfew.” “No problem,” Ziggy said. “They’ll probably give me some wicked pain medication at the E.R.” Nathan watched him descend the stairs, then closed the door and turned to me. “Here we are again. Just you and me, alone together. Not completely dressed.” The comment was so playful and unexpected, I didn’t know what to say. I wrapped my arms around my chest to cover the burn holes in the T-shirt and tried to force a laugh. “I’m not having much luck with shirts lately.” “Well, I’d loan you another but I saw what you did to the last one.” His voice sounded weary, but he smiled, anyway. “Besides, I like the view.” I rolled my eyes. “If you’re going to be a smart-ass, I’ll just ignore you.” Nathan clearly dealt with stress through humor. As long as I had to deal with him, I hoped he had enough stress to cause an ulcer. He was much more pleasant when he was using his coping mechanisms. The fading sunlight that had peeked from the edges of the blanket over the window disappeared. If Dahlia’s brick had broken the window five minutes later, it would have already been night. I checked my scorched flesh again. It had nearly healed. “Why did that happen?” I asked, holding up my seared hand. “Because you’re a vampire. Haven’t you seen any movies?” Nathan asked. “I’m more of a werewolf fan, for your information.” He made a face. “You wouldn’t be if you ever met one.” “Werewolves are real?” I smiled in spite of myself. I’d always liked the idea of wild guys who were animals in bed. Not that I’d ever actually experienced said animalism for myself, but a girl can dream. Sighing deeply, Nathan stretched out his legs. “Why is it you women find them so damned attractive? Is removing ticks from a guy such a turn-on?” “I never said I was attracted to them. I just said I favored them to, well, humanoid leeches, for instance.” I spied Ziggy’s cigarettes that lay forgotten on the coffee table, and snuck one from the pack. “Anyway, why did it happen now? It’s been nearly two months since the attack, and I’ve been in the sun since then.” Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/jennifer-armintrout/blood-ties-book-one-the-turning/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.