Читать книгу Blood Ties Bundle: 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 - Jennifer Armintrout, Jennifer Armintrout - Страница 7

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-traumatic 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 submarine-like 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, et cetera, 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. Zigmeister69@usmail.com 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 coffeehouse. 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?”