Bitten & Smitten

by Michelle Rowen

  I froze in place. “What?”

  “Just don’t move. I’m serious, Sarah.”

  I heard something. Close. Twigs breaking on the ground. Loud breathing in and out. Sniffing.

  Sniffing?

  I glanced down. There was a large—and I mean large—dog staring at me from only inches away. It growled, low and menacing, and bared its teeth.

  “I don’t like dogs,” I whispered. “Go away. Shoo.”

  “Be nice,” Quinn warned.

  “Uh…” I could feel sweat dripping down my back. “Nice doggy? Yeah. Good doggy.”

  The growl increased and it took a step closer to me. I couldn’t tell what breed it was. Big, black, and probably rabid. The kind of dog that rips your throat out now and asks questions later.

  “Nice dog—”

  It jumped at me, muddy feet on my chest, knocking me to the ground and into a big pile of wet snow. I screamed and saw Quinn leap toward me.

  Then I heard the gunshot.

  And I felt the hot, wet tongue of the dog licking up my left cheek.

  “Ew.” I tried to push its muzzle away.

  There was another gunshot, but the dog didn’t budge. Who was shooting?

  “Barkley,” a coarse voice commanded. “Get off the lady. Now!”

  Barkley whimpered and, with a last affectionate swipe of its tongue, moved away from me. I was too stunned to stand up yet, so I just lay there on my back. Quinn came into view above me, a look of concern on his face. Then another man appeared. He was tall, skinny, and had sparse, longish white hair plastered to his head. He wore a ratty burgundy housecoat. If crazy had a look, this was it.

  He pointed the gun at me. “Get up, vampire.”

  He backed away as Quinn helped me to my feet and motioned with the shotgun for us to go toward the trailer.

  “You’re Dr. Kalisan?” Quinn asked.

  “Shut it. Get.”

  We turned toward the door, and he pushed the gun into each of our backs to nudge us forward.

  “Listen,” I said. “We can just go. Don’t want to bother you or anything. Our cab…” I glanced behind me. Where the cab used to be were two dark tire tracks in the light covering of snow. I shook my head. “Oh, never mind.”

  Kalisan pushed us into the trailer and shut the door behind us. Immediately we were plunged into darkness.

  “Down,” he said, and I felt the gun jab me in my spine again.

  I clung to Quinn’s arm and found that we were making our way down a long flight of stairs. Down and down. It was so strange. I stumbled a couple of times, but finally ended up on flat ground.

  Fluorescent lights flickered on. We were standing in a large living room: couches, television, stereo system, weird embryos in glass jars on the bookshelf. The trailer must have been just the tip of the iceberg. This was a whole underground lair. Well, suburban-style lair, anyhow.

  Kalisan still had the gun on us, his eyes narrowed. Barkley sat next to him, large and foreboding, but panting, with his tail wagging happily.

  “Why don’t you point that gun somewhere else,” Quinn said, holding on to my sweaty hand.

  “What do you want, vampires?”

  I frowned. “The cure, of course. We called for an appointment.”

  “You think it’s that easy? Just call for an appointment and come on over?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  His eyes narrowed even farther until they were such tiny slits I couldn’t believe he could see out of them at all. “Who are you? What are your names?”

  Quinn glanced at me and squeezed my hand. “I’m Michael Quinn. And this is Sarah Dearly.”

  Kalisan frowned and lowered the gun a fraction. “Quinn, eh?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  The doctor moved backward, without taking his eyes off us. He grabbed a framed photo that sat on a table next to his television and brought it back to us, thrusting it in Quinn’s face.

  “Who’s that, then?”

  The photo was of a much younger Kalisan. He wore a bright yellow leisure suit and a tie so wide I would have thought it was a Halloween costume if my father hadn’t owned the exact same outfit. On either side of him was a much younger Roger Quinn and a pretty blond woman.

  Quinn snatched the photo away from Kalisan. “Those are my parents.”

  Kalisan eyed him for a moment. “Your father is the great vampire hunter, Roger Quinn?”

  Quinn stared back at him. “Like I said, I’m looking for a cure.”

  “I see.” He lowered the gun to the floor. “Your father is an admirable man. Someone who would be disappointed to find out what has happened to you. He doesn’t know, I presume?”

  “You presume correctly.”

  Kalisan glanced at me. “And what’s your story?”

  Barkley had come to sit next to me, and I patted his head absently. “I’m just a girl in need of a cure.”

  He glanced down at the dog. “I suppose you can’t be all that bad if my werewolf likes you.”

  I removed my hand. “Were-what?”

  Kalisan smiled. “Ah, so you are a vampire who doesn’t believe in werewolves?”

  Barkley licked my hand, and I immediately wiped it on my pants. “Gross.”

  “His rude behavior isn’t his fault. He’s been stuck that way for a very long time. He forgets normal human manners. I’ve been working on a cure for him as well, but alas, the university’s grants for this sort of research are few and far between.”

  I glanced down at Barkley. “Bad dog.”

  He licked my hand again.

  Kalisan turned to Quinn and took the photo back. “You truly want the cure?”

  Quinn nodded. “Yes.”

  “I’ll give it to you.” He handed the gun to Quinn. “But first you must shoot the woman.”

  I heard a whimper, and I wasn’t sure if it was Barkley or myself.

  Quinn frowned down at the gun in his hands. “You want me to—”

  Kalisan pointed at me. “Shoot her. She’s a vampire; you’re a hunter. This should be no problem for you.”

  I backed up a step. “Quinn.”

  “Shut up,” Quinn said. Then to the doctor, “You’re saying that all I have to do for the cure is to shoot her. Right here. Right now. And you’ll give it to me.”

  “That’s correct.”

  Quinn raised the shotgun toward me, and I backed up against the wall. I was barely breathing, barely thinking. Just the word “no” going through my head over and over again. And the thought that I shouldn’t have made him sleep on the couch last night. Big mistake. Huge.

  “Just shoot her,” Quinn said to himself as he aimed the gun at my forehead. “Easy as that.”

  Then he turned the gun toward Kalisan.

  “Sorry, Doc. Things stopped being that easy for me a while ago. Now about that cure?”

  The doctor stared at him for a second and then laughed and pushed the gun away. “Blanks. Just blanks. I was only testing you.”

  I hadn’t moved. I’d been seconds away from needing adult diapers and was trying to make my brain work again. Guns are bad. Very bad. Especially when they’re pointed at me.

  “Sarah,” Quinn said. “You okay?”

  “Sure, no problem.” My voice was squeaky.

  “Come,” Kalisan said. “I’ll make coffee.”

  Five minutes later I was sitting in the doctor’s expansive kitchen trying to make my near-death twitches go away. He’d given me a coffee mug that read RESEARCHERS DO IT BY THE BOOK. I think it was supposed to sound dirty, but I wasn’t in the mood to find it amusing. We’d already called for a cab. Being where we were, it would be better to have one waiting outside than be stuck here forever. To put it mildly.

  “You two are an item?” Kalisan asked after biting into an apple Danish.

  Quinn glanced at me. “No. Just friends.”

  “May I ask why you want to be cured?”

  “It’s simple,” Quinn said. “We want our old lives back.”

  “The
n perhaps you should have thought twice before being sired.”

  I shook my head. “We were both turned against our will.”

  He studied me for a moment, perhaps trying to decide if I was lying or not. “You’d allow yourselves to be my guinea pigs?”

  I didn’t particularly like the sound of that.

  “Has the cure been used successfully before?” Quinn reached under the table and squeezed my hand.

  “Yes, of course. But, in the grand scheme of things, it’s still a new technology.”

  He nodded. “We’re interested.”

  Kalisan went to refill his coffee mug, topping it off with a lot of cream and several spoonfuls of sugar. “Then there is only the matter of price.”

  I’d expected that. You can’t get anything good for free anymore, even when you volunteer to be a guinea pig. I could sell my sofa. There were those commemorative Princess Diana plates that were probably worth a pretty penny on eBay. And I still had a bit of money my grandmother had left me in her will. It was only a few thousand, but it was nice to know I had it for a rainy day. And it was very rainy.

  “Okay,” I said. “How much?”

  “One million dollars.” Kalisan took a sip of his coffee. “Each.”

  My Princess Diana plates couldn’t go up that much, even if there was a last-minute bidding war.

  “What?” I managed. “Are you kidding me?”

  I looked over at Quinn. His face was red. “That’s excessive. There must be another way.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s the going rate,” Dr. Kalisan said, almost apologetically. “It’s not as though I have a lab here and am able to mix up the ingredients easily. It is a long, expensive process. Components have to be gathered from the four corners of the earth. Dark magic is involved, too, and you would not believe how much the going hourly rate is for a wizard these days. Working wizards have such huge egos, you have no idea. I don’t care what the movies would have you believe.”

  I grabbed Quinn’s arm. This was bad news. We weren’t going to get the cure. It existed, but it was all about money, like everything in the world. Money talked, bullshit—and vampires—walked.

  “Thanks for your time.” I pulled at Quinn. “We’ll hold on to your number in case we win the lottery. Come on, Quinn, let’s wait for the cab outside.”

  That was it, then. It was over. I was stuck as a vampire forever.

  “Just a moment,” Kalisan said. “If you truly have no money, I think there might be another way.”

  We turned back around.

  “You’re from Toronto, isn’t that so?”

  Quinn crossed his arms. “That’s right.”

  “There is a much-sought-after vampire who is reportedly living in your city. He is old, very old, and impossible to kill. He’s a legend. There is a price tag on his head, which would more than cover your fees. If you were to give me his location—information I could sell to those who wish to find him—then I think we could come to an understanding.”

  “You’d give us the cure for this information?” Quinn said with disbelief.

  “Yes.”

  I didn’t say anything, but my mouth had gone dry. He wanted information for the hunters to capture and kill a vampire who was old and powerful enough to be considered a legend? There was only one vamp living in Toronto I was aware of who fit that bill. Gee whiz. What a small world.

  “Who is it?” Quinn asked.

  “His name is Thierry de Bennicoeur.” He smiled. “To bring the great Thierry de Bennicoeur down would be a feather in anyone’s cap. A feather that they’d be willing to pay quite dearly for.”

  I dug my fingernails into Quinn’s arm before he had a chance to say anything.

  “We don’t know him,” I said.

  “Perhaps not. But I am quite sure he is in the city. I am confident that you are sufficiently motivated to find his location, his hiding spots, for such a reward as the cure.”

  Quinn inhaled deeply. “I don’t know about that.”

  I could have kissed him.

  Kalisan nodded. “Ah, loyalty. I respect that. Misplaced loyalty, but loyalty nonetheless. Protecting your own kind, whether or not you wish to remain one of them, is an admirable gesture.”

  Quinn didn’t say anything, and I knew it was a struggle for him. It wasn’t as though he liked Thierry very much, but he had saved Quinn’s life. Quinn was honorable, and that counted as something to him.

  “There has to be another way,” Quinn said.

  “I wish that there were. But I am not the only one involved in the process. If it were up to me, I would hand over the cure to you happily, for free. But I’m afraid that’s not the way it works.”

  “Then I’m sorry we couldn’t work this out.” Quinn’s voice sounded strangled.

  The photo of Kalisan with Quinn’s parents had been placed for the time being on the shelf behind the doctor. He glanced at it. “Your mother was a wonderful woman. Beautiful, charming, a marvelous wife and mother. I had the honor of meeting her on several occasions. A shame about what happened to her.”

  “I didn’t come here to discuss my family,” Quinn said sharply. “Sarah, I think you’re right. We should leave.”

  Dr. Kalisan nodded. “A painful memory. Yes, I understand that.”

  “You have no idea.” There was no more friendliness in Quinn’s eyes. He looked at Dr. Kalisan as he once looked at me. Emotionless, murderous, without compassion or feeling. He grabbed my hand and steered us back in the direction of the stairs without another word.

  Kalisan cleared his throat. “I see that you have no idea that it was Thierry de Bennicoeur who was responsible for your mother’s death, or I can’t imagine that you would be protecting him so fiercely.”

  Quinn froze in place.

  “Yes, he murdered her,” Kalisan continued. “It is well known in the hunting community, but I would assume your father has shielded you from the unfortunate details. I saw the papers, the reports. I know what he did to her before her death, and if I shared with you the grisly details, then you would be having no second thoughts about handing him over on a silver platter.”

  I was screaming inside at what I was hearing, though I tried not to show anything on my face. I couldn’t think about what was true and what was not. I only knew that I had to get Quinn the hell out of there before he did something crazy.

  He was still in the same spot, hadn’t moved an inch. I touched his arm and he flinched.

  Quinn glanced over his shoulder. “I’ll think about your offer.” His voice was dead.

  “Yes, you do that.” Kalisan took a sip from his mug of coffee. “You have my number. Would you please be so kind as to close the door behind you?”

  Chapter 21

  The entire ride back to the city was in silence. But it wasn’t just uncomfortable silence, it was torture.

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to think. It felt like some sort of a nightmare come to life. Thierry killed Quinn’s mother? It couldn’t be true. Dr. Kalisan was lying, he had to be.

  The cab pulled up in front of my apartment building. I turned to Quinn.

  “What are you going to do?”

  He didn’t meet my eyes. “I don’t know.”

  “Where are you going now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can come with you. We can talk about this. There has to be another way.”

  “I want to be alone.”

  “But… you’re not going to…” I swallowed. “Are you going to call Dr. Kalisan back?”

  He looked up at me, and his eyes were full of pain. “I don’t know.”

  “He’s lying to you… to us. He has to be.”

  “Of course you’d think that.” His voice was scornful. “I don’t know, Sarah, I can’t think straight. I need to be alone. If what the doctor said is true—if Thierry really did that to my mother—” His voice broke off. “I still don’t think I’d tell him.”

  I let out a breath.

 
He gritted his teeth. “I’d rather kill Thierry myself, even if it costs me the cure.”

  “Quinn…”

  “Get out of here, Sarah.”

  “But—”

  He leaned over to open the cab door and practically pushed me out onto the sidewalk. “Get out.”

  I struggled to keep my balance, and by the time I was ready to say something else, the door slammed shut behind me and the cab drove away.

  If only I’d never tried to find out about the cure. Opening that can had let out too many worms. And I hated worms.

  I didn’t know where to turn. I didn’t know where to go. I thought briefly about just going up to my condo and crawling back into bed, but that didn’t seem like something I should do.

  A sign. I was lost and didn’t know what to do next— I needed a sign to show me the way.

  Looking up, I saw a billboard for the Toronto stage production of Mamma Mia!, surrounded by glowing reviews from a bunch of newspapers.

  I frowned. I meant a different sign. Not that one.

  Somebody bumped my shoulder as they walked briskly past me.

  “Hey!” I yelled after him. “Watch where you’re going, jerk.”

  The man turned to glance at me and my breath caught in my chest. It was Eugene, looking nervous and jittery, but he was alive and well.

  “Eugene!”

  Fear crossed his expression when he saw me. “Leave me alone,” he said in a quavering voice. “Don’t hurt me.”

  I ran to catch up with him and grabbed his shoulder. He backed up against the wall and held his hands up to protect his face.

  “I’m not going to hurt you. What are you doing here? Did they let you go last night?”

  “Y-y-yes,” he stammered. “They released me when they finally decided I was telling the truth.”

  “They just let you go? Just like that? Even now that you know where the club is?”

  “The dark-haired man, the scary one, he let me go. The others didn’t want to.”

  The dark-haired, scary one had to be Thierry. Everything I expected to happen last night, all of my crazy imaginings of what Thierry would do—letting Eugene go was not one of them.

  I cocked my head to one side and tried to look mean. “And you aren’t going to say anything about where you were?”