Legally Undead (Vampirarchy Book 1)

by Margo Bond Collins

  Word must have spread through Deirdre’s party guests about what was going on, or maybe about who I was and what I’d helped do to the vampires in the armory, because when we finally staggered to the top of the stairs on the first floor, vampires lined the marble foyer. There was just enough room for the two of us to stumble through a cleared path toward the glass doors. None of the vampires ever actually said anything, but they all hissed and growled at us as we lurched our way through them.

  They closed ranks behind us, baring their fangs and making that god-awful, inhuman, cat-like growling noise.

  They didn’t follow us outside, though. The human attendant at the door opened it for us as if we were any guests leaving—just as if we didn’t have an entire vampire mob behind us growling and lusting for our blood.

  The thought made me shiver. So did the early-morning air. It wasn’t light out, but the air had taken on that slight dampness that indicates dawn is approaching. The long, curving driveway stretched out in front of us. We started down it.

  I still didn’t know how we were going to get home. No one was going to stop to pick us up; we looked like refugees from an insane asylum. Or worse. My long black dress was wrinkled and stained. Malcolm didn’t even have on a shirt, his jeans were unbuttoned, and the blotches on the pants really couldn’t be taken for anything other than the bloodstains they were.

  For that matter, Malcolm wasn’t wearing any shoes. We were only halfway down the driveway and already he was limping. Walking for any length of time on the road would tear his feet up entirely. At least I had my boots.

  My boots. I had totally forgotten about my boots, and about the cell phone in them.

  “Stop,” I said. “Wait.”

  Malcolm didn’t even ask me what I was doing. He just nodded wearily and stood still, swaying slightly on his feet.

  I shoved my hand down into my boot and lifted out the phone. Miracle of miracles, it was still on, it still had battery power, and if the minute-counter at the top was any indication, it was still connected to Nick’s cell phone. I turned up the volume and lifted it to my ear. I could hear traffic noises through the receiver.

  “Nick?” I asked. “Please tell me you’re still there.”

  “Elle?” a voice at the other end said. “Nick! It’s Elle! Hey, Elle. It’s Dom. Where are you? God, we thought you were dying there for a while. We’re coming to get you just as soon as you tell us where you are.”

  “Um,” I said in my most intelligent manner. “I don’t know. We’re on a driveway. Hang on. I’ll give you a street name as soon as we get to one.”

  I heard a fumbling sound at the other end as the phone changed hands. “Elle? It’s Nick. We’re on our way. Where are you?”

  “Don’t you people communicate at all? I already told Dom I don’t know. I’m headed toward a street. Give me a minute.”

  We weaved our way to the road and looked left and right.

  “Nick? I don’t see a street sign, but there’s some big marble sign out here that says ‘Eisenhower Park’ on it. Ring any bells?”

  “I know where it is. Hold on, Elle. We’re on our way.”

  Another wave of vertigo washed over me.

  “Okay. Hey, Nick?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m going to sit down now, okay?”

  “That’s fine, Dixieland. You do whatever you need to.” His voice was gentler than I’d ever heard it. “Just stay awake until we get there. You hear that?”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled. I let go of Malcolm and collapsed on the curb. He joined me a second later, then snaked his hand out to mine. I took it gratefully. I didn’t want to be alone out here in the night, either, even with Nick on the end of the line, even if Deirdre had promised that none of her people would attack me. For all I knew, Deirdre’s vampires weren’t the only ones wandering around Long Island.

  “Elle? Elle!” Nick’s voice came to me as from a distance. “Talk to me, Elle!”

  Oh. The hand with the phone in it had fallen to the ground, far away from my ear. I lifted it back up. It was like lifting a heavy weight. “What?”

  “Elle, is Malcolm there with you?”

  “Yeah, he is.”

  “Is he okay?”

  I peered at Malcolm through the semi-darkness. The sky was beginning to lighten in the east.

  “I guess. As well as he could be, all things considered.”

  “Are you sure they didn’t turn him?”

  “Totally.”

  I heard John cursing in the background, heard the sound of tires screeching and horns blasting.

  “Did you bring the whole crew?” I asked.

  “They wouldn’t have had it any other way, Dixieland.”

  “I’m glad.” My voice sounded far away.

  Malcolm laid his head on my shoulder and closed his eyes. I rested my head against his. I had to fight to resist the urge to close my eyes, too.

  “Elle, you’re starting to fade. Don’t do that.”

  Damn that man. How did he know, anyway? “I am not, Nick.”

  “Ah. That’s better. We’re almost there, girl.”

  I saw headlights round the curve of the road and moments later made out the shape of Nick’s van.

  I don’t think I was ever so glad to see anything in my life.

  The van barreled up to us, then screeched to a halt. Tony threw the back doors open from inside and jumped out to help us in.

  “Not me,” I said. “Malcolm first.”

  “Elle?” said Nick.

  “Yeah?”

  “You can put the phone down now. That’s a girl. Hang it up.”

  I shook my head and tried to clear my vision.

  “Okay. I’m awake now.” With Nick’s help, I dragged myself up into the van.

  “Well, you don’t have to stay that way for long.”

  “Thanks, Nick.”

  “No problem, Dixieland. We always take care of our own.”

  He pulled the door closed. “Get us out of here, John,” he said.

  “You got it.” John eased the van around in a wide circle and drove away from Deirdre and her unpleasant kiss, slither, whatever of vampires.

  Malcolm was seated on one of the bench seats, wrapped in a blanket with his head slumped forward. Tony had already pulled out his medical kit and was tending to the worst of Malcolm’s visible wounds.

  “Looks like he’s had it pretty rough,” Dominick commented.

  “Yeah. They had him in there for I don’t know how long, maybe five or six days. I think they were taking turns with him.”

  Tony let out a low whistle. “Damn,” he said. “That’s rough.”

  “What about you, Elle?” asked Nick. “Do you need any medical attention?”

  I nodded silently, then pulled up the sleeve of my dress to show him the inside of my elbow. Nick let out a growl surprisingly similar to the ones the vampires had made as Malcolm and I had left Deirdre’s house.

  “Is that the only one?” he asked.

  “No,” I whispered.

  “Can I see the other one?” His voice was almost as quiet as mine had been, but it was shaking.

  I peeled away the remains of the sleeve covering the original wound on my shoulder and the new bite mark overlaying it. Nick scowled. Dom hissed in a breath through his teeth.

  “Tony,” said Dom. “I think you’d better come take a look at this one.”

  “Is it that bad?” I asked.

  “I think it’s going to leave a scar,” Dom said.

  “Probably so,” Tony said as he peered over Dominick’s shoulder.

  “Did Deirdre do this to you?” Nick asked.

  “She did the one on my elbow. Greg did this one.”

  “Greg your ex?”

  “Yeah.” I was whispering again.

  “The one who is working for Pearson.”

  “That one.”

  Tony wiped some sort of disinfectant over my shoulder wound, and this time I was the one who hissed in a breath between my
teeth.

  “Sorry, Elle,” Tony said quietly. “But it’s got to be done. This may need stitches, too. I’ll know more when we get you home and I can look at it more closely.”

  I nodded. “Do whatever you have to, Tony.”

  “I’m sorry, Dixieland,” said Nick, shaking his head. “I should have killed Greg as soon as you told me about him.”

  “It’s not your fault, Nick. And I’m not sure you can kill him now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I need to tell you something. I may have made a few mistakes tonight.”

  Tony finished taping a new bandage over the wound and moved to his own seat in the van.

  “Listen, Dixie,” said Nick, “you got out alive, and you got your friend out alive. As far as I’m concerned, the only real mistakes are the ones that get you killed. Whatever happened tonight, we can talk about it later. The sun’s coming up; the vampires won’t do anything more tonight.” He gently wrapped a blanket around me. “You just rest. We’ll go someplace safe, and we’ll talk after you’ve had some sleep.”

  I nodded; I could already feel my eyes drifting shut.

  “Okay. But don’t let it get dark tomorrow before I talk to you, okay, Nick?”

  “I promise.”

  And with that, I slept.

  Chapter 17

  I didn’t get to sleep for very long, though. It seemed that almost as soon as I had closed my eyes, Nick was pulling me out of the van and carrying me.

  I opened my eyes and peered around. We were in a parking garage of some sort. John had pulled up in front of the elevator and Tony was helping Malcolm out of his seat.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “I decided to bring you to the shop instead of taking you home.”

  “The shop. Nick, I told Deirdre about the shop.”

  “But you didn’t tell her where it was, did you?”

  “No. I didn’t know where it was.”

  “Right. So don’t worry about it now. We’ll deal with it in the morning. You need to get some rest.”

  “But first I need to take another look at that shoulder wound of hers,” Tony said. “I think it might need a couple of stitches.”

  Malcolm was silent through all of this, looking around the garage dazedly.

  We took the elevator up to the top floor, then walked across a short walkway to what looked at first glance to be an office building. Numbered doors lined the hallway, much as they had in Deirdre’s dungeon. I shuddered at the memory.

  Nick gently set me down. Tony led us to a corner suite, number 401, and unlocked the door. The nameplate beside the door read “Anthony J. DeLuca, M.D.” I looked at Tony.

  “You’re a doctor?” I asked.

  He laughed. “No need to sound so surprised.”

  “No. It’s just that you’re so young. And... um... I don’t know. Tough? I guess I just think of doctors as old and kindly looking, not the sort to go chasing after vampires.”

  “But chasing after vampires sure does give me a lot of business. You, for example. Come on,” he said, opening the door and flipping on a light switch. “Let’s get you two taken care of.”

  The outer room of the suite looked exactly as I would expect any doctor’s office to look. There was a reception desk directly across from the door. Off to the left was a small waiting room, complete with uncomfortable chairs and boring magazines. Tony led us to a closed door at the other end of the waiting room, which led to a long row of small examining rooms. He ushered Malcolm into one, then told me to wait for him in the next one.

  “Will you be okay alone?” Nick asked me.

  “Sure,” I said. I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want him to think I was a complete wimp. I sat in the chair in the corner. I could hear a murmur of voices from the other room, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  Posters of various body parts and illnesses adorned the walls. I examined a depiction of the workings of the inner ear for a moment.

  I think I must have drifted off to sleep again, because the next thing I knew Tony opened the door and said, “Okay. If you’ll get up on the examining table, we’ll get you all fixed up.” His voice had taken on that cheerful professionalism of doctors everywhere.

  “How’s Malcolm?” I asked. I stood up and hoisted myself onto the table, with Tony’s help.

  “He’ll be okay. I stitched him up and gave him a shot to help him sleep; he’ll need a lot of rest over the next few days, but physically, he’ll be just fine.”

  “Physically? Does that mean you think he might not be okay mentally?”

  “It’s hard to say. He’s been through a pretty traumatic experience. People process those sorts of things differently. I’d say there’s a good chance he’s going to have some sort of reaction. It’s just the extent of that reaction and how well he’ll handle it that’s in question.”

  I nodded. I knew that I’d had a pretty intense reaction after the attack on Greg.

  Tony took out a pair of scissors. “How important is this dress to you?” he asked.

  “I hate it. You can burn it, for all I care.”

  “Good.” He snipped the sleeves off to reveal the elbow and shoulder wounds.

  “I’m going to give you a shot to numb this shoulder. It might sting a bit.” Tony made several injections around the wound. I tried not to flinch.

  “There,” he said. “We’ll give that some time to take effect. In the meantime, let’s take a look at that elbow.” He took my arm gently in his hand and looked at the crook of my elbow.

  “This one’s a lot cleaner than the other one. Neater.” He looked up at me questioningly.

  “Deirdre. She was the one in charge out there.”

  He nodded. “They seem to learn a lot about how to deal with their dinners effectively as they age.

  The younger ones are more likely to rip out a chunk of skin than the older ones. As you learned.” He gestured at my shoulder.

  “First I’m going to take some swabs of this so that I can take a look at it in my lab. Then I’m just going to clean it out and cover it; puncture wounds often heal best if they’re left to their own devices.

  Have you had a tetanus shot recently?”

  “No.”

  He rinsed the punctures on the inside of my elbow out with some sort of stinging liquid, then again smeared them with an antibiotic ointment. He finished taping a bandage over it.

  “Same instructions as last time. Put this ointment on it every day, then bandage it back up. Let me know if you start to see any signs of infection: if the skin around it swells up or turns red, if you start running a fever, or if you start getting a lot of discharge out of either of the wounds.”

  I nodded.

  “How does your shoulder feel?”

  “Numb,” I said.

  “Good. Lean forward just a bit. This might take a little longer.”

  I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he cleaned the wound, but I was afraid to really look. I didn’t want to know what had made Dom whistle when he saw it. I turned my head away entirely when he began stitching the skin up.

  “Okay, then,” he said as he placed another bandage over the stitches, “Let me just get the tetanus shot ready.” He left for a moment, then returned with three different syringes.

  “I’m also going to give you a shot of antibiotics and the same thing I gave to Malcolm to help him rest,” he said, setting the syringes down on the counter that ran against the left wall of the room.

  The first shot was fine. I’ve never had the horror of needles that many other people seem to have.

  “I think I’m going to hold off on giving you the sedative until we get you set up with a bed,” he said as he pocketed the second syringe.

  Then he picked up the third syringe.

  “This is the tetanus shot. This one might actually hurt a little.”

  The needle going in didn’t hurt much, but I could feel whatever he pumped into my arm as it slid in, and it did more than
hurt. It ached abominably.

  “And now I’m going to take just a small sample of blood so I can run a few tests on it, as well.”

  Wonderful. More blood loss. Just what I needed. He pulled a small kit out of one of the drawers in the room. He did at least take the blood from the otherwise undamaged arm.

  “Okay. All done,” Tony said cheerfully. “Now let’s get you to a bed so you can get some sleep.”

  I nodded woozily. Tony helped me off the table and led me down the hall, away from the waiting room, and through the last door on the right. We walked through a small storage room with another door in the back. When he opened that door, I realized that it led to yet another hallway much like the first.

  “This used to be two different suites of offices,” he explained. “Alec Pearson owns the building.

  When I got hooked up with Nick and his gang, Pearson gave us these suites and did a little remodeling. The other office is my public office; I actually have regular patients I see there a couple of days a week. This is the private office—the shop.”

  He pointed out various features of the shop as he walked past open and closed doors, including one closed door that he identified as belonging to Nick’s private office. Some of the examination-size rooms had been set up as small bedrooms, “In case anyone ever needs to crash here,” Tony said.

  Given the inherently sterile nature of former examining rooms, the bedrooms weren’t too bad. For the most part, they contained single beds, small bedside tables, and televisions mounted on the walls.

  A couple of them looked like they might be in more-or-less regular use; those had posters or prints hanging on the walls and books or computers on the built-in cabinets.

  One room held what looked like a ridiculously large arsenal of weapons, mostly old-fashioned things like bows and arrows, but also a few more modern and, to my eyes, more lethal-looking guns.

  In another room, some of the interior walls had been knocked out and the rooms combined to make enough space to hold a complete, if small, gym. A similar-sized room held a conference table, a dry-erase board, and a video monitor. “We call that the War Room,” Tony said.