by Dani April
She did as he asked. She kicked off her shoes, and smoothed her skirt down, then lay back against the armrest of the couch, placing her feet up on the cushions. Not having been expecting this turn of events, she felt slightly apprehensive.
“Just try and relax,” he instructed her. “I am going to give you some Demerol. It will make you very relaxed. You might even go to sleep.”
“I don’t think I can take Demerol, doctor.” Marty felt her anxiety grow, and her body squirmed uncomfortably on top of the couch.
“Don’t worry. I’m going to give you a shot. I don’t think your system will have a problem handling it.”
She looked up at the doctor as he readied a needle, tapping it a couple of times with a gloved hand. She gave plenty of shots as a nurse, but never liked the idea of actually being on the receiving end of one. She made an effort to try and calm her nerves. Somehow she wondered if it was a good idea to give a vampire a drug. However, being a nurse, she was accustomed to following doctor’s orders.
“Do you really think the Demerol is necessary?”
“I think it will help us. For this to work, you need to be completely relaxed. I promise this won’t be painful at all.”
She rolled back the sleeve of her blouse for him and held it in place. “I’ve never had a shot of anything since I’ve had my disease, doctor. I hope it will work.”
“It will. Trust me.” He held her arm out and thumped around for a vein. Then he slowly lowered the needle. It punctured her skin and poured its contents into her bloodstream.
Almost at once, she felt the effects of the medication. She began to relax, and her mind began to float. She thought perhaps she would fall asleep. It was a very peaceful feeling. The ceiling tiles overhead looked nice, and clean, and white, and the lights outside the doctor’s window looked like stars twinkling in the sky. A slightly giddy feeling was starting to overtake her.
“What do you hope to learn, doctor?” she asked him, her voice groggy.
“I want to learn everything we can about your past.”
“I have a longer past than most people doctor. We may not have enough time tonight.”
“Specifically, I want to find out what happened to you in the summer of nineteen sixty-five. I want to find out why and how you became a vampire that year.”
* * * *
Marty was only half-conscious. She felt like she was floating in the air. Doctor Bradon had been talking to her in a soft and soothing voice. He had asked her to start counting backward from one hundred. She got down to ninety-one and then lost the count, but the doctor kept talking to her and getting her to respond, making sure she had not gone to sleep. Marty had even forgotten the reason she was lying here on the couch, but she felt very relaxed and wanted to do everything the doctor told her to.
“Can you hear me, Marty?”
“Yes.”
“Will you do as I say?”
“Yes, of course, doctor.”
“You’re a young girl again, Marty. Tell me what that is like?”
“Happy…” She slurred her words and spoke very slowly. “My dad and I live in a big, white house. I have a dog. There is a park down the street, and my dad takes me there to play with my dog all the time. Only…”
“Only what, Marty?”
“Only I get lonely sometimes. I don’t have any brothers or sisters like the other kids on my block, and I don’t have a mother like they do, either.”
“What happened to your mother?”
“She died when I was born. I never got a chance to know her. My dad is sad. He won’t ever talk to me about her. Dad makes up for it though. He spoils me rotten. He spends all of his free time with me and buys me presents all the time. We go on picnics and walks together. I loved my dad.”
“Can you tell me when he died?”
“He died just before…”
“Before what Marty?”
“Before I got sick.”
“When did you first start to get sick?”
“I don’t know if I can remember that.”
“Try hard for me, Marty.”
“I was still happy back then. In fact, my life was just about perfect. I had gone to the university. All I ever wanted was to be a nurse and work in the hospital. I wanted to marry a doctor someday.” She smiled at him.
“And were you sick at the university?”
“No. I was the healthiest student anywhere. I swam and did gymnastics, even played on the girls’ basketball team. I always had a lot of energy, and I loved being outside when the sun was shining.”
“And you went to nurses’ school so you could become a nurse?”
“Oh, yes. I made very high grades. I didn’t have any trouble getting accepted. My dad was so proud of me. I had a lot of friends. I was in one of the sororities. I had a normal life just like everybody else.”
“Did anything happen to change that?”
“I met a boy.”
“This is important, Marty. I want you to really think hard on this. Do you remember anything about that boy?”
“Oh yes, I remember everything about him.”
“Was he your boyfriend?”
“Yes…but more than that. I loved him. We were going to get married. He was so handsome and sure of himself. When I was with him, nothing else in the world mattered but him and me. My dad even liked him. But I think dad knew he had no choice, because even if he hadn’t liked him, I would have still loved him.”
“Was this boy you were in love with sick like you are now?”
Marty didn’t answer for a few seconds. She tried to picture the boy’s face. It was coming in and out of a fog in the back of her mind. Doctor Bradon patiently waited for her reply.
“I never thought he was sick,” Marty finally answered. “But I was starting to get sick at that time. Many bad things happened all at once.”
“Was this in the summer of nineteen sixty-five?”
“Yes it was. I graduated nurses’ school that spring. That was about the last happy memory I have. After that, the bad times started.”
“Tell me what the bad things were, Marty?”
“There were three awful things that happened that summer.” Marty began to tense up. Her mind was starting to resist the memories it had kept hidden from her for so long. “They occurred one right after another, and by the time it was all finished, my world had been destroyed. I just crawled up into a little ball and gave up for a long time after that.”
“Can you remember what these bad things were, Marty?”
“My boyfriend got drafted into the army. He left, and I never saw him again. A few weeks after that, my dad had a heart attack. He was inside this hospital for a few days afterward, but then he died. He was still too young to die. I was suddenly all alone. All I had was my career as a nurse to think about, and as it turned out, I didn’t even have that for too long.”
“Why didn’t you have your career? What was the other thing that happened to you?”
Marty started to feel panic as the memories of that horrible time came flooding back to her. “I started to feel strange.”
“What do you mean by strange, Marty?”
“The sun…it was the goddamned sun…I started to hate it…”
“What happened when you would go out into the sun?”
“At first it wasn’t too bad. I remember walking back home with some of my girlfriends one sunny afternoon. My dad’s funeral had just been held. I thought I was just feeling bad about that. I was also hoping to get a letter from my boyfriend. He was in boot camp and writing to me every day.”
“What happened that day in the sun, Marty?”
“I just got burned. My skin started to blister, and it hurt really badly for a long time. I thought it was strange because we weren’t outside for very long, and none of the other girls got burned, only me.”
“Is that what scared you away from the sunlight?”
“Oh no, it wasn’t only that. If that one time had been all, I would have
been okay. But after that, every time I was outside in the sun my skin started to burn. It started getting worse every day.”
“Did you go to see a doctor?”
“Yes, I did. But the funny thing was my burns would heal just as fast as I would get them. When I went to the doctor, my skin was fine. He thought I was just upset because of losing my dad.”
“What did you do?”
“I was real worried about it, but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do. I started only going out of my house at night. My friends thought I was going crazy and stopped coming around to see me. I knew I was getting sick.” Marty rolled on the couch as the next painful part of her story came to her. “But I didn’t know how bad it was until…”
“Until what, Marty?”
“I was sleeping all day and staying awake all night. I couldn’t find a job, but my dad had left me a little money, so I wasn’t worried. I was making myself dinner one night, and all of a sudden the food smelled horrible to me. I thought for sure it had spoiled.” Tears began falling down from under her fluttering eyelids as she remembered.
“Marty, you’re doing very well,” Doctor Bradon encouraged her. “Please go on.”
“I couldn’t understand what was wrong with the food inside my refrigerator. I threw it all away. I went to the night market to buy some more, but that food smelled just as bad to me. I asked the other people shopping what was wrong with it, but they said it smelled fine to them. I forced myself to buy some vegetables and take them home. I choose some carrots to eat. They had always been my favorite. I forced myself to eat them. They tasted terrible, but at least I kept them down. Night after night, I started having to force myself to eat that terrible food. Then one night I couldn’t eat again. As soon as I’d put the food in my mouth, I would gag and vomit it back up. It got so bad I couldn’t even swallow food.”
“You must have been losing a lot of weight and getting very weak by this time.”
“But I wasn’t. I didn’t feel weak at all, and I was never hungry. I didn’t need to eat anymore. It wasn’t really so bad…but then late that summer, in either August or September I think it was, the worst thing happened.”
“What was that, Marty?”
Marty could feel the pain of that moment as if it was happening to her all over again. “I stayed awake all night, and I slept all day. I knew it was weird, but I couldn’t stand the sun anymore. But I was still normal. I slept in the same bedroom at my dad’s house I’d had as a girl. Then one morning when the sun came up, I couldn’t sleep there anymore.” She paused and didn’t want to have to continue.
“Why couldn’t you sleep there, Marty?” Doctor Bradon urged her.
“The sunlight came inside my window. I had the curtains drawn, but that didn’t keep it out. The light that came in underneath them was so painful. Right before my eyes, my skin started to peel back. There was this horrible liquid that it was turning into, and that was running down my arms and legs. It was like I was going to melt. I knew I was going to die unless I found a good hiding place from the sunlight. I would have died that morning except I remembered, in the living room of our house, there was this loose floorboard. My dad had always been promising to fix it but never got around to it. I ran out to the living room and pried up that board, and when I got it loose, I pried up another and another. When I had enough of them up, I crawled into the little space underneath the floor and then pulled the boards back over me. It took me several minutes to do that, and by the time I got down into the darkness under the floor, my skin had melted so bad I could see the veins in my hands standing out above where the skin used to be. There was a lot of blood, and I think I almost died that morning.”
“Then that was the last time you were ever in the sunlight?”
“Yes. After that, I faced what I had become. I had become a vampire, and I’ve been one ever since…”
Chapter Eighteen
Marty checked her watch when she came to. Only half an hour had gone by since she had fallen asleep on Doctor Bradon’s couch. She still felt loopy from the drug and when she tried sitting up the doctor’s office spun before her eyes.
Doctor Bradon was seated in a chair across from her waiting for her to recover. He gave her a brief smile when their eyes met. A notepad was stretched out on his lap and he was in the process of filling it up with his small handwriting.
“How do you feel, Marty?”
“Tired,” she replied after a long pause. “How did I do?”
“You were great. Can you remember anything of what we talked about?”
“I think so.” Marty had to search her brain for a moment and then all of the memories she had shared with Doctor Bradon came roaring back to her, most of them extremely painful. “Yes, I remember more about my life then I have for a very long time. Do you think this will help us any?”
“Possibly, but I’m still unclear how you contracted the disease.”
“It had to be my boyfriend.” Marty sat up on the couch and pulled her legs over the side. She felt that she and the doctor were onto something, and yet it was just out of reach as to what that something might be. “I can’t remember his name. Did I say anything about the name of my boyfriend?”
“No you didn’t, and I didn’t pursue it. I didn’t think it was important. The circumstances sounded normal. You and he were young and met at college. He left you to go to the war as many young men were doing at that time. I didn’t think he was relevant to the disease.”
“But I only caught that disease after he left me. And a vampire has to have a maker.”
“You seem to know a lot about vampires.” Doctor Bradon set his notepad aside. His thoughts told her that he felt bad because he knew less than his patient did. Still under the influence of the drug she began reading his thoughts without any fears of invading his privacy.
“I contacted a guy I met online. He wrote me a couple of e-mails about vampires. He claimed to have been a vampire once himself.”
“Very interesting. Do you know where this person lives?”
“No. He is just an anonymous person I met online.”
“Nurse Williams, you should rest for a few more minutes on the couch. Then I am going to tell the charge nurse on your floor that you need to take the rest of your shift off. You should go home and rest.”
His idea sounded good to her. She felt too out of it to perform any of her duties that night. Her mind was so out of sorts by the drug that it kept wondering back over to read inside his head.
“She is extraordinary! She has been through hell and back and yet she is still strong and wants to keep fighting. She is also beautiful. I know she doesn’t think of herself as a human being anymore, but she is the most human individual I know. She mentioned that she has three boyfriends living with her. I envy those men. What I would give to be one of them and spend more time with this incredible woman. But she is my patient. I could never say anything to her. I refuse to cross that professional line.”
She smiled at Doctor Bradon. The drug was having a strange effect on her vampire’s metabolism. She felt almost like she was drunk. She also felt horny, but strangely this time she didn’t feel hunger accompanying her sexual urge, only the sexual tension by itself.
“Doctor Bradon, I would have never known you felt like that toward me. You don’t have to worry. You do a good job of staying professional inside this office.”
The doctor got up and moved away from her across the office. “We spoke of this earlier, nurse. You agreed you were not going to use that ability of yours on me to see what I’m thinking.”
She got up and followed him. When she stood she almost tipped back over. The room was still flying around in circles, but now there was growing warmth inside of her, and she could feel the dampness between her legs. She realized she didn’t know what she was doing. That drug had made her lose all her inhibitions. For a vampire who had a hard time controlling them even when not drugged, that was definitely not a good thing.
“You
don’t have to feel embarrassed, doctor. I’m not trying to read your mind, but your thoughts were about me.”
He had his back turned to her and was staring back out his window. She was in no mood to control what her mind saw now, and she reached out to him. “I may have made a mistake to agree to treat this nurse. She is driving me crazy. If I don’t get her out of here soon she’s going to make me cross the line. Damn it, I won’t let her do that to me!”
She reached out to him and put her hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right, Doctor Bradon. I desire you, too. I wouldn’t find anything inappropriate if you wanted to respond to me as a man rather than as a doctor.”
“I think you should leave, Nurse Williams.” Every muscle in his body had stiffened at her single touch.
She moved in closer and placed her arms around his chest. “I just remembered I haven’t paid you yet, doctor…” she whispered into his ear.
“Don’t do this, nurse.” He choked on the emotion that was welling up inside of him.
“Everyone working the night shift in this hospital already thinks we’re lovers.”
“Of course they don’t!”
“Yes they do. Don’t forget, I can read their minds. That is exactly what they think about us.”
“Regardless of what anyone thinks, this isn’t right, nurse.”
“You’re always so serious, Doctor Bradon. But you don’t have to be serious with me anymore. You just hypnotized me, and I can read your mind. We haven’t got any secretes from each other.” She was continuing to whisper in his ear and caressing his face softly with her fingertips. “Don’t worry, I’m not hungry. I won’t bite you. I just want to touch you and be touched by you.”
“This is wrong…”
“No it’s not.” She let him go and took a step away from him. “There are only four people in the whole world who know my secret, and until now only three of them have been my lovers.”
She began unbuttoning her white, one-piece dress. He turned about and watched, his eyes never leaving her body. He was still shaking his head, but his thoughts betrayed him to her. He wanted her with a fever that was even greater than her own. In the back of her mind she knew it was the drugs making her act, and after it was over she would have even more complication in her life, but at that moment she had no control to stop herself.
