by Atha, DL
To my right, Asa materialized. He was smiling a very gloating smile, pointing out that I was such a fraud. “Are you not a physician, Annalice? Should I not call you ‘Dr. Creed’?”
“Why are you still here? Haven’t you gloated enough?” I hissed.
Asa just shrugged. “Think, Annalice. Look at him. I do not think your patient is doing well. Is not the heart rhythm strange for one so young?”
“You’re not a doctor, Asa,” I said. “How would you know?” “My name is Jonas,” the man managed to say while I was talking to Asa. I turned back towards the human and snarled. The sound shut him up pretty quick; his breath was going in and out in short wheezes.
“Think, Annalice.” But this wasn’t Asa’s voice. Detective Rumsfeld stood to my right now. “Something’s not right with this picture. A man this young shouldn’t have atrial fibrillation. Taking any amount of blood is going to kill him.”
I looked back at Jonas, frozen like the proverbial deer in my headlights. He was only in his thirties. His blood should be fresh but there was something about his scent that reminded me of cleaning supplies. It wasn’t enough to keep me from doing what I was about to do, but it was enough to tell me that nothing about this evening was going to go well. He’d leave me wanting for more. The logic of my hallucinations was undeniable. He was too young to be going into this irregular heart rhythm from fear, and the sucking sound in his heart was no coincidence.
“Strange,” I said back to Rumsfield and Asa. But my mind wasn’t really on my former dead vampire lover, the detective, or what they were trying to tell me. I was concentrating on the damaged sound of Jonas’ heart. Unfortunately, I wasn’t listening in a doctorly sort of way.
Jonas’ eyes were still riveted on me when his legs started to go out from under him. His brain hadn’t even registered the movement when I reached out, my reflexes like the sharp jabs of summer lightning, to catch him. He started to open his mouth, but before he could utter a syllable, I opened an artery in his neck.
I hadn’t meant for it to happen this way. When I imagined how this was going to go down, I’d soothed and calmed him with my lips, filled his veins with my powerful saliva until he had, in some fit of passion, given me his blood willingly. Then while he lay drunk from my pheromones, I slipped off unknowingly across the river after laying him gently where others of his kind would find and care for him.
What actually happened was that I crushed him against me, my fangs buried in his neck. As I did so, his brain and reasoning power finally kicked in. His fists flailed against every part of me that he could reach as I drank from him, but my jaws were a vice against his neck. His legs went rigid but soon gave way until all the joints in his body went lax and it was only my strength that held him upright. His neck lolled to the side; his hands went limp, slipping from the side of my face, and dropped to his side.
At some point, his heart thudded itself silent; I only noticed the organ’s failure because it stopped pumping his blood into my mouth. I pulled my lips away from his neck when the flow stopped, jerking his face around to look into his now cold eyes. I should have been sorry, but at first, I was so angry that I shoved his body away. His limp form flew backwards, arms askew, before pirouetting like a bizarre, overdressed scarecrow, and dropped, dead weight, onto the damp riverbank. The left side of his face sank into the mud, cold river water creeping into the depression where he landed and lapping at the dark hair curled against his forehead. One white hand landed across the toe of my left boot.
I stared at the white of his dead skin mutely before jerking my foot back and stepping away from the body in the sand. I’d thrust him aside so quickly that bloody saliva was stringing from my lips. I wiped it away as my brain processed what I’d done and what I should now do. My first instinct was to call 9‐1‐1. It was short‐ lived, and then my second instinct was to dive into the river. I could be gone and already dried off from the swim before anyone noticed this man was missing. I turned to jump into the current when I remembered the security cameras in the building.
The owners had them placed a year earlier as a concession to the police, and they were everywhere. How many of them had caught sight of me luring Jonas out of the building, across the parking lot and out of sight? I could hardly leave him to be found by some passerby or early morning fisherman. Burying him would only open a missing person case that would lead straight back to me. Such behavior would do nothing but add fuel to Rumsfield’s flames. I had no choice but to report his death. Still, I couldn’t let anyone examine the body in such a state.
Most people think of death as a sudden, abrupt occurrence. You have a heart attack, and you’re dead. Take a blow to the head, and you’re dead. We all, doctors included, tend to mark the end of life as the cessation of a heartbeat. Time of death 3:12 a.m., Jonas’ death certificate might read. But in reality, death is a process that starts when the heart stops, but there is so much more that has to die as well. Otherwise, how would we take an organ such as a kidney, unattached from its blood supply, fly it four hours across the state and re‐attach it to another human? How could we do CPR and bring someone back twenty minutes after their heart has stopped if death wasn’t a process?
It’s very simple really. Cells remain active after the heart stops for some period of time, and it is during this nebulous period of time that humans sometimes work the impossible—heart transplantation, successful code blues, resuscitation after hours submerged in a cold lake, life from death, re‐animation, whatever you want to call it.
This principle was foremost in my mind when I bent down and rubbed my spit into the wound on Jonas’ neck. Some of the cells were still alive, and I used their final minutes to heal the small wounds that I’d created. Then I took a deep breath for good measure and did what any good doctor would do.
I leaned over and gave him two rescue breaths. Then I started screaming to beat the band while I began chest compressions. I gave him two more breaths and began the process all over again.
Finally, after getting the attention of someone who’d left the bar to smoke, and through a series of yells and hand signals, 9-1-1 was notified.
By the time the ambulance arrived, a crowd had grown around Jonas’ body, and I appeared the very convincing innocent bystander caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. One woman had given me a handful of wadded up tissue paper to blow my nose into, and another was rubbing me on the back from the presumed exertion of providing CPR. A man who’d wandered down from the bar had handed me a beer. I pretended to drink it.
Chapter 9
“How is it, Annalice, that whenever you and I run into each other, someone has died? And always in your proximity.”
Rumsfield was standing to my left, and the sheriff from Sebastian County, Sheriff Taylor, stood to my right. I’d met Taylor while working in the Fort Smith emergency room a few years back, and I’d liked him instantly. With Rumsfield standing beside me, I liked the sheriff even more.
John Taylor was on the right side of middle‐aged. Still handsome, he worked out at the local fitness center several times a week. Somehow, against all the cliché donuts and fast‐ food joints prolific in cop careers, he’d managed to maintain the physique of a twenty‐year‐old. He was also nice, which never hurt any man’s looks.
The three of us were staring down at Jonas’ body. Me, with my hands on my knees, bent over deep in thought about how to explain my presence here while Rumsfield was racking his brain over how I’d managed to kill this man. Meanwhile, Sheriff Taylor was trying to figure why he was standing here on the dark banks of the Arkansas River with a local doctor and a detective from another county looking at what he clearly thought was the leftover corpse of too much alcohol. I, for one, loved him for not looking outside the box on this case.
“He was the town drunk, Mike,” Taylor said beside me. He’d lifted his hands from his knees to stand upright. Done with the case and ready to write up the cause of death while he waited for the medical examiner to agree with him, Tayl
or looked over me at Rumsfield. Obviously, they knew each other. He called him “Mike.” The shortened name just didn’t sit right with my interpretation of Rumsfield because I couldn’t imagine him in a friendly kind of way.
“So that rules out foul play? Him being the town drunk and all?” Rumsfield asked, still bent over studying the corpse.
“Look, Mike. I’ve personally picked this guy up more times than you can count the feathers on a turkey for public intox, bad debt, and misdemeanors. You name it, and I’ve brought him in for it. He’s spent half his time in the hospital and the other half in a beer can. This is death by natural causes. Pure and simple.”
Rumsfield, standing to his full height, motioned behind him. “John, can we talk a minute?” he asked the sheriff, pointing to a small grove of bushes behind us. The riverbank was too sandy to grow much here where the body lay, but a few feet back, everything was coming up green. I walked a few steps down the riverbank as Rumsfield and Taylor stepped away, pretending to ignore them as Rumsfield shot suspicious eyes in my direction. But vampire hearing has its perks, and I wasn’t going to miss a word.
“Listen, I think you should put a little more thought into this case,” Rumsfield said. “I’ve got a bad feeling.”
“A bad feeling? You’ve no right to have a feeling at all. You’re not supposed to even be here,” Taylor answered. He looked at Rumsfield, his arms crossed on his chest. His jaw was shifted to one side, his tongue poking furiously into his cheek as he studied Rumsfield.
Rumsfield dug his cowboy boots into the sand as he pointed to the body. “So you don’t find it a bit strange that this woman, who has been associated with two murders, just happens to be standing over his dead body?”
The detective wasn’t wearing his cowboy hat tonight, and his blonde hair danced lightly in the wind while the warm vanilla of his aftershave wrapped his entire body in a scent that made me want to snuggle up against him. More like woller actually. That’s a southern word that means get right on up in there and make yourself at home on somebody. Why did he have to smell so good?
“If you’re trying to tell me that Dr. Creed snuck out here on this riverbank and killed this man, then I’m telling you that the only thing strange around here is you. And this is the first I’ve heard that she’s been associated with any murders,” Taylor said. The sheriff was starting to get angry. I could smell it on him like the lingering scent of a Roman candle.
Rumsfield was no idiot. He might not smell the anger, but he could feel it. “John, this is your territory, and I know that, but just think about this. A man was found in Madison County, a mile or so behind her house, dead. Her next‐door neighbor, an elderly woman, was also found murdered in her home.”
“I’ve heard all about the first case. A clear and simple bear attack, and in the second case, the suspect is a man.”
“That’s right. A man that she knew and yet she won’t shed a light on about his whereabouts.”
“And you can prove she knew him?” Taylor asked. His forehead was wrinkled with skepticism.
“Annalice Creed was seen with a man who roughed her up a little,” Rumsfield said. “We have a reliable witness to that. Then her neighbor dies. Fits a certain picture, doesn’t it? That this is the type of man who could have perpetrated the attack on an elderly lady?”
“And you have reliable evidence to say it’s the same man?” Taylor asked like it was the cliffhanger in a comic book. He didn’t get an answer, just a roll of Rumsfield’s eyes.
“I have evidence, Taylor,” Rumsfield finally answered.
“And?” Sheriff Taylor asked again, but no answer came. He waited the time it took Rumsfield to huff his breath out and shake his head. “Then you have nothing,” Taylor continued.
But Rumsfield couldn’t leave it alone. “If he’s even still alive. I think she killed him, too,” Rumsfield said. To anyone else, he probably sounded confident, but to me it came off as self‐ righteous indignation.
Taylor took a step closer at his words and dropped his voice. “Mike, I think you need to simmer down. Those are serious accusations. You can’t just throw those kind around without something to back them up. I’ve known Dr. Creed a long time. She’s a fine doctor and a fine lady. She’s not a murderer.”
“Taylor, you’ve known me a long time, too. I’ll wager even longer than her. Have you ever known me to throw around false accusations?”
The space between the two of them festered for a long minute, and it was a relief when Taylor’s cellphone rang. He pulled it smoothly out of his pocket and answered it. His eyes were still on Rumsfield when he turned and walked away.
With no one to protect me from Rumsfield’s mouth, I watched him warily. He ran a hand through his sandy blonde hair. Locks of curls lifted and settled in the wind as he stalked towards me. “So, Annie, how’d you do this one exactly?” he asked. Maybe he was taking a class on diplomacy because his voice had dropped into the low rumblings that proceed spring storms—the kind that makes you eager for the rain.
With his blue eyes, rugged features and a body that made a girl gasp out loud, Detective Rumsfield was a dangerous man. I was going to have to be careful, but he should be more careful, too. His presence tended to bring out the worst in me, and these days, that was a bad thing.
“I didn’t do ‘this one,’ Detective.” I made quotations in the air. The angrier I got, the more I talked with my hands.
“But you were with him, Annie, when he died.”
“Well, most people have someone with them when they die, and no one accuses them of murder.”
“Not quite the same thing, and you know it. The bartender said you two were getting pretty cozy.” He motioned towards Jonas’ body on the ground. “Wanna tell me why you’re slumming it with an alcoholic? This man doesn’t strike me as your type. I pictured you with someone more… I don’t know, debonair maybe.”
I gave him a “come hither” wink. “Why have you been picturing me at all, Rumsfield?” I let his cheeks flame for a split second before I continued. “But I gotta say, it’s flattering. You do that mainly at night when you’re alone in your bed?”
His cheeks bloomed into a deep red as he cursed slightly under his breath. “That’s not what I meant,” he answered.
“Ahh, that’s too bad. But as I’ve said before, Detective, you don’t know me. You certainly don’t know me well enough to keep calling me ‘Annie.’”
“Then let’s change that, Dr. Creed. You call me ‘Mike’ and I’ll call you ‘Annie.’ Easy. Now we know each other.” He knelt back down by Jonas’ body and retrieved his camera.
Great. He’d unleashed the low thunder voice again. It rumbled all the way to the tips of my toes.
“So we’re friends now, Mike?”
“Friends,” he said. I swear his voice dropped another half an octave. His blue eyes danced a little from underneath a stray lock of blonde hair as he cut his eyes up at me.
I laughed out loud, but I couldn’t stop myself from enjoying his flirting. “Is that how you catch the bad guys, Mike? Do you look at all of them like that?”
“Friends, Annalice, are not so suspicious of each other.” “Sorry, I forgot. Here’s the deal, friend. I came here tonight to let my hair down a little. Relax a bit. Jonas is a former patient of mine. We met up by happenstance, and I was talking to him, trying to provide some direction.”
“And you directed him right on into the afterlife.”
“Now, Michael, my good friend, how do you propose I did that?”
“Guess we’ll just have to wait for the medical examiner. And when I get the cause of death, I’ll be the first to tell you about it while I’m serving the arrest warrant.”
“So much for the friendship.” I narrowed my eyes at him but kept a sarcastic smile plastered on my face.
“You know what they say. Friends who do time together stay together. Only difference is which side of the bars we’ll be on.”
“Let me tell you what the M.E.’s going to s
ay. That way the ‘not knowing’ won’t keep you up at night. I know he’s backlogged and all because I talked to him about a month back at a medical conference in Little Rock. First, he’s going to say that Jonas was suffering from cirrhosis, a dense fibrosis of the liver caused by long‐term alcohol use. Then he’s going to say he was suffering from congestive heart failure due to the direct effects of alcohol on the heart musculature. Also, he was anemic due to the cirrhosis and the bleeding gastric varices he had, once again, due to the cirrhosis. And when you combine that with the congestive heart failure, his heart simply could not take it. He then had an acute myocardial infarction, a.k.a., a heart attack. And that, Michael, is your cause of death.”
I was ninety percent sure that was what the good doc was going to say because the theory was the most logical and obvious conclusion. I’d had time to put all the clues together now that my blood lust wasn’t driving me to near insanity. I was still thirsty. Jonas’ blood hadn’t packed much punch, but it had put up a thin wall that would keep the beast at bay for a while. I hadn’t had any hallucinations in the two hours since Jonas had died, so I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Asa. For the moment, I was rational. Calm.
The cleaning supplies scent I’d smelled on Jonas was the ammonia produced by his liver failure. He was already dangerously anemic, and that was why the adrenaline produced by fear caused him to develop the irregular heart rhythm. My only little white lie in the whole scenario was that I’d drunk what little bit of blood he did have left, thereby pushing him into a heart attack. Jonas had been a ticking time bomb, but I lit the fuse.
I should have been wracked by guilt, writhing with it actually. But all I could think about was how the sun would be coming up in a few hours, and I couldn’t still be here dickering with the detective when it did so. There would be time for guilt later. That sneaky emotion always caught up with me.
