Blood Reaction Saga (Book 2): Blood Distraction

by Atha, DL

  “How convenient for you that he was an alcoholic. But the medical examiner is getting his mental workout this week. Lots of odd cases. Maybe he’s going to be thinking outside his normal comfort zone?” His voice raised on his last words, his shoulders helping to push them even further up.

  “Okay. I’ll bite.” My eyes went wide at my verbal mistake. I didn’t mean to say it. It just slipped out. I pretended to wipe a lash away and continued on. “Tell me about these cases. I’m sure you think I’m involved somehow.”

  “How dare I make a supposition about the innocent, the sublime Dr. Creed?”

  “Innocent, yes. Sublime, probably not. Just think of it as a sideline medical consult. Free of charge,” I said.

  He blew out his breath slowly, pulled a hand through his hair, and finally pinched his forehead between two fingers before he decided to talk. By his body language, you’d think talking to me made him a Benedict Arnold. “It’s classified, but why not enlist the aid of a thief to catch one. So here goes. There’s been a couple other cases in the last two weeks. One, a twenty‐year‐old frat boy at Arkansas State was found dead on the edge of campus. He’d just left his job at a local pull‐through hamburger place. Death was from massive breakdown of blood or loss of blood. The medical examiner said he probably had bone marrow failure. He also said he could have a gastrointestinal bleed and been bleeding for days. Either way, the death was ruled natural causes. But then in the peaceful town of Brasshears, about eight days back, a farmer was found dead out by his henhouse. Time of death was estimated to be at two a.m. the morning before he was found. He lived alone, so why he was out at his henhouse in the middle of the night, God only knows. Brasshears is in my district, so I worked the scene myself. The body had multiple scratches, lacerations and multiple bruises. Looked like he’d gotten in a fight with a cat. I found a couple of dead chickens scattered around, but otherwise nothing out of the ordinary. Any guesses on the cause of death?”

  He didn’t wait for me to come up with a guess. “Anemia, disseminated intravascular hemorrhage vs. gastrointestinal hemorrhage. The same thing all over again,” he spit out.

  “Those are pretty common causes of death, Mike. Anemia just means they’re low on red cells. So any type of bleeding, traumatic or internal, can make you anemic. Let alone the thousands of medical conditions that can cause anemia. Then you can throw in all of the viruses that can shut down your bone marrow. Anemia is a very generic term.” Did I just call him “Mike”?

  “And what about all of the scratches and bruises? Men who die of anemia don’t usually get in a fight with someone, do they, Annalice?”

  “Maybe his cat got him after he fell over dead. Or maybe he did have bone marrow failure, so he didn’t have any platelets to stop the bleeding, and he bruised all the time. Or maybe a raccoon lit into him after he died. I had a patient once whose dog chewed their toe off after he died, but I didn’t think we had a mad‐dog killer on the loose. I could go on and on with the what‐ ifs in this kind of case, Mike. Do you really think the medical examiner is going to find something strange about this? Is that what you’re looking for?”

  I was hoping he’d see reason, and not just for my sake. Mike and I weren’t friends, and I wasn’t going to pretend we were, but I didn’t want him to ruin his career. He was probably the only detective able to see any of these cases clearly for what they were, but I hoped he was able to realize how crazy this made him look before everyone else did or before he realized just how messed up I really was.

  “Don’t you think it’s odd there have been so many deaths from anemia in such a short time span?” Rumsfield was exasperated. His voice sounded a little frantic.

  Of course. Yes. Because there was a mad vampire lose in the area. And now there’s another. Asa must have killed the Jonesboro kid before he met up with me, and the older man was part of the reason he’d managed to keep me alive. Another casualty for my benefit. I’d tasted his blood on Asa’s lips one night, and I’d liked it.

  “No,” I lied smoothly. “I don’t find it odd at all. Almost everyone in the hospital is anemic.” At least that part was true. It’s just normally not fatal. “I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with me. ASU is in Jonesboro. I’ve never even been there. Brasshears is close enough to my house, but why in the world do you think I had anything to do with that? There’s nothing at all to tie me to that man’s death.”

  “You seem to have something to do with everything bizarre in my county these days,” he answered.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with either of those two cases.” “Fine. What about this man tonight?” he asked, pointing to where Jonas’ body lay on the ground.

  I’d almost forgotten about him. The body hadn’t been moved yet, and the dew of early morning was beginning to settle on his face. The light slick of liquid gave his skin the allusion of dewy youth. The effect was kind. His features didn’t seem quite as flat and made it look like maybe the human was only sleeping, but it didn’t soften my guilty conscience. I wished the deputies who were milling in the background would bag him up and carry the body away. No one wants to look at their sins any longer than they have to.

  “I didn’t kill him,” I reiterated. I wasn’t lying, I told myself. His heart had killed him.

  “What did you do to him?” Detective Rumsfield was punching keys on his phone. He didn’t look at me for the moment as he asked the question. If I didn’t know better, I’d have said he was distracted.

  “What do you think I did to him?”

  There was silence from him as he fingered his phone screen again. For a man with man’s hands, he was a quick texter. Who was he texting anyhow? Secretly, I was hoping for some other homicide to get his mind off of me. What a pathetic excuse for a person I’d become.

  “What do you think I did to him, Detective?” I asked again, trying to bring him back to me. Knowing what he was thinking was still better than the not knowing. Maybe I could stay ahead of him that way.

  “Hmmm?” he asked, still not looking at me.

  “Forgetful much?” I asked, throwing my hands up into the air. Patience had once been one of my minor virtues. These days, it didn’t even register on my personality scale.

  He’d snagged his lower lip between his teeth and was making a light meal of it while he studied his phone intently. His texting hand had risen up to rub the back of his head. Rumsfield took a deep breath and shook his head. I watched the rise and fall of his chest under the chest‐contouring T‐shirt he wore. It was skin‐tight under his leather jacket. He swallowed hard. So did I. As much as he annoyed me, he was easy on the eyes.

  “I’m losing my fricking mind,” he said under his breath. A human couldn’t have made out the words.

  Was he figuring me out?

  “What are you losing?” I asked, hoping for once he’d continue to speak.

  His eyes were wide, a little incredulous, when he looked up at me. A little scared even. “Um. Nothing. I’ve got to go. Something’s come up.”

  Sheriff Taylor was walking back up to where the two of us still stood over Jonas’ body. Behind him were a couple of paramedics and a woman I’d met before. She was the county coroner.

  “John, I’m heading out. Something just came up in Crawford. Sorry I stepped on your toes, man.”

  “Nothing to apologize for. What’s going on in Crawford? Anything big?” Taylor asked.

  Rumsfield smiled as he waved a good‐bye to the other officers. “Just more of the bizarre and unusual that has overtaken my life. See y’all around.”

  Nervous as a cat, I watched him all the way back to his police cruiser. But for once, he didn’t give me a backwards glance.

  The next hour was an uncomfortable one where I attempted to make small talk with the county coroner, who was a nice but predictably weird lady. I didn’t want to rush off and make myself look suspicious in any way, so I fielded some questions from the coroner as well as from one of the deputies and Sheriff Taylor. Finally, I w
as all smiles with the bar owner as I told him how sorry I was about Jonas. He’d been a great guy, I’d lied.

  The county coroner unit was loading up the body when I made my good‐byes to Sheriff Taylor and walked towards the parking lot as though I had a car stationed there. No one had asked yet what I was driving. I hoped they wouldn’t think to before I was gone and out of sight.

  The parking lot was practically empty except for four dark police cars and three other civilian vehicles as I pretended to quickly walk across the black pavement. Inside, I was cringing at my slow progress. I did thank the gods for that morbid human curiosity that kept all the humans at the back of the building with the body, and I slipped out of the parking lot unobserved into the flood plains that grew corn in during dry years and mosquitos in the wet ones.

  Only a handful of minutes passed before I picked my way through the shadows of a few abandoned houses and empty lots on my way to the river bridge. Finally, with an almost human sigh of relief, I grasped the slimy pylons of the train bridge crossing from Fort Smith into Van Buren.

  The trains this time of night were few and far between. Still, I crossed the bridge quicker than the river water surging beneath me, careful to stay hidden in the crevices of the massive structure.

  The entirety of my evening had been spent on finding blood, and I knew it had been necessary. Still, one look at my daughter’s face would have been a sight for sore eyes. I craved that as much as blood.

  I planned to take a shower at my house, change clothes and then to steal a kiss from Ellie’s forehead before dawn took my remaining time away. But fate had other plans, and as I prepared to climb the steps of our back deck, I could see the silhouette of my mother stalking the living room floor.

  After a long debate with myself, I went straight to the root cellar. I finally decided delaying the oncoming fight was probably better than having to run from the house in a frenzy to avoid the sun in the midst of the heated discussion I knew was coming.

  Chapter 10

  The evening was quiet. Unusual for early spring when the call of the bullfrogs ushers in spring and the whistling breezes blow down from the mountains. The coyotes hadn’t begun their evening songs, which can be so eerie as to bring you awake, eyes wide open and darting around in the dead of night if you aren’t used to the lonely sound. Even the doves that usually wooed each other from deep within the forest were quiet tonight. Not a human sound littered the air as I stepped out of my hiding place in the root cellar, and I appreciated the beauty of the silence—a golden thing really considering the strength of my hearing.

  I couldn’t hear any cars on the dirt road. Even the main highway was empty. No hunters searched the forest. No dogs barked for miles. The quiet added to the calm I had gained from the blood the night before, and for a few seconds, I felt like things were looking up. I studied my house, realizing how picturesque it really was from this angle, and I admitted that it had been a poor choice, but from this view, I might have bought it all over again. It was peaceful, tranquil.

  Too peaceful, I realized. The washing machine, dryer, and dishwasher were off. Nobody flushed a commode. No water ran from the faucets. I couldn’t make out a single alarm from a DSI or iPad. Even Ellie’s normally pesky cellphone was quiet. But it was more than that. The gentle purr of electricity was absent. The normal sounds of a working household were gone. No normal sound of a heating system. The refrigerator had lost its hum. The house was no longer lived in. A house with no family is a lonely place. Just an empty shell.

  Ellie was gone. I knew it before I swung open the kitchen door, desperately searching the room for my daughter and mother. I flew down the hallway, hoping to find something and yet terrified to do so. My imagination ran away with itself. Immediately, I thought of Rumsfield and blamed him. Perhaps he’d taken them. Or maybe it was Asa back from the dead. Maybe I’d been too confused to realize that he was real. It could be a simple intruder. Or Mom had finally had enough and left. That thought crossed my mind, but I refused to acknowledge the possibility. Cautiously, I stood still, listening for human or vampire sounds, but other than the constant creaks and moans of an old house and the tree branches scraping the roof, there was silence.

  There had to be another explanation. They wouldn’t just disappear, and as I rounded the doorway of Ellie’s room, I dropped into a crouched position, half expecting and definitely craving a fight. But the room was empty, the light off, and her bed made. Nothing threatened me, and I couldn’t find the scent of an intruder. The only scents I caught were those of my mother, Ellie and I. From a single look, she might have been at school. But to me, someone who knew Ellie like the back of my hand, it was a room emptied out. Too neat and very sterile. Not the room of a little girl who excelled in feminine clutter.

  Asa appeared behind me. The blood from the evening before was already wearing off, and he was back. “I finished her. Did you really think you could protect her from me?” he asked.

  I batted at his imaginary figure with one hand while I rushed to her closet. The door was shut. Momentarily, I argued with myself as to whether I should open it or not. Finally, I wrenched the door open, half expecting to find my missing family, more victims of Asa.

  Instead, the shelves were cleaned out. Most of her favorite jeans and dresses were gone, along with her best boots and tennis shoes. Two old family quilts had been taken from the top shelf. Behind me, her dollhouse was missing, as well as her favorite stuffed bear—the one nearly as tall as her. I’d won it last year at the Washington County Fair.

  Refusing to accept the most obvious explanation, the one that was slapping me in the face repeatedly, I cursed Rumsfield, blaming him for the disappearance of my family. I raced to the dresser in the corner of the room, jerking the drawers out two at a time. Empty. Cleaned out. “Damn you, Rumsfield!” I screamed. “And you thought your mommy would understand,” Asa laughed behind me. “You know the detective is not the guilty party. Your mother took your precious daughter and abandoned you.”

  “She wouldn’t do that. She does understand!” I continued to scream, slicing at his laughing face with an empty dresser drawer. He dissolved as my momentum threw me to the floor, the drawer flying from my hand and disappearing out the window. I heard the split‐second indecision of the glass before it gave way and burst, shards of glass flying in all directions. Some flew outwards, some backwards, burying themselves into my skin. Small drops of blood beaded across my face and arms but I paid them no attention. One more burst of anger caused me to pull the bureau over, but the resounding boom of it hitting the floor gave me no satisfaction.

  Asa was right, and I knew it before I read the note on the counter. The flat sheet of paper appeared stark white against the granite counter. I approached the note cautiously, dreading to read the words she’d written.

  “Annie, I have taken Ellie into town. I’ve rented an apartment so that she can finish out the school year here. There’s been too much trauma to move her now, so we will stay here until the end of the semester. I know you loved her. She was your life. If there’s any part of you that is still my daughter and still her mother, please try to understand that this is in Ellie’s best interest. Please don’t do anything rash.”

  The tile floor of the kitchen was no cooler than my skin as I slumped down beside the kitchen island. The note was still drifting in the breeze blowing in from the forgotten open kitchen door as Asa slid down beside me, his back resting against the wood. “Do you not wish I had simply killed you outright?” he asked.

  Chapter 11

  The trip to town was windy and wet, but I didn’t feel the rain or the wind as I slung my body between the trees. There was only one apartment complex in the small town where Ellie went to school, and I aimed myself straight for it. It never even crossed my mind to take the car. I realized how inhuman and alien it appeared as I stepped out of the tree line that ran in a horizontal line behind the apartment complex. Three sides of the two-floor complex faced small city roads, but behind
it was an open field, the fence of which had collapsed not long after the farmer who’d sold the field had cashed the check.

  Mom hadn’t left me the unit number, not that they’d be hard to find. I could have simply sniffed at each door until I found Ellie. Of course, that would look really strange, but I didn’t have to resort to that. I could see her stained‐glass sun catcher hanging behind her curtains—a gift from her father the previous Christmas. She was in unit sixteen, a ground‐floor unit. Unfortunately, she was flanked on both sides by other tenants.

  I tried to calm myself down as I crossed the field into the parking lot. Would it look more bizarre to see a blur coming across the empty field or what appeared to be a person walking in from the woods? Definitely a blur I decided, so I forced myself into a fast but even‐paced step. If anyone asked why I was on foot, I’d tell them my car broke down.

  It was February; the rains had still not let up and a fine mist had fallen while I was in the forest. I ran my hands through my windblown, damp hair as I crossed the field. I smoothed my clothes down and tried to knock some of the mud off of my shoes. Normal was what I was going for. I had to appear normal.

  The apartment door was a light green, a bright shock in an otherwise drab brick building. But apartments were slim pickings around these parts, and I knew they’d been lucky to find a place at all. To the left, I could hear a family making dinner. Something was boiling on the stove; the microwave was running. To the right, the two people who occupied number seventeen were watching TV—an old rerun from the seventies. Inside number sixteen, I could hear Ellie’s cheerful voice. Things had gone well at school today. She’d gotten an A on her spelling test. Math was fine and she thought this little boy named Dillon was kinda cute. But just kinda.