“No,” I rasped, even as the darkness of sleep—or perhaps unconsciousness—beckoned. I was distantly aware of the sound of the patio door sliding open and shut.
No. I won’t forget.
TWO
“MISS? MISS. CAN YOU open your eyes for me?”
My eyes fluttered open to find two cops crouching over me—a man and a woman. Huh? I let my head flop first to one side, then the other, trying to orient myself. I was... lying on the floor, in what would be my dining room if I actually owned a dining table.
Why was I lying on the floor?
I’d been having some kind of crazy dream—
“Miss?” It was the female cop, an edge of worry coloring her tone.
“Yeah, I’m...” I began, only to trail off in search of the right word. Okay didn’t really seem to cover it, somehow. “... awake,” I finished lamely.
“Are you Zorah Bright?” the woman asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you remember what happened?” asked the male cop. “You called nine-one-one.”
I blinked, puzzle pieces starting to reassemble inside my scrambled brain. Then I sat up abruptly, every muscle in my body protesting the movement. My head swam, and the female cop shot a hand out to steady my shoulder.
The man. In my shed. He hadn’t been dead. He’d broken the door and—
My hand flew to the side of my neck. It was smooth. Unblemished. I rubbed at the skin, not understanding.
“Take it easy, Ms. Bright,” said the male cop. “We knocked on the front door but there was no answer. So we did a visual inspection through the windows, and saw you collapsed in front of the patio door. It was unlocked.”
Sirens approached from the road out front.
“That’ll be the ambulance,” said the woman. “Go get the EMTs in here for her.”
“No!” I said quickly, my thoughts whirling. I couldn’t afford an ambulance ride, much less an ER visit. And if I tried to tell anyone what happened, I’d be lucky not to end up in a straightjacket. Did they still use straightjackets these days?
I shook my head, intending to clear it. Instead, it felt like my brain had melted and was sloshing around inside my skull.
“No,” I said more calmly. “I don’t need the EMTs.”
In fact, there was every chance that I did need the EMTs, but I couldn’t go down that path right now.
“You collapsed,” the female cop said gently.
I thought fast. “No, I... think I just fainted. It happens sometimes. Low blood pressure.” I swallowed, my dry throat rasping. “I just need to, uh, sit quietly for a minute.”
The male cop helped me stagger to my feet and deposited me on one of the bar stools by the stretch of kitchen counter I used as a table. “Do you remember what happened?” he asked.
I glanced between them, noting that the woman had pulled out a pen and notepad, ready to take a report. Again, visions of being carted off to a psych ward danced in my head. They even had an ambulance waiting right out front to transport me to crazytown.
A series of knocks pounded against the front door.
“I’ll let them know what’s going on,” muttered the male cop, heading for the front of the house.
I turned to the woman and cleared my throat. “Right. So... like I told the nine-one-one operator, I went out to the shed to get my lawnmower, and when I got close I saw that the padlock had been broken.”
“Was the shackle cut?” asked the woman, pausing in her note taking. “Like, with bolt cutters?”
I shook my head. “No. It had just been... wrenched open, I guess.”
She raised an eyebrow and made another note, but didn’t comment.
“The door was ajar, but only by a few inches,” I continued. “I opened it, and that’s when I saw the guy with the gunshot wound in his chest.”
“Can you describe him?”
More memories shook loose. “Uh... he was a white guy. In his thirties, maybe? Dark hair. Wearing black jeans, a white shirt, and a black leather vest. His eyes were blue...”
She looked up again. “His eyes were open?”
I hesitated. They hadn’t been. “No, they were closed. Maybe I saw them later. Or... maybe I just thought they were blue.”
She suppressed a sigh. “Go on.”
“He was obviously shot through the chest. There was a lot of blood. I felt for his pulse, and put my hand near his mouth and nose to check for breathing. I couldn’t feel anything, so I closed the shed door and put the broken lock back on the latch to keep it shut. Then I ran inside and called the police.”
She nodded, still writing. “And what happened next?”
This would be the tricky part, I knew. “I was waiting in the house for you guys to arrive—I think it had been about seven minutes. I heard pounding coming from the back yard. When I looked out through the patio door, I saw the door of the shed shaking on its hinges. It burst open, and... well... I guess I must have fainted.”
Movement in the back yard caught my eye as I related the last part of my tale, startling me. The second cop was poking around the damaged shed, examining the door and peering into the musty interior. The woman finished writing and lowered the notebook. The edges of her mouth tugged down.
“I see,” she said.
Her colleague finished whatever investigation he’d been doing and came back inside. His gaze raked over me briefly, but when he spoke, it was to his partner.
“There’s traces of blood on the floor of the shed,” he said. “Doesn’t look like nearly enough to have killed someone. Whoever it was must not’ve been in too bad a shape. The workmanship on the shed is shoddy, but it would still have taken a fair bit of strength to tear out the door latch and one of the hinges from the inside.”
The female cop nodded. “She says she thought he was dead, so she locked the shed door and came in here to make the call. She heard pounding, saw the door rattle, and fainted when it burst open.”
Now both of the cops looked sour.
“Am I in trouble?” I asked carefully. “It wasn’t a prank call. I honestly thought he was dead.”
The female cop sighed. “Here’s the thing, Miss Bright. Your supposed gunshot victim might have grounds to press charges against you for felonious restraint. You locked him in a shed, after all.”
“What?” My stomach twisted. “But... he was on my property! Don’t I have grounds for... I don’t know... trespassing or breaking and entering, or something? And—I told you—I thought he was dead! I was trying to protect a crime scene!”
The woman made a quelling gesture with one hand. “Try to stay calm, Miss Bright. The guy’s not here anymore.” She looked at her partner questioningly.
He shrugged. “There are no obvious clues to show which direction he took off in.”
“Okay,” said the female cop. “So the victim is gone, and aside from putting out a notice to local hospitals about any patients presenting with gunshot wounds, we don’t really have a good way to find him, or even identify him.”
“Assuming it even was a gunshot wound at all,” the other cop muttered.
“Basically, unless you want to file an official complaint against him, we’re willing to let this incident slide. You were trying to do the right thing, but you made a mistake. We can just call it an unfortunate lapse of judgment on both sides and move on.” The female cop looked at me hopefully. It was pretty obvious that neither she nor her partner wanted the headache of trying to deal with this little mystery.
“All right,” I said meekly. At this point, all I wanted was for them to be gone, so I could lick my wounds in private. My fingertips strayed once more to the unblemished side of my neck.
After a few more perfunctory questions about my contact information, they left.
“Oh, by the way,” said the male cop. “The lock on your patio door appears to be broken. You should get that fixed. It’s a security risk.”
Gee, you think so? I couldn’t help the sarcastic mental quip.
>
“I’ll put it on the list, along with my broken shed door,” I muttered.
He gave me another frown—the kind that said he didn’t appreciate having to deal with sarcastic twenty-somethings who locked wounded intruders in sheds and then fainted while waiting for the police. If I were being brutally honest, I couldn’t really blame him for that. I kept my mouth shut, and closed the front door behind them.
Once I’d confirmed that the squad car had gone, disappearing around the corner onto the main road, I sighed and let the curtain fall back. The stairs up to the loft I used as a bedroom loomed like a towering mountain. I stared at them for a moment, feeling every shaky muscle and every aching joint. Then I headed for the first-floor bathroom instead.
The cheap fluorescent lighting hurt my eyes as it illuminated the paleness beneath the light brown of my skin tone. I looked gray and pasty, dark circles under my sunken chocolate gaze. My kinky hair was half-flattened where I’d lain on it, the rest of it sticking out in every direction. God, I looked like a complete wreck. But I was a complete wreck without a visible mark anywhere on my neck. I leaned forward over the sink to look more closely.
Still nothing.
Was I going insane? Hallucinating? Should I have let the ambulance take me to the hospital for a psych evaluation? I rubbed at the tender skin of my throat, feeling phantom lips there.
I didn’t imagine it, damn it.
But... now what? Vampires were real. Maybe. What was I supposed to do with that?
Falling back on practicalities, I splashed water on my face with shaking hands, and pulled my wayward hair into a ponytail. The pull against my scalp momentarily eased the throbbing of my headache, but I knew in an hour or two it would probably make it worse again.
I wandered listlessly to the kitchen, remembering that they always told you to eat and drink something after you made a blood donation.
Blood donation. I nearly laughed, but if I started I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stop.
If memory served, orange juice and a cookie was the preferred menu at the Red Cross. I had OJ—no preservatives added, not from concentrate—but cookies were a no-go with all the gluten and sugar. I grabbed a banana instead.
I’ve been kind of a health disaster since I was a kid, and even more so since puberty. One of the few things that seemed to make any real difference was sticking to an autoimmune diet. The one that seemed to work best was a sort of extra-strict version of Paleo. That—along with regular yoga—made the difference between being a more-or-less functional member of society and being too sick to work half the time.
I drank my juice and ate my banana, debating next steps.
I knew what I wanted to do, and I also knew that doing it would be a bad idea. I wanted to call my father, even though I was fully aware that the conversation was likely to end in tears—metaphorically, if seldom literally these days. In many ways, Dad was all I had left since my mom died, so long ago. In other ways, I’d lost him just as surely as I’d lost her.
Right now, I wanted to hear my father’s voice—even though the realist in me knew it was unlikely that our relationship would spontaneously repair itself now, some twenty years after the fact.
Twenty years.
Christ.
I felt a jolt upon realizing that we were only two weeks out from July Fourth—the anniversary of the day that a lone gunman shot my mother through the heart while she was giving a Senate campaign speech. I found myself reaching for my phone before I even realized I’d done it. If I was reacting like this, how much worse must my father be feeling about the upcoming reminder of our loss? I’d been so young when it happened that my memories of Sasha Hawkins-Bright were hazy. But Dad had been married to her for years.
The call picked up on the fourth ring.
“Hello?”
I took a deep breath. “Dad? It’s Zorah.”
A pause.
“Hi, Zorah. Why are you calling?”
Not ‘How are you doing?’ Not ‘Good to hear from you.’
“I... uh... I was wondering if you knew anyone here in St. Louis that I could borrow some tools from?”
I’d grown up here. In this very house, in fact. The moment I’d hit eighteen, though, my dad had taken off like a shot. He’d moved to Chicago, and I hadn’t needed to be a genius to understand that I wasn’t invited. The one charitable thing he’d done for me since then was to let me take over the mortgage payments on the old family home. The house had been refinanced to take advantage of the large amount of equity he and Mom had paid into it, and the low monthly payments that were left were the only reason I was able to live in a decent single-family residence rather than a dodgy apartment somewhere.
“What kind of tools do you need?” came the flat voice from hundreds of miles away.
I dragged my thoughts back to the conversation. “A power drill and a circular saw. Or a Sawzall in a pinch.”
“What do you need them for?”
My jaw worked, recognizing the moment when our conversation would start to deteriorate.
“Someone broke into the garden shed,” I said, trying not to make a big deal of it when all I really wanted to do was pour the story out to him and have him tell me not to worry and that everything would be all right. As if. “The latch is broken and the door’s half off its hinges. Oh, and I need to replace the lock on the patio door, too.”
“All you need for the lock is a screwdriver and a strong wrist,” he muttered over the crackling cellular connection.
“Yeah? Well, a screwdriver’s not going to cut it for the shed,” I said. “Trust me. I have to replace part of the door frame.”
“You should already own those tools. That’s just part of being a responsible homeowner.”
My teeth ground together harder, and I consciously relaxed my jaw. “I should, but I don’t. I can’t afford them. Now, do you know anybody I could borrow them from, or not?”
“You know damn well I don’t keep in touch with anyone from... back then.” He paused. “Just... go rent them from somewhere. I don’t know why you need me to tell you that.”
“Sure,” I said tightly. “Okay. I’ll just go rent them.”
I thought he might mutter some half-assed goodbye and hang up then, but of course he had to get in a final word. A final reminder of my shortcomings in his eyes.
“You need to be more careful about security. I mean... people coming onto your property like that? Breaking locks and getting into things?” He huffed, and I didn’t need to see his frown or rueful headshake in order to picture it, clear as day. “You’re going to come to a bad end one day, Zorah—just like your mother.”
“Uh-huh. Thanks for all your help, Dad,” I said around the tightness in my throat, and disconnected the call.
THREE
I STAYED IN BED for as long as I could get away with the following morning, hoping that the double dose of over-the-counter painkillers I’d taken would be enough to get me through the day. Unfortunately, while they might’ve taken the edge off a bit, it was pretty clear that the score was still Kitchen Floor—one; Zorah—zero.
I should’ve let them drag me to the ER yesterday so I could have gotten some decent pain meds. I should call into work and tell them what happened... except for the vampire part, obviously. My supervisor would probably let me take the night off, under the circumstances.
I didn’t, though. There were bills to pay. Power tools to rent. Lumber and hardware supplies to purchase.
Adulting, man. The struggle was real.
Instead, I stumbled down the stairs that seemed to get steeper every day, and took a very long, very hot shower. I aimed the cheap plastic detachable showerhead at the tight muscles of my neck and shoulders, the pulse of water on the massage setting going some way, in combination with all the ibuprofen I’d downed, toward making me feel human again.
What I needed, I decided, was a hot guy to rub my back with oil before and after every waitressing shift. Well, my back, along with several other area
s that needed more attention than they were getting these days. I felt the familiar pull of frustrated sexual need, and eyed the pulsing showerhead speculatively for a moment.
But, no.
Irritated with myself, I put it back in the bracket and finished my routine—lather, shave, rinse. People with chronic health problems weren’t supposed to also be sex addicts. But I wasn’t a damned freak, no matter what my string of exes had to say on the matter.
Jesus, Zorah—what the hell is wrong with you?
You’re draining me dry, woman. It’s not natural.
No one wants to date a goddamned nympho, Zorah.
Either popular culture had lied to me, or I was a magnet for the only men on the planet who didn’t like horny women. So, yeah, maybe I was in the midst of a pretty long dry spell at the moment, but that didn’t mean I was doomed to marry my seven-in-one massaging showerhead quite yet. Especially on a day when I was already running late for my shift.
I worked cacao and shea butter conditioner into my hair, and then rubbed moisturizer over my body. At least I’d gotten a polite vampire yesterday, and he didn’t let me drop like a ton of bricks when he was done using my neck as a sippy cup. There wasn’t a bruise on me unless you counted the dark smudges of exhaustion under my eyes.
Hair, makeup, clothing. I stood before the bathroom mirror, giving myself a calculated onceover. Passable, I decided, though the tips tonight might be a bit on the thin side. Normally, I seemed to possess a talent for motivating the male customers, at least, to tip well. AJ’s City Broiler was a fairly upscale restaurant. The pay was shit, but with tips it was enough for me to stay afloat while still devoting time to my passion project, volunteering for the Missouri Mental Health Alliance.
At least my job allowed me to stay afloat as long as everything didn’t decide to break at once. I brought my push mower and the weed whip into the dining room to discourage anyone from taking advantage of the broken shed door while I was gone. I looked around, my eyes lighting on a straight-backed wooden chair. I jammed the chair sideways into the track of the patio door, spanning its width so that the door would catch against the wooden legs if someone tried to open it. That still left a gap of a couple of inches, but it wasn’t big enough for anyone to squeeze through.
The Last Vampire- Complete series Box Set Page 2
