One (Rules Undying Book 6)

by R. E. Carr

  “If that is what you wish, friend. You have—”

  “I have to do something impossible?” Georgia offered. “What—because I’m cursed like Lancelot and terrible things are about to happen? Is this some amazing destiny thing, and I’ve been chosen?”

  “No . . . bad things will happen—you choose if you want to stop them, friend.” With that, the Sock Monster disappeared as mysteriously as he had appeared in the first place. The door opened again so that more fitness freaks could hit the showers. Georgia rolled under the bench to avoid getting stepped on. A few minutes later, a pair of red Chucks shuffled into view.

  “Did you fall down, mi amiga?”

  “Maybe,” Georgia said noncommittally as Javier helped her up. He raised a brow at her. “I can’t keep going on like this. I—” She leaned against him. “I need to see . . . I need to see someone.”

  “We need to get you some strength. You can’t go back to—”

  “I don’t want to go back to Merlin or Arthur. I need to find out what happened to Mr. Lambley. I don’t know why, but I need to find him first. You might think it’s crazy—”

  Javier’s eyes lit up. “Of all the people in this world, you want to help Geoffrey? Señora, I am at a loss for words.”

  Georgia smiled weakly. “Really,” she said with a little laugh. “Maybe I can do the impossible after all.”

  34

  “It is impossible to get anything done around here,” Gail growled, hearing a crash from the back of the apartment. She snapped her laptop closed, interrupting her study of practical theories of miasma influence upon the distracted and weak-minded. She let out a deep breath as she approached the door. “You OK back there?”

  She waited a few moments. Muffled murmurs drifted to her ears, followed by an echoing thud that Gail felt through the floor, but there was no other reply. “Lorcan?” Nothing. “Jonathan? I’m not sure which one of you is out, but if you don’t respond, I’m coming in there. You need to eat something.”

  She was answered by silence. Gail slowly opened the door. She could just make out an arm flopped across the carpet. “Jonathan!” she gasped as she dashed to his side. He opened his eyes and gave her a bleary emerald stare.

  “Did we win the war, good nurse?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The insurrection?” Lorcan grabbed her hand and continued to plead in his proper British accent. “I betrayed my own people for the hope that there would be a better place, a free land across the sea. Pray, tell me—did General Washington make it in time?”

  “General Washington?”

  “Are you daft, woman? Surely you have heard of General Washington?”

  Gail rolled her eyes. “You’re about three hundred years too late.”

  Lorcan blinked a few times. “Gail? Is that you?”

  “Jonathan?”

  He shook his head. “No, that is not my name. I took that name because no one knew what to call me. It was a name on a milk carton. Damn it, I don’t even know who I am anymore.”

  “Lorcan?”

  “That’s not my name either. I took it from some mercenary who died on the battlefield . . . or was it the mercenary’s dog?”

  “Mordred, then?” Her patient shook his head. Gail forced a smile as she checked his flickering pulse and dilated pupils. “Well what the hell should I call you?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked away. Gail brushed the hair out of his eyes. Sweat stuck to her fingers. “The world keeps shifting and changing. Where is my wife?”

  “Paige?”

  “Who is Paige?”

  Gail buried her face in her hands. “Why are you on the floor? Did you fall?”

  Her patient nodded. His stomach growled loudly. She lifted him to his feet, but his knees buckled almost instantly. “You are starving, and I’m going to get you some fresh blood—”

  “No, I don’t think I can handle blood.” Jonathan turned green and shook his head. “The thought makes me sick.”

  “That’s definitely Jonathan talking. I know it’s rough, but you must eat. The shakes, the weakness, and the disorientation are all being amplified by low blood sugar or at least the vampire equivalent of it. If you don’t think you can handle blood, will you at least be able to chomp on a rare steak?”

  A few minutes later, Gail found herself slapping a ribeye in a hot pan while she sipped some blood-spiked coffee. The mostly-Jonathan vampire was curled in a dining chair, slurping some milk out of a cup with a cartoon character on it. “I watched her die, Gail, and then I didn’t. So much death, and hate—and was there . . . exploding parmesan cheese?”

  “Yes, there was exploding parmesan cheese. That was real.” She flipped the hunk of meat over. “You’re getting this one black and blue—so suck it up, Buttercup. Are you still having flashbacks?”

  “Sorta,” Jonathan muttered. He poked at his steak reluctantly when Gail passed it his way and blanched at the pink puddle forming on his plate. Gail’s withering stare encouraged him to take the first bite, and hunger gave him the strength to chow down the rest. “It’s more like . . . I’m here, and then everything changes, and I’m somewhere else. I’m somewhen else, even. There are all these pieces, and I can’t quite put it together. I think I kicked my own ass at one point.”

  “You remember me, though?”

  Jonathan nodded weakly. He closed his eyes and licked his lips. “Paige, oh god!” When his eyes snapped open again, he dug his claws into the table. “Damn it, where is Paige?”

  “Nashville—”

  Jonathan hurled his plate. Gail barely managed to dodge. The plastic didn’t shatter and instead bounced off the wall and ended up smacking Jonathan in the face. He roared. Gail bolted for the bathroom and snagged a leftover tranquilizer pen, while behind her more furniture bit the dust. She sent a text to Edwin, trying her best to explain a cross-century temper tantrum.

  “I want to see Paige!” Jonathan snarled. A fist slammed through the bathroom door.

  “Why do I always end up cleaning up a mess?” Gail sighed and jabbed the hairy arm reaching desperately through the splinters. Her attacker yowled and jerked away. She waited for the thud before she slipped into the living room to scoop up the drooling mess of a vampire-werewolf hybrid. “Mina, you left me with this, and I’m not ever going to forget it.”

  She used tweezers to pick the splinters out of his arm. The moment the cellulose spikes left him, his skin healed before Gail’s very eyes. His fur retracted as well, giving Gail her first real glimpse of a reverse transformation. She grabbed Baxter the sledgehammer from its spot by the door and rested it beside her as she curled on the couch. She frowned at the return message, “Chaos here, turn on the news.”

  “What now?” Gail asked, turning on the TV. She flipped around a bit until she caught a clip called “Chaos in Nashville”.

  “Oh, god,” Gail whispered as aerial images of multiple fires blazed on the screen.

  “Police are still denying the fantastical reports that zombies have appeared in the Greater Nashville area. Scientists have confirmed that the images of decomposing bodies apparently moving of their own accord in the Nashville Cemetery are indeed hoaxes. This just in—a third body has been found hanging from a tree in Centennial Park. It appears to have been exhumed from a nearby gravesite, judging by the advanced state of decomposition. Now this city is asking when the reign of terror will come to an end.”

  Gail flipped from news channel to news channel and found more gruesome images of rotting bodies being wrapped up by terrified EMTs. One ticker read simply, “At least five dead and thirty injured in gang-related fires”. Scared Tennesseans begged for the National Guard to come to their rescue, while the requisite disaster weirdo claimed he had seen Bigfoot raiding a strip club near the airport.

  “Paige,” Jonathan whimpered in his sleep.

  “Yeah, that is probably Paige,” Gail acquiesced. She caught a financial report and gawked at the headline “Matsuoka Corporation Reports CEO Shakeup After Tumb
ling Stock Price.”

  Her phone shook repeatedly. “Massive attack—unknown source,” Edwin texted her. “Hong Kong stock exchange in chaos.”

  Gail spent the next hour digesting the drama. She leaned in to watch reports of the SEC investigating MedCentric for reporting irregularities and Biogenesys Labs for potential sample contamination. By the time Jonathan groaned and opened his eyes, Gail’s jaw was perpetually pressed into her neck.

  “What did I miss?” Jonathan asked, rubbing his eyes. “We beat the Nazis, right? . . . or were they Visigoths?”

  Gail buried her face in her hands, then glanced up and saw yet another layer of horror on the local news. “No!” Jonathan cried as a familiar face appeared on the screen. “My love!”

  “—Boston police have finally released the name of the woman found dead in the Charles River in July. The victim, Georgia Sutherland—”

  “Guinevere!” Jonathan howled. He crawled to the screen and pressed his fingertips to the LCD. “Guinevere, how can this be?”

  “The county sheriff’s department has also released this sketch of the only suspect in Georgia Sutherland’s disappearance. Known aliases include Steven DeMarco . . .” Gail gawked at a surprisingly good pencil sketch of Steve looking like a terrible thug. “Citizens are advised that he may be armed and is considered extremely dangerous. If you see this man, please contact your local police or the sheriff’s department immediately.”

  Both Jonathan and Gail cocked their heads as another familiar face appeared on the screen. “What a horrible picture,” Gail said as the anchor read, “He is also wanted for questioning in the disappearance of Gail Filipovic of Revere—”

  “Oh Steve, what have we gotten into now?” she whispered. Jonathan continued to moan and roll on the floor, a muddle of Latin, Gaelic, French, and English spewing from his lips. Gail’s phone shook again, this time notifying her of a local event. “You have got to be kidding me!”

  Gail did her best to clean up the mess, settling for shoving things into corners. She made a glove out of tape to pick up the splinters, but still managed to end up with her fingers covered in welts by the time the bathroom door was relatively vampire-safe.

  “—Fatum est fidelis canis,” Jonathan whimpered in his fitful sleep. “Imo! Nay . . .”

  His eyes snapped open again and he stared around the room like a man possessed. Gail could only watch helplessly as Jonathan scrambled backwards on all fours, only stopping when he banged into the wall. He pointed his finger at thin air. “Quis es . . .? Who are you?”

  “It’s me, Gail, damn it!” she replied with a heavy sigh. Jonathan remained focused on the former location of the coffee table, his fangs extending and finger shaking. He looked over to her. “No, who is that?” he asked, pointing to the empty space.

  “There is no one in this room other than you and me—”

  Jonathan clutched his chest and howled. The mix of languages continued to exacerbate. Gail could just hear, “Allez-vous-en!” as the panic continued. She stopped cold as the TV flickered, and the nearby lamp sparked.

  “Is someone here?” Gail asked, her voice breaking. A scream sounded from across the room as a line of blood oozed through Jonathan’s shirt. Gail dove for him and landed against a bare back. For an instant, she could see a surprised face and a flash of fangs. “You’re not Javier,” she choked out, before the world went black.

  “We are all just whispers and energy wrapped up in packages of stardust, so why is it so impossible that you are talking to me now?”

  “It doesn’t seem so impossible right now,” Gail whispered as she opened her eyes. A delicious metallic aroma filled her nose and mouth, and she involuntarily licked her lips. The taste, however, spectacularly failed to live up to the scent, and she spat out the foul-tasting blood into the rapidly swelling puddle on the floor beside her. “Jonathan!”

  He lay splayed on the floor, his shirt torn open and a gash over each side of his chest. Gail blinked a few times as she saw the pulsing of a heart under the right-side incision rather than the left. “That’s not right.”

  She crawled to his side and watched as the gelatinous vampire within him bubbled and oozed through the incision where a heart should have been—making an awful noise like the tail end of a dish-soap bottle. His back arched as the tendrils of the vampire wrapped around to the right side. She could just see more blood dripping off the edge of the sofa, where a kitchen scale sat on the edge of one cushion, and her now-gutted down comforter fell over the other.

  “What the actual fuck!” she exclaimed. The flickering image of a naked man sprayed with blood and feathers walked out their front door. Jonathan cried out in terror as he regained consciousness with his sternum still in the process of connecting to his ribs. Gail pinned his shoulders to the floor to prevent him from interfering with his body stitching itself back together. “Sorry about this,” she said, before spitting along the wounds.

  “What the hell is an ember?” Jonathan asked, terrified, before passing out in a puddle of his own blood. Gail stared at him, dumbstruck. Her phone shook violently, but rather than answer it, she chose to pass out as well.

  “Gail! Gail, can you hear me?”

  “Mmmhmm, just give me another minute,” she said before letting out a big yawn. She curled against fabulously silky fabric and smelled the most heavenly mix of coffee, copper, and bacon. A familiar metallic taste touched her lips, and she opened her eyes to see a concerned pair of hazel eyes staring back at her. Ruby-tipped hair framed her caregiver’s freckled, distinctive face. “Beulah? Where am I?” Gail whispered after sipping the freshly squeezed type-A from a china cup.

  “We are sorry that we didn’t come sooner, but it has been a hell of a past twenty-four hours,” Edwin answered flatly from his seat across the suite. “How are you holding up over there? You were out cold when we found you.”

  “Jonathan! Is he—?”

  “Mom is taking care of him. I think he took a hit to the head too. He keeps raving about a guy wearing a sock on his whanker who attempted twice to cut out his heart and weigh it. Then he asked me why I wasn’t in uniform because the Boche were coming. Yeah, Dad is definitely off his rocker.”

  “I know something weird happened, but it’s all so fuzzy.” Gail rubbed her eyes and acquiesced to Beulah propping her up on a marshmallowy pile of pillows so that she could sip her cup of fantastic quality blood that even had a bacon swizzle stick in it, just to gild the lily. “I feel like I should be more upset after watching someone’s heart beating in an open wound, but all that’s really going through my mind is why didn’t I notice that Jonathan had dextrocardia before? It’s such a strange feeling.”

  “Like you’re drunk?” Edwin offered, more focused on whatever was on his phone than the girls by the bed.

  “More like high. Jonathan had dilated pupils and was raving as well.”

  “Well, I’m not surprised, considering his ribcage and sternum looked like they’d been clawed open by hand. What the hell attacked him? Was it a werewolf?”

  “I think I would remember a werewolf. It had fangs—and was very . . . shiny, for lack of a better word.”

  “Gail, if you are about to tell me that you saw an actual sparkling vampire, I’m going to go crawl into a bottle and never come out,” Edwin said with a sigh. “Some things should remain buried in fiction.”

  “Not sparkly, more like well-oiled,” Gail said, scratching her head. Beulah leaned in and sniffed Gail’s breath. Gail raised a brow.

  “You think a vampire was strong enough to tear open Lorcan’s chest—?” Beulah started.

  “He said not to call him that anymore,” Edwin interjected.

  “Well, he didn’t tell us what we could call him, damn it, and I’m not going to keep saying, hey you—Mina’s ex,” Beulah said, gritting her teeth. Gail’s eyes lit up.

  “I know, right? I just say Jonathan because—”

  “We have to call him something,” Beulah and Gail finished together before breakin
g into giggles. Beulah patted Gail’s hand gently. “I thought I was the only one being driven crazy by this whole new Lorcan. Hell, we’ve known each other since the Civil War, and it’s like he’s a total stranger now. I haven’t even had the heart to tell him about Javier.”

  Gail chose that moment to survey her room a bit more. She studied the drapes and sleek modern furnishings, even the pile on the fluffy mushroom-colored carpeting. Beulah cringed a little. “It’s never easy when one of our kind dies,” she said softly. “Javier was a survivor—”

  “Seems a little disingenuous to call someone a survivor after they died, don’t you think?” Gail interrupted. Beulah snorted a little. She snagged one of the bacon strips off Gail’s tray and nibbled it nervously. Gail let out a deep sigh. “I’m sorry, I just—”

  “No, I’m sorry. You were very close, and it’s just a . . . a . . .”

  “Shit show for being a vampire out there,” a new voice said as the door opened. Gail, Beulah, and Edwin all cocked their heads as they tried to piece together exactly who had decided to crash their little party. The strange voice sounded almost like a British actor trying his best to play an American in an action movie, with a guttural depth that was practically Batman-esque. “And for the record, you can call me Lorcan—but it’s Lorcan Dean now, if you don’t mind.”

  “. . . You went back to Lorcan?” Edwin asked incredulously. “Really, Dad?”

  “It was a name I once chose for myself, and it’s what most of you knew me as, so we decided to keep it since y’all are so obsessed with knowing what to call me.”

  “Did you really just say ‘y’all’ correctly in a sentence, old man?” Beulah asked skeptically. Lorcan nodded. A Celtic cross earring once more dangled from his ear, but he kept Jonathan’s short hair and designer stubble. “What next, cowboy boots?”

  Lorcan lifted his jeans leg to show off his slightly less good-ole-boy steel-toed hiking boots. He did maintain a T-shirt and flannel combo, but the rock logo had been changed out for plain black. “So, are you . . . better?” Gail asked cautiously.