Once Bitten

by Reinke, Sara

  “Sandy,” John cried out as she sailed across the threshold and over the porch. There was a loud crack of splintering wood as she smashed through the decorative railing, then a heavy rustling as she landed in the dense shrubbery beyond.

  He cried out again, strangled, as Duvall Wilder leaned down, clamping his hand fiercely against John’s throat.

  “You killed Boyd,” he seethed, jerking John so close, his spittle peppered John’s forehead and cheeks. He threw John the length of the front foyer, sending him crashing into the far wall, splintering a leaded glass mirror behind him. John collapsed, breathless, in pain, with a shower of splintered, razor-edged glass spilling around him.

  The floorboards shook as Duvall approached. John looked up, blood trickling in thin rivulets down his face from his lacerated scalp. He caught a glimpse of the fallen pistol laying on the floor ahead of him, just beyond his reach, then gulped back a cry as the patriarch of the Wilder clan again grabbed him by the throat and hauled him to his feet.

  “You killed Boyd,” Duvall hissed again, and this time, he sent John sailing down the corridor and through the front door. Wind whistled in his ears, whipped in his face, then he slammed down hard into the lawn, skidding deep trenches into the manicured grass as he tumbled ass over elbows to an eventual, painful stop.

  This isn’t going to end well, John thought, dazed from the impact, still unable to catch his breath because he was in the middle of serious cardiac arrest. He was hard-pressed to decide which would kill him first, the heart attack or the pissed off master vampire, but then he heard the heavy stomping of Duvall Wilder’s footfalls in the damp grass seconds before feeling his furious hand clamp in his hair, and decided his money was on the vampire.

  It felt like he was being scalped as Duvall hauled him upright by the hair. “I am going to tear you apart,” he said, pulling John back against his shoulder so he could purr with obscene intimacy into his ear. “I am going to peel the flesh back from your miserable, misbegotten bones inch by inch and let my werehounds have their way with what’s left.”

  Oh, yeah. This isn’t going to end well at all.

  With a grunt, Duvall threw John again, sending him flying across the lawn before face-planting in the grass again. The automatic sprinkers came on, filling the air all around John with a dense haze of moisture, a luminescent mist infused with glow from the rising moon.

  Through this incandescent veil, Duvall Wilder stepped into view, first as a silhouette, then as he drew near, more clearly into focus.

  “Please,” John croaked. He tried to hold up his working hand, pleading, but twisted sharply in the grass as a stab of pain wracked his torso.

  “Go ahead,” Duvall said. John could see his fangs now, huge and gleaming as they protruded from his mouth. “Beg me. You’ll be doing that a lot before the night is over…before I’m through with you.”

  He reached down and John closed his eyes, hunching his shoulders, the closest approximation to a cower he could manage. From above him, he heard the sharp intake of Duvall’s startled breath, followed by a thick, wet sound like a boxer jabbing a left hook into a hanging rack of raw meat.

  Then John heard a little cry caught somewhere between furious and ferocious, and he opened his eyes to find Sandy standing behind Duvall. At first, John didn’t realize what had happened, but then Duvall turned to face her, revealing the length of a hand-turned wooden spindle protruding from between his shoulder blades. It had broken off the porch when Sandy had smashed through it.

  Duvall opened his mouth, baring those hideous fangs, and hissed at Sandy. For her part, she uttered another one of those angry, fearsome yells, then planted her hands into Duvall’s chest and gave a mighty heavy. He stumbled backward, off balance, but not enough to topple, at least not until he tripped over John, who lay on the ground behind him. For a nearly comical moment, Duvall seemed frozen in the air at a precarious, backward angle, his arms pinwheeling, and then he lost the battle against gravity’s insatiable pull. Down he went, slamming into the ground perpendicular to John, driving the length of the porch rail shaft through his torso as he went. It made a sickening, sodden crunch as it pierced through flesh and bone, puncturing his heart, sending up a thick geyser of blood as the end punched out of his chest.

  Duvall shrieked as his body, like Boyd’s, began to dissolve into smoke and ash. He fought as long as he could, his hands flapping in the air, his feet drumming, even as his flesh blackened, seared down to the bone. When at last, the charred remnants of his throat collapsed in on itself, his voice dissipated along with it, and the husk of his corpse lay still, melting into sludge beneath the pelting spray of the sprinklers.

  “John!” Her face streaked with blood, Sandy fell to her knees beside him. “John, are you alright?”

  “Yeah,” he said with a slight grimace as he tried to kick the Duvall slime off his leg. Then he blinked in surprise to realize that he could move his leg again, both of them in fact, his arms, too. He still felt weak and exhausted, hurting all over in places he hadn’t even realized he had, but he could move again, free and unabated. The terrible pain in his chest had abruptly vanished and he could breathe again, too—not that he wanted to, because Duvall Wilder’s remains smelled like a damp skunk that had gotten caught in an incinerator. “I think I’m going to survive,” he said, managing a rough-shod and shaky laugh as he looked at Sandy.

  “Really?” She laughed with him, tearful and hopeful.

  “Yeah. I mean, I think it worked this time.”

  “Dr. Gough was right?”

  He held up his hands, wiggling his fingers for her. “Looks like it. I’m me again.”

  With a happy little cry, she threw her arms around his neck, hugging him fiercely. “Ow, hey,” he said. “Watch it. I said I’ll survive, not that I’m good as new. In fact, I think I’ve got some busted ribs in there somewhere.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Because she looked wide-eyed and worried again as she pulled away, he added, “I can see through your wet shirt, by the way.”

  She slapped him on top of the head. “You’re you again, alright.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  John dreamed of lips against his, soft and warm, gentle at first, then pressing down more firmly, melding to his own and when he felt the light, tentative prodding of the tip of a tongue against the seam of his lips, he let them part. With a soft groan, he drew the warm tongue against his own, twining and tangling. His hands slipped up to cup the back of the woman’s head and pulled her near, deepening the kiss, drawing in her breath hungrily.

  He hadn’t been kissed with anything like passion—much less returned it—since Bevi at least. This was filled with the same sort of eager anticipation and energy he’d felt in his ex-wife’s mouth on their wedding day. But this wasn’t Bevi’s mouth, not Bevi’s lips against his, coaxing this deep, visceral, urgent arousal in him. He didn’t know this mouth, had never felt it before, never tasted the sweetness of these lips, something floral or fruity, like raspberry lipgloss maybe or strawberry gum. When at last it was over, after a long, bewildering moment in which the kiss lingered—amazing, exhilarating, dreamlike and wondrous—he gasped for breath, disappointed, dismayed, his eyelids fluttering open.

  “Hey, you.” A face swam into murky focus, looking down at John and smiling, familiar blue eyes, sun-kissed blonde hair, heart-shaped face and elfin features.

  “Sandy.” His voice came out a croak. “Hey yourself.”

  She brushed his hair back from his brow with her fingertips. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”

  “Did you…” His voice came from miles away, fathoms in fact, hoarse and frail, nearly unrecognizable to him. “Did you just kiss me?”

  It might have been his imagination, just a trick of the bright fluorescents overhead, but he could have sworn that she blushed, color blooming in her cheeks. Before she could answer, however—in fact, just as she opened her mouth to reply, he heard a knock from across the room.

  �
��Mr. Harker?” a woman called.

  In an instant, Sandy was gone, leaning away from him, awarding him for the first time an unobstructed view of what he now realized was a hospital room. The nurse now walking toward the bed was also a pretty good give-away.

  “I need to check your vitals,” she said, holding up a digital thermometer.

  “I’ll come back later,” Sandy said, but when she tried to leave, he caught her hand.

  “Sandy,” he began.

  “Later,” the nurse told him, pushing the thermometer into his mouth.

  ***

  After the nurse had finished with him, his mother came next into the room. Because she arrived unannounced, it didn’t give him the chance to feign being comatose and thus forced him to endure her fussing and fretting over him.

  “…and it’s not like this place did any good the last time you were here,” she said during the course of a diatribe that had begun from the moment she’d entered the room and had continued unabated for the better part of the last ten minutes.

  “Mom, I’m fine.”

  “Well, of course you’ll say that now. You didn’t see yourself when they brought you in here, unconscious and bleeding to death. You’re lucky to be alive.”

  She was more right than she knew. So were the doctors and nurses at the Sister Islands Medical Center. The woman who’d taken his vital signs had told him that he was referred to in the same sorts of hushed and reverent tones usually reserved for mentions of the Pope, the Lost Ark of the Covenant or Brad Pitt.

  “You’re the miracle man,” she’d said with a wink. “Less than a week ago, your entire body was pretty much in systemic shutdown. And now look at you.”

  And he had. Because he could. He had a reflection again. His color had restored, and his face had lost that gaunt and haggard cast. The mottled look to his skin was gone, along with the tangled network of dark lines radiating out from his injured neck and arm. The bite wounds themselves were now healing, the necrotic appearance vanished. He could move his arms and legs again with full range of motion, and all of his tactile sensations had been restored. The palsy that had affected the left side of his face and body had disappeared, and he could run the tip of his tongue along the rim of his top teeth and feel that his canines had receded back to normal.

  He’d been in the hospital for little more than a day. Which was apparently about twelve and a half hours too long for Wilma’s liking.

  “Mom,” he said again, because she’d continued babbling despite his attempt at reassurance. “Really. Look at me. I’m fine.”

  Luckily, Bevi arrived to rescue him. It had been close to three months since he’d last seen his ex-wife, but he’d never been so glad to in his entire life.

  “Can I come in?” She tapped lightly on the door before poking her head through, looking to him with a hesitant smile.

  “Hey.” He squirmed, sitting up more in the bed. “Bevi, hi. Sure. Yeah. What a surprise. Come on in.”

  With the possible exception of Wayne Newton, only Bevi could have extricated Wilma from his bedside at that moment. As evidenced by the framed wedding photo of the two of them that John’s mother kept on her television set, Wilma still had it lodged somewhere in her mind that he and Bevi would get back together. Apparently the words cold day in hell did not share the same definition for her as John.

  After Wilma exchanged warm embraces and chattering small talk for a few moments with Bevi, she ducked out the door, closing it behind her, shooting John a conspicuous wink before leaving him and Bevi alone.

  Still smiling in that tentative way, Bevi approached his bed. She had a deep, copper-toned Florida tan, her hair highlighted and styled in a shaggy, short crop he’d never seen before but thought suited her. She wore denim capris and a scoop-necked, floral print T-shirt. In an instant, her perfume, Burberry, seemed to fill the room, a fruity, floral and still poignantly familiar fragrance.

  Along with everyone else in his life, John had pushed Bevi away after the shootings. He’d sank into a depression so deep and all-encompassing, he’d felt he would never emerge. It had been Bevi who’d had him involuntarily committed for psychiatric evaluation, teaming up with the police department shrinks to see him hospitalized, kept for the better part of a week in the suicide-watch ward of the Jackson Mental Health facility in Miami.

  Bevi had agreed with the psychiatrist’s suggestion that they move out of Dade County. An accomplished realtor, she’d found them a deal on the home on Big Sister. Sometimes, like right now, when seeing her again evoked all sorts of residual warm-and-fuzzy feelings inside of him, he tried to tell himself that she’d done all of that for him, for their marriage. In more cynical moments, he suspected Davis Monroe had played a bigger factor in this decision than either of the former.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked as, at his waved invitation, she sat in a bedside chair. She carried a small clasp-front pocketbook with her, and draped her hands atop it, sitting with her knees together, spine straight, all prim and visibly uncomfortable. Her eyes cut from his face as she spoke to the visible margin of bandages sticking out over the neckline of his hospital gown.

  “Great.” Raising his hands slightly to give his IV lines demonstrative waggles, he said, “All this stuff is just for show. All part of the deal. I signed up for the ‘first class’ hospital package.”

  Bevi laughed, her posture relaxing somewhat, that awkward tension between them lessening. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d made her laugh, at least in a pleasant fashion and not in the “Oh, ha, ha, ha, asshole, see you in court” sort of way.

  “How’d you know I was here?” he asked.

  “Wilma called me,” she said, to which he thought in interjection, Of course. “She said you’d had a heart attack. You almost died.”

  Her voice choked on this last and he felt nearly moved by the concern in her face, the unabashed fear in her eyes as she spoke.

  “I’m fine, Bevi,” he said. “You know how Mom gets.”

  Bevi’s eyes looked unnaturally glossy all at once, and she sniffled loudly, averting her gaze to the purse in her lap. She unsnapped the top, then rifled inside, pulling out a wadded tissue which she then used to dab at her nose. “I’m sorry about the other day. The things I said in my message on your cell phone. It was a bad day all around and when Davis told me about you stopping by his office, I guess I just took it out on you and that wasn’t fair. I’m sorry.”

  She looked up and he realized it wasn’t a trick of the lights. Her eyes swam with tears, and when one rolled down her cheek before she could blink it away, he found himself absurdly touched.

  “Bevi,” he said gently, reaching for her.

  She coiled her fingers against his. “You were right about Boyd Wilder. Davis knows that. He’s sorry, too.”

  Not sorry enough to come here and tell me himself, John thought, biting back the words. From Wilma, he’d learned that the police had discovered the remains of fifteen women on Wilder’s property at Duvall Island, the vampire brides he’d made for himself, and who had turned into little more than ash piles along with him and his great-great grandfather when they’d died.

  Other skeletal remains, those of two men, had been found in a basement crypt, and John had surmised these to be of Boyd’s father, Landon, grandfather Samuel and great-grandfather, William Pardon. Apparently they hadn’t yet risen for the night when Duvall and Boyd had been killed.

  You snooze, you lose, boys, John thought. In this case, literally.

  Among these had been Lucy Weston, who had been unceremoniously buried in a shallow grave in the woods framing the Wilder family mansion. Final DNA identification was forthcoming, but dental records had confirmed the identity of the charred remains to the police’s satisfaction.

  “That horrible man,” Wilma had remarked of Boyd Wilder with a frown and a shudder. He had been painted in the press as the “most prolific serial killer in the history of the Florida Keys” and his death was being attributed to either a suicide o
r an accidental incineration. No mention had been made about the possibility of spontaneous sanguinarian combustion due to contact with a silver-plated bullet. Of Jame Covey and the “werehounds,” as Duvall Wilder had called them, there’d apparently been no report or sign that Wilma had been able to relay.

  “I didn’t think I’d get the chance to tell you that,” Bevi told him. “That Davis is sorry. That I’m sorry. When your mom called, all that kept going through my head was that you’d die thinking I hated you, or worse, you’d die hating me.”

  He gave her hand a gentle squeeze. “I’m not going to die,” he said again. “And I could never hate you. We have strong differences of opinion on occasion that lead to less-than-civil conversations between the two of us, and I definitely have no fond or deep-seeded affection for the man who is currently your significant other, but besides that…”

  She laughed, tearful and somewhat choked.

  “I’d say we’re good, Bevi,” he said gently.

  “Yeah?” she asked as more tears spilled.

  He drew her hand to his face, kissing the back of her knuckles. “Yeah,” he promised.

  He glanced past Bevi and found Sandy standing in the doorway to his room, her eyes round and surprised. She’d frozen in mid-step, her mouth paused in mid-smile, and she blinked between John and his ex-wife in visible confusion.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, backtracking through the door again, drawing it closed as she went. “I should have knocked.”

  “No, hey, wait,” John said, sitting more fully upright. “Come on in. It’s alright. You remember Bevi?”

  “Uh.” Hesitant, Sandy pushed the door open again, but remained poised on the threshold, uncertain and embarrassed. “Sure.” To Bevi, she flipped her hand in a wave. “Hi. Nice to see you again.”

  “Hi, Maureen,” Bevi said. She looked down at John, then with noticeable reluctance, drew her hand away from his. Touching his face, she smiled and said, “I should get going. I’ve got a showing this afternoon.”