by Winter Reid
“What?” Mildly annoyed, he took his hand out of my mouth.
“I changed my mind.” Blood dribbled onto my chin.
He wiped it away with my towel. “Too late.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Too late?”
He sighed. “If I don’t do it now, you’ll only make me do it later. Let’s get it over with.”
“I don’t think I want to.”
“I don’t think it’s up to you anymore. I’m the one doing the yanking.”
The drugs were still making me loopy and I smirked. “What? You gonna hold me down?”
His face went very still.
My mouth fell open. More blood came out. I jumped out of the chair, knocking it over to get away from him, and ran for the door. Still crouching, he reached out and caught me by the leg. I tripped over his arm and went down in one of those spectacular falls where you can’t get your arms out in time. Neighbor lady hit the wall again and I struggled for breath. He flipped me onto my back and straddled my hips.
“I… can’t… breath.”
“Do you want me to knock you out? I can but it’ll leave a bruise.”
I tried to punch him but he caught my arm, pinning it to my body and locking it there under his knee. He did the same with my other hand. I attempted to buck him off but my hips never left the floor. He grabbed the pliers and caught my jaw with his hand.
“Relax,” he said.
I stopped struggling and looked at him. He raised his eyebrows, waiting for permission. Finally, I nodded.
He yanked and I cried, but I wasn’t as loud or shrill as I was the first time. Meidias dropped the pliers and rolled off me, stretching out next to me on the linoleum.
“I hate you,” I whispered. In the aftershock, I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open.
Giving me a gentle smile, he took the towel off of my neck, using a clean spot to wipe my cheeks and nose, then my mouth, holding the towel against my empty tooth sockets until the bleeding slowed. I felt his lips brush against my forehead and eyelids. He put his hand on my hip and rolled me onto my side. When I opened my eyes again, we were nose to nose, and he kissed my mouth, battered as it was.
“I love you,” he said.
Chapter Thirty
“She loved him,” I said.
“Hmm?” Meidias asked, walking beside me in the night. After passing out on the kitchen floor for the second time in as many hours the night before, I’d woken up around noon in my own bed with his body tucked around me and every blanket I owned covering my bedroom windows.
“She loved him,” I repeated. “The vampire who killed the runner. She loved the vampire we killed in the swamp.”
He thought it over for a minute. “That would make sense.”
I stopped short. “He was going home. We wounded him so he was going home.”
Meidias took a deep breath in and blew it out slowly. “Again, that would make sense.”
“If we went back to the swamp, do you think you’d still be able to smell her? To track her?”
“No, it’s been far too long, and it’s rained.”
He was right. What we really needed was a bird’s-eye view of the city.
“Come with me,” I said and took his hand.
I put my overdue library books on the counter and Ginger looked at me, arching a delicate eyebrow.
“My goodness,” she said.
I grimaced. “They’re a little late.”
“A little?”
“I’m sorry. I got attacked by an alligator and I just… forgot.”
She smiled. “That’s one I haven’t heard before. You owe the central library system fifty-eight dollars and forty-seven cents.”
I handed her my debit card. “Do you know if the library has any aerial maps of the city? Especially the area near the Amadahy Reserve? Maybe with a tax map overlay?”
“Sure. But you’d be better off using Google Earth and cross-referencing with the county tax records. Give me ten minutes and I’ll show you.”
Ginger kicked us out at eight-thirty, but not before we’d gotten two potential leads. There was a fifty-acre scrapyard a mile north of the park and an abandoned storage center to its northwest. We hit the scrapyard first, taking Lake Drive around the Amadahy and under the I-40 overpass. I reached for Meidias, tucking my hand into his as we walked along the eight-foot tall chain-link fence covered in vines. Razor wire ran along the top like curled ribbon. The corner of his mouth twitched up and then he stopped.
“Smell that?” he asked.
I took a deep breath and shook my head.
He kissed my hand. “Try again,” he said. “Close your eyes this time. It’s faint.”
“Nuthin’,” I said after a minute.
He chuckled and kissed me on the lips, stripping out of his leather trench coat and tossing it up so it draped over the coiled barbed wire. He took a few steps back and ran at the fence, leaping onto it and vaulting over the top, landing on the other side with a soft thud.
I sighed. A running start wouldn’t help me. I worked my fingers into the vines until I reached metal and scrabbled my way up. Once I actually got to the top I wasn’t sure how to get over it. In the end, I put way too much weight on the leather-covered wire and its metal barbs bit into my skin. When I finally landed on the other side, it was with bloody palms and an angry scrape on my thigh.
Meidias made a disgruntled sound and took my hands in his, examining the cuts in dim light.
“You might have just shouted to announce us,” he said, running his tongue along a cut that ran from my wrist to my middle finger.
“Fuck you,” I breathed.
He grinned and tore a strip off the bottom of his shirt, wrapping it around my hand in a makeshift bandage. He did the same to my other hand and then glanced down at my leg.
“It’s not that bad,” he whispered, jumping up to retrieve his coat. “This way.”
He walked toward the back of the scrapyard, navigating around big piles of twisted metal and stacks of crushed vehicles. There was a series of old railcars behind an oak tree by the fence and he steered us toward them, his hand at the small of my back.
I finally picked up her scent. She wasn’t home but I didn’t doubt that she lived there. I breathed deeper. They had lived there together. His scent still clung to the air, the vampire from the swamp. It was faint and stale, but it was there, seeping out from inside one of the railcars.
Meidias stopped in front of the furthest one, rusty red with washed out white lettering. It was a transport car, not a passenger car; windowless and corrugated. He opened the door, silent on well-oiled hinges, and candlelight emanated from within, lining his face. Sadness colored his features just as surely as the light.
“What is it?” I asked, ducking under his arm and slipping inside.
It was a love nest. Or as close to a love nest as what I imagined vampires capable of. A mattress sat in the corner, covered with pillows and soft blankets. All clean. There was a chair, draped with a woman’s dress and coat. A small collection of shoes lay in another corner, his and hers. The light came from a metal footlocker at the back of the car. Four pillar candles of various sizes sat on a tray, surrounding a worn photograph of a young man in a cowboy hat and bandana. I would have put it in the 1850’s. There was a pocket watch beside it, resting on a folded handkerchief. I reached out and ran my fingertips along the photograph.
“It’s him,” Meidias said.
I nodded, tears running freely down my cheeks.
“No,” he said, taking my face in his hands. “He didn’t have to go after you in the park. He could have just run.”
“And risk us following him? Finding this place? Finding her?” I shook my head. “Would you?”
He took a deep breath and cocked his head to look at me. “No,” he answered at last, kissing me and brushing the loose hairs from my ponytail back from my face.
The door slammed shut behind us with a crash that rocked the entire car. Meidias ran to it,
yanking hard on the latch that locked it. It groaned, popping open in time for us to see a dark shadow running through piles of metal. Her long hair, blackened by the night, whipped from side to side behind her.
Meidias took off like a shot.
We lost her scent by the river when the sky opened up, soaking us both with a drenching rain that came out of nowhere.
I took him back to my apartment where he cleaned my wounds properly and made love to me against a soundtrack of thunderstorms and tornado sirens.
“You never try to bite me when we do that,” I whispered later. The storms had moved on, leaving nothing but a light drizzle and the occasional breeze moving the curtain at my open window.
Meidias looked slightly horrified. “Do you want me to?” he asked.
“No,” I shook my head, thinking about his mouth on my hands earlier in the night. “I just thought that was what vampires did.”
“The human race has developed some strange theories about our existence. If you were starving,” he said, trailing his fingers over my shoulder, back to the scar he always touched, his scar, “and could eat anything you wanted, what would you reach for first?”
I smiled. “A cheeseburger.”
“And if I was with you, would you bring this cheeseburger to bed with us?” He was careful with the new word, sounding out each syllable.
“No, but…”
“But what?”
“I remember what you did to me. Both times. I think it’s safe to say you liked it.”
He picked my hand up and pressed his mouth to my wrist. “You’re delicious.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“What do you mean?”
My face went a deep, hot red. “You were naked,” I said. “I could feel it.”
“That was you, not the blood,” he whispered, smiling.
“If I wasn’t starving,” I said after a few minutes. “I might bring chocolate.”
He laughed and bit me just hard enough to break the skin.
I gasped.
“Bleeding,” he said, turning my wrist so I could see the blood that seeped from the wound, dripping onto my stomach, “hurts because it’s a sacrifice of life. It’s not meant to be an aphrodisiac or something done lightly. If it was, we wouldn’t value it as we are supposed to, as a gift.”
He put his mouth to my skin near my elbow, licking his way up my arm, sucking gently at the wound.
“That feels pretty good,” I said, my voice low.
“That’s me.” He smiled. “Not the blood.”
I touched the tips of his fangs with my fingers. “They never go away?”
“Why would they?”
“So you can pretend to be human. They’re only supposed to come out when you’re hurt or hungry.” I left out horny.
Rolling on top of me, he put his knee between my legs to spread them. “I don’t pretend to be anything.”
“You’re supposed to charm your victims.”
“I don’t charm them,” he whispered, play biting my shoulder. “I eat them.”
He kissed me, and after a long time, I became conscious of a voice calling out from the street below. It was the same word again and again, and the word was familiar.
I stilled, listening. It came once more.
“Oh shit,” I said, propping myself up on my elbows.
Meidias smiled at me and put his fingers on my lips. “Nadine?” he asked. “Is that what they call you?”
“Shit,” I said again and slipped out from under him, wrapping the sheet around my breasts. I leaned my head out the window.
“Nadine, let me in!” Jackson stood staggering in the middle of the street, shirt tail hanging from his pants and jacket gaping. He held a bottle in one hand. It looked fairly empty.
I glanced back at my vampire before I answered. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Jackson’s eyes widened and he looked like I’d stabbed him.
“Come on, baby. What do you…” he broke off for a minute. I heard him clear his throat. “Do you have someone in there?”
It was suddenly hard to breathe. I’d nearly excised Jackson from my thoughts completely in the last few months. I’d spent ten years of my life with a man it had taken me only minutes to lose and scarcely longer to lock away in a little box in my heart. But, oh, he was beautiful. Alive and young, the blood fanning out in the vessels of his cheeks, so red I wanted to taste it. I held tight to the window casing.
“I don’t know what to do,” I whispered to the room.
“Nadine!” Jackson threw the bottle against my building, shattering it.
“Go say goodbye,” Meidias answered and I turned again to look at him.
“I don’t want to,” I said.
“I think you have to.” He pushed the curtain aside, looking down at the street where Jackson had taken a seat on the curb. “I don’t think he’ll leave until you do.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
He kissed my forehead. “You will.”
“Will you stay and wait for me?” I asked.
Meidias didn’t answer at first. Then he nodded and I got the feeling it was teacher vampire and not lover vampire who agreed. I hadn’t been around many humans in recent weeks; best not to eat one on my stoop.
I picked my dress off the floor and put it on, one of those filmy, gypsy things they sell in head shops. I’d bought it two years earlier on a trip to Gulf Shores, certain Jackson would ask me to marry him on that trip. We all know how that turned out.
I didn’t put my shoes on. Risky since my sidewalk was littered with broken glass but it seemed safer somehow without them, like I couldn’t go anywhere. I slipped out of my apartment and down the stairs. Jackson didn’t notice me until I sat beside him.
“Hi, sugar,” I whispered.
The liquor he’d downed lingered on his skin and in his breath. He’d fallen at some point, his pants stained with dirt and grass. And blood, seeping through the khaki in pinpoints of red, its scent just as clear as the whiskey. My stomach growled and I looked up at my window—black, but not empty.
Jackson turned to me, his eyes glassy.
“Nadine,” he breathed and cupped my face, dark brows drawn down together. “I was a good man, wasn’t I?”
I reached up and covered his hands with mine. “You are the best man,” I told him. “We just didn’t want the same things.”
“You look different,” he said.
Smiling, I shook my head. “I don’t. It’s only that you haven’t seen me in a while.”
“I know you,” he continued, leaning in closer, running his finger over my collar bone and along the curve of my shoulder. “I know every curve of your body. Don’t tell me you’re not different.”
I started to speak, but he interrupted me.
“You smell the same, though. Like the woods and vanilla.”
“I think you vomited.”
“I miss you,” he said.
“That’ll pass,” I promised and I knew it would.
He cast a suspicious glance up at my window. “They said you’re on sabbatical from the museum. You going away?”
Swallowing, I nodded. “Soon.”
“I can’t come?” he asked.
“You don’t want to come with me,” I told him. “Besides, what about Emmy?”
“She’s a great girl. I asked her to marry me.”
“Oh yeah?” I smiled.
“She said yes. Fuck, baby, what happened to your teeth?”
“Good. She’s perfect.”
“She’s not you.”
“Jackson,” I said, taking his hand. “I was your habit. Habits are hard to break, but that doesn’t mean they’re good for you.”
I stood up. Cabs always ran up and down my street, taking a shortcut to St. Catherine, to the bars and clubs. I waved one down. Jackson stood too close behind me, his breath on my neck. Leaning into the passenger side window, I gave the cabbie Jackson’s address.
“He have
any money?” the man asked.
I reached into Jackson’s pocket and pulled out his wallet, passing a twenty to the driver. “He’s a doctor at Regional,” I said. “Plenty of people to miss him if he doesn’t make it home safe.”
“What are you trying to say, lady?”
“Nothing. Just take care of my friend.”
I straightened up and Jackson looked at me.
“You were never a habit,” he said. “You shouldn’t have been, anyway.”
“Look at me, honey,” I said, and he did, as best as he could. I caught his chin in my hand and smiled. “It’s okay. You go have a beautiful life now.”
He pressed his forehead into mine, rubbing his thumb against my cheek. “Who lit you up, Nadine?”
He tried to kiss me but I pulled away, opening the backdoor of the cab.
“You don’t love me?” he asked, and his voice was tight.
“I’ll always love you,” I lied, tucking him into the back seat.
Chapter Thirty-One
There was a familiar rhythm to the pounding on my front door.
“Goddamnit, Levitt,” a voice called. “Open up.”
Meidias was asleep beside me but his eyes snapped open and he was half out of the bed before I caught him.
“Stay here,” I whispered, pulling on my pajamas. I closed the door to my bedroom, in spite of his scowling.
I left the safety chain on, opening my front door just enough to see my visitor’s face.
It wasn’t a happy one. Bell looked tired and pissed.
“Open the fucking door, Nadine.”
He was in full uniform.
I obliged.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, following him into my living room. “Did you find something on the girl?”
He stopped short, turning around and closing the distance between us. “Where were you last night?”
Oh, shit. He must have found out about the scrapyard.
“Um. I went to the library to do some research and then I came home.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “You were at the library?”
“Yeah. For maybe an hour and a half.” I scooted around him and sat on the couch. “Why?”
