by ID Johnson
“I know,” Jamie nodded, “and that’s why you’re able to sign this. I just don’t want to be accused of coercing you.”
That answer seemed to satisfy Brandon, though I thought Cadence still looked a little irritated. Jamie crossed over to the table and looked at everything he had laid out there. He seemed to be going through a checklist in his head. Perhaps he just wanted to seem relaxed, but Brandon slipped his shoes off and tossed himself back onto the bed, folding his arms across his stomach. Jamie seemed satisfied and turned to look at him. “How many times have you done this?” Brandon asked. He seemed to notice he was wearing long sleeves and began to roll up his right one.
The doctor smiled. “Thousands. You’ll be fine, I promise. If it gets too painful, I can take care of that, too, although I’m hoping I don’t have to throw myself on top of you the way I did Cadence. That might be a little awkward.” He turned and looked at my sister, and I saw her blush a little. I wondered what that had been like exactly and if Aaron had been there.
Brandon chuckled, probably imaging how uncomfortable it would be to have Jamie lying on top of him. “Yeah, please don’t.”
Cadence stepped over to the bed and squeezed Brandon’s hand. “It’ll be all right, and when you wake up, you’ll know immediately that it was worth it.” She patted him on the arm and gave him a reassuring smile before stepping away. I waited a split second too long to gain the courage to go speak to him, and Aaron stepped over instead.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to call your mom?” he asked. “You might be out for a day or two.”
Brandon tipped his head to the side and looked up at the ceiling for a minute as if he couldn’t decide. After a second, he let out a deep breath and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. “All right, but make sure I’ve gone through with it before you call her. And her number isn’t under mom. But you’ll find it.” I wondered what that was supposed to mean but figured it wasn’t my business.
Aaron took the phone and slipped it into his pocket. “All right. We’ll see you in a few hours.” He clasped Brandon’s hand confidently.
Brandon let go of his hand and Aaron began to step away. “Oh, and she’ll probably be really angry,” he added, talking about his mom.
“I think I can handle it,” Aaron said with a slight chuckle.
“You know that Vampire y’all killed the other night? He ain’t got nothin’ on my mama when she’s mad.” I raised my eyebrows at him and tried to imagine what it would be like to grow up with only one parent and have her be vicious the way he was describing his mother.
Aaron snickered. “Well, unless she can reach through your phone, I think I’ll be okay.”
Jamie cleared his throat. He was holding the tourniquet and seemed to be set to get on with it. Looking at Brandon, he asked, “You ready?”
I saw Brandon’s eyes shift, and he seemed to swallow a lump in his throat. Everything was suddenly very real. “I guess so,” he said quietly.
“Wait!” The word was out of my mouth before I even knew I was going to speak it. They all turned and looked at me, and I stepped over to the side of Brandon’s bed. Hesitantly, I said, “Uhm, good luck.”
Brandon looked into my eyes, and I suddenly felt a lot calmer than I had before. I think he did, too. “Yeah, thanks. I’ll see you in a little bit, okay?”
I nodded at him, trying to be as confident as possible. I put my hand on his arm, which seemed more familiar than it should after having only known him a few hours, and said, “I’ll be here when you wake up.”
He didn’t say anything, but in his smile, I saw relief. I hoped I’d be able to keep that promise. Still smiling, I backed away, and Cadence put her arm around me. Brandon’s eyes stayed glued to mine even though Jamie was clearing his throat again, trying to regain Brandon’s attention. Finally, Brandon realized the doctor was waiting for him, and with a nod, he said, “Let’s do it,” and offered up the same arm I’d just been touching a moment ago.
“All right,” Jamie said, tying the tourniquet tightly around Brandon’s arm just above his elbow. I knew I was staring, but I wanted to see everything that was happening. I imagined myself in that bed someday soon, hopefully no more than a year from now, and I wanted to be prepared when it happened. I wanted to be able to tell Emma and Lucy everything, too, so they wouldn’t be nervous when it was their turns. “Go ahead and make a fist for me.” It was hard to tell exactly what Brandon was doing, but I imagined he was doing as instructed. Jamie appeared to be poking around on his arm with his finger, and I assumed he was looking for a vein. He held his finger in a spot he must’ve liked and turned to the table to pick up the first syringe. “Here we go.”
I didn’t blame Brandon for closing his eyes. Part of me wanted to, too. I know I was holding my breath as Jamie inserted the needle and pressed down on the lever, injecting the Transformation Serum into my friend’s bloodstream. There would be no going back now. I wondered if Brandon would start shrieking in pain as I’d imagined my sister must’ve, but he hardly even moved. Once Jamie was done, he discarded the syringe and said to Brandon, “If you’re doing all right, give me a head nod.”
When Brandon’s head rocked up and down slightly, I let my breath go. I glanced at Cadence, and she seemed to also be relieved. I imagined if that had taken all right then everything was probably going to be fine.
Jamie turned back to the table and picked up a second needle. He glanced at the clock on the wall, I imagined out of habit since I was fairly certain he had a clock in his IAC. I thought I remembered hearing he had to wait a couple of minutes to give the pain medication that would make Brandon go to sleep and put his brain in the best state to Transform quickly and painlessly. I didn’t know what might happen if the pain medicine was given too quickly or not at all.
I saw Jamie look at my sister and nod and imagined they were having a side conversation again, and when the doctor smiled at her and Cadence made a humming noise, my suspicions were confirmed. What I wouldn’t give to have an IAC.
It was then that I noticed Cadence had her hand across her midsection again. She turned around and grabbed a rolly chair that had been sitting against a wall and drug it over, back to where she’d been standing between me and Aaron. He looked down at her, a flicker of concern on his face, but Cadence didn’t acknowledge it, so he returned his attention to Brandon, and so did I.
The doctor turned back to his patient and inserted the second needle into his arm. Once the syringe was empty, he withdrew it, placed the tourniquet back on the table, and fastened a cotton ball over the puncture mark with a bandage. He looked carefully at Brandon for a second and then went to the foot of the bed and grabbed the blanket that had been folded down there and pulled it up to his chin, tucking him in. Brandon looked like he was sleeping peacefully, and I began to feel my racing pulse slow down just a bit.
“That’s it,” Jamie said. Walking toward us, he added, “And now, we wait.”
“That's it?” I asked quietly, almost unable to believe that it had been so simple. I’d been expecting something much more traumatic but was thankful that hadn’t been the case. “He’s done?”
“Well, my part is over,” Jamie explained, stopping in front of me. “But the hard part is just beginning. His DNA is undergoing the Transformation process, which takes quite a toll. He’ll be very different when he wakes up.”
“As long as he’s still his sweet self.” I could tell by my sister’s smirk that she was being sarcastic.
Jamie chuckled at her and then looked at me and Aaron before saying, “I can go get a few more chairs from my office if you all really want to wait.”
“I do.” The words came out of my mouth very quickly, and I noticed all three of them had turned to stare at me with raised eyebrows. Deciding I needed to back it down a notch, I added, “I mean, you know. I guess.”
I could tell that Jamie was trying not to laugh at me as he headed toward the door without another word. I wished I had an IAC so I could tell him
to stop being a jerkface, but my sister would question our familiarity, so I chose to glare at the back of his spiky head instead.
Following Jamie to the door, Aaron said, “I’m going to go call his mom.” Cadence nodded at him and leaned back in her chair, her hand still on her gut.
Jamie brought in three more chairs and offered the first to me, which I took. He set one on the other side of Cadence and then sat down next to me. This was the first opportunity I’d really had to talk to him since I arrived, but with my sister here, it was a little awkward, so we sat in silence. I was staring at Brandon, lying there like he was just asleep, and realized my leg was swaying back and forth frantically. I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t. “You sure he’s okay? He’s awfully still,” I said to Jamie.
“I’m sure,” Jamie said. I turned and looked at the doctor for a moment, and he added, “Let me just go check.” He walked over to Brandon, fished his arm out, and felt his pulse. With a nod, he laid his arm back down and crossed back to his chair. “Everything’s good.”
“Cassidy, he’s going to be okay. The scary part is over,” Cadence assured me, her hand briefly brushing my arm.
“Oh, I know.” I shrugged and tried to be nonchalant. “It’s just weird seeing him so still and knowing I couldn’t wake him up if I wanted to.”
“He’s just fine.” Jamie reiterated what Cadence had just said, and I looked at him and smiled, but it didn’t reach my eyes.
I wasn’t the only one having trouble sitting still. Cadence’s knee was bouncing around like she’d just drank two cups of coffee. Jamie must’ve just noticed for the first time. If he said something to her, I didn’t know, but his eyes bore down on her in concern. “I’m fine,” Cadence assured him. Slowly, she added, “It just seems like there’s a Vampire around, and I don’t know why.”
I turned to look at Jamie to see if that seemed as alarming to him as it did to me. His eyebrows were knit together. “How weird. No one new came in today, right?”
Proud of myself that I’d asked a similar question in the gym, I turned back to Cadence as she said, “Right. I feel like I need to go jog the perimeter of the grounds and make sure there’s nothing suspicious going on.”
Continuing to stare at her, Jamie offered, “Maybe it’s just all this stuff with Giovani.”
Having no idea what they were talking about, I waited for my sister to answer. I hated that I was missing information. “I don’t know. Maybe,” Cadence shrugged. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. If I’ve felt like there was a Vampire nearby, it was because there was a Vampire nearby.”
“That is strange,” the doctor agreed. He turned and looked across the room thoughtfully for a few moments, and I continued to wonder if something new was going on with Giovani, or if they meant the footage Emma had found. Cadence’s leg continued to bounce, and Jamie asked, “I hate to change the subject, but when were you planning on letting me look at your knee?”
I saw my sister tense up. She looked at me for a second before she began to wiggle her leg every which way possible, and to Jamie, she said, “Look at it; it’s fine.”
“Very funny. I’m serious. I need to do an MRI.” A glance at Jamie’s face told me he really was serious.
Happy to have the opportunity to inquire about the situation Aaron had made me swear not to mention, I casually asked, “What happened to your knee?” as if I had no idea. I was getting awfully good at this, unfortunately
Cadence shrugged like it was no big deal, and as Aaron came back through the door, she said, “I was dropped out of an airplane.” Realizing he’d come back in, Cadence glowered at him, and I caught his eyes, letting him know I was playing innocent, my usual role.
Aaron cleared his throat and said, “I prefer to use the phrase ‘lovingly assisted.’” He moved his seat so that it was on the other side of Jamie, away from Cadence, which I thought was sort of funny.
Feigning shock and avoiding everyone’s eyes, I asked, “What? Who pushed you out of an airplane?”
But Cadence didn’t answer me. She just continued to look at Aaron with those harsh eyes.
“She had to get out, and she wouldn’t jump.” The way he said it now was similar to the way he’d originally told me on the way over here, while Cadence was sleeping in the back of the plane.
I let my mouth hang open for a moment as I turned and looked at Aaron. “You pushed her out of an airplane?”
The look he gave me was one I’d seen a few times before, the one that reminded me we were sharing a secret, and it sort of made me feel slightly important. He explained, “She was wearing a parachute. Besides, she would have been just fine if she would have listened to me and bent her knees when she landed.”
“Sorry, I guess I couldn’t hear you over my screams of terror.” Cadence actually stuck her tongue out at him and crossed her eyes, and I felt like perhaps I wasn’t the only child in the room now.
Raising his voice above the argument, Jamie interjected. “My point was I need to see if there’s any damage in there that didn’t get fixed correctly when I did the emergency healing on the side of the road. If there’s still damage to your ACL it could snap at any time--and it can’t heal itself.”
All pretending aside, I realized Jamie had a point. Cadence needed to have that taken care of. “You tore your ACL? That’s super serious, Cadey.”
“It’s fine!” Cadence attempted to assure me. “I’m fine.”
“You need to let him look at it,” Aaron said, a serious expression on his face.
“You need to not push people out of airplanes.” My sister folded her arms and turned away from all three of us.
My mouth suddenly became my mother’s. “Cadence, just let him look at it, jeez.”
Cadence glanced at me for a moment like she had no idea where that tone had come from. “Fine.“ She looked past me to Jamie and added, “But not until Cassidy goes home.”
The doctor’s tone was a warning. “I hate putting it off with everything that is going on with Giovani. What if something happens and we end up going off to hunt him down, and I still haven’t had a chance to look at it?”
This assured me there was something else they weren’t telling me. I didn’t know where to look and was having trouble staying focused on what they were saying as I wanted to demand information about what had happened with Giovani, but I did hear my sister say, “Jamie, I’ve been on a hunt, and it was fine, remember? As soon as I get a few minutes, I’ll let you do it. But I really think it’s fine. So long as I don’t get dropped from any great heights.” Once again, she was glaring at her fiancé, and I began to think she needed to let that go, although I would probably also not be happy if someone threw me out of a moving airplane.
Aaron didn’t acknowledge her comment. Instead, he inhaled deeply and then said, “I’ve been talking to Eliza--a lot--this evening, and she seems to think that Giovani has left the country. She’s got people looking into where he might be headed, but she doesn’t really have any idea. Did you both get a chance to look at the note she found?”
I realized that last question was to both of the other conscious people in the room and not to me, and I wasn’t happy, but I couldn’t get distracted by the fact that I was out of the loop. Giovani was on the move and had left a note? Aaron had been talking to Eliza? So even she was involved in this?
Jamie’s voice cut through my thoughts. “I read it, but I’m not sure I have any idea what he was trying to say.”
“It seemed very nonsensical,” Cadence agreed.
Unable to stand it anymore, I tried to keep my voice even and asked, “What did it say?”
Cadence glanced at Aaron for a moment. I didn’t think they were actually talking, but she did seem to be looking for confirmation that it was okay to tell me. “It was really strange,” she began, squinting in thought before looking me back in the eyes. “It said, ‘Tell Miss Findley I said missed me, missed me…. Do you know what comes next? I will see you soon.’”
I agreed, that was odd, but Aaron’s correction interrupted my processing. “Actually, it said, ‘I await your arrival,’ which makes it even more odd. What makes him think you are going to travel to wherever the heck he is?”
“True,” Cadence agreed. “I don’t know where he is, or I would go there.”
Jamie offered, “Maybe that’s some sort of a clue.”
I went over the entire riddle in my head again. What would a crazy Vampire be trying to tell us? I decided to break it down. “So… missed me, missed me--now you’ve got to kiss me?” I said slowly, assuming that the old rhyme was what he was alluding to there.
“That’s what most of us were thinking,” Aaron nodded. “Which wouldn’t really mean kiss, I assume. Since he’s a Vampire, I would think he’s talking about biting--a Vampire kiss.” Looking back at Cadence, he added, “But it would do him no good to bite you.”
She seemed to agree that Giovani wouldn’t want to kiss her. But--having never fought a Vampire before, I had no idea how they went about defeating Vampire Hunters. “He couldn’t kill you by biting you?”
Cadence tipped her head to the side in consideration. “I guess he could, technically, but he couldn’t turn me. So why say that? If he’s trying to say he wants to kill me, aren’t there better ways to say that than a schoolyard taunt?”
I agreed the rhyme was very peculiar. What was he trying to say?
“That’s so bizarre. That’s a really old rhyme. We used to say it when I was a kid,” Jamie agreed, nodding.
“When was that?” I asked. I had an idea of how old he was, but I didn’t really know how long ago we were talking about.
Jamie replied, “Well, I was born in 1868, so… a long time ago.”
“Wow.” Even though I’d seen pictures of him from the turn of the last century, I couldn’t imagine almost being a witness to the Civil War. “I can’t really wrap my mind around that,” I admitted, shaking my head. “I mean, I know you’re even older, Aaron, but still….” He raised his eyebrows at me, and I felt really silly again, all of a sudden. I hadn’t meant it as an insult. Apparently, these old people didn’t like to be reminded of their age. “Anyway,” I dragged it out like it had six As, “the whole letter makes no sense. There’s got to be more to go with it. Something is missing.”
