“You’re pretty far from all right,” retorted Emma. She got to her feet, and set her book on her chair. “You’re undead. This is not some magical fantasyland where you get to tell your family you’re okay and get to have a heartbreaking, but still lovely reunion, and they let you go because they know you’re going to be all right. You get to be on a milk carton, and the best possible scenario is everyone you ever knew will be dead in seventy years and you’ll finally be able to relax and stop worrying about being found.
“Now, let’s go.”
I looked at Wash, although I didn’t know what I expected him say. Some part of me wanted him to stand up, to declare this wasn’t how things were supposed to be, that I was supposed to stay here and everything was going to be okay.
But that wasn’t what happened.
I took a paper bag that Emma handed me. I went into the bathroom, took off my old clothes, and put on new ones Emma and Wash acquired for me.
I also got a new backpack with all the essentials of life in it. More clothes. A toothbrush. A hairbrush. Little packets you tore open to wash your hands with.
I put my old clothes, shoes, and backpack into the paper sack, and walked into the other room.
Emma looked me over. “Makeup?” she asked Wash.
Wash shook his head. So did I.
Emma looked me over one last time. To Wash, she said, “She’s pretty.” To me, she said, “Let’s go.”
I followed her out the door.
CHAPTER 39
As we stepped into the street, Emma walked in the direction of the bus stop and pulled a super-fancy cell phone out of her coat.
She began tapping on the phone and I kept quiet as long as I could stand it. Which wasn’t long.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m checking for flights out of here,” she replied, clicking away. She paused. “This’ll work. Colorado. Leaving in ninety minutes. We’ll land well before dawn.”
Emma continued walking and stopped at the bus stop. She began playing with her phone again.
In my old life, I would have been going crazy with impatience. In my new one, I felt only a twinge. Finally, as a prompt, I said, “And?”
Emma glanced at me, barely taking her eyes off her phone. “And what?”
“And we’re going to Colorado, and then what?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
I took a step back and assessed Emma’s body language, trying to figure out if she was playing a kind of prank on me. Aggravate the new vamp. Something like that. But her being was a mask of what I was starting to think of as vampire neutral. “I need to know. What are we doing?”
Emma finally took her eyes off her phone and looked at me. “It’s my job to worry about what happens next; it’s your job to keep your head down and not do anything stupid. Right now, you’re asking a lot of questions on a public street, and to my mind, that equals stupid. Do your part and shut up.”
If I could have gotten angry about that statement, I probably would have.
Emma looked back at her phone. “This is irritating.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure this bus line will get us to the airport in time.”
“So call a cab.”
Emma looked away from her phone again. “That’s a great idea. A girl who recently ran away from home gets into a cab and heads to the airport. You won’t be easy to track down or anything.”
“But we’re about to get on a bus.”
Emma shook her head. “A bus is anonymous. Bus drivers don’t care who rides, as long as they drop the right amount of change in the little slot. A couple more teenage girls on a bus won’t be remembered.”
The bus rumbled at the end of the street and Emma looked down at her phone again. “I think we’ll make it,” she said, tapping her fingers on the screen.
“I’m not so sure,” I said, as the bus screamed to a halt in front of us and the doors popped open. I wasn’t talking about the bus ride.
CHAPTER 40
The trip to Colorado was mostly uneventful. We took the bus to the airport. Once we were there, Emma e-checked our tickets using her phone, and we headed towards our gate.
It wasn’t until the very last minute I realized the only identification I had was my driver’s license, which was in my old backpack.
Lucky for me, at the last moment, Emma “reminded” me my wallet was in the side pouch of my new backpack. I pulled it out and there was my ID. Or rather, the ID for someone named Sarah Jane Smith, which I thought was in poor taste until Emma pointed out it was the name of a popular companion from a TV show called Doctor Who.
When I said that seemed like the kind of obvious fake name that throws up red flags, she stopped talking to me again, which made for a long plane ride.
Trapped in a steel tube flying through the air, I started to miss Wash and his wall of books, and wished he thought to shove an old paperback or two in my bag. I pulled my backpack out from under the seat and discovered that, sure enough, Wash had left something in there for me—a beat up copy of I Am Legend.
By the time we got off the plane in Chicago and sat through our thirty-minute layover, I was well into the story of a lone vampire-slayer in a world where vampires had taken over.
In the time it took to get to Denver, I understood what Wash was telling me. Vampires were not the bad guys in this particular story.
Once we were at the airport, Emma rented a car and we drove for about an hour, heading to what Emma’s phone’s GPS told us was a nearby hotel. We checked in just as the night sky started to turn the color of blue that tells you dawn is on its way.
I wondered idly how she was paying for everything so easily. The flight was last-minute, the hotel expensive, and the car a rental with, in her words, an uncertain return date.
I’d only been a new vampire for a day and already the costs of keeping me around probably ran into five figures.
It really was like being a baby.
We went to the fourth floor, and Emma made sure the Do Not Disturb sign was firmly in place as we entered the room.
I set my bag down and removed my jacket. Unable to really register heat or cold, I’d left it on in the plane.
I sat down on my bed.
Emma sat down on her bed.
We both looked at the curtains covering the window and verified that while we could see light seeping under the bottom of the curtain in spots, no sunbeams were going to touch us.
“You should get some sleep,” said Emma.
So I did.
CHAPTER 41
When I woke up, it was already dark outside and Emma was, once again, doing something with her phone.
I looked around for a few minutes, giving my brain a chance to reorient itself. Then I sat up, and looked at Emma.
She didn’t look back.
After what felt like an eternity, I boldly made a move. “So now what?”
I sat there staring at her for another two minutes while the amber lights on the bedside clock kept time.
I got up and walked over to Emma. “I know you can hear me.”
Emma looked up for a fraction of a second. “Yes, I can.” Her eyes moved back to her phone.
For the last few months, I had spent a lot of time on my own, doing what needed doing. And under any other circumstances, I think I could have handled taking care of my needs pretty well.
But at that moment, I had no idea what my needs were.
Since Emma was in the middle of something she didn’t want to involve me in, I decided to see what other supplies I had with me.
I went to my new bag and opened it up, carefully spreading out the clothes. I had a few basics in everything, a pair of jeans, a couple skirts with tights, a pair of pants. Five long-sleeved shirts in different colors. It was a total mix-and-match bag where everything went with everything else.
There was also a nightshirt and shorts, which amused me.
I checked my other pockets and found a phone and ch
arger. A much better phone and charger than the one I actually owned.
I turned back to Emma. “Where’s my phone?”
Emma didn’t bother to look up. “Lucy Leary’s phone has been ground to a fine powder so it can never be located. On the other hand, Sarah Jane, you have a very nice phone with an excellent texting and data plan, and saying thank you would not be remiss.”
“But my phone had all my numbers in it,” I protested.
Emma finally stopped playing with her phone. “In case you’ve forgotten, you’re dead. Dead people don’t need their old phone numbers.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. I felt the familiar tingle that told me I should be getting angry but that I wasn’t.
Oddly, I was more angry about not feeling angry than about what Emma had just said.
“Well, if I can’t call people, what am I supposed to do with this thing?”
Emma didn’t answer. She returned to playing with her phone.
I decided to wait her out.
I took a shower. I washed my hair, brushed my teeth, and put on new clothing.
I turned on my phone. I downloaded apps. I played games.
Emma never said a word.
I tried to check my email and Facebook accounts, and discovered both of them had been deleted. I tried a few other out-of-the-way sites I had logins for, and every computer system I’d once been a part of no longer knew who I was.
I’ll give this to vampires. They’re thorough.
I thought about asking Emma how she’d managed to wipe me out of e-existence but I didn’t feel like hearing her say, “Remember? You’re dead,” again.
After three hours of sitting in silence however, I was done.
I got up off my bed, picked up my coat, and headed towards the door. “I’m headed to the snack machine,” I said. “You want anything?”
“You don’t eat anymore. And you’re not going anywhere without me,” said Emma. She looked up from her phone. “That means you’re not going anywhere. Sit down.”
I felt the anger pluck again. “I just want to go to the lobby. At least out of this room. As much as I enjoy playing brightly-colored games on a four-inch screen, I’m kind of ready to be done with that now.”
Emma continued to stare at me. “Sit.”
“I need to walk around.”
“Then walk in the room.”
“I’m just going to walk down the hallway.”
“No.”
“Emma.”
I shrugged, as if to say, “Eh, you’re not going to stop me.” I put my hand on the door handle. I turned it. The door opened a quarter-inch.
Then it slammed shut. Emma was standing next to me, holding the door closed. “Look at my eye,” she said.
“What?”
“My eye. Look at it.” She raised her free hand, and pointed at the eye that had been punctured.
And then I saw what she was trying to show me. The eye wasn’t completely healed. There were microscopic scratches on it, parts where it hadn’t come all the way back together. And her iris was shot through with small lines of blood.
“Do you understand?”
My brain tumbled through my limited collection of vampire lore. “You aren’t…” I hunted for the right words. “All better?”
Emma gave a pinched smile. “I’m not healed. That means if I get hurt, seriously hurt, that’s it for me. I need to feed.”
“You need blood?”
Emma looked at me sharply, then relaxed her face. “Yes. But we don’t usually say it like that.”
“Not politically correct?”
“Not the kind of thing you want to say in a crowd. Or where the walls are thin. Or anywhere there might be someone who isn’t like us.”
“What, like anyone believes in vampires?”
“I’m not saying people believe in vampires. I’m saying they may believe you think you’re a vampire and call the cops before you hurt yourself or someone else.”
I nodded. It was a fair statement. “Well, then let’s go get you someone to eat.”
Emma gave me an exasperated look. Then she sighed. “It’s not that simple.”
“Sure it is. We’ll just go somewhere that isn’t inside this room, you’ll wander around, find someone who needs to die…” I could see what she meant about not saying these things out loud in a place where the walls might be thin. “And you’ll, you know, do your thing.”
Emma closed one eye and rubbed her forehead, a gesture I was starting to realize was her thinking face.
Something occurred to me. “How do you know what people need your, um, services, anyway?”
Answering that didn’t require thought. “You’ll know soon enough. Trust me, finding people who need us isn’t a problem. Not in a city this size.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem is, I don’t have any connections here, which is something I should have thought about, but didn’t. Now we’re here and I have to make the best of things.”
“What do you mean by connections?”
“You realize you’re going to turn me into Wash, right?”
I looked at her, confused. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning if I’m going to get into the whole connections thing, I’m going to need to get into this long, long, long story, and I don’t really have the time. I kind of need to eat.”
“So, let’s go find you something.”
Emma sighed. “Okay, I need to break this down for you because you clearly don’t get it.
“Back when I became this thing,” she flashed her fangs, pointing for emphasis, “it was a totally different world. There was no such thing as a hospital. If you stayed near a populated area, people would get sick, really sick, and need what I could offer them.”
“When was this?”
“A while ago,” she huffed, avoiding the question. “Don’t get me off topic. My point is, back then, people got sick, and got ready to die, and you’d sneak into their house in the middle of the night and help them, and no one was the wiser. Easy.
“A hundred years ago, you could walk into any hospital and listen for ragged breathing. Ten minutes later, someone is dead of so-called natural causes and you’re out the door. Next thing you know it’s the end of the century and government legislation is cracking down on everything. You need baby seats in cars, kids aren’t allowed to be outside on their own anymore, everyone has to wear a helmet when they’re riding something with two wheels, hospitals won’t let you in unless you’re a family member, and on and on and on.”
I took a moment to process all of this. “In conclusion?”
“In conclusion, today, if you want to eat, you have to have a system in place. You’ve got to have a friend who can tell you what nurses don’t ask questions when you walk in the door. You’ve got to have a friend with a homeless shelter who’ll let you top off your tank when you need to.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Then you starve.” She held up her phone. “Or, you start texting everyone you know, asking if they’ve ever been to Denver, and if so, where can you get a meal?”
Emma’s phone chose that moment to vibrate. She looked at the screen, did some tapping, and turned to me. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 42
Ninety minutes later, we were standing outside a retirement community somewhere near the edge of town.
Emma lifted her phone out of the cup holder and checked the time. She looked at me. “Two minutes. Follow my lead. Don’t ask questions. Just do as I do.”
I considered bowing in reverence, then thought better of it.
Exactly two minutes later, it was 10:00 PM, and a woman wearing comfy shoes and a loose Scooby-Doo shirt walked out the door and lit a cigarette.
Emma and I stepped out of the car and walked towards the woman. I thought Emma was going to address the smoking woman but she walked right past her like she was in a hurry. I was about to follow suit when the smoker called out to us both. “Visi
ting hours are over, it’s ten o’clock.”
Emma turned. “You don’t think I know that? Me and my sister here are all set to go out and get our drink on, and the next thing I know I’m getting a call from our mom telling me she forgot to drop off Grandma’s meds, and they’re in the car, and can we please just drop them off? And I’m like, ‘No, mom, we’ve got places to go,’ but apparently it has something to do with her heart, so…” Emma shrugged.
The smoker looked at both of us, and then at her cigarette, weighing the burden of her job duties against the pleasures of a few extra minutes with her filter-tipped friend. “You know where you’re going?”
Emma nodded and shrugged again.
Smoker took another drag and held up a pair of fingers. “Two minutes.”
I had questions but knew if I started rattling them off, Emma would be less than pleased.
Emma headed straight for the stairs. The lights were dim up and I felt my pupils dilating
In a fraction of a second, the upstairs was as bright as downstairs. Vampires have big black eyes due to pupil dilation. They can take in every source of light and see not just in the semi-dark, but also in near complete dark.
Emma slowed for a moment, listening, and I paused as well. Less than a second later, she moved off down the hallway and I tried to keep up while attempting to ascertain what she had heard.
Then we came to a door, and my ears tuned in. On the other side of the door, someone was breathing erratically, wheezing in and out, while their heart pumped at uneven intervals.
I looked at the door handle. . The doors had locks on them. I was about to indicate this to Emma when she placed her hand on the handle and opened the door.
Someone had forgotten to lock it. A lucky break for us.
We moved inside and I glanced around. The space was roughly the size of a small living room, with a small table and two chairs, a couch, and a TV assembled tidily. A nearby cupboard wasn’t completely closed, revealing a few paper plates, and a small end table in the corner held a microwave and a hot plate.
Off to our left was a small bathroom, the door open to show a walk-in shower and a toilet.
Blood Calling (The Blood Calling Series, Book 1) Page 11
