Blood Calling (The Blood Calling Series, Book 1)

by Patterson, Joshua Grover-David

  I allowed my senses to open up as fully as possible. I knew what I was listening for, both consciously and subconsciously. The erratic heartbeat. The near-death rasp of pained breathing.

  It wasn’t on the second floor. Or in the building. As I let my senses expand, I could tell there wasn’t even anyone on the block who needed what I had to offer.

  My face showed Emma what I couldn’t unclench my jaw to say.

  Emma lightly grabbed my arm and led me towards the back exit.

  My throat burned but I had to ask. “Can we…just…pick someone?”

  We both stopped in the hallway. “That’s not how it works. You have a job to do. You will do it. Let’s go.”

  She wasn’t cruel about it. It was just a fact. One of these people might need me in the next hour or day or week or month or year. But they didn’t need me now and that was all there was to it.

  Back in the car, Emma pulled away from the lot and headed back towards our hotel. If she had a plan, she wasn’t telling me.

  My senses were singing, making every tiny noise in the air smash into my auditory canals like a cannon going off an inch from my head. My eyes were straining, trying to take in everything.

  Ten minutes passed. Buildings slid by my window. Then a cemetery.

  Then a park.

  I touched Emma on the shoulder. “Stop.” I wanted to say, stop the car but I couldn’t get that many words out.

  Emma circled the park looking for a place to leave the car. We were on a four-lane city street, which gave us nowhere we could just pull over.

  Emma finally located a parking lot but it was blocked by a chain. Whether it was because of a city curfew, or if the park was just closed for the winter, I didn’t know.

  What I did know was I could sense someone out there who needed me. And I needed him so very, very badly.

  Emma looked at the chain, looked at me, and sighed. This was a rock-and-a-hard-place situation, and she didn’t like it one bit. In the end, she chose the hard place.

  She pulled our car into the park driveway, parallel parking with the chain. We were about ninety-eight percent out of the street but if someone happened by, it would be obvious we didn’t belong there.

  I didn’t care. I stepped out of the vehicle.

  It was chow time.

  CHAPTER 47

  I slid a tiny bit on the snow and ice packed under my feet. The weather had run warmer and cooler over the past few days, and if I had been my non-vampire self, I would have taken a vicious tumble.

  As a creature of the night, however, I instantly adjusted my balance and started walking in the direction I sensed I needed to be.

  Emma caught up to me as I found my target: a single park bench with a shivering homeless man lying on it, wrapped in a ratty blanket and old newspapers.

  Unlike Smitty, outside of a case of the shakes, the man didn’t look like he was dying. But my senses told me otherwise.

  What was he dying of? Well, I’m a vampire, not a doctor, but I could hear some serious nastiness in his lungs and sinuses. I suspect something to do with pneumonia.

  Ultimately, all I knew was this: he needed what I had to give.

  I approached the man on the bench, trying to figure out exactly how to work my way into a neck-biting situation. Do I introduce myself? Tell him I was there to take the pain away? Or did I just let him experience the thrill of a newly-legal adult female nibbling on his neck?

  It’s not the worst way to go.

  I remembered Emma had asked the old woman if she could take her pain away.

  I kneeled down to talk to the man on the bench, opened my mouth, and a kind of sludgy growl came out. My throat had officially reached the too dry mark.

  Emma knelt down next to me, and placed her hand on the man’s face. His eyes opened and met hers. “She can take your pain away, if you want.”

  The man’s head nodded, ever so slightly.

  Emma turned to me and said, “Watch.”

  The man on the bench had a jacket and scarf covering his neck. She pushed them away, revealing the spot I would feed from. “Gently,” she said.

  I knelt down and placed my teeth against the man’s neck.

  It was weird. I had no idea what was going to happen. My teeth were extremely sharp but what would occur when I shoved them into the man’s neck? Were my teeth like tiny straws now?

  Turned out, no.

  I nipped him, like I was sticking two tiny pins just deep enough into his neck to reach the sweet, sweet blood.

  Then I pulled my teeth out and sucked. And sucked. And sucked. And sucked.

  Did I mention I did some sucking?

  And then my vampire body turned on its little You’re Full Now light in my brain. I dabbed my tongue over the wounds and the holes in his neck healed over into light scars.

  And then he died.

  I was too close to his face to see what was happening as I fed but I felt his facial muscles move. He was smiling.

  I stood and wiped my lips with my hand. There was a little blood there, not much. I licked my fingers without even thinking about it.

  And that was my first meal.

  Without a word, Emma and I turned and walked back to the car. We had done what we came to do and now it was time to get out of there before someone saw us.

  Except there was a cop car blocking our exit. That slowed us down a bit.

  CHAPTER 48

  It’s funny. When you’re a vampire you can actually hear the sound of someone grinding their teeth. That’s what Emma started doing the moment she spotted the not-so-happy-looking officer who was in the middle of writing us a ticket.

  Looking back on it, I can see why she was concerned. We were supposed to be under the radar. It’s possible I was a missing persons case. There was a dead guy on the park bench twenty yards away.

  But I felt so good.

  I’d like to say it was all because I helped that man go on to whatever was next but mostly, I felt like I’d had the best meal of my life. And unlike when I’d been a human, there was no adjustment period. I’d eaten, and now I was prepped for an Iron Man competition. I didn’t care whether it was on TV, or if I actually had to participate and pull a boxcar somewhere. I was good to go.

  “If he’s got our license plate, we’ve got problems,” said Emma, so quietly only I heard her.

  I ran towards the cop.

  That sounded aggressive when stated like that but that wasn’t what I was going for. I also added ragged breathing, some crying noises, and the following words. “Thank goodness you’re here! That man! I think he’s,” dramatic pause, “dead.”

  The cop looked up from his pad of paper. He lifted his pen from his ticket pad. It hovered in the air. “What?”

  I pointed at the bench behind me, which was outside of the light of the streetlamps. “There’s a man over there. I saw him and we were going to offer him a ride somewhere. I know we’re not supposed to but it’s so cold tonight. And so we parked here, which we aren’t supposed to do either, I’m so stupid, sorry, and went to talk to the guy. And he’s dead. I think he like, froze to death, or something.”

  You know, I’m kind of a terrible actress. I let out a nervous giggle in the middle of my speech.

  The nice man with the badge put his pen on his clipboard and placed his hand on the butt of his gun. “Show me.”

  We walked to the bench while I tried to figure out how to move in a sort of forlorn way. It was not the best performance ever.

  The cop placed a hand on the dead man’s neck, feeling for a pulse. After about fifteen seconds, he sighed.

  He looked at me and Emma, and it was clear he didn’t quite know what to do. Even in the dark, my vampire eyes could see that he hadn’t gotten all that far in his ticket writing. All he finished was the date and time. No license plate.

  And he had a dead dude to deal with.

  Of course, the dead dude wasn’t going anywhere. He could write us a ticket, send us on our way, and call an ambulance, or a
hearse, or whatever he needed to pick that person up. For all I knew, budget cuts had been enacted and he was going to have to pick him up and drive him back to the station in his squad car.

  I could almost read his thoughts in his eyes. “Who are these girls? Why are they in a rented car? How did they see the dead guy from the street?”

  “He was dead when you found him?”

  I nodded, clutching my throat as though I couldn’t even speak, I was so overwhelmed.

  “Your car is a rental. Are you from around here?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Where are you staying?”

  Emma named a hotel we most definitely were not residing in, saying we were here to check out college life. The officer asked if either of us had a cell phone.

  “Lost mine,” said Emma.

  “I left mine at the hotel,” I said. “New number. I don’t remember it.” I looked pained. “Sorry.” I am the worst liar, ever.

  The cop pulled a business card from his pocket and handed it to me. “When you get back to your room, call me. I might need to get in touch with you if this wasn’t an accidental death.”

  I felt sorry for the guy. He stopped to write a ticket, and now there was going to be a bunch of paperwork. Here he was trying to be a nice guy, letting a couple of naïve high-school girls off the hook so they didn’t get into trouble and he didn’t have to mess with paperwork.

  I looked at the card. “Officer Garcia?”

  Garcia nodded. His eyes were miles away.

  “Thanks for your help. You’re really…” I trailed off. “Nice.”

  “Have a good night, ladies,” said Garcia.

  Emma and I started walking towards our car.

  Garcia’s squad car was sitting on the street, its lights flashing. Luckily, he hadn’t parked us in.

  As we walked, I heard Garcia giving someone on the other end of his radio a thumbnail sketch of what had just gone down. The person on the other end was not pleased we were walking away.

  I heard Garcia shout as we stepped into the car. Emma turned the key and drove away as Garcia ran to catch us.

  We were around the corner and gone before he even got close to his car.

  CHAPTER 49

  Emma calmly drove us back to our hotel. We walked in, grabbed all our stuff, and checked out.

  We went to the airport and turned in our car.

  We walked to another rental place, out of view of the first rental place, and Emma rented a car using a totally different credit card with a totally different identity.

  We drove to a new, random hotel, and checked in.

  I spent the rest of the night reading.

  Then I went to sleep.

  CHAPTER 50

  When I woke up, it took me a tenth of a second to remember we’d moved from one hotel to another during the previous night. In so many ways, every hotel room is the same—same beds, same ancient TV—but the covers, bad art, and bathroom placement were just enough to throw me off-balance.

  Emma explained to me the night before that the move was not only necessary, but in this case, it was the very least we could do. Under better circumstances, we would have hopped on a plane to another city.

  When I asked why we didn’t just go, Emma stopped talking. After I pestered her for most of the car ride to the airport, she spat out, “Because I’m just figuring out how this city works, and having to go to another one isn’t an idea I really want to explore.”

  So, laziness. Or maybe she didn’t want to have to drag me around if I started starving again. Who can say?

  Regardless, when I woke up, Emma was playing with her phone again, pressing on the screen harder than she had in the past. Something was bothering her a lot; we vampires spent most of our time feeling pretty laid back.

  I spent the night downloading episodes of my now-favorite TV show while reading my way through a couple more books. Then it was day, and I slept.

  When I opened my eyes, Emma wasn’t there.

  All my senses flared and I realized I could hear Emma in the bathroom. The sink was running, and she was talking in a voice so low that, even with super-hearing, I could barely make it out.

  I sat up further, and strained harder, wondering what Emma was keeping from me.

  The slight rustle of the blanket gave me away. Emma said, “She’s up,” ended her call, and shut off the water.

  As she walked out, I said the first thing that came into my head. “That was kind of a waste of the earth’s natural resources.”

  Emma stared at me a moment. “What did you hear?”

  “Not much.”

  “That was the plan.” Emma paused again.

  The conversational ball was in my court. I looked over at the window. The curtain was shut. “Nice night,” I offered.

  “You’re not going to ask who I was talking to?”

  I looked back at Emma. “I’m getting the impression my job is not to ask questions. My job is to do what you say.” There might have been a sarcastic edge to my voice. A little one.

  Emma sat down on the foot of her bed and stared at her phone. “You’re a quick study, I’ll give you that.”

  “I aim to please.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Emma. She smiled. “That’s what I like about you.”

  “You make me sound ornery,” I said.

  “Who uses the word ornery?”

  “I do. I also enjoy using the term curmudgeonly.”

  “Not ornery,” she mused. “Straightforward.”

  “Did we just have, like, a moment?”

  Emma snorted. It was not quite a laugh. “Sure.”

  “So am I shutting up now, or what?”

  Emma bit the inside of her cheek. I hadn’t been a vampire long but I could tell that was huge. It was almost an emotion. Combined with her frenetic screen tapping yesterday, I knew something was not just wrong, but horribly wrong.

  “Or what,” said Emma.

  I cocked an eyebrow and waited. And waited. And waited some more. If it would have made any sense, I would have held my breath.

  “I was talking to Wash,” Emma said. Finally.

  “And?”

  “We are facing several problems with no solutions,” said Emma.

  “You mean besides the fact that I’m a missing person?”

  “That’s pretty low on the list at the moment.”

  My heart actually thumped. “Say what now?”

  Emma looked at me. She looked away, and mumbled a bunch of curse words, ending with Wash.

  Then she looked back at me. “Wash doesn’t want you to know any of this. At all. And I am stuck. I am in Denver, Colorado, with you, in a hotel room, and I am stuck. There is no vampire babysitting service. There is no secret bunker I can take you. I cannot have you kenneled. If I had more time, I might, and might is a very strong word, be able to call in an old favor and get someone to watch you. But I doubt it.”

  “Am I that bad?”

  “No. But you’re new, and dealing with a new vampire is about as much fun as watching paint peel.”

  I smiled. “Hey, I didn’t ask to be born.”

  Emma grinned back. “Yeah, it’s a bit like that, isn’t it? Two people bring a baby into this world, and then they complain they never get any sleep, never get to spend any time together. But I’m getting off the subject. You had a best friend, right?”

  I blanched at the word had. It felt so final. “Sure.”

  “How much time do you think you could with her before you got sick of each other? I mean, totally, this-isn’t-fun-anymore, get-out-of-my-face sick?”

  I shrugged. “Dunno. It didn’t happen a whole lot. I mean, there were times when we ran out of things to talk about.”

  Emma rocked her head up and down. I had put my finger on something. “Exactly. Your best friend, and you’re out of topics. Happens all the time. You know what makes it harder?”

  “Eternal life?”

  Emma snapped her fingers and pointed at me. “Smart. You
get it. Many vampires don’t. They meet someone, fall in love, decide to reveal their true nature, and turn their new significant other. There’s nothing but time. Nothing. But. Time.

  “People act like divorce is a new concept but if you crack open a bible, you’ll find out there were rules about it going all the way back to the Old Testament. Back then, people lived to be thirty-five or forty.” She pointed at me. “Your parents would be dead. You’d have a baby, or two, or three. And people were getting divorced!”

  Emma actually was getting kind of mad. It freaked me out, as much as I could freak out. I think my heart thumped again.

  “But this whole vampire love thing is supposed to be forever. There’s no ‘til death do you part, because you’re already dead. That’s…” She finally realized she was ranting. “That’s crazy.”

  “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with all this information. You were saying something about a babysitter, and then it was a whole thing about marriage. Or vampire marriage, maybe. I’m not certain what I’m supposed to be learning, here.”

  Emma clicked her teeth together. “It’s more what you’re not supposed to be learning.”

  “Okay.”

  Emma considered for another second, then came to a conclusion. “Might as well get it over with.”

  She looked me in the eye. “Wash loves you.”

  CHAPTER 51

  You may not know this, but the traditional first anniversary gift is paper. True fact. You can look it up.

  Apparently, when you know a vampire for a few months, and help them clean up after homeless folks, the gift you get is eternal life.

  And here I didn’t think to get Wash anything.

  My heart beat twice. “You’re kidding, right?”

  Emma shook her head. “That’s why you’re here. In every sense of the word.”

  I was about to protest, to question, to ask for an explanation, but it all fell short. So I said, “Really?”

  Emma grimaced. “I’m not going to keep saying it until it sinks in. The man loves you. Or he’s infatuated. Or he has a crush. Or he just thinks you’re super-keen. I have no idea how you measure these things.