“It’s an ER, Mary. People mostly come here when they’re bleeding to death.” I didn’t hear the rest of their conversation. I, too, wondered if maybe there were more instances of anemia than usual.
When I reached the blood bank, I found a man dressed in blue hospital scrubs inside, staring at the bags of blood through the refrigerator door. He had warm-toned skin, as though he spent a lot of time in the sun, but he had dark bruises beneath his eyes, as though he rarely slept. There was something off about him that I just could not put my finger on—not off, as in weird, but different, not your usual, run of the mill human being. I was sensing that something else was there. But I could not have told you what, as it was an experience that I had never had before.
"Excuse me, can I see your identification?” I asked him as the door to the blood supply room shut behind me with a click. The sound my stomach feel a bit queasy. My heart pounded strangely in my chest. I tried not to show how intimidated I felt.
“Oh, I'm fine,” he said blithely, looking into my eyes. A strange, tickly feeling ran through me as soon as we met eyes. He smiled confidently, and a chill ran down my spine, as though he were doing something to me; what, I didn’t know. I shrugged the feeling off. He was definitely not supposed to be here. I frowned.
"No you're not. And I'm calling hospital security if you don't show me that you have a right to be in here.” I made sure to make my voice drip with superciliousness. He looked taken aback, as though he were seeing me for the first time. His eyes narrowed suspiciously.
"How did you do that?" he asked me, his voice and his face both registered extreme shock.
"Do what?” I snapped. I wasn’t here to play games. There was a victim of a car crash in the ER, possibly bleeding to death. Every second counted at that moment. “You still haven't told me who you are."
His eyes widened. "You—it’s impossible!"
"That's it. I'm calling security." I backed away from him. He must have escaped the psych ward.
"Wait! You want to know why so many people are getting sick, don't you?" I looked at him, sighing.
"This is a hospital. Of course people are getting sick. They come here when they get sick.”
“But the increase…in the blood loss…unexplained anemia in otherwise healthy patients? Strange puncture marks?” That caught my attention. I crossed my arms to hide the shake of my hands. This guy was really throwing me off balance. “It's happened within the past ten days, right?” I was dumbfounded. How did he know?
“I’m a detective…of sorts,” he said. “I’m working to find the party responsible.” As he said this, he stepped backward, placing one of his pale hands on the metal countertop…where there was an empty bag of blood. It looked like it had been sucked empty—like a child’s juice box drank dry. I wanted to gag, thinking about this man drinking an entire bag of blood. What sick, twisted…I took a step back.
“What did you do?” I growled, grabbing the phone by the door off of its hook. An operator answered immediately.
“Emergency,” the woman’s voice said. Before I could answer, the man rushed past me, knocking me off balance as he bolted from the room. He moved unnaturally fast, and when I looked out into the hallway, he was already gone. I frowned; I couldn’t remember actually seeing him cross the room. One second he was there, the next, he was gone.
Chapter Three
I stood, looking at the monitors that oversaw the entirety of Linda Vista Hospital with hospital security. The man, a bulky ex-cop, dressed in a black uniform and ball cap reading SECURITY in white letters, was frowning at me. He had a buzz cut, large beefy hands, and his face was slightly reddish. He was obviously a drinker when he was off-duty. Beer, if I had to hazard a guess.
“Play the tape again,” he directed the lanky, nerdy kid who operated the monitors. The tape burred as it rewound, and then began to play again. The kid sucked his teeth audibly. There I was, walking into the blood bank, the cameras flickering and blacking out a minute later, and then my head, peering out into the hallway.
“I see no man,” the ex-cop said bluntly.
“But…he was there,” I said incredulously. “He was there before me. I saw him. I spoke to him. Did you go back far enough to see him enter?” The ex-cop shook his head.
“There was only you.”
“What about the empty bag?”
“There is saliva…with an anticoagulant mixed in, which strange,” the ex-cop said. “But it’s funny how the cameras failed when this individual should have been either coming or going.”
“And there’s no evidence of anyone going in,” the kid piped up. I glared at him, and his head sunk between his shoulders.
“Well, I certainly didn’t drink the blood,” I said, my eyes wide. The ex-cop looked at me strangely.
“We didn’t say that you had. But you are the only person to have gone in there for several hours.”
“And there’s no other jump in the tape?” I asked, not ready to just let it go.
“Well,” the kid said. “There is that.” He pointed. The time stamp read several minutes before I entered. There was the briefest jumps in the tape. I smiled triumphantly.
“There, see?”
“He might have some gadget that we don’t know about,” the kid said.
“What’s he doing in the blood bank, then?” the ex-cop said, shaking his head. “I just—I don’t know that a psych patient would have something like that. And we never admitted anyone into the hospital on the grounds of an investigation of any sort.”
“But you admit that there’s a chance,” I said.
“The smallest. However, it’s just you on the tape, Doctor.” The ex-cop was looking at me strangely. I could tell that he was a person for whom the truth needed to be tangible. The man that I had encountered was operating on principles that were outside of the realm of the natural.
Chapter Four
As I walked back to the ER, I heard someone behind me call my name. I turned, brows raised, to find Mark walking toward me, trying to catch up.
“Samantha, are you all right?” His face was etched with concern. I sighed, crossing my arms. I had sent the fresh supply of blood to the ER before I had gone over the tapes with security, so I was not in any particular rush at that moment.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I was exhausted, and far from fine, but I wasn’t about to start admitting to things in front of a guy that I had the feeling that I was going to want to be impressing soon.
“I heard that you were attacked in the blood bank,” he said, coming closer and placing a hand on my arm.
“I think he was just someone from psych that escaped,” I admitted, my attention on his hand—it was surprisingly…cold.
“Did he say why he was there?”
“He said he was a detective,” I said, laughing a little. “He said that he was looking into the increase in cases of anemia and unexplained blood loss. But the kicker is…he had just finished sucking down an entire bag of blood.”
“Oh, really? What did he look like?” I was a little thrown off that he wasn’t as disgusted by this information as I was. To be honest, he looked a little…excited…and most certainly not concerned about my welfare at all. This was a decidedly disappointing turn of events. Feeling a little like I'd been slapped in the face, I thought for a moment.
Just then, a code was called over the intercom.
“Oh,” I said. “I’d better go.” I waved to him and raced down the hallway, my thoughts reeling and a deep sense of disappointment pooling in my stomach.
Chapter Five
Exhausted from my twelve-hour shift, I slipped my front door key into the lock. I twisted it, hearing the lock click. I flung my apartment door open and walked in, shutting and locking the door behind me. My apartment was my pride and joy—the fact that I could finally afford a luxury apartment with clean white walls, hard wood floors, and large, clean windows that faced a park was truly a wonderful accomplishment. My feet ached in their white New Balance sneake
rs, and I was positive that my knees were about to give out. I needed food—real food, and not the microwaveable meals that I had been living off of, but I needed sleep more. I dropped my bag on the floor by the door, and then looked up to find the mysterious man from the inside of the blood bank, sitting on my couch.
I screamed. Faster than was visible, he bolted over to me, covering my mouth with one of his hands. He had been seated on my couch one second, and the next, he was pressed up against me. His skin was hot and dry. I had never felt someone feel so hot—it was like the desert sun, or a furnace glowed within his core. I wondered if something was wrong with him. That would explain the dark circles beneath his eyes.
Up close, he was attractive in a rugged way. His lips were masculine, yet pouty—I wanted to kiss them, make them flush from the friction of my own lips against his. His features were sharp—predatory. Everything about him betrayed the fact that there was an inner strength to him—something unusual. His skin smelled masculine—musky and spicy, clean. He hadn't shaved in a few days, leaving a healthy growth of stubble across his cheeks and chin. I wanted to rub my hands over it; I wanted to feel the grasp of it against my skin. It spiked in an attraction that I felt shocked me into silence.
“I’ll let you go if you promise not to scream,” he whispered, and I nodded, eyes wide. He didn’t release me yet, speaking to me in an undertone. “Just listen to me for ten minutes. If you don’t like what I have to say, I will leave and never bother you again.” We looked into each other’s eyes for a second before I nodded. He let me go, stepping back a short way.
“My name is Jared Hamilton,” he began. He kept his eyes on me, studying my reaction to everything that he said. “I am a vampire hunter. The being who is responsible for the sudden rise in blood-related illnesses and injuries in your Emergency Room is a rogue vampire whom I have been hunting for months.”
“Vampires,” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” And yet, I realized, I believed him. He shook his head.
“Vampires and other supernatural beings are very real, Samantha,” he said. “You need to come to terms with this. You need to be aware enough to protect yourself because if I’m correct, then you have a very dangerous supernatural being very close to you while you work.”
“What are you talking about?”
“No matter how it may have looked, I did not drink that bag of blood,” Jared said. “My kind does not drink blood…but a rogue vampire would.” He looked at me with a significant expression.
“A rogue…?” I cocked my head to the side. I was not familiar with the term. The entirety of my knowledge of the supernatural came from the stories that my grandmother had told me when I had spent summers with her while growing up.
“When a vampire goes rogue, it means that he or she has departed from the rules and moral codes that are strictly enforced by the supernatural community. We have these rules in place in order to protect the human race, as you are, by nature, weak.”
“Oh, thanks,” I mumbled, crossing my arms over my chest. As if things couldn’t get any worse, I was weak.
“The particular rogue vampire that I am chasing is the last progeny of another, far older, and more dangerous rogue. I had tracked him as far as the blood bank at Linda Vista. The scent of his particular strain was heavy upon the blood bag. I would have been able to make an attempt to take him then…” I held out my hands.
“I know, I know…if I hadn’t come along and disrupted you. I apologize for being an unwitting human.” He grinned.
“In any case, the one who is plaguing your hospital has committed a trail of murders, dating back to the early eighties which I have been following in the hopes of making a capture.” He looked down at his hands then laced them together behind his back. He looked at me, studying my expression as he went on.
“At the present moment, I am unsure of which name the rogue is going by, but he has had many aliases in the past.” He was watching me closely. “Vampires can neither be photographed nor videotaped. I can only give a verbal description. He is very good-looking. Usually poses as a physician. He has an aquiline nose, and a square jaw, and looks as though he were of Scandinavian descent.” He had just described Mark to a t. The way that Jared was looking at me, I knew that he knew that I knew.
“What do you know?”
“What will you do if you find this rogue vampire?” my voice sounded hoarse. His face did not change as he said:
“I will kill him.”
“But…but what if you’re wrong?” I thought about how cold Mark’s hands were…but he had seemed so nice. Seemed being the operative word, there, Samantha.
“If I get close enough, I will be able to smell the blood of the vampire’s creator…all lineages of vampires have a scent,” Jared claimed.
“Wait? What are you? How can you do this?”
“I’m something special,” he said. “But you are as well.”
“What do you mean?” my heart was pounding as he stepped near to me again, leaning in and sniffing my neck.
"You are mine.” I felt my stomach clench in fear, but then, he kissed me. It was a kiss that had the ability to transfer all of the heat from his body into mine. I felt like I was on fire. It was as though all of the air had been sucked out of the room, or that something momentous had occurred to make the entire fabric of the world shift. It went on for ages, until I stepped back, looking at him. His eyes were smoldering. He nuzzled my neck with his nose, mumbling something beneath his breath.
“What did you say?” I asked, feeling out of breath.
“When this is done, I will tell you.” He stepped away from me his face was filled with regret and sorrow. I felt confused. But I also wanted more.
I stepped forward, pulling him back toward me. He answered, kissing me and it was like this was supposed to be. I ran my hands up and under his shirt, feeling the heat radiating from his skin. He pulled back, looking me in the eyes as he pulled my shirt up and over my head. I bit my lip, feeling the strength of my desire for him. He looked hesitant, but followed my lead as I pulled his shirt off.
He was well-muscled, and they rippled beneath the tanned skin. I stepped out of the pale blue pants of my scrubs, enjoying the sensation of being touched, feeling his hot skin, pressed up against mine.
“What are you?” I whispered.
“A monster,” he replied with an ironic grin. To my surprise, his eyes shifted. They went from the human-like brown to a bright, glowing green. They were almost reptilian, with irises like slits crossing through them. I startled, gasping in surprise, my hand covering my mouth. “Are you frightened, Samantha?” I paused for a moment, considering before I shook my head.
“No,” I said, and then brought him back to me. I kissed the tender skin beneath his ear, reaching with my teeth and biting the lobe of his ear. He growled; it was a low, deep rumble. It sounded…strangely animal, and I wondered again what he was. I was fumbling at the zipper to his jeans, and he picked me up, carrying me into the bedroom. I wrapped my arms and legs around his torso, letting him carry me as I trailed kisses along his neck. He threw me down on the bed. Removing his pants and then his boxers, he watched, eyes in a slow burn as I removed my underwear.
I let the straps of my bra slide down my arms, freeing my breasts from the cups. I let it fall to the floor beside the bed before peeling off my panties. He looked at me solemnly, and I could hardly bear it, being looked at like that—like I was something mysterious, yet precious at the same time. I was surprised that such animal, reptilian eyes could still convey such emotion. It seemed so far-fetched. I launched myself at him, pulling him close.
“I want you,” I whispered in his ear. “I want you now.” And then he was kissing me passionately, our mouths open, and he entered me, slowly at first, and I moaned delectably. I arched my back, pressing into him. As he began to move against me, inside of me, I felt like I was on fire, being consumed, immolated entirely.
“More,” I begged, “more.”
I
was curled up beside Jared, my head resting on his collarbone. My exhaustion was complete, and I was just beginning to drift off. I had decided that I would be appropriately shocked over my impulsive actions later. Right now, I felt warm and satiated. He sighed, his breath blowing my hair across my forehead. He placed a warm hand in the dip between my ribcage and my pelvic bone.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered against my hair.
“For what?”
“What I am asking of you,” he replied. “I’m using you as bait for a rogue vampire…it feels wrong.”
“I would have willingly agreed to help you, either way,” I said. “I’m a doctor, and I believe that protecting and saving lives is the most important thing. By helping you stop the rogue, I am helping to save the potential lives that he would take in the future.”
“This is true,” he said, and I could feel the words as they echoed throughout his body, thrumming against his sternum. “How do you want to proceed?” I thought about that for a moment, the cogs of my brain whirring as an idea formed and gelled in my mind.
“I have plans with Mark,” I said. “We can use it as a trap…if he really is the one that you are looking for, I can make a signal to you, or lead him somewhere that you are waiting. From there, you should be able to take him, right?”
“Is there a coffee shop somewhere around—”
“The hospital coffee shop has a stairwell outside of it,” I replied confidently.
“Perfect. I’ll wait there. Do you think you can lure him there?”
“I can try,” I replied, thinking about the Hippocratic Oath that I took. “I just…”
“What?”
“I took an oath…to protect life.”
“Human life, Samantha,” he said. I shook my head, sitting up.
“Any living thing,” I replied. “Even if that living thing has harmed other lives. Every life is precious, Jared. Each one has meaning and importance. Promise me you won’t kill him.”
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