by L.J. Hayward
Chapter 34
I rolled Mercy off the dead animal and cradled her in my arms. Her blood had stopped flowing, so I wasn’t in danger, but I would have preferred it if I were. I didn’t know if the lack of leaking meant her feeble clotting powers had kicked in or if she’d simply bled dry. Pressing a hand between her torn breasts didn’t get me a heartbeat. A desperate search on the side of her neck not hanging wide open came up skint for a pulse.
Fuck. Shit. Damn. Fuck.
“Come on, Mercy,” I prayed. “This pansy little dog is not going to beat you. Come on.”
Her eyelids fluttered and I almost screamed for joy.
“Mercy, it’s Matt. Time to wake up.” It was silly and desperate, but it worked.
One eyelid rolled back and her dark, glazed eye stared up at me.
There was time. Right then, I didn’t care what the wrong blood group would do to her, so long as she got something. I tore at the sleeve of my shirt with my teeth, trying to expose my tender, inner wrist.
“Hawkins? What’re you doing?” Erin sank down beside us, wary of the dead beast, but curious and concerned. She’d picked up her gun, held ready.
“She needs blood. She’ll die without it.” And because I could feel the world around me rushing back to zero and my starting post roaring toward me, I began babbling about blood. “Mercy’s group is O positive. Ideally, she should get some of that, but we’re fresh out. I’m A pos, not so good for her. Won’t really help her heal too fast, but it will keep her alive until I can find some O group. I would kill for some O group blood. Positive or negative. Either one would be fucking brilliant.” All the while I was working at my sleeve, pushing it up to reveal the bandage around the last vampire bite.
“I’m O positive.”
I don’t think Erin meant to say it out loud. But she did. It clamped onto my brain like a vice grip. I went through a very quick and dirty internal battle. It was entirely fair to say some nasty guerrilla tactics were launched by the dark side of my personality against the nicer side. A sneak attack from whatever it was that inspired and fuelled that berserk rage I tried not to acknowledge but found myself relying on too much. Sad to say, the bastard won.
Abandoning my sleeve, I grabbed for Erin’s arm.
It took her a moment to realise what was happening. Most of that time was probably spent regretting whatever impulse had made her open her mouth. The rest of it was consumed with pulling away from me. I caught her hand, though, and jerked her back. She vented a wordless, furious denial and twisted her arm in my hold. It broke my grip and she rolled away.
Sliding Mercy to the ground, I gave chase. She scrambled backward on her arse, kicking at me with her feet. I half crawled, half loped after her. Remembering the gun in her hand, she raised it, pointed it right in my face.
“Back off,” she screamed.
I ignored the weapon. Whether I didn’t think she’d fire or just didn’t register the threat was beyond my capability to decipher. All I knew was she had something I needed. I would get it.
She didn’t fire and when I took a swipe at it, the gun flew out of her hand far too easily. I got her wrist and dragged her back toward me. Fighting and screaming, she came very reluctantly, but come she did. I dragged her back to Mercy’s side and shoved the sleeve of her jacket up her arm. Her efforts to get away redoubled then. I punched her in the face.
Dazed, she slumped to the ground. When I shoved her inner wrist onto Mercy’s fangs, she jumped and tried to pull away, but I held on hard and milked the blood from the wound into Mercy’s mouth.
I don’t know when my thoughts began turning in voluntary circles again. It might have been when Mercy’s lips closed over the wound and worked to pull out the blood. It could have been when Erin’s last protests died and she went completely limp, narcotized by Mercy’s saliva. Whatever happened first, I just suddenly realised what I had done and had to work hard to keep from puking. I fell away from what I’d caused to happen, staring in horror as the vampire fed off the human.
It was a gut deep, visceral repulsion, like watching a cat crunch down on a still struggling mouse. This wasn’t the awe-inspiring chase, the wonder of watching a creature perfectly crafted for the hunt and pursuit. It was the savage result, the bloody aftermath that was the whole reason, the point, the sum total of life. This was an apex predator doing what came natural to it, a primitive experience humankind had deluded itself into thinking it had escaped. Watching it made us cringe and despair over the lost life and wonder what we could do to stop it.
I knew what I could do to stop this. It was the side of Mercy I hated, that I had refused so hard to believe I’d twisted her into something unnatural, for a vampire. She was weak, close to mortally wounded. It would be easy. Erin’s gun was just there. I could pick it up, bang, right in the brain, dead. No one would ever be in danger from her again. But I would effectively be killing Night Call along with her. She was Night Call. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t the car. And without Night Call, I’d be nothing.
Throwing myself forward, I pulled Mercy off Erin. The vampire struggled, reaching for her victim again, but she was still fragile. I knocked her back easily.
“Enough.” I snapped it down the link as well, getting a satisfying flinch from Mercy.
Without putting my back to Mercy, I checked Erin. Her pulse was still strong, but her skin was frightfully pale, her breathing shallow. I worked fast, tearing a strip off her shirt and binding the ragged wound in her wrist. Mercy prowled around us, on all fours, watching me like a challenger to her territory. In a very real way, I was, but I was the dominant and I let her know it with hard glares and the occasional slap through the link. I was exhausted though and knew I couldn’t keep it up for long.
“Get my knife,” I told her. “It’s in the wolf.”
She hissed at me, but slunk off to get it. The greater wounds bled sluggishly now, fuelled by Erin’s donation. Mercy was still in need of blood to heal properly. Even with an unlimited supply of the right group, she’d probably need days to close the wounds, weeks to regain all of her strength.
While the vampire was occupied, I made sure Erin was going to be okay. She had no broken bones, only a small trail of blood from one nostril to her chin. She’d probably get a black-eye, but nothing worse. Still, it was bad enough, made even more horrible by the fact that I’d been the cause of it.
“I’m sorry, Erin,” I whispered as I laid her on the ground and straightened her limbs. “I told you I was too dangerous for you.”
Searching my pockets turned up a battered business card. I slipped it into her jeans pocket. After this, she deserved the chance to call me up and abuse the living daylights out of me. And if she didn’t, I’d call her and make sure she did.
Erin stirred, eyes half opening to stare at me blankly.
In the distance, sirens began to wail. I was surprised, but only because it seemed a lifetime had passed since we’d got here and began disturbing the peace.
“You’ll be fine,” I told Erin, brushing the hair out of her face. “The cops will be here in a minute or two. They’ll take care of you better than I can. Tell them about Tony Rollins and the dog. Tell them you took it down yourself. You’ll be a hero, get on the news and everything. Tell them that and I promise to never bother you again.”
And for some strange, totally whacked out reason I still don’t understand, I kissed her. A feather light touch on her forehead. When I lifted my head, I nearly toppled over from wooziness. Great. I’d probably just laid down a compulsion of my own.
It was done and the sirens were only getting louder. I stood, fended off another bout of light headedness, collected Mercy and we stumbled back to the car. Mercy was all but falling over when we reached it. I had to drag her the last dozen yards. The morphine was really gone and my leg sent a memo that it was going to its union if conditions didn’t improve soon.
The one good thing about this mess going down in the suburbs was that there were plenty of little side streets
to lose myself in. I got us thoroughly lost and didn’t care because no flashing lights followed. The down side was that by the time we got home, I was all but asleep at the wheel and Mercy was delirious with spiking hunger again. I had to carry her inside to her room and while wishing I could just crawl into bed, I fetched the last bag of O pos from the fridge. Putting the bag through a rapid warm up, under my arm, basically, I made sure she was eating before locking the cage door.
I hoped that between Erin’s fresher than fresh blood and the bag of packed cells, she would have what she needed to heal, but right then, my hope was a fragile thing.
For myself, I bypassed the kit with the last two ampoules of morphine and stood under a scalding hot shower until I was about ready to faint. Then I scrounged around and found every heat pack I owned and strapped them around my knee.
I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to sleep. The action was over, the vampire was mending, the poor bystander was hopefully in hospital by now, babbling about how she took down a psychotic, giant dog. And me? What was I in all this mess? A sarcastic prick who got a kid killed.
I shouldn’t have brushed Rollins off when he first called. I should have taken the time to listen, to think, to apply a cool, logical process to what he told me. It was all so apparent now. Aurum had only put a spotlight on something I should have stumbled over in the dark. Instead I’d acted like everyone else when faced with something they didn’t understand. They rationalised it away, they ignored it, they said it wasn’t real and went on about their lives. I should never have done that. I knew better.
Yet when I tried to not think about Tony Rollins, tried not to see his mutilated body wherever I looked, all I could see was Mercy feeding on Erin. Another situation that would never have happened but for me. It would be easy to blame that dark instinct lurking in the deeper parts of my brain chemistry that made me go berserk. Easy and at least partially correct. The fact remained, I had known exactly what I was doing.
Saving Mercy.
The thought was there, though, that it hadn’t been necessary. Mercy had been wounded in the past and she’d been fine. Perhaps she could have survived until we got home. Or perhaps she would have died halfway. Mere days ago I had been contemplating her death, conducting it myself. Put her out of her misery was how I would rationalise it away. If there was any hint of the old Mercy, the real Mercy, even a trace of Susan Grayson left, would she like what she was now? Could she tolerate the hunger, the instincts to hunt and fight? What would Susan want if she could see Mercy?
I walked a fine line in my own life, between being a calm, rational person, and slipping into the abyss of frustration and fear that became all-consuming anger. Knowing this before I’d ever laid eyes on Nasty Kitten and falling head long into an unhealthy obsession with Mercy Belique, I’d still thrown myself into yet another balancing act when I decided to do anything and everything I could to save Mercy from her vampiric transformation. I tempered my dark side by nurturing Mercy’s. At least, I tried to. And it was sort of working. With semi-regular releases of my savage half while executing jobs for Night Call, I wasn’t beating up on helpless girls, or turning into a homicidal maniac in traffic. I even had a friend.
So why had I brutalised Erin? When all was said and done, she was just an innocent bystander, there only because she was good at her job. She hadn’t deserved to be dragged into the situation with Rollins’ dog, and she certainly hadn’t deserved to become dinner for a vampire at my insistence. So why had I done it? Had I wanted to save Mercy? Or myself?
I couldn’t answer the question and that scared me.
Pain relief was too good for someone that stupid. I pried the heat packs off my knee and tossed them across the room. Abandoning the bed and walking heartlessly on my bad leg, I went into the living room, slumped on the couch and turned the TV on.
A big, black dog jumped at the screen, snapping and growling. I flicked channels without realising it, heart slamming against my ribs in totally unwarranted but hopefully understandable panic. The next channel was a guy desperate to sell me a vacuum cleaner. The next, cartoons not good enough to make it into a time slot after dawn. Then an evangelist imploring me and other nutcases unable to sleep to acknowledge the sin in our souls and repent. What the heck. Maybe he had a point. I let his impassioned oration numb my thoughts.
While I sat mindlessly before the TV, my knee wasn’t so lucky. It was swollen from the night’s efforts and throbbing with a dull, penetrating pain I felt in my teeth. I should have strapped it up, even if I was going to continue with the stupidity of denying myself pain relief. But I didn’t think I could get up now to go hunt down a support.
I was on the verge of dragging myself to the en suite and the waiting ampoules of liquid oblivion when a few words from the TV caught my attention. Somewhere along the way, the sun had risen and the evangelist had been replaced by a morning news broadcast. What had snagged at my ragged thoughts was the blurb of an upcoming story. A woman grievously injured while saving a quiet suburb from a rampaging dog.
The commercial break was about an hour long. Plenty of time for my brain to slog past the fogging pain and chuck a few conclusions at me. Erin was fine. Alive and well enough to speak to the media, or some intermediary who then spilled the beans. The authorities believed her. No word of Tony Rollins though. If they’d found the body, that would have been a major head line, not just an ‘after the break’ teaser. The last titbit that slotted into place was this—damn, the media don’t waste any time.
Finally, ads for toothpaste and toilet cleaner out of the way, we returned to the news. The story was, of course, suitably sensational with confident recitation of the animal’s size and violent tendencies. Erin wasn’t named, but I doubted there were a great many private investigators who used to be in the police force working in Brisbane. She was being lauded as a hero who’d struck a pre-emptive strike against a potential threat to citizens. As the news reader then launched into the commerce report, I wondered how the story would change when word of the death got out. I wondered what was the real speculation behind the scene in the park. No matter what I’d done to Erin’s mind, there was little chance the police would believe she’d shot it God knows how many times, then broken its back before impaling it with a bit of pipe.
Just like earlier, thinking wasn’t making me feel much better about myself. And come on, neither was the pathetic denial of pain relief. If I sent myself insane with pain, I would have no chance of making up for last night’s complete failure to anyone.
I was propped against the toilet, needle against the skin over a vein when the phone rang. Thankfully, the mobile was still in the pocket of the pants I’d discarded before climbing into the shower. I rescued it and answered with a wordless grunt.
