by Debra Dunbar
He sounded lonely. Was this just about me coming by for some early morning java and talk?
“There is something I’d like to run by you, though.”
Please don’t let it be two missing persons reports. Please don’t let it be that.
“Shall I guess? Dragon in Pigtown? Troll under the overpass? Mermaids in the harbor?”
“No, this is sick people. As in a whole lot of sick people all within the last couple of days.”
Whew. “I know. I’m on it. It’s a plague demon. I’ve got no idea why he’s here or who to blame, but Raven and I are working on getting him gone. Give us a few days.”
Hopefully it would take less than that. The vampires didn’t have a few days with the rate they were being infected and I wasn’t sure the humans would either. Eventually the plague demon would tire of salmonella would turn to e-coli and other, more deadly bacteria.
“We may not have a few days,” Tremelay said, echoing my thoughts. “I’ve got someone I want you to meet. She can explain it better than I can.”
She? Did Tremelay have a girlfriend? From what I’d seen, he was still mourning his wife, so this must be a work colleague or a confidential informant. I told him I was on my way, hung up, and headed down, figuring I’d need to jog into Little Italy to get my car from the parking lot behind Sesarios.
Nope. It was in my parking spot, where late last night a black SUV had sat. I pulled the keys out of my purse and as I unlocked it noticed a blue nylon bag on the passenger seat. It was a little cooler with a box of pastries neatly packed in ice and a note.
“Hope this feast wraps up quickly so we can have a repeat of last night. See you there. And be thankful Leonora’s not making you wear what the other humans will have on.”
Yikes. Knowing Leonora, it was probably some scanty leather thing—something that would make me look like a mannequin run through a chipper shredder and dressed in fetish wear. I stuffed a cannoli in my mouth and pulled out on the road, grateful that I’d somehow dodged that bullet.
The coffee shop next to Hopkins wasn’t any Holy Grounds. Beyond Tremelay and his companion, it was completely empty. I was pretty sure the hospital had their own coffee machines at every hallway. They probably had a Starbucks on each floor. Either way, this little shop looked like it was struggling with the competition. The big glass windows out front were grimy, the red paint on the brick was chipped. Two massive iron gates were folded up to the sides of the building, ready to secure the entire front of the shop from robbery and vandalism once they closed. Although they didn’t seem to ever close, judging from the faded sign on the door.
Tremelay was sitting at a table toward the back, an institutional-looking white coffee mug in front of him. He was indeed with a woman, but all I could see from my angle was a short bob of silky black hair and a pair of lilac scrubs with prancing unicorns on them.
The detective stood. “Aria. This is my daughter, Kyra.” At his words the woman turned to face me and smiled warmly.
“It’s nice to meet you,” she said, standing and extending her hand. “I’ve heard so much about you. Dad is a big fan of yours.”
Tremelay’s daughter was stunningly beautiful. In the flesh, the resemblance between her and the pictures of her mother was far more pronounced. She had the same almond-shaped dark eyes, the silky black hair, the dark-gold complexion. She looked like she stepped right out of a Bollywood romance and threw on a pair of scrubs.
“Well I’m a big fan of his too,” I told her, shaking her hand. “He said you’re in med school?”
She smiled again and I swear I heard angels sing. “Third year. I’m doing a rotation at Hopkins right now.”
“What’s your specialty?” I asked.
“I’m leaning toward internal medicine, but we’ll see how I feel when I complete the other five rotations.” She shot a quick smile in Tremelay’s direction. “That’s actually why I wanted to meet you. Dad’s told me a lot about what you’ve done together, your skills as a Templar. Maybe I’m going crazy from sleep deprivation, but I think there’s something going on you need to know about.”
“All the stomach issues? It’s a plague demon. I’m on it.” I hated to cut her off like that but I had to get going or I’d be late to work.
“It’s more than that. There are a few really odd things I wanted you to know about.”
Something odd beyond a plague demon? Beyond vampires going crazy and wanting to eat everyone in sight? Normally the thought that there was something happening in my city would have filled me with a sense of determination and excitement. It was my duty to protect my Pilgrims on the Path. But right at this moment…the timing was horrible. Hopefully whatever this was it could wait until next week.
“There’s been an influx of people coming into the emergency room in the last two days with a weird eating disorder. They’re all normal weight, some a bit more than normal, but they’re all suffering from severe malnutrition.”
Huh. That was actually kind of intriguing.
“Some kind of metabolic disorder?” I guessed. Look at me, playing doctor when I had one sitting right in front of me. I doubted she would have wanted to consult a Templar if the patients had suffered from something so easily explained by modern medical diagnosis, though.
“We’re still running tests. The odd thing is in the last twenty-four hours, we’ve had seventy more people present with the same symptoms. They think they’re starving. We caught one out of bed huddled in the bathroom. He’d gone down the hall and taken the half-eaten meal trays from other patients and was sitting there cramming it all in his mouth as fast as he could.”
My heart skipped a beat. This was sounding an awful lot like the human version of what the vampires had. Could these people be the donors who’d infected them, or was this just another, unrelated ailment caused by the plague demon? Even if the demon caused it, there had to be a normal medical diagnosis. If I could find out what that was, maybe I could figure out how to treat, or even cure, the vampires.
“Tapeworm?” I guessed. “Crazy, super-infectious tapeworm?”
She shrugged. “Like I said, we’re still testing. What’s even weirder is the marks they all have on their necks. We check these cases carefully, since lots of patients deny drug use. I’ve never seen a user inject into their neck, though, and Dad had mentioned there were vampires in the city...” She blushed faintly, biting her lower lip. “I’m embarrassed to even say that. Me, a doctor, conjecturing that vampires had something to do with these people’s illness.”
It was the other way around. These people had something to do with the vampire’s illness.
“Vampires don’t get sick, but the local Balaj has at least twenty-three with similar symptoms. I’m beginning to think that the plague demon is targeting them, but this could be a sort of side illness. These people are sick with something from the plague demon, then vampires feed from them, and because it’s a supernaturally infected illness, the vampires catch a mutated form of it.”
“Or why not the opposite?” she shot back. “The plague demon infects your vampires, and they’re spreading it to the humans around the city.”
If that were the case, then the plague demon would need to have a specific reason to go after the vampires. Demons liked humans. They liked to dole out their special brand of misery onto creatures with souls. Vampires were already damned. Plaguing them would be a wasted effort.
Unless the demon had been summoned and ordered to go after the vampires. Russell had certainly used magic to target them in revenge for the murder of his family. There might be another mage out there with a similar grudge. Or Simon, who would love to weaken the resident Balaj and snatch Baltimore for his own family.
“Thanks, this information is a huge help. I can’t help heal those who are already sick, but I can get rid of the demon and stop this before all of Baltimore is in your emergency room. The big problem is finding the demon, or finding out enough about him that I can call him into a circle and banish him.”
“That’s where Kyra might be able to help,” Tremelay chimed in. “They’ve got to report this stuff. There are other doctors on the food poisoning cases, but Kyra is assisting with this one. They’re trying to find commonalities between the infected patients to help trace back where and when they were all exposed, as well as what the heck they were exposed to.”
Of course. Duh. “They had to have been in contact with the plague demon. They don’t infect people from afar, they need to do it personally, and while they’ll occasionally do widespread infections through water supplies or dropping anthrax into the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese, they like to hang around and watch the fallout. And they like to spread illness through as close a personal contact as they can.”
“Chuck E. Cheese?” Kyra’s voice rose in pitch. “One did that? A plague demon seriously put anthrax into a kids’ ball pit?”
I waved my hand. “Yes, but some kid threw poop into it and they had to close and clean the area. No kids were harmed. What I’m saying is that if these people were all in the same place at the same time, they might have noticed the demon. They might have had contact with him.”
It probably wouldn’t help me identify the demon for banishment, but it would go a long way toward figuring out who was behind this. And that was important. I was beginning to think this demon wasn’t just here joyriding off a human’s mark. He’d been summoned.
“Why don’t you meet me at the hospital later today? I start my shift at noon. I can go over the non-confidential information with you, see if you can figure out a connection.”
“Can you get me their names?” If I knew who they were, I could ask Dario about the blood donor angle and be able to figure out who gave this disease to whom.
She shook her head. “Nope. The only reason I’m telling you this much is because with multiple patients and a potential epidemic, privacy laws become somewhat flexible. I can tell you if they’re all from the same neighborhood in Baltimore, or if they all work in the same area or building, or if they all frequent the taco truck on Forty-Second and Grover, but I can’t tell you their names.”
It would have to do. Maybe I’d actually be able to speak with a few of the patients, to get information about where they’d been in order to nail down the origin of the infection. If the plague demon was slipping something into that taco truck on Forty-Second and Grover that most of the blood donors hit up before visiting a vampire, then we’d know how to cut out the infection, or screen against it.
Chapter 17
Johns Hopkins Hospital was a maze of interconnected buildings, and parking was a total nightmare. The covered parking areas charged a fortune, but street-side had cars packed in like sardines for eight blocks out. I’d either need to fork out for the hospital lot, or get in some cardio.
I chose cardio. The money I’d “borrowed” from my other account weighed heavily on my mind and I couldn’t bear the thought of spending another twenty on parking when I had two perfectly good legs.
Once inside it took me a while to find Kyra’s ward. Hopkins was old-school hospital mixed with strange additions of futuristic glass walls. A tube-like walkway kept visitors and doctors from needing to go outside as they walked from one section to the other. Some administrator had tried to liven things up with inspired artwork, and there truly was a coffee machine at every corner, but the whole complex felt like it was trying too hard to be trendy. And failing.
I managed to find an information desk once I’d found the correct building, floor, and ward. They beeped Kyra. I had a few moments to buy a vending-machine latte before Tremelay’s daughter came around the corner, short glossy hair swinging with each step, her arms filled with folders and a clipboard.
“There’s a consult room down the hall,” she told me, not even breathless from her brisk walk. “We can be undisturbed there.”
I followed her, admiring the smiling sunshines on her bright yellow scrubs. I’d need to ask her where she bought these things. I might not be able to wear them at the coffee shop, and they’d be equally unprofessional while taking care of my Templar duties, but they looked ideal for lounging around the apartment on a rainy day, researching or watching television. So comfy. I wondered if they made them in fleece or flannel instead of the thin cotton Kyra was wearing?
“Here.” She swung open the door and I entered, sitting in one of two chairs that flanked a circular table. The room was barely big enough for the furniture. I noticed a lightbox on the wall for X-ray examination. The other wall held a piece of watercolor artwork showing two kittens inside a basket.
Kyra got right to it and handed me the folders. “You probably won’t be able to read my chicken scratching. Dad says I was born to be a doctor with handwriting like this. It hasn’t been transcribed yet, but I wanted you to see the notes before the official version goes out this afternoon.”
Names and addresses had been carefully blacked out in this photocopy, but in addition to the narrative, Kyra had also included a handy grid. Different races, genders, ages, body types. Different socio-economic classes. Different jobs and locales for those jobs. Different neighborhoods. One even lived out in the county.
“Hobbies?” I asked. “Besides the vampire bites, I mean.”
Kyra flipped a page. Sheesh. These people couldn’t have been more different. One was in an adult basketball league. One was a scrapbooker. One mountain biked. One collected coins. One was an avid Raven’s fan, never missing a game. One made felted animals and sold them through an Etsy shop. I shook my head, bewildered.
“They all denied drug use,” Kyra told me. “Vehemently denied drug use. That kind of emotion usually means that either they have a close family member who has battled addiction, or they’re lying. None of them had the physical appearance of long-term addiction, but people start somewhere, and a bad batch of heroin doesn’t always hit the habitual users; it can be more lethal in the newer addicts who haven’t built up a tolerance. So we check. That’s how I saw the bite marks.”
She handed me a photo, a collage of two dozen necks with tiny, barely visible puncture wounds. Definitely vampire bites, and recent ones too. Outside of the marking of blood-slaves, feeding vampires were very discreet about leaving marks. Tiny, freckle-looking marks that faded in a day or so were fine, but huge bites that drew attention were a no-no. A devoted blood-slave might want that sort of thing, but a casual supplier didn’t want to be teased when going into work the next day. And very casual suppliers who didn’t remember ever being bitten didn’t need to have huge teeth marks on their neck the next day to spur their memories. Either these people were unaware they’d been fed on, merely thinking they’d indulged in a one-night stand with an attractive partner, or they were regular suppliers, doing this for compensation as well as the euphoric hit.
“Outside of the symptoms, it’s all they seem to have in common,” Kyra confessed.
Had they been sick before they were bitten, or after? I looked through the profiles again. If these were the vampire equivalent of one-night-stands, a dine-and-dash, then the illness had to have come from the vampires to them. Otherwise the demon wouldn’t have known who was going to be tonight’s dinner, and as ballsy as plague demons were, I doubted they’d mess with a potential “date” right in front of the vampire. A vampire’s sense of smell was just too acute, and judging from the guy I’d met in the coffee shop, as well as Mansi a few weeks ago, plague demons stank.
That might be my way of finding out if these people had been the ones initially infected. Regular donors might be easier for a plague demon to identify. I’m sure the vampires kept a list or database so they knew who was up next in their donor line up. If the demon wanted to infect vampires, hitting their regular donors with an illness would be the easiest way to do it without being detected.
“Do they have any anemia?” I asked.
She nodded. “And judging from some of the tests we’ve run, I’d say it’s persistent at a low level. I included it in my notes, but I’m not positive it’s a
symptom. It might be an underlying vulnerability that made them susceptible to this infection. Oh,” her eyes widened and she laughed. “Anemia because they’ve been bitten by vampires! Yes, judging from what I’ve seen, I’d assume this wasn’t the first time they’d been a vampire’s dinner.”
“If it’s any consolation, most regular donors come into it voluntarily,” I told her. “Vampires do pick up meals of unsuspecting people, but that’s usually harmless. A small amount of blood is taken and the victim only thinks they had a really awesome one-night stand. Regular donors are on a schedule where they give every eight weeks in exchange for monetary compensation. And there’s something in vampire venom that makes the experience very pleasant.”
Kyra frowned. “They’re addicts, you mean. Don’t sugar coat it for my benefit. It’s like being paid for doing heroin. There’s still long-term damage.”
This was where I got into a gray moral area that made me squirm as well as doubt myself. “Yes, but it’s not physical damage. They have cravings. They count down the days until they can do it again. It’s a dependence, but the only damaging side effect to their body is the mild anemia. Honestly that’s no worse than giving blood regularly.”
“But the dependence,” she urged. “That’s going to lead them to want to experience it more than every eight weeks. I’ve worked with addicts before. I know how this happens. They’ll lie about the last time they were fed from, or find a vampire who just doesn’t care, and eventually they’ll be dead.”
I winced, deciding not to tell her about blood-slaves and how that was their eventual fate. “Yes. But the Balaj in Baltimore takes this very seriously. They keep records, they enforce rules on feeding from donors. None of them wants a donor to die or be compromised. They depend on these people. They’d starve without them. If they didn’t practice restraint, they’d burn through their food source and face their own extinction.”
She eyed me doubtfully. “Okay, but I still don’t like it. I don’t like the thought of people suffering from addiction.”
