by Anna Rainn
“No, wait!” I screamed out of the window. They looked up at me. “I’m coming down.”
Darkness enveloped me again as I withdrew from the starlit sky and into the cold void of the deserted apartment and then the staircase. I descended fast, my feet trying to outrace the thought of Justin’s cold blade diving into Nick’s body. They were going to get me anyway. If I stay in, I may survive the night, but I will spend all the nights to come alone, hunted by the two vampires, haunted by the thoughts of Nick dying. Nick didn’t have to go. They were reluctant to hurt him. It was me they wanted.
Descending the dark abyss of the stairs, a hundred imaginary hands reached for me, cold and hungry. And a hundred deaths befell Nick during what seemed like an endless descent. But then the stars shone again as my feet collided with the cobbled alley floor. And I screamed.
The first thing I saw when I came out of the building was a bloody dead body on the floor. I looked away, pain cracking my thoughts, clouding my vision, sending me staggering back. Nick was on the floor in front of me. He had been taken in the moments it took me to race down to him. I lost him; I lost him without even saying goodbye!
In slow motion, I saw Owen move toward me, to pull me away from the bloody body on the floor, to protect me from meeting the same fate. His right hand moved in an arch protectively. But Owen was too slow. Before the detective’s knifed hand was fully extended, Tyler came at us, leaping to bring his prey down. Owen fell down before him, as I took a step back, my feet hitting something, then I stood frozen in place, my screams dying.
I saw a knife tear at the detective’s shirt to bare his skin. Tyler tilted his head and grinned at me, the horrible smile exposing his long fangs. Then he brought his head down and bit. When the vampire pulled his hideous face back, there was no mistaking the blood running down his chin, even in the dark of night. Owen was thrashing under him, a fallen prey. A manic laugh sliced through reality as the vampire opened his mouth again, overjoyed by the taste of Owen’s blood. Then he brought his face down on the detective’s body again.
Before the fatal bite, strong arms took hold of Tyler and dragged him away. Clear blue eyes looked at me from over the vampire’s shoulder. Nick! Next to my feet, a shiny blade waited. I grabbed it and handed it to Nick, then I watched as the glittering silver blade ran cleanly across Tyler’s neck. It was a slice of moonlight cutting through the horror of the night. Nick’s eyes caught mine, and I hung on to their exotic blueness for dear sanity. Then I tore my eyes away and looked at the spot a dead body had occupied when I came into the night, a body I had thought was Nick’s. A body was still lying there, but it wasn’t Nick’s. Justin’s face had been turned sideway, gazelessly staring into the dark. The two vampires were dead.
Chapter 23
The heat of the day had given way to a chilly night. I hadn’t realized how cold I had been until I was safely wrapped in Nick’s leather jacket and tucked behind him on his motorcycle as we chased the ambulance. The wind whipped all sound away, save for the ominous siren of the ambulance ahead. We rushed in pace with the wailing vehicle wordlessly. I wouldn’t have wanted to talk even if it was possible for Nick and me to hear each other over this night’s soundtrack of impending sorrow.
Owen hadn’t woken up. He didn’t even stir no matter how hard Nick shook him. The detective’s eyes hadn’t fluttered once as Nick ran to Owen’s car to radio in and call for medical assistance. It took them four minutes to arrive, followed by a fleet of police cars to close off yet another crime scene.
Nick and I spent all four minutes silent, with him crouched next to Owen, putting pressure on the horrible wound on his neck, and me shivering right next to them both. Metro general was within eyesight now with the ambulance taking a right turn and Nick steering his motorcycle the same way. I wrapped my arms around Nick’s body, looking for a degree of reassurance in the hardness of the muscle below his ripped clothes, looking for comfort I knew I would badly need once we got off this motorcycle and into the hospital.
But the time I had to soak up strength from Nick was too short. We were back on our feet again. Nick’s hand closed around mine and pulled me forward. It was as if I was floating through a thick cloud of night, through a nightmare. I wanted it to end. I wanted to wake up.
My shoes pounded the street’s dark concrete, then the hospital’s pale linoleum floors. Somewhere there, Nick’s hand left mine, and I stood, lost, looking around the too-bright surroundings. Why did hospital lights shine so brightly? Didn’t the dead deserve some rest? I took two steps to the right as a man and a woman in a lab coat passed me by, running.
A hand closed around my arm. A scream pierced my ear as I jumped back, my own scream.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” I whispered to the nurse next to me, “I thought you were…,” I trailed off, unsure of what to say.
“It’s okay,” she smiled empathetically. “I’m nurse Gwen. Please come with me.” She signaled ahead to a corridor.
I walked behind her, trying to shrink into Nick’s jacket. Behind me, a door closed loudly.
“Stop right there!” Nick’s voice echoed.
The nurse turned. “Excuse me?”
“Where do you think you’re taking her?” His long legs closed the distance between us in wide steps.
“To the examination room. She is obviously in shock,” the nurse rationalized.
Nick put his arm on my back. “She is not going anywhere without me.”
“Are you family?” She asked.
I opened my mouth, searched for the words, and finally found four of them. “I want him to.”
When the nurse was done taking my vitals, under Nick’s piercing gaze, I had somewhat recovered my ability to talk. A young looking doctor showed up and asked me a few questions. Something about my answers or vitals must’ve alarmed them because I ended up laying on the examination bed with an IV drip in one arm and Nick’s jacket covering the other arm along with the rest of my body. My initial thought was that I wanted everything to be normal. I wanted to go home. But then I remembered what had happened back home, and I had no desire to be there alone. Not now, not ever.
“It’s okay, love. Your blood pressure is just high. You will be fine.” Nick walked back into the room and leaned over me, stroking my hair.
“Where is Owen?” I asked, tears already stinging my eye at the memory of the detective on the floor with Tyler crouched on top of him like an animal, biting.
“He is in the operating room," Nick said, the clipped sentence carrying more meaning than the words. I didn’t want to ask more questions. Nick spoke anyway. Sitting on a small stool by my side, he interwove his fingers into mine, his thumb stroking my hand, then he started speaking in a soothing voice.
“You’re safe now, Marissa. It’s all fine. Tomorrow you can open shop if you want to. Except I think you need the rest. But you can have your staff reopen Black and Foam, and you can drop by later in the evening after you had woken up. How great would that be?”
I stroked his thumb back and tried to smile, failing.
“It was a trap, Nick,” I said.
“I know, and I wasn’t there.” His voice was bitter.
“You came,” I said. But the unspoken words we both knew. It wasn’t enough.
“I was at the vampire club when you called, Marissa. I came as fast as my bike would allow,” Nick defended against an accusation I neither voiced nor felt. “The girl who spoke to you in the bathroom, the redhead, she is a waitress at the club. I suspected that because of your description of her and because of what she told you. Having someone like her follow you and warn you meant one thing: somebody knew more than they were letting on. So I went back. It didn’t make sense, though, for a faction of such heavyweight as the red faction to lie and break the code to protect two run of the mill vampires. Justin and Tyler weren’t old vampires; they had no status, no power, nothing to warrant a cover up. But I already had my suspicions nevertheless, and with this girl following you, I couldn’t ig
nore the feeling that the faction knew more than they told me.”
“What did they know, Nick?”
“In my previous meeting, their leader Marcus was in for a brief visit, and I met with him. Him being here should have been warning enough that something out of the ordinary was going on. I’ll admit I was uneasy, but Marcus assured me it was two rebels acting out, that he was on our side.”
My thoughts were too clouded for me to be making hypotheses, so I just listened as Nick went on.
“Then you told me about the girl in the bathroom, her warning to you, and more importantly, about how you thought she was Bianca because Bianca used to have the same hair. Do you know who has hair like that? Some waitresses at the vampire club. It makes for a better tip.”
I flinched, Nick’s words identical to those Bianca had spoken ages ago when she first showed up to work with her new red hair.
“It makes for a better tip, Marissa, because the red hair is a sign that the waitress is also a blood cow for hire. She lets vampires feed on her for a price.”
“What are you saying? Are you saying Bianca was selling her blood?”
Nick nodded, his hands squeezing mine gently, his pale blue eyes searching for mine.
“That was my theory,” he said, “and that’s why I went back. The faction had been covering up for the two rebels because the victim wasn’t just some random girl; she was a waitress and a blood resource.”
“But Bianca had blond hair that night…”
“She quit two days before she got murdered, Marissa. When I faced Marcus with my doubts today, he had no option but to admit the faction’s involvement. Bianca left peacefully, according to him. But her departure must’ve angered Justin and Tyler for some reason. Maybe they had developed a taste for her. Maybe they felt she had no right to be in charge of her own destiny.”
“Their leader told you that? He told you Bianca worked for them?”
“Yea.”
So many things about Bianca had seemed wrong to me, but I would’ve never imagined she could be involved in something that dark, that dangerous. What had she been doing that night on my doorstep? Was she there to make amends, or to seek revenge? Or was she running away from the two vampires? How heartbreaking was it for her to finally quit and walk away from the underground life she had been leading for years only to have the life sucked out of her. What Bianca had been selling was taken from her for free that night; she’d been drained of her currency as I watched in horror. And then I became the new prey.
Nick’s voice was still a low, soothing hum. “Marcus says they were after Justin and Tyler themselves. The faction’s plan was to capture the two vampires and hand their lifeless bodies to us. That way, they wouldn’t have to admit their involvement, risk their reputation, or compromise their club.”
“Nick,” I turned to him. “Why were the two vampires after me?”
Nick’s eyes glittered with something I didn’t recognize.
“In the beginning, it was because I had seen them murder Bianca, I understand this much. But why did they continue to pursue me later after you had known about them, after their own faction had known about them? Everybody was after them anyway. What I saw or didn’t see was irrelevant.”
“I have been asking myself the same question for some time now,” Nick said, his voice deep in thought. “I asked Tyler earlier tonight as he lay on the ground. He said they wanted blood. Maybe you awakened their predatory senses somehow, and they wanted to feed on you at any cost. Although it doesn’t make sense for them to pay so dearly for a feeding. The normal thing to do with them exposed to so many people, their own leader included, should have been to run away.”
The fact that Nick shared my thoughts made things better somehow, even if the question hadn’t been answered. I sighed and relaxed into the hospital bed.
“It’s over now, love.” Nick murmured, stroking my hair again. “I’m here, and it’s over, and you’re safe. All will go back to normal.”
Chapter 24
Normal is underrated. We wake up to buzzing alarm clocks, slip on sensible black heels, listen to audiobooks on our way to work, then put in our eight hours, and go back to have dinner and watch TV. On Fridays, it’s either date night or girl’s night out, depending. We take all this for granted. Worse, many despise it; they hate the routine, crave a change, an adventure. Well, not me, thank you very much. I’ll have a scoop of normal with extra work hour toppings any day over the little adventure of the past three days.
The whir of the coffee machines greeted me as I slid through the backdoor and into Black and Foam. My heart skipped a beat. I always called Black and Foam my baby, and the feelings I had walking into the place I had built from the ground up were almost overwhelming. I paused, blinking the tears away. These were tears of the good kind, though. And when Caleb saw them, he smiled, the one dimple appearing in his right cheek.
It was already late noon when I woke up. My sleep wasn’t easy; it was hot, sweaty, and nightmare-ridden. I woke up shaking with cold sweat and with a scream at the back of my throat. The fact that I was sleeping in my own bed in my own apartment didn’t help with the first wave of panic. But slowly, as I sipped on a large cup of homemade americano, pulled all the curtains to bathe the apartment in sunlight, and texted Nick and Caleb, I felt more like myself. I wasn’t a weak victim with a mark on her back any more; I was the busy owner of Black and Foam, taking a much-needed shower and getting ready to get to work.
I have something for you. Look out of your window, Nick’s last text read.
The warm sunlight of the evening seeped into my freshly washed hair with a delicious tingle as I leaned out of my window. Below, my car awaited, a trusty blue shade of reliable normalcy.
Thank you! I texted him.
Nick hadn’t come home with me last night. He tucked me behind him on his bike, walked me to my door, tucked me in bed, and raced back to Owen. The detective was still in surgery when we left. He came out sometime in the early hours of the morning, according to Nick, and I had missed the morning visiting hours at the intensive care unit, where Owen will be spending the critical days ahead.
I couldn’t imagine what last night was like for Nick. How terrified he must’ve been with Owen and me under attack, how helpless when I had walked out of that dark, deserted building and to the vampires, how furious when his partner was almost bitten to death before his eyes. Nick probably had one of the worst nights of his life. Yet he found the time to go back to the freshly released crime scene at Black and Foam, recover my car, have it cleaned, and park it under my window. It was a gesture he didn’t even need to do. I was heading to Black and Foam first thing after waking up anyway, and Nick knew that. But he probably also knew that me seeing my car in the same spot it had been the night I witnessed Bianca’s murder would conjure up memories better forgotten. And he probably knew that the normalcy of taking my own car to Black and Foam was just what I needed today. It was the perfect normal start to what I hoped would be a perfectly normal day to herald my life returning to its normal state.
Now, my normal stood before me in a black apron, necklaces professionally tucked under a clean white T-shirt, with a single dimple showing up on his right cheek as he smiled. He was waving his hand in front of my face.
“What?” I pushed Caleb’s hand away.
“You’re blocking the blenders,” Caleb rolled his eyes comically. I was, too, and Black and Foam was crowded like never before.
I had texted Caleb last night from the hospital with instructions to open this morning. He took care of the rest.
“What’s going on?” I asked Caleb, pulling an apron of my own and tying my hair in a tight ponytail.
“I guess any publicity is good publicity,” Caleb said with a straight face, the smirk that would typically accompany the comment nowhere to be seen. Of course the nature of the publicity he was referring to was the murder of Bianca. It was nothing to smile about. I felt a pang of guilt at how I had moved on from her death so
fast, how I thought Caleb’s comment funny instead of tragic. Life is cruel that way. Humans are cruel that way. When one disaster strikes, the one before recedes into the shade. And what I had seen yesterday was disaster enough, even without detective Chase in the ICU fighting for his life.
“What exactly does everybody know?” I asked in an unnecessarily low tone; the clatter of the dessert trays and purr of espresso shots in the making was more than enough cover for my conversation with Caleb.
He pumped caramel into a blender jar and scooped some ice into it. “You haven’t read today’s papers. Have you?”
“No,” I answered, bracing for disaster.
“The Tribune. Look it up. We’re famous,” Caleb said, then started the blender.
I fished my phone out of my apron pocket. The article wasn’t on the homepage, but that’s where my good luck stopped. I clicked on local news. There, on the slide bar at the top of the page, my face greeted me. It was a picture of Black and Foam taken outside, with the neon sign shining against a dusky sky, and I was standing center between four staff members, Caleb included, smiling. “Local café witnesses freak murder," the title read.
Lucky for me, the shots I was pouring were done, or I would’ve probably burnt them. I turned to Caleb, and over the buzz of the blender, I let a stream of curses pour out of my mouth. Caleb just waited it out, pouring two iced drinks meanwhile, and picking up the two shots I had pulled to hand them to the customers.
It was all in there. My name, Black and Foam’s name and address, Bianca’s murder, me witnessing it. According to the article, the two criminals were shot in an exchange of fire.
Now, Owen was in a hospital bed unconscious. And there is only one person who could share this information in so much vivid detail. His name shone at me innocently from the article next to a direct quotation: special police consultant Nicholas Hayes. I am going to kill him.
