Count On Me

by Abigail Graham

  All at once I’m not me anymore. I’m still me but I’m not me, I’m her. I can feel it, feel her behind my eyes, screaming. I don’t know where I am except it’s a dark room, an old room. It’s the odd details that hit me. No electrical outlets on the walls, candles in the chandelier over my head, oil burning in lamps on the sideboard. I move, but it’s not me moving, it’s her, her legs, her body.

  “Vincent?” my mouth works, and her voice comes out.

  A terrible, grinding sense of dread settles heavy in my stomach. I call out his name again but the house is empty, and dark. Something moves behind me but when I turn to glimpse the motion from the corner of my eye, nothing is there. A presence behind me makes me turn.

  “Brother,” I say to a grinning Vincent. “Is this a game? Where are the servants? Why have you doused all the lights?”

  He reaches over and snuffs out one of the remaining candles between his fingers. I feel another presence behind me.

  I turn and see my father. There’s something wrong with him. There’s something wrong with both of them. Vincent’s hands clamp on my arms like iron, and I scream and struggle and kick my legs but it doesn’t matter and then I’m on the floor, and he’s holding me down while father kneels beside me. He bends down on all fours and Vincent forces my chin back, his grip so strong I think he’s going to break my jaw, pushing so hard I feel bones grinding in my neck. With my free hand I try to push my father away but his lips are on my throat like a kiss.

  Then his teeth. It hurts, it hurts, the pressure builds and builds and then his teeth sink into my flesh and the skin bursts…

  Victoria shudders and tears her eyes away from mine. She curls into a ball, tucked up against the invisible barrier, and weeps softly to herself, but there’s nothing for her to make tears.

  “No more,” she pleads.

  “Let her out.”

  “Christine,” Mike says, insistent. “She’s playing you. You don’t know what this thing is capable of.”

  “Yes I do,” I say, very quietly. “She’s not going to hurt us.”

  He swallows hard, and stoops, murmurs a word and the barrier just blinks away. When I kneel in front of Victoria and slip my hands around her neck, the clasp on the collar is easy to find. It snaps apart in my hands, and I drop it on the floor like a dead snake. She doesn’t attack me or leap away. She sits there and hugs her knees and rocks forward and back.

  “It wasn’t the pain that was the worst,” she says, so softly. “He was my father, and my brother.”

  I put my arms around her and pull her to me, and she sags into my shoulder.

  “Christine,” Mike says, his voice heavy with warning. “She’ll bite you the first chance she gets.”

  “She can’t. I made her my thrall.”

  I take a deep breath as I hear Mike suck in his.

  “I’m not like you,” I say. I feel it in my hands, creaking between my bones when I make a fist. “I’m not like her, either. I’m something different. I’m new.”

  I lower Victoria to the floor, rest her head on my hand, and lightly touch her eyelids closed with my fingers.

  “Somnari vampiris,” I whisper.

  Something in me crackles and she goes limp under my touch, still and lifeless as a corpse, but when I take her wrist in my hand I can feel the faintest hint of a struggling, irregular pulse.

  “I didn’t hurt her,” Mike insists. “I needed to know it would work…”

  He doesn’t look at me as I stand up. He shakes his head.

  “You could have killed her but you didn’t. Even when you didn’t need her anymore.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  I slip my arms around him. “You’re not a monster.”

  “Yes, I am. We all are.”

  He hugs me back and lets me go.

  “It’s time,” I say. “I want to go outside, and you, we, me answers. Quid pro quo, Mike. I have questions.”

  He nods. “Let’s go.”

  16

  The sun. The sun. I want to stare at it but I can’t, it burns my eyes. I keep looking back anyway. The sunglasses help. I’m still sensitive to it, still feel it burning into my skin, but it feels good, a welcome sensation. I breathe deep and taste the shivering cold air. I should be cold. I feel like I need to be cold, but I’m so warm I slip out of my jacket and stand shivering in the chill and look out into the woods. The sun on my skin, a breeze in my hair and the stiff fingers of the cold gripping my arms.

  When I look Mike in the eyes it’s all there. There is nothing in the world for me but him. My hero, my savior, the love of my life.

  It’s all here now, all of it. I just have to look in his eyes and remember the first time we met. I came from money, he was at the school on charity. I was fourteen years old, he was fifteen, just barely. A girl named Sally Sackweather of all things mocked my baggy sweater, my buck teeth and limp, oily hair and pimples. It was Mike who stepped in and saved me. Mike who noticed I had a battered copy of The Lesser Chronicles of Conan in my locker. I remember the time I talked Andi into playing a tedious and boring game of Dungeons and Dragons with us, just the three of us. We needed more people, eventually found them. Andi might have still had the sheet for her character tucked away somewhere when she…

  Mike sits on the bench next to me and looks at his feet.

  “You want to know about Andi.”

  I nod.

  “They found her six months after you disappeared. Her body, I mean.”

  I suck in a breath, and my chest heaves. I don’t want to think about it like this.

  “They found her in a landfill. Even with the wounds to her,” he swallows, “throat, the cops wrote it off. Out of town girl gets drunk, gets high, walks down the wrong alley and never goes home. After they found Andi the officially canceled the search for you. They stopped looking. Everyone gave up on you.”

  “Everyone but you,” I say, and squeeze his hand.

  “I identified the body,” his voice lowers. “I mean, Andi’s. Her mother couldn’t do it, so I did it for her. They took my word for it. It was awful. She’d been out in the heat in the garbage for months, and they stripped her before they dumped her.”

  He stops when I choke up and cover my mouth.

  I can compose myself. “I need to hear this.”

  After the paperwork was done I talked with the medical examiner, one professional with another. I told him I was studying to be a doctor, told him our whole situation, about you. Somehow I managed to convince him to meet me for drinks. I think he wanted to unburden himself to somebody.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I know that feeling.”

  Another squeeze of my hand. “He told me they had cases like this all the time. No pattern, no discernible motive, except that maybe two thirds of the victims were female, young, sometimes younger than you were. A few as young as fourteen or fifteen. Runaways.”

  “God.”

  “They write them all off. The injuries they put down to decomposition, or animals. The official cause of the wounds to Andi’s neck was a coyote scavenging her remains. The examiner told me something interesting, though. It caught my attention.”

  “What?”

  “The bodies. Bugs won’t touch them. He never found so much as a maggot on any of them, even Andi after they found her in a dump. One time, he took one of the Jane Does and tried something. You know those beetles they use to clean bones?”

  “Beetles?”

  He rolls his shoulders. “When they want to clean specimen, museums use these beetles that eat dead flesh but don’t touch the bone. They clean it so thoroughly that it’s more efficient than boiling and bleaching them. There’s even beetle services. Hunters mail them remains, and the beetles clean the skull or whatever and send it back to be mounted by a taxidermist. Anyway, this examiner gets some of these beetles and he takes a severed finger from one of the bodies.”

  “Jesus,” I whisper.

  He shakes his head.

  “They refused to touch it. Event
ually they starved, the flesh untouched. The decomposition was all natural. See, the human body has all these systems that keep it functioning, repair damage, make new cells. When the body dies, that stuff all stops and the body falls apart because there’s nothing keeping it together anymore. Rotting, consumption by pathogens, is a whole separate process. One that doesn’t occur in these victims of these weird throat ripping attacks. It got me thinking.”

  “Thinking what?”

  “All kinds of things. Then I started thinking something very, very crazy. There was something else about the bodies. They were all drained of blood. Not completely, not perfectly like a movie, but they were bled and then deposited somewhere else. Somebody was taking out the blood and dumping them. So it hit me. What if it was a vampire?”

  “That must have gone over well with everyone.”

  He rubbed his hands together and looked down. “They thought I was nuts. I kept it to myself. That medical examiner told me about another body he saw once, though. Like none he’d ever seen. The head was torn off. Not cut, torn, ripped right off the base of the neck by something strong. He said it was like a car accident, but it wasn’t right, the other kinds of damage weren’t there. The body was fine otherwise, except something punched right through its ribcage and pulled out its heart. Neither the head nor the heart were ever found. The city wrote it off as an organized crime execution, the head removed to make identification more difficult, but they left the hands and feet attached. That makes no sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “The weird thing was the body itself. The organs were soup, except for the circulatory system, but the rest of the body was dried out, almost like jerky under the skin. He’d never seen anything like it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I laid it all out to your mom. She believed me. I needed more information and I started tracking it down.”

  “Where?”

  “I had to go to Oxford. To England. See, nosferatu are outcasts, they’re all over the place. I didn’t know what I was looking for yet, just tracing down some leads. I read anything I could. Folklore, mostly. Since vampires aren’t real there aren’t many serious books on them.” He sighs. “I ended up in Italy. That’s where the lamia made her move. She watched me doing research and moved to take care of me. They have rules, these things. One of them is that they keep quiet, keep things secret. Even the nosferatu do that. I was looking at the wrong things, and it attracted a lamia.”

  “What did she do to you?”

  “She tore me up. I was badly hurt, but she did something. Looked in my eyes. Then she changed her mind, I think. She bit her finger and stuck it in my mouth, and it hurt. It was like swallowing acid. She said if I was strong, I would make it. If I wasn’t I would die. I made it.”

  His hands flex in his lap. “I knew you were still out there. I couldn’t just abandon you. Never.”

  I take his hand.

  “When I woke up I was different. The lamia came back. She taught me things. She was impressed with me. She taught me how to fight, how to tap into the strength I draw from drinking the lifeblood of other people.”

  “The lifeblood of other people,” I say.

  “If the blood bank found out they’d kill me,” he says, nervously. “It was the easiest way. When a nosferatu uses the mind power, it’s brutal, crushing. Domination. When a lamia uses it it’s seductive, suggestive. A nosferatu dominates with hate. A lamia controls with love. It was easier just to steal blood from a convenient supply. I needed a lot. I knew I’d need power for what I was going to do. You don’t remember, do you?”

  “Remember what?”

  “The first five times I tried to help you. You kept getting away. You were strong, and you didn’t know who I was.”

  I shift closer to him on the bench. “How did you find me?”

  “Police reports. I knew you’d have to feed. So I started looking for signs of vampire activity. It’s mostly concentrated out West. They like warm, dry places. I started seeing reports that looked like attacks on the East Coast and went to check them out. You were working your way East, trying to come home.”

  I stifle a small sound and he puts his arm around me.

  “The worst pain was when I saw you the first time,” he whispers, “you looked through me like you’d never seen me before.”

  “He did that,” I snarl, my voice thick with fury. “He stole you from me. He ripped you out of my head. He…”

  I can’t help it. The tears burst out and I hug myself, sobbing.

  “He made me kill Andi. I killed her, Mike. I ripped out her throat and drank her blood. She was looking at me the whole time. I could see it in her eyes. She wanted to know why, why, why are you doing this to me.”

  I sob into his chest for what feels like hours while he rubs warmth into my arms.

  “What happened to her was not your fault.”

  “Yes, it is. If I’d just gone with her to that stupid show…”

  “He’d have taken you anyway. He had you marked from the minute you walked into your hotel.”

  “Why me? What did I do? What did any of us do to deserve this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I hate him. I hate him so much.”

  “I can feel it coming off of you. Christine…”

  He trails off as I stare into the distance.

  Andi watches me from the trees, her eyes burning.

  Help me.

  “Why do I keep seeing her?”

  “It’s him,” Mike says, softly. “He’s coming here.”

  I tense. “What do we do?”

  “We wait for him. Then we kill him.”

  “If he dies, what happens to Andi?”

  “In the books I read, it says if the master is destroyed, the shades bound to him are set free.”

  “Can we do that? Can we kill him?”

  “I don’t know, but we’re going to find out. You were still his thrall when I brought you here. He felt it when I severed that connection. Whatever you did to Victoria, he felt that, too. He won’t be able to stay away.”

  “I can feel him,” I murmured. “It’s like I swallowed a fishhook and it’s tugging on me.”

  I look off to the West and I can feel him there, approaching.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Kill him,” Mike says, flatly.

  “How?”

  “I have a plan for that. Let’s go inside and talk.”

  17

  As I watch my first sunset, the snow begins to fall in earnest. The sun was gone a while ago, but now it’s a pool of red on the horizon, like blood welling in a cup. It turns the sky a brilliant pink as the snow falls in thick, wet flakes, already turning the front lawn white, sticking to the trees and painting them into bones. As I stand on the front step I can feel it reaching for me, a touch almost on my skin. A darkness swirls in the light.

  “He’s already here,” I say. “Out there. I can feel him.”

  “On the wind,” Mike says, softly. “He can’t take physical form while the sun is up. Come on.”

  Back inside, he leaves the door open. Snow swirls in and cold air blasts into the house. He finally closes it, and I unfocus my eyes a little. Once he showed me how, it was easy. My third sight opens fully and I see. There’s lines of crackling energy flowing all through the house, sunk into its bones. The web of energy is strongest over the door itself, and the windows. They’re called wards. They make a wall, like the wall around the circle that bound me.

  “What do you mean he can’t take physical form?”

  Mike sighs. “He came on the wind, mist.”

  “You mean fog?”

  “Yes,” Victoria says, curtly. “Some time after he discarded you he killed Elizabeta and consumed her. All that she had became his. He’s like the stories, now. He can fold into shadows, turn invisible, change his form to mist, and walk in his own shadow in daylight. Why do you think I ran away?”

  She’s awake. She’s changed
her clothes, into my things. It’s odd seeing her wearing a color besides white. I can feel her standing behind me, like an invisible string tied between her wrist and mine. Victoria is tired, bone tired, and confused, her head swimming. She glances at my mother and I feel the hunger stir inside her.

  “Sarah, go to the library like we talked about,” Mike says.

  “Are you sure this is going to work?”

  “No,” he says. “You know what you have to do.”

  She squeezes my hands and kisses my cheek, then walks upstairs. Victoria goes with her. I feel nervous watching her stalk behind my very human mother, but she can’t hurt her. I won’t let her. Besides, mom is locking herself in the library with dad’s shotgun. I don’t know if that can kill Victoria, but it will ruin her day. It’s better than being out here.

  “Are they going to hold?” I say, tracing the invisible lines of crackling energy with my eyes.

  “They’ll do their job,” Mike says.

  I nod.

  All we can do now is wait.

  When I see it, I shiver. It creeps in around the trees, a mist too low, too heavy, and it floats and curls and swirls around itself, ignoring the wind. It flows across the lawn and just stops, a solid line curling back on itself, like a smoke ring.

  It’s him.

  The mist swirls there as the last light of day dies away, then rolls back, like a wave on a beach.

  Something moves in the dark, in the trees, and I feel a restless moth in my chest.

  Here he comes.

  I cover my mouth when he steps out of the trees. I’d know his cruel, aquiline face anywhere, but he’s changed, different. Bald, for one. Not a single hair on his egg-shaped head, and his ears have shriveled into little black husks, like dead leaves clinging to the smooth slope of his skull. No more bleached white finery. He’s dressed in filthy coveralls and a sweatshirt, the hood pooled around his neck. Part of me wonders if the clothes became mist too, if they’re somehow part of him.

  When he moves forward in a shambling slouch, it triggers something in my memory. A flicker of recognition.

  “He’s dressed like the thing at the party,” I murmur to Mike. “The thing in the filthy clothes, that they told me not to look at or talk to.”