Five
Decisions, Decisions
I woke to the gentle sound of someone humming Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage.” My eyes snapped open in alarm.
Judging from the clutter around me, I was in Nathan’s apartment. I couldn’t remember how I got there. My stomach growled, and my memory slowly returned. I’d been hungry. I’d gone in search of blood. Then I’d met Dahlia.
Being stabbed, now that’s something I definitely remembered. I lifted the blanket that covered me. My wounds were carefully bandaged. Dried blood stained the gauze wrappings, but I resisted the urge to poke at them. It didn’t take much to upset a fresh wound, and I didn’t want to start bleeding again.
I reached up and gingerly felt my face. Completely monster-free. Aching all over, I sat up. My torn sweatshirt had been carefully folded on the arm of the couch. I pulled it over my head quickly, trying not to dwell on the fact that Nathan had seen me in my ratty, laundry-day bra.
“Feeling better?” he asked as he entered the living room.
I could smell the blood in the mug he carried. My throat was a desert and my stomach was trying to digest itself, but I turned my face away.
“Drink,” he said, holding out the cup to me. He must have sensed the reason for my reluctance. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve seen a few vampires in my time.”
“Not like me.”
“Exactly like you.” He knelt in front of me, and I hid my face. My bones shifted under the mask of my fingers as he pressed the cup against the backs of my hands. “You need to drink this.”
I heard the resolve in his voice and knew I wasn’t going to win.
“Don’t look at me,” I whispered.
“Okay.” He moved to the farthest corner of the room and turned his back.
The blood was warm, as Dahlia’s had been, but thicker, as though it had already begun to clot. It coated my tongue and left a faint taste of copper in my mouth. It was like drinking penny-flavored Jell-O that hadn’t set. This repulsed me, but instead of gagging, I gulped half of it down. I felt gluttonous. If I were drinking straight from someone’s neck I probably wouldn’t have thought of manners, but it was much different sitting in Nathan’s living room, drinking from a mug like a civilized vampire.
I sipped the blood self-consciously and studied him. It was my experience that people weren’t nice to strangers. In med school it’s every student for his- or herself. In fact, most of us went out of our way to intimidate the “competition.” The eat-or-be-eaten attitude had become so ingrained in my psyche, that I’d come to expect such behavior from everyone. But Nathan had been nothing but helpful from the start, which was surprising considering he was a week away from killing me if I didn’t join his vampire cult.
It didn’t seem right that a man so attractive would be such a complete stickler for the rules. He must have worked for the IRS in a past life.
Of course, I didn’t know much about Nathan’s current life. In the brief phone conversations we’d had during the past week, he’d revealed only generic information about himself and hadn’t given me much room to ask questions. If I was going to trust anything he told me, I needed some answers.
There was no time like the present.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Thirty-two.”
“I meant including…” I didn’t know how to phrase the rest.
“Oh, that,” he said, and it sounded as if he didn’t care to dispense that information. “I’ve been a vampire since 1937.”
I tried to conceal my disappointment. I had expected to hear he was hundreds of years old, that he’d walked the battlefield with Napoléon and discussed the mysteries of the cosmos with Nostradamus, like the vampires in the movies. “That was the year ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ became the national anthem, you know.”
“I didn’t know that. I wasn’t an American at the time.” He glanced over his shoulder, and I immediately covered my face.
“It’s okay,” he assured me. “You’re back to normal.”
I leaned over a clear patch of the glass-topped coffee table to check my reflection.
“It’s the hunger,” he said as he straightened up the room. “The worse it is, the worse you look. The same goes for anger, pain and fear. It’s very animalistic.”
How anyone could be blasé about his entire head morphing into a Harryhausen-esque special effect was beyond me.
“The scary part is that it gets worse with age. Some of the real old vampires even get horns when they change, or cloven feet. But you can control it, with practice. You just have to calm yourself, find your center, all that New Age crap. It’s very Zen.” He took the empty cup from my hands and headed to the kitchen sink.
New Age crap? This from the guy running the witchcraft minimart?
“Now, how about telling me what happened tonight?” he called over the sound of running water.
I shuddered. “Can’t we start with what the weather’s been like?”
“No.”
“It was nothing, really,” I said, trying to sound casual.
“‘Nothing’ rarely stabs people.” He came in and sat next to me on the sofa. The scent of him teased my nostrils, and I rather seriously debated whether or not to lean against him and inhale deeply.
I really need to get out more.
“I needed blood.”
Nathan frowned. “You didn’t hurt anyone, did you?”
“Okay, even if I had, did I look like I won that particular fight?”
He looked relieved that he wouldn’t have to chop off my head.
“I followed a girl into a club downtown. One of those…Goth clubs.” I lowered my voice, as if Goth were a dirty word.
“Club Cite?” he asked, and I nodded. “That was very dangerous. Clubs like that are full of all kinds of undesirables. People who think they’re vampires, wannabe vampires and vampire hunters. Amateurish vampire hunters, but with enough knowledge to kill you, even if it is just a lucky accident.”
“I know that now,” I said bitterly, remembering the metallic taste of Dahlia’s blood on my tongue. I took a deep breath. “I met a girl there. She told me she’d let me—” I stumbled over the words. “Drink her blood. I paid her.”
Nathan sighed and shook his head, reaching for one of the notebooks on the table. “What was her name?”
“Dahlia.” I looked over his shoulder as he flipped through the pages. There were crudely drawn diagrams and notes in the margins. A paper clip held a Polaroid in place at the top of one page. He handed the photo to me.
“Is this her?”
I looked at the photo. The woman did look like Dahlia, but a black Betty Page wig covered her red curls. The eyes were the same. Hard and crazy. I wondered how I hadn’t noticed that before. I told him it was her and returned the picture.
He stood, cursed and threw it down on the table. I shrank away, surprised at his sudden vehemence.
“I told you to come here if you needed blood! Why didn’t you come to me?” he shouted.
“I did! You weren’t home!”
“You