by Drew D'Amato
Jasmine walked out to the bow of the ship to find Vlad swimming in the Pacific. She didn’t realize she was naked as she walked out. It was all right though, so was Vlad.
“Hun,” she said
Vlad looked up at her but found he couldn’t speak. The sun was just overhead and the sight of her was too much too fathom all at once.
“Vlad?”
“Sorry something beautiful just came into view.”
Jasmine smiled. “Do you like me just for my looks?”
“Nooo, I don’t know anyone else who can steer a boat.”
She smiled again. He was good. Jasmine felt a little fear grow inside her. That foreboding fear that this was too good to be true.
“Do you have any service on your cell phone?” she asked.
“I don’t know, I haven’t tried. But I haven’t gotten any messages, so probably not.”
“Mind if I use yours in case you do? My dad gets nervous if he doesn’t hear from me.”
“Not all, go ahead.”
She walked into the cabin, and a few seconds later came back out.
“Nope, you don’t have any service either.”
He could tell she was a little distraught. He started to swim back to the boat.
“Well let’s get ready to go back in.”
“No, we don’t have to do that already.”
“No, you have class today.” Vlad climbed up the ladder and onto the boat. “Besides, it’s not like you aren’t going to see me again.”
2
Jasmine steered the craft while Vlad stood next to her drinking his coffee in the flybridge above. They were dressed now. The coast started to come into view.
“Vlad can you go see if any of our phones are working, yet? I left them both on the table below.”
Vlad nodded with the cup at his lips and turned around. He climbed down the ladder to the galley below underneath. He picked up both phones on the table. As he turned to make his way back up he glanced at his phone. There were three voicemails, and two text messages. He checked the text messages first. They were both from Malachi: Vlad call me it’s an emergency, and: Vlad please call as soon as you can.
Vlad grew nervous. He hurriedly climbed up to the flybridge, handed Jasmine her phone, told her he had to make a call, and made his way back down to the galley. He didn’t even hear what Jasmine had said. Where was Jericho, and why hadn’t I heard from him? He dialed Malachi’s phone expecting to hear either Malachi or Jericho. Neither answered, but someone did.
“Vlad?”
“Father Pacami?”
“Vlad, where have you been?”
“I was out at sea, I just got service now. What is going on, and tell me from the beginning?”
“I got a call last night from a nurse at the Cedars-Sinai Center, telling me there was a patient in here asking for me specifically to give him his last rites. Cedars has their own Catholic, Jewish, and Christian Chaplain, but he asked for me specifically. I told Father Montes about it and then took a taxi here as soon as I could. It was Malachi, he was beaten to a pulp. He and Jericho were found in a parking lot near the Staples Center. The cops assumed they were at the Lakers game. They found ticket stubs in their wallets.”
“The cops?”
“Yes, LAPD got an anonymous phone call that two men were mugged in a parking lot. Malachi can talk, but that was all he told the cops, too. He and Jericho were mugged and he was beaten with some type of small bat. The police did not find any money missing. They figured the perps got scared for some reason and ran off in fear. Malachi told them they were wearing ski masks, he couldn’t describe them.”
“How is Jericho?”
“Vlad… Jericho’s dead.”
Vlad dropped the phone. He sat there like his life was just flushed out of him. He broke into tears as he sat on the couch next to the table. He heard Jasmine coming down the ladder, “Vlad, my Dad was just nervous where I was, he said we don’t have to—”
Before she could finish her sentence, she had made it down the ladder and found Vlad holding his head in his hands crying.
“What’s wrong, what’s wrong?” She started to panic.
He couldn’t respond. She saw his phone on the floor next to it, and picked it up. She could hear Pacami’s voice asking for Vlad as it got closer to her ear. She spoke into it.
“Hello.”
“Jasmine, this is Father Pacami. Is Vlad all right?”
“He’s sitting here in tears. Father, why are you calling Vlad?”
Pacami did not know how to answer, and what would be telling her too much. He didn’t know if Vlad explained anything about Malachi or Jericho. Pacami was trying to stall. Vlad had his wits to know he had to do some explaining.
“One of my cousins that I lived with died last night. Father Pacami was asked to give the last rites to my other cousin who survived.”
Jasmine started to understand.
“Father, where are you?” she asked into the phone.
“Cedars-Sinai.”
“We will be there soon.”
She hung up and hugged Vlad. “What happened,” she asked.
“They were mugged after the Lakers game.”
“Did they catch who did it?”
Then it dawned on Vlad. Who did do this?
“They were wearing masks. They don’t know who did this.” Vlad was trying to hold back his tears in front of his woman.
Jasmine made her way out of the galley and back up to the flybridge. Vlad felt the boat throttle up. He climbed up after her.
“Are we going too fast?” he asked.
“It’s about an hour from the marina to Cedars without LA traffic. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”
Who did do this? They better hope whoever they are that the police got them before Vlad did, because he will have no mercy on them, he will…Then it dawned at Vlad, what would he do? He was after all, just a man.
3
Vlad acted like a zombie as he worked through all the paperwork for checking the boat in. Jasmine could see he was in no shape to drive, so she drove his Mulsanne to Cedars-Sinai. Vlad was very quiet on the drive. She tried to console him as they dealt with the traffic. He was responsive enough to be polite, but he never let her on at all to what he was really thinking.
He felt guilty. He felt his love had killed Jericho. If he had not given up immortality for what he felt, if even he allowed Jericho to drink the blood and not destroy it, Malachi would not be in intensive care, and Jericho would not be dead because to two punk muggers needed some money—probably to buy drugs. They had mugged two gods. Ex-gods. Was this a cruel twist? Was this the other foot dropping? The dark karma that made life par. He gets the love of his life, and then loses his closest friend.
Hours later Vlad would wish that was the only bad news.
4
Jasmine took the lead when they got to the hospital. She was familiar with Cedars. She led him to the information desk on the plaza level. However, when the nurse asked for the name, he was blank. He wasn’t spacing out. He just had no idea what name Malachi was registered under. It wasn’t Malachi, it was one of his aliases. Time was adding up. How could he explain not knowing the name of the cousin he was just crying over?
“George Patterson,” he heard from the voice of Pacami behind him. Vlad turned his way. “Are you George’s cousin? I was the priest he asked for.”
“Yes, yes I am.” Vlad said.
The nurse kept looking at the computer, but Jasmine had found the whole exchange odd. I thought his name was Malachi, and why are they acting like strangers, they were just talking on the phone? It appeared there was something more between these two than Vlad was letting on. But why would he hold back?
“He’s in the Saperstein tower. That’s the critical care tower, attached to the north tower,” the nurse said.
“Can I visit him?” Vlad asked.
“Yes, but only one person, and only for an hour at a time.”
“That’s fine, how d
o we get there?”
“I know where it is,” Jasmine said.
“Hold on though, I have to call up to make sure they’re not busy with him now.”
The nurse called. The three of them looked at each other, each not sure what to say, each full of questions. Pacami and Vlad each had questions for the other, but neither wanted to say it in front of Jasmine. Jasmine wanted to ask Vlad why he paused for his cousin’s name and why Pacami acted like he didn’t know Vlad, but she didn’t want to say anything about it in front of the nurse. So all of them stood there with no idea of what to say, and if the nurse looked up from the phone she would have seen the awkwardness written all over their faces.
The nurse hung up. “You can all go up, room 542, a doctor will meet you outside. But we could not find any type of insurance for your cousin.”
Vlad pulled out a wad of cash, and dropped fifty hundred dollar bills on the desk.
“That’s five grand, keep the tab open.”
“Well okay,” the nurse was a little shocked. “I just need ID’s from you all to give you your passes.”
Shit, Vlad thought as he dug into his wallet. Jasmine hadn’t noticed the fake name Vlad used to charter the boat, even when he returned it. Vlad kept an eye on making sure of pocketing all the paperwork, and avoiding her seeing the name it was rented under. But now as the nurse handed back the visitor’s pass, he saw it coming,
“This is yours Miss O’Reilly, and this is yours Mr. Wellington.”
Jasmine’s face rose in surprise and she stormed off from the desk. Pacami and Vlad followed her lead. As they got out of range of the nurse, Jasmine started with her questions.
“You said your name was O’Connell. Who the hell is Mr. Wellington?”
“It’s a fake name.”
“What, Father do you know about this? How do you guys know each other anyway? You seemed familiar on the phone, then acted like strangers back there. What the hell is going on?”
Pacami paused unsure, and let Vlad answer.
“I actually met Father Pacami at a book store. We had an interesting discussion, and he was the one that sold me on the idea of getting back into the church and so I chose his parish.”
Pacami nodded in approval. The story worked, it was simple, and Jamsine bought it too. The next answer would be trickier.
“What is the deal with your cousin? He has no insurance, and you seemed to blank out when asked his name. Father, why did you two act like you didn’t know each other?”
Vlad again spoke for both of them. “My cousin is, how do you say, off the grid.”
“Why is he off the grid?” she asked with a hint of suspicion.
“Have you ever heard a guy say, ‘If anyone ever raped my child, I’d kill them.’?”
She nodded yes. “My father is one of those guys. He always says that about his little girls.”
“Well, my cousin is one of those guys who actually did it.” The story had just struck him and he went with it.
A fugitive from the law, but not someone you could hate. Pacami chimed in.
“It was his son, it was by a priest. That was Vlad’s aversion to the church when we met. I told him there is evil everywhere, but he should not let it shake his faith.”
Vlad turned to Pacami pleased. He seemed apt at bullshitting. He should, he’s a priest.
“Well killing the priest started a man hunt. The priest had family connected to the IRA, very bad people to upset. His wife and child are still with the rest of my family in Ireland. They have nothing to fear because he faked his own death—took his boat out to sea, and blew it up—and that was the real reason why we moved out here. I have a fake name for safety’s sake more or less. I need an ID when I’m doing anything involving him. I used one when we traveled together last week. I stalled at his name, because I had no idea which alias he had on him when the police discovered him. He has a few.”
“I’m sorry Vlad, I didn’t think of it when I spoke to you,” Pacami said.
“It’s all right. Pacami also helped convince my cousin to get back into the faith, too. That is why he asked for Pacami specifically.”
Jasmine processed it all. It was a story so crazy it was easier to believe than deny. “You’re probably the only priest he trusts,” she said to Pacami.
“Yes, exactly,” Pacami said rather fast.
“I never heard about this priest killing.”
“It happened back in Ireland, not much of our news travels over to America,” Vlad said.
“So was that why you really went to Ireland last week?”
“Oh no, someone from my family did die. But while over in Ireland, he avoided running into his wife and child. He didn’t want to risk putting them in harm’s way. That’s why he avoids contact—they stay over there and he stays over here.”
Jasmine turned her head forward. She believed them, she had no more questions.
“They always come in threes,” she said.
“What does?”
“Death, it always comes in threes. First your family member in Ireland, now your cousin Jericho.”
Vlad didn’t like that omen.
5
They got to room 542. A middle-aged doctor of Indian descent, Dr. Patel, greated them at the door.
“Mr. Wellington, Mr. Patterson is your cousin, the nurse informed me? She also explained to all of you only one at a time can see him?” He looked at all three of them.
“Yes, it’s no problem. Doctor, how does he look?”
“Well he was beaten up pretty bad. He has dark urine, like the color of soda. It’s a sign of kidney trouble, he has rhabdomyolysis. It usually happens to victims that are crushed. He wasn’t attacked with many blows, but the blows he did get had some force. His femur broke. We can’t break that on a skeleton with a hammer. It takes up to 550 lbs of pressure to break. The kidney trouble is tied to the muscles in his leg. They ruptured in his leg and myoglobin has gotten into his kidneys. This is rhabdomyolysis, the kidneys cannot do their job. The waste that should be coming out of his urine is now poisoning his body.”
“Oh my God, whats going to happen?”
“Well he’s on hydration and dialysis. He should make a full recovery, but nothing is guaranteed. If he hadn’t been discovered he might have died. You can speak to him, but in five minutes I will be in to let him rest.”
“Thank you doctor.”
Vlad looked back at Jasmine and Pacami, and then made his way through the door.
In the room, Malachi was hooked up to machines. He had a cast over his right leg. A bandage covered the right side of his face. Vlad saw the movement of his left eye, the only eye that was uncovered. He knew Vlad was in the room. Vlad stood over him and almost cried.
“Stop, I know you don’t have much time,” Malachi said.
“How could this happen? A day of being mortal and two punks almost kill both of you.”
Malachi was confused, and then realized. “Vlad, it wasn’t some punks. I just told the cops that. It was Radu.”
“Radu! How can it be Radu?”
“There was an escape route to his panic room. He ran to it while his panic room was filled with smoke. You never had a chance to see him, he moved too fast. Last night, he landed in LA. He saw us on the court at the Laker game on television and tracked us down. He told me, to tell you, he will let you and Jasmine live your life, as long as you don’t interfere with him taking over the world.”
Vlad did not need long to decide.
“Fuck that. A promise from Radu is not a promise at all. And I cannot stand by and let every human suffer for my own selfish love. I would give the world for her, but I will not give Radu the world. If he is alive, we must kill him.”
“How?”
“The way we had intended to last week, as humans, with human powers, when he sleeps.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Why not, we were ready to do it a week ago?”
“A week ago we were fools. We underestimated the disc
repancy between a human and a vampire. Seeing them move last night, I…I didn’t even see them move. They are too fast, too strong, and we are too slow. They toyed with us. An infant has a better chance against a man, than you do against a vampire. Radu had more strength and speed than you when you were both vampires. Now, there is no chance.”
“Strength doesn’t matter. I’ll get them when they are sleeping.”
“How, you have to find him? And don’t assume he will not keep someone on guard. Now that you aren’t a threat how big do you think his army will be by tomorrow, by next week? Just stay out of it. He will let you have Jasmine and your life. What else can you do?”
“Stay out of it, and stand by as he kills Jasmine’s family, and tell her I could have stopped it?”
“You can’t stop it. There is no more Blood, you destroyed it. You have no more power to counter his. He is the only vampire left. Stay with your love and hope he fails. Hope the humans kill him. We lost Vlad.”
“We have not lost anything as long as I still breathe. How can I sit by and let him takeover the world? If I choose not to fight, then I do not deserve Jasmine’s love.”
“Vlad it’s not a choice, not as a human, trust me. If only we had the Blood.”
“Yes, but then I would still not be able to have Jasmine. One cannot become a human again if one willingly drinks the Blood.”
“I would drink it. I’ll become the master. You can trust me. And when it is all over, and we do kill him for good. I will let you kill me. You could still have Jasmine.”
“You would do that?”
Malachi stared at him with his one available eye. “When I told you I would die for you, I meant it. I never cared about dying. Maybe that was why I fought so good, I was never scared. I just cared about winning. We have lived long enough, and once this war is won, I don’t have much to live for.”
“Malachi, I…I don’t know what to say.” Vlad started to tear up again. He truly was a good friend.
“Say nothing, because it doesn’t matter. There is no more Blood.”
Dr. Patel came into the room. Without saying a word Vlad left. He was mostly silent for the ride too as he drove Pacami and Jasmine back to her car. He spoke when they arrived at the marina.