InsistentHunger

by Lyn Gala

  “It’s just another name for a vamp. She was a blood-drinker from mythology. Apparently she lost her kids, and after she turned demonic, she got obsessed with drinking the blood of everyone else’s kids. Vamps that get focused on killing one sort of human, that’s what we call Lamias.”

  “I call people like that serial killers.”

  “Undead serial killers,” he agreed.

  “But if that’s the case, then something of the person is left. They wouldn’t feel anger, they wouldn’t be driven by memories unless they had memories.”

  “Memories, maybe,” he agreed with a shrug. “They can talk and walk and pretend to be human if you don’t stand downwind. But they aren’t the person. If your Brady is a vamp, he’ll know your name, but he won’t give a shit about whatever relationship he had with you before.”

  Paige nodded. She didn’t agree for one second, but she nodded before she headed out into the yard, looking for her cell phone, and Jim just stood in the door watching her without trying to follow.

  Chapter Seven

  Paige had no idea where the day had gone, but the sun was starting to sink low when she pulled up into her driveway and hit the garage door opener. The thing clanked ominously, but then again, it’d been threatening to die for at least a year.

  Inside, Paige dropped her cell phone on the table and stared at the two black and white feathers on the carpet, the sharp shafts tipped with red. Pulling her weapon, she inched around the corner to the living room. Nothing looked out of place. She moved to the basement door and the padlock still hung from the mangled hasp.

  Inching down the stairs, Paige called out in a whisper, “Brady?” The basement was silent, a long slant of light cutting through the air. “Brady?” Paige moved to the bottom step and trained her gun toward the dark corner that had been the laundry room. She was starting to feel like one of those women from a horror movie. However, the alternative included calling for backup and she wasn’t prepared to do that.

  When she got close enough, Paige could see Brady huddled in the corner where the mold crept up the cinderblock wall. “Brady?” She looked around, but nothing else seemed out of place. The Christmas decorations had been picked up and the box sat next to the ruined shelf.

  Brady looked up at her, his hands stained with blood and the fluffy down from a chicken. Black and white flight feathers were scattered around the drain along with several of the larger bones from a chicken. It looked like a dog had chewed on them. From the pattern on the feathers, Paige was guessing that her Plymouth Rock chicken had been turned into dinner and she hoped Brady’s stomach was pretty strong because most people avoided swallowing chicken bones.

  “There’s something wrong with me. Oh god, I’m evil,” Brady said, his light brown eyes staring up at her with horror.

  “Brady? What did you do?” Paige kept her weapon pointed at the ground, but she couldn’t stop remembering how the vampire’s head exploded right before the body turned to dust. She didn’t want Brady dead, but at least now she knew he could die.

  “I’m evil. I killed it.”

  “What did you kill? Brady, talk to me.” Paige knew how strong he was. Who the hell knew what or who else he might have gone after. She had a couple of neighbors she didn’t like much, but she sure didn’t want them to end up getting eaten like the chicken.

  Brady stared at the bones. “I killed your chicken. It…. I was just so hungry and I ripped it apart and the blood smelled so good. God, I’m sorry. I can’t control this hunger, Paige. I’m evil.”

  Paige let out a sigh of relief. “Because you ate a chicken? God, Brady, you really scared the shit out of me for a second.”

  “I couldn’t…. Look what I did.” He gestured at the scattered remains of her barred Plymouth Rock.

  “I’ll get an arrest warrant for those serial killers over at Kentucky Fried Chicken.” Paige holstered her weapon.

  Brady pushed himself up off the ground. “You think it’s funny?”

  “No, I think that chicken wasn’t laying eggs and I was planning to eat her myself sooner or later.”

  “But not like—not with—”

  “The world’s worst table manners?” Paige interrupted. “No, I was going to be a little neater about it. I mean, I know you’re a single guy and you frat-boy types aren’t exactly known for neatness, but this is pretty disgusting.” Paige made a face at the streaks of blood up his arms and the cracked bones and bloodied feathers. However, mostly she felt relief.

  “Disgusting. That’s me.” Brady turned his back, his shoulder hunched and his body radiating misery over a chicken…a fucking chicken. Paige loved chickens and she still butchered and ate them.

  “Actually, disgusting is my basement. You’re just emo.”

  That forced a pained laugh out of him. “I think I’m entitled since I woke up dead.”

  Paige crossed her arms, sick of the roller coaster of emotions she’d been on for the last few hours. Confused, terrified, angry, frustrated, terrified again. She hadn’t felt this turned around for years and she hadn’t liked the feeling then either. She’d come back here to talk about what she’d learned, not cry over a chicken. Not a fucking chicken.

  She might cry over Brady, over the unfairness of this whole situation. She might cry over the murder victims the captain thought were linked to Brady’s death, women who had died from rapes so brutal their bodies couldn’t handle it. She’d even cry for the majority of their rape victims who did survive. There was a lot of shit she wanted to cry over, but a chicken did not make the list.

  “It’s a chicken! You’re emotionally shredding yourself over a chicken, Ross.”

  He turned on her, his bloodshot eyes and pale amber eyes flashing with anger. “I couldn’t control myself!”

  Paige took a deep breath and looked at the mess. “Brady, no one can control themselves if they get hungry enough.”

  “Really?” His voice dripped with disbelief. “They’d do this?”

  “Yeah, they would,” Paige said firmly. “There was that team in the Andes that crashed and had to eat the dead. People aren’t rational when they’re hungry, and if you’re hungry, you’re welcome to my freezer or my chickens. That’s what food is for—eating.” Paige walked over to the steps and sat down. She had passed her limit for weird three exits back and she wanted this whole conversation over. Of course, if it were over, they’d have to talk about what Jim had said and that led to even more weirdness.

  “But I’m not natural. I’m not human. I’m dead.” Brady sounded so weary that Paige studied him, a whole new worry pulling at her.

  “Don’t complain too much,” she said. “My first partner did the old-fashioned kind of dead. It was a lot less fun.”

  “What? Really? You lost a partner?” The unhappiness that had been weighing him down dropped away from Brady as he focused on her instead of his own problems. “I didn’t know that.”

  Paige shrugged. “I don’t talk about it all that much. A suspect’s bullet went in his gut, hit a hip bone and ricocheted through a couple of internal organs.”

  “And he died?”

  “Not immediately.” Paige shook her head. “The bullet he put in his own brain eight months later pretty much did the trick though.” Sometimes Paige thought she’d done something very evil in a past life to deserve all the violence in her life. She doubted her nice Lutheran minister would appreciate that thought, but then there wasn’t much about this whole situation that Reverend Ward would appreciate.

  “Shit.”

  “Exactly. So all this crap about being evil or wanting to die—it ends right now. We’re partners and we’ll figure this out together.”

  Brady ducked his head and gave a short laugh. “I thought for sure that when you saw this, you’d throw me out or stake me.”

  “For killing a chicken? Come on. I’ve been a cop for fifteen years, plus I grew up on a farm, and you thought a bit of blood…and gore…and feathers stuck to my cinderblock would send me over the edge?” P
aige looked over. “Okay, the feathers come close. You are cleaning that shit up.”

  Brady gave a desperate laugh. “I guess I underestimated you.”

  “Hell yes. Just…let’s leave the neighborhood dogs alone, okay?”

  Brady inched closer and his body language looked more like the Brady Ross she knew—a man who still had a touch of the lanky awkwardness of youth in his movements. “I can do that. I feel more in control now.”

  Paige thought about that. “After eating the chicken or now that you know I won’t toss you out on your ass for eating it?”

  Brad took a deep breath and looked over at the mess he’d made. “The first, I guess.”

  “Did you even consider thawing the steaks I had in the freezer?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I looked at them, but I just couldn’t bring myself to eat them. They looked—” He stopped, and from the way he pressed his lips together in a tight line, Paige guessed that there was something he didn’t want to tell her. The first priority was to make sure he wasn’t starving and he could control himself. Torturing him into confessing whatever thoughts he had in his head could wait until later.

  “Okay, that suggests you need more than blood or meat.”

  “So, I need to feed off something’s life?” he asked uncertainly. Paige watched him and waited for him to realize that’s exactly what she meant. It took a few seconds, but he broke eye contact, his gaze skittering away. “This is where you’re supposed to flee, screaming,” he said softly.

  “I don’t flee. And I only scream when I see those really big spiders. Hate those.”

  He rubbed a hand over his face. “God, you should be disgusted by me and you’re making jokes.”

  “Brady.” She stopped, caught between wanting to just order him to pull his shit together like he was still her trainee and wanting to comfort him as the victim of a horrific crime. He was both. However, she wasn’t sure how to handle that.

  He walked over to where an overly ornate mirror her father had given her was propped up against the wall. Crouching down, he reached out and brushed his fingers over the dusty surface so that four clear streaks reflected his otherwise dust-obscured image. So much for vampires not having reflections. Brady’s distorted face appeared in the mirror and he traced a finger along it. “I don’t know what I am. God, Paige, you should kick me out and do an exorcism or something.”

  Paige walked over and crouched down next to him, looking in the splotchy mirror with silver dots that didn’t reflect anymore.

  “That’s still Brady Ross,” she said confidently. Jim had told her about vampires in general, but he hadn’t said one thing that was true of Brady. She reached out and brushed her fingers over the image in the mirror. “Those are his brown eyes and his brown hair and his ridiculous dimple. Seriously. You’re a cop, you aren’t supposed to be cute,” she teased.

  “Stop.”

  “What? You’re going to press sexual harassment charges?” she asked playfully, but after a moment of awkward silence, she thought that maybe she’d missed the mark. “That was a joke. Not a good one, obviously, but I don’t have a lot of experience with t comforting the undead,” she offered.

  “I don’t want your comfort.”

  “I’m just saying that it’s still you.” She let her hand fall away from the mirror.

  However, Brady was shaking his head. Standing up, he backed away from the mirror. “No. No, it isn’t. That isn’t me. I can’t stand to look in the mirror because that isn’t me.” Whirling away, he stared at the block wall.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That.” Brady gestured toward the mirror without looking at it. “That isn’t me. That’s something weak. It’s like….” He sucked in a loud breath.

  “Like what?” Paige asked when the silence had gone on too long

  “I don’t know!” he shouted. Immediately, he fell silent and looked around with horror. Paige waited as he seemed to gather his thoughts. “Like parts of me are gone. Do you know that disgusted feeling that you get when you see someone who’s had some body part hacked off, when you look at a body that’s been cut into pieces?”

  Paige knew the feeling too well.

  “That’s what I feel when I look in the mirror, like there’s something gone, something fundamentally wrong with me,” Brady whispered.

  “Brady.”

  “Don’t go sympathetic on me now, Silver. Not now.” Brady looked up at the ceiling. Paige had seen enough people do that to know that he was trying to avoid crying. One sympathetic word and he was going to lose control of those tears and Paige knew her partner well enough to know he didn’t want that to happen.

  “Sympathetic? Are you kidding?” she asked in the most casual tone she could manage. “I was going to point out that you’re an idiot.”

  He whirled around to glare at her. “Excuse me?”

  “A first-class idiot. I mean, you’re adorable as hell and now you have the eternal life thing going for you and you’re complaining that it isn’t enough.”

  “I’m dead.”

  “You’re cute dead,” Paige pointed out. “I’ve seen plenty of DBs, and trust me, very few are as cute as you.”

  Brady’s mouth fell open. “This isn’t some storybook. I’m not going to start sparkling or something because you think I’m cute.”

  “Hell, one sparkle out of you and I’ll stake you myself,” she warned. “I’m just pointing out that you’re looking at the negative here. You think I’m looking at all the love stories and expecting you to be that vamp, but you’re expecting yourself to be the leading role in some horror film. Give it up, Brady. Yeah, this sucks. Yeah, things are different. How different is still up to you.” Paige stood up and crossed her arms as she gave him a good glare—the kind she’d give him when he’d been a trainee and he’d said something painfully stupid.

  “Shit, you shouldn’t be this calm.”

  “I’ll schedule a panic attack for next week,” Paige said. “Right now, we have things to figure out. So, if you’ve gotten over your emo moment, we have to move forward. So, you don’t feel like this body is you?” Paige studied him, remembering what Jim had said about the vampire really being a demon that took over the body. She had trouble reconciling that with the vampire standing in front of her because she was definitely looking at Brady Ross.

  Brady rubbed his upper arms like a kid trying to get warm. “It’s like that’s not me. I look in the mirror and it makes me sick.”

  “I met someone today—a hunter who killed a vampire right in front of me,” Paige confessed. Brady’s gaze snapped to her and his eyes seemed for a moment to glow with fury. The red certainly got brighter.

  “You saw…? You were close enough to see the vampire?”

  “Yep,” Paige said, ignoring the unvarnished fury in Brady’s face. “The hunter…he knew what he was doing and he gave me a few tips.”

  Brady leaned back against the wall and slowly slid down the cinderblock until he was sitting on the floor. “A hunter. You met a hunter.” Brady sounded shell-shocked. “What did he tell you?”

  Paige considered lying. It’d be easier on Brady, but it wouldn’t be fair to him. “He said that the ceremony is designed so that a person’s soul moves out and the demon moves in and takes over the body.”

  Brady nodded like that made sense to him.

  “It’s crap,” Paige said firmly before Brady could go getting some crazy idea in his head.

  “What?”

  “Brady, you came to me. You remembered our friendship. You asked me for help. If you weren’t in there, if this was just the body of Brady Ross walking around with some stranger in it, none of that would have happened. Jim is full of shit.”

  “Brady Ross wouldn’t have ripped a chicken apart because the sound of its heart beating made his mouth water with need. Brady Ross wouldn’t have bitten you,” Brady snapped, with an angry gesture toward her arm.

  Paige moved to a spot right in front of Brady and knelt down. “A
demon would have killed me. A demon would have fed when he was hungry, and you were starving this morning, weren’t you? You bit because you needed the blood, but you stopped because you are Brady Ross.” She reached out and rested her hand against his knee. His whole body shivered. “Alex thinks you like me,” Paige said. Even as she said it, she had no idea why she would throw out that random bit of nothing.

  He looked at her and the red in his face intensified. He swallowed so many times that she knew the answer before he said it. “I kind of did.” He shrugged and looked the other way.

  “Do you now?” Paige asked. She wasn’t exactly a hot commodity. She’d been fine in a girl-next-door way when she’d been younger, but now she had the tiny lines around her eyes and creases that led from her nose to the outside corners of her mouth. Some women fought the signs of age, but those wrinkles and the first wisps of gray in her brown hair were marks of honor—proof that she had survived the years. Not everyone she knew had.

  Her mother had died younger than Paige was now and her father—well, even if he was technically alive, life at the bottom of a bottle wasn’t really surviving. It was just hard to believe that Brady had a crush on her.

  He shrugged again. “Yeah,” he admitted softly.

  “Not exactly demonic,” she pointed out. “Not exactly sane, but not demonic.”

  “Don’t say it like that,” Brady said as he looked up. “You’re a strong woman—a beautiful one.”

  “Hell yes, I’m strong. I’m also average and more than a decade older than you.”

  “Which is why I never mentioned anything. That and the fact that I was afraid you’d kick my ass, file harassment paperwork and dump my bruised body on my parents’ lawn, not necessarily in that order.”

  “I might have,” Paige said with a small laugh. “I would have taken you to a psychiatrist first.”

  Brady rolled his eyes. Shifting around, Paige sat on the ground next to him. “This guy Jim wore garlic, so garlic works,” Paige said. She’d dumped it in her trunk rather than risk making Brady sick with it. “However, the vampire came out into the sun, so the whole immolation myth is clearly more myth than reality.”