He’d been falling apart at the seams since Aidan had stuck him with that needle. I’d just severely underestimated how fast he was unraveling.
“It might not work,” Ry said.
“It will,” I insisted, but there was no guarantee.
Making a vampire wasn’t as easy as shoving vampire blood down their throat until the magic took over. The person had to be on the verge of death, and ideally, the vampire needed to drink a good amount of the person’s blood first. There were theories about how allowing the person’s blood to mix with the vampiric blood allowed their body to accept the magic more easily and gave them better odds of turning rather than dying. Some people claimed that was total crap, but almost everyone I knew who’d survived to be a vampire had it done that way, even the people like Kate who’d been on death’s door. There had been time for her sire to drink her blood before giving her his. And even if you did everything right, there was no guarantee. Sometimes, it just didn’t work.
Ry’s face was full of trepidation. He knelt on the rug and stroked Cazimir’s cheek. He bent his head so he could get at his throat more easily and then gave me a warning look. I wasn’t sure if he didn’t want me to watch or if he was just trying to let me know that shit was about to get real, but I met his gaze head-on and folded my arms over my chest.
Cazimir had been a useless goddamn lump on my sofa, but he was in my boat and I was not going to lose a member of my crew before I found a way to make us both immortal again. If Cazimir died, so did the only person on this entire fucking space rock who could understand what I was going through. I needed him to live. And I needed him to become a vampire again so I could prove to Sean that it could be done.
I needed this almost as badly as Cazimir did.
Ryuto started to bite Cazimir’s throat but stopped short, his eyes going wide. “Fuck,” he said. “Heart’s stopped.”
I shook my head, disbelieving. This couldn’t be happening.
Being on the verge of death is one thing. Being dead is another. There’s a fine line between life and death, and once you cross it, not even vampirism can bring you back.
Ry compressed Cazimir’s chest, like you would for CPR, and breathed into his mouth. And then he slashed his own wrist with one of his fangs. He pressed the wrist to Cazimir’s mouth and continued compressing the chest with his free hand.
“Get me your Taser,” Ry hissed.
I grabbed my purse and fumbled around until I found the plastic square. I handed it to Ry, who whispered an apology to the mostly dead man before him. He pulled up Cazimir’s t-shirt and pressed the Taser against his pale chest.
Ry hit the “on” button and the Taser flared to life. Cazimir’s body jolted with the electricity and then Ry let out a breath. Cazimir’s heart had started again. I could see his chest rise and fall. Caz’s mouth had fallen open.
Ry slit his wrist with his fangs again and shoved it against Cazimir’s mouth a second time. Now Caz’s throat moved as he swallowed. He didn’t open his eyes, but he drank.
Relief washed over me like a tidal wave. The tension in my muscles receded as they turned to Jell-O, shaky and unsteady. After a few moments, Ry pulled his wrist away from Cazimir’s mouth. Blood dripped on my now-ruined rug until the small wound healed itself.
Cazimir lay still but not dead. Visibly, miraculously not dead. Tears pricked at my eyes as I watched the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest. Once the magic took over, it would kill him, or at least the human parts of him. That would be messy. That was okay. I could replace the sofa.
Ry flopped onto the easy chair as if the weight of gravity were too heavy for him to bear. Neither of us spoke. We both knew the odds of this working. They weren’t great. The fact that Ryuto and Caz had been exchanging blood with each other recently increased the odds of Cazimir coming out unscathed. But there was no guarantee.
There was nothing to do but wait.
* * *
Look, I’m going to skip the nitty-gritty details of what dying entails. Suffice to say, by the time the clock struck four in the morning, my sofa was ruined, the apartment stank of death and bodily fluids, and Cazimir was still unconscious.
The blood was working inside of him, but what it was doing, neither of us could say for sure. But we knew we couldn’t risk letting Cazimir get exposed to sunlight. And while my apartment had vampire-safe blinds I could shutter, it wasn’t a good idea to lock myself in for the day with someone who might wake up ravenously bloodthirsty.
After some discussion, Ry decided to take Cazimir back to his “residence” (apparently he’d learned Super Vagueness from his sire), where he could monitor him during the day and get him fresh blood that night. Assuming Cazimir needed it.
God, I hoped to hell he needed it.
Ry hefted Cazimir’s limp form over his shoulder and then extended a hand to me. I shook it. His skin was cool. He’d gotten paler since giving all of his blood to Caz, and he didn’t look human at all. People he passed on the street would see a human, but only because that was what they wanted to see. Anyone who looked closely would see the monster he was.
I’d given Ry my cell phone number and he promised to keep me updated.
“Take care of yourself, yeah?” he said to me. “And stop jumping random vampires who cross your path. That’s a damn good way to get yourself killed.”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I feel like it’s a damn good way to stay alive.”
He shook his head ruefully and then carried Cazimir out the door. If anyone asked or gave him odd looks, I was sure he’d tell them Caz was drunk, like he’d told the man who’d seen me on my ass on the sidewalk.
When they were gone, I got a box of big black trash bags out and began stuffing sofa cushions into them. I cut up the rug and shoved it into bags, too, and carted it all downstairs.
I’d need to haul the sofa’s frame out later, although it looked like the cushions had taken the brunt of the damage and I might be able to keep the frame.
I locked my door, including the deadbolt, and did a quick check of all my closets and under my bed. It was relief not to find another corpse stashed in my home, but Fiona’s lack of action was becoming unsettling. Maybe she’d done the smart thing after all and bolted for Europe or China or Mexico. I could only be so lucky.
I went to the window and looked out. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the world had faded from black night to gray dawn. Early-morning joggers bounced past on the sidewalk, along with a woman in a bathrobe walking a small white dog.
No sign of Eva.
Cold moved down my spine. I wanted to be relieved she’d stopped holding vigil beneath my window, but something felt wrong about that. Eva hadn’t struck me as the type of person to give up.
I was too tired to worry about it. I shut my blinds, throwing my empty apartment into darkness. I brushed my teeth, swished with mouthwash, and then tore off my clothes and climbed into bed for the day.
Chapter 20
My phone buzzed and I snatched it off the bar so fast I almost dropped it, but it was just an alert for a spam email. I sighed and set it down again. I was sitting at a trendy new bar, nursing a glass of white wine and waiting for word about Cazimir. The way I was glancing at my phone, my fellow drinkers probably thought I was waiting for a friend or a date.
It was a good thing I didn’t know where Ryuto lived, because it wouldn’t be smart to bang down the door of a hungry new vampire and his sire, and I was so far beyond the edges of patience, I was ready to do just that.
Finally, around eleven, Ry messaged me. The entire text consisted of a thumbs-up emoji and an address. I stared at it for a moment, trying to decide if I appreciated Ry’s brevity or hated it. Either way, I took that to mean Cazimir was alive and let my stomach unclench itself as I paid my tab. I left my wine mostly untouched and summoned a car with an app.
I could still remember the awe I’d felt back in the 1910s, when my neighbor had purchased an automobile, years before my own parents managed to buy one.
If you’d told me back then that someday there would be a tiny device I could keep in a pocket that would summon a car to take me anywhere I wanted, I would have laughed in your face. If I dwelled on it sometimes, I could drown in a sea of amazement at how much the world had changed since I’d been born in 1903.
Ry lived in a small house in Ballard, on an unassuming residential street. It was a quiet neighborhood at this time of night. There were plenty of lights on inside the nearby houses, but there was no foot traffic or cars driving along the narrow street. It was a great place for a vampire to live: smack-dab in the middle of unassuming people, going about their lives, in a neighborhood where a loud party probably drew the cops in under an hour.
It might seem counterintuitive for an immortal monster to live in the thick of human life, which was why stories always put Dracula in a castle on a hill, far outside of town. But the truth was, vampires loved the thrum of heartbeats and the music of blood singing through veins. They loved the rich, heady scent of blood and sweat and living bodies. They were not super big on the smells of cooking, and summer barbecues could really test a vampire’s patience—the smell of cooking meat is pretty vile to creatures who prefer live prey—but otherwise, suburbia was a great place for vampires to reside. Come up with a lie about working the night shift and having to sleep all day and even nosy neighbors were neutralized. If not, well, it wasn’t like vampires didn’t have ways of dealing with people who couldn’t mind their own goddamn business.
Ry’s house was a basic two-story craftsman-inspired house painted green with brown trim. His front yard was a single foot of grass in front of his narrow porch, but a fence behind the house suggested he had something of a backyard.
I knocked twice, loudly. I was anxious to see for myself that Cazimir was a vampire again. To know for a fact that it was possible for me to become a vampire again.
Ry opened the door a moment later in a plume of cigarette smoke. He had enough color in his cheeks to suggest a recent blood binge, which explained the smell of copper that rose over the odor of cigarettes.
“You came,” he said. He sounded a little surprised. A small smile tugged at his lips. I couldn’t read that smile, but it reminded me of Aidan’s self-assured smirk and I didn’t like it.
“Where’s Caz?” I demanded, stepping into his house. In my periphery, I saw Ry’s face fall. My heart slammed into my guts. “Where is he?”
“Upstairs, in bed.”
“In bed?” It came out more screech than question. A new vampire should not have been in bed, even one who’d been through the whole process before. He should have been buzzing, floating on the high of new immortal power rushing through his body. On the heat of fresh blood humming through his veins.
“He’s—” Ry started, but I was already bounding up the stairs to see for myself. Ry followed close behind and zoomed past me in the narrow upstairs hall. He blocked the door. “He’s unconscious. I got him to drink blood earlier, but he’s not awake. You need to be prepared for that.”
“Let me see him.” My words were hard and brooked no argument.
Ry nodded and opened the door for me.
The bedroom was large enough for a queen-sized bed with about a foot around it on all sides, a dresser on the wall opposite its foot. On top of the dresser was a big sailboat built out of Legos and propped up on a stand like one of those expensive model ships that were popular in wistful old men’s cigar lounges.
Cazimir slept in the dead center of the bed, on top of the cream-colored duvet. He wore a bathrobe and looked like he’d been bathed. His short blond hair was still a little damp and curled at the ends.
Something stuck in my throat as I realized Cazimir would always have short hair now. I hadn’t asked why he’d cut it after being made mortal, but I had assumed it would take us long enough to find the road back to immortality that his hair would grow out again before he was turned.
I reached over and touched his hand, expecting his eyes to snap open as my hot human skin made contact with his. I wanted him to wake up. I wanted his eyes to pop open and his mouth to slide around his sharp fangs. I’d be happy if he went for my carotid artery. It would mean he was okay.
He didn’t move even as I touched his cool immortal flesh. He didn’t so much as twitch.
“He drank blood?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Ry said, shifting uncomfortably.
I nodded, swallowing the lump that had formed in my esophagus. Bending over Cazimir, I hooked a finger between his lips and pulled up the top one to examine his teeth. His canines were long and curved into fine points. Fangs. It was something. It meant the transformation had worked, at least partially. I let his mouth fall closed.
I glanced back at Ry, whose face was hard. His eyes sparkled with the hint of tears. “His body should have burned through whatever poison he drank by now,” I said.
“I know.” Ryuto leaned against the door frame, hands in his pockets, eyes on his sire.
Or, actually, Cazimir was his fledgling now. Talk about inbred family trees. Mortal terms for family were always awkward to apply to immortals, though some vampires did refer to their makers as “mother” or “father,” and some vampires called their fledglings “children,” which frankly had always weirded me out. But Ryuto and Cazimir had taken the twisted family tree to a new level.
Ry shifted, straightening. “If a human in the same room isn’t waking him up, I don’t know what will.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. That’s why you called me?” I’d known it was risky to march to the bedside of a new vampire, catatonic or not. I just hadn’t realized that had been Ry’s objective: dangle a hot-blooded human with a beating heart and racing pulse in front of Cazimir and see if that helped jar him out of his vampiric coma. It was a damn good plan, even if I didn’t like being used as bait.
Ry gave me a sheepish smile that looked more boyish than malicious, not that it made him any less dangerous. “I figured better you than some innocent off the street.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re an asshole.” I turned back to Caz. He was as still as an enchanted prince in a fairy tale. It was creepy as hell.
“You ever see anything like this before?” Ry asked.
“No,” I said.
Vampirism heals one’s mortal injuries, within reason. If you’ve lost a limb or an eye or another body part as a human, becoming a vampire won’t grow it back. But the magic will heal most physical illnesses as it transforms you: open wounds, cuts, and scrapes will be gone, and internal damage will heal. It won’t grow you a new kidney, but it will allow you live without it. Whatever poison Cazimir had drunk mixed in with the so-called “vampire blood,” it shouldn’t be hurting him anymore.
But vampirism can’t fix everything. It has an unpredictable effect on mental illnesses and chemical imbalances, sometimes correcting them and sometimes throwing them even more wildly out of balance. The mind is a strange thing. Once I’d met a vampire who’d been an evolutionary biologist before he was turned, and he told me that it was a matter of what the vampire “virus” (for lack of a better term) needs for survival. A working body is required to ingest blood and pass vampirism on to others. A working mind is less necessary.
“There’s this story I heard once, about a vampire who was turned wrong and never woke up again. They had to burn her body,” Ryuto said. “Her maker thought maybe the flames would finally wake her up, so he stood by with a blanket, ready to douse them if she showed any signs of life. She never even twitched.”
“Turned wrong how?” I asked.
Ry shook his head, his mop of black hair falling into his eyes until he pushed it back with his fingers. “The story didn’t specify details. But I didn’t drink Caz’s blood. There wasn’t time. What if he’s like that?”
“You said he woke up.”
“I said he drank blood,” Ry corrected.
“Goddamn it,” I hissed.
I leaned over Cazimir again and tapped his cheeks gently a few times, though I knew if m
y presence and touch hadn’t roused him, hitting him was unlikely to do any good.
He didn’t move a molecule.
I swore. Then I let out a breath and clenched my fists. “We’ll figure this out.”
“What if there’s nothing to figure out? What if I just fucked it up and did it wrong?” His voice was strained and his shoulders were slumped.
“He drank a lot of that black market shit,” I said. I got the impression it might have been the first time Ryuto had ever turned anyone, but I didn’t ask. It wasn’t relevant. It was a lot like making babies in that way: it didn’t matter if it was the first time or the sixth, if something went wrong, it had nothing to do with the other times. Sometimes shit just happened. “Maybe it’s taking his body longer than usual to filter the crap out.”
“Maybe.” Ry sounded skeptical. I didn’t blame him. After the stuff his body had expelled last night in my living room, there shouldn’t have been anything left of the poison. If that was the case, then his new vampire blood was taking its sweet time to heal the side effects, and honestly, the way things had been going lately, that seemed like too much to hope for. Neither of us were toxicologists, and I sure as hell wasn’t taking Cazimir’s blood to Neha for testing unless I was desperate, so there was no way to know.
That left two other (more likely) possibilities: One, something had gone wrong with the transformation. The fact that Ry hadn’t drained Cazimir first might have screwed something up. And sometimes even if you did everything right, the transformation failed. It was fun that way.
Or two, this was a side-effect of Neha’s Cure lingering in his body, rejecting the vampirism and not allowing it to take over completely. That didn’t make a ton of sense given that he had fangs and could drink blood and didn’t look or feel human anymore, but neither did the fact that Cazimir was stuck in some kind of Sleeping Beauty curse.
I wasn’t even sure which one to hope for. I supposed if it was related to the Cure, Neha might be able to fix it. Maybe. If she was even willing to try. Not that I was going to give her a choice if that became necessary.
Bloodless (Henri Dunn Book 2) Page 14