by J. R. Rain
I wiped the handle clean of my prints, stepped through the doorway, waved to the security camera, and headed over to the elevators, knowing full well that I wasn’t wearing enough makeup to even show up on camera.
Sometimes it was good to be me.
Chapter Twenty-four
Allison answered her door with her own cell phone pressed against her. She waved me in without a thought. I wondered if she was aware that she hadn’t actually buzzed me in.
The apartment was smaller than I had expected, but the monthly rent was undoubtedly quadruple my own mortgage. The door opened into a small hallway that led first to a smallish kitchen. Shoe boxes were piled on the counter and spilled over onto some stools, as well. The shoe boxes were printed with Jimmy Choo and Manolo and Valentino, words that were foreign to a single, working mother who lived in the suburbs.
I continued following Allison into a smallish living room, where she motioned offhandedly for me to sit on an oversized couch. I was just figuring out how to offhandedly sit, when I saw something I probably shouldn’t have seen.
A fresh cut along the inside of her finger.
Normally, the sight of blood does little for me. Yes, I drink blood. Yes, it nourishes this strange body of mine. But that’s about the extent of it. I have a supply of the stuff at home. It was not generally a big deal to see blood.
Until now.
Now, the sight of her bloody finger did something to me that concerned me greatly. It stirred a hunger in me. Real hunger. My stomach growled and my mouth watered and I hated myself all over again. I forced myself to look away, gritting my teeth and grinding my jaw. I looked down at my own pale hands and was surprised to see I had balled them into fists. Purple veins crisscrossed just below the surface of my skin.
A bleeding finger should not arouse a hunger. A bleeding finger should not arouse a need. It was just a wound.
Unless, of course, you were a fiend.
My stomach growled and roiled. It seemed to turn in on itself. Jesus, my sudden hunger was unbearable, unrelenting.
“Jesus,” I whispered, still looking down at my clenched fists.
“Are you okay?” asked Allison. She was standing nearby. I could hear her sucking on her finger now.
My stomach nearly did a somersault.
Jesus.
I looked up, despite knowing that doing so might be a mistake. It was. Allison was still alternately sucking her finger and looking at the wound—and wincing. I didn’t wince. I stared. No doubt hungrily.
It’s just a wound, a voice in my head said. The voice, I knew, was the last vestiges of my humanity. Just a wound. An injured finger. Nothing more, nothing less.
Except I knew that it was more. So much more. The wound, and the resultant blood, represented so much. It represented complete satiation. Unlimited life. Unlimited strength. Complete and utter superiority.
I blinked. Hard.
Since when did superiority matter to me? Since when did I ever care to be better than others, or control them?
I didn’t know, but that train of thought alarmed me more than my hunger. That train of thought was dangerous. Violent. Scary as shit.
“Oh, does blood make you queasy?” asked Allison.
I blinked and might have nodded.
She went on, moving her hand out of my line of sight. I tracked her finger closely, the way a cheetah might a wounded warthog. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was cutting an apple when the phone rang. My mom. Always my mom. Especially with Caesar gone. Everyone calls me these days. Everyone feels sorry for me. Anyway, long story short, I cut my finger pretty deep.”
“I see that,” I said, the words coming out sounding guttural, and not my own. “And, yes, I have a...problem with blood.”
“Oh, geez. I’m sorry,” she said sympathetically enough, but she was looking at me oddly. I didn’t blame her. I suspected I looked like a complete freak, staring pale-faced, my voice barely intelligible.
Samantha Moon, ace detective at your service.
She went to the bathroom and returned with a Band-Aid. She was watching me as she returned. I knew she was watching me, but I ignored her curious stare. Instead, I was openly staring at her finger like the hobgoblin that I am.
“I’m just going to put this Band-Aid on. Do you want me to do it in the other room?”
“No, here is fine,” I said, perhaps a little too quickly. I leaned forward a little in the process to get a better view of her finger.
God, help me, I thought.
Allison continued watching me as she sat across from me on the coffee table. She was Hispanic. Very toned. Lean muscles undulated with each movement. She was wearing short white shorts and a tight tank top. She looked, if anything, like the girlfriend of a world-class boxer. I knew from Romero that she was a personal trainer and competitive body builder. I didn’t doubt it.
Except I wasn’t looking at the way her muscles rippled or flexed. I was closely watching the way she removed the Band-Aid from the wrapper. She next peeled away the protective backings, exposing the sticky underside. I noted the way her blood continued to fill the open wound. It really was a nasty cut.
I began sweating.
What the devil was wrong with me? But I suspected I knew. I hadn’t had human blood in a few weeks, and I was missing it terribly. I didn’t want to miss it. In fact, I had made it a point not to think about it.
But to see it now...right in front of me...triggered something in me that I was having a terrible time controlling. Or dealing with.
I looked away, breathing hard.
“Boy, you really do have a problem with blood,” said Allison.
I think I nodded. Who knows. Maybe I drooled like ghoul. I kept looking away, breathing slowly through my nose, focusing on the thing that was in front of me, which was a magazine with Katie Holmes on the cover. She looked happy and unencumbered. The words above her said: “Freedom.”
“I can go in the bathroom if you want,” said Allison.
I was about to tell her to please do so, but there was something in her tone. Something...challenging.
“No, don’t,” I said. “I’m okay.”
“You don’t look okay.”
“I’ve been...sick,” I said, using my old standby excuse.
“I’m sure you have,” she said, her words surprising me. “I’m sure you’ve been very, very sick.”
I looked at her sharply. She had quit playing with the Band-Aid, which now dangled from her finger and thumb. She was squinting her eyes a little. Squinting them at me.
“You’re here to find out who killed my Caesar,” she said. She lowered her wounded hand in front of me.
“Yes,” I said. The word was barely understandable to my own ears. The significant wound along her finger had begun bubbling over again with fresh hemoglobin.
“You are here to help us find answers,” she said.
I nodded again, this time unable to speak.
“And you’re also a vampire,” she said.
I looked at her sharply, and her eyes narrowed further still. I said nothing. She said nothing. Blood was now dribbling freely down her finger. I swallowed hard. It was all I could do to not lunge forward and seize her finger.
She leaned toward me and held her finger in front of me. Like a carrot. “And you’re very, very hungry, aren’t you?”
I flicked my gaze from her wound to her eyes and found myself nodding.
“Then drink, Samantha Moon.”
Chapter Twenty-five
It was after.
I hadn’t drank much, but it was enough to feel good. No, great. To feel that special surge of energy, strength and vitality gained only by drinking human blood. Fresh human blood.
And never had the blood been as fresh as this.
It was straight from the source, so to speak.
I had also drank enough to be embarrassed, especially now as I sat back on the couch and wiped my mouth. I looked away.
Had I really just drank from her? F
rom her finger? Sucking on it like a newborn from a teat?
I had...and I had loved every second, even when she looked away, clearly uncomfortable and perhaps even in pain. Still I drank from the open wound in her finger. I drank and I drank.
It wasn’t until when I had stopped, until when I removed my lips from around her finger, when my eyes finally focused again, did the embarrassment set in.
Allison had immediately pulled her hand into herself, holding it close to her side, as if she were cradling a baby chick. And that’s how we currently sat. She, sitting on the coffee table, holding her hand. Me, on the couch, embarrassed as hell and slightly confused over what had just happened.
Lord, I don’t even know her.
“I’m...sorry,” I said after a moment or two. Outside, through the open sliding glass door, laughter reached us from the street below. Car doors shut firmly, and I suspected one of the limos had just left the scene.
“For what, Samantha?” asked Allison. She seemed to recover from whatever it was she’d gone through. She looked at her finger. “For being what you are? And for that, there is no apology needed.”
“How—” But my words stopped abruptly when I looked at her finger. The wound was gone.
She saw the surprise on my face. “Yes, Samantha. Your healing qualities extend to your victims.” She turned her face toward me...and smiled deeply. “Even willing victims. It’s why, I suspect, vampires have existed among us for so long. The victims’ wounds almost always heal.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but I still hadn’t completely regained my voice and, quite frankly, I felt a little high. The fresh blood was intoxicating, to say the least.
Her blood, I thought. I drank her blood.
“How...how do you...”
“How do I know so much about vampires?” she asked, finishing the sentence for me. “How do I know so much about your kind?”
“Yes,” I said finally.
I quickly got over the initial high—the contentment, the satiation—and focused on my surroundings. After all, it’s not every day that someone so easily surmised my true nature. So then what the hell was going on here? Was this some kind of a set up?
I doubted it.
For one, my inner alarm hadn’t sounded. Two, I had sensed nothing but mild curiosity radiating from Allison. Nothing hidden. Nothing darker. Nothing malicious. But I’d been wrong before.
Finally, she said, “I was a plaything to a vampire, Sam. There’s no easy way to say it. He used me, abused, me, and drank from me.”
“He?”
She smiled again, and now I did sense something else coming from her. Waves of sadness. “He’s dead now, killed by a vampire hunter who very nearly killed me, too.”
She reached for a packet of cigarettes that were on a shelf under the glass coffee table. She opened the box and tapped out a cigarette and offered me one. I took it without thinking as she produced a lighter from a pocket and we both lit up, exhaling together.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She shrugged and dragged deeply on her cigarette. “I loved him, but he was a bastard. I suppose he had it coming to him.”
I didn’t know what to say, and so I smoked quietly, which was something I actually enjoyed doing. The act was very human, very real, and had no ill effects to my body, which was a plus.
She flicked her gaze my way. She studied me for a beat or two. “He also got that very same look in his eye. The one you had earlier. When he was hungry. Or when he saw blood.”
“What look?” I asked.
“It’s a fire. I can see it. Not everyone can see it, but I can.”
I saw it, too, but said nothing. After all, I had seen it in Hanner’s eyes last month. The smoldering fire. Just behind her pupils.
“Your eyes actually lit up. Fired up. Literally.” She laughed. “You were either a vampire...or one sick chick.”
I laughed, too. Nervously. All of this talk made me feel uncomfortable. After all, I was discussing my closely guarded secrets with a complete stranger. Then again, I had drank from her, hadn’t I? Didn’t that make her a kind of blood sister?
God, my life is weird.
As we finished our cigarettes—along with two more—she told me her story. She had met the vampire at a nightclub, where she’d been a go-go dancer. She had always been attracted to bad boys. He was the baddest of bad boys. She could see it in his eyes. He was trouble. He was dangerous, and he was a killer. She sensed all this from him. She had always sensed things from people, her whole life. Her grandmother had always told her she was a sensitive.
Later, after a night of dancing, he had brought her home and made love to her, unlike any man she had ever been with before. His home had been in the Hollywood Hills, and there she learned just how deep pleasures could go. He next fed from her. Without asking. Without prompting or warning. He began drinking from her forearm. She had fought him at first, until she realized the feeling was...incredible.
“Incredible?” I said.
“Don’t you know, Sam? May I call you Sam?”
“I just drank from you,” I said. “You can call me whatever you want.”
She laughed a little. “The pleasure I receive from a feasting is almost as much as you receive from the feeding.”
I hadn’t known this.
She nodded. “You must be new to all of this.”
“Fairly,” I said, and left it at that.
She nodded after a moment. “I get it. You don’t want to talk about it. It’s personal shit. Trust me, I know. Nothing more personal than being what you are.” She snubbed out her third cigarette. “I was addicted from the get-go. Addicted to being feasted upon. To being drank from. To being sucked. I was his for as long as he wanted me. Turned out, it was only for a few months.”
“Until he ended up dead.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Right, dead. The bastard broke into the house. Shot my man in his sleep. In his sleep.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
She shrugged again, something I was beginning to think she did a lot. “Well, like I said, my vampire was a bastard. According to the hunter, my guy had hurt many people.”
Now she was silent for a long time. I could hear her heart beating, which surprised me. I wondered if it had to do with me drinking her blood. Maybe we really were blood sisters.
Finally, she looked sideways at me, and put on what I suspected was a brave smile. “But that’s not why you’re here, Sam. Is it? We’re looking for another killer.”
I nodded, briefly jolted back to the reality of the situation. “Yes,” I said.
“That’s good,” she said. “Because I have a theory about Caesar’s death.”
“A theory?”
“Yes,” she said. “And you’re going to think I’m crazy.”
She looked at me. I looked at her. And we both laughed. “Well,” she added, “crazier than you already think I am.”
I laughed again, and by the time she was done telling me her theory, I decided that she was right.
She was crazy.
Chapter Twenty-six
She and Caesar had been at a charity event six weeks ago, exactly two weeks before his death.
Caesar was always doing charity work for the Latino community, and this event had been no different. Well, except for one small occurrence, an occurrence that Allison didn’t think was small at all. It was an occurrence, in fact, that she was quite certain had been very big indeed.
So big that it killed Caesar.
Or so she felt.
It had been a charity fight. A professional boxer against a martial artist. And he was not just any martial artist: the current, reigning karate champion. The match had gone well enough for the first few rounds. Lots of posing and light punches. Lots of ducking and juking and sliding and laughing. Good times. The crowd was loving it. And why wouldn’t they? Two pros at the top of their respective worlds, were matching techniques, wits, and punches.
Until it happ
ened.
The Punch, as Allison thinks of it.
One moment the two fighters were exchanging cushy punches. The karate champion was even doing a few kicks that Caesar easily avoided. After all, this was a charity event. The punches and kicks weren’t meant to land. And if they did, there wasn’t much force behind them.
Allison had been on the phone, talking to a friend, when the fight suddenly took a very strange turn.
“He punched him, and hard,” said Allison now, lighting up another cigarette and sitting back on the couch.
“Who punched whom?” I asked, fairly certain I was using correct English. I was a vampire momma, after all. Not a grammarian. If that was even a word.
“The karate champion,” said Allison, exhaling. “One moment they were exchanging light punches—most of which were glancing off each others’ shoulders—and the next...” She paused, looked at me. “And the next, this guy, this asshole, punches Caesar hard. I mean, really fucking hard. Caesar wasn’t expecting it. It was a charity event, for crissakes. The first few rounds were light and easy. In fact, it was only a three-round charity match. There was only like twenty or so seconds left in the third round. It was almost over.”
I perked up. “And this happened two weeks before his death?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to Caesar after the punch?”
“It laid him out. Remember, the karate champion was using his bare fists. Caesar had gloves on. The fight was just for laughs. A joke. Nothing serious. Just two guys lending their names to a charity event.”
I nodded, thinking, mind racing. There was something here. I could feel it. Whether or not this something was my enhanced psychic abilities kicking in or my detective instincts, I didn’t know. Sometimes it’s impossible to know. Logic suggested that the punch had occurred far too early—two weeks, in fact—for it to have any ill effects on Caesar’s health.
And yet...it just felt right.