by C. L. Quinn
“I will comply, my lady.”
“All right.” She paused, her arms folded, as she walked towards the door.
Sighing, she turned to face the man lying on the gurney watching her every move. “This will take some doing.”
Five
“God, I’m going to be fired.”
Rolling the gurney out of the elevator, she pushed it into a maintenance room that was never used at night.
“I’m going to try to track down your blood samples, but for the love of the world, stay here.”
Nikolai’s body sat up and swung around so that his long legs touched the floor.
“I am healing enough to help you.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. “Yes, because no one will notice that the critically injured patient we just received half an hour ago in trauma care looks remarkably fine all of the sudden. No. Stay here.”
Mies watched the door as she closed it behind him.
I don’t believe I’ve ever had anyone, let alone a human female, speak to me so forcefully.
Get used to it. Women are a formidable lot now. They are beautiful, smart, and capable, now that the cultural bonds that people used to place on them are gone. You will like them, I promise.
Mies didn’t want to tell him that he already did. Sarah intrigued him. In his eight-hundred years on earth, he’d never found his mate. While he had always been highly sexually active, and always satisfied, that hole in his life had been deeply noticed. Would it be possible that he might find a mate, here, in this time, in whatever semblance of a life he might be able to carve out given the unusual nature of his return? Whatever his future held, he reminded himself of the grave circumstances they faced. This was not the time.
Twenty minutes later Sarah came back through the door quickly, closing it as if she was afraid someone else would follow her through it.
“Success?” Mies asked.
“Shit. No. I couldn’t get around the techs in the lab without being suspicious. They haven’t fully processed them yet. They’ve tried to type one sample, though, and they can’t. You’re going to have to use compulsion after all. I hate to do it, but there’s no other way.”
Mies nodded. “I will go. Please show me the way.”
“Not like that. Here. I got the largest I could find.”
Sarah threw a set of scrubs and a lab coat to him.
“Hurry. The longer we wait, the greater the chance something will get out of our hands.”
Immediately, Mies dropped his pants. Sarah shot her eyes to the floor, but not before they lingered on him. He’d been commando, and his huge organ just poked out after he removed the ruined jeans he’d been wearing.
Oh, I didn’t need to see that, she thought. She’d been so sexually charged these last few weeks and now all she could think of was the size of that beautiful cock. Not the time, not the time, she repeated to herself as she counted the tiles on the stained floor.
“Are you ready?” she asked without looking up.
“I am. Do I look like one of you?”
Her eyes moving over the huge man in front of her, dressed in too-tight blue scrubs, Sarah held her breath for a few moments. She didn’t see her friend Nikolai in him, she saw instead the stranger who wore his body. His heavily muscled arms flexed as he tried to put the surgical cap over long dark hair to further hide his identity.
“No, but it will have to do. Come with me and let me do the talking.”
“Little doctor, there will be no need.”
Nodding, Sarah led him from the small room. He was right, from here on, his vampire skill of controlled compulsion would be their best recourse.
So much for a vampire-free life, she thought.
Even though he followed beside her, she watched him stride confidently, his eyes missing nothing, as they headed toward the lab. He moved like he owned the world, and if he truly was a resurrected first blood, he probably thought that he did.
“Here. Just do this quickly and efficiently. We need to get out of here as soon as we can.”
The vampire stared at Sarah. “Madame, I do everything quickly and efficiently.”
She stared back, rudely she thought, but she was already impatient with his self-imposed superiority.
“Just…get this done.”
As they entered the room, Tio, the man who handled labs almost every night, looked up and grinned. Always the first one with a smile, Tio was one of the most pleasant people in the hospital.
“Ms. Doctor S, you still need something?”
Before she could speak, the vampire moved in and captured Tio’s gaze.
“Show me all blood taken from the man who was hit by the taxicab.”
“All blood tests for Nikolai Zalesky, Tio,” Sarah explained.
Wordlessly, he complied.
“Tio, are there any reports prepared yet on the results from this patient’s blood tests?”
“Here, on my clipboard,” he said.
Sarah gently removed the folder.
“Clear him,” she said to the vampire and walked to the door.
“You will not remember either of us coming here, or anything at all about the blood or tests for Nikolai Zalesky. If anyone asks, you know nothing.”
Tio nodded.
Silently, but with a sigh of relief, Sarah led Nikolai’s body from the room. She needed to go back to the ER and redirect everyone, make them think that someone else had the emergency patient tonight so no one would question his disappearance.
Traveling back to the ground floor, she steered the vampire to a set of sliding double doors.
“Go outside and stand in the shadows so that no one sees you. I’ll be there in a few moments.”
His eyes landed on hers, and a split-moment of wills ensued. He didn’t like to be told what to do, even if he knew that he needed her help.
“Go outside and do as I asked you to do,” Sarah repeated, knowing it would piss him off, and smiled because of that, then she went back to explain to Tracy that she had to leave.
Mies watched her go, dumbfounded.
Get used to it. Women in this time do not defer to men and even if they knew that you were some kind of powerful supernatural creature, they wouldn’t defer to you either.
She’s magnificent.
Da, she is. Mies, she is not for you. She’s left the vampire community that she lived in for over a hundred years. She’s done with your kind.
We shall see, my friend.
Pushing open the door to her apartment, Sarah motioned to her unexpected guest.
“Go in. It’s small, but it’s where I live.”
“We’ve engaged a room in this city,” Mies informed her as he wandered through the door. It took a mere moment to scan the space from one side to the other. “This will not do.”
Stepping in, Sarah closed the door. “It will have to. Daylight is around the corner, and you are still badly injured. I should keep an eye on you the rest of the night and tomorrow. Then, I want to know what the hell has happened to my friend. After you reveal that extraordinary event, we’ll find out what you want from me, see what I can do for you, and get you back to your hotel. Okay?”
“I do not think so. This room has an opening to daylight.”
“It does. See that door there? That will be your room.”
Slowly, Mies walked over and opened the door to the bathroom. He flipped on the light switch, and looked back at Sarah with a grimace. “Hardly. That room is inadequate in ways I cannot possibly list.”
Amused, Sarah dropped her bag onto a side table near her kitchenette. “It will do. All you need is a place to rest.”
Mies stood completely still for several seconds before he walked over to Sarah, his size normally intimidating, but not with this woman.
“You show no fear or respect for this first blood vampire. I do not understand why.”
Sighing deeply, Sarah walked around the counter and started a kettle to heat water. “I do not disrespect your race. I do not disrespec
t you, either, but your sudden shocking appearance somehow merged or conjoined or, I can’t even imagine, with an old friend has thrown me from my game. Not to mention, I respond to how I’m treated, and you, sir, have a lot to catch up on when it comes to contemporary human relationships.”
“I am sorry that you do not like how I’ve treated you. I will endeavor to improve.”
With a long release of breath, Sarah nodded. “I’m sorry, too. I can’t even imagine how this feels for either of you. So let me get us some coffee, and we’ll sit down and find out what the hell is happening. You’re here with me for a reason, that I’ve surmised. You wouldn’t be in Boston otherwise.”
Mies didn’t respond at first.
Don’t be a shit, vampire. Sit down and let this woman in. I’ve already told you, she’s brilliant. We need her.
This is not easy for me.
None of this is, but it is time to let someone else help us. That’s why I brought you half way around the world. Neither of us can keep doing this, agreed?
“Agreed,” Mies said out loud, and he meant it to both voices in his head. He watched Sarah’s movements as she prepared the hot beverage that Nikolai often made for them at Lake Baikal. He’d grown fond of it. Her movements were efficient and moments later she handed him a mug with steam rising from its rim.
“Then we’re on the same page. Come with me to the sofa, you don’t look well.”
“Then I look like how I feel. That vehicle that struck us was traveling so quickly, I didn’t have the time to even use air displacement to be somewhere else when it reached where we stood. I believe there is considerable internal damage to this body.”
“I know there is. You were on your way to surgery to find the bleed. Although you’ll heal on your own, I have some narcotic pain relievers that may help temporarily, even with a vampire’s fast metabolism.”
“It would be appreciated.”
“Certainly.”
Mies dropped onto the soft surface beside Sarah, who’d taken a seat on the left end and placed her coffee on her knee that she’d drawn up onto a cushion.
“Will you let me know how this happened? Or, forgive me if I’m blindsided, let me know what happened? I have never encountered anything like this, I doubt anyone has.”
“It is necessary. I should allow your friend to tell the story, but I think you’ll be better served to hear what happened from each of us in our own voice. That will give you an impartial and better rounded view of what we are experiencing.”
“Rashomon, yes. Alternate versions of events as seen by differing points of view. I agree about that. I also agree that you are the best place to begin.”
“Yes.”
Sarah watched as he sipped the coffee, stopped, raised his eyes to hers, then sipped again. “This is sweeter than the coffee Niko gives me. It suits me.”
“Sugar, the drug of the people.”
“I am first blood vampire, you are now aware of that, yes?”
“Quite.”
“Nikolai has told me about your history with my people, that you were blood-bonded to one of my kin. But you do not know the clan that I rose from. We were alive on this world six thousand years ago.”
Startled, Sarah said nothing, but kept her eyes on his. Six thousand years ago? That meant he was with that first group of vampires born of the race and buried beneath ice caves in Siberia. All of those people had died centuries ago.
“I see you realize the significance. Here is what I know. I was in my final resting place, bound to the spiritual plane for the rest of eternity. It was a place of ultimate serenity. I was done with life and grateful for it. Immortality isn’t as perfect as you imagine it is.”
“You’d be surprised. Let’s just say I concur. You have my attention, vampire. May I ask your name?”
The big man who dwarfed her sofa tried to bow slightly, but he set off a sharp pain that stole his breath.
“Shit. I’m sorry. Here.” Sarah fished a bottle from her bag. “These should help with the pain, at least some, anyway.”
Nodding his thanks, Mies slid four of the white tablets down his throat. “I am Mies, and I was leader of my clan. It was a peaceful time in my people’s history. When the sickness came that should not have been a sickness for us, it devastated my people.”
“We know of it. When your graves were uncovered, the strain of that virus was released in Switzerland and tried to spread. We realized quickly that it had the makings of a global event, so we stopped it. In fact, we used a scroll from your people to defeat it, so I need to say thank you for the cure.”
“It killed all of us in time, there were so few left when it was over. I was one of the last to go, but there was nothing that I could do at that point to save my race. It is my greatest sorrow.”
“Something like that is out of the hands of any one man, vampire.”
“Perhaps. Yet many thousands of years later, I still feel responsible. That is my background. What happened three months ago changed the end of that tale, when it comes to me. Nikolai fell through the ice-supported floor of the cave where he found my people’s remains.”
She watched the hard jaw flex.
Mies continued. “My remains. He was badly injured and dying. He reached out and touched my spirit amulet, dead too all of these centuries, as I was. His touch reached from his dying body to my first blood spirit, my soul, that had gone to its reward beyond the stars. All I know is that the powers that exist to guide this universe released me to live again, corporeal, on this world. They sent me with the message that I had a mission, and that I would not be alone. I could never have dreamed what they had in mind. In my spirit realm, this man appeared and I knew, somehow, I just knew what the future held for us.”
“I get some of it, but it can’t be right. You are both, both men, both souls, in Nikolai’s body? Together?”
Mies nodded. “Imagine our surprise.”
Sarah shook her head in disbelief. “Oh, God. How in the justice of the cosmos can they expect you to live like this?”
“We’ve tried for about three months now. We can’t. That’s why we’ve come to you. Nikolai believes that you can help us.”
“Me? What can I do?”
“He has faith in you. In your excellent mind and instincts. Having met you, I think I see why.”
“I don’t understand why you haven’t sought help from the other first bloods. We have three communities of strong, talented, spectacular first bloods vampires who can help.”
He leaned closer, and Sarah felt light-headed. Was that his scent assaulting her? It was primal, pure masculine pheromones. This couldn’t be good in the tight quarters of her apartment with her own sexual appetite so fired up. She scooted deeper into the corner of the sofa.
“It is the spiritual realm, the order of the universe, that has designed this path for Nikolai and myself. I am certain that it is unwise to involve my race. Their tether to that realm is close and it may compromise our attempt to separate our lifeforces. Sarah, I honor the choices of the powers that rule events in this world, but I cannot live this way. If I am here for some noble reason, some critically vital mission, I will do everything within my power to achieve it. But not like this. Nikolai is a good man, with a heart of gold. He doesn’t deserve this.”
Holy hell. Within inches of this big man, his pain palpable, his heart open, his body singeing hers, she wondered how in the world someone as small as she became part of something so huge. This was the work of the universe, of forces beyond any measure of power, beings that guided the future. This man had been here at the dawn of humankind, and had been drawn from death to live again to perhaps affect the course of human events.
Only one thought kept repeating in her mind.
“I’m not worthy,” she whispered.
Without warning, Mies was beside her, her hands in his, his knee touching hers, his forehead against her palms. “We need you, Sarah of Boston. I believe you are more than worthy. I now believe you were always m
eant to be part of this journey. You have a place in this story, my beautiful lady.”
His voice lowered to just above a whisper. “Please, two strong men need you and beg you to rescue them.”
He looked up at her then, dark eyes weaving into her soul. She really liked Nikolai and seemed to be bonding against her will with this man who should not exist. More than the fact that she couldn’t say no to them, she wanted to help them, needed to give them everything she could, even though she knew, it might be more than she had.
“I will do all that I can, whatever that is, and I can’t make any promises. I am no more than a universally powerless human woman.”
“I have faith. Thank you, little doctor.”
Suddenly, his touch threatened to overwhelm her, so Sarah pulled her hands from his.
“Um, all right, Mies. Please let me speak with Nikolai.”
He no sooner nodded than his intense demeanor changed. The body relaxed and a charming humorous smile spread across his face.
“Nikolai,” Sarah said in welcome.
“Damn, we found you.” He scooted closer and gave her a warm hug.
As she held him, she realized that the strong attraction that she’d felt to this man’s physical presence had subsided. The huge vampire was still here, now in her arms, but that overt sexuality that compelled her had gone.
“Oh, this is so bizarre,” she said out loud.
Nikolai scooted back. “You don’t say, my friend. I have been living this way for months. I have had very little contact with anyone else because I’ve lost my sense of self and that vampire has control over this body whenever he chooses. So we’ve done nothing but fight and eat this whole time, with weekly visits to get blood meals, which...yuck!”
“Poor Nikolai! I assume that each of you knows anything the other knows, right?”
“It’s unavoidable.”
“Then, his version of what happened, it’s how you see it too?”
“Pretty much. My team and I had finished for the day, I stopped to make sure the site was secure before I left when I saw a glow near the back of the cave. One of the spirit amulets had come alive. Naturally, I was curious, I tried to free it from the ice when the ground gave way. I would have died, I know that, but suddenly, there I was, in the spirit realm, with this guy. It’s as he told you, we’ve apparently been recruited for something. Neither of us have any idea what.”