by Jamie Wahl
“I am the leader of the New York vampires,” his voice echoed through the motionless room. Behind him, Tanish kept slicing. Michael cringed at the sound of tendons snapping and the nauseating squish of his arteries being severed. “I am the leader of all the vampires. The leaders I choose, I choose for a reason. Would anyone else like to debate this point?”
All eyes were on the floor. It seemed no one was even breathing.
“Bell has managed everything so well for so long,” he said, gesturing to her. She shrugged off her guards and strode out to meet him. “I didn’t think I was needed.” He put an arm around her slender shoulders. Bell smiled proudly.
“And now I find she has completely lost control of the New York clan.” Bell’s contented smile vanished. “Vampires fighting vampires. Nymphs running around the city unchecked.
“Perhaps,” he looked down at her, “I put too much faith in her.”
“Father,” she said with injured eyes. “I was—”
“I think,” he said, shaking her gently, “you need to be reminded of a few things. Maybe you’ve forgotten where you were when I found you.”
“Father, please, I—” she pleaded. But his emerald eyes cut into hers and she fell silent.
“Yes, I think so.” He drew his arm away, and immediately Michael saw a change in her. She was smaller, shrinking. The vibrant blaze of hair softened into a strawberry blonde; her muscled limbs withered away into the frail, shapeless body of a malnourished child. Freckles popped up across her cheeks and peppered the bridge of her nose. She crumpled to the ground next to Joseph’s body, writhing in pain as he held his hand over her, forcing her transformation.
“Even in this pitiful form, she was more powerful than any of you. She just didn’t know it yet.” Dark circles appeared under her eyes. A whimper escaped her colorless lips.
“Stop!” Michael heard his own voice cut through the dreadful scene.
Everyone looked at him. Bram’s eyes locked onto Michael’s and he felt as though he had been doused in cold water. There was no anger in those eyes. No regret, no amusement. Nothing at all. His mouth twitched into a smirk. He laughed.
He looked down at Bell. “He is something, isn’t he?” He lifted his hand, and Bell’s tortured body relaxed. In a moment she was herself again, tears stinging her eyes as she panted, her cheek still pressed against the floor.
“Now,” he said, disgust wrinkling his nose as he looked down at his daughter and around at the blood-stained and destroyed theater, “clean this up.”
“Yes,” she gasped, “I’ll take care of it.”
He motioned to the hounds, who had never taken their piercing eyes off their master. Jessica screamed when one bounded straight at her. But the creature stopped short, picking Tanish’s head up off the floor in its mouth. The other trotted down the steps and returned with Joseph’s head, dripping blood across the stage.
When they reached Bram’s side, their solid forms undulated into rolling smoke, and the blackness enveloped his tall form. In an instant, they were all gone. Nothing but the smell of sulfur remained.
Bell’s arms shook as she raised herself up off the stage floor. Her body had returned to its lean-muscled form, but the girl lingered behind her eyes.
When she stood, all that was gone. She smoothed her jacket and smirked at the bodies sprawled on the floor.
“Everybody out!” No one waited even a moment for her to change her mind. The curtain rustled with their passing. The front doors of the theater slammed shut.
“Randy!” Michael jumped off the stage and rushed to his friend.
Michael knelt next to him. He didn’t look good. His right arm lay at the wrong angle from his body. His eyes weren’t closed quite all the way, a sliver of white showed under his eyelids. Michael put a hand gently on his chest.
He was breathing.
Bell appeared by his side without a sound.
“Let me see.” She placed a hand on his forehead. “Did anyone else see him? Besides Tanish and Joseph?”
Michael frowned. “There was the nymph, I guess.”
“Why did you do that?” she asked, gingerly lifting Randy’s arm.
“What?”
She glared at him expectantly.
“Oh,” he said, “With your—“ Michael shifted uncomfortably. He just wanted to get Randy out of there. Why did it matter? “It just wasn’t right.”
She raised an eyebrow and smirked at him. “I can take care of myself.” Her eyes glowed silver in the darkness as she inspected Randy’s limp arm. “He has a concussion, and a dislocated shoulder...those are just the obvious things. He needs to get to the hospital.”
“You mean…you’re going to let me take him?”
“Not like this.” Bell began unbuttoning his shirt.
“What are you doing?”
“I need to get to his heart.”
Michael grabbed her wrist. “Why?” he demanded.
Bell smiled at him. “Don’t you trust me?” Her eyes sparkled in the half-light. “Let’s just say, after this we’ll be even.”
Bell twisted easily out of his grasp. She worked the buttons and opened his shirt. She made a disgusted face and poked one of Randy’s soft moobs. “You should take him to the park or something.”
“What are you doing? He needs to see a doctor.”
“No doctor can help him if he walks out of here with all of his memories.”
“You mean—can you—?”
“Hush,” she chided. She placed both hands on Randy’s sparsely-haired chest and closed her eyes.
Several silent moments passed before anything happened. Bell was muttering under her breath. Michael couldn’t make out anything she was saying. She appeared to be in some sort of trance. Her hands pressed down on his chest so hard that blood was drawn under her manicured nails. She leaned closer, her vibrant hair falling in front of her face.
Hadn’t he seen this before? The alley came crashing in around him: the dark and the damp and the freezing pavement. He remembered a flash of light. Voices from far away. A cascade of red. But it wasn’t blood.
It was hair.
Color blossomed into life on Randy’s cheeks. His lungs filled with a massive breath, but his eyes stayed closed.
“There,” Bell said, sitting back on her heels and gesturing to her patient, “Now you can take him.”
Michael stared at her in shock. The disjointed memory of the alley flashed together like a puzzle. Callista had been there. She stood silhouetted against the street light, flanked by a blonde and a brunette. “My daughter,” she pleaded in a grieved tone, “you must sense the good in him.” Bell’s laugh came to him like the hopeless refrain of the raven. “I sense nothing. Let me show him the world as it is.” The light that danced mischievously in her eyes went out. “There’ll be nothing left of your precious ‘goodness’.”
They had shaken hands over his injured body. He could see that clearly, Bell’s orange nails in sharp relief against Callista’s dark skin.
The night’s overheard conversation flashed before his mind. Michael stared unseeingly at the carnage around them. It was a bet, Michael thought, Bell was the devil…and I was Job. He could see it all now. Pristine white fangs behind soft pink lips. That red hair falling in front of his face as she struck.
“You turned me.”
Those same soft lips parted slightly in surprise. Michael was sure of it.
“You did this,” he said again.
Her eyes narrowed. “Nothing has changed, Michael.”
Michael didn’t wait for her to say more. He lifted Randy off the carpet, and turned for the door.
She appeared in front of him, eyes ablaze. “What are you doing?”
“I’m taking my friend to the hospital,” Michael shook as he spoke.
“You still need the clan,” she said, standing firmly in his way. “You’ve barely scratched the surface of everything we will teach you.”
“I don’t care!” he yelled, sidestepping h
er and running down the aisle.
“Michael!”
He ignored her.
She appeared in the doorway to the lobby, smirking. “What will you do about the cops?”
“What about them?” he pushed past her. He was clenching his teeth so hard he was afraid his teeth would shatter. Pain seared in his temples. “Clearly you don’t want me killed, and it seems like an awful lot of hassle to kill all the cops that would inevitably discover my secret when they arrest me. So that’s your problem.” He navigated around the remains of a chair and walked out the front door and down the steps. “You’ve got connections. I’m sure you can figure it out.”
She appeared in his path on the bottom step. “Michael, I can’t let you go.”
“Sure you can,” Michael brushed past her. “We’re ‘even’ right?”
29
Michael didn’t stop running until he reached the bright lights of the emergency room carport.
His hands trembled as he filled out the paperwork. They took Randy to a room straight from triage, and immediately began hooking him up to all sorts of machines. Michael hovered around the group of scrub-clad nurses, craning his neck to see what was going on.
“How is he?” Michael asked when yet another nurse entered the room with a caddy of vials to take blood. “Is he okay?”
“Sir, we need you to wait outside.” A wiry brunette with a severe ponytail ushered him out of the room. “We’ll let you know when we know something.”
Michael opened his mouth to protest, but she had already shut the door in his face. He looked in through the narrow rectangular window in the door. She pulled the curtain closed around Randy’s bed.
He glanced up and down the hall and then pressed his ear to the door. He could hear plastic caps being popped off of things and the rustling of some kind of paper, and their voices crystal clear, but they weren’t talking about Randy. Aside from ‘pass me that’ or ‘careful there’, they were gossiping about someone named Rebecca who was, apparently, quite loose. A passing doctor looked up from his clipboard and narrowed his eyes at Michael.
Michael muttered an apology and wandered back to the waiting room. There were a dozen people in there, half of them in costume. Michael passed a green-faced witch and a lady in a chicken suit, and sat in a small plastic mossy-green chair that somehow provided no back support and also tried to slowly slip him off onto the floor.
He stood again and paced, fuming. I just took everything she said as truth.
“Sir.” A nurse at the desk called to him. “Do you need to be admitted?” He was eyeing Michael’s blood-soaked costume.
“Oh.” Michael ran his hands through his curls. “No, sorry—it’s not real—just a costume.”
The nurse smirked at him and turned back to his computer screen. “I hate Halloween.”
Michael marched to the little bathroom in the corner and tore it off. I believed every lie she fed me.
“Idiot!” he yelled, wadding the black fabric into a ball and throwing it into the trash can. He watched the lid spin and swallowed hard against angry tears. He’d made the wrong decision every step of the way.
Michael turned on the sink and splashed water on his face. He looked up into the mirror. His t shirt was torn nearly in two and soaked in blood, but at least it looked more like an intentional Halloween costume than a randomly bloodied grim reaper. Blood was dried in his hair and down the whole left side of his face. He waved a hand underneath the motion-activated paper towel dispenser, tore it off and started scrubbing. It shredded into little rolled-up fragments and did little to remove the red stain from his cheek. He growled and threw the mess into the garbage can.
Joseph was right. It was so obvious! Michael waved his hand under the dispenser repeatedly and cringed at the loud automated whir it produced along with each small segment of towel.
He saw himself in the mirror, ghostly pale and seething. Bell was right, too. I am angry.
He scrubbed some more. “If I had just thought about it for even a second I would never have gone along with her stupid plan!” And Randy may not be in the hospital now. In the mirror, Michael saw his bottom lip tremble, and that made him even angrier. If I hadn’t been so stupid, I would’ve just left them right away, and none of this would have happened.
There was an urgent knock on the door. Michael could hear a child whimpering and a Father threatening punishment if the kid peed himself.
Michael took the deepest breath he could muster and tossed his bloody paper towels into the garbage. He wrenched the door open and forced a smile as the pair rushed past him without a thank you.
Michael eyed the doors into the ER on his way back to his horrible plastic seat. He put his head in his hands. Nurses came in and out with clipboards and urgent airs. Michael’s stomach churned as though he had swallowed a mouthful of gravel. He better make it.
The intolerable scolding of Judge Judy was replaced by the news. Michael stared at his shoes as two ER visitors squabbled over the channel all through the high-pitched weather man’s prediction of more snow. He looked up when they returned to the news desk.
“A fire destroyed The Destin College Dinner Theater tonight, shortly after a disturbance called police to the scene.” Michael stared, open-mouthed, at the shaky camera footage of the smoking remains of the school’s theater.
“It’s unsure at this point what caused the fire, which affected half the block. Residents of nearby apartment complexes were evacuated and firefighters were able to extinguish the flames before those buildings were lost, but the theater itself is in ruins.
“A play let out only minutes before the blaze started. No one was inside at the time.”
Michael remembered Bell’s promise to her Father. ‘I’ll take care of it.’ It looked like she had.
The metal detector beeped angrily from the entrance. Everyone turned to see what had set it off.
Charlotte was standing in the computerized archway, anxiously unshouldering her purse and handing it to the security guard. Michael stood when he saw her.
“Michael!” she said, trying the doorway again. It blared and flashed red. “You’re alright!”
Michael let out a long breath. “You’re alright!” He rushed over to her.
“Sorry,” Charlotte said to the security guard, removing her keys from her jeans pocket.
She stepped through and set it off again. Michael stood there waiting awkwardly.
“Geez,” she said, feeling inside her jacket pockets. She pulled out a bright pink taser and placed it in the man’s hand. “That should be it.”
She passed through the metal detector victoriously and immediately hugged Michael. He breathed in her sugary scent. But it wasn’t like the other hugs. She jumped back almost immediately, and when she released him, she didn’t quite meet his glance. Michael pretended not to notice.
She cleared her throat. “How is he?”
“They wouldn’t tell me anything. I think he has a concussion, and his shoulder is messed up. He was unconscious when we got here.”
“I am so sorry.” She glanced at the swinging doors as a nurse came out in a hurry. “What happened? At the theater?” she asked before turning to get her things back from the man working security. “I remember Tom and I were in the final act, and then Paole showed up—and then I was at home. The same thing happened to everybody. Half the cast called me, totally freaked out.” Michael noticed she shivered despite her thick coat. “What happened to you?”
“Oh.” Michael hadn’t thought far enough ahead to have a story ready. “I don’t know. There was some kind of fight. Maybe we were just in the way? Randy and I were heading down the ladder when he…fell off. I thought he was dead.” Michael’s face felt cold.
Charlotte met his eyes, and took both his hand in hers. “He’s going to be alright.” Her eyes were so clear, so honest. A shadow passed across her face; a glimmer of doubt. Then she laughed. “I’m sorry.”
Michael blinked. “What are you sorry for?”
/>
“I heard what the detective said— what he said you did. It seems so stupid now, but I remembered I saw you with the costume on the street. And then you had it again when the detective came around the theater this morning to get it. For a minute, I—“she laughed again, and booped him on the nose. “Not a chance.”
Michael faked a smile.
“Michael Wallace!” a voice blurted from the nurse’s station.
Both Charlotte and Michael jumped and hurried to the desk.
“Yes, ma’am?” Michael asked anxiously.
The nurse flipped a page of paperwork over on her clipboard and smacked her gum. “You bring in Randy Phillips?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Your friend is going to be fine.” She gave them a shallow smile and turned to type at her computer with long faux-diamond-studded fake fingernails. “His mother asked me to tell you.”
Michael let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
“Can we go see him?” Michael asked.
“Family only,” she replied, without taking her eyes from the screen.
Michael deflated a little.
Charlotte hugged him around the neck. His arms encircled her slender waist. Relief spread through his body. When she pulled back, her eyes met his. He would have loved to kiss her then. But he couldn’t. Randy nearly lost his life an hour before. It was a miracle nothing worse had happened to Charlotte. Everyone in the play had been put in terrible danger, all because of him. He couldn’t make the same mistakes again.
Michael cleared his throat, and released her, pretending he didn’t see the confusion in her eyes as he took a step back.
The metal detector blared again, and they turned toward the sound. An impossibly curvy brunette walked through without any protest from the security guard. She wore a nurse Halloween costume that looked like it had been purchased in an “adult” store. He could hear her pleather creaking across the room as she waved to the rent-a-cop. She turned eerily familiar honey-colored eyes directly at Michael.
Michael, could you join me outside as soon as you can? She had a high-pitched voice that rang in his ears just like Bell’s had. Callista would like to talk to you before Bell puts another tail on you.