After all, a gourmet can survive on hamburger, but will always prefer filet mignon.
As I approached a bar with a neon sign that said SAILOR’S ROOST, a pair of young black men stepped from an alley and blocked my path.
“Hold on there, sucker!” one of them growled, affecting a tough, menacing tone to his youthful voice. They couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old.
“Where you think you’re goin’, honky?” his companion asked as he took a knife from his pocket and pressed a button on the side. A long blade flashed from the handle and glittered in the light of the neon sign.
I smiled, revealing teeth that glowed with eerie phosphorescence in the darkness. As a longtime denizen of the night, I was used to encounters such as this, much more so than the innocents standing before me.
“I have business in that bar over there,” I replied calmly. “And if you . . . gentlemen want to survive this night, I’d suggest you pick someone else to hold up.”
The two young men glanced at each other, their expressions surprised at my lack of fear. They looked around as if making sure I wasn’t an undercover policeman with backup nearby. Their insolent grins returned when they saw I was alone.
“I think you the one gotta worry ’bout survivin’ this night,” the first boy growled, pulling a small-caliber pistol from his belt and aiming it at my stomach.
I didn’t have time for this. The Hunger was raging and I knew that before long I would lose control and stealth would no longer be possible.
I looked at the door to the bar, regretful that my feeding tonight wasn’t going to be as satisfying as I’d planned, and I let my Transformation begin.
The second boy opened his mouth to speak, but stopped with it hanging open as he noticed my hands becoming claws, with long, pointed nails growing from the ends of my fingers.
With an expression of horror, his eyes moved to the tissues of my face, which were melting and coalescing and changing as my lips pulled back from fangs that eased from my gums, dripping red drool.
“What the fuck?” he said, stepping back and holding his knife out in front of him as if it were a cross that would protect him from the monster I was becoming before his eyes.
“Jesus . . . ,” the other managed to whisper before I stepped forward and swiped backhanded at him. My razor-sharp claws cut through his neck muscles like so much butter and his head was nearly severed from his body.
Before he could fall to the ground, I was on his companion, my hands brushing his knife to the side as my fangs sank into the tender flesh over his carotid artery.
He stumbled back, moaning and trying to cry out as I sucked the life from him, holding him in my arms like a lover. I almost gagged at the bitter taste of the drugs coursing through his bloodstream, but my Hunger was too great to be concerned with taste. I continued to feed.
When I was done, I dropped his empty husk on the sidewalk and picked up the other body, which was still pumping blood from the stump of his neck. I managed a few quick drafts before he, too, was empty.
A body in each hand, I dragged them back into the alley from whence they’d come and threw them into a Dumpster behind the bar. I found a couple of cardboard boxes nearby and placed them over the bodies, covering the remains from sight as best I could. With any luck, they wouldn’t be found until the garbage truck that emptied the Dumpster deposited them at the city landfill. I preferred not to draw any attention to the dock area if it could be helped.
Now all that was left was for me to get back to my ship without being seen. The feeding had been messier than most and my shirt was soaked with blood, though it appeared black rather than red in the moonlight.
The Hunger satisfied, for the moment, my body slowly changed back into its more human form. With a quick glance from the alley to make sure no one was about, I headed home. I was satiated but strangely unsatisfied, my loins heavy with unrequited passion and my mind filled with sorrow at two more deaths that would be added to the ledger of lives cut short by my disease.
As usual, the remorse about what I had done only hit me after my blood lust had been satisfied. The only thing that kept me from becoming morose about the night’s activities was the fact that the young men I’d killed had surely deserved it as much as any I’d taken in the past.
Walking toward my ship, I fervently hoped now that the worst of my Hunger was assuaged, I would be able to control it enough to partake only of nonlethal feedings in the future. Otherwise, I would have been better off remaining at the bottom of the Houston Ship Channel for all time.
Four
Matt leaned against the wall of the doctors’ lounge in the Ben Taub Hospital emergency room and rubbed his eyes. He was dog tired. He’d just finished a twelve-hour shift, from seven in the morning to seven in the evening, supervising the ER’s house staff; it was all part of his duties as an associate professor of emergency medicine.
He stifled a yawn and looked at the blackened, stained coffee urn in the corner, wondering if his stomach lining could survive another cup of the potent brew. He was trying to decide two possible outcomes—getting an ulcer or falling asleep at the wheel driving home—when the door opened and Jeff Strickland, the chief surgery resident on duty, stuck his head in.
“Hey, Matt, they’re paging you,” Strickland said.
Matt glanced at his watch. “Damn, five more minutes and I’d be out the door.”
Strickland grinned and shrugged. “Such is life as a professor, Matt. That’s why they pay you the big bucks.”
Matt grimaced at the humor. Everyone knew professors were paid far less than they could make in private practice. “Yeah, right,” Matt groused, wondering if he should just ignore the page and pretend he’d already left for the day.
But, as usual, his conscience and almost compulsive dedication to his duty prevailed.
He stepped to the corner and picked up the phone, dialing the operator as he yawned again.
“Dr. Carter,” he said when the hospital operator answered.
“You have a call from a patient up on surgery, Dr. Carter,” the feminine voice said. “Would you like me to put him through?”
Matt frowned. He never received calls from patients after they were admitted to the hospital, even ones he’d treated in the ER. “Uh, sure,” he said, wondering just what this was all about and who might be calling him.
After a couple of clicks, the operator said, “Go ahead, sir. Dr. Carter is on the line.”
A male voice said, “Matt?”
Matt recognized the voice immediately as belonging to Damon Clark. “Damon?” he asked. “What are you doing back in the hospital?”
“Why don’t you come up to my room when you get a chance and I’ll tell you. Room three twenty-two.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Matt said.
“Oh, Matt,” Damon said.
“Yeah?”
“See if you can bum a couple of smokes. The bastards took mine when they admitted me.”
Matt grinned, shaking his head. Damon, chief of detectives of the Houston Police Department, was an inveterate smoker. About the only thing he did that was politically incorrect.
“You know the Taub is a nonsmoking facility, Damon,” Matt said.
“What are they gonna do, arrest me for smoking?” Damon said with a chuckle, quoting a line from a movie.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Matt said, and hung up.
A few minutes later, while riding up to the third floor in the elevator, Matt reviewed what he knew of Damon Clark. The first black man to be made chief of detectives on the Houston Police Department, Damon was independently wealthy and was a fixture in Houston society. Handsome, articulate, and extremely politically astute, he’d been the first to recognize the presence of a serial killer working the Houston streets the previous year. The killer’s trademark of slashing throats and draining his victims of their blood had caused him to ask for help from the medical community. Matt and Sam and Shooter had gotten inv
olved, eventually determining the killer was a vampire.
After a long investigation, in which the creature had killed one of Damon’s female officers, Damon had finally led the assault on the killer’s ship, which resulted in the death of the vampire. During the assault, the vampire had managed to skewer Damon through the abdomen with a sword, resulting in his losing almost half his small bowel and a portion of his colon. Matt hadn’t heard from Damon since his release from the hospital after a series of difficult operations a few weeks back.
Matt knocked on the door to room 322 and entered. He tried to keep the look of shock off his face at Damon’s appearance. The man seemed to have lost twenty pounds and his eyes were sunken in his face. He still wore his trademark gold-rimmed designer glasses, but his once-lean frame now looked gaunt and his eyes had a yellowish tint to them.
“Hey, Damon,” Matt said.
Damon looked up from his hospital bed and grinned. The smile reminded Matt again that this was one of the most charismatic men he’d ever known.
“Howdy, Matt,” Damon said. “Close the door and come on in.”
Matt shut the door and took a seat next to the bed.
“Were you able to get what I asked for?” Damon asked, glancing at the door to make sure it was closed.
Matt pulled a wrinkled cigarette from his shirt pocket, along with a kitchen match. “Yeah. We had a homeless man in the ER needing some stitches in his head. He made me give him a dollar for the cigarette and match.”
Damon reached out and took them from Matt’s hand. “Worth any amount when you really need one,” Damon said. He got out of the bed, opened the window a crack, and sat on the window ledge as he struck the match and took a deep puff.
“Those things’ll kill you,” Matt said.
Damon gave him a look, smoke trailing from his nostrils and an expression of sublime satisfaction. “Sure they will, but only if your doctor friends don’t do the job first.”
“Speaking of that, just why are you in here?” Matt asked.
“Adhesions,” Damon said shortly. “Seems there’s some scar tissue building up around where they took my guts out and they want to go back in and get rid of it before it causes an obstruction.”
Matt nodded. Scar tissue as a result of massive bowel injuries was fairly common. “Well, at least it’s nothing serious.”
“Serious is in the eye of the beholder, Matt, my boy,” Damon said sarcastically. “Anytime they cut me open and poke around in my insides, I consider it serious business.”
“When are you scheduled?”
“Tomorrow morning, first thing. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”
“Anything I can do, Damon. You know that.”
Damon took a final drag off the cigarette and threw the butt out the window. He grinned. “Got to get rid of the evidence or that Nazi nurse will have my hide.”
Matt looked at the tray across Damon’s bed. “Yeah,” he said, “she might take away your bouillon as punishment.”
“That wouldn’t be punishment; that’d be a blessing,” Damon said. He walked over to the closet and took out a leather-bound book. “This is the real reason I wanted you to come,” he said, handing the book to Matt.
The book appeared to be very old, with a leather cover that was cracked and wrinkled with age and pages that appeared to be made of parchment rather than paper. The writing inside was done with India ink and was in long hand in a style that seemed . . . ancient.
Matt looked up at Damon over the book, with a questioning expression.
Damon sat on the edge of the bed. “Shooter tells me you all have been having some trouble with TJ,” he said.
Matt nodded slowly, wondering what that had to do with the book. As he considered Damon’s statement, he was unsure of how much he could tell Damon without breaking patient confidentiality.
Damon held up his hand. “I know. You can’t talk about a patient without her consent, but I think there are some things in that journal that may be of help to you and the doctors who are treating TJ.”
Damon hesitated and his eyes got a faraway look in them. “It’s a hell of a read.”
“Just what is this book?” Matt asked, glancing again at the old-style writing on the pages.
Damon’s eyes came back into focus. “It’s the journal of Roger Niemann. The man . . . or thing we killed on that ship.”
“The vampire?” Matt asked, unable to keep the incredulity out of his voice.
Damon held up his hand, a half smile curling his lips. “You know the department never admitted he was anything other than a serial killer, Matt.”
“But we know different, don’t we, Chief?”
Damon frowned. “I don’t know what to think, Matt. One of my men found that book in the ship and gave it to me after he looked through it. He didn’t think it should go into the evidence room at the station. He was right. That thing is political dynamite.”
“What do you want me to do with it?” Matt asked, unconsciously running his hands over the supple leather.
Damon shrugged. “Read it. Study it. There may be some things in there that will do TJ some good. I owe my life to Shooter for what he did to protect me on that ship, so this is the least I can do.”
Matt got to his feet. “Thanks, Chief. I’ll go through it tomorrow after I’ve had some sleep.” He stuck out his hand. “Good luck tomorrow, Damon.”
Damon shook his hand. “The doctors tell me luck has nothing to do with it.”
Matt nodded, but he was thinking luck is always a part of surgery, no matter how skilled the surgeon. Most surgeons admitted to each other they’d rather be lucky than good any day.
He told Damon he’d check in on him after his surgery the next day and left the room, cradling the ancient journal under his arm as he walked tiredly down the hall.
When Matt got to the parking garage, he tossed the journal into the passenger seat of his new Mazda Miata convertible and got behind the wheel. He’d bought the Miata with the insurance money he’d received when his ’65 Vette convertible was wrecked while chasing the vampire Niemann a few months back. While not as throaty sounding as the muscle car from the sixties, the Miata at least had reliable air-conditioning, a must in Houston’s ninety-plus summer heat—and it was a fun ride.
Since it was only a little past eight in the evening and the temperature was manageable, Matt put the top down and cruised home to his town house in University Place near Rice University.
Since he was heading away from the medical center, the Sunday-evening traffic was against him and he made good time, arriving home twenty minutes after he left the parking garage.
He parked in his space, took the journal, and trudged slowly up the walk to his door.
Once inside, he kicked his shoes off, headed to the bedroom, dropped the journal on his bedside table, then flopped facedown on the bed without bothering to undress. He was deep asleep within minutes.
Five
Matt woke up the next morning feeling a little hungover from his twelve-hour shift. Since it was a Monday, he had no official duties until his one o’clock class on emergency medicine with the sophomore medical students.
He climbed slowly out of bed and shuffled into the kitchen, smacking his lips. He hated falling asleep in his clothes. It made him feel rumpled and dirty until he took his shower.
In the kitchen, he put a pot of coffee to brewing and opened the freezer. He took out a can of frozen orange-juice concentrate and a package of frozen strawberries and put them on the bar to thaw while he took a shower.
Once he’d scrubbed the grime of the ER out of his skin and hair, and brushed the taste of stale coffee off his teeth, he threw on a terry cloth robe and went back into the kitchen. He put the orange juice and the strawberries in a blender and turned it on while he poured himself a cup of coffee.
Taking the morning paper off the front step, he took his coffee and fruit drink out on his porch. He sat at the table there and began the process of starting his day.
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After downing his coffee and juice, he went to his bedroom to get dressed for the day. When he took his robe off and threw it on the bed, he noticed the leather journal lying on his nightstand. He’d forgotten all about it.
He put on some jeans and a short-sleeved cotton shirt and took the journal into his living room. After fixing himself another cup of coffee, he sat in his favorite chair and opened the journal. In faded but still legible India ink, the top of the page was labeled with the date June 24, 1870. Matt felt the page with his fingers. Parchment. Perhaps the book was that old after all. He settled back in his chair and began to read.
Jesus, Matt thought after he’d scanned the first few pages. This must be Niemann’s diary. He glanced back at the entry of the first page. If the journal was accurate, that would have made him over two hundred years old. He opened the journal back up and continued to read, his forgotten coffee growing cold on the table next to him.
An hour and a half later, Matt slowly closed the journal and leaned back in his chair. He found he was covered with sweat and shivering. After reading the innermost thoughts of the monster he knew as Roger Niemann, he felt almost sorry for the creature. It was clear from his journal he’d struggled as best he could against his fate . . . trying his best to satisfy his fiendish cravings while doing as little damage as he could. Still, Matt thought, the man was an admitted killer of no telling how many innocent people over two hundred years.
Damon had been right—the book was dynamite. Matt knew he’d have to share its contents with his friends as soon as possible. There might just be something in the book that would shed some light on the mysterious illness that affected TJ after being forced to drink the creature’s blood.
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