“I know it sounds silly to you, Gabriel, but it’s something the Dineh believe. The old ones anyway.” She opened the door. “Her process has already been interrupted by all of this investigation delay. I need to get her in the ground and let her rest in peace. Then I can worry about whom or what did it, although you seem to have an idea, but cannot tell me.” She laid a hand over mine. “You’re different and I respect that. What makes you different does not matter to me. At the same time, you have to respect my differences. If I ask you to help me keep a straight head throughout this, do not contradict me.”
“Right on. I can do that.”
We went back inside but didn’t return to the table. Instead, she had me follow her back out to the den, and down a short hallway. She stopped in front of a closed door. “This was her room.” She looked up at me standing beside her. “Go on in and take all the time you like. I’ll be out in the kitchen waiting for you.”
The room was stuffy, even though it hadn’t been that long that Heather’d been dead, maybe a week or so? My mind returned to the sight of her frozen corpse but was quickly dissuaded as I circled the narrow bed in which she used to sleep. The room was small, but well-organized, with a tall dresser, a wardrobe that took up half a wall next to a large mirror, a bedside table with a ceramic pottery base lamp, a bookshelf full of books and a rack of CDs. The whole room was done in earthy tones, rich deep reds, azure blues, crisp greens.
A glance at the spines of some of her books led me to believe she hadn’t lost her free-spirited self. She even had quite a few vampire novels. I laughed to myself as I recognized Anne Rice, Michael Romkey and even Stephen King titles in there. A few metaphysical study books. Outdoor guides. Self-help books for females. Navajo history and mythology. A peek inside her wardrobe revealed her clothes neatly hung, with shoes arranged in straight rows on the floor of the cabinet. I felt like an intruder in such a private space, but at the same time compelled to rediscover a woman I had turned away so long ago.
The corner of a Polaroid photograph jutted out from behind a gauzy black dress. I pushed the garment aside to reveal a picture of us–me and Heather–from when we were still dating. I think Silvia had taken it. We were sitting on some steps, her between my legs and I had my arms wrapped around her. God, I was so skinny then. I wore glasses, and my hair was much shorter, chin-length and teased a little in the front. It made me look like a masculine, gangly girl. She was beautiful there, her face framed by her long hair. How old was that picture? Had to be almost thirty years ago. My eyes stung and I closed the doors to the wardrobe, unable to look at the picture any longer. I had no idea what life had in store for me at that moment. In fact, knowing the old me, I was probably as impatient as I looked in that picture, eager to take Heather out for a hot and heavy make-out session in a movie theater afterward. I used to be kind of a dick like that.
I did so much better with her as a friend, and that’s really why I called it off. I knew it hurt her, but we just weren’t good relationship material. Fuck, seeing that she kept a picture of us around...I swallowed hard and continued my exploration of her things.
Her dresser was topped with two framed pictures, one of her and Silvia, probably after they left Colorado, and another one of her holding a baby. She was grinning up at the camera, but I couldn’t tell if it was her baby, or someone else’s. A thin gold necklace with a tiny cross on it, like Tabby’s. A couple of pieces of folded paper. I opened one. It was a short note, scrawled in barely legible handwriting and signed simply “S.” Did she have a boyfriend? I didn’t want to bug Silvia with any more painful questions.
I’d seen enough. The room was stifling, with a faint underlying scent of her. Movement in the corner of my eye caused me to wheel around in a panic, but it was only my reflection in the mirror. Her mirror. What did she think happened to her precious Gabriel? I bared my fangs at myself and scowled before I left the room and closed the door behind me. More pictures hung in the hallway. The baby Heather was holding grew older picture by picture, until I came upon an image where he was grouped with Silvia and some older man I could only assume was Silvia’s Ralph. The boy favored Silvia’s husband. Where was this kid? Judging by the hairstyles I placed the picture to have been taken somewhere in the nineties. He looked about twelve, which would make him around thirty at present. He probably had a wife and kid. Fed up with nostalgia trips, I rejoined Silvia in the kitchen where she was listening to the radio on the counter play oldies and dealing a game of Solitaire.
“Who is the kid in the pictures you have in the hallway?” I dropped into the seat and watched her flip cards over and clear out rows.
“My son.” She didn’t look up from her game. “He lives in Ohio with his girlfriend.”
“Oh, so he’s all grown up now.”
“His name is Gabriel.” She looked up and met my gaze. “I named him after your father.”
I frowned. Yeah, I definitely misread signals way back when. Silvia’s face was turning red.
“Did you and...Dad...did you two date or something?” I put on my most interested face, which wasn’t hard because I did find it interesting to see how much she thought of me. And really sad too.
She snorted. “No. He was taken with my sister, and broke things off with her only right before I was scheduled to return home. I wouldn’t have had a chance after that regardless.”
“You liked him.”
“Very much.” She let out a sharp laugh. “He never suspected a thing, which was good, because he was dating my sister and I don’t steal boyfriends. Especially from my only sister. And then here you show up, his son that I knew nothing about, and to top that all off, you look so much like I remember him.”
I hung my head. “I’m sorry.”
“You can’t be. You shouldn’t be. I was the fool that hid my feelings for him.”
“Still, it has to be hard for you. So much loss in such a short time.”
She snorted and dropped a card on the bottom of a row before picking the whole thing up to set aside. “Yes. It has been a lot of pain.”
“I’m sorry.” I sounded like a broken record.
She glanced up. “Don’t be. If you want, you can sleep in her room. I don’t know if it’d bother you or not.”
“Why would it?” I sounded cockier than I actually felt. What, did she think I was scared? It was a room with a small window that could easily be covered. I’d take my chances sleeping with ghosts than waking up on the couch smelling my own cooking flesh. Silvia didn’t know just how comforting her house was to me. Some of my past was here, from the rug on the wall in the den, to the old photograph pinned to the inside of Heather’s armoire. I was okay with it. It was just dredging up old memories of a life I’d mostly forgotten, or at least tried to. The sad part of it was I knew I could never entirely forget the man I’d once been, or the people that filled that man’s life.
Silvia went to bed around five in the morning, so I sat in her den, thumbing through old photo albums and reminiscing about how life had been when it’d only seemed endless. Death had a way of tearing off a chunk of a person to burn right in front of their eyes. It was an end. An over and out. There was no fucking reset in life.
Except in my case, and those like me. Was it better? Hell, I couldn’t really say. I hadn’t been around long enough to really feel the pain of everything I knew fall to pieces around me. I wasn’t depressed. I didn’t scale garden walls to watch young girls sleep like some perv. Then again, I wasn’t insane like most of the vamps. The rest of them out there? It was prerequisite to have lost half a mind.
When sunrise pinked the horizon, I retreated to Heather’s old room, locked the door, covered the window and slept wrapped up in her ghostly perfume. Surprisingly, I had no dreams.
Silvia woke me around eight the next evening. She’d been crying again. I chomped down on my lip before I offered consolation, remembering what she’d asked me to do for her.
“What’s up?”
“Heather’s body h
as been stolen,” she said softly, as if she was telling me she’d wrecked the family car.
I grabbed my pack of cigarettes and headed toward the back door barefoot, with her on my heels. “Stolen? Who the fuck would steal a dead body?”
We stood on her back steps. I still had to squint when I looked toward the west even though the sun had disappeared below the earth’s edge.
“The police just left,” she said, as if she didn’t hear me. “I didn’t want to wake you since you’d been up all night.”
Would a Nesfer actually go into a morgue and steal a corpse? I’d seen her body. She was frozen, for fuck’s sake. The cadaver had to be heavy. I rubbed my face and grimaced at the beginnings of stubble. I needed a shower. I wanted time to think.
“I want to go talk to the staff there to find out how it’s possible to have a body stolen.” She looked at me like she was waiting for an answer.
I frowned. Okay, no shower then. I curled my lip in distaste at the idea but nodded. “I’ll get my shoes on then.”
Neither one of us had much to say on the ride over. The hospital loomed as if in disapproval. Even the lines of the windows formed a stern frown. I returned the gesture and lit up with Silvia in the parking lot when she came back out after the interview session. We couldn’t be near any entrance with a cigarette and not get bitched out by security. Every damn place was getting like that. Hell, I remembered when I could smoke in the hospital.
“So what did the police say?”
“They told me to get some sleep.” She tossed out her cigarette and immediately jammed another in her mouth. I joined her, sharing my lighter.
“They don’t have a fucking clue do they?”
“They don’t really care, Gabriel.” She rubbed her forehead and sat on the curb.
I frowned and held out my hand. “Come on. Let’s get you home. There’s nothing left to do here.”
I guess I wanted to get away from the situation just as badly as she did. She gave me a sad smile. “I’m just trying to finish this.” She took my hand, rose to her feet and walked past me before stopping halfway to her Willys.
I nodded. Were the Navajo so different from the whites in the area? From what Silvia let on, I took it there was some tension. I didn’t want to ask much lest it end up in some political rant with her angry and me pressed back in my chair. I was one of them, true, but I was very much estranged from my roots, and I wasn’t one-hundred percent. Hell, it didn’t matter anymore.
A blond woman in pale blue scrubs walked across the street nearby. I caught her scent. It was a reminder that I should pay attention to my needs in addition to everyone else’s. I would be hungry again soon.
A flash of movement snared my gaze from the right and, before I could react, the girl in the crosswalk was knocked to the ground by something that looked like a crazed naked lady. The nude woman growled and bit into her throat, her fingers clutched tight around her victim’s upper arms to pin her to the ground. The smell of spilled blood blossomed in the night air, sharpening my senses instantly. Another goddamn vampire.
I charged at the vampire and tackled her, sending us both into a roll almost to the curb. I shoved her against the pavement, but she squirmed from under me, since I had nothing to grab onto but her bare skin. She reared up, hissed at me with bloody fangs and streaked across the parking lot as quick as only a vampire could. I rose up on my knees.
Unfuckingbelievable. It was Heather.
I wanted to chase her, but the hospital worker was badly hurt. I scrambled to her side, and she looked at me with bulging terrified eyes. Her fingers clawed at the concrete. I clamped my hand to her spurting neck and shouted at Silvia.
“Get help out here now!”
Surely the cameras had seen all that. I looked up and around for them but couldn’t see any right off. Headlights glared as a car stopped by me and the woman in its path. A man got out and started toward us.
“Hey, is she okay?”
I had trouble answering. There was so much blood. I was hungry and fucking vamping out and it was hot and flowing between my fingers. Her blond hair was soaking up crimson. The driver came closer and I growled at him.
“Does she look fucking okay? Get the fuck away!”
He got a good look at my face, looked scared, jumped back in his car and sped out of the lot. Fucking Heather was wandering around out here, and she was a–I couldn’t conceive of it. She was dead. I’d seen her corpse myself. I’d smelled her. Then again, there were other bodies in that freezer, and hell it was a morgue...maybe she’d defrosted enough to reanimate and had been a vampire the whole damn time. I read somewhere that freezing a body completely halts all processes, including decomposition. She’d be laid out to get ready for pick-up so they could bury her. She was like a frog in spring, thawed out from winter’s grasp and chirping in the night. Chomping, same thing.
A few hospital workers rushed out to meet us, and the girl was pried from my hands with gentle reassurance. Silvia arrived right after. I focused my breathing and kept my gaze pinned on the ground. I had to get away. When they rushed the girl back inside, Silvia glanced back at me and I waved her on but she came back over.
“What attacked her?” She’d missed everything up to the point of Heather streaking like a weird dog back into the shadows.
“Something,” I said, “I didn’t get a good look at it.”
“Are you coming in? You need to wash off, and they’ll want to know what you saw.”
“I’ll be there in a few,” I said, wincing at the deep growl lacing my voice. She cocked her head at me but followed everybody in. The second they weren’t looking, I licked my fingers, shaking as the tingle hit my tongue. I was in a mode and needed to get away. I needed to find Heather and find out what the hell happened to her. How it could be her? It was her–I saw the stitched “Y” between and over her breasts.
I didn’t even know if the woman would survive. Her blood was sweet. Blood. I could think of nothing else. My head pounded with hunger. If before I had needed a snack, now somebody was definitely getting it, but what the fuck would that make me? Any better than what Heather had become? I shook my head to clear it and let Silvia drag me back inside. She nudged me toward the men’s room and I washed the blood off my hands in a sort of daze.
Becoming a vampire fucked with my head–something about being dead, then being alive again. It had done weird shit to my memory and my eyesight at first, so I wasn’t worried that Heather didn’t recognize me, because she was new and was probably still adjusting. She likely wouldn’t remember me anyway. But Silvia. She hadn’t attacked Silvia. She had attacked some stranger instead, right out there in the open.
Silvia was right about them wanting to ask me shit. I claimed ignorance on just what or who had attacked the blonde, and even though they couldn’t hold me there at the hospital it was still a bitch. I sat in an undersized plastic chair that squeaked with every move I made. Different people asked me the same fucking questions, over and over. Uniforms of all kinds. A shiny badge–police again. That guy was the only one I really looked at, mainly because if I didn’t look a lawman in the eye, they’d think I was hiding something.
He lowered himself into the chair directly across from me. Only a long folding fake-woodgrain table divided us.
“My name is Officer Anderson. I’m just going to ask you some questions, Mr. Nez. Mind if I call you Gabriel?”
I sighed through my nose and stretched my legs out under the table. “Whatever you need.”
Officer Anderson was a short white man, shorter than most people were to me. His hands were small, like a woman’s. He clicked his pen and opened a little red spiral that already contained a bunch of scrawling on its pages. Our gazes met. His eyes were a faded blue that looked like they’d seen a lot. I wondered what he saw in mine, if they were silver or dilated. Not that I could help any of it.
“You said this woman came out of nowhere. And what were you doing here in the first place?”
I swa
llowed before speaking. My throat was dry as an old shoe in an empty lot. “I was here with family. Her sister’s body was taken.”
“Mrs. Redhouse has given her statement and confirmed this and your identity, since you say you have no ID.” From tone of his voice, he still didn’t sound so sure. He leaned forward. “Gabriel, we have nothing to go on if you don’t help us out. Are you sure, you don’t have a description for us?”
“I already told the others. It happened too fast. I was more concerned for the blonde.” Without meaning to, I was clenching my jaw. I forced myself to relax, just a little.
He frowned. “What brought you down this way? Visiting folks on the reservation?”
I caught it. A little smirk. I didn’t need mind-reading powers to tell he’d already categorized me, just from my looks. Indian. Another damned Indian. Silvia was right. They really didn’t give a shit, except if the victim happened to be white, which she was. It’d been a while since I’d faced that kind of subtle racism. I slipped my hands under the table to clench them into fists, partially from the pulling desire in my veins for Officer Anderson’s blood, partially because his change in attitude was really uncalled for. I answered carefully, because my fangs would show if I didn’t. “I was visiting to go to Heather’s funeral. To support Silvia. And no, officer. I don’t have family on the reservation.”
He raised an eyebrow and reached in his breast pocket for a business card holder. I was getting a good collection going of business cards from police and sheriffs lately, it seemed. I took the card he offered me.
“If you remember anything–and I mean anything–you call me. Day or night. Miss Johnson could have died tonight, if it wasn’t for your quick thinking.” He offered his hand and I reluctantly shook it. “Your quick response saved a life. You should be proud.” He let go of my hand and I resisted the urge to either wipe my palm on my jeans or punch him in the teeth. We both stood at the same time.
“Am I free to go now?” I hooked a thumb toward the door.
“Yes, you can go.” He gave a single nod and opened the door for me. His eyes still held a hint of suspicion but I’d passed his inspection. Fantastic. I walked out of there and found Silvia in the waiting area, her purse perched on her lap, eyes glazed over at the TV turned down too low for any person to hear.
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