“Bullshit, she owes you!” Max raged, his fists curling at his sides. Let him hit me, Ziggy thought, his vampire heart beating faster in his chest. I don’t care. I have to do what I have to do.
He looked into Carrie’s eyes. They were hollow and rimmed red. She still felt guilty. Good. She should feel guilty, and it would work to his advantage if he played it like that. “You got Bill killed, too. It was your monster that did this. Carrie, you have to fix him. You owe me. And you owe him.”
She sighed, her shoulders sagging. “I’m not a surgeon, Ziggy. I don’t know how to do a heart transplant. Besides, it takes a whole team of people to do one of those.”
“Right, but they want their patients to live. We just need him to…not die right away. Can you just do a half-assed job?” Half-assed wasn’t the best word choice, he supposed, but he stared at her, hard, daring her to meet his eyes. “Please. You could always just tell Nate I was wounded or something.”
“Of course. ‘Nathan, your son is dead. He was wounded or something. Never mind this vivisected human and all these surgical tools,’” Max grumbled, raking his mutilated hand through his hair. “I can’t believe you’d even consider this, Carrie!”
Ziggy couldn’t argue anymore, and he didn’t have anything to bargain with. It all rested on her now. “Please, Carrie. Please.”
She looked at the box of medical supplies, then held up her hands, helpless. “Fine. But we have to do it now.”
Ziggy swallowed the lump of stones in his throat. A nagging doubt grew in him, telling him he should be overwhelmed by near-painful relief. That he wasn’t might be a sign that he’d made the wrong choice.
“This is crazy,” Max exploded, pacing back and forth behind them. “Bill is dead! Nathan is close to it! What the hell are you doing?”
Carrie’s expression was grim as she settled beside Bill, the bag with the heart in her hand. “I’m trying to save life instead of taking it for once.”
Fourteen:
Wounded
T ransplanting Ziggy’s vampire heart for Bill’s human one was, by far, the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.
It also turned out to be the most brilliant. Even before I completed the sloppy job, a technique I improvised with common sense, a copy of Gray’s Anatomy and liberal amounts of guessing and prayer, the change started to creep through his other organs. I watched, horrified and dazzled all at once, as the vampire blood began to flow into his heart, mending the places where I’d poorly patched veins to ventricles, occasionally bursting a connection. The left atrium and ventricle split completely away, and I held my breath, wondering if Ziggy was about to die or the transformation was about to complete. The left half of the heart fell back, pressing into the lung, and regenerated its missing right half. However, unlike the right half of the human heart, the right half of the vampire heart was covered in soft, pointed spines, and it beat with its own weird rhythm. A long, purple vein snaked from the left side, slithering past the other organs, out of view. I assumed it must attach to the stomach, as in the diagram from The Sanguinarius. Forcing back a shudder at the memory of that horrible illustration, I watched the remaining half of Ziggy’s human heart regenerate its left side, free from those nasty, dark spikes, and, for just a moment, cease beating. The veins connecting it to any blood source pulled free, and, with nothing but memory to account for it, the heart started up again, thumping but not processing any blood through it. Just a spectral beating heart, the only human thing that remained in Bill’s chest. Before my eyes the pericardium, the sack around the heart and lungs, lashed itself back together. His sternum closed, too, but the skin over it did not. The healing power of Ziggy’s blood stopped short right there. I would have to stitch him up.
“When will he wake up?” Ziggy asked as I reached for the needle drivers again.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It took two months for me to change, because I didn’t feed. He won’t be completely finished until he feeds the first time. You should probably give me some of your blood to transfuse into him to make the healing go faster.”
“You should open up a vampire hospital,” Max said angrily. He’d stood by and watched as I’d worked, interjecting unhelpful comments and muttering under his breath about how crazy I was. “Not like anyone can stop you. At least, not with rational arguments or common sense.”
A vampire hospital. Now there was an idea worth considering. I tucked it away for a time when I was less tired. “I need to go tend to Nathan.”
“And I need to wash the van so no one comes asking about the blood and hair stuck in the grill,” Max snapped, heading downstairs and slamming the door behind him.
I let him go. There were already so many sparks flying in my overloaded brain, I didn’t feel like adding to the commotion by fighting with Max over something he’d get over on his own.
Nathan lay exactly as we had left him, on top of the blankets on the half-made bed. The pinkish fluid of white blood cells mixed with dried blood from his wounds had seeped through the sheet he was wrapped in. I’d have to get him free from it before it healed to his skinned torso.
I was shocked by the sudden realization that I’d left Nathan alone to help Bill. I guess there was still something of a doctor in me. I’d helped the one who’d needed it most first and trusted that Nathan wouldn’t die in the meantime. It was something I’d done on autopilot, because there was no way I’d have taken the chance if I’d been thinking right.
Hell, if I’d been thinking right, I wouldn’t have transplanted a vampire heart into a half-changed human.
Pushing aside those thoughts—because I didn’t want Nathan to hear them right now—I got a large mixing bowl from the kitchen and filled it with scalding hot water from the tap. Then I grabbed every clean washcloth I could find. By some miracle, the vampires who’d ravaged the apartment hadn’t trashed the linen cupboard. Nothing fun to smash there, I guessed.
“Hey,” I said softly, gently shaking Nathan’s shoulder.
His eyes opened, just a little, and he half smiled at me, but didn’t speak.
“I’m going to have to clean all of this out.” There was no other way to put it. “Do you want anything for the pain? Maybe something to make you loopy?”
“No.” His throat sounded parched, and I cursed myself for not bringing him something to drink. “No, save it. For when…we need it.”
“If this isn’t when we need it, I shudder to imagine what those circumstances will be.” Slowly, I peeled back the sheet covering him. “This might hurt, if it sticks.”
“I might cry.” If he’d been less tired, less injured, it would have sounded like a joke. But I knew it wasn’t when he said, “I thought I should warn you.”
I had to struggle to keep from crying, myself, as I viewed again the damage that had been done to him. “I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
“I’m so sorry, Carrie.” Nathan did start to cry then, and before I could wonder what he meant, something in my mind showed me.
Dahlia. Dahlia showed me. I saw the little room where I’d found Nathan, saw him tied to the bed, not as he’d been when I rescued him. He lay on his back, his pale, nude skin still intact, still stretched smooth over his tightly corded muscles. And Dahlia was there, burning something in a metal dish beside the bed. The smoke was strong and sickly sweet. She climbed onto the bed beside Nathan and kissed him, sliding her hands over his chest. He didn’t resist her, though I saw a flash of confusion and regret in his drug-clouded eyes.
I shook away the image, forced Dahlia to the back of my mind. “Don’t apologize. It was a spell. You couldn’t help yourself.”
He looked at me with confusion that slowly faded to horror. And through the blood tie, I saw him make the connection between what I knew of Dahlia and what I’d done to her. His lips moved, but I barely heard the word from his mouth. Instead, I heard it through the blood tie, like a death sentence. Soul Eater.
Whether I’d acknowledged it or not, I had known it. I had known what
I was doing when I’d gulped down Dahlia’s blood. And I had known why I heard her voice in my head, so clear it was a part of me I had to forcibly ignore. I was a Soul Eater. There was no way to deny it.
So, I didn’t. I just didn’t mention it.
I finished peeling back the sheet and reexamined Nathan’s wound. I lifted the edges of his skin, which made him wince, but I had to see how much he’d healed, if at all. The torn flesh tried to mend. There was just too much to regenerate.
I dunked the washcloth into the substantially cooler water and started cleaning the skinless patches as best as I could. Vampires don’t get infections the way a human would, but I at least wanted to get the linen fibers and gummed-up blood off of him. It couldn’t do any more damage, at least, to be clean.
“Why did you do it?” Nathan asked. For someone who’d been half skinned alive, he was remarkably unconcerned for himself. Maybe it was helping him ignore the pain that made his lips go blue with shock and his whole body tremble.
Since I didn’t have an answer right away, I concentrated on washing his wound. When he made a noise of impatience, I sent all the answers I could think of over the blood tie. That I didn’t know why I’d done it; that I hadn’t known what I was doing; that I had known; that I’m still a flawed human masquerading in a body with far too much power and far too many possibilities and no compass to guide me.
“You did it because you hate her,” he said, when the torrent was finished flowing into him. “You can lie to yourself, but not to me. You hated her so much, you wanted to do something to her that you could never undo.”
“You’re right.” I swished the washcloth in the now-pink water and wrung it out. “I did hate her. But this wasn’t a planned revenge, okay? I didn’t sit around for days formulating how I would do it. And I didn’t go there intending to…eat her soul. I went there to get you back.”
He reached one arm—oddly half-whole in that the front had been skinned, but not the back—up to touch my face. “You should have left me.”
I knocked his hand away, not caring if it hurt him. Hell, I hoped it hurt him. “That’s a great thanks, you know? Bill almost died. We all almost died. And you can’t even try to be grateful?”
“For nothing?” He wasn’t mad, and he wasn’t really arguing. Just stating a fact. “I’m going to die.”
“No. Maybe not.” I couldn’t think of a way to heal him or ease his pain, but I knew I couldn’t live without him. “I’ll figure out a way to fix this. For now, let’s just get you bandaged up. And stop talking about dying. I went through too damned much to get you back.”
Despite his pain, he laughed. “That’s not self-serving at all, is it?”
“My selfishness is what’s going to save you,” I reminded him. Then I worked in silence, because there was nothing left to say and small talk would only exhaust him.
When the wound was clean, I went to the kitchen and retrieved the plastic wrap. I needed something to cover the wound that wouldn’t stick when I needed to change the dressing, and I’d seen how well the sheet had worked. I took the plastic wrap with me to the bedroom, throwing a quick glance at Ziggy, who still sat beside Bill’s sleeping form.
I cut the plastic wrap in pieces large enough to reach from one side of Nathan’s chest to the other, and secured it around three edges with medical tape. I gently taped the seam between the first piece and the second, and continued down to his hips. From there, I wasn’t sure how to proceed. His legs were each skinless from hip to knee. I bandaged those with the plastic wrap, then turned my attention to parts still uncovered.
For whatever reason, Dahlia hadn’t done anything to his genitals. She tried, Nathan explained through the blood tie. She didn’t have the stomach to do it.
I almost gagged at the thought myself. “Thank God for small favors, huh?”
He nodded grimly. “She did try, though. Believe me, she did try.”
I didn’t want to know. “I think what I’ll have to do for your hips—” I looked away from the hips in question, where the white of bone actually showed through where she’d cut too deep and stripped away muscle “—is just put on a pair of underwear. It will probably stick, but you won’t have much mobility any other way.”
“I’m not going to run a marathon,” he grumbled, his eyes sliding closed in exhaustion. “Do what you have to.”
I went to one of the drawers that had been overturned when the apartment had been ransacked and found a clean pair of briefs. The waistband would put pressure on some of the skinned areas of his lower body, so I used the scissors from the med kit to cut it off. I did the same to the elastic around the legs, and I slit one side to make it easier to put them on him. After I’d carefully rolled him to get the makeshift bandage under him, a lot like the way you roll an injured person to change their bedsheets, I taped the open side together. What he ended up with was a white cotton version of Tarzan’s loincloth. At least, the Hollywood version of Tarzan who had to hide his junk from the camera.
“You’re too good to me,” Nathan said, gripping my wrist as I carefully arranged the fabric so it wouldn’t pull on his wound. His words didn’t make up for the fact he’d told me he’d rather have been left for dead, but they did soften the blow a little, after the fact.
I rationed a little blood out for him—we’d have to find a way to get more at dusk—and got him to swallow a few Tylenol for the pain, but he refused anything else for his comfort. “Just stay with me while I fall asleep,” he asked, and I did, climbing onto the bed beside him and trying to find a place to lay my hand that wouldn’t hurt him. I settled for lacing my fingers with his, and he squeezed in acknowledgment before falling unconscious once more.
“What the hell happened?”
Ziggy raised his head and tried to shake some of the sleep out of it. The light in the living room was rosy. It gave the whole place a surreal familiarity. He’d seen the light look exactly like this a hundred times.
But he’d never seen the living room all torn apart and covered in bloody tools, and he’d never seen it with this weird channel in his head. Hello? he asked across it.
Bill answered him out loud. “Hey. What happened?”
“Um…” How did you break it to someone that they were—surprise!—a vampire?
“You just did, genius.” Bill tried to sit up, groaning as he did, and Ziggy helped him.
“Your chest is going to be sore for a while. I’m guessing. Carrie had to…” He didn’t want to go into what Carrie had done. Looking back, it was incredibly stupid to have even tried. “She got the knife out, at least.”
“Was that what it was? I couldn’t remember. All I knew was I turned around and something hit me. But you’d think that if it was a knife, it would have hurt more. I always imagined I would feel it go in, if I was stabbed.” He shrugged, winced and rolled one of his shoulders to ease the ache. “So, I’m guessing that, from the voice I heard in my head when you were thinking, that I’m a vampire?”
Ziggy nodded, unable to think of anything to say.
“Son of a bitch.” Bill half laughed, an expression caught between amused and totally, murderously pissed-off on his face. “That would explain why I’m so thirsty.”
“I’ll get you some blood.” Ziggy stood, and stopped when Bill’s hand closed over his arm.
“No. Get me water. I don’t think I’m ready for the other.” When he finished speaking, he released his hold, as if Ziggy was dirty or something.
Great. He went to the kitchen and filled up a glass from the tap and took it silently to Bill.
Bill gulped down the water, and Ziggy had to refrain from telling him that it wouldn’t do any good. No matter how much he drank, even if he swallowed the ocean, nothing would feel right until he’d had some human blood. He wouldn’t push it until it was a life-or-death thing, but he really hoped it wouldn’t get that far.
“So, I’m blood tied to you now, right?” Bill wiped his mouth and set the glass aside. “Isn’t that what you call it
?”
“That’s it.” A hard edge was creeping into Ziggy’s tone, a defense against the steel in Bill’s words. “Us crazy vampire folk call it that.”
“All right, knock it off!” Bill snapped, and the air in the room seemed to crackle with pent-up anger. He cleared his throat and looked away, visibly trying to calm himself. “Why did you do it?”
“Because it didn’t feel right to let you die.” There was no other explanation. No excuses. No big declaration of love. Sometimes, the cheesiest moments in movies turn out to be the ones you wish for in real life.
Bill sniffed at that, looking around the room as if it was going to be different somehow now that he was a vampire. “So, it didn’t feel right to let me die, but it felt just fine to change me into a vampire without knowing what I would have wanted?”
Damn. Put that way, it did seem like a dickweed thing to have done. “Fuck you, you’re alive. It’s not like you were wearing some MedicAlert bracelet that said, ‘Hey, don’t turn me into a vampire, okay?’”
“You’re right! That’s the kind of thing you know about a person after you actually know them!” Bill pounded his chest with his fist and flinched, but he didn’t crumple the way someone else would have in that kind of pain. Instead, he put his hand down slowly and glared at Ziggy, as if he could funnel all of that pain into him.
Ziggy stood, slowly, and tried to do his best impression of Nate during an argument over curfew. “Listen, I understand that you’re upset, okay? But I was in a situation where I either had to let you die, which is irreversible, or take a chance and try to save you.”
“Irreversible? And being a vampire isn’t irreversible?” Bill kicked the overturned coffee table and the corner splintered, sending a leg skittering across the debris-covered floor.
“No, it’s reversible.” Ziggy leaned down and scooped up the table leg. “Let me know when you’re ready.”
They stood, frozen, glaring at each other. A pulse leaped in the hollow of Bill’s throat, but that was the only clue to his fear.
Blood Ties Omnibus Page 114