• • •
At 5:50 a.m. my phone rings. I grab it and answer blearily. “Mughrhh?”
“It’s Jeremy. Turn on WVMP. Make sure you’re both listening.” He hangs up.
I reach across Shane to switch on the clock radio on the guest room nightstand. He murmurs my name and pulls me to his chest.
I snuggle close, caressing the smooth planes of his muscles and staring at the window. I know it’s still dark out, but my body zings a bit with fear at the thought of the coming sunrise. “We’re supposed to hear something.”
“Okay.” He strokes my hair with just his fingertips. “I woke up in the middle of the night thinking of Jim. The look on his face when I killed him, and when we found him in that place.”
“He forgave you. Maybe not in so many words, but he said he didn’t blame you.”
“I wish there was a way to know for sure if he’d changed.”
“Whatever the truth is, you did the right thing based on what you knew at the time. You had every reason to think Jim was a threat.”
“I did. But now I don’t.”
Jeremy’s voice comes on the radio. “It’s five before the hour here at 94.3 WVMP-FM, the Lifeblood of Rock ’n’ Roll. I don’t do many dedications here on my indie rock show, on account of the fact that I don’t have many listeners.” He chuckles. “Anyway. This song is from me, for two of my friends I love very much.” He pauses. “And always will.”
The first acoustic guitar note makes my lids close with sorrow. I cry every time I hear this song, thinking of me and Shane, or any couple growing old together and, one day, one of them leaving the other behind.
“Listen to the lyrics,” I tell Shane.
Maybe in the last several years since this song came out, in the dozens of times I heard it, it wormed its way into my soul and led me to make that leap from the radio station with no hesitation. Maybe this Death Cab for Cutie song saved our lives.
Shane’s arms tighten around me after the first line. He hasn’t heard the chorus or even the title, but he can already tell what it’s about. Refusing to lose someone to death. Joining them instead.
“I’ll follow you into the dark again,” I tell him. “A million times.”
He swallows, the sound heavy near my ear. “And I’ll lead you out again, a million times.”
31
Changes
Cruelly, we have to get up early for the Control car to pick us up at seven a.m. Our examinations will take place at a secret facility an hour west of headquarters, since our transformation is supposed to stay hush-hush until we’ve figured out what the hell happened.
Shane stands at the stove, holding a frying pan and a can of cooking spray. “I forget how to make eggs.”
“We have to fast before the blood tests, anyway, remember? I’ll get you a cookbook for Christmas, since my breakfast-making skills pretty much began and ended with cereal, not always in a bowl.”
“Put down the pan,” David says as he enters the kitchen, damp-haired and barefoot but otherwise dressed for work. “The smell of eggs makes Lori barf.” He takes the coffee I offer him with a nod of thanks. He goes to sip, then looks at the clock. His mug stops halfway to his mouth. “I just realized I don’t need to tell you to go home or hide in the basement before sunrise.”
“Sunrise.” Shane turns to me. “We’ll be able to see it.”
“It should come up while we’re in the car on the way.” I bite my lip in excitement. “It’ll rise over the mountains.”
I cross the room and let him envelop me in his arms. He winces, then covers the hiss of pain with a cough.
“You okay?” I ask him.
He lets go of me. “Yeah, my back’s a little stiff.”
“Sorry about the mattress,” David says. “It’s pretty old. And since it’s usually vampires with tough skeletal systems sleeping there—” He cuts himself off and looks away in discomfort.
“You can comment on our being human, David. We promise not to take offense. Right, Shane?”
“Hmm?” He frowns at the toaster as he lifts it with one hand. Then he sets it down and picks up the base of the blender, which Lori leaves on the counter, since fruit smoothies are one of the few foods she can stomach. “Huh.”
David and I watch in silence as Shane circles the kitchen and the adjoining dining room, picking up random objects, then putting them down.
Finally he lowers the corner of the dining room table with a thunk. “I’m weak now. I’ll suck as an Enforcement agent.”
“Plenty of them are human,” David points out. “I was.”
“When you were, what, twenty-one? That’s half my age.”
“You have the experience. Nothing can take that away.”
I hide a smile, remembering I said the very same thing about Shane and sex yesterday. It turned out to be true.
David lifts his mug. “And how many Enforcement agents are ex-vampires? You’ll have valuable insights your comrades won’t.”
“True. I just—it was weird waking up this morning and . . . well, it was weird waking up in the morning, period.” Shane gives a nervous chuckle as he glances between us. Then his gaze rests on David. “I don’t know how to be middle-aged.”
And that is my cue to go take a shower. David’s only thirty-five, but he’s still got eight years on me. Plus, he’s a guy, and a former Enforcement agent. He might be the best anchor for Shane on this crazy new ship.
I spent most of my life learning how not to need others. It’s a trick I had to unlearn when I became a vampire. I vow not to relearn it now.
• • •
Shane and I spend the morning subjecting ourselves to every medical examination, head to toe and all parts in between, inside and out. We leave behind every kind of bodily fluid.
Well, not every kind. The fertility tests will have to wait, since Shane was supposed to abstain from sex for two days before taking it. As for me, they have to draw blood on a certain day of my cycle—another thing I haven’t had for over six months. So it could be weeks before we know if both of us can have kids.
The rest of our results won’t be in until late this afternoon, so we meet Colonel Lanham for lunch. Luckily for our new human taste buds, this secret Control facility has an amazing food court, much better than the cafeteria at headquarters.
“I want to start by saying that none of this discussion will go beyond this table,” Lanham says as he sets down his tray of spinach quiche (Shane says that “real men don’t care whether real men eat quiche,” but I have no idea what that’s a reference to).
“But it’s obvious we’re no longer vampires. Will people need a top-secret security clearance just to talk to us?”
“Yeah, won’t the rest of the agency want to know how we became human again?” Shane asks.
“Obviously we’re playing this as we go along,” Colonel Lanham says. “This is unprecedented.”
“But I’ve done something no one’s ever done before, right?” When he nods, I continue. “And I bet a huge contingent of the Control would like to harness my power to unmake other vampires.”
“That’s impossible,” Shane says. “To unmake us, you had to (a) be a vampire, (b) die, and (c) come back to life.”
“Exactly. And I don’t think what I did was a power. It was a unique situation.” I explain to Lanham the sequence of the void, the light, and the dark. “I couldn’t have made it out of the darkness without Shane.”
“And I couldn’t have made it without her,” Shane adds. “Sir.”
“Fascinating.” Lanham spears a piece of butternut squash with his fork. “My theory is that at the heart of this transformation is Agent Griffin’s anti-magic essence. Your body and soul resisted the idea that you could be destroyed by sunlight. You were able to transfer this notion to Agent McAllister.”
“Did my body and soul also resist the idea of the afterlife? Because I didn’t feel at home in any of those three places.”
“I did.” Shane examines the soft
wheat roll he’s buttering. “I’d been to that darkness before.”
“When you died?” Lanham asks.
“Literally, yeah. And figuratively, a few times since then. I think that’s how I was able to find our way out.”
“So perhaps only a failed suicide like yourself could have accomplished the second part of the resurrection.”
Shane keeps buttering, smoothing the condiment evenly over the surface. Finally he says, “Maybe.”
“That would be cool.” To his questioning look, I respond, “It means that whatever’s out there, that thing that’s bigger than any religion, doesn’t hate suicides. Only someone who knows the darkness the way Shane does can find a path out of it.”
“If I may venture a guess,” Lanham says, “I think it’s about more than your first death, McAllister. It could concern your second life.”
Shane creases his brow. “You mean my life as a vampire?”
“Exactly. By every measure, you were a good man when you were undead. You saved lives on more than one occasion.”
“And you made people happy with your radio show,” I add.
Lanham continues. “In short, Agent McAllister, you redeemed yourself.”
“Not that you needed redeeming,” I interject.
Shane looks at me, then Lanham, then takes a bite of bread. “Wow,” he says as he chews.
We wait for him to add further commentary, but he simply eats his bread, focusing on each bite. Watching him revel in the simple pleasures of a human body, I wonder how much of our journey to death and back was done by me and how much by him.
We’ll probably never know, or fully understand why it happened. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
All that matters is that we didn’t make that journey alone.
• • •
“Well! I have good news and bad news.”
Shane and I turn from the window, where we’re watching absolutely nothing outside, and it is lovely, because it’s daylight. Unfortunately, it’s also overcast, which meant this morning’s sunrise was more of a “cloud-glow.”
Dr. Sanders motions for us to sit in the chairs on the other side of his desk. In his white coat he looks just like any other doctor, except for the amber-colored Research Division patch above his pen-lined pocket.
“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me together instead of separately.” He switches eyeglasses as he sits and opens our file folders. “As you know, we’re understaffed here at headquarters, so my schedule is a madhouse. But obviously I cleared my calendar for your spectacularly unique case.”
I nod, trying to keep my breathing even and slow, despite the fact that these results could hold devastating news: a horrible disease, a lack of some vital element humans need to stay alive. And if I’m perfectly normal and mundane, I’ll be kicked out of the Immanence Corps. Dr. Sanders literally holds our fates in his hands.
His trembling hands. If I were a vampire, I could tell by smell whether he was emotionally nervous or simply overcaffeinated. But I’m human now, so I have to use mere con-artist intuition.
“The good news is, you’re both in excellent health, for the most part. Cholesterol in particular is fabulous. We’ll want to check that again in six months, once you’ve been eating regularly.”
Shane leans forward. “What about diabetes?”
“To be completely certain, we’d want to do a glucose curve, but I see nothing in your chem profile to indicate either hyperglycemia or hypoglycemia, so I think you’re good to go.”
“I can eat pancakes?” Shane asks, sounding boyish and adorable.
“Go for it.” Dr. Sanders flips the page. “Your blood pressure, Agent McAllister, is at pre-hypertension levels, so you should watch your sodium, maybe adopt some stress management strategies. Definitely don’t smoke.”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Don’t start.”
“What about drinking?”
“Fine in moderation, although”—he plants his finger on one section of Shane’s file—“with your previous human history of depression and addiction, you might want to be careful with any sort of drugs. Just a moment.”
Dr. Sanders fumbles for a bottle of pills on the right side of his desk. He knocks over the bottle. Shane reaches forward to catch it, but by the time he’s even moved an inch, the bottle has hit the floor.
“I’ve got it.” Dr. Sanders bends over and picks up the pills.
Shane sits back in his chair and drums his fingers on the arms, as if his slow human reflexes don’t bother him at all. As a vampire, he could’ve grabbed the bottle before it was halfway to the floor.
“Sorry about that.” Dr. Sanders shakes out two pills into his quivering palm, then downs them with an energy drink. I wonder when this guy last slept more than three hours in a night.
“Other than those minor issues, Agent McAllister, your health is quite boring. Congratulations.” He closes Shane’s file and opens mine. “Agent Griffin, soon to be the other Agent McAllister, is that correct?”
“No, I’m keeping my name when we get married.” Or possibly becoming McGriffin. Why not?
“Everything checks out with your results. No major issues.” He folds his hands atop the file and takes off his glasses. “If I were a civilian doctor, I would tell you to be thrilled.”
He doesn’t look thrilled. I straighten my posture, bracing myself.
“I’ve lost it, haven’t I? My blood is just . . . blood?”
He frowns again. “Believe me, no one is sorrier than we are here in the Research Division. Your resurrection, or whatever it’s being deemed, gave us great hope for the future of vampire medicine. But alas, as you say, your blood is now just blood.”
“Can we run more tests? In a week or a month, after I’ve had time to forget what it was like to be in that place? Maybe once I get more cynicism back, my blood will be anti-magic again.”
“We will certainly test you again in a few months. Both of you. What you’ve done is—”
“Unprecedented,” I finish, having heard that word twice from Lanham. I should get it on a T-shirt.
“Extremely unprecedented. Vampires don’t un-vamp. There’s no record of it, at least. I hope you understand if we want to study you closely, for a long time.”
I tense, ready to run. “How closely?”
“Don’t worry, we’re not going to lock you up. That would ruin the experiments. Oh, and it would be wrong.” He laughs at his own non-joke with a sleep-deprived giddiness.
We make appointments for follow-up tests next week, then Shane and I leave the office as fast as we can. On the way down the endless corridors of the Research headquarters building, I try to console myself.
“I didn’t really want to be in the Immanence Corps anyway. Bunch of weirdos.”
“It sounded interesting to me.”
“I don’t want interesting. I want a desk job in the Anonymity Department, making fake passports and driver’s licenses for aging vampires. I’m good at inventing stories. It’s where I belong, using all my old con-artist talents.”
“Sounds boring.”
“Boring, but also a complete lack of getting killed. Since when are you looking for adventure? What happened to the slacker dude I fell in love with?”
“Hey.” Shane takes my hand and stops me. “Things change. I’ll change. You’ll change. But what’ll never change is this.” He leans over and gives me a warm, soft kiss, laying a soothing balm over my rattling nerves. “Okay?”
I nod and say nothing, knowing my voice would belie my doubt. As we continue down the hall, I remark, “Dr. Sanders said ‘extremely unprecedented.’ ”
“Huh?”
“It’s incorrect usage. Either something is unprecedented or it isn’t. Nothing is adverb plus ‘unprecedented.’ Same with the words ‘perfect’ or ‘unique.’ There aren’t degrees of perfection or uniqueness.”
“Not even spectacularly.” Shane smiles down at me. “Did you miss that? He said we were ‘spectacularly unique.’
”
I gasp. “I did miss that.”
He squeezes my hand. “That’s a good sign.”
We walk out the door into the sunlight, two extremely, spectacularly, perfectly unique human beings.
32
Nowhere to Run
Shane and I have no time to enjoy being alive, what with planning our own funeral.
With only a day’s notice, we’ve had to move the memorial service for Jim and us from Crosetti’s Monuments to the small clearing next to the radio station. It lacks the fake-graveyard ambience of the headstone maker’s lot, but it also lacks police tape and dead bodies.
Jeremy has added an extra security camera to the side of the station where the memorial service will take place, as well as a pair of bright floodlights. Our stockpile of weapons and Control personnel has increased. Now that Kashmir is responsible for the deaths of two agents (four including me and Shane), they’re out for his blood. If he’s smart, he’ll cut his losses and go far away before the Control hunts him down. Adrian hasn’t heard from him since we died, so maybe he is gone for good.
Under protest, Monroe prerecorded his “Midnight Blues” show and was taken to a Control safe house for the duration of the night. Noah volunteered to play the prerecorded segments in the studio tonight, interspersing timely commercials to give it a live-show flavor. Hopefully this will fool Kashmir into thinking Monroe is here.
As sunset approaches on Monday, we hurry through last-minute preparations, including loading a dozen holy-water pistols with fresh ammunition. The potency of the water decreases once it leaves the vessel it was blessed in, so they have to be armed shortly before battle. To me it’d make more sense to buy forty thousand pistols, load them up, and have them all blessed afterward, but I’m not in charge of logistics.
Jeremy, Shane, and I sit in the center of the main office, working as a team to fill the pistols. I hold the gun, Jeremy holds the funnel, and Shane pours the water. The process can be done by one person, since it’s often performed in the field, but this is more efficient.
Lust for Life Page 24