Legally Undead

by Margo Bond Collins

  “They’re probably too big,” he said, “but they’re bound to be more comfortable than that dress.”

  I’d been glad for them; the thought of sleeping naked made me feel vulnerable. And it would be a long time before I felt comfortable with being vulnerable again.

  I padded out of the room on bare feet and followed the smell of coffee out to the waiting room area. A little exploring revealed a small kitchenette off to the right of the reception desk. It held a sink, a coffeepot, a microwave, a one-burner hotplate, and a dorm-room-size refrigerator. Unlike most of the rooms in the suite, this one had a window looking out across the city. I hadn’t even been certain that we were in Manhattan until I saw the view. John stood over the counter with a measuring cup in one hand and a box of pancake batter mix in the other. He was reading the directions.

  “Hey,” I said by way of greeting.

  “Hey yourself. Sleep well?”

  “Much better than I expected to.” I leaned against the edge of the counter. “You making breakfast?”

  “Attempting to.” He smiled at me.

  “Okay. So Nick’s the boss. Tony’s the doctor, and I’m guessing that Dominick’s the computer guy, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So what are you? Other than chauffeur. And den mother,” I said, pointing at the pancake mix.

  “Chauffeur. Mechanic. Den Mother.” He opened the box and measured out some of the powdered mix. “And weapons specialist,” he added, pulling eggs and milk out of the refrigerator.

  “So you’re really the guns guy.”

  “Guns, crossbows, longbows, shortswords, broadswords; you name it, I’ve probably learned a little bit about it over the years.”

  I suspected “a little bit” might be an understatement.

  He finished stirring the batter and poured out several pancakes into the skillet.

  “I’d offer to help,” I said, “but I’m a total disaster in the kitchen.”

  “No problem. Want to serve the coffee as people get up?”

  “Sure. How do you take yours?”

  “Black. Nick takes sugar only, Dom takes milk only, and Tony won’t touch the stuff. He makes some vile-smelling tea. I suggest you just let him do it; don’t offer to help. You’d only be sorry.”

  He pointed out the mugs and sugar and handed me the milk. I poured our two cups and handed John his, then poured a third.

  “Know where Malcolm’s room is?” I asked.

  “Third door on the right.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  I walked back down the hall with more than a little trepidation. I was worried about how Malcolm might handle the horrors he’d seen over the last couple of days. I was hoping that he wouldn’t blame me too much for not having told him sooner what we were really up against.

  But I wouldn’t be able to hold it against him if he did.

  I knocked softly on the door, then went in without waiting for an answer. Malcolm was lying on the bed with his eyes closed, curled up as tightly as possible. I could tell he wasn’t asleep.

  “Hey, Malcolm,” I said softly. “I have coffee.”

  He just curled tighter.

  I sat down on the bed beside him.

  “I think you’ll start feeling better if you sit up and drink this.”

  There was a long silence. Then he slowly uncurled and gingerly eased himself to an upright position. But he didn’t take the coffee from my hand.

  Nor did he look me in the eye. Instead, he stared at the floor.

  “I’m not sure I’ll ever feel better again,” he said.

  I leaned around so I could see his face.

  “But coffee’s a start.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Okay. I’m going to set it down on the bedside table here. I’ll be in the common room at the end of the hall. Just follow the smell of pancakes if you want to join us.”

  I stood up to go, but he put his hand out and grabbed my wrist to stop me.

  “Those really were vampires, weren’t they?”

  “Yeah,” I said softly, “they really were.” I sat back down.

  “At the end there, when you came in, I thought I was hallucinating. You came for me, right?”

  “I did. I’m so sorry it took me so long, Malcolm. I didn’t know they had you.”

  “But you knew what they were.” His hands played with the borrowed t-shirt he wore, rubbing the hem between his fingers.

  “Yes.”

  “Your boyfriend, too.”

  “Ex. But yeah, him too.”

  He looked up and met my eyes directly. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I thought I was protecting you.” I wanted to say more, but anything else would sound like an attempt to justify myself. I didn’t want to do that. I’d been wrong, and if Malcolm thought so too, I wasn’t about to try to convince him otherwise.

  He looked away again and the silence stretched out between us.

  Finally, he broke it by saying, “At the end there, I thought I heard… Did you trade your blood for me?”

  “Yes.” My voice was barely audible. I didn’t want to answer that, but Malcolm deserved the truth.

  “So you know.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “The worst part of it is… the worst part…” his voice broke and be began to cry. “By the end, I was begging them to bite me.”

  I wrapped my arms around him and he buried his face in my neck. I rocked him back and forth, whispering over and over, “It’s okay. You’re safe now. Shh. You’re safe.” We sat that way for a long time.

  Chapter 18

  Eventually Malcolm fell asleep again, still clutching me tightly. I gently disentangled myself from his grip, pulled a blanket over him, and went in search of Nick.

  He was seated in a chair in the common room, sipping coffee and reading a newspaper. I sat down on the sofa across from him and leaned toward him, my elbows on my knees, hands clasped loosely in front of me.

  “We are going to kill them, aren’t we?”

  He folded the paper and set it aside.

  “That’s certainly my plan. You want to join us when we do?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “How’s your friend?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Pretty shaken up at best. Permanently damaged at worst. I don’t even know how long they had him out there before Greg came to get me.”

  “And how are you?” he asked.

  I laughed bitterly. “I don’t know. Shaken up at best, damaged at worst. And they only had me for a few hours.”

  “I think you’d better tell me everything.”

  So I did. Even the parts I wanted to forget. He didn’t say anything, just leaned back against the chair and closed his eyes to listen.

  When I got to the part about Deirdre’s bite, I faltered. I think that it would have been easier to tell had a male vampire been the one to elicit such a primal, physical response from me. I had never had any sexual interest in other women. I just wasn’t wired that way. The memory of Deirdre’s hands and mouth on my skin made me shudder. It also made me tremble. And it was the combination of those two things—repulsion and desire—that scared me the most.

  In many ways, it was easier to talk about Greg’s bite. A few weeks before, I would have said that nothing could have been worse than being attacked by Greg. Now I knew better. I felt betrayed and violated by Greg, but I felt degraded by Deirdre. Humiliated. Ashamed of my own response.

  I hated them both.

  When I finally finished talking, Nick opened his eyes and began questioning me about the layout of the house. On one hand, I was relieved that he didn’t want to talk about the bites any more. On the other hand, I had questions that I needed answered.

  “Wait.” I said. “I need to know something.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve read Dracula and I’ve seen all the horror movies. Am I going to turn into a vampire?”

  “No. As far as we can tell, simply being bitten—e
ven repeatedly—doesn’t turn humans into vampires.”

  “Does it require some exchange of blood?”

  “We don’t know. None of our people and none of our contacts has ever, to the best of my knowledge, seen a turning.”

  “But it must happen quickly—otherwise, how was Greg able to leave the apartment so quickly the night he was turned?”

  “Either that, or it’s a process that occurs over a period of several nights,” he said.

  I thought for a moment. “That’s entirely possible. Greg often worked late at the office—at least, that’s what he said he was doing.” I felt much more comfortable talking about theoretical turning methods than I did discussing my own experiences of the night before. “So how do we kill them?” I asked.

  “You realize, don’t you, that once we start killing them, there’s no stopping until we’ve wiped out every last one? You promised not to attack them. Killing even one of them will be tantamount to a declaration of war.”

  My voice was grim. “Then I say we declare war.”

  *

  We spent most of the rest of that afternoon going over everything we knew. But first I took a shower in the converted bathroom in the middle of the hall and changed into yet another borrowed set of sweats. I spent a long time scrubbing every part of me that either Deirdre or Greg had touched.

  I wished I could scrub my soul.

  When I finally got back to the common room, Nick started by asking me to again tell him everything I remembered about the building Malcolm had been held in. He took notes while I spoke, and after a few minutes he called Dominick into the room.

  Dom had some sort of architectural program that set up a blueprint of the building and eventually created a virtual representation of Deirdre’s mansion; we could “walk through” it room by room. I sat beside him and filled in the blank spots. I was amazed at how much I remembered once I saw the space again on the screen.

  “No,” I said, “the ballroom wasn’t that close to the front door.”

  Dom tapped a few keys and the screen reloaded.

  “Yeah. That’s it,” I said. “And the stairs curved more. Like that.”

  “How many floors were there?” Dom asked.

  “Three that I saw. There was another set of stairs that went down, though.”

  Tony wandered through once to check on me and to give me some more antibiotics.

  I kept waiting for Malcolm to come out of his room.

  He never did.

  At about 4:30, I suddenly remembered Millie.

  “My cat!” I said, jumping up out of my chair. “I have to go home and feed my cat!”

  “John’s already headed over there,” Nick said from his seat in the common room. “I sent him out to pick up supplies and told him to stop by your place. He’s going to change the locks and bring back some clothes for you. I’ll give him a call and tell him to gather up your pet, too. Anything else?”

  “You kept a key to my place?” I asked.

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time,” Nick said.

  I wasn’t sure I liked that, but given the fact that my own keys were still in my jacket pocket at Deirdre’s, I didn’t press the issue.

  “Yeah. Tell him to bring cat food, litter, a litterbox.”

  Dom snorted. “John’s just going to love hauling around kitty litter.”

  I told Nick where everything was, including the cat carrier I kept in the top of my closet.

  By the time the light outside began to fade, Dom and I had a pretty good virtual reality representation of Deirdre’s house and I was exhausted. Millie, who had spent a good hour sniffing almost every corner of the shop, was curled up on my lap, purring contentedly.

  Nick came in from whatever he had been doing in the back part of the shop and pulled up a chair.

  “Let me see what we’ve got.”

  Dom began walking us through the image of the building from the front door.

  “The front foyer has glass doors, so I’m guessing that’s designed for their human friends. This is the ballroom, and Elle says that the wait staff all entered and exited through this door to the right, so I’ve put in a kitchen back here. I’m just guessing at the dimensions, based on the other things Elle told me. Upstairs seems to hold dressing rooms, bathrooms, perhaps a few bedrooms—again, probably for the humans.

  “This is where it gets interesting,” he said, leading us back down the virtual staircase. “This floor is set up like a hotel—lots of rooms, lots of privacy. Judging from what Elle heard and saw, I’d say this is where the vamps take their human friends when they want to be alone. I’m guessing it’s a real suck-fest down there.”

  “It also seems to function as a makeshift prison, since that’s where they kept Malcolm” said Nick, “and that means that they don’t have any real dungeon area. They may not be used to having to take prisoners.”

  “Which means,” said Dom, “that this floor down here, the one that Elle never saw, is probably their true den.”

  “Makes sense,” Nick agreed. “It’s far below the ground, so there’s no chance of any sunlight getting in. And if they’ve got human servants around during the day, it means that they’ve got yet another layer of protection.”

  “Do you think their humans will fight for them?” I asked.

  “If your experience with Deirdre wasn’t some anomaly, then I’m guessing that some of these people will fight tooth and nail for the vamps. It sounds to me like the sort of thing that could work like an addiction. And addicts will always fight for their fix.”

  I considered that. It would make sense; all of the people there had seemed more than willing—even eager—to accompany the vampires. And Malcolm himself had talked about actually wanting the vampires to bite him by the end of his confinement in the mansion. I started to relay that information to Nick, but stopped before I even had the first word out of my mouth. Malcolm hadn’t specifically asked me not to tell anyone what he’d said, but I’d heard the shame in his voice when he’d spoken. It had sounded like my own shame felt.

  I did, however, tell Tony about Nick’s surmises about the addictive nature of a vampire’s bite.

  He nodded. “So Malcolm might be suffering from some sort of withdrawal symptoms in addition to post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  “You think he’s got that?” I asked, suddenly alarmed at the possibility that my own stupidity had led directly to Malcolm ending up with a medically defined disorder.

  “It’s almost impossible that he wouldn’t have some PTSD symptoms,” Tony said. “And I won’t be surprised if you show some symptoms of it, too.”

  “What can he do about it?” I asked. I didn’t care so much about myself—I knew I’d be okay in the long run. But I wanted to do everything I could to help Malcolm.

  “I’ve already started the first step,” Tony said, “and that’s getting him to talk about it.”

  “You’ve talked to him today?” I asked.

  “For quite a long time, actually. He’s asleep again, though; talking about it pretty much wore him out. It’s going to take him a little while to recover from the physical trauma, too.”

  And here I was thinking that Malcolm had been hiding out in his room all day to avoid me. I just hate those moments when I discover that I’ve been completely self-centered.

  “So it would be okay if I asked him about it?” I asked Tony.

  “Sure. The more he’s willing to talk about it, the better. And if he’s still got any residual reaction to the trauma a few weeks from now, I can prescribe some antidepressants.”

  “Do you think it would make him feel better or worse to be involved in our plans to take out Deirdre and her crew?”

  “I have no idea. You’ll have to ask him. But wait until tomorrow, okay? I think he’s had enough today.”

  I agreed and Tony changed the subject to my own physical wounds.

  “How do they feel?” he asked.

  “Painful.”

  He changed the bandages
and let me get back to planning Deirdre’s annihilation, but not before giving me a small package containing several pills.

  “Just in case you have any trouble sleeping,” he said.

  I took them from him and placed them on my bedside table, but I didn’t plan to use them for the same reason I’d stopped drinking. I wanted to keep my wits about me at all times.

  Chapter 19

  “Before we begin,” said Tony, “I’d like to ask your permission to give Nick a report of what you tell me. I won’t give him any information that you might prefer to keep private, but anything that tells us more about how vampires work might prove useful.”

  Tony and Malcolm and I were sitting in my room, Tony and Malcolm in chairs we’d brought in from other parts of the shop, me cross-legged on my bed. We were getting ready to “de-brief” Malcolm.

  “Okay,” said Malcolm, “but I don’t know how what I can say might help anyone else.”

  “We’re planning to go back in,” I said. I watched Malcolm’s face for any reaction—fear, excitement, anger, anything—but I couldn’t read what I saw there. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again.

  “You’re going to wipe them out?” he asked.

  “Every last one.”

  “I want to help.” His voice was quiet but fierce.

  I looked at Tony—I didn’t want to agree to anything before I knew what the rest of the group might say.

  “We can use all the help we can get,” Tony said. “Just as long as you’re up to it physically by the time we go in. As your doctor, I’m reserving the right to ground you from the mission.”

  Malcolm nodded.

  “Okay, then. Let’s get started.” Tony pulled out a small notepad and a pen. “Where were you when they first picked you up?”

  “On my way home,” Malcolm said. “I’d been at the Jolly Tinker—a bar on Webster Avenue—having a few drinks with some friends. It wasn’t very late, about 10:00 or so. A young woman approached me. She looked young, like a student, maybe a freshman or sophomore. At first I thought that she was going to ask for directions or something. But she was looking at me like she knew me, so then I thought that maybe she’d been in one of my classes. I kept thinking I would figure out who she was when she spoke. But she never said anything.