“Yes, well, that doesn’t mean you have to do the job personally,” Clifford argued stubbornly. “Go back to the lodge, Michael. Stay there tonight. And then tomorrow…we can start looking for Rendell again.”
Michael’s eyes locked with those of the older man for a long moment. They were more than cousins and comrades-in-arms. Clifford was like a brother to him, and Michael was sorely tempted to give in to temptation and accept Clifford’s unselfish offer.
But then he shook his head. “Take her down to the basement. I’ll handle this.”
Clifford sighed. “You’re a fool sometimes. A noble fool, but still a fool.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Michael said with a bleak, humorless smile.
A shiver ran through Michael as he stood in the cold, sterile room with the tile walls and floor. The stainless-steel table in front of him had ridges and channels around its edges to carry away fluid. A large, square drain had been installed in the floor nearby. Fluorescent lights cast a harsh glare over everything.
Clifford rested a strong hand on Michael’s shoulder to steady him as a pair of attendants wheeled in the gurney carrying Jessie’s body. They were followed by the white-coated doctor, a couple of guards, one of whom carried a small bundle, and finally Max, who limped over to Michael’s side and clasped his other shoulder.
“Let me do this, Michael,” the big man said.
“You’re wasting your breath,” Clifford told him. “I already offered. He turned me down.”
“But damn it, he shouldn’t have to—”
“I’m fine,” Michael broke in, steeling himself to sound convincing, even though he was the furthest thing in the world from fine. He was about to lose his whole world. “I appreciate the two of you being here, but this is something I have to do.”
Max nodded and stepped back. “All right, then. I’m sorry, Michael. I wish this had never happened.”
Michael returned the nod. They all felt that way, and there was nothing left to say.
Jessie’s body, still clad in the pale blue gown, was lifted from the gurney and placed gently on the stainless-steel table. The doctor said quietly, “I’ll get a bone saw.”
“No,” Michael snapped. “Clifford.”
The older man knew what he wanted. Clifford went to a metal cabinet and opened it. He took out a sword with a long, heavy blade and an air of antiquity about its curved hilt and leather-wrapped grip. Jessie Morgan wouldn’t be the first person dispatched in this room, before the vampiric curse could take effect. This scene had been repeated thousands of times, in hundreds of places all over the world, during the Brandt family’s long war against the unholy creatures. To Michael’s mind, each such death represented a failure. But to allow those innocents to become vampires would be an even greater failure.
Clifford gave the sword to Michael, who kept his hand from shaking with a supreme effort of will as he took it. He wrapped both hands around the sword’s grip. Cutting off a person’s head wasn’t as easy as they made it look in the movies. It required a steady hand, a sure eye and a powerful swing of the blade to accomplish the grisly task in one swift stroke. Even if the person on the table hadn’t been his beloved Jessie, he wouldn’t have wanted to have to hack away several times to finish the job.
The others in the room backed off as Michael turned to the table and lifted the sword. He took a deep breath and raised the weapon until the blade was poised over his head. He tried to shove aside all of his memories of Jessie—her beauty, her passion, they way she had felt in his arms when his need for her had overwhelmed everything else in his world. He couldn’t allow himself to remember those things if he was going to do what needed to be done. The sword was heavy, but the muscles in his arms and shoulders didn’t tremble even slightly as he hesitated. The ancient blade glimmered as it hung there, steady as a rock. Michael looked at the gentle curve of Jessie’s throat as he judged his aim.
Then he stepped back suddenly and let the sword slip from his fingers. The blade hit the floor with a discordant clang.
“I can’t do it,” he said simply, giving in to the demand that his heart was screaming at him. “I have to find some way to help her.”
Max moved toward him, saying, “Michael, you know the only way you can help her.”
“Go on upstairs,” Clifford urged. “Leave this to us.”
Michael turned on his cousins with a roar of mingled grief and rage. “No! You don’t understand! There must be some way to fix this! Our ancestor was cured. We have to find out—”
Max gripped his arm. “The best minds in the family have been tryin’ to figure it out for a couple of hundred years, Michael, and they’re no closer to a cure now than when they started! If you let her come back, she’s liable to kill you!”
“We’ll take precautions—”
Clifford said, “That’s what some of the others thought. They lost their lives. Michael, for your sake, for our sake and for the sake of anyone else she might encounter, that girl has to be—”
A dull buzzing sound interrupted him. The three of them turned in surprise to look at the guard who had carried in the bundle earlier. It contained Jessie’s personal effects, Michael knew. The man had placed it on a small side table, and it lay there now with the guard staring at it. The man tore his eyes away from it, looked at Michael instead and gulped.
“I…I think the lady’s cell phone is ringing, Mr. Brandt.”
Chapter 15
M ichael stood there in shock, not only at the way he had failed to do what he needed to for Jessie, but also at the timing of the call. It was late, almost midnight. Who could be trying to get in touch with her now?
Only one way to find out, he told himself, and anyway, at this moment he would grasp eagerly at any excuse to keep from thinking about what had almost happened here—and what hadn’t.
“Well, answer it,” he snapped at the guard, and then thought better of the order. “No, wait. I’ll get it.”
He strode over to the table and picked the phone out of the bundle. It buzzed insistently, as if the caller didn’t intend to give up and would let the phone ring the rest of the night if need be. Michael looked at the display and saw a number with an unfamiliar area code.
He opened the phone and thumbed the button to answer the call. “Hello?”
“Who is this?” The words came back at him sharply. The voice belonged to a woman, an older woman, by the sound of it. “Where’s Jessie?”
“She’s…not available right now.” And she never will be again, Michael thought, but he couldn’t bring himself to say that.
“Well, where is she? And who are you, mister, to be answering my granddaughter’s phone at this hour of the night? If Jessie’s there, you’d better let me talk to her, or I might just call the cops there in Dallas!”
Granddaughter…? “You’re Nana Rose!” Michael said, surprised.
“That’s right. How do you know my name?” The woman’s tone softened, but only slightly. “Are you Jessie’s boyfriend?”
Boyfriend? No, not really, although he had been on the verge of being much more than that when tragedy struck. He said instead, “No, but I am a good friend of hers. And I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Mrs. Morgan, but Jessie is…sick. Very sick.”
A gasp sounded on the other end of the phone. “Oh my God! Is she in the hospital?”
“That’s right.”
“Which hospital? I’ll drive down there tonight—”
Michael broke in on the woman’s frightened words. “It’s a private clinic, actually, and there’s nothing you can do. Jessie’s receiving the very best of care….”
In this case, cutting off her head and burning her body, Michael thought bitterly—and he hadn’t even been able to bring himself to do that, despite knowing it was the only way.
“You should bring her here,” Nana Rose said, intruding on Michael’s grim thoughts.
“What? I assure you, the hospital here is better than anything—”
> Again she interrupted him. “I’m not talking about hospitals. What’s wrong with Jessie? What made her sick?”
“I…don’t really know,” Michael lied. “I’m not a doctor, just a friend of hers.”
Clifford, Max and the other men watched him with expressions of sympathy as he talked to Nana Rose. None of them would have wanted to find themselves in his position right now, having to explain the unexplainable to Jessie’s grandmother.
“Listen to me,” Nana Rose said with an unmistakable urgency in her voice. “I almost didn’t call because it’s so late, but I just got a terrible feeling about Jessie a few minutes ago, like she was in great danger. I didn’t want to believe it, but then I heard an owl hoot and I knew it was true. Tell me, Mr. Whoever-you-are, is my granddaughter going to die?”
Michael didn’t know what to say, but evidently his silence spoke volumes, because a moan of despair and sorrow came from the phone.
“Bring her here!” Nana Rose said. “Bring her before it’s too late!”
“Mrs. Morgan, there’s nothing you can do—”
“The Adawehi can!”
Michael had never heard the word before and had no idea what it meant. It sounded almost like gibberish to him. He said, “I don’t understand.”
“The Cherokee healers! They can help her. I know they can.”
Tribal medicine men, that’s what she meant, Michael realized. Shamen, priests, whatever you wanted to call them. He didn’t put any stock in such mysticism….
Those thoughts slammed to a sudden halt. Here he had spent years battling creatures that most people would regard as mythological because they didn’t know any better, and he was looking down on the beliefs of someone else? The sheer hypocrisy of his reaction would have made him want to laugh, if he’d still had the capacity for laughter after seeing Jefferson Rendell draining the blood from Jessie’s neck.
“I don’t know, Mrs. Morgan,” he said. “It seems like grasping at straws to me. I think Jessie should stay here at the clinic.”
But to do what? he asked himself. Either be utterly destroyed, or turn into a vampire? What kind of options were those?
They had some time, he told himself. Not much, but maybe enough to at least try to save her.
Something else nagged at him. He broke in on Nana Rose’s continued protests and pleas. “Mrs. Morgan, you said you had a feeling that Jessie was in great danger a few minutes ago?”
“That’s right. It came on me so suddenly and so strong it almost made me sick. I was almost asleep, and I sat bolt upright in bed when it hit me.”
“You didn’t feel anything like that earlier this evening?” Michael couldn’t discount some sort of psychic connection between Jessie and her grandmother; plenty of evidence of such things had come out over the years. But it seemed to him that if that bond existed, it should have warned Nana Rose of Jessie’s danger when Rendell captured her, or if not then, certainly when he sank his fangs into her neck and pierced her veins.
“No, it was just a little while ago,” the woman insisted. “Everything was fine before that.”
Fine? Jessie had been bitten by a vampire! That hadn’t triggered any sort of warning in Nana Rose, though.
No, it had taken Michael getting ready to chop off Jessie’s head. That revelation hit him like a fist in the belly, taking his breath away. His fingers tightened on the phone.
Even though Jessie appeared to be dead, Michael knew that something remained, deep inside her. Some spark of life that would be corrupted and transformed by the curse that infected her, until it turned into something that wasn’t life at all and reanimated her body.
Right now, though, that hadn’t happened yet. The tiny, flickering glow that was still Jessie Morgan had known somehow what was about to happen as Michael stood there with that upraised sword, and in that moment, it had reached out to her grandmother with a mental cry of fear and longing and desperation.
And not only to Nana Rose. Michael knew now that was why he had dropped the sword, why he had stepped back and refused to end it.
Because he had sensed, deep in his soul, in the place where he had connected so strongly with Jessie, that there was still hope.
Those thoughts flashed through Michael’s brain in the space of a heartbeat, and then he took a deep breath and said, “Tell me how to get there, Mrs. Morgan.”
Once again, Max and Clifford thought he had lost his mind.
“With all the money and brainpower the Brandt family’s been able to throw at this problem for decades, you really think some medicine man is gonna be able to solve it?” Max asked.
“The Native Americans lived a lot closer to nature than we did,” Michael replied. “Think about all the cures from folklore that have proved to be scientifically effective.”
Clifford said, “This isn’t like chewing tree bark to get rid of a headache, Michael. Turning into a vampire is just about the most catastrophic thing that can happen to a human body.”
They stood in a basement garage adjacent to the clinic’s morgue, where Jessie’s body was being loaded into a black SUV. The back of the vehicle had been fitted up as an ambulance, and it was used in cases where discretion was important, such as this one.
Nana Rose had given Michael directions to her place in the country outside Tahlequah, Oklahoma. It would have taken several hours to drive there, but the Brandt helicopter waiting at a private airfield north of Dallas could get them where they were going a lot faster.
And time was of the essence. As far as the scientists working for the Brandts had been able to discover, the time required for a person to transform from human to vampire varied according to the amount of blood taken, the human’s own immune system and any number of unknown variables. The vampires themselves seemed to know how long it would take for one of their victims to transform, but for the humans battling them it was strictly a best-guess situation. The twelve-to-seventy-two-hour parameters were only an approximation.
For that reason, Michael couldn’t afford to dawdle. He had to get her to Oklahoma as soon as possible, so those Adawehi healers could begin the purification ritual that Michael hoped would cure her.
Amazing how appealing those straws were to clutch at, when no other hope existed.
“I know it’s a risk,” he agreed with Clifford. “A leap of faith. But what harm can it do to try?”
Max scowled. “If she turns into a vampire and gets away, she can do plenty of harm. Don’t forget what happened with Charlotte Whittier. She may still be out there somewhere, murdering people and turning others into the same sort of creature she is.”
Michael frowned at the blunt way in which Max expressed himself, but he couldn’t argue with any of the facts. The way she was now, Jessie really did represent a potential threat to humanity. But not if the Cherokee ritual was able to cleanse her of the vampiric curse. Then she would be human again, and they could still have a life together.
“This has nothing to do with Charlotte,” Michael said. “It’s about giving Jessie a chance. That’s all I’m trying to do.”
“Well, if you’re determined to go through with this,” Clifford said, “we’re going with you.”
Michael looked at Max and said, “You should be upstairs in one of the rooms, resting.”
Max shook his head. “Ain’t gonna happen, pal. I’m coming along.”
Michael felt a surge of warmth and affection for his cousins. “All right,” he said with a nod. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Once Jessie’s body—not just “her body,” damn it, her, Michael reminded himself—was loaded, he and Max and Clifford climbed into the SUV. Within thirty minutes, Michael was driving up to the private terminal, where one of the Brandt helicopters waited on the tarmac, warmed up and ready to go.
Max and Clifford wheeled the gurney out to the chopper and lifted it through the open side door. Michael climbed into the cockpit and settled himself in the copilot’s seat.
“I’ve filed a flight plan fo
r Tahlequah Airport,” the pilot said. “We can take off as soon as you’re ready, sir.”
Michael turned his head to look over his shoulder. Max and Clifford had finished securing the gurney with the shrouded shape on it, and Max was about to slide the side door closed. With a thumbs-up and a nod for the pilot, Michael said, “Let’s go.”
The lazily turning rotors began to move faster and faster as the noise of the engine increased, as well. The pilot moved the controls, and with only the faintest of lurches, the chopper’s skids lifted smoothly from the tarmac.
As the helicopter rose into the darkness, Michael reflected on how good it felt to be taking action again. Giving up went against the grain for him. He had been born to do battle, and now he was fighting for the greatest prize he had ever sought.
The life of the woman he loved.
What was that noise? Jessie wondered. The steady, throbbing beat sounded like something she should recognize, but confusion made it impossible for her to think at first. Disoriented, sick to her stomach, feverish, she knew something just wasn’t right.
Then the fever within her flared up suddenly in such a searing burst of heat that she surged upward, opened her mouth wide and screamed as she struggled against something that held her down.
Her eyes snapped open. Faces loomed over her, ugly, distorted faces, and she felt such hatred toward them that she wanted to lash out at them, smash them to pieces, make the blood flow from the wreckage of their puny human bodies.
Blood!
An overpowering need washed over her. More than a hunger, more than a thirst. Like a drowning man gasping for air, she panicked as the bloodlust hit her.
The men holding her down had what she needed. She would take it from them, she vowed, and once again her back arched as she fought to free herself.
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