The Bite Before Christmas

by Heidi Betts

  Lifting her arm to her mouth, she licked the long cut to seal it. But the blood against her tongue didn’t taste quite the same as usual. Oh, it tasted like blood, but it didn’t burst in her mouth like an exceptionally fine wine. Didn’t turn her warm and tingly as it slid down her throat.

  And when she lifted her head to look at her arm…the slice was still there. Still open and red and…bleeding again.

  Shit. Vampire saliva contained healing enzymes; it was how they kept victims…er, donors…from bleeding out, and sped up the healing of their own wounds. The cut should have been nothing more than a tiny pink scratch by now, but instead it was fresh and ouchy and flowing.

  What the hell did that mean? Had she lost her mojo? Had she contracted some kind of bizarre vampire disease no one had ever heard about that slowed her healing or zapped her powers?

  Or was this her new reality? Was she really here, in this motel room, in these clothes, living a life she wasn’t sure she knew anything about?

  Maybe she just needed to give it time, let it—whatever it was—play itself out.

  Grabbing a wad of toilet paper from the roll on the back of the commode, she staunched the flow of blood on her arm. Wiped it away, tossed the tissue, grabbed another small bunch to tuck against the cut like a gauze pad. Then she yanked her sleeve back down and buttoned the cuff.

  Before Ian could yell for her—or at her—again, she shrugged into the shoulder holster he’d given her. She only knew how because she’d seen him do it so many times, but the straps and weight of the gun still felt awkward and uncomfortable against her body, like a too-small bra she really wanted to toss in the fire—and not to make a political statement.

  Well, what could she do? This was apparently her new persona: Paulina Bunyan, P.I. Or undercover cop. Or rent-by-the-hour hooker for the nearest lumber camp.

  Since she didn’t know what else to do, she left the bathroom, her heart pounding in her chest as she shrugged into the navy blue parka Ian tossed her. Not a coat she would ever choose for herself, that was for sure, at least not outside of her usual space-time continuum.

  He opened the motel room door, ready to step out, only to have a wide shaft of sunlight pour in.

  Angelina shrieked and threw herself back, out of the way, rolling across the rumpled bed and landing on the floor on the other side, with the mattress and box spring acting as a shield. Her hands were lifted instinctively to cover her face and protect her exposed flesh, but also because she couldn’t bear to see Ian catching fire and dying right before her eyes.

  Only he wasn’t screaming. She didn’t hear the tell-tale sounds of popping and sizzling or his thrashing about, trying to stifle the flames that were licking at his flesh.

  Lowering her arms, she poked her head up over the edge of the bed to find Ian…fine. Healthy. Nowhere close to being a crispy critter or pile of barbecue ashes. He was staring at her like she’d just sprouted horns and a set of bony wings from her shoulder blades, but was otherwise unharmed.

  “What in Christ’s name is wrong with you?” he snapped, both his brows and mouth pulled down in a scowl.

  The question wasn’t what was wrong with her but what was wrong with him. How could he be standing in a shaft of pure daylight and not be sizzling like a juicy steak on the grill?

  Could it be because, in this reality, he wasn’t a vampire?

  It seemed too outrageous a possibility, but what other explanation could there be?

  And if he wasn’t a vampire, then…

  She stood, slowly. Rounded the bed, slowly. Stepped into the shaft of sun, slooooowly.

  No smoke. No burning sensation. Not even a tingle.

  She took another step, and then another, until she stood smack-dab in the center of the doorway, every inch of her—hands and neck and face included—exposed to direct sunlight. It was warm, but not painful. The first drop of sun she’d felt on her skin in nearly a hundred and fifty years.

  She didn’t know whether to be excited about this turn of events…or horrified that she was apparently no longer immortal. And being no longer immortal meant that she was most likely very, very mortal. As was Ian.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, his voice softer this time. He sounded genuinely concerned about her odd—to him, at least, she assumed—behavior. “I’ve never seen you act this way.”

  “Sorry,” she apologized, stepping out of the motel room and letting him close the door behind them. “Just…jumpy, I guess.”

  Reaching into the inside pocket of his bomber jacket, he pulled out a pack of smokes, stuck one between his lips, and lit the tip. After taking a couple deep puffs, he blew out smoke and moved to the driver’s side of an older model, nondescript gray Ford Taurus. He clicked the button on his key-chain fob to unlock the doors, then opened his and climbed in.

  Not knowing what else to do, she followed suit on the passenger side. He started the car and cranked up the heat, but for a few minutes, only cold air blew out at them, making her teeth chatter.

  “Can’t blame you for the nerves,” he said, rapping his hands on the steering wheel.

  Curls of smoke started to fill the inside of the mid-size sedan and Angelina wondered how long she could hold her breath to keep the poison from entering her body. Ian’s smoking had never bothered her when they were both immortal, because although it could be stinky, he’d always been careful to keep from blowing it in her face. And even if he did, it wasn’t going to harm either one of them.

  But now, if they were mortal (and judging by the fact that she was outside while the sun was still up without becoming a one-woman bonfire, that seemed to be the case), everything could hurt them. Somebody could run up to the car window right now and shoot her in the head. They could get in a car accident and have all of their appendages torn asunder. Secondhand smoke could even now be filtering its way through her system and blackening her lungs.

  Oh, God! There were so many things to worry about now. Germs and disease and acts of God. A paper cut could do her in, where before having an entire tree fall on her would have only flattened her and put her in a maple syrup mood for a while.

  She tried not to panic, but in order to avoid that, she was pretty sure she needed to take deep breaths, and that would involve inhaling cigarette smoke that would likely kill her in ten to twenty years. Which might not sound so bad to the average homo sapien, but to her—vampire her—ten to twenty years was a catnap, the blink of an eye!

  Just when stars began to dance in front of her eyes and she could feel herself turning blue, Ian ran the window down on his side of the car, and the gray cloud hanging over their heads began to dissipate, forced out by the slowly warming air blowing from the dashboard fans. She sighed in relief.

  Putting the car in gear and backing out of the motel parking space, he said, “This case is starting to make me as nervous as a roach in a room full of exterminators, too. If something doesn’t happen soon, I’m going to plant meth on one of the little bastards just for an excuse to bust them.”

  He pulled out of the motel lot and onto what looked to be a much busier main drag. She had no idea where they were, and even fewer clues about what was going on, so she was doing her best to pay attention to what he was saying and take note of her surroundings.

  They were apparently both law enforcement officers of some kind; when she was alone, she’d look for a badge and try to find out for what branch or department. They were also apparently on some kind of drug case, one that was dragging and putting him on edge.

  Okay, fine. Although she wasn’t sure what the heck she was supposed to do or what sort of cop she’d be. She was a girly-girl, not a tomboy, and had never touched a gun before, let alone handled a firearm in such a way that she could point one at another person or—God forbid—use it.

  All she could do, she supposed, was hope she figured out how she’d gotten here and how to get back before a situation arose that put somebody—her, Ian, or anyone else—in danger.

  “And Ellen’s actin
g weird, too. I think she’s suspicious that all the hours I say I’m working might not actually be work related.”

  Angelina knew better than to ask who Ellen was. It might be tricky, but she was going to have to act like she knew who everybody was and what was going on until she started putting all the pieces together on her own.

  So she said nothing, and let the awkward silence build between them until he pulled to the curb in front of a tall, slightly run-down, redbrick building. A wooden sign with spray paint residue in places identified it as BRIARVIEW APARTMENTS.

  The car idled while they sat there, and finally she asked, “Why are we here?”

  He shot her another one of those half-confused, half-annoyed glances. “I told you, I think Ellen’s starting to suspect something’s up. I promised I’d be home tonight for dinner with her and the kids before we go back out on stakeout. We’ve got the graveyard shift, so I’ll pick you up again around ten.”

  Angelina understood all of the words he was using. That was to say, her mental dictionary applied definitions to each and every one.

  So why was it, then, that she was having so much trouble making sense of them as a whole?

  Who was Ellen, and why was he rushing home to eat dinner with her? Why did he care if she was getting suspicious? And while they were at it, suspicious of what? and what kids?

  Then her gaze flitted to his left hand, where it rested on the steering wheel.

  He was wearing a wedding band.

  She glanced at her own ring finger.

  And she was not.

  All of her fingers were conspicuously bare, which was odd enough for Vampire Angelina. But this wasn’t just a case of under accessorizing. No, the fact that Ian was wearing a wedding ring while she wasn’t was…not good. Sooooo not good.

  She swallowed hard, her own suspicions beginning to build, as well as a sinking knowledge of who Ellen most likely was.

  A lead weight pulled her heart down, down, down so far she was afraid it was going to disappear into the gaping black abyss of her shattered soul.

  Ian was married, she realized.

  But not to her.

  SIP THREE

  Angelina lost track of how long she cried after getting out of the car and making her way stiffly up the three flights of stairs to her apartment. Her apartment in this reality, anyway. She’d only found it by looking for her name on the row of mailboxes in the lobby, and the key had been in her coat pocket.

  But once inside, she hadn’t paid much attention to the dark, spartan interior, the proof of her poor housekeeping skills, or the fact that she hadn’t bothered with a single sign of Christmas cheer, even though the rest of the apartment building was decorated with lights and garlands and a tree in the entry. Instead, she’d fallen back against the door, sunk to the floor, and sobbed.

  Sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Until her nose ran and her breath hitched. Until her chest ached and she thought she might throw up.

  It was hard enough being thrust into a world and existence she didn’t understand, but to find out the man she loved was married to another woman…?

  And that she was the other woman. A home-wrecker. A whore. Human Angelina was having an affair with a married man. A man she had to have known was married when they first got involved, since they were also partners on the job.

  As guilty and disgusted with herself as she felt over that, she was equally disgusted and angry with Ian. What was wrong with him? She never would have expected him to be a cheater—in any life.

  Was he cheating on her back in…well, her real life? The immortal one. Had he ever?

  She didn’t know, though she wracked her brain to remember any suspicious activity on his part that might have hinted that he had a mistress. And if she ever got back there, she was damn well going to find out.

  Once she was as cried out as she was going to get, Angelina climbed to her feet and made her way to the kitchen sink, where she splashed her face with cold water and dabbed it dry with a dishtowel. According to the clock on the microwave oven, she had four more hours before Ian would be picking her up again for their stakeout.

  Stakeout of what, she wasn’t sure, but she assumed she’d been a cop—and Ian’s partner—in this life long enough that begging off because she’d discovered her secret lover was a jerk and she wasn’t in the mood to go out again—let alone be anywhere near Ian in the next millennium—wasn’t an option. She couldn’t even call in sick because he’d just seen her and would know it was a bald-faced lie.

  There was also a pretty good chance that she’d begun her affair with Officer Ian knowing full well he was already a husband and father. So what did that say about her?

  Blowing out a heavy breath that ruffled her bangs, she started moving through the apartment. Nothing looked even remotely familiar, and she wondered how long she’d been living here. Well, residing; she didn’t consider this much like living.

  Everything was dark and dreary. The carpet, the curtains, the sofa cushions were all faded and threadbare.

  A ratty, dog-eared copy of Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot sat on a low, scarred coffee table. This surprised her, since she’d never been a fan of the author’s work before and made a point not to read vampire or paranormal fiction because so much of it was outrageously speculative garbage. Humans writing about vampires was like short order cooks lecturing on brain surgery. What the hell did they know about it?

  Moving down the short hallway, she ducked her head into the tiny bathroom and noted a small array of toiletries near the sink. A single toothbrush, toothpaste, and a stick of heavy duty, androgynous deodorant. No sweet-smelling girly stuff for her, she guessed. Being a cop must be sweaty business.

  She also must be lacking the personality gene now because the shower curtain was nothing more than a giant swath of plain white material.

  At home…her other home, her real home, her vampire-occupied home…the guest bathroom was done in a bright flower motif while the master bath was decorated entirely in seashells and all things beachy. She and Ian found it both ironic and amusing, since the beach was one place they were never going to see, at least not in daylight. Moonlit walks in the sand were perhaps doable, not that they’d ever bothered.

  The bedroom, when she got there, wasn’t much better. Cramped and even darker than the other rooms, it contained a lumpy double mattress with sheets that looked as though they hadn’t been changed in months (yuck), a single dresser, and a nightstand that held a chipped, shadeless lamp.

  Didn’t she have any self-respect as a human being? How could she live like this, without color or light or hope? She’d seen homeless shelters that were less depressing.

  Still, there had to be something personal lying around. Some clue about her past, or her current thoughts and feelings. Something that made this place more than simply a place to crash when she wasn’t out screwing another woman’s husband.

  Twenty minutes later, she’d ransacked the closet and under the bed, and was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bedroom floor, single lamp burning as brightly as it got while she read through a shoebox full of newspaper clippings, photographs, and assorted odds and ends. It was apparently her version of a scrapbook.

  From the shoebox, she learned about snippets of her childhood, her high school graduation, her enrollment in the police academy. There were a few bits about old boyfriends and family members, but nothing tantamount and nothing that stirred a single memory in her brain. In the pictures, she saw herself at different stages of her life, but she didn’t remember a single one of them.

  But at least now she had a bit of a better idea of what kind of person she was: how she lived, how she thought, how she acted. She might be a cop, which meant she had to be smart, strong, and independent…but she was also a lonely introvert.

  The life she was leading here was so different from the one she was used to, it was like black and white. Even as a vampire who had to keep to nighttime hours, she’d always been outgoing, always had dozens of f
riends to keep her company and whom she could turn to if she needed to talk.

  Boy, could she use one—or all—of them now. Maybe they would know what the heck was going on. How she’d gotten here, what she was doing in this alternate universe, and how long she was going to be forced to stay.

  Was this all a dream, something she would wake up from in a few hours? Or was this her new reality, a very real new existence she was going to have to come to terms with because she was going to be stuck here forever?

  The up side, she supposed, was that her definition of “forever” now was quite a bit different than it had been. Fifty or sixty years, tops, rather than the hundreds or thousands she’d learned to expect as an immortal.

  Of course, time was relative. If she was unhappy, fifty years could seem like an eternity; whereas, if she was happy, a century could go by in the blink of an eye.

  Pushing up from the floor, she felt every kink and cramp from being in the same position for too long—something that never would have happened before. She wasn’t used to aches and pains, and judging from how uncomfortable they were, she didn’t want to get used to them. But again—did she have a choice?

  With less than an hour left before Ian showed up, she dug a fresh set of clothes from the dresser—another pair of jeans and a thick tan vee-neck sweater. Then she went for a quick shower, coming out feeling a little more human (har-har), and ready to face whatever nightmare within her current nightmare might crop up next.

  She didn’t know what their normal routine was—whether Ian came up to her apartment to get her when he picked her up for work, or if she met him downstairs. To be safe, she decided to meet him downstairs.

  Since it was cold outside, and she could see that it was beginning to snow again, she remained inside the building’s lobby, fiddling with the gun and holster that felt entirely unnatural tucked against her side beneath her ugly navy parka. She hoped to God she never had to draw it or she’d probably look like one of those bumbling, incompetent cartoon characters.

  Within the next ten minutes, the gray Taurus pulled up to the curb and she ran out and jumped in.