Had Nathan been hurt worse than me? The lion I saw on the video feed was walking around, so it didn’t make sense.
I dropped Lauren off at school and drove to work with Xiaolan, as usual. Still not back to one hundred percent, I took the elevator instead of the stairs, but only told Xiaolan I hadn’t slept well.
I went into my office and prepared for my first appointment — a new patient scheduled for nine o’clock. Alexander Jones. No information about why he was here, which might mean he’s just shy, but could also mean it’s another patient who’s part of the lifestyle. I moved the chairs around so we would be comfortably seated across from each other over the coffee table, and then went over paperwork at my desk as I awaited his arrival.
Eileen announced him, and I stood to walk to the seating area, and went dead still as I saw my friend Alex.
My mind froze as well, but only for a half-second, and then it went into overdrive even though my body was still immobile. The man I’d seen looking at me last week from across the street had been Alex. I wasn’t imagining things. I also hadn’t imagined him not aging — he should look thirty-nine but still looked to be college aged. It was a little cloudy out, but still full daylight so he couldn’t be a vampire. I sensed his energy and didn’t pick up shapeshifter.
I’d always thought Alex to be beautiful. Not effeminate in any way, he was just a gorgeous, manly man. Dark hair, perfect features, and the body of someone who builds houses for a living — big enough without being too bulky, not an ounce of flab anywhere, and lean muscles rippling everywhere you look. Just his hand on the back of the doorknob had the muscles moving against each other on his forearm.
He paused inside the door, took me in, and shut the door behind him. I was still frozen in place as he walked around my desk and stood looking down at me.
I finally managed to move, and as I stepped towards him he drew me into his arms and hugged me. My arms automatically went around him, and it felt a lot like coming home, but I knew something wasn’t right and I couldn’t trust the feeling.
“Let me go, please.”
He held me a little less firm, but didn’t completely let me go as he said, “It’s good to see you, too, Kirsten. I’m relieved to see you’re okay.”
“How did you go from Alex Howard to Alexander Jones. And why have you not aged?”
“When I lived in Knoxville I was Alex Howard. When too many people started noticing I was holding up well, I moved to Portland as I said I would. When it was time to leave Portland, I came here, to Chattanooga, and became Alexander Jones.”
I finally pushed him away a little, and he let me out of his embrace. I looked up to ask, “How is it that you’re holding up so well?”
He gave me the half-smile I remembered so well. “Can we catch up with each other before we get to that, please?’
My returned smile was more habit than what I was actually feeling. His half-smile had brought so much back of what we could’ve been. “Will we get to it in the next hour and a half?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then we can catch up a bit first, but I’ve had a rough couple of days and I don’t have a lot of patience with secrets right now. Fair warning.”
He brushed my hair away from my face and let his hand drop. “I always had an attraction for you, but because of what I am, I don’t allow myself relationships with humans. I wished we could be more than friends, but was grateful for what we had.” He closed his eyes, breathed in as one would upon entering a pastry shop, and added, “I’ve missed you.”
I steered him around the chairs and towards a sofa. “And you couldn’t tell me what you were, or you’d have to kill me?”
He shook his head. “I don’t have any such rules on me, though if someone I tell blabs then they must die, and if word gets out then I can get in a good deal of trouble.” He sighed as he took a seat on the sofa and pulled me down beside him. “I’ve just found it easier not to tell, but in hindsight, perhaps I should’ve told you. You have many friends who aren’t human, other monsters, and apparently you’re dealing with it fairly well.”
“How much do you know about me? And who do you know I’m friends with?”
“Aaron Drake, for starters, but I’ve seen you with several other non-humans and I assume you know what they are. I’m also aware you’re called in to help fight when Aaron needs your particular skillset, and I know you killed someone who was once considered either a giant of old, or a god, depending on who you talk to.”
“You know who I killed? Do you know his name?”
His head tilted sideways and I realized he found it odd I didn’t know. His eyebrows drew together as he said, “He goes by Stuart Sutherland now, but he was once known as Surtr.”
“I was right! I guessed that once and no one told me I was right. Damn them.” They hadn’t told me I was wrong, either, but had successfully deflected me to another subject.
“Don’t be so hard on them, they’re bound to not give away the secrets, but I’m not. And when I say bound, I mean metaphysically bound. If they were to tell then it would be known right away and it would be very bad.”
“Are you and Aaron friends?”
“We’ve met, and we aren’t enemies, but we haven’t spent enough time together to be friends. I’m quite young, barely over one hundred, so I don’t have the history with him some of the old ones have.”
“Does he know you know me, that I’m from your past?”
“No.”
I started to pull in my energies. Alex had been a very good friend, but there was something he wasn’t telling me and I’d feel better if I was armed, so to speak.
“Why don’t you tell me what you are and why you’re here now, please, Alex.”
“I can smell your fear. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m here as your friend, and I’m excited we can be friends again because I have reason to believe you can accept me for what I am. You appear to have accepted other monsters into your life without being horrified, maybe you can accept me, too.”
“I’m not afraid of you, but I’m concerned you don’t seem to want to tell me what’s going on. I’m not doing so well with secrets right now, so tell me, what are you?”
“I’m a vampire.”
My temper wasn’t far under the surface, but I managed to keep my voice even. “Sitting in my office at nine thirty in the morning? Try again.”
The look on his face made me pause. He was afraid, and I hadn’t noticed. I suddenly felt terrible. He’d made an appointment, come to my office, and I’d made this about me instead of him.
I was about to apologize and begin asking questions so I could figure out what was going on with him, when he opened his mouth and let me watch his teeth grow from normal canines to long, scary looking fangs, and then back to human sized canines.
I didn’t say anything as I tried to make this work with what I knew of vampires.
Alex broke the silence. “There’s more than one race of vampire; we don’t all have the same rules.”
“You can walk in the sun?”
“I can walk in the shade, and I can walk about on a cloudy day. Unfiltered sunlight is painful, but I can still go out if I’m not in it long, though I’ll usually have on a cap, dark sunglasses, pants, and a long sleeve shirt. I use heavy-duty sunscreen on the exposed skin, but still keep my hands in my pockets and try my best to keep my face shaded.”
“You don’t collapse at dawn?”
“I’m most comfortable sleeping in the day and being up at night, but nothing says I have to. Just as you prefer to sleep at night, but if you want to stay up all night, you can.”
Two races of vampires? What was I being thrown into? I needed to have a serious talk with Aaron about what other beings were out there that I didn’t know about yet. It was way past time for me to stop being surprised, I needed to know this stuff up front.
I took a breath and composed my thoughts. While I had Alex here and he seemed to be forthcoming, I’d see what I coul
d find out.
I started asking questions, and he gave me answers.
Alex usually drinks bagged blood, though he isn’t averse to drinking from humans. It’s more pleasant to drink from a bite, but he doesn’t get anything extra from it. His bite has something in it that makes it pleasurable to humans, unless he’s ticked off and then something else gets secreted and it’s incredibly painful. Either way, there’s a paralysis agent so the human can’t move around much once bitten.
He drinks from sixteen to twenty ounces at a time, how often he feeds depends on his level of activity. If he’s really active he may feed twice a day, really sedentary and he can go about three days. He’s currently working as a private investigator, which works out well since he can tell when people are lying or not. He’s incredibly strong, has great hearing, extraordinary night vision, a strong sense of smell, and is hard to kill.
He bought one of the historic homes near the University and is in the process of restoring it. He’s one hundred and seventeen years old, a baby compared to most of his friends. He wouldn’t tell me the circumstances of how he was turned, but explained the mechanics of it — the vampire must feed at least ten ounces of vampire blood to the human, though more is better, and then completely drain the human. If it works, the vampire rises at the next sunset, assuming there’s been at least five or six hours since the draining.
He can’t fly, but he can jump straight up around three stories, and he can jump down seven or eight stories with no problem. He might be able to jump from higher, but he hasn’t tried it since seven stories jars him pretty bad and eight stories hurts.
Alex doesn’t have any magical abilities, everything he does is a physical thing — smell, hearing, rapid healing.
As far as he knows, he can repair anything except having his head taken off, being set on fire, or silver entering his body when he can’t quickly get it out. A stake through the heart just pisses him off. Holy items were no problem to him, either, but silver is, again, very bad.
Part of me was impressed he trusted me enough to basically tell him how to kill him, but common sense told me he knew if I could kill Surtr, I could kill him. Telling me these things didn’t give me a leg up.
My thoughts also jumped off on a tangent, once again wondering why silver was bad to so many supernatural species. It’s bad to both types of vampire as well as most of the shapeshifters.
I brought my thoughts back to the present moment and kept up with the questions. Once again, Alex answered everything, and I learned he doesn’t have a problem with garlic more than any other food, and the only food that makes blood taste bad is asparagus. The look on his face made me want to laugh and hug him, but I kept asking questions.
He doesn’t exactly have mental powers, but he can use his voice and eyes combined to make humans want to do what he says. “I think,” he told me, “it’s a bit like what cats do to birds, or what some snakes do to their prey. My eyes alone won’t do it, and neither will my voice, but when used together they are a powerful combination.”
I needed to know if it would work on me. “Try it. See if you can affect me, please.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to do that, Kirsten.”
He looked genuinely distressed so I let it drop, but decided either he or someone else would be trying it at some point — I needed to know if I was susceptible.
Then he wanted to ask me questions. I told him I can kill things from the demons’ plane of existence, not just send them back, and then I explained why I probably wouldn’t be doing it too much anymore. He asked what else I could do, and I told him I’d learned to manipulate energies in a lot of ways.
I reminded him of how awed I’d been when I first found out I could make someone’s headache stop hurting by manipulating their aura or their energies, and then told him it’d taken me a few months to realize I could also give people a headache.
He asked who had taught me my more advanced skills, I told him I wasn’t comfortable talking about it, and he accepted it without argument.
“Surtr injured you,” he said, looking more serious than he had since he walked in my door. “You sustained a lot of damage, and Aaron gave you something to drink. I can tell you what it was.”
“If you can, that’d be great. I’m tired of being kept in the dark.”
“My blood, or the blood of any vampire like me, has healing properties in it for humans. He gave you vampire blood.”
I absorbed that a minute, and then had to make an effort to keep from gagging at the memory of drinking it. “Won’t that mean I can be turned into a vampire?”
“Only if your blood is drained in the next few days.”
“That’s why I can’t go to Abbott’s house? Because his vampires will smell the other vampire’s blood in me?”
“Yes.”
“Do the two races of vampires get along?”
“In this territory, mostly, but there’s still some antagonism here and there. Evolution gave them magical abilities, but knocks them out at dawn and gravely injures them in sunlight. We can be awake and even outside during the day, but we aren’t as strong and don’t have any magical abilities. They’re jealous of us because we aren’t banished from the sun, and we’re jealous of them for some of their abilities.”
“So, Abbott won’t want to be around me when I’m smelling like your kind of vampire?”
He tilted his head and looked…upset? I couldn’t be sure, but his next words clued me in. “Are you romantically involved with Abbott?”
Unsure of what to say, I opted for the truth. “I’ve only recently met him, but it seems to be the direction he and I are headed.”
“I don’t believe Abbott will have a problem, but some of his people will.”
“But, he’s the boss, right?” Everything suddenly fell into place and I added, “Wait, you’re saying it could cause political problems for him?”
“Yes.”
“Even though it was a one-time thing that apparently saved my arm? From what I’ve been told, and what I remember, I’d have lost my arm if they hadn’t given it to me.”
“You know Abbott is the one who made the arrangement for the blood, right? His blood won’t do it, and he asked one of his friends to meet Aaron and give it to him.”
“No, they didn’t tell me. Should I thank the vampire who, err, donated?”
Alex laughed, and I remembered once again what good friends we’d been, and how much I’d missed him. “You can if you want,” he said with a smile, “it’s someone I’d like you to meet. He’s a good friend of mine.”
My mind was spinning, this was Alex, my dear sweet Alex, and he’s friends with someone who is friends with Abbott. And Abbott and Alex are vampires, but different kinds of vampires.
Out of the blue, I remembered my vision quest. I’d hiked more than five miles into a wilderness area with two bottles of water, stayed on a small cliff shelf for three days, and then hiked out. On the final day, hiking out, I kept falling, and my hands were bloody and hurting. Someone walked beside me with their arm around me for probably a mile, and in my altered state I’d known that whoever it was wasn’t human, but wasn’t spirit, either. Now, I was betting it was Alex.
“My vision quest, you helped me walk out?”
He nodded. “Yes, and you saw me as a monster.”
“No, I saw you as other-than-human. This isn’t the first time you’ve referred to yourself as a monster. Do you regret being turned?”
He suddenly looked hard, like he was such good friends with this slice of anger, he isn’t even angry anymore about it. “I was turned without my consent. On the third date with a beautiful woman she turned me into a vampire, a monster. She put her blood in the wine without telling me, and when I’d had enough, she drained me.”
“That must have been terrible.”
He didn’t respond, so I went on. “I can understand your anger, and your first impressions of being a monster when you weren’t prepared for the change. However, you’
ve been a vampire for so long, have you not been able to see yourself as something other than a monster?”
His voice was so low, so quiet, I had to strain to hear him. “But I am a monster. I did some horrible things in the early part of the last century, and then I spent a long time trying to figure out who I want to be. You met me while I was figuring it out.” He brought his voice back to a normal range. “All of the meditating and soul searching, I finally decided to use my powers for good.” He grinned. “That’s why I’m a private detective now.”
“I guess Aaron kind of went the same route, with his security work.”
He nodded.
“Your... the woman who turned you... I’m assuming you broke it off with her? You weren’t required to stay with her or anything, were you?”
“My maker, she’s called my maker.” He leaned against the back of the sofa, looked out the window a brief second, and I had the feeling it hurt his eyes and he’d done it to remind himself it would hurt.
He looked back to me and continued. “Since I was the third person she’d turned without consent and her maker didn’t approve, he killed her after she turned me. He then stepped into the role of my maker and taught me, though by then she’d already done a good bit of damage by teaching me bad feeding habits. By the time he realized what had happened and intervened, it was almost too late to save me.”
A few more things clicked into place and I touched his arm as I said, “I’d like to help you see yourself as the gentle soul you’ve become and not the monster she tried to turn you into.” He shook his head and I added, “Assuming you came here for my skills as a therapist, and not just as a way to get to talk to me?”
“I don’t want a therapist-patient relationship with you. I want our friendship back.”
The timer on my clipboard blinked at me to let me know we had five minutes left in the session. I thought about the Alex who had walked me out of the woods. The Alex who had taken me out for my twenty-fifth birthday and I’d gotten so drunk I couldn’t walk, and then he’d held my head while I puked later that night, and then cleaned me up and put me to bed without laying a hand on me. Yeah, I knew him. No matter what he was, he was good, and he was my friend, and I was glad to have him back in my life.
Only Human (Kirsten O'Shea Book 1) Page 27