Twice Bitten

by Diana Greenbird

  ‘This time if you feel like running, you have your own getaway car… bike,’ Emerson said.

  ‘You bought me something to aid my leaving?’ I asked. ‘I thought you said you didn’t want me to go?’

  Emerson shook his head. ‘I don’t want you to leave me in a way that makes me panic or worry about whether you’re safe. But I know sometimes you’ve got to run. You’re your own person. I never want to change that, love. Just, remember your promise, that’s all.’

  I agreed. I never wanted to leave him in a prolonged state of worry. Ever.

  I smiled mischievously. ‘So… have you ever rode a bike?’

  ‘What sort of a question is that?’

  ‘One posed to a guy who didn’t even know how to change his own flat tire before he met me.’

  Emerson snorted. ‘No. I haven’t.’

  ‘Hop on, then. It’ll be good to give an ancient vamp such as yourself one of his firsts.’ I shoved the helmet onto my head.

  ‘You’re serious?’

  ‘Like Death, baby.’ I said, pushing down the visor.

  Emerson slid on the seat behind me, his hands wrapping around my waist. Even with my scarf, coat and helmet, I still managed to feel Emerson’s breath touch my skin on the back of my neck. It was impossible, but I attributed it to the bond which allowed so many other impossible things between us.

  ‘Hold on tight,’ I said, right before I set off.

  I’d never ridden with someone on the back of my bike before, but it didn’t take me long to get used to Emerson’s weight with mine. He turned naturally as I moved around corners, like he was in sync with everything my body was doing and could mirror it perfectly.

  It was amazing to be able to travel like this again. It was already dark, the streetlights and the headlight of my motorbike the only thing that lit the way, but this was the best time to drive. The headlights of other cars warned you of their whereabouts much sooner than you would ever know in the day. It wasn’t raining, but was a clear night, the stars above the city almost visible.

  ‘How’re you doing?’ I asked. If it was anyone else, I would have doubted their ability to hear me over the speed and roar of the engine.

  Emerson squeezed my waist tight, twice. I took that to mean he was good.

  I rode on quiet roads, flanked by national parks rather than houses since Emerson was without a helmet and the last thing we needed was to be stopped by some policeman. I picked up the pace, wondering if the thrill I felt going this fast was anything like what a vampire felt when they moved with preternatural speed. The only times I’d known for certain I’d moved faster than should have been possible, I’d been in a state of shock to fully appreciate it.

  ‘How fast would I need to go to reach vamp speed?’ I asked Emerson.

  I heard Emerson’s laugh behind me. God, I loved that laugh.

  ‘Think we could race? You running and me on the-?’

  My joke was interrupted by the figure in the road. Like when I had first come to this small town, one minute the road was clear and the next there was a figure standing right in front of me. I swerved.

  My bike flipped up in the air and I had this insane thought that this was like Final Destination where I might have missed Death the first time this way, but he’d eventually come back around to take me this time. I’d almost forgotten about Emerson. Until I felt his whole body wrap around mine.

  Instead of hitting the floor and being scraped across the tarmac with no leather to protect me this time, I landed on Emerson. From the speed we’d been thrown from the bike as I’d swerved and it had flipped, Emerson skidded across the floor a good several meters before he stopped.

  I shook in his arms. I’d taken a jolt or two, but other than a slight twinge from whiplash, I was completely unharmed. Emerson… Emerson had taken the brunt of the damage.

  When I’d gathered my wits about me, I pulled myself from him and knelt by his semi-unconscious form.

  His jacket and t-shirt were in bloody tatters, his pants equally torn. A rib poked out from his chest – not breaking the skin – but at an odd enough ankle it had moved the flesh unnaturally. There was more damage, but I didn’t have time to see it. He was already healing. Bones audibly cracked whilst blood clotted at the torn flesh which was knitting itself back together. I’d never seen a vampire heal like this. I’d only ever seen Emerson damaged by silver which couldn’t heal at the preternatural rate. It was… incredible. Sickening. Both.

  I eventually found my voice. ‘Emerson… Emerson!’

  His eyes fluttered open. His hands tried to brace himself on the floor, to push up, but he crumpled at the elbows.

  ‘I’m fine.’ I wasn’t inclined to believe him as he had to say those words through a mouth full of blood.

  ‘Did you… did you see the figure?’ I asked. I really wanted him to know that I hadn’t just crashed for nothing. I wanted to know that.

  Emerson spat the blood out of his mouth. ‘Yes.’ Emerson tried to get up again. He’d stopped bleeding and there weren’t any more bones popping. But he didn’t look good. He had no colour and his eyes weren’t focused.

  ‘Silver lining: I’m not crazy,’ I told him. It was either talk nonsense, or panic. I didn’t want to panic.

  ‘Not so… silver lining,’ Emerson said. I hadn’t realised how painful it must be for him to talk until he tried to string more than two words together. ‘We’re in-’ he stopped speaking to take a painful gasp. His hand gripped below his ribs. What I could see on the surface was already healed, but there was a lot still going on beneath the skin. ‘-Some… serious trouble.’

  Maybe I should panic.

  Thanks to Emerson, not only had I survived the crash, but my phone had, too. I managed to drag Emerson’s body to the side of the road – and the remains of my second trashed bike. I called Charlotte to come pick us up immediately.

  Emerson’s brain and heart weren’t irrevocably damaged, he wasn’t being burned alive, and there was no silver preventing him from healing; I knew he’d live. But he was certainly suffering. He needed blood – a lot of it – and fast.

  Grayson picked us up in Emerson’s car – I assumed he must have had spare keys since Emerson’s were… somewhere along this road. As he loaded Emerson into the back, he told me Charlotte had rushed off to find someone for an emergency transfusion.

  ‘If it’s dire I could…’ I suggested. It made me sick to even say the words, knowing as soon as his teeth would near my throat, I would be transported back to the night my parents had been killed.

  ‘No. Bollocks to the walls, no chance. He’d kill us if we forced him to take blood from you.’ Grayson tried to reassure me. ‘He’s going to be fine. He’ll heal. It’s one of the great things about vampires. We survive.’

  Emerson kept passing in and out of consciousness as Grayson carried him up to their apartment and placed him on his bed. He then left me alone with Emerson in his bedroom to make a call to Charlotte and see how she was getting on with finding an emergency donor.

  I started to internally panic as I watched Emerson stain his silk duvet with the blood that had covered his skin and clothes before the wounds had closed. Emerson needed more frequent blood transfusions because being around my unnatural energy “used up” his blood supply quicker. Surely that meant that me being here was screwing up his healing process and making him suffer more than he had to. I should leave. But then Emerson would think I was that bitch who left him after he saved my life. But I was leaving to help him. But even if I did leave, I’d be breaking my promise to him – leaving him suspended in a state of panic as the last thing he’d be able to feel connected to was an accident. Good for his mental health, or good for his physical health? I paced to and from the bed and doorway, trying to decide what I should do.

  ‘Hunter…’

  He was conscious again.

  I ran over to his bedside, kneeling so I was eyelevel with him.

  ‘What?’ He didn’t repeat what he had said. His eyes
flickered like he was trying to stay awake. ‘Emerson, you’ve lost a lot of blood. Charlotte’s gone to get some more for you. You’re going to be okay.’

  That’s what you told people who were in a bad state, right? That they were going to be okay? Usually, I was on the one needing to be told I was going to be okay. Grayson had told me Emerson was going to be fine, and I believed him. I did. So, Emerson would believe me when I told him that, too.

  ‘I know… what you are.’

  ‘Emerson?’

  ‘Liv, what’s going on?’ Grayson appeared in Emerson’s doorway, having heard his friend’s voice.

  ‘He’s started talking but he’s not making any sense.’

  ‘Hey, mate,’ Grayson said, ‘you take it easy, alright?’

  ‘Figured… it out.’

  ‘That it hurts like hell falling from a motorbike? No shit,’ Grayson said, trying to infuse some humour into the situation. ‘I told you buying her that bike was a bad idea. Who thinks giving the girl who trashed her last two rides another mode of transport is-?’

  ‘No… dipshit,’ Emerson managed to choke out. ‘What Liv is. Why… she’s not human… not lamia…’

  ‘I swear, if you try and tell me it’s because she’s an angel I’m telling Charlotte to press pause on the transfusion.’

  Emerson managed to crack open his eyes. He focused on Grayson, but I felt his hand brush the covers trying to reach me. I was wearing my rings. There was no way I could touch him in this state.

  ‘Hunter. She’s… a hunter.’

  ‘She’s not immune, E,’ Grayson said.

  Emerson shook his head, but winced in pain. ‘Blood type… o… positive.’

  Emerson didn’t say anything more, speaking had taken it out of him. He’d passed out again.

  ‘What the hell was he on about?’ I asked, turning to Grayson.

  He didn’t look like he wanted to answer; like me asking him made me out to be the crazy one since someone in Emerson’s state wouldn’t be making any sense.

  ‘It’s this thing from back when Emerson was forced to work with the Mors Exercitus,’ Grayson said. ‘They’d know a hunter was immune for certain because one parent and all their children were all o-positive. Blood types aren’t inherited. It’s more likely for a kid to be in a different blood group from their parents. The impossibility of full families being one blood group was what helped Mors Exercitus determine who was immune.’

  A Venus-flytrap effect. Hunters drew in vampires the same way a carnivorous plant would draw in an insect with the promise of nectar they could drink from. No matter who they were, an immune hunter would always attract any vampire they met because they were universal donors.

  ‘I’m not even bleeding,’ I said, like Emerson had only figured out my blood type because he’d smelled it on me now.

  ‘You’re appealing – to all three of us. Which means you’re o-positive,’ Grayson said.

  ‘I’m sure there are a lot of humans out there who are universal donors,’ I said. ‘Like you said, I’m not immune to your glamour. In my dreams, hunters were always immune.’

  ‘I know.

  ‘So, why’s he going on about it like he’s cracked the case?’

  Grayson shrugged. ‘He’s completely out of it. You try being thrown from a speeding bike and making sense afterwards.’

  I waved my scarred hands at him. ‘I did.’

  Charlotte returned with someone in tow. When she said she’d gone to get help, I assumed she’d come back with blood bags, not a blood donor. I was just thankful I saw a kit for transferring the blood.

  The woman who came with Charlotte introduced herself as Circe, before she disappeared into Emerson’s room and shut the door. She was in her late twenties, with dyed candy apple red hair and skin freckled from being in the sun for too long – clearly not a Washington native. She was lean and slender, like a willow tree. There was no glamour about her, but she was unnaturally beautiful. I guessed it was more likely she was a witch than a human. In my head, no one that gorgeous came about it naturally without being lamia.

  It took an hour for her to finally come out of the room and update us on Emerson’s condition. He was going to be fine. Charlotte sat Circe down on the armchair in the living room to rest a while. She didn’t have any biscuits or orange juice, but I made her a glass of water – the best I could offer her. I felt like I needed to do something to help; this was all my fault, after all.

  Circe took the water from me. She brushed her fingers along mine as she did so. I pulled back quickly and returned to the other side of the room.

  ‘There is much magic working on you,’ Circe said, her voice echoing slightly like she was far away. ‘So much.’

  I frantically looked to Grayson and Charlotte. They noticed that she was talking weird, right? It wasn’t just me. Unless my senses were going weird again.

  ‘Overly complex witch,’ Charlotte mouthed to me, before she explained to Circe that I had a spelled ring, which was probably what she was picking up.

  ‘Spell crafters,’ Grayson told me. ‘They can sense spells and the webs of magic.’ His disinterest in anything magical was once against prevalent in his voice.

  Though Charlotte was the one speaking to her, explaining my ring and the residual energy Charlotte was able to sense from it, Circe’s eyes didn’t leave me. Not once did she glance at the other silver rings; she focused entirely on my mom’s.

  ‘When I wear it, I dream of things that happened in the past. Real things,’ I said. I figured Charlotte wanted me to explain. Why else would Charlotte have taken to stare at me, too?

  ‘I think the ring has retrocognitive magic,’ Charlotte said. ‘I’ve read her dream journals. She sees the past in visions, just as lamia gifted with seeing the past might.’

  As Circe was a witch, she would already be able to sense that I wasn’t lamia, and likely read the off energy Grayson had always mentioned experiencing around me.

  ‘I can’t read magic anymore to be certain. Do you think you could…?’

  Circe opened her mouth. Her blank expression told us all she had no idea how to do that. Or she was still weak from giving blood and hadn’t expected to be called for any other purpose.

  Charlotte disappeared and reappeared right in front of Circe. She held the witch’s hands and instructed her. Whilst Circe looked older than Charlotte, and had more years as a witch than the vampire ever had, it was clear who was more experienced.

  Charlotte spoke to Circe in terms she would understand as a spell crafter. She had to follow the only thread of magic that remained in Charlotte’s vampiric form; the one which had transformed her. Circe must look past the vampire she saw into the witch – read the history of the magical thread that tied who Charlotte was now to what she had once been.

  It felt wrong. To be casting spells or looking into magic, or whatever the hell Circe and Charlotte were doing, when Emerson had been so close to Death and was still recovering. But Charlotte and Grayson didn’t experience events in the same timeframe as I did. The accident was so close to me, but could have been years ago for however little they were connected to it. Charlotte could probably recall that I’d asked her to get a witch to find answers for me – whether they were crazy or not, with or without Emerson and Grayson’s agreement. This met that criteria, even if it was an exceptionally inappropriate time for those of us who weren’t dissociated.

  If Circe thought it was weird that she had been called here to rescue one lamia, and instead had been roped into another task altogether, she didn’t comment on it. Apparently, the strenuous activity blood donors were advised to abstain from for the next few hours after donating did not include magic.

  It took a while, but eventually Circe could see it.

  ‘It’s the same, your energy and the rings – it matches.’

  Charlotte stepped back, removing her hands from Circe’s. She nodded to herself. ‘I thought so. I was able to infuse objects with retrocognitive magic back when I was a witch, bu
t nothing quite as powerful as Liv has been experiencing in her dreams. I could only connect someone to their own memories, but Liv has been experiencing ours and histories beyond people she’s ever met.’

  Charlotte disappeared again and handed Circe my dream journal. Before I could protest, Circe was fingering through my visions of the past. It felt wrong having her read those dreams. Charlotte had been reading about herself; I felt like I was giving back a piece of personal history I shouldn’t have been privy to when I’d handed over my dream journal. But this time, it was like something private was being aired in front of a stranger.

  She hadn’t read much past the first few dreams before she snapped the notebook closed. ‘Where are the dreams she is not connected to?’ Circe asked.

  ‘The first dreams from the plague,’ Charlotte said. ‘They’re on the first page.’

  Circe waved Charlotte’s comment off. ‘They are connected to her more than the dreams she has of you. Memories can transfer through the bloodline.’

  ‘Bloodline?’ I asked.

  Grayson swore beside me. He looked at me. ‘Hunter,’ he said, repeating the word Emerson had before he’d passed out.

  ‘This is not… news, is it?’ Circe asked. ‘You know she is immune?’

  ‘I’m not,’ I denied. I wasn’t.

  Circe’s thin lips moved into a smile. She stood up from the sofa. ‘The threads of magic I see around you aren’t as fixed as they should be. They slip loosely around your sphaeram, like there is nothing they can quite grasp to. Except for this one thread.’

  Circe moved closer towards me. Like Grayson, there was something uncomfortable about her: the intensity of how purely she was a witch. If preternatural power was at its peak with Grayson, the supernatural was the same with Circe.

  As the only person who would have noticed my discomfort was unconscious, I was left to shift awkwardly on my feet as Circe approached and ran her hands close towards my face, and chest, not touching but sensing the energy there.