by P. N. Elrod
I turned away as though thinking. I had no choice but to agree, but she expected reluctance and was getting it. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
But she’d heard that one before and had the same answer ready. “I do know, and I’m not asking now. Do what I want and the girl goes free. You already know what happens otherwise.”
“You’d let them do that?”
“Yes.”
My eyes were on Bobbi’s face. “Will you free her unharmed?”
“Yes.”
“All right.”
She gave a sigh, very much like the one that came over the lines when I’d first called. “Good, then come here.”
“Let her go first.”
“No.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Malcolm.
She shook her head. “No. He is to watch. If he thinks anything is wrong, he will take steps.”
“Steps?”
“Whatever he thinks is necessary.” She gave him her cane.
I looked at him. He was watching me, but not smiling as before, and I liked it a lot less.
“Come over here,” she repeated. She extended her left arm, wrist up, blue veins bulging slightly beneath the thin crinkled skin. “Now. Do it now.”
At least I’d be spared the intimate contact with her throat. To save Bobbi I would have done even that, but the thought of touching her in this way was sickening, and it showed on my face. She waited, though, until I moved a few reluctant steps closer. Her eyes took in every movement, as did Malcolm’s. It was worse than being naked.
“Now, Jack,” she whispered.
But my body was not cooperating. True, I had not yet fed; the hunger was there, but not the will. It would be many more days of fasting before I could overcome the physical revulsion with physical need.
My mouth came within an inch of the crepe-textured flesh, smelling faintly of some kind of soap and with a smear of paint on the upturned wrist. She painted pictures.
“Now.”
Pictures of flowers. What had Pruitt said about flowers? Roses for Bobbi, fading now, and I had to do this or Bobbi—
“Now.”
Damn her. With cattle in the Stockyards it was simple feeding, a necessary chore. With Bobbi it was the means to express physical love. With Gaylen it was obscene and humiliating, and blinding white fury was the result. Most of my concentration was on holding in the rage or the old woman would find herself and her chair crashing through one of the walls.
She refused to meet my eyes, staring at her bared arm instead.
“Look at me,” I said.
“No.”
“Look at me.”
“Malcolm . . .”
His step behind me.
Bobbi. My eyes dropped.
“Wait, Malcolm.”
He paused, then moved back.
Damn her. God damn her to hell.
Then anger tipped things and my canines emerged the necessary length and cut hard through her skin, tearing silently. It hurt and her arm jerked, but her free hand came down and she forced it to be still again. I swallowed her thin, bitter blood and tried not to choke. I thought of cattle and tried to pretend it was no more than a routine feeding, something my mind could handle to keep from retching, because if I stopped now I could not do this again and Bobbi . . .
The worst of it was that blood was blood, and my body began to accept it. Never mind the source, that didn’t matter. This was food, all food and usable. Hot strength flowed down and through and I held on more firmly. She wanted me to take her blood, then so be it. Tonight I could and would take it all, and then I’d deal with Malcolm. I’d open his mind up like a tin can and not care what mess I made of it as long as he freed Bobbi.
“That’s enough.” Her teeth were set from the pain because I was not being careful with her.
No, now I make my own choice.
“Stop.”
I’ll drain you dry until there’s not enough blood in you to keep your brain conscious and your head droops—
“I said enough.”
—and your heart stops because there’s nothing left to pump and everything winds down to a final stillness and all that’s left is a hundred pounds of carcass and a bad memory—
“Malcolm . . .” Her voice was weaker, frightened.
—and I lift my head in time to see it coming as a blur, but he’s already into the swing and it’s too late to react. The thing hits me square and hard and sends my skull spinning into the light, and I fall—fall—and hit something hard—and lie still—
The yellow bulb burned my eyes; I was faceup on the boards, with the two of them staring down at me to see if I were alive. That’s hard to do, since there’s no pumping of lungs or beating heart.
Malcolm set aside the cane he used to crack my skull, waved out the window with his hat, and knelt closer.
“Jesus, look at his eyes.”
“Yes, they get that color during feeding. It fades.”
And when we make love, so Bobbi and I leave the lights out . . . Light—the damned thing was boring right through me.
“If he’s dead—”
“He can’t be. You said they were tough, that there’s only one way for them.” He passed a hand over my eyes. His pink fingertips brushed the lashes and I blinked. He looked relieved. “It’s all right, he’s just stunned. What went wrong?”
“Never mind. Are they coming?”
“Yeah, but I think Norma needs some help.”
“She can handle it.” She was wrapping a handkerchief around her arm to stop the flow. Her face was white and her hands shook. I’d been very close but could do nothing more. The room spun sickeningly with the light bulb in the center and I couldn’t move. It was different from being hit with a stone, I wasn’t vanishing to heal. Something about my nature and the nature of wood prevented it, but I knew I’d recover soon and the feeding would help. A few more minutes . . .
Malcolm grabbed my ankles and dragged me from the room. My arms fanned out uselessly over my head; I was unable to control them or anything else. He had struck with killing strength, leaving me helpless.
Grunting and straining, he got me through the door and around a corner into the stairwell. We were on the top floor, but there was still one last flight leading up to the roof. He struggled hard with my weight until the length of my body was stretched halfway up. My head hung off the angle of the step, turning the room upside down for me. My knuckles brushed the landing.
I tried to move and got only the smallest quivering along the muscles for all the effort. Not yet, perhaps in a few more minutes, but not yet.
“Hurry,” she said. She had wheeled her chair into the landing, set the brake, and Malcolm helped her out. He was as solicitous as any boy scout helping an old lady across the street. She shuffled close to me and stiffly sat on one of the steps below my head. With icy misery, I realized what was coming.
Her breathing was hoarse and labored. I’d taken a lot of blood from her, after all. Now she was going to take it back. This was the exchange she had to have. It had been very necessary for Malcolm to hit me and keep me quiet or I would not have been able to stand it.
She hovered close with something in her hand, but kept it just out of view. She turned my head away and I was staring at Malcolm. His eyes were peeled wide with excited interest and he struggled to control his nervous laughter.
A tugging at my throat, a sharp sting, and then a strangled gag escaped me as she cut into the skin. I’d been placed head down so that gravity would speed the flow. Warm and wet, it trickled past my chin onto my face, filled a crevice in the corner of my mouth, overflowed, and skirted my eye and into my hair, tickling my ear and finally dripping onto the stairstep.
She drew a steadying breath and lowered her mouth to the open wound.
I didn’t know how much it might take to secure the change she wanted, perhaps only a single mouthful was sufficient. She kept her lips hard on my neck, swallow after swallow, drinking quickly to keep
up with the flow until it was too much for her and she had to stop. She was still alive and a living human unused to it cannot handle large quantities of blood, physically or mentally. She leaned back against the wall, eyes shut as she caught her breath.
Malcolm stepped forward and helped her back to her chair. “Can I—”
“No, later. I’ll do for you later. I promise. Take me to the truck, I must rest.”
“I thought—”
“Yes, you’re right. Finish it.”
The flow from my neck slowed and stopped. She must have used some wooden instrument to cut me—a sharp piece of ebony, perhaps. The pain in my head was subsiding, but not as fast as I wanted. Controlled movement was still a moment or two away. My arms were working a little, enough for the muscles to contract. It was a start....
Malcolm’s upside-down image was smiling at me; it grinned, it giggled. A long pole was in his hands, one chiseled end protected by a sharp metal tip to keep the point on the wood from splintering.
Panic roared up and took over. I tried to vanish and felt only a flicker of response brush over the nerves. The shock of the wooden cane had been too much. I needed more time and had none. My hands came up in a feeble effort to push away the tip of the pole. There was no strength in them. I was absolutely, utterly—oh, God . . . no . . .
With all his weight behind it, he rammed the thing into my chest and blood shot up and out. My body shook and bucked as if with seizure, hands clawed, legs kicked. A terrible suffocating weight settled on me, crushing and smothering out the life.
He pushed once more and the shattering, engulfing agony negated all thought and effort as a dying animal’s shrieks filled the building; ugly, frightening screams that shook the walls and went on and on until there was no more air for the lungs to push out. The mouth hung uselessly open, and the last echoes hammered down the stairs and were finally lost in the darkness below.
10
FIRE.
Black fire.
Black fire you can’t see or hear or smell, only feel, and by then it’s too late. It’s caught hold and is consuming everything.
Searing black fire that fills the chest from the inside out, until it should explode from the heat and end things forever, but doesn’t. The silent body lies inert, enduring and somehow still conscious. Death is too far away for sanity to remain.
Gaylen’s chair wheels grinding over the flooring, Malcolm’s steps fading . . . crunch, bump, and they were in the elevator. The door was pulled shut and they began to descend. He would load her into the truck and they would go somewhere else. Somewhere . . . Bobbi . . . They’d pulled her out—their voices said as much in the distance....
Move. Move something.
Bobbi had seen their faces, they couldn’t afford to let her go. Gaylen would never take that chance.
But she had promised. She had—
Did a finger twitch? Or was that imagination?
My hands had only found movement at the end, when the wood stake plunged into me. The right one found direction, clawing to pull it out, and the left had convulsively torn through part of the steps. It was still there; damp river air curled around my fingers.
Doors slammed shut. The motors started, gears shifted, and they rumbled into the street.
Try to move.
Nothing. The body was still and dead, the brain was just taking a little longer. The cold was creeping slowly up my legs—cold and then numbness, something familiar and unpleasant. It was what had happened when I tried to stay awake past sunrise to see what it was like. I fought the numbness and clung to the pain. If I gave in and let the sleep take me now I would never wake up again.
Move.
Nothing.
Nothing at all for an infinity.
Alone in the dark with the pain and the cold and the fear for Bobbi. Would it be quick for her? Would they let her go?
Foolish thought.
Numbness from feet to knees. In a few hours it would reach my burst heart and smother the black fire raging there.
A soft crunch, conducted up through the stairs. It repeated and resolved; grit trapped between shoe soles and the flooring. Probably Malcolm returning at last to get rid of the body. I hadn’t heard the truck coming back; must have blacked out for a while. I thought unhappily of the dirty river water closing over my head.
Scrape, scrunch. Pause. Not Malcolm, he wouldn’t be so cautious. A tramp, then. He was in for a nasty surprise when he got to the top landing.
Numbness from knees to waist. Death was taking me an inch at a time and moving faster than I’d thought. Soon the ice and nothingness would flow over my brain....
Move, damn it, move.
Someone breathing softly, listening at the foot of the landing below me, heart pounding, anticipating possible danger from above. Maybe he’d spotted my left hand poking through the underside of the steps and was having second thoughts about coming the rest of the way.
The first thin tendrils of cold streamed into my vitals like a dusting of snow off a glacier.
Heart thundering now, lungs taking short drafts of air, and then a long one as he came up the last flight and stopped because now he could see me. I heard in his voice some fraction of the agony that was holding me so helpless.
“Jack . . . Oh, my God . . . Oh, my dear God . . .”
I tried to speak, tried to move, but the slightest flicker of an eyelid was too much. The thing piercing my chest held me frozen. I could not tell him that some part of me was still alive.
Then Escott’s hand closed around the stake.
God, yes, pull it out.
He pulled once, twice, then stopped because the gurgling sob that came out of me startled him. Coming back to life was almost as bad as dying. The third tug did the job, and it scraped between the ribs, shook the breastbone, and finally came free. Blood welled up coldly in the wound, quenching the fire there, and the body shuddered as the numbness retreated a little.
His hands went under my arms and he eased me from the stairs until my body was level, slowing the downward flow of blood I couldn’t afford to lose. My eyes were open now.
He looked worse than I felt, with his paper white face and new lines formed by the horror of what had been done to me and what he had had to do. I’d read a lot of nonsense about vampires, but there was truth to the stories about those killed; when the end came, it came violently and loud, and mine had been no different. The walls of the stairwell were splashed with gore, and from the dampness soaking into my clothes, I knew I was lying in a pool that had formed on the floor below the steps.
The cold was coming back and I tried to tell him about it, but couldn’t draw the breath to do so. Thanks for coming, Charles. It’s too late, but thanks all the same. Maybe you can track them down before they kill Bobbi.
My eyes rolled up and the dark closed in.
“Jack!”
The lids twitched. They were so heavy. At least this time it wouldn’t hurt.
He was doing something, making short, choppy movements above me. “Stay with me, Jack. Damn your eyes, stay with me.”
Fingers forced my lips back. He pulled my teeth apart and the first drops seeped into my mouth. I gagged, fighting him.
“Stay with me,” he hissed.
It was hardly more than a taste, enough to seize my attention, but not nearly enough to do me any real good. I couldn’t let him risk himself.
“Stay . . .”
I turned my head away or tried to, but his other hand grabbed my hair and held me in place.
“Stay . . .”
Then I accepted it. Fully.
My teeth abruptly pierced his skin, and the red warmth flowed more freely. He recoiled—perhaps from pain, perhaps from revulsion at what I was doing—then recovered, knowing that I couldn’t help myself. I still desperately wanted to live. The instincts born from my changed nature had taken over and ignored the faint, dissonant warning that I could kill him if I went too far.
I ignored it—and I drank.
A heavy engine driving a heavier load. Men distantly shouting to each other. The lazy lap of wash as the barge passed along the river three stories below. The city was slowly waking, or maybe it had never really been asleep.
Some long time earlier I’d found the strength to push away Escott’s lifeline, hopefully before it was too late.
My eyes were squeezed shut as much from the effort of recovery as to avoid looking at him. I wasn’t quite able to do that just yet.
“Come on, Jack, no games. Are you still with us? Wake up.”
His voice was thin, but conversationally normal. Some of the crushing weight on my soul melted away. I wanted to shout from the relief.
“That’s it, open them so I know you’re all right.”
I did, but couldn’t focus too well and didn’t want to look at the stuff on the walls. The lids came down again like lead bricks. He, at least, was still alive. I was too shattered and sick to be very certain of my own chances.
He continued, trying to encourage me. “The bleeding in your chest stopped. It closed right up once I took that bloody great stick out.”
He couldn’t have meant it as a joke. My head wobbled from side to side as though to deny the thought. The cold and numbness were gone, but shock and weakness were left in their place. I could move again, barely.
“You’ll be all right.” He sounded very convincing, but I wasn’t quite ready to believe him yet.
I drew an experimental breath to talk, and heard and felt a bubbling noise within. It developed into a spasm and I roiled on one side in a fit of coughing. One of my lungs had been pierced and was full of blood and fluid. This alarmed Escott, but I felt his steadying hand on my shoulder as I hacked some of it out. The business passed and I flopped back, exhausted.
I took another breath, shallow this time, to avoid coughing. It stayed inside without discomfort and wheezed out in what I hoped was a recognizable name.
He understood. “Your friends told me where you’d gone. They’ve heard nothing from the kidnappers yet.”