by P. N. Elrod
“Done what?” Coldfield rumbled.
“He wants me to do an exchange on Charles.” There was only so much I could say with the nurse present. I closed the door to keep things private.
“An exchange?”
“The kind that made me…like I am.”
“Like you?” That shook him. “He knows?” Coldfield straightened to face Kroun.
“Yeah. He’s in the same club.”
“What?”
“Hey!” Kroun hadn’t wanted that news spread.
“What’s it matter?” I said.
Coldfield pointed at Kroun. “He’s like you?”
“That a problem?” Kroun asked.
“I donno yet.”
“An exchange,” I said again with enough emphasis so the meaning was clear. “You know Charles best, what would he want?”
Coldfield visibly fought to focus. He must have gotten details from Escott at some time or other about how vampires are made. I take in blood, let it work through me, then give it back again. After death, Escott might return, but it rarely worked, or there’d be a lot more vampires in the world. He might not come back as I had done. “It would make him like you?”
“It probably won’t work. Long odds, Shoe. Real long. Against.”
It was a lot to take in, a lot to think about. He looked at Escott, then at me.
“What would Charles want?” I asked.
“To live, goddammit! What the hell you waiting for?”
“I can try, but you’ve got to understand that—”
“Cripes,” said Kroun, disgusted. “Stop wasting time and just give him blood before it’s too late.”
The nurse had picked up that something out of the ordinary was afoot. “A transfusion?” she said.
“Yeah, sweetheart, one of those.”
“Let me get the doctor.” She sidled toward the door.
“Ahhh, cripes.” Kroun slipped his suit coat off and unbuttoned one shirt cuff, rolling it up.
“Sir, you can’t just—”
He ignored her. The tumbler with its glass straw was still on the bedside table. He took the straw and snapped it in half, then dumped the leftover water on the floor and put the tumbler back but nearer the edge.
“Sir? What are…stop!” Her voice shot up.
Kroun let out a few ripe words as he swiped the jagged end of the straw hard across his exposed wrist. Blood suddenly flooded out. He held his wrist over the glass to catch the flow.
We stood rooted—me, Coldfield, and the nurse—too shocked to move or speak while Kroun freely bled.
He grimaced and cursed some more and finally grabbed up a discarded compress. Shaking it open he wrapped it tight on the cut. The bloodsmell hit me hard.
“Gabe…?”
“Not now.” Kroun tapped Escott’s face with the back of his hand. “Hey. Hey, pal. Wake up. Come on!” He hit harder, once, twice, and Escott’s eyelids fluttered. He made a protesting moan. He wasn’t awake, but could respond a little. Kroun held the glass to Escott’s lips and tilted it.
The nurse screamed and surged forward. I caught her and kept her back. I didn’t see what good this might do, but Kroun seemed to know his business.
“Come on…drink up, pal,” he murmured. “That’s it.”
Some of the blood trickled down one side of Escott’s mouth. The rest made it in past his clenched teeth.
Coldfield gaped at me, out of his depth. I shook my head.
The nurse got to be too much of a struggling handful, so I swung her toward the door. She pushed it violently open and kept going, shouting for help.
“Gabe?”
“He got most of it,” said Kroun, putting the glass on the table. “Didn’t choke.” He went into the washroom. He twisted the sink spigot and carefully undid the cloth, holding his cut under the stream of water. “Damn, that stings.”
He’d heal quick enough, but Escott…
Bobbi rushed in. “Jack?” She froze, seeing the blood that smeared Escott’s face and pillow. “My God, what are you DOING?”
The doctor, arriving with what seemed like half the hospital, asked the same thing and almost as loudly. While he checked Escott, he also instructed several heavyweight orderlies to escort us from the building. Things might have devolved to a fight, but Kroun caught the doctor’s eye for a moment. I was too busy to hear, but the eviction was abruptly canceled, and the orderlies and everyone else were kicked out of the room instead. Confused, they hung close, peering in with other bystanders attracted by the commotion.
I shut the door on them, leaving me, Bobbi, Coldfield, and Kroun inside with the oblivious, hypnotically whammied doctor.
Kroun sat the man down and told him to take a catnap. Things fell quiet except for the fast, labored saw of Escott’s breathing. He was fully out again.
Bobbi started up. “What did you do to Charles?” She’d aimed both barrels in my direction.
“It was me,” Kroun muttered. “Just trying to help.” His bleeding had stopped, leaving a hell of a red welt on his wrist. He frowned at it.
She put that together with the blood on Escott. “How? How does that help?”
He didn’t answer, just shook his sleeve down, buttoning the cuff.
I stumbled out with a half-assed account of what he’d done.
Bobbi looked at Escott, then at us. “Will it help him?”
Kroun shrugged. “Maybe. Left it late. Have to wait and see.”
“Jack, will this turn Charles into—”
“I don’t know. Gabe?”
He shrugged again, pulled on his coat, buttoned it, checked his handkerchief. If he started fiddling with it again, I’d knock his block off.
“C’mon…talk to us. How did you know to do that? I never heard of it.”
“Well, it’s a big world, you learn something new every day.”
“Not something like this!”
“Hey! Sickroom! Pipe down!” Hat on, he slung his overcoat over his good arm and started for the door.
“You gotta talk, dammit.”
He paused, back to us, head half-turned, considering. Then, “No. I don’t.”
He went out.
“Son of a bitch,” rumbled Coldfield. “The son of a bitch is crazy as a bedbug.”
“You’re all crazy,” said Bobbi. She went to Escott, found a clean, damp cloth, and dabbed at the blood. It took her a while; her tears were back.
I went to her, but she didn’t want to be held.
Someone ventured to open the door. It was Faustine.
“Things go-ink how?” she asked, gently easing inside. A damn good question. “Bob-beee, poor da’link. You let me help, yesss?”
“I’ll be all right, I need to stay.”
Faustine looked hard at the doctor, who was still out for the count. “Zen I find coffee. Yesss?”
No one turned her down. She swept out. I heard her dealing with the crowd in the hall, telling them to leave, all was well, all was fine. I recognized the nurse’s voice raised in challenge, but Faustine wouldn’t let her by and kept asking about coffee.
HOURS of hell later I went looking for Kroun.
He was in a dark waiting room at the far end of the hall, feet up, nose in a magazine. The glowing spill from the corridor was more than enough for our kind to read by, but it looked odd. I turned the light on.
He squinted. “Ow. Too bright.”
“Too bad.”
“How’s your friend?”
It was hard to speak. Almost too hard. I had to swallow, and my mouth was cotton dry. “His…his fever’s down. He’s breathing better.”
“That’s good.”
“Is he going to need a second dose?”
“Nope.” Kroun turned a page.
“The doctor woke up.”
“He remember much?”
“Not a lot.”
“That’s good, too.”
“He checked Charles out, took a blood sample, did some other stuff. The infection’s…Charles seems t
o be throwing it off. The doc said it’s a goddamn miracle.”
Kroun shrugged. “Maybe it is. Thanks for telling your big friend about me. Next time use a megaphone.”
“He had to know.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Coldfield won’t say anything. Who’d believe him?”
“That’s not the point—”
“Where’d you learn that angle on the blood? Who told you?”
“Doesn’t matter.” He continued to read.
“The hell it does. The one who made me didn’t know, and neither did the one who made her. Who did your initiation?”
“Drop it, kid.”
Was he ashamed? Granted, such things could get embarrassing. “You don’t have to go into detail.”
“I’m not going into it at all.”
“Where’d you meet her? When?”
“You deaf? I’m not—”
“Or was it a man?”
That netted me a beaut of a “what the hell did you just say?” expression.
It lasted about two seconds.
I blinked at dark green linoleum, disoriented. I was facedown on the floor with no understanding of how I’d gotten there. My jaw hurt and hurt bad. I tried moving it, and some dim insight—along with a sudden burst of agony and the taste of my own blood—told me it was broken. Shattered maybe. In several places. The rest of me wanted to vanish, and I didn’t fight the urge.
When I resumed solidity, everything was in working order again, though I still drew a blank on what had happened. I found my feet, taking it slow.
Kroun sat in his chair as before, but leaning forward, rubbing the knuckles of his right hand. They were raw and red. His expression was calm. “Are you anywhere near the point of backing off, or do you want your face rearranged more permanently?”
I stared at him, wiping leftover blood from my mouth with the back of one hand.
“Well?”
“I’m thinking.”
He snorted and picked the magazine up from the floor. “And the man said I was crazy. I heard him.” He flipped pages filled with pictures about hunting and fishing. “I need to get out of this town.”
“Thought you still had business.”
“I do. Tomorrow night. Till then, I got nothing else.”
“No need to hang around here.”
“Some babysitter you are. Forget about Michael and Broder already?”
“You could say.”
“Word of warning: don’t. Mike looks nice, but he isn’t. Broder looks dangerous, and he is.”
I’d figured that out already; Kroun just wanted a change of subject. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Smart boy. I’ll need a ride tomorrow night.”
“No problem.” I could guess that it had to do with those cigars. It seemed a good idea to not try any more questions. I’d goaded him enough for one night. “Lemme tie things up here then we’ll go. Thank you.”
“Mm?”
“Thanks for what you did for Charles. I owe you.”
He grunted again and found a page to read.
BOBBI looked up when I came in. She smiled—a small, sleepy one—but my world tilted another notch back toward its proper place once more. I could deal with anything so long as she smiled like that.
“Faustine’s left?” I asked.
“She’s bunking in Roland’s room,” she said. “If there’s more excitement she doesn’t want to miss it. You got more waiting in the wings?”
“Not that I know of.”
I checked Escott over again for the umpteenth time, looking for changes. His heartbeat was strong and steady, no longer racing fit to tear itself apart.
“It’s getting late for you,” she said.
“You, too.”
“I’ll be fine. Shoe and I are staying.”
Coldfield didn’t speak, but his expression was eloquent. Yes, Escott seemed to be safe now, but that did not mitigate the fact that I’d nearly killed him. If not for Gabriel Kroun and the devil’s own luck, Escott would almost certainly be dead by now. However matters had turned out, I had been stupid, and Coldfield did not forgive stupidity.
We were very much alike on that point.
The blue tinge to Escott’s skin had faded. His color was nearly normal except for the bruises, and he looked to be in a natural sleep instead of deeply unconscious. That death smell was still present, but it was old air not yet cleared by the ventilation. What I got from him now was ordinary sweat, and that more than anything reassured me that he was truly recovering.
It’d happened extremely fast. In a tiny span of hours he’d drifted back from the brink. I’d watched the process and hardly dared to hope. The doctor had muttered about a miracle and recorded it on the clipboard. The nurses would glance at me and whisper to others, and on down the ladder went the story. Even the deaf old janitor must have gotten word; he kept his back to the commotion, clearly not wanting any part of it.
What the consequences might be later for Escott I couldn’t begin to guess. Bobbi—all of us—wanted to know if it would change him in some other way.
I only knew of one means to turn a person into a vampire and just how rarely it worked. A blood exchange takes place, but with a normal human donating first, then taking in the vampire’s blood; that was how it was done.
Kroun’s variation was new to me, only he wasn’t talking, which was nuts. What harm was there in telling?
Would Escott recall anything about drinking Kroun’s blood? Perhaps as a fever-induced dream?
Coldfield might tell him. I wouldn’t know where to start.
Bobbi promised to phone me at sunset tomorrow. I kissed her good-bye, nodded at Coldfield, who did not react, and left.
I drove to the Stockyards.
Snow sifted down, cheerful as Christmas. It was pretty until the window wipers began to clog. The milk trucks were out, as were the newspaper trucks, not a lot of cars. We made good time.
Kroun was pale as paint, though he wouldn’t admit to being hungry. I was, mildly. Before Hog Bristow put me through hell, I’d gotten into the habit of never letting my hunger go beyond the mild stage. I found a place to park under a broken streetlamp and we got out.
“Cripes, what a stink,” he complained.
“Don’t breathe.”
“Huh.”
A high fence separated us from the source of the stink. Not a problem for me, but he’d have to climb get in. He studied the fence and shook his head, apparently mindful of his new clothes.
“It’s not that bad,” I said.
“Yes. It is. You have more of those bottles in your icebox?”
“Yeah, but—”
“I know. Not fresh. I’ll get by. Hurry it up before we’re under a drift. I’ll be in the car.”
He had a hell of a lot more self-control than I did. By now I’d have been crazy-starved, shaking, and suffering tunnel vision. Maybe the bullet in his skull had something to do with it. Kroun sauntered back to the Buick and shut himself in.
I vanished, passed through the fence, and re-formed on the other side.
After my resurrection, it’d taken months for me to get used to my new diet. The profound physical satisfaction I got was one thing; it was the part about biting into a living animal’s vein and feeding from it that had bothered me for a long time. The benefits outweighed the unpleasant details, though, and eventually I reached the point of not thinking much on them.
Getting blood while it was still flowing and hot might not have the same importance to Kroun. Some people demanded bread straight from the baker’s oven while others were happy enough with two-day-old leftovers. Others wouldn’t even notice a difference. Maybe he was like that.
These nights I had to be cautious about choosing a four-footed victim. My hypnosis had been handy for soothing skittish animals; now I had to find ones that were already calm. Not easy. Cattle could be deceptive: one second lethargic, the next trying to trample you. Horses were easier prey; they were used to being
handled. The shorter hair on their hides was a bonus.
Three tries to find an animal that allowed me to do what I had to, then I rushed the process. Things were getting damned cold. The snow swirled and fell more thickly, caking on my shoulders. Kroun’s idea of going to a butcher shop was looking better by the minute.
The cattle in the next pen over abruptly stirred, restless and noisily fretting. They might have smelled their impending death on the freezing air, but if not, then something else had bothered them. Kroun’s advice about being more careful was still fresh in my mind.
You can’t be paranoid if someone really is after you.
I broke off feeding and looked around, listening hard, but I heard only lowing and the wind. Sight was limited because of the falling snow. The cattle could have been reacting to the weather or one of the yard workers. I’d learned to avoid them, but sometimes got spotted. Usually a man would shout, which was my cue to vanish, leaving him with a mystery. I was sure stories were circulating about a dark-clad specter haunting the stock pens.
Had it been a worker, he’d have yelled by now. My neck prickled the way it does when you think you’re being watched. Most of the time we’re wrong, and no one is around, but I paid attention to such warnings. The instinct is there for a reason. The last time I’d felt it, Hurley Gilbert Dugan had stepped out of the cold shadows and shot me.
He didn’t seem to be around, which was just as well for us both. I’d have killed him on sight. Not a lot of people inspired that kind of reaction in me, and I wasn’t proud of it. On the other hand, given the opportunity to bury him in the lake, I’d do it and no second thoughts.
I had come a long way down my private road to damnation.
Sparing my shoes further damage, I vanished and floated out, not re-forming until I was close to the Buick. If anyone saw, then their view would be as impaired by the snowfall as mine.
I took a last gander at what I could see of the empty street, got in, and wasted no time flooring it.
“What?” Kroun asked. “Something wrong?”
“Not much. It’s been a hell of a night.”
No disagreement from him on that.
THE house had been broken into, again.