solitude but…deal with that later. “Lieutenant, if the doctor okays me, can I stay with Harry?”
“All right.”
5
Of course the doctor checking his heart, blood pressure, and reflexes okayed him…“persuaded” into recording normal values, as he was persuaded into performing the examination without Harry and Serruto present.
Freed from control, Serruto looked baffled by how he agreed to the arrangement Garreth suggested. Garreth worried about him reneging, but the…suggestion held. To a point. Frowning when the doctor pronounced Garreth “miraculously fit,” he said, “I don’t believe it. This coming week you’re going to have a real medical exam…along with the psych evaluation the department wants.”
“Dr. Leonard?” Garreth protested. “I don’t — ”
“Do you want your badge back?” Serruto snapped.
“Yes!” Of course he did.
“After this hospital stunt on top of what you’ve been through, the department’s never going to okay you for duty without the shrink’s okay. Understand?”
Something else to deal. Later. For now, no longer threatened with hospital confinement, he nodded meekly. “Yes, sir.”
“After we let you pick up clothes and stuff at your place, go home with Takananda and rest.”
So he did…more or less. Not in the guest room where he stayed until Harry and Lien went to bed, but out under their tree…reminded of the times he camped as a Boy Scout. Except now he luxuriated in the cool comfort of the ground instead of wanting an air mattress between him and it. While he rested, he considered solutions for the sleeping situation. A coffin was ridiculous, but he did need some kind of container for a layer of earth. Any kind of earth, it appeared, not that native soil nonsense.
He sat up, thinking again of the Boy Scouts. An air mattress might work. As soon as possible, he would leave here and try it out.
In the morning he played with the eggs and toast Lien fixed for him, managing to look like he ate without actually doing so. He also palmed the vitamins she forced on him and drank only tea.
“Since Harry is on duty today,” she said, “will you come to church with me?”
His stomach knotted. Church!
Reaching Our Lady of Grace, however, crushed by daylight and taut with apprehension, he followed Lien in gingerly, feeling he violated the place. If he were wrong about churches…
But nothing punitive happened as they entered the sanctuary. Still, he forced himself not to cringe when Lien touched him with Holy Water…and sucked in a breath of relief when that brought no Divine retribution, either. Sitting in a pew with her, he even felt a kind of peace. Even with blood scents washing around him from all sides. While St. Paul’s in Davis was Episcopalian, Our Lady had the same light coming through the stained-glass windows, the same rhythm of standing, sitting, kneeling. It took him back to sitting sandwiched with Shane between his mother and Grandma Doyle, where they could be thumped on the head with a grandmotherly knuckle if they wiggled too much.
If Our Lady’s tall priest had looked more like Father Michaels — a round, jovial man who smelled pleasantly of pipe tobacco and endlessly relit that pipe at the coffee period following Morning Prayer — Garreth thought he might have been tempted to confess his vampirism and ask for absolution. Or was that cure for his condition myth?
Leaving afterward, Lien said, “Shall we eat lunch out somewhere?”
His teeth rubbed against the inside of his upper lip, so loose they felt ready to fall out. No doubt they soon would, and be replaced by new, sharp canines. Need to be alone overwhelmed him.
“Another time, please? I think I’d like to go home and sleep.” If she argued, he was ready to persuade her… as much of a jerk as it made him feel to contemplate doing that to her, of all people.
After for one concerned glance across the top of the car, not long enough to trap her gaze, she slid in under the wheel without looking at him. “Home to our place, I hope you meant. You know the agreement with your lieutenant.”
Nor did she look directly at him at the house. Did some mystic Chinese sense warn her of the danger? Might she even suspect the kind of change in him? Was that why she touched him with the Holy Water? The questions left him in turmoil.
More pressing, though, was the problem of escaping his imprisonment without anyone’s knowledge. At least temporarily. Only one way he knew. It was not going to hurt her, he argued, and he really had get out.
He followed her into the kitchen. “Lien.”
She turned to look at him. Finally.
He trapped her gaze. “I’m going upstairs to lie down. If Harry calls or comes home, tell him you’ve checked on me and I’m sleeping. You won’t notice me leaving or coming back.” He paused. “Where am I?”
“You’re sleeping.”
Okay…now what. Much as he wanted transportation, he decided against taking her car…not and risk having it gone if Harry came home. He called a cab, arranging to meet it at the corner. Rather than stand conspicuously in the open, he waited outside the front door, gritting his teeth against daylight’s weight and fear of being caught.
When the cab finally appeared an eternity later, he had it take him to a home and garden store long enough to buy an air mattress in their pool supply section, some vinyl tape, and a bag of potting soil. Which seemed as effective as the earth under the Takananda’s tree since touching the bag sucked away a fraction of daylight’s misery and brought an urge to stretch out right there on the pile of bags.
Back at the house he looked for Harry’s car before having the cab drop him off. No sign of it. He seemed to be in the clear. Inside, Lien sat in the family room reading, never looking up as he peered around the door before slipping into the kitchen to borrow scissors and paper towels.
Upstairs, he cut a slit in the end of each tub in the air mattress — not trusting the potting soil to pass from tube to tube as air did during inflation — and using a paper towel as a funnel, trickled in the potting soil until each tube had a layer. After pressing out any air that leaked in with the potting soil, he taped the cuts closed.
Time to see if this worked.
Garreth spread his makeshift pallet on the bed and lay down. Here and there the soil lumped. His body ignored them. Nerves untwisted. Tension and pain drained away, bringing relief so profound he was falling asleep almost before he realized it. At the edge, he forced himself back…struggled upright and slid the pallet under the bed’s bottom sheet to hide it.
Last, before letting go, he worried the loose teeth free. Pushing his tongue into the spaces left, he felt sharp points coming through and shivered. The teeth signaled a point of no return. Now he could no longer deny the thing he had become. The chill of that thought followed him into sleep.
6
Hunger woke him, violent, racking cramps doubling him up in bed. His throat burned with a thirst that refused denial. Icy dread replaced the mere chill he felt falling asleep. The time had come to face the problem he had refused to think about before: food.
Tonight he had to…eat.
Garreth staggered down the hall to the bathroom and doubled over the washbowl gulping down water. Neither hot nor cold water slaked the thirst, just eased the cramps enough to let him stand upright.
In the mirror his face loomed pale, unshaven, and gaunt. No longer square, he noticed. Cheekbones showed where none had before. He grimaced. After the times he tried to shed a few pounds…
