Chapter Twenty-Nine
What would I do now? Where would I go? Where had they taken her? I was sore, I was cold, and I was royally pissed off. The clouds hid the moon from me, but I didn’t need to see it to know my time was winding down. I sat on a different train with the same watch advertisement, only this time someone’d drawn a cock by her mouth. The graffiti matched my sentiment. I’d been dicked over. Worse yet, Anna’d been dicked over. God, to get free after a hundred years, only to be trapped again? How horrible was that? I shuddered inside my jacket, even as I began to sweat. I stared at the advertisement, and felt like if I looked at the watch faces closely enough, I could see the remaining time in my life tick away.
A group of young men loaded on. It was technically late at night. I pretended to ignore them while paying attention out of the corner of my eye. They were busy discussing something exciting among themselves, and I tried to be charitable and think they were high-spirited instead of dangerous.
One of them spotted me, and broke from their pack. He came over, and I stiffened.
“Miss?” I didn’t respond. My mouth was dry. “Yo, miss?” he said, waving a hand in front of my face.
I glared up at him. “What do you want?” I said, in a voice that encouraged no further interaction.
“You’re bleeding,” he said, pointing at my lap. “Are you okay?”
I looked down, and saw Yuri’s shirt, with blood on the cuff where Anna had wiped her eyes. And his hand shifted, to point at my coat shoulder, where there was even more blood—from when we’d hugged, I guessed. I stared at my shoulder in disbelief for a moment, before looking up at the man whom I’d erroneously judged. Someone’s mother, somewhere, had raised them right.
“It’s all right. It’s not mine.”
His eyebrows rose, but he nodded and sidestepped back to his friends. I got off at the next stop.
I trudged the rest of the way home, with Anna’s bloodlike tears, or tearlike blood, on my shoulder and on Yuri’s cuff. What was happening to Anna now? What were they doing to her? I couldn’t leave her like that. I just couldn’t.
I went inside my house and found the lawyer’s number. He’d said not to call back if I hadn’t found her—but I had, then I’d lost her again, and someone had to help.
The phone rang four times. I expected voice mail soon—maybe vampires had caller ID. It was night at least, just before two A.M. I paced around inside my kitchen as it rang again. Who else could I call afterward?
“Hello,” said the voice I remembered. It sounded like it was going to go into a voice mail message after all, the tone was so formal and low—but there was a pause. “Hello?”
“You’re awake!” I exclaimed in relief.
“Of course.”
“It’s Edie Spence. We spoke the other day, about the murder and the girl.”
There was a pause. “Go on.”
“I found her.” Then I stopped and thought about what next to say. How could I sum up the events of the night and not sound insane?
“But?” the anonymous voice on the other end of the line asked archly.
“She was kidnapped.”
“Really.” His inflection on the word rose and fell in ironic disbelief.
“Really. She swore she’d help me before that … but…” I stood in front of my refrigerator, staring at its ivory- colored door, as blank as my mind of good sense.
“You tell the most interesting tales, Miss Spence.”
“It’s not a story.” I leaned forward and rested my forehead on the door. The cheap metal dimpled inward, with a thunk. “She needs our help, they took her away—you don’t understand.”
“She promised you she’d be there?”
“She did.”
“Well, then.” I heard papers shuffling in the background. “My appointment book is already full until dawn tonight. But I may have time to see you early tomorrow, before sunrise.”
“You—you’re taking my case?”
“If she swore she’d be there she’ll try.”
“You … believe me?” I stood up straight, and my fridge door popped back into place.
“I’m your lawyer. It doesn’t matter what I believe. What matters is that she wouldn’t have sworn it if she hadn’t intended to help you. Unlike humans, vampires are creatures of their word.”
I rolled my eyes. “I get off at seven-thirty tomorrow morning—”
“Eight A.M., then.” He started spouting off an address, which I wrote quickly down. “Be on time.”
“You’ll help me save her, right?”
The voice on the other end of the line paused. “You should worry about your own fate first, Miss Spence. Eight tomorrow,” he said, and the line went dead.
I leaned back against my cheap fridge again, and again felt it buckle behind me. Worry about my own fate first—but how could I live with myself while knowing about Anna’s?
The address the lawyer’d given me was off the public transport routes, so I drove to work that night. It was unfair that I had to keep going to work with all my personal drama. But I didn’t have much time off saved, and every time I called in, I was worried I’d be fired without cause—it wasn’t like Y4 nurses had a union to protect us. With my luck, I’d be fired just as Jake was shooting up the eight ball to end all eight balls, and then what would happen to him? He’d find out he wasn’t superman and that he could still get high five seconds before his happy heart stopped cold.
Besides, what would I be doing at home, anyhow? Doing my depressed-oversleeping thing? Or eating everything I had in my fridge because it was there? Worrying about resaving Anna? Pacing around, listening to Merle Haggard, like Dad always did?
I pulled my Chevy into the empty visitor’s lot and pulled on the parking brake. No, being at work would be better than all of those. I hoped.
I had both of Maganda’s patients. I always felt good about following her—she was tiny, Filipino, and full of energy. If there’d been anything pressing that needed to be done, she would have done it already. She reminded me of the nurses at my last job.
“Mr. Smith, you know him?” she asked.
“Had him the other night.”
She nodded, making her gold earrings jingle. “No change!” She passed the chart over to me to co-sign.
“And him?” I asked about room four, as I finished my nearly illegible “Spence, RN.”
“Not so good. Out of the woods now, but this afternoon? Full of trees.” She laughed at her idiom, and I grinned along with her.
“So, room four came up this morning with massive blood loss. At first, they thought he was just hypothermic, or hyper-ETOH, you know? But his hematocrit came back very low. Turns out he had no blood—and bite marks. He came down here, and we’ve been transfusing him all afternoon. Three units of packed red blood cells so far, and then I sent off a crit. Waiting on the results right now.”
I nodded. I could wait for test results. And I could hang more blood if his crit came back low again. Easy- peasy. “How’d he get like that, though?”
“Don’t know.” She handed over the chart, and I signed it.
“Was he a donor before?” I asked, looking past her into the room, where the dregs of a blood bag were running into the patient’s antecubital IV line.
She took the chart back and closed it. “Doesn’t matter—he is one now.”
I nodded and waited for her to walk away before flipping through the charts. As curious as I was to see Ti again—and I wasn’t sure why, I just was—I knew the fresh donor needed my attention first.
