After I’d said good night, I got into my car. First thing, I checked through my purse—which I’d unwisely left in the hallway alone while I’d been taking care of my mother—to make sure all my cash and ID were still there. They were. Maybe even the great and selfish Jake had been humbled into pure living by Mom’s cancer. Or, more likely, he’d already shaken down my mom for money before I’d gotten there, and she’d leniently given in.
I drove home and got ready for bed. Today had been too long. I’d showered earlier, so all I had to do was brush my teeth and crawl under my sheets.
I still took an Ambien. My body wasn’t used to switching to days yet, and if you could harness the power of sleep into a convenient pill form, you’d take it too, wouldn’t you? Especially if you didn’t want to lie there and think. None of the things I had to think about were good.
I was woken by a thump outside my door. A glance out the window proved it was still night—the middle of the night even. Full streetlight, no haziness of dawn. I closed my eyes. It was nothing, or a neighbor. Sleep had released me momentarily, but if I waited here quietly, it would retake hold.
Another thump. And then a third. They weren’t knocks—definitely thumps. I reached for my phone. It was three A.M.
I still felt bleary from the Ambien. People saw things on Ambien, and drove cars up telephone poles. Was this Ambien, or was it real?
Another thump. I looked down, and Minnie was at the foot of my bed, standing up, looking into the hallway with concern. The sound was real. She leapt off the bed and dove underneath. That sealed it.
I got up and went as quietly as I could to the door, which actually wasn’t very quiet as I stumbled along in my hall. Walking on Ambien was like walking on a boat. I didn’t have any windows out to the second-floor landing, just the peephole. I pressed my hands to the door and leaned forward.
My outside light was on, casting something gray in shadow. The peephole’s refraction made it hard to see what was really there; it kept focusing in on individual parts instead of the whole. Or maybe that was just me, woken against my will, the Ambien refracting my vision. I concentrated, hard.
Another thump, and I jumped back. Dammit. I still couldn’t see. And I didn’t dare open my door.
There was a whuffling sound of disgust, a massive indignant snort, the sort of thing you’d think a
I assumed it was the last thump. It’d had that sort of pissed-off quality. But really, there was no way of knowing. I waited for a time, and neither the sound nor the creature came back.
I made a short list of things that would be able to find me, cross-matched with things that looked like what I’d partly seen outside my door, and came up with an answer I didn’t like very much.
Jorgen.
Fuck me.
On my way back to bed, I pulled my decorative silver cross off my wall.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It would have been easy for Jorgen to find me, no matter where I moved. He knew what I smelled like. He was a vampire’s Hound now—it was his job.
He hadn’t started off as a Hound, though—he’d been a minor werewolf, a human bitten on a full moon night. This past winter he’d been involved in the same confrontation over vampire blood that’d gotten me shunned, and this was his punishment. He wasn’t a free wolf anymore. He couldn’t even go back to being human. Trapped as a Hound, he was enslaved to a particularly frightening vampire named Dren.
And it was my fault he was a Hound now, if you went back far enough. I’d been the one who’d stopped his pack’s plan and destroyed all the extra supernatural blood. I had no idea what he wanted to see me for, but I couldn’t imagine any reason that was good.
He was a piece of my old life, the one I was so foolishly, desperately trying to get back to. I pressed the cross to my chest and it chilled me through the fabric of my nightshirt.
“Goddammit.” The reason I’d moved was so things like this wouldn’t happen to me. At least at this new place, I’d never given any vampires permission to come aboard.
It was a good thing, though, right? If Jorgen wasn’t shunning me … what did that mean for me? Did it mean I was allowed to talk to vampires and other supernatural creatures now, and they to me? Or was I in trouble for refusing to accept my shunning? Was his visit a punishment, or a warning? If Jorgen was here—could Dren be far behind?
I tossed and turned until dawn.
My alarm went off at six thirty and I woke up and showered without much enthusiasm. At least today was Friday. It was easy to forget about Jorgen in the daylight—if I hadn’t woken up with the cross beside me and Minnie still under the bed, I might have brushed the whole thing off as a bad dream.
I rode the train in and walked down the stairs, half expecting Dr. Tovar, my recalcitrant chaperone, to be waiting for me at the bottom. He wasn’t there, though. I waited a minute, and then prepared to make the walk in myself.
Yesterday’s shirt stall was still gone, but another clothing store had taken its place. Pink scrubs with a purple trim hung flat, straight as day, without any wind. They looked familiar …
I started walking quickly to the clinic.
The front of the building was covered in graffiti, looping swirls of complex writing that I couldn’t decipher. The front door was open. I went inside and found it empty.
“Hello?” I looked around and realized all the chairs in the waiting room were gone, and the walls were painted with huge multicolored crosses. The room reeked of fresh paint. “Is everyone okay?”
Hell, was anyone but me even inside? The door to the back had been busted through. “We’re not seeing patients today!” came a yell from beyond. Dr. Tovar followed it, his coat finally off. He was wearing a white T-shirt with his normal dark slacks. When he came out his hands were tight in rage, which made the muscles of his arms stand out. When he saw me he relaxed a little. Without his coat he looked surprisingly human, and more frail.
“What happened here?”
“We were looted last night. We’re lucky they didn’t burn the place.”
Suddenly my urge to help that woman yesterday—this attack put it into focus. My mouth went dry. “Did I —”
“No. This is about them, and me.”
“The Three Crosses?” I guessed.
“It’s not like they tried to hide it,” he said, pointing to the walls. “They took all the chairs, and anything left out in the break room. They broke into all the lockers. And they cut up an exam room table, autopsy-style.”
“Should I call the police?”
“Already called. I have to report this, for insurance’s sake.”
I pointed back outside. “I saw Catrina’s scrubs at the station. Should I go get them, and report who the seller is?” Maybe there were other chairs there for sale.
“No. I doubt Catrina would want them back. They took things to trash them. That person probably just picked them up out of the trash. That’s where the receptionists and MAs are, looking for the waiting room chairs.”
“Ugh.” I would sit down, only there was no place to sit. I spun, looking from wall to wall—and the front wall, the one visible from reception, had looping numbers written on top of the crosses. It took a moment for my mind to resolve them into a date. Seven-seventeen. Like I’d seen on the mural on my computer map, that first day on the phone. “Why the date?”
He flushed darker. “No reason.”
I pressed my lips together. I didn’t want to refute him, but they hadn’t written a huge date on the wall for their own health. Today was Friday, the eleventh of July. The seventeenth was next Thursday. What would happen
