The cheap fluorescent lighting hurt my eyes as it illuminated the paleness beneath the light brown of my skin tone. I looked gray and pasty, dark circles under my sunken chocolate gaze. My kinky hair was half-flattened where I’d lain on it, the rest of it sticking out in every direction. God, I looked like a complete wreck. But I was a complete wreck without a visible mark anywhere on my neck. I leaned forward over the sink to look more closely.
Still nothing.
Was I going insane? Hallucinating? Should I have let the ambulance take me to the hospital for a psych evaluation? I rubbed at the tender skin of my throat, feeling phantom lips there.
I didn’t imagine it, damn it.
But... now what? Vampires were real. Maybe. What was I supposed to do with that?
Falling back on practicalities, I splashed water on my face with shaking hands, and pulled my wayward hair into a ponytail. The pull against my scalp momentarily eased the throbbing of my headache, but I knew in an hour or two it would probably make it worse again.
I wandered listlessly to the kitchen, remembering that they always told you to eat and drink something after you made a blood donation.
Blood donation. I nearly laughed, but if I started I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stop.
If memory served, orange juice and a cookie was the preferred menu at the Red Cross. I had OJ—no preservatives added, not from concentrate—but cookies were a no-go with all the gluten and sugar. I grabbed a banana instead.
I’ve been kind of a health disaster since I was a kid, and even more so since puberty. One of the few things that seemed to make any real difference was sticking to an autoimmune diet. The one that seemed to work best was a sort of extra-strict version of Paleo. That—along with regular yoga—made the difference between being a more-or-less functional member of society and being too sick to work half the time.
I drank my juice and ate my banana, debating next steps.
I knew what I wanted to do, and I also knew that doing it would be a bad idea. I wanted to call my father, even though I was fully aware that the conversation was likely to end in tears—metaphorically, if seldom literally these days. In many ways, Dad was all I had left since my mom died, so long ago. In other ways, I’d lost him just as surely as I’d lost her.
Right now, I wanted to hear my father’s voice—even though the realist in me knew it was unlikely that our relationship would spontaneously repair itself now, some twenty years after the fact.
Twenty years.
Christ.
I felt a jolt upon realizing that we were only two weeks out from July Fourth—the anniversary of the day that a lone gunman shot my mother through the heart while she was giving a Senate campaign speech. I found myself reaching for my phone before I even realized I’d done it. If I was reacting like this, how much worse must my father be feeling about the upcoming reminder of our loss? I’d been so young when it happened that my memories of Sasha Hawkins-Bright were hazy. But Dad had been married to her for years.
The call picked up on the fourth ring.
“Hello?”
I took a deep breath. “Dad? It’s Zorah.”
A pause.
“Hi, Zorah. Why are you calling?”
Not ‘How are you doing?’ Not ‘Good to hear from you.’
“I... uh... I was wondering if you knew anyone here in St. Louis that I could borrow some tools from?”
I’d grown up here. In this very house, in fact. The moment I’d hit eighteen, though, my dad had taken off like a shot. He’d moved to Chicago, and I hadn’t needed to be a genius to understand that I wasn’t invited. The one charitable thing he’d done for me since then was to let me take over the mortgage payments on the old family home. The house had been refinanced to take advantage of the large amount of equity he and Mom had paid into it, and the low monthly payments that were left were the only reason I was able to live in a decent single-family residence rather than a dodgy apartment somewhere.
“What kind of tools do you need?” came the flat voice from hundreds of miles away.
I dragged my thoughts back to the conversation. “A power drill and a circular saw. Or a Sawzall in a pinch.”
“What do you need them for?”
My jaw worked, recognizing the moment when our conversation would start to deteriorate.
“Someone broke into the garden shed,” I said, trying not to make a big deal of it when all I really wanted to do was pour the story out to him and have him tell me not to worry and that everything would be all right. As if. “The latch is broken and the door’s half off its hinges. Oh, and I need to replace the lock on the patio door, too.”
“All you need for the lock is a screwdriver and a strong wrist,” he muttered over the crackling cellular connection.
“Yeah? Well, a screwdriver’s not going to cut it for the shed,” I said. “Trust me. I have to replace part of the door frame.”
“You should already own those tools. That’s just part of being a responsible homeowner.”
My teeth ground together harder, and I consciously relaxed my jaw. “I should, but I don’t. I can’t afford them. Now, do you know anybody I could borrow them from, or not?”
“You know damn well I don’t keep in touch with anyone from... back then.” He paused. “Just... go rent them from somewhere. I don’t know why you need me to
