Sex and the Single Vampire

The nonghost seemed to be breathing hard, which made his wounds seep blood all that much faster.

'I am not a ghost,' he acknowledged, his teeth still apparently doing the grinding thing. 'I have told you that at least six times now—'

'Twice.'

Breath hissed out his really nice lips. His eyes darkened until they were obsidian. His fingers clenched. 'Twice what?'

'You said you weren't a ghost twice, not six times. Must be the blood loss making you a bit woozy.'

Muscles in his chest rippled. I tried not to notice them, feeling it was rude to stare at such a magnificent—if bloody—chest when its owner was clearly in need of deep psychiatric and immediate medical care.

'I have never been spoken to as you have spoken to me.'

'Is that so?'

'I do not like it,' he continued, just as if I hadn't said anything. 'You will cease it immediately and leave.'

'Leave. As in… now?' Clearly he wasn't thinking straight. It behooved me to try to calm him down before he did any more damage to himself.

'Yes, now,' he answered me, a muscle in his jaw twitching. 'You need to leave right now, before you ruin—' His lips clamped down on the words, cutting them off.

'Ruin what?' I couldn't help but ask. 'I realize it's a bit nosy of me, but I don't often find naked men slowly bleeding to death in the basement of haunted inns. Call me silly, but I think you still need help. It can't be good for you to slice yourself up like that and then lie around in the damp and drip blood everywhere. I'm sure there are some very nice doctors who would be happy to take care of you—'

He said something in a language I didn't recognize, but which sounded suspiciously like it was swearing, then froze and looked at the doorway. There was a soft noise from the upper level that sounded a whole lot like someone had just closed the back door.

'Peste,' the man snarled, whirling around to leap back on the table. His voice deepened until it felt like the richest velvet brushing against my skin. 'I command you to go now, without allowing the others to see you. You will forget everything you have seen here tonight.'

'You know, I was married to an arrogant, domineering, tyrannical sort of man who thought he could control me. You can just take it as a given that the high-and-mighty act isn't going to cut any ice with me.'

The man banged his head on the table twice. I winced for him. The table sounded awfully solid.

A faint echo of a voice reached me. I turned my back on the crazy man and rushed to the door. 'Hello? Is there someone up there? Listen, I need some help down here. There's a guy who needs a doctor and… uh… a policeman. Hello?'

Hushed voices whispered to each other for a moment.

'You know, there's some really bad karma to be had from refusing to help someone when they're injured,' I yelled up the stairs. 'If you don't want to come down here and help me restrain this guy, the least you can do is call for—'

A hand wrapped itself around my mouth and pulled me backward against a warm, hard body.

'Now listen carefully,' the man said in my ear, the silk of his voice doing all sorts of naughty things to me. 'You will heed my words and do as I command.'

It was the word command that did it. Ever since Timothy, I react badly to it. Without even the merest thought about the repercussions of my actions on an obviously insane and badly wounded man, I stomped my boot down on his bare foot and slammed my elbow back into his belly. He grunted in pain and doubled up as I lunged forward and raced up the stairs. I knew it was the sheerest folly to leave a lunatic with a bag full of expensive equipment, but I had no choice. Whoever he was waiting for, whoever had left without having the decency to help, clearly wasn't going to call the police or medical aid. I leaped up the stairs, ignoring the pain in my leg and the stitch that instantly formed in my side as I ran down the hallway to the door. I had remembered seeing a callbox down the block. I'd call for help, then sneak back into the inn and keep an eye on the poor, handsome, utterly deranged man.

It was raining—a cold, nasty, sleety type of rain—as I galloped awkwardly down the road to the call box. It took me three tries to dial 999, but at last I was connected with an emergency dispatcher. Two minutes later, having described where I was and what the problem was with the man, I headed back to the old inn at a slower pace, worried that my escape might have sent the poor man over the deep end.

I crept into the hallway and stood with my back to a moldy wall, keeping an eye on the stairs to the basement. It seemed like it was an hour before the sound of a police car siren Dopplered against the building, but according to my watch it was only eight and a half minutes. I greeted the two policemen, explained quickly what I had seen, and followed them down the stairs to the now closed door. They switched on powerful flashlights and cautiously opened the door.

The room was empty.

Not only was the room empty, the table was gone, and the pool of blood on the floor had vanished. My bag and piece of chalk and flashlight were still there, but everything else was gone.

'Wait a minute—I… There was… He was right here! How could he… And the blood, it was right there—that table must have weighed a ton! How could he have moved it so quickly?'

'Madam,' said the smaller of the two policemen, shining his flashlight right on my face. I heard him gasp as I turned away so I was in profile. 'Madam,' he said again, his voice a bit shaky. 'Are you aware of the fact that it is a crime to call the police out on a nonemergency situation?'

'But…' I looked around the room, keeping my head tipped so they couldn't see directly into my eyes. There was nothing here but an empty room, two cops, and my bag of tricks. 'He was here! I swear to you, he was here! Bleeding all over the place, and naked as the day he was born.'

The taller policeman took a deep breath. It didn't take any psychic abilities to know I was in for a lecture. I gathered up my things as they took turns telling me what happened to tourists who turned in false alarms. By the time I explained what I was doing there, reiterated that I wasn't given to phoning in prank calls, and heard their second round of lecturing, they hustled me upstairs. I was more than willing to believe that I'd had some sort of weird episode in the inn, something related to its spectral inhabitants, and imagined everything with the handsome, if troubled, man.

Until I reached in my bag to pull out the key to lock the door behind us. Then I saw my notebook.

There were bloody fingerprints all over it.

I spent the rest of the night writing up my experience, in between watching the ghost cat sleep, groom itself, and hobble around the room poking into things. It didn't seem to be thrilled to see me, and after trying unsuccessfully to convince it to lie on the bed next to me (so I could take a picture of the two of us together), I ended up more or less ignoring it as it ignored me.

By the time dawn lightened the gray layer of clouds enough to indicate it was morning, I was exhausted and cranky, unsure whether I had witnessed some amazing spectral encounter with a ghost that could manifest a physical presence, or if I was delusional.

I fell asleep wishing the former. At least then I could touch him.

'No messages, Miss Telford,' Tina the receptionist said that afternoon as she handed me the room key. I waited to see if she had anything else to add, anything along the lines of a complaint about the three-legged semitransparent feline that was inhabiting my room, but she just smiled and turned to deal with another customer.

'Curiouser and curiouser,' I said as I limped over to the elevator, my bag clinking and rattling. I shifted it to the other shoulder and wished I were in a line of work that didn't require so much equipment, equipment that had to be taken everywhere, just in case it was needed. My day trip to a haunted abbey turned out to be one of the times when it was nothing more than a heavy albatross hanging off one shoulder. I punched the number for my floor, and wondered if the Summoning had faded enough to let the cat return to its previous existence. Maybe the maid hadn't seen the cat because it was gone.

'Oh, hello, kitty,' I said as I unlocked my door. It was sitting on the windowsill, staring out the window. 'I thought you'd gone. I'm glad to see you haven't, although…' I tugged on my lip. Between the tests I'd conducted early the evening before, and the ones I'd done during the dark hours of the night, I had about as much data as I could conceivably collect. Pictures, video, infrared and ultrasound readings, ion analysis, you name it, I had it,