Bleeding Out (8 page)

“I know why you’re here.”

“You do?”

“There’s only one question that would bring you down here, alone, in the middle of the night. But I don’t have an answer for you.”

“Tell me it wasn’t a car accident,” I say.

“I only know what she told me.”

“What she told you to write on the report, you mean.”

“Her injuries were consistent—”

“Evelyn, please. I’m not stupid. If it had been a car accident, she wouldn’t have gone to a CORE clinic.”

“It was—” She shakes her head. “There was a normate with her. The guy wouldn’t leave her side, but she couldn’t very well tell him the truth.”

“But she told you.”

“She had a concussion. She was barely coherent.”

“She must have said something about what attacked her.”

“Why don’t you just ask her?”

“Don’t you think I have? She just lies. Her lies are complicated, beautiful, like layer cakes. I can’t cut through them.”

“There’s a reason that she doesn’t want you to know.”

“Did you do an assault kit?”

“Tess, I can’t answer that.”

“Was there evidence of trauma?”

Evelyn calmly picks up her coffee and opens the door. “I promised her that I would never tell anyone. I’m sorry.”

Sadness crawls into my throat. I blink. “Do you know what it’s like,” I whisper, “not knowing where you came from?”

Evelyn pauses with her hand on the door. For a moment, I see pain flash across her eyes. When she speaks, her voice is barely audible. “She wanted Rhophylac.”

She walks out before I can respond.

I can’t catch my breath. I’m wheezing as I leave the clinic. Outside, a warm rain has begun. I can’t stand still. I have to run. I pass the intersection of Fourth and Vine and keep running, until I hit the beach. This was where we found Ru. We thought he was dead, but he woke up on the autopsy table, like a small scaly miracle. The sand clutches at my feet, but I keep running awkwardly. When I reach the dark water, I drop to my knees and retch.

My phone begins to vibrate. I look at the call display. It’s Derrick. I try to answer, but all I can do is sob weakly.

“Tess? What’s going on?”

“She—” The bile rises in my throat again. “She knew. Derrick, she knew all along, but she—she—”

“Sweetheart, where are you?”

I hang up.

My hands are trembling. Slowly, I get to my feet. The cold water soaks my canvas shoes. The moon is a pitiless cat’s eye. I stare at the obscure waves until I can’t feel my toes anymore. Then I turn around and start back up the beach. In the distance, I can see an LED light flashing. A late-night runner or cyclist, immune to family drama, committed to fitness. The thought almost makes me smile.

I feel another cold that has nothing to do with my wet shoes. All I can do is laugh softly. Of course a fucking vampire would find me, tonight of all nights, wrecked and crying on a beach. It’s practically operatic. I pull out my athame. The blade is a bare suggestion of silver in the dark.

“Come out,” I say. “Or run. I don’t care. But don’t think for a second that I’m some little rabbit for you to gnaw on. I’ve got teeth just like you.”

The vampire from the convenience store appears. He has his hands in his pockets, like he’s just taking an innocuous stroll. His eyes are red and cloudy. He smells strange. When he sees my athame, he smiles. His teeth are stained wine dark.

“Who are you?” I raise the dagger. “I’m not playing.”

“I thought you people loved to play.”

I frown. “What people?”

“You’re CORE.”

“Right. Sure, we can be Byzantine, I guess. But what you seem to be forgetting is that your people and mine have a truce.”

He steps closer. “The truce ended with him.”

“I’m not sure you understand what a truce is. Lord Nightingale’s death hasn’t affected the law. If you attack me, you’ll be punished.”

“I’m not afraid of pain.”

“Oh, no? One of the downsides of being undead is that torture kind of takes on a whole new dimension.”

“When I’m finished drinking, there won’t even be enough dry pieces of you left for the wind to carry away.”

I assume a defensive stance. “You know what’s sad? That’s not even the worst pickup line I’ve ever heard.”

He moves quickly. Too quickly for a whelp. Maybe I was wrong about his age. I slam the pommel of my athame into his mouth, shattering one of his molars. He swears and spits out blood, which is the same color as the black water. I reach for a strand of earth materia and let it slip into the blade, which becomes a singing blue candle. I level it at the vampire.

“I’ve been fighting your people since I was thirteen. You think you can intimidate me? I’ve looked into the eyes of a Manticore. I stabbed an Iblis, right in the middle of his flaming fontanels. You’re nothing but a drunk moron.”

He leaps. His feet push him off the sand, like the beach is his trampoline. He slams into me, and we both fall into the water. The shock of the cold makes me gasp. Before I can move, his hands are around my throat. It takes only a few pounds of pressure to strangle someone, and he has the strength of an insane wrestler who’s tweaking on PCP.
I start to see spots. My athame is in the water. I search for it, but my numb fingers find only wet sand and lichen.

He leans in closer. That’s the nice thing about vampires. They love what they do a bit too much. The desire makes them vulnerable. When he’s close enough for me to smell his breath, I reach up and drive my thumb into his right eye. I push hard, until the sclera yields and warm fluid bathes my hand. The eye breaks like a split fruit. He screams, and the pressure around my throat lessens, enough for me to kick him and crawl away. My wet hand comes down on something hard in the water, and I pull out the athame, still shining.

“I’m not sure how the vampiric healing factor works, exactly,” I say, “but I feel like it’s going to take a while for you to grow a new eyeball.”

He stands up. His face is covered in blood. He screams a word that I can’t understand, then runs at me again. I spin to the side and slash just above his kneecap, opening the popliteal artery. A fan of blood soaks my jeans. Why do I never think to wear a damn slicker until it’s too late?

He howls and reaches for me. I kick him in the chest. He stumbles, but keeps coming. It’s not as if vampires have a lot of blood in them, and he’s already leaking like a sprinkler. Why is he so stubborn?

I slash again, aiming for another artery—a nice brachial one—but he catches my wrist. His hand moves swiftly. I feel a bloom of pain, as if someone has just set fire to my hand. I drop the athame. My brain registers the fact that
my wrist is broken, but for a second, all I can do is stand there, like a cartoon coyote, perplexed by the impact of the falling anvil. Still holding on to my broken wrist, he pulls me to him. The pain makes me sick. He grabs my hair and yanks my head back, exposing my throat.

“You have beautiful circulation,” he says.

I stare at the moon. The fire trick won’t work this time, not in the middle of the ocean. Water is my mother’s element, not mine. But she’s also inside of me, just like he is. For every demonic protein running rampant through my body, there’s a piece of my mother, a mitochondrial knight streaming along embattled vessels. The water in my blood calls to the water around me.

I feel the something coalesce in my hand. A stinger of ice. A blade of astonished liquid, seaweed, and shell matrix, which I drive through his heart.

He stumbles back with the icicle stuck in his chest. Blood streams from his mouth, nose, and eyes. He’s laughing, but the sound is like rent cloth. His skin is already beginning to slough off. His fingers curl as they decompose. I smell the sweet reek of cadaverine, the tincture of decay, as it spreads through him.

“You don’t even know.” He laughs. “You idiot. You don’t even know what’s going on. That’s the funniest thing of all.”

“Tell me, then. What are you on? What was the point of this?”

“He’ll destroy you.”

“Oh, please. Did Arcadia put you up to this? Look, I know that my father is a crazy mofo, but this is getting old.”

He falls to his knees. His face is mostly gone now, a steaming crater of broken tesserae.

“Who sent you?”

He melts into the water. Seconds later, there’s nothing left of him but smoke and a vile odor. I start to shake. I can barely feel my broken wrist, which means that my body is going into shock. Numbly, I make my way back into the beach, holding my injured hand close to my chest. I see headlights. I hear voices. Someone is running toward me, and I realize that it’s Derrick.

“She’s here! I’ve got her!”

He sees the blood on me. He sees my wrist. Before he can say anything, I bury my face in his neck and start to cry.

“I’ve got you,” he whispers. “Geez. What happened? Did a shark attack you? What are you doing here at this time of night?”

“I don’t know,” I say, holding on to him. “I don’t know who’s lying to me and who isn’t. I can’t fucking tell anymore.”

“I’ll never lie to you again.”

I want to believe him, but I can’t. I look down and see a glimmer of light on the sand. It’s my athame, burning like a birthday candle too stubborn to realize that its peculiar life is already over.

This is an old dream.

I’m in the pool with my mother. She spins me around in circles while I exclaim:
I love my friend the water
. I make waves with my small, prunish hands, while she holds me. I whirl in the heart of a golden mean. I am an overjoyed crystal in my mother’s arms, polished by the sun and the water.

I know that she will never let me go. We will spin like an eternal record in this flood, and after, on the drive home, I will eat a tuna sandwich with diced pickles and watch the trees effervesce. With my bare feet propped against the cooler, I can drift with the power lines as my mother sings us around familiar curves in the road. A blue spark glows in my hand. I look at it and smile. It’s a
burning flake of our water I stole when nobody was looking.

I open my eyes. I’m in my own bed, doused in sweat. For a moment, the loss of the dream is so sharp that I can feel its exit wound. Then I realize that it’s just my fractured wrist, numbed by painkillers but still throbbing. I look up at the ceiling fan. All it can do is displace the muggy air. My sheets are a wet tangle. I could take a shower, but I can’t bear the thought of more water. I can still see the vampire melting before me like a hideous snowflake.

I don’t think that my father sent him. But if not my father, then who? Arcadia? She could kill me by blinking if she wanted to. She had no reason to send tweaked vampires after me.

I can’t stop thinking about what he said.
The truce ended with him
. If this is the public sentiment among vampires, then something has gone seriously wrong. Deonara isn’t doing her job as the new Lord Nightingale. I doubt I’ll have any luck brokering a meeting with her, but I can at least ask Modred about it. Figuring out what to wear to an undead house party will distract me from thinking about what I learned at the clinic.

I pull on a clean shirt and walk into the living room. Derrick’s watching television, and he frowns when he sees me.

“You should be asleep.”

“It’s too hot. The fan is useless.”

“Those painkillers are hard on your stomach.” He stands up. “I’ll get you some dry toast and ginger ale.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Nonsense. I’ll be back in two shakes of a rabbit’s tail.”

I sit down on the couch. It’s so late that it might as well be morning. They spent hours fussing over me, plying me with hot tea and blankets. It was a relief when everyone finally went to bed. I’ve never liked being taken care of. I’m like a cat when I’m sick. All I want to do is crawl under a piece of furniture and sleep.

Derrick returns with a plate of dry toast and a glass of ginger ale. He places them warily next to me, as if I might claw him. The bubbles relax me, but it’s hard to chew because my throat still aches.

“What are you watching?” I ask, once I’ve finished.

“
Today’s Special.
For some reason, they air it late at night.”

“I used to have a crush on the mannequin guy.”

“Didn’t we all?”

I lie down with my head in his lap. He dabs at the sweat on my forehead with his sleeve. His fingers are cool. His Canucks pajamas are worn and smell like a dryer sheet. We’re silent for a while. Puppets dance on the television, while outside, darkness presses the world into familiar shapes.

“What were you doing on that beach?”

His voice stirs me. I’ve been expecting that question
all night, but only now, in this anchorite silence, is he able to ask me.

“I was at the clinic,” I say. “I had to talk to Evelyn.”

“About what?”

“Derrick—” I stare at the classic skate logo on his pajamas. “I don’t think my mother was raped. I think she was already pregnant when Kevin found her. Those injuries were caused by something else entirely.”

He touches my hair lightly. “How do you know that?”

“Evelyn said that she asked for Rhophylac. That drug is used in cases where a Rhesus incompatibility factor might develop in the mother’s blood. She would have only asked for the injection if she knew”—I swallow—“that our blood was at odds. Which makes sense, given what my father is.”

“Why would she lie to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“So—what?—your stepdad found her that night, and she just pretended that she’d been assaulted by someone?”

“She was hurt. She must have been fighting something. If she’d been thinking clearly, maybe she never would have let Kevin come with her to the clinic. Maybe we never would have met him. Isn’t it weird how random life can be? If he hadn’t walked past that parking lot, he never would have entered our lives.”

“Are you going to talk to her?”

“I don’t know what to say.
Hey, Mom, any particular reason why you fuzzied up the details of my conception?
She’ll just say that she was protecting me. That’s her answer for everything.”

“It’s kind of her job. Wouldn’t you do the same for Mia?”

“I wouldn’t lie to her about something so important.”