Ian takes the long way back to his warehouse. I pull out my phone and enter the passcode for the gate to open. Once it closes, I enter another code for the garage. Ian pulls right into the warehouse.
I moved in with him after the attack. He hired me as his assistant and showed me that I was right—vampires are real. He didn’t need a roommate, but it’s not like he doesn’t have the space. This place is giant. I do random odds and ends around to help out. Everything from getting coffee to research. I spend a lot of time with my nose in old books looking for information he needs.
“Are you sure vampires can’t mind control without your blood?” I ask when I get out of the car. I know they can be persuasive if they’ve drunk your blood. It doesn’t last long, but they can have control for a short period. At least that’s what I read in a few of those books.
“No. Why?”
I follow him over to his office area as he powers on his computers. “I don’t know. I felt a pull to him.”
Ian stops clicking away on the keyboard to glance over at me. “You got lightheaded. Not to mention he was handsome.” Ian lets out a whistle as he grabs one of my test kits. I take it from him, poking the tip of my finger before placing it on the machine. It beeps a few seconds later. “You really gave yourself a treatment?”
I nod.
“Sit. We’re doing another.”
“Okay.” He tries to mask his worry, but I catch it. I walk over to the sofa and sit down while Ian goes to grab a bag of IV iron. I drop my head back, not fighting the pull of sleep when Ian returns and starts my treatment for me.
I let the darkness take me. Only this time the darkness has bright blue eyes and fangs.
3
Vincent
She’s in a warehouse. I perch on the edge of a high window and look down at her. The man she was with inserts an IV into her arm and starts a bag of something that looks like blood. It’s not, though. Blood is my business, the reason I’m able to keep living after death, so I know it when I see it.
I rub my chest where my heart thumps steadily. It’s as if the entire world is shaking in a steady rhythm, but only I can feel it. I’m alive. But not. Before, it was quite clear I was dead. Nothing warm ever suffused my body once I woke as a vampire. No strumming of blood ever whirred in my ears once I’d changed.
But now, I’m different. Not alive. Not dead. Something else entirely. And the reason for it is the woman on the couch with the pale skin and murderous intentions.
Running my tongue along my fang, I stare as the man—who I want to kill—finishes setting up her IV and then turns back to his bank of computers. I spot a window on the other side that’s closer to the girl, so I skitter across the rooftop toward it. I can’t fly. I’ve never met a vampire who could. But I can move impossibly fast, and my agility is even greater than that of the cat who is sitting beside the girl on the couch and watching me with suspicious eyes. Buffy, I think was her name.
I get a better look at the girl, and my heart seems to beat even harder. So much so that I look up to see if the world is falling apart, if the buildings nearby are tumbling into dust as the world shakes and shakes, beating, beating, beating.
But no. The world is the same. It’s me who’s different.
My gaze goes right back to the girl. Because of her. What is this magic? I shake my head and get as comfortable as I can against the high window glazed with dirt and decades of rainwater.
I watch her. For hours. Hours and hours as she slumbers and the man taps away on his computer and brews coffee after coffee. Even the cat is asleep, her head in her mistress’s lap. Still, the man works. It’s too bad I have to kill him. He seems rather industrious. But he touched her. He touched the girl, probably thinks she’s his, and for that I can’t forgive him. She’s mine to touch.
After another hour, he finally rises and stretches, then goes to her and removes the IV and the empty bag of not-blood. With gentle hands that I want to rip off, he lays her down and covers her with a throw blanket.
I want to go in there and yank him away, rip out his entrails, then offer them to her as a gift. But I can’t. No one’s invited me in.