A vicious, murdering, bloodsucking monster.
My knees gave out under me, and I passed out on the dirty floor of the women’s washroom.
A cleaning lady nudged me with her sensible shoe. I blinked my eyes open and stared up at her.
“You need ambulance?” she asked in broken English.
I fumbled for my purse and slowly, shakily got to my feet. “No.”
“You do the drugs?”
“No, no drugs.”
She shrugged and got back to mopping the floor. How long had I been out? Not long. My face was still damp from when I’d splashed the water on myself. I left the washroom not knowing where to go next, so I let my feet choose for me. My feet decided to get on the nearest subway. But we weren’t headed home. We were headed to Midnight Eclipse. The neighborhood looked different in the late afternoon. Somehow it looked seedier, which I hadn’t thought possible. I tried the front door, but it was locked. There was a sign in the window that read CLOSED. The hours of operation started at nine o’clock, and they weren’t talking about the morning.
I knocked, anyhow.
I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t be alone. Being alone meant that I’d have to think about what I’d just seen. I’d let a man die and hadn’t said a word to save him. I felt so guilty about it that it felt like it was eating me up inside. He’d been killed by vampires. Just like me. No, not just like me. I ran my tongue along my upper teeth. They still felt normal. Nothing pointier than usual. That’s the way I wanted them to stay. I knocked again, but there was no answer. I figured that there might be a back door to the place, so I went around the side of the building. There was a green Dumpster spilling its contents out on the freshly fallen snow and a sturdy red door with no handle. I knocked on it, and it hurt my knuckles. I waited for a few minutes and then knocked again.
After a few more minutes I turned away. My cheeks were wet from melting snow. Yeah, it was the melting snow. I wasn’t crying. Sure. The door made a clicking sound behind me and I spun around. It opened and Thierry looked out at me.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said.
I ran to him and hugged him hard, blubbering like a baby into his black shirt. He didn’t hug me back, but directed me inside and closed the door behind us. I could feel his vague discomfort, but he waited patiently for me to stop wailing and clutching at him. Finally I released him and looked up at him with puffy red eyes.
“You weren’t supposed to come here until this evening,” he said.
I didn’t reply. I don’t think I could have if I’d tried. I just looked at him with my big, soggy eyeballs until he finally nodded.
“Fine. You may as well stay, now that you’re here. No one else has arrived yet, though. We don’t open for six hours.”
He led me to a small office. There was a couch inside, much like the one he had in his living room. I climbed onto it and laid my cheek against the cool leather. I was starting to calm down a bit. I felt safe there. With Thierry. He was staring at me, waiting for some kind of explanation as to why I’d interrupted his “alone” time, but I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. As the fear slowly faded from my body, it left behind a thick blanket of weariness.
All I wanted to do was shut my eyes. Shut it all out. Wake up later and have it all be just a horrible, horrible dream. The pain woke me. It was like a hot knife slicing through my entire body. I sat up too fast, and the sudden movement made me double back over. I was allowed a brief moment to collect myself before me second wave hit. I slid off the couch—deja vu all over again—and may have let out a small yelp. Yeah, right, some yelp.
No, it was more like a loud scream that caught halfway down my throat when I couldn’t find the air anymore. I decided, finally and formally while writhing in pain on the floor of Thierry’s office, that being a vampire sucked. I wished that Gordon were still alive so I could kill him myself for getting me into this horrible mess in the first place.
The door to my right opened and I glanced up. Thierry entered, looking at me with concern. He had a knife in one hand and a glass of water in the other. Newbie special. I didn’t care anymore that it was blood. Human blood, vampire blood, pig’s blood—hell, even hamster blood. Come to Mama. Another wave of pain shook me to my core and I cried out. Thierry was shaking his head, saying something like, “Too long. Shouldn’t have allowed her to go for so long.”
He drew the blade across his left wrist. At the first glimpse of red I clawed wildly at the leather seat behind me. He grabbed the water he’d placed on the desk just as I reached out and clutched the bottom corner of his shirt. The glass slipped from his grasp and shattered on the floor.
I pulled myself up a bit so I could grab his injured wrist and, as if by instinct, brought it straight to my mouth. He gasped with surprise as my lips made contact with his wound. As soon as his blood touched my tongue, the pain vanished as if it had never been there in the first place. It was like a cool glass of water after being lost in the desert for a month. It was like fine champagne, strawberries and cream, Kahlua chocolate sauce on French vanilla ice cream—ambrosia, food of the gods. Pick one. His arm was tense for a moment, but he slowly relaxed as I drank from him. I looked up to see that his eyes were dark and half closed, and there was an unfathomable expression on his face.
“There are reasons why those as old as I do not sire fledglings. ”
I ran my tongue along his wrist as the words went through my mind, his words from last night. I might have wondered what he meant by them if I’d currently been thinking straight. But I wasn’t thinking. At least, not in any normal way. Our eyes stayed locked for what felt like forever. Then slowly, very slowly, his expression changed as he regained his composure.
“Enough, Sarah.” His voice was ragged.
Enough ? I thought. No, not yet. Just a little more. I felt like Oliver Twist. “Please, sir, I want some more.”
He groaned as he tried to pull away, but my grip on him must have been stronger than I felt.
“Enough,” he said louder. He squeezed my arm and roughly brought me up to my feet. He put a hand under my chin to pry my mouth from his wrist.
I felt funny, kind of light-headed. I looked at Thierry, with the taste of him still on my lips. By his dark, intense expression I figured he would push me away from him and storm out of the room. But instead, he grabbed my shoulders and pulled me hard against him, then crushed his lips against mine, drinking me in as I’d just done to him. I wrapped my arms around his waist and kissed him back—deeply, so deeply that I thought I might drown. Then he pushed me away from him and stormed out of the room.
I staggered back to the couch, sat down heavily, and tried to breathe as normally as I could. I touched my fingers to my lips, feeling dazed by what had just happened. Okay, maybe being a vampire wasn’t so bad, after all. The jury was still out. A few minutes went by before I heard a light knock on the door. I looked up, expecting it to be Thierry. I had no idea what I was going to say to him: “Thanks for the drink”?
“You’re a great kisser”? Nothing I could have said would have come out sounding half intelligent. Luckily, I wouldn’t have to think about what to say, since it wasn’t him. A redheaded girl with a sprinkling of freckles on her nose poked her head in the partially opened door and blinked at me. She looked to be no more than a teenager.
She smiled at me. “Hi.”
I checked to make sure I was the only one in the room before answering. “Hello.”
“Sarah,” she said.
“That’s funny, that’s my name, too.”
I was trying to make a joke. She found it to be more than a little bit funny and threw her
head back with a huge, loud cackling laugh that showed off her fangs and managed to
scare me a little. I’d have to add to my growing list of phobias: “Loud redheaded teenage vampires.”
“No. You’re Sarah. I’m Zelda.”
“Zelda?”
“That’s right.”
I didn’t know what to say next. Were we supposed to be having some kind of a conversation? I wasn’t feeling all that chatty at the moment.
“Thierry called to ask me to bring some clothes in for you.” The rest of her appeared from behind the door as she entered the room. She was dressed in a black skirt and an emerald green blouse. It looked as if she’d borrowed the outfit from her mother. She presented an armful of folded clothes to me, but I didn’t take them. I just looked at them questioningly as I got to my feet. There was no pain anymore. Actually, I felt pretty terrific, all things considered.
“Why did Thierry ask you to bring me clothes?”
She looked uncertain. “Um, because you’re on shift tonight, and… uh… jeans aren’t normally part of the uniform. Cool sweatshirt, though.”
I absently touched my Tweety Bird-clad chest. “You’re kidding right? I’m on shift?”
“No. Not kidding.”
I took a moment to inspect the clothes. She was a couple of inches taller than me, but we were about the same size. If the clothes were hers, then they’d definitely fit me. Black skirt, black hose. Strappy heels and a long-sleeved red blouse. Not my taste, but wearable.
I frowned at her. “What exactly do you mean when you say I’m ‘on shift’?”