CHAPTER TWENTY || BRYAN
“ I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” I muttered, keeping watch at the door for any hospital personnel who might come along and demand to know what we were doing. We were at a medical center halfway between Poplar Creek and Portland. The place had been bustling with people, but Tobias and I had strolled right in, past hospital staff and security, courtesy of the illusion spell he’d placed over us. According to him, it made us seem unimportant, not worth noticing. Then, with another muttered spell, he’d caused the locked door to the blood bank to swing open and we’d stepped inside.
My condition had gone from bad to worse so rapidly that it should have been alarming. My throat was on fire and my veins felt like there was gravel moving through them. My level of need was, in fact, getting much worse than I had let on.
“This beats the alternatives,” Tobias muttered darkly, slipping another bag of blood off a metal hook and placing it into the small lunchbox style cooler we’d picked up from the big box store we’d stopped at on the way here. His breath fogged in front of him, and he shivered. “One for here and four for the road ought to do it for a little while. Until we can figure something else out.”
I turned to shoot him an alarmed glance. We were standing in the middle of a refrigerated room, surrounded by bags of blood hanging from hooks. I was doing my best to ignore that fact, but my vampiric instincts were boiling just under the surface. There was a part of me that wanted to start tearing the bags from the hooks and drain them dry, one after another. On the other hand, I was pretty sure it was a felony just being in here, much less stealing blood meant for sick patients.
“I’m not drinking that in here.” I paused, then added, “We should just put everything back. I’m sure there’s got to be a butcher or a slaughterhouse around here somewhere that we could get some blood from.”
“Come on, babe,” he replied, holding a bag of blood out to me. The expression on his face was caught halfway between amused and exasperated. “Even if you’re not willing to admit it, you’re ready to pounce on anyone who so much as gets a paper cut and you know it. This is a matter of public safety.”
Tobias was, as usual, annoyingly right. Of course, apart from the fact that I really did feel guilty about taking the blood from someone who might need it, the bigger issue is that I didn’t want him to watch me drink it.
Tobias sighed. “That’s fine. I’ll go out into the hallway and keep anyone away from here. A standard repelling charm ought to be enough.” He paused, then added, “Your concentration slipped again, by the way. I can hear you.”
I swore under my breath and immediately threw the wall back up. There was a flash of pain in Tobias’s eyes when I did it, but it was gone so quickly that I might have imagined it.
Tobias would have told me if it wasn’t okay to shield my thoughts, right? I mean, come on. He was the one who had taught me how to do it.
“What if I go crazy and ransack the blood bank?” I asked. “What if I just go completely nuts and drink it all until there’s nothing left?”
I could almost picture it. Snatching bag after bag from the hooks and draining them all dry, one after another, glutting myself on everything, all at once.
On some level, I wanted to do just that. A part of me wanted to make a bloody mess of this room.
My stomach growled, as if on cue.
But the mental image of Tobias seeing my face smeared with dripping red, dozens of empty blood bags littered at my feet, looking like something out of a nightmare, was like a shock of cold water dumped on top of me, banishing the image from my mind.
But even so, even overcome with horror at the idea of Tobias seeing me that way, in the back of my mind I still wondered what it would be like to drink from Tobias, his hot blood flowing into my mouth, tasting of rust and salt and vitality. It would be infinitely better than a blood bag, to drink straight from the source. I hadn’t been able to get the idea out of my head since he’d suggested it.
He was right. I needed to feed. I wasn’t safe to be around.
Tobias shrugged. “Try not to do that. But if you do drain the room dry, I’ll help you clean it up.”
With that, he slipped out the door, leaving me alone in the room, still holding the bag he’d handed me. It was made from a thick, clear plastic and there was a bit of stiff tubing connected to the top of the bag, with a plastic top that popped off. It looked like a horribly macabre Capri Sun. The contents were so dark red it was nearly black.
I popped the top off, put the tubing between my lips, and sucked in a mouthful of the blood.
I fought the urge to spit it out. It was freezing and it tasted old. Not quite as lifeless as the animal blood I’d last fed from, but close.
Still, I drained the entire thing, forcing myself to swallow it down, gulp after terrible gulp. It took the edge off my hunger, soothing a bit of the burn in my throat. And my veins no longer felt like they were on fire either. But it didn’t actually satisfy the need that ached within me.
Still, I had fed. I was reasonably sure I wouldn’t attack Tobias without meaning to now. Sharing my blood with him had taken far more out of me than I had realized. Probably because I’d never needed to do it before.
Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I made my way out of the closet-sized room and into the hallway.
Tobias stood there with the cooler, looking completely at ease, even though we were committing a theft that would be awfully hard to explain if anyone caught us.
“Thanks for standing guard,” I told him. “Um, we can leave now.”
“There’s one more thing we need to do,” Tobias replied, turning to meet my gaze. “Do you trust me?”
“Yes.” I said it without hesitation, because it was true. I wasn’t entirely sure I trusted myself any longer, but I knew that I trusted him.
“Good.”
With that, Tobias turned and stalked off, down the hall. Feeling mounting confusion and alarm, I followed him. He turned a corner and stopped at a bank of elevators. There was a directory posted to the wall between them and Tobias scanned it for a moment before hitting the button to summon an elevator going up.
The hospital wasn’t like the massive Medical Centers I was used to in Seattle. It was much smaller, and I felt even more out of place and exposed, like anyone might come along and realize we were intruders. But a small group of nurses passed by, right beside us. Judging from the cups of stale-smelling coffee they clutched in their hands, they were clearly coming from the tiny cafeteria nearby. They didn’t pay us any attention at all.
The elevator doors chimed open, and Tobias led the way inside. He hit the button for the second floor. Still, he didn’t speak.
He was starting to freak me out a little, actually.
“Where are we going?” I asked, following him out of the elevator when the doors opened again.
When he looked at me, his face was all wrong. It was tight and set into hard lines, like he was still angry.
“I’m showing you something that you need to see.”
“O-kay,” I replied, my confusion rapidly turning to fear. Because the look on his face was all wrong. Like he was filled with an intensity of purpose that bordered on anger. And I couldn’t be entirely certain that it wasn’t directed at me.
I didn’t like it one bit.
Tobias led us to the ICU—the intensive care unit. There was a nurse’s station there, with heavy double doors that stopped anyone from going further into the unit. An older, exhausted-looking female nurse with her graying hair pulled back into a severe bun looked up at us as we approached.
Which meant that Tobias’s spell was no longer working on us.
I shot him a nervous look.
“We don’t allow visitors,” she informed us, the steel in her voice impossible to mistake. “And you two aren’t wearing visitor badges. How did you get past security?”
Tobias caught her gaze and held it. Then he cast the same spell he’d used on the morgue attendant, speaking the strange words in a tone that was halfway between cajoling and forceful.
The effect on the nurse was so immediate and abrupt that I actually flinched away from her. All the tension drained away from her face and her eyes glazed over. Her lips parted slightly and she stared at Tobias without seeming to actually see him.
Watching the easy way he messed with someone else’s mind turned my stomach. “You promised not to do this unless you had no other choice,” I whispered.
Tobias ignored me. His gaze was still locked on the nurse at the desk. “We’re not visitors. We’re here to help.”
“You’re here to help,” the nurse whispered, nodding. She looked horribly like a marionette on a string. “Right. Yes.”
“You’re going to take us to whichever patient you know, deep down, won’t make it.”
The nurse nodded, then stood up, moving almost mechanically, like she was in a deep trance. Which, I supposed, she was. She used her badge on the keycard reader next to the door and the heavy double doors opened with a soft hiss, revealing a half dozen rooms with glass walls in a U formation. Only half of the beds were occupied.
The overhead fluorescent lights were too harsh and the floor smelled of dried blood, cleaning chemicals, and the faint sickly sweet odor of death. I heard several monitors from the surrounding rooms beeping, the noises blending together into a single discordant sound.
The nurse led us to one of the rooms on the right.
Through the glass window, I saw that the bed was occupied. The patient had so many tubes, wires, and monitors connected to them that it was impossible to make out the age or gender.
“Tell us about this patient, in plain language. Explain to us why they won’t recover.”
“Her name is Annie Reynolds. She’s twenty-nine years old. She came in six days ago, complaining of severe stomach pain,” the nurse explained, a note of faraway sadness entering her words even though her voice still sounded all wrong to my ears, mechanical and almost dreamy like she was deep in a trance state.
She continued, “The doctors discovered that blood flow had become blocked to her intestines for long enough that her entire digestive tract shut down. The rest of her vital organs are now doing the same. No one has been able to determine the cause, but we all know what will happen. She is dying and there is very little we can do to stop it. Her family is all on the east coast and no one at the hospital has been able to reach them. We’ve put her into a medically induced coma, because otherwise she would be suffering.”
“Tobias!” I hissed, looking at him sharply. Alarm flooded through me. Had he sensed the fact that the blood bag wasn’t enough? Was this his plan B? That I drink from someone who was already a goner? “No! We’re not doing this. I’m not doing this.”
The nurse blinked, focusing on me for an instant. She seemed momentarily puzzled by my presence there. But then her eyes went unfocused again. The freak show way she stared at us, without really seeming to comprehend that we were there, set my teeth on edge and caused the little hairs on the back of my neck to rise.
“You said you trusted me,” Tobias replied.
“I did! I do. But I’m not hurting anyone! I’m sure as hell not feeding on an ICU patient!”
Tobias frowned at me, like I’d said something strange.
But then, an instant later, his expression darkened, like he’d parsed out my meaning and didn’t like it one bit. Sorry bud, I’m a vampire—that’s where my mind immediately goes.
“I promise that you can always trust me, Bryan. I would never, ever do anything to hurt you. And I would never let you do anything to hurt an innocent person, either.”
“Oh.”
I immediately felt dumb. But if he didn’t want me to feed on this patient, what on earth did he want?
“So then, what is this?” I gestured to Annie’s room vaguely, feeling an annoying combination of foolish and confused. “What are we doing here?”
Tobias gave me a small, encouraging smile and took me by the hand. “We’re not here so you can feed on her, Bryan. We’re here so I can show you that being what you are is powerful and beautiful. We’re going to help her. If you’ll agree to let me show you how.”
I froze, staring at him.
I suddenly understood what he was implying. He was suggesting that we could do something good. That I could do something good. Disbelief welled up deep within me so quickly and fully that I couldn’t help but realize, for the very first time, that deep down I had fully accepted the fact that I was a creature that survived by preying on others, end of story. I had accepted that there could be nothing fundamentally good or redeeming about my condition.
Or… about me.
Tobias seemed to understand because something softened in his expression as he studied me. “You’re wrong about yourself. I can’t force you to see it, but if you trust me at all, trust me on that,” he whispered fiercely. The level of emotion in his voice caused hairs to rise on the back of my neck again, but for entirely different reasons this time. He added, “Also, your wall slipped again.”
I probably should have thrown the wall back up, just on principle, but I suddenly didn’t want to. Instead, I wanted, right then, more than I wanted anything else, for Tobias to be right about me. I wanted to believe him, that there was something inherently good about me.
Before what Giles had done to me, after I had first woken up from my transformation and Veronika had explained my new condition to me, I had still believed in my inherent goodness as a person. That is, until the very first time I had fed from someone. Veronika had been convinced that my qualms about snacking on random strangers would fade with time. After all, according to her, so long as I let them go about their lives after I was done, without a mark on them, and with no memory whatsoever of what had just happened to them, what could be the harm? They might be a little woozy or have a mild headache for a day or so afterwards, but that was nothing in comparison to what most other vampires would do to them.
And so that became my litmus test for myself. I wasn’t like most vampires. But my very existence was still inherently predatory. Parasitic. I was still leeching off the people I came into contact with. I was just nice about it.
But if Tobias was right…
And if he was right and we could help Annie, didn’t that mean we had to try? She was twenty-nine and dying, all alone, hooked up to a half-dozen tubes in this awful hospital wing with its too-bright lights and unpleasant smells. That wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.
If there was even a chance that I could do something about it, I had to try.
Tobias gave me a little lopsided half-smile and I remembered, with a start, that he had access to all my innermost thoughts. He’d just had a front-row seat to that entire internal exchange. Oddly enough, in that moment, I wasn’t entirely sure I minded.
“We’ll help your patient,” Tobias told the nurse. I felt mildly startled to realize she was still there. “I promise. If there’s anything that can be done to save her, we’ll do it.”
Her brows pulled together. “There’s nothing that can be done. She’s beyond medical help.”
“True,” Tobias replied. He gave me a wink. “But she’s not beyond our help.”
The nurse nodded, but even in her dreamlike state, she still had the capacity for confusion, it seemed. Because it was perfectly clear that she didn’t believe him. Of course, I wasn’t entirely sure I did either.
“Go attend to the rest of your patients. Stay far from this room and make sure no one else comes in, either. Until we’re gone. And then, after we leave here, you’ll forget all about us. We were never here.”
“You were never here,” the nurse repeated, giving Tobias a blank smile. Then, abruptly, she brushed past him, presumably to go and do exactly what he’d just told her to do.
I shuddered.
“It was necessary,” Tobias reminded me. He took my hand. “Are you ready to do this?”
“What are we doing, exactly?”
“You heard the nurse. Annie Reynolds is dying. But you and I are going to stop that. We’re going to save her life.”