The woman woke up.
It felt like she’d been kicked in the head by a herd of trampling elephants, but she was alive, and that came as a bit of a surprise. She blinked, realising that the light shining from up above was not, in fact, the light of a heavenly host, but the much harsher glare of hospital LEDs.
She looked down. There was a needle in her arm and a variety of wiring sticking to different parts of her body, and the familiar beep, beep, beep of an EKG was audible over the background noise of whirring machinery and muted chatter. She winced as her skin finally registered the presence of an oxygen mask covering the lower half of her face, and with some effort she pulled herself into an upright sitting position. She regretted it almost immediately—every light and sound blurred together and kicked the back of her head, causing a wave of pounding agony to rush through her skull.
She let herself fall back against the soft pillow of the bed and tried to recall what had happened over the last twenty-four hours. There’d been a fight—yes, she was sure of that. She’d been in a fight with some bastard because he’d said that she’d had more than enough to drink already, and she'd disagreed, and then she’d been kicked out of his bar. She couldn’t remember which bar it was because she’d just picked out one which hadn’t put her on a blacklist yet. Then, she’d finished her bottle while sitting in the street, and she remembered looking at the stars above and thinking that they were the shiniest things on Earth. Everything had become patently hilarious at some point, and then…
"Ma'am?" The doctor was wearing red nail polish, the woman noticed. "Try not to move around too much. You're still intubated."
"What happened?" It came out as a dry croak, and the woman realised exactly how thirsty she was at that moment. Her hangover was like a living, breathing thing which was demanding to be sated.
"You drank a whole bottle of isopropyl and you were clinically deceased for a while." The doctor picked up a clipboard and began flipping through it. "Apparently, a very distressed young man dropped you off, but refused to come in with you because—" The doctor flipped through some more pages. "Hm. It seems he didn't want his feet to catch fire. Something about consecrated ground, apparently."
Memories slowly dripped back into the remnants of the woman's brain. "Oh," she said. "Yeah, he was a weird kid."
She'd sent him to get another bottle, she remembered. And then… and then…
"Ma'am…" The doctor hesitated. "It seems that you've had a history of alcoholism-related incidents. Have you ever tried going to a rehabilitation centre, or cutting back on your drinking? Have you seen any support groups? It could be helpful for your health."
The woman stared at the bright lights on the ceiling.
"Ma'am?"
The woman ignored her.
"Ma'am, prolonged drinking can cause—"
"I know," snapped the woman. "Fuck off, will you?"
The doctor sighed. "I'll be back to check in on you again soon," she said. "Try to get some rest."
The door closed behind her as she left the room.
The woman waited until the sound of the doctor's footsteps had disappeared completely, and then she yanked the oxygen mask off her face. It was time to get a move on. With the militaristic efficiency of somebody who had experienced this particular situation one too many times before, she ripped the EKG wires off her body and removed the needle from her arm, wincing only slightly as she did so.
She fumbled around the foot of her bed for the bag of clothes which she already knew would be there, as it was standard hospital procedure around these parts to leave the clothes the patient had arrived in someplace nearby. Her hand closed around the expected plastic bag, and after a quick change into her everyday wear of a stained hoodie and sweatpants, she stumbled out of the room and into the hallway.
The white lights were too bright. She blinked, her eyes watering, and tried not to fall over as she wandered in search of the elevators. Why did the hallways have to be so long? What if there was somebody dying at one end of the hallway and every doctor was suddenly afflicted with spontaneous paraplegia while at the other end of the hallway?
They’d probably have bigger problems if that ever happened, she thought.
She finally found the elevators after a few wrong turns and a bored receptionist. There was a man standing next to them who was wringing his hands and pacing back and forth. He looked up as the woman approached.
"The wife is expecting," he explained unnecessarily as she arrived. "I'm just—I don't know what to do with myself. I hope she's alright. Have you ever had children?"
"Yeah." She closed her eyes and concentrated on staying upright.
"Oh, wow. What was—what was that like?"
She opened one eye and gave him an incredulous look. "Painful."
"Oh." He grew very quiet, which suited her just fine.
The elevator arrived with a ding. She stepped inside with the soon-to-be father and pressed the button for the ground floor.
"Hey!"
They both looked up. The doctor with the pretty painted red nails was at the other end of the hallway and pointing at the woman in the elevator. "You haven't been released yet!"
"Shit," muttered the woman, and she slammed her hand on the button to close the doors. The doctor started running towards them.
The elevator doors closed in the nick of time. Before they did, the woman had the satisfaction of watching the doctor struggling to sprint down the length of the hallway while already knowing that she would arrive too late to catch her. Perhaps, she mused, long hallways weren't such a bad thing after all.
"What was that all about?" asked the father-in-waiting from just behind her. He chuckled nervously. "Running from your jailer?"
"None of your business."
"Right. Sorry."
Ding.
The elevator doors opened to the ground floor. The woman paused as she stepped over the threshold and turned to look back at the man, as though she’d just remembered to say something important. "Good luck with your baby. Or babies. It'll be hard and rewarding. Protect them with your life, or you'll regret never being able to hear their laughter ever again in the mornings." She was wearing a very distant expression, like she was lost somewhere in a labyrinth of her own devising. "You'll also start to forget their faces, and it will hurt more than anything else in the world. So, keep them safe, otherwise you'll never get rid of your own crippling guilt."
The man nodded. "Sure. Thanks." He was just grateful to be rid of her.
The sky was dark when the woman walked out of the hospital, and the only illumination present was in the form of two dim streetlamps just outside the hospital doors. The parched feeling in her throat was getting worse. She was already starving for another drink.
I’ll just call a cab and head home, she thought. Then, she’d… head back to a bar, probably, which was the way she’d been doing things for about a year now. Maybe, if she was lucky, they’d have a discount on the absinthe at Duffy’s.
“Hello,” said somebody from directly behind her.
The woman yelped, spun around, and punched him. It was a blow that would have gotten a solid 8/10 from a boxer’s judging panel had there been one watching nearby.
“Ow,” complained the vampire, holding a hand to his noise. There was a look of betrayal and hurt on his face so sincere that it was almost comical. “Not again.”
It took a moment for his voice to register in the woman’s brain. “You!”
“Me,” agreed the vampire, somewhat sheepishly. “Hi again.”
“Why the hell are there bullet holes in your shirt?”
The vampire looked down, as if he’d just noticed them. “Because… I got shot?”
“I thought you went to get alcohol, not fight in a war.”
“Well…” The vampire shrugged and started fidgeting with his bloodstained shirt. “I did get your alcohol.”
“Where?”
The vampire shuffled his feet awkwardly. “You told me to go around doing good deeds,” he said. “I asked you if I could do anything to help.”
“Yes, and?”
“You died. I wasn’t helping you at all.” The vampire’s voice had a slight edge to it. “You lied to me.”
The woman’s voice had a harder edge to it. “And?”
“You…” The vampire faltered. “Look, were you trying to die? Because there was an old lady near your body, and she told me that—”
“Of course not,” said the woman abruptly, turning away. “Don’t be ridiculous. Where’s the alcohol?”
“I’m not going to give it to you.”
The woman turned back and raised an eyebrow. “What?”
The vampire quailed under her gaze, but rallied. “I won’t. It killed you yesterday.”
“You think I’m going to kill myself if you give me the alcohol?”
“Yes.” The vampire lifted his chin defiantly. “I won’t give it to you.”
The woman sighed. “Kid, if I wanted to off myself, I could just take a flying leap off a bridge. You know that, right? You can’t be my nursemaid all the time. And I don’t want to kill myself, okay?”
The vampire blinked, as if the thought had never occurred to him. “Really?”
The woman snorted with derision. “Of course not. Got a lot to live for and all that jazz.” She stepped over to the curb. Nary a cab was in sight, sadly. “You should probably go home, kid.”
“Look, that’s the thing. I was wondering…” The vampire’s fidgeting sped up until his fingers were almost a blur, and words tumbled from his lips in a jumbling heap. “It’s just—I slept under that bench over there for the whole morning and afternoon today, so can I… stay with you? It’s not really safe for me to be out during the day.”
Healed-over bullet wounds. An aversion to daylight. ‘Blasphemous monstrosity’, he’d said. Unlife advice. Consecrated ground. The woman’s freewheeling, alcohol-starved mind finally started putting two and two together. She gave the vampire an extremely suspicious look. “Hold up. Are you a bloodsucker?”
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The vampire grimaced. At long last, the woman was picking up on his extremely heavy-handed hints. “Yes.”
The woman just stared at him. “You don’t look very much like a bloodsucker,” she said, squinting slightly to better take in the sight of him. “I thought you were supposed to be some kind of elite shock trooper of the night or whatever.” That was how they were always depicted in the reels, anyways. “Come here on a vacation to kill people and suck blood or whatever?”
“Of course not!” The woman had never heard anybody sound so utterly offended before. “That’s everyone else. They’re rabids, I’m not. And why aren’t you trying to stab me with wood or something? Everybody else tried that when they figured out what I was.They kept trying to shove the wood through my heart, but wood’s pretty much the worst material possible for doing that kind of thing, so I just get splinters because they don’t sharpen their wood properly. And people vastly underestimate the strength it requires to shove wood through a torso.” The vampire blinked, his brain catching up to what his mouth had just said, then flinched, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’m not going to hurt you. Please don’t give me splinters.”
“Relax.” The woman sighed deeply. “I don’t have anything against you, and I don’t make a habit of carrying two-by-fours around. You might want to stop telling people about what you are, though. People don’t react well to hearing that you’re something that might eat them.”
“Well, they’re going to find out eventually,” the vampire pointed out, with a surprising amount of reasonableness. “If I hint at what I am right off the bat, it saves me a lot of trouble in the long run. I mean, it worked for you, right? You’re actually talking to me.”
The woman shrugged. She supposed it was true. “Well, you can’t stay with me, bloodsucker or not. I haven’t got a place, either.”
“Really?”
The woman gave him an exasperated look. “When you met me, I was begging for change on the street so I could buy more alcohol,” she explained patiently. “I don’t have any money, and I don’t have a place. So you’ll need to find somewhere else to stay. I’m very sorry, but this won’t work out.”
“Oh.” The vampire went quiet as he absorbed this new information. “I actually wanted to apologise for something, too.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” The vampire took a deep breath, even though he didn’t need one. “I’m… I’m sorry. I didn’t realise that drinking isopropyl could kill you. I thought all alcohols were the same.”
The woman threw her head back and laughed. It was her first genuine expression of amusement in days, and it felt surprisingly good. “Oh, god, you’re really just a kid, aren’t you?”
He blinked. “I’m actually three hundred years old.”
“Well, for somebody who’s three hundred, you’re still pretty wet behind the ears, kid. What’s your name, then? I bet it’ll be Vlad, or Edward, or Louis, or something.”
The vampire shuffled his feet in embarrassment. “You’re going to laugh at me,” he said, looking somewhat shamefaced. “Promise you won’t laugh?”
“Absolutely,” said the woman, pokerfaced.
“It’s Greg.” Greg coughed and shrugged. “Greg Boot.”
“Greg… Boot?”
“Yeah.”
The woman looked at Greg with varying degrees of pity and astonishment. “You’re serious?”
“Yeah.”
She burst out guffawing. Greg turned a deep shade of red and looked down at his boots as the woman wiped tears from her eyes. “I’m Kiera,” she said, still chuckling. “Kiera Sevyn. And it’s very nice to meet you, Greg Boot.”
Greg opened his mouth. He wanted to say something pithy like, And you’d be the Sevyn Pillars of Wisdom when it comes to names, but was tragically interrupted by a shout. "Hey!"
A security guard was running towards them. Kiera's expression turned from mirth to exasperation in an instant. "Shit," she said, and then she started running in the other direction.
Greg caught up to her in a few easy strides. "What's going on?"
“I was in a hurry to leave the hospital, so I escaped a little early. Still have a wicked headache.”
Greg slowed down out of concern for Kiera. "Huh? You’re still hurt? Why were you in such a rush to leave?"
Kiera kept running, also out of concern for Kiera. "They charge you for your stay."
—
Twenty minutes later, the two of them were sitting in an empty diner and enjoying the free coffee—or Kiera was, anyway. Greg was using a stirring stick to poke gingerly at his cup like it was a dead mouse he’d found in his soup.
“Are they going to keep looking for you?”
“What?” Kiera was startled out of her thoughts. She’d been thinking about what a pleasant time she would have been having had the cup in front of her been filled with whisky, not coffee. Her headache was only getting worse, and she was starting to sweat despite the air conditioning.
“The hospital. You’re not wanted or anything, right?”
“Probably not,” said Kiera. She took a sip from her coffee. It tasted like aromatic dirt. “They’ve got better things to do than chasing after somebody who did a runner, like fixing kidney cancer or something.”
“Well, that’s good.” Greg cleared his throat and looked off into the middle distance. “So… what are we going to do now?”
Kiera snorted. “‘We’? Don’t you have people to go and drink from or something?”
“No.” Greg looked hurt. “I’m trained so I don’t drink unless I need to, and I don’t need to right now.”
“Sarcasm, kid. You’ve got a lot to learn.” Kiera sighed. Her head hurt. “Look, there is no ‘we’. I’ve got my own life to get back to, and you’ve got yours. You said you wanted to be a friendly itinerant, right? Just…” Kiera flapped her hand in the direction of the window. “Get out there. Go help people. It’s what you wanted to do, right?”
Greg hesitated. “I promised to help you.”
“Yeah, and you’ve been a great help, Greg. Go bother someone else.”
Greg didn’t move a muscle.
“Look, I’m fine, alright?” Kiera frowned at him. “What’s wrong with you?”
A brick flew through the window.
It was a nice brick, Kiera remembered afterwards. It wasn’t a dandy face brick meant for aesthetically-pleasing facades, or an antique veneer for an authentic-feeling plastered panel exterior, or a paving brick for shoe-shredding in the gardens of tomorrow. It was a solid, tried-and-true, load-bearing, fireproof bricking unit used for the construction of bunkers. You didn’t get many bricks like that these days.
It hit Greg in the face and broke his nose.
“Ow!” Greg slammed his fists on the table hard enough to crack the wood. “That’s the third time in two days!”
There was a woman standing outside the window, her arm still raised from the act of hurling the brick. Kiera’s first thought was that she was your typical Saturday-night vandal, but that notion went straight out the proverbial window when Kiera saw the woman leap a good ten metres from the street into the diner through the mangled glass.
Oh, no, thought Kiera wearily as she dove under the table, knocking all their cutlery to the ground with a surprisingly musical sound. Not another one.
Greg was already rising to meet the new bloodsucker. His fists curled, and there was a wet thudding noise like a sledgehammer hitting fresh concrete as he drove a punch of painful precision into her ribs. The bloodsucker cried out and dug her claws into his face, retaliating by shredding through his left cheek. It was like watching two bears fighting—both terrifying and fascinating at the same time. Each blow they struck against the other carried enough force to pulverise walls.
Half-mesmerised by the sight, Kiera tried to think of a plan. What did all the safety videos say? ‘If you spot a vampire, run, because they’re stronger and faster than you and you’re filled with blood and they go nuts for that stuff’ was about all she could remember. Running didn’t seem like a good idea at the moment, especially since the path to the exit was being blocked by the aforementioned vampires, so there had to be another option.
And… she hated to admit it, but she didn’t want to leave the kid behind.
Kiera stifled a groan. Her head was pounding painfully with adrenaline and from being drink-starved, and it felt like the top of her skull was about to split open to spill her brains all over the floor. Think, Kiera, think. What had Greg said to her?
They’re rabids, I’m not.
Kiera did not like the plan that was forming in her mind at all.
—
Greg was hurting.
Sure, being immortal had its perks when it came to not dying, but you still got all the pain. It would have been nice if he could just instantly heal himself back to normal and take it all away, but doing that meant risking losing control.
Pain was good, his master had said. Pain meant that you were in the driver’s seat.
The other vampire dug her claws into his neck, and he gasped as a cold bolt of agony fired through his brain. Focus, control. The pain wasn’t really there. The pain didn’t matter. There was no pain. Greg reached over and ripped off the other vampire’s left ear in a spray of blood.
She howled and retaliated with a blow that sent him sprawling against the wall. Greg grunted as one of his ribs cracked and made breathing a hundred times harder.
You don’t actually need to breathe. That’s just a leftover instinct. Focus, control.
The other vampire was advancing on him with a horrible finality. “Deviant!” she hissed, and her jagged, serrated teeth were on full display for the whole world to see.
Greg struggled to get back up. Focus, control. But it was getting harder and harder now to maintain that without his master around any longer. It would be so easy to make it all go away…
He smelled her blood before he heard her. It tasted like fear, old spilled drinks, and anger. So, so much anger. “Hey!”
Kiera was standing upright and breathing hard. There was blood spilling down her forearm from where she’d jammed a fork into it, and she was regretting every second of the cruel existence which had led her up to this point. “Come and get me, you…” She racked her brain for a creative insult, but sadly, the human brain tends not to have a lot of artful creativity in life-or-death situations. “...leech!”
The bloodsucker swung around, baring her teeth, and Kiera was reminded that she was facing down a predator optimised for killing and draining the life out of bipedal monkeys without breaking a sweat. This had not been a good idea.
In a blur of speed, the bloodsucker lunged for her. Kiera barely managed to throw herself out of harm’s way and behind some more tables, and the bloodsucker sailed into the wall with an almighty crash. It looked like Part 1 of her plan had been successful: distract the bloodsucker. Now what? She hadn’t put a lot of thought into Part 2. She wasn’t even sure there was a Part 2, although it was rapidly starting to look like Part 2 was the planning of her obituary.
Greg pushed himself to his feet, wobbling. Kiera was not going to last long. She was making an effort to duck and weave and roll amongst the tables, but the smell of strain was in her sweat and she was still weakened from dying the day before. Greg closed his eyes. There was one thing which he could do, and he’d been trying not to do it for the past five minutes.
There was nothing for it. He burned his blood and sprang.
Kiera crawled out from under a table just in time to see Greg suddenly grabbing the bloodsucker in a bear hug from behind, opening his mouth wide, and biting down.
The bloodsucker wailed as Greg sank his teeth deep into the side of her neck. For a moment, all he could taste was the tang of iron, but then the flavours of her blood unfolded like a symphony in his mouth. There was a running undertone of sweetness mixed with a heavy, cloying musk, alongside a slightly sour note of copperish juiciness. Over top of everything, there was one taste which he would recognise until the day he died: a pleasant spice which lightly burned and reminded him of the smell of tulips.
His master’s blood.
Kiera watched in horror as the bloodsucker struggled futilely to escape, clawing weakly at Greg’s arms, but the colour was already starting to drain from her face as blood burst in rivulets from her neck and Greg vacuumed the life out of her.
Eventually, the bloodsucker grew completely limp, and Greg wiped his lips with the back of his hand as he discarded her corpse into the puddle of blood at his feet. It hit with a soft splash. “Are you alright, Kiera?”
“Holy… holy shit!” Kiera was hyperventilating. “What the hell, Greg?”
Greg swallowed. He was feeling uncomfortably full from the large quantity of blood he had just ingested, and he could feel his insides already starting to work on incorporating it into his own bloodstream. “Are you mad at me?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.” Kiera stared, wide-eyed, at the bloodsucker’s corpse. “I just… I didn’t expect your drinking to be so violent. They don’t… we’re not told about this.”
“Sorry,” said Greg, because… what else could he have said? Kiera was watching him with a new unease that was just as frightening as it was foreign.
Finally, she turned her head and broke eye contact. “Why was she after you, anyway?”
He shrugged.
Kiera swung her gaze back up and glared at him. “That bloodsucker almost killed us both, kid. You owe me some answers.”
Greg took a deep breath and tried to figure out the best way to tell a white lie. “Uh… I ran away.”
“What?”
“I ran away from my master,” said Greg, trying to wipe more of the blood from his face. Unfortunately, his sleeve was already so wet with it that all he succeeded in doing was smearing it around. “I think he wants me back, or he wants to kill me, so that’s why she attacked me.”
“Are there more bloodsuckers coming to get you?”
“Probably. I just killed her, so I think I just alerted the rest of the network.”
“Network? Are you all spies now?”
“More like a hive mind, actually.” Greg waited for Kiera to start screaming at him.
“What—I’m not going to ask.” Kiera got to her feet and firmly clamped a napkin around her bleeding forearm, wincing as several of her joints cracked. “Let’s get out of here, then.”
“You’re… coming with me?” There was a note of hope in Greg’s voice which was almost painful to hear. The kid was absolutely hopeless. “Really?”
“Yeah, yeah, don’t get your knickers in a knot about it. Come on. Let’s move.”