LITMIR.BIZ

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up at me through her disheveled hair. Her eyes were hard and furious.

      “Yeah, you were an accident all right!” she screamed. “But it doesn’t matter! You’ll be dead by morning!”

      My anger deserted me, and the weakness returned. Dah-lia’s voice was too loud, too shrill. Blood flowed freely from my wounds. I knew I needed to stop the bleeding, but I could think of nothing but getting away from Dahlia.

      I staggered through the rail yard. Every step I took felt as though I were descending into a dark, warm pit. My pulse thrummed in my ears. It was slowing.

      The impact of my footfalls on the uneven ground jarred my ankles and sent shock waves of pain up my legs. When I reached pavement, my body seemed to know where to go on its own. I moved in slow motion, but I must have been running because I reached Nathan’s apartment in a matter of minutes.

      I stood stupidly on the sidewalk, unsure what to do as I pressed my hands feebly against my torn flesh. I knew my car was parked nearby, but I didn’t have my keys. I looked helplessly up and down the street, shivering. I yearned to be at home in my bed. I settled for Nathan’s doorstep. At least there I would be shielded from some of the biting wind. Dahlia might have followed me, but the more pressing desire for warmth and sleep outweighed my fear. If she did come to kill me, my exhausted brain reasoned, I would finally be able to rest in peace.

      I don’t know how long I lay there before the snow began to fall. Big, fluffy flakes, straight out of a Christmas movie, floated to the ground. I watched a few land in my palm, where my lack of body heat allowed them to gather without melting. I started counting them, but when the storm picked up I couldn’t count fast enough. I contented myself by watching the swirling patterns of snow and wind on the sidewalk. My eyelids grew heavy. Unable to fight sleep and not sure why I’d tried in the first place, I closed my eyes.

      A familiar voice woke me. It was Nathan. It took a moment before I realized he had hold of my shoulders. He shook me frantically. He shouted at me and clapped his hands in front of my face, but I was too exhausted to respond.

      My head lolled to the side. A brown paper bag lay forgotten on the sidewalk. The contents rolled across the snowy concrete.

      “Your shaving cream…it’s getting away,” I mumbled, trying to follow the canister with my eyes.

      “Don’t worry about that.” He turned my face to his. “What happened?”

      “I don’t know,” I said as I tried again to give up and sleep.

      Nathan shook me the moment my eyes slid closed.

      “What?” I whined, and tried to push his hands away.

      He cursed and gripped me tighter. “Wake up!” he yelled. When I didn’t, he slapped my cheek.

      My eyes flew open and I sputtered in shock. “What? Just let me go back to sleep!”

      “I can’t! You’ve lost a lot of blood. If you go to sleep, you’ll die.”

      Then I felt the pain, a twisting, pinching feeling in my gut. As if I’d eaten broken glass. I clutched his arm, writhing in misery. He shrugged off his coat and quickly wrapped it around me. “I’ve got to get you inside,” he murmured. He scooped me into his arms and carried me through the door, up the stairs to his apartment.

       Five

       Decisions, Decisions

      I woke to the gentle sound of someone humming Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage.” My eyes snapped open in alarm.

      Judging from the clutter around me, I was in Nathan’s apartment. I couldn’t remember how I got there. My stomach growled, and my memory slowly returned. I’d been hungry. I’d gone in search of blood. Then I’d met Dahlia.

      Being stabbed, now that’s something I definitely remembered. I lifted the blanket that covered me. My wounds were carefully bandaged. Dried blood stained the gauze wrappings, but I resisted the urge to poke at them. It didn’t take much to upset a fresh wound, and I didn’t want to start bleeding again.

      I reached up and gingerly felt my face. Completely monster-free. Aching all over, I sat up. My torn sweatshirt had been carefully folded on the arm of the couch. I pulled it over my head quickly, trying not to dwell on the fact that Nathan had seen me in my ratty, laundry-day bra.

      “Feeling better?” he asked as he entered the living room.

      I could smell the blood in the mug he carried. My throat was a desert and my stomach was trying to digest itself, but I turned my face away.

      “Drink,” he said, holding out the cup to me. He must have sensed the reason for my reluctance. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve seen a few vampires in my time.”

      “Not like me.”

      “Exactly like you.” He knelt in front of me, and I hid my face. My bones shifted under the mask of my fingers as he pressed the cup against the backs of my hands. “You need to drink this.”

      I heard the resolve in his voice and knew I wasn’t going to win.

      “Don’t look at me,” I whispered.

      “Okay.” He moved to the farthest corner of the room and turned his back.

      The blood was warm, as Dahlia’s had been, but thicker, as though it had already begun to clot. It coated my tongue and left a faint taste of copper in my mouth. It was like drinking penny-flavored Jell-O that hadn’t set. This repulsed me, but instead of gagging, I gulped half of it down. I felt gluttonous. If I were drinking straight from someone’s neck I probably wouldn’t have thought of manners, but it was much different sitting in Nathan’s living room, drinking from a mug like a civilized vampire.

      I sipped the blood self-consciously and studied him. It was my experience that people weren’t nice to strangers. In med school it’s every student for his- or herself. In fact, most of us went out of our way to intimidate the “competition.” The eat-or-be-eaten attitude had become so ingrained in my psyche, that I’d come to expect such behavior from everyone. But Nathan had been nothing but helpful from the start, which was surprising considering he was a week away from killing me if I didn’t join his vampire cult.

      It didn’t seem right that a man so attractive would be such a complete stickler for the rules. He must have worked for the IRS in a past life.

      Of course, I didn’t know much about Nathan’s current life. In the brief phone conversations we’d had during the past week, he’d revealed only generic information about himself and hadn’t given me much room to ask questions. If I was going to trust anything he told me, I needed some answers.

      There was no time like the present.

      “How old are you?” I asked.

      “Thirty-two.”

      “I meant including…” I didn’t know how to phrase the rest.

      “Oh, that,” he said, and it sounded as if he didn’t care to dispense that information. “I’ve been a vampire since 1937.”

      I tried to conceal my disappointment. I had expected to hear he was hundreds of years old, that he’d walked the battlefield with Napoléon and discussed the mysteries of the cosmos with Nostradamus, like the vampires in the movies. “That was the year ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ became the national anthem, you know.”

      “I didn’t know that. I wasn’t an American at the time.” He glanced over his shoulder, and I immediately covered my face.

      “It’s okay,” he assured me. “You’re back to normal.”

      I leaned over a clear patch of the glass-topped coffee table to check my reflection.

      “It’s the hunger,” he said as he straightened up the room. “The worse it is, the worse you look. The same goes for anger, pain and fear. It’s very animalistic.”

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