LITMIR.BIZ

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ominous tone of the question, I nodded. At this point, I wanted answers. I’d fill out a complete medical history if he asked. “Shoot.”

      “I followed your story in the papers very closely and I have some concerns. Namely, why you were in the morgue that night.” When his eyes met mine, I saw the real question there.

      “You think I did this on purpose?”

      He shrugged, all compassion and friendliness gone from his face. “You tell me.”

      I had spent the past month in a haze of depression, deprived of normal life by a mysterious illness I couldn’t shake. My bones ached twenty-four hours a day. My head throbbed at the faintest glimmer of light. If I was indeed a vampire, I certainly wasn’t living out the posh existence of a Count Dracula or a Lestat de Lioncourt. I was in a living hell, certainly not by choice.

      “Please,” he said quietly. “I need to know.”

      I could have slapped him. “No! What kind of freak do you think I am?”

      He shrugged. “There are some people out there, sick people, who want to escape their lives. Maybe they’ve had some sort of trauma, an illness, the loss of a loved one.” He looked me dead in the eyes. “The loss of your parents.”

      “How do you know about my parents?” I asked through tightly clenched teeth. I hadn’t spoken about them since the car accident that had killed them. They’d been on their way to visit me at college. Guilt had kept me from opening up about them. No one, save my distant, remaining relatives in Oregon—many of whom I’d met for the first time at the funeral—knew anything about them or the circumstances of their death.

      “I have connections,” he said, as if we were discussing how he’d obtained courtside Lakers’ tickets instead of how he’d invaded my privacy. He actually had the nerve to reach across the table and take my hand. “I know what it’s like to lose someone. Believe me. I can see why you’d want—”

      “I didn’t want this!”

      I hadn’t meant to scream, but it felt good. I wanted to do it again. The ugliness and horror of the past month seemed to swell inside me, pushing me beyond the limits of my self-control.

      “Carrie, please—” he tried again, but I ignored him.

      My knees bumped the table as I stood, and Nathan’s mug toppled over, splashing warm blood across the tabletop. The sight held a sick fascination for me, and in a flash I saw a clear image of myself leaning over and licking it up. I shook my head to destroy the vision. “I didn’t want this!”

      Jerking the collar of my sweatshirt aside, I jabbed a finger at the barely healed scar on my neck. “Do you think someone would ask for this? Do you think I went down to that morgue and said ‘Hey, John Doe, why don’t you rip my fucking neck open? Why don’t you turn my life to absolute shit?’”

      The volume of the music from Ziggy’s room drastically lowered. Good. Let him hear.

      “Do you think I wanted to sit here and watch some guy I’ve never met fucking drink blood? I just want my life back!”

      No, what I wanted was to scream until my throat was raw. I wanted to stamp my feet and throw things. I wanted to be empty of these feelings of despair and frustration.

      Instead, I cried. My legs buckled and I slid to the floor. When Nathan knelt beside me and put his arms out to comfort me, I pushed him away. When he tried again, I didn’t fight him.

      I couldn’t control my sobs as I cried into his firm chest. His wool sweater pricked my cheek. He smelled good, distinctly male and slightly soapy, as if he’d just gotten out of the shower. So what if he was a complete stranger? I’d never been able to cry and let someone comfort me like this before.

      “I know you didn’t,” he said softly.

      “Do you?” I demanded, looking up at him. “Because you were sure acting like the vampire police or something.”

      He gently took my face in his hands to force my gaze to his. “I know because the same thing happened to me. At the hands of your John Doe.”

      His words seemed to magically patch the dam that had broken within me. My chest no longer heaved with sobs, and my tears miraculously dried.

      Nathan helped me to my feet. I took advantage of the moment, resting against him as long as I could without seeming weird. I pressed my hand just below his rib cage in the guise of steadying myself and felt the solid ridges of a perfect stomach beneath the wool.

      He picked up my chair—a casualty of my sudden rage—and helped me sit. Then he got me a glass of water and began cleaning up the spilled blood.

      The silence between us was stifling, but my questions overwhelmed me. I started with the obvious. “How did it happen?”

      Nathan stood at the sink, rinsing the blood from the kitchen towel. “He took some of your blood, you took some of his. Then you died. That’s the way it happens.”

      “No,” I began. I’d meant to ask how he’d been made a vampire, if John Doe had attacked him without provocation, as he had me. Instead, I focused on his statement. “I didn’t drink his blood. I don’t think he drank mine.”

      “Did his blood get in your mouth? In your wounds?” He leaned against the counter. “All it takes is one drop. It’s like a virus, or a cancer. It can lie dormant for decades, waiting for the heart to stop beating. Then it corrupts your cells.”

      “Yeah, but I didn’t die. They got me to surgery to stop the bleeding—” But that wasn’t exactly true. “Oh, God. I went into v-tac, in the recovery room. I flatlined.”

      “That’s when it happened.” He pointed to the living room. “Let’s go in here. We’ll be more comfortable.”

      I sat on the couch while he went to the bookshelves lining the wall. He pulled a volume down and handed it to me. “This should answer some questions.”

      The book, bound in burgundy-colored leather, had gilt-edged pages and seemed incredibly aged. The cover was bare, save for small gold lettering stamped in the lower righthand corner. “The Sanguinarius,” I murmured, running my fingertips across the letters. I recognized the root word, Latin for blood. I opened it, but the usual publishing information wasn’t printed. The title page lent the only clue to the age of the book.

      The Sanguinarius, it read in large print. Beneath that, in smaller type, A Practical Guide to the Habits of Vampyres. The font was uneven, as though the pages had been printed on an ancient press. The book must have been at least two hundred years old.

      I flipped a few pages. “A vampire handbook?”

      “Not exactly. More like a training manual for vampire hunters.”

      No sooner than he’d finished his sentence, I came across a graphic woodcut of a man sinking a pitchfork into the round stomach of a raging she-demon.

      “Oh.” I slammed the book shut.

      “Roughly translated, the title means ‘The Ones Who Thirst for Blood.’” He smiled. “This is complicated. I’ll start from the beginning.”

      I nodded in agreement, though it didn’t seem I had a choice. He sat beside me, a little closer than I’d expected. Not that I was complaining.

      “For more than two hundred years, there has existed a group of vampires dedicated to the extinction of their own kind for the preservation of humanity. In the past they were known as the Order of the Blood Brethren. Today, they are known as the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement.

      “There were fourteen clauses under the Order. But the Movement enforces only three. No vampire shall feed from any unwilling human. No vampire shall create another vampire. And no vampire shall harm or kill a human.”

      “Those don’t sound like such bad rules,” I observed.

      “Vampires

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