Blood Work (40 page)

Which made her
think about Matt and Mercy. His hurried, panicked talk of blood
groups and what was best for the vampire. Her own, foolishly
blurted admission. If she’d kept her mouth shut she wouldn’t be
here now. She would be fine and able to answer all the questions
the police could throw at her without an excuse to fend them off
for another day or so. She would be able to go home and see William
again, see him bound by restraints of illness, see him as a pale
shadow of his former self and maybe she would get angry at the
world for doing that to him and be unable to look at him
anymore.

And maybe
Mercy would be dead.

Vampires.
Werewolves. And that meant the thing she’d seen driving the van
during the drive-by shooting was probably not a deformed human.
This was Matt Hawkins’ world and she could understand him wanting
to keep it quiet. She picked up the business card he’d left
her.

His mobile
number was on the back, hand written. Another mystery as to why it
wasn’t printed along with the rest of the details. A mystery Erin
would let sit idle until she forgot all about him.

She put the
card on the table beside the flowers and vowed that as soon as
she’d passed his gun and fine back to him, she would destroy the
card.

Not long
later, the last bag of blood finished emptying into her body and
the nurse came to take it down. A few not too minor changes later,
and they hung a bag of intravenous antibiotics. This time Erin was
allowed to sleep and she settled down.

She didn’t
know what woke her, but the light in the room had changed,
brightened with the afternoon sun coming in the window. Despite
this unfettered wash of warmth, the room felt colder.

“You’re
awake.”

Erin jumped,
as much as she could with tubes trapping her in the bed.

Mrs Veilchen
moved to the bedside. Two wardsmen stood in the doorway, their
expressions glazed, shoulders slack, hands loose. The slender woman
put a pale hand on Erin’s bandaged arm. Her touch was cool against
the raw heat of the wound.

“What are you
doing here?” Erin asked her.

“I went to
your office,” she said, tone flat, sunglasses huge and round this
close to Erin’s face. “Your… assistant was there.”

Erin jerked
away from her hand. “If you touched him, I will—”

“He will be
fine, eventually. I am not in the habit of leaving behind bodies
where they can easily be found.” A small, chilly smile curved her
white lips. “Forensics is coming along in leaps and bounds. It pays
to be cautious. The boy-child told me you had closed my file. He
was quite brave, actually. At first.”

The nurse-call
buzzer was by Erin’s right hand. She reached for it, closed her
hand around it. Veilchen was quick. Her long fingers wound around
Erin’s hand and squeezed. Bones grinding together, Erin’s hand
jerked open and dropped the buzzer. Veilchen moved her hold to it,
and squeezed again. Broken plastic clattered to the floor.

“That’s enough
of a token resistance,” Veilchen murmured. She leaned down over
Erin, took in a deep breath. “You have a stranger’s blood in you.
How delicious.”

Heart racing
away with her thoughts, Erin stared dumbly at the woman. As she
spoke, her teeth were shown. Nice, normal, perhaps a bit whiter
than white, but not at all pointy.

“What do you
want?” Erin asked, her voice painfully soft and nervous.

“I want you to
tell me where Matthew Hawkins is. The boy-child did not know.”

“I don’t know
where he is.”

Veilchen
stroked the side of Erin’s face. Her fingers left trails of cold
along Erin’s skin, her nails scratching like a razor blade.

“I think you
do. But he’s done something to you. I can’t get into your head. So
we’re going to have to do it the other way.”

“The other
way?”

Veilchen
smiled again, but this time, she had two very long, very pointy
teeth. “The hard way.”

I medicated myself very carefully
after speaking with Erin. She was alive and well enough to know
that I was bad business. She hadn’t forgiven me, not unexpectedly,
but at least she hadn’t been screaming mad at me. Gotta look at the
bright side. So I measured out just enough morphine to cut the edge
off the pain but not enough to knock me out.

Got some sleep
though. On the back patio, in the sunlight. With the sun burning
the inside of my eyelids to red and the warmth baking deep into my
bones. It was a deep, exhausted sleep, and dreamless, thankfully.
Or not.

At some point,
I began to hear my neighbours, Charles and Sue. And in my sleep
befuddled way, I realised very slowly that their voices weren’t
raised. They were speaking calmly together, their words little more
than mumbles. How I knew it was them I wasn’t sure and decided it
was just the vagaries of dreaming. Rarely did anything make logical
sense in dreams and yet we grooved along well enough. Hence I
wasn’t all that concerned with this strange turn in my
subconscious. Frankly, all things considered, Charles and Sue
muttering in my inner ear was about the best I could’ve hoped for
in the dream department.

So when the
words began to take on substance, there was no sense of
trouble.

“—had you only
just listened to me earlier.” Sue sounded triumphant.

“Oh come on. I
don’t think it was that bad. This…” Charles’ tone was a peculiar
mix of frustration and strangled relief. “It was just, I don’t
know, temporary. Sure of it. This wasn’t necessary.”

“Not
necessary? Did I mistake that look on your face this morning when
you woke up?”

Charles
grunted. “No, but—”

“No buts about
it, mister. Last night was fantastic. It hasn’t been like that in
years.”

“Not
years!”

“Yes, poodle,
years. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had a thumping
good—”

“What about
that time at the coast? You disturbed the people in the next
unit.”

“Oh, poodle.”
Sue sighed. “That was fake.”

I had to share
Charles’ shocked silence. Fake? God, women could be so… so… Even if
they were as sexy as hell in that tousled teddy and tangled silk
sheet.

“And that time
in the casino?” Man, I shared Charles’ dread.

Sue made a
noise that was undecided as to whether it was a confirmation or
denial. “Well, I was nearly there, but you didn’t quite deliver…
enough. It was good, but open ended.”

“Jesus,
Sue.”

“But last
night…” This noise was very definitely a confirmation, in the most
satisfied, deliciously sensual manner. “I thought my teeth would
rattle out of my head.”

Charles’
surprised laugh was cut off when Sue kissed him. It was sweet and
soft, her lips still swollen from the previous night’s escapades,
banishing thoughts of the burgeoning argument. Then even that
thought raced away as she crawled on top, pressed herself against
his skin, the thin film of satin moving between them.

Oh. God. Her
tongue brushed his lips. He opened his mouth to her and the kiss
deepened, became something hungry and desperate. His hands slid
over her body, crushing the satin into bunches and rubbing them
against her sensitive breasts. Moaning into his mouth, she wriggled
her hips. Mind whiting out with need, he reached for her thighs,
clamped them to his and rolled her over. Beneath him, she gasped
with surprise and pleasure, wrapped her legs around him and pushed
up into him.

It was about
then that I began to question the dream. Surely I wasn’t that
screwed up I was having a pornographic dream about my neighbours.
And even sadder, the dream I’d had about Erin had been nowhere near
this definite, this solid.

Ah shit. It
wasn’t a dream.

Realisation
gave me some control and I pulled away from my neighbours just as
things got to a point that was past voyeurism and well into the
realms of seriously unhealthy perversion. Porn was one thing. This
was a ménage à trois where one of the combatants wasn’t
invited.

Whether it was
the morphine playing havoc with my control, or simple exhaustion, I
couldn’t wake up, or rise from this trance, whatever it was.
Somehow I was reaching beyond my physical body without the benefit
of meditation or desperation. That was a bit scary.

Floating in a
place I tended to call ‘null space’, where I was merely perception
with no physicality at all, I took stock. I wasn’t in Invisible
Matt, meaning I hadn’t progressed to the point of being able to
manifest a real effect on the world on a whim. That, at least, was
a bit reassuring.

The link to my
body in this form did not come from the same place as the link to
Invisible Matt. That one came from my solar plexus. This one came
from the crown of my head and wasn’t so much a cord as it was more
like pushing out with my aura. It was a hard start to attain, at
least for me. Crafting up a body of air molecules and plugging it
into the body-battery was far simpler. This was like peeling your
skin off and stretching it in new and interesting ways. The cons of
this compared to Invisible Matt was that I couldn’t ‘see’ anything,
I could only sense minds. I hadn’t actually heard Sue and Charles
through my ears. I’d just been in the vicinity while they’d been
throwing thoughts at each other. All those fascinating sensations
of touch and heat and soft, warm… Ah hem. All that, just me riding
their mental waves. Bit more intimate than watching a home
movie.

So. Here I
was, all astral-plained up and nowhere to go. I decided to see just
how far this unconscious utilisation of my growing and totally
sweet psychic powers would go.

I dropped in
on Mercy first. Her mind was locked away, suffocated under layers
of tiredness and pain and that inscrutable blanket of emptiness
that sapped energy from vampires with the rising of the sun. It was
a deep, murky pool, the bottom of which was where the vampire mind
fled to when dawn came. I could have swum down and down and found
Mercy, just as she could, with sufficient prodding, reach back up
with limited ability. Even though I knew reaching her in this state
was possible, I hadn’t yet tried it. I mean, all those warnings you
grow up with about not diving into water you don’t know the depth
of are hard to forget. Even when you know that these waters are
concealing a violent instinct attached to a mind with psychic
abilities. With that down there, you kind of have to wonder what
else might be lurking in the sewers.

As I touched
her, I concentrated on tasting her aura. Aurum had made his point
very well and it stuck in my gullet like a barbed fish hook. I
could pinpoint Red vampires with little effort. They were the most
prolific around the place. Yellows and Blues were about the same
for numbers, with Oranges a distant fourth. Greens I had no
personal experience with but Jacob suspected they were out there.
My work didn’t usually call for touching human auras, but from my
limited experience—being the sum total of Erin—human auras were a
messy, troubled mix of flavours. Her sweet and bitter taste was not
as easily quantifiable as a vampire’s. And despite Jacob’s faint
ability to sense vampire flavours, he had never been able to touch
mine.

Just like it’s
a physical impossibility to lick your own elbow, you can’t touch
your own aura. So I had no idea about mine. As vampires take on the
flavour of the clan that turns them, I would presume, if Aurum was,
you know, possibly, right about me and Mercy, then I wouldn’t get a
flavour from her.

Perhaps that
was something Aurum could clear up for us, if I let him near Mercy,
that is. But, in truth, it was an academic question. Mercy and I
did just fine without him trying to add complications. We were more
than capable of making our own trouble.

Giving up the
attempt, I left Mercy behind and travelled.

In the past,
I’ve pretty much been able to cover the block. For an up market
suburb, and apart from Chuck and Sue, my fellow canal lifers were a
boring bunch. They weren’t the carelessly rich folk their houses
and boats would have you believe, with all the attendant issues you
see on shows where the wives of such places had naught better to do
than stick their scalpel-sculpted noses into everyone else’s
business. These people struggled for the lifestyle, concerned more
with image than quality. It was a sad place to contemplate on this
level, so I suppose I was keen to reach beyond it.

And for once,
my rubber band-esk aura didn’t snap me right back once I got past
the end of my street. It grew tighter and strained, but there was
still give in it. What the heck. I floored it.

Holy
guacamole!

By the time I
could slow down and regain some control, I had no idea how far I’d
come. See earlier dialogue about what one can and can’t sense while
riding the astral express. The only touchstone I had was the sparks
of individual minds in the pulsing, seething mass of urban living.
Drifting toward a mind that shone brighter than those around it, I
dipped in to get a location.

“– here today
to witness the joining of these two souls in Holy Matrimony.”

A priest.
Rightio. Where was he? But he was fixated on the ceremony at hand,
determined not to stumble over any of the words, especially the
self-scribed vows of the couple before him. Silly notion, writing
your own vows. Weren’t the Lord’s good enough?

I shook off
the priest and touched off the happy couple—she was smug, he was
scared shitless—and floated amongst the not-so-innocent bystanders
to this merciless torture. The front rows were just one great mass
of joy and/or sympathy. Those in the middle tried to be good and
concentrate on the ceremony, but restless kids and groaning
grannies pulled at their attention. Pay dirt was in the last rows.
The folk there mainly so they could get a free meal at the
reception afterward and maybe pick up. Score.