Hellbent (21 page)

I flopped down on the bed with the television remote and my laptop, and reached into my go-bag for my primary cell phone.

Horace didn’t answer when I dialed him up, but I left him a message that was cryptic enough to make him call me back. If he thought I had the bones, he’d go have himself a celebratory drink and get back to me when he felt like it; if he thought I didn’t have them, he’d stew about it awhile just to punish me.

I know this guy. He’s easy to handle if you figure out where his buttons are.

As I waited for him to call, I settled in with my laptop and the semi-crappy wireless Internet provided by the hotel.

I struggled with the spotty coverage until I’d retrieved my email and discovered a query from Ian, wondering how things were going. It was so very
like
him to email. Silly man. Never wanting to intrude with something so gauche as a phone call. A warm fuzzy ran up my bruised spine as I typed out a quick reply, swearing that all was well and we’d be home soon—and I’d tell him everything.

I also had an email from Horace, including a PDF of the odds and ends he’d been able to gather on Elizabeth Creed, and since I was still vegging out in my borrowed bathrobe, and since Adrian wasn’t back yet from his hunting and gathering (I stifled a pang of envy because it was silly, and I could go hunting, too, if I really wanted to) … I settled back against the pillows to read.

The better I could get to know my enemy, the more effectively I’d confront her next time.

Also, having encountered her face-to-face, I was curious.

How does somebody go from being a respected aerospace engineer to … to … whatever she was now? A schizophrenic sorceress with world-destroying ambitions? It was strange to me, how someone who built a career looking into outer space could show
such rage toward her home planet. Or maybe it would make perfect sense, if I could see it from another angle.

I opened the PDF, and from time to time I followed up with the Internet. Over the course of an hour, I teased out bits and pieces of information about Elizabeth Creed until I had an uncomfortably clear picture of her psyche to go along with the image of her face, which was burned into my brain. Her face, after all, was the last thing I’d seen before grabbing that bone and going off the roof.

When I say that the picture was uncomfortably clear, I mean it.

Elizabeth Creed was born in 1953, in Houston, Texas. Her mother died when she was young; her father was a chemist working for the Dow chemical plant in Freeport. She first began to display psychological problems in grade school, and was briefly institutionalized as a teenager, but she was released with a high school diploma and very high test scores in math and science. She went to the University of San Francisco, which partly explained what she was doing in the region. She was married in 1974 to a guy named Harold Hopkins, which explained the rest of it.

Their wedding had been held on the mission’s grounds.

Her words came back to haunt me.
Mistakes need to be unmade
.

Did she honestly think she could … what? Turn back time? Reverse her marriage—make it so it’d never happened? I kept reading, and learned for certain what I could’ve guessed: Her marriage ended badly three years later, when Harold left her for another woman. In 1978, she was institutionalized for a second time, and formally diagnosed with schizophrenia.

But she was very, very smart. Upon her release, she changed her name, taking on the identity of Rachel Olsen and getting a second degree, this one from MIT. She went to work for NASA,
which meant the woman had some
major
identity theft skills—but I knew what that was like, didn’t I? I’d done it before, myself.

My imagination could fill in some of the holes. She had taken her medicine in secret, visiting psychologists under other assumed identities. She’d struggled in the dark, battling her own mind as it turned on her.

My own mental health issues had come and gone the same way, diagnosed nearly a hundred years ago as simple “hysteria,” which only meant that I was a woman and really, who gave a shit what was actually wrong with me? Or that’s how I took it at the time. I was fortunate that my father hadn’t sent me away, even though he could have, and even though he was urged to do so more than once.

It wasn’t until the eighties that I finally figured out what was wrong with me. Severe obsessive-compulsive disorder with a touch of the old manic swing.

For added irony, OCD is something that defines vampires in a number of traditions around the globe. Have you heard the old stories? All you have to do to get rid of us is throw a handful of rice, and we’ll have to stop and count every grain before pursuing you … or you can do the same with sand, or running water, or crossed lines. Some people have argued that the running water and the cross are religious wards, water being the element of baptism and the cross as the sign of Christ. But people like me—and maybe people like Elizabeth Creed—we know better than that. We know how it feels to hesitate before something that’s moving, unwilling to put a toe in, and unwilling to step across it for no logical reason whatsoever. And step on a crack, break your mother’s back. The more lines, the more prohibited things to step on—and things to avoid.

In the years since figuring out my problem, I’ve often wondered
why it wasn’t fixed when I died and became what I am now. How come my mental malfunctions weren’t repaired like my asthma, my allergies, and my nearsightedness when the supernatural blood went coursing through my veins? Why did I get stuck with the one truly bad thing—the thing that kept me from a normal life, and now keeps me from a normal afterlife?

I looked at my go-bag, loaded with a thousand and one things I would never need in a hundred jobs, in a thousand years. I considered my army of cell phones, my elaborate precautions, my grasping nature that never finds enough to hold
just in case
tomorrow everything implodes and I have to start over … so I won’t start over with nothing.

And when I looked at Elizabeth Creed’s life story, something in my stomach constricted with sympathy. Such a mind, such potential. Did the magic make her mad, or was she born that way, same as me?

I suspected a congenital problem. Magic isn’t like hat-making; there’s no mercury in it to create a wild-eyed stereotype. Wizards, magicians, sorcerers—whatever they call themselves—they’re usually a controlled, calculating lot.

I’d like to say “You’d have to be,” though Elizabeth Creed was pulling it off with full-blown schizophrenia, so I might be wrong. It definitely takes a mind that’s comfortable with vast catalogs of data, and a firm memory, and a serious attention to detail. Either Creed had all these things lurking beneath her illness, or she’d found a way to work around them.

In 1996 Elizabeth Creed had been discharged from NASA and arrested for her identity theft, but by all appearances she’d only impersonated the dead and hadn’t screwed up anybody’s credit score or given anyone a criminal record. Back then it wasn’t all digital, like it is now. One number couldn’t unhinge an entire
lifetime. She hadn’t hurt anyone, she’d only lied, and she’d lied in order to survive as a free woman. It was hard to hate her for it.

Well, it was hard for
me
to hate her for it, even though my back cracked as I sat up and adjusted myself on the bed. As I’d been reading, I’d sunk lower and lower into the bedspread and deeper into the feather pillows. I hate feather pillows. Nobody gets any decent support from those things. They’re worthless.

As I was extricating myself from this downy quicksand, I heard a keycard in the lock and Adrian came slinking in—peeking around the door before letting himself inside.

He said, “Hey.”

I said “Hey” back. “How was supper?”

“Fine. I found a TacoTime and went to town. I was starving when I woke up this afternoon.” Nice, how easily he was adjusting to vampire time. Or maybe it was only that he was already adjusted to drag-queen time. Come to think of it, they were probably similar. “Sorry I was gone so long, but I assumed you’d call if you got worried.”

“No problem. It gave me time to catch up on my reading.”

“And take a bath? God, the windows are still fogged in here. How hot did you run it?”

“As hot as it would go. It felt great.”

“I bet.” He came to sit down on his bed, and he held out a brown paper bag that’d been rolled up like an oversized school lunch. “I … um. I brought you something.”

“A present? For me?” I joked. But when I took it from him, it was heavy. And it sloshed.

“It took me some time to track down a place that would give it to me, and I used your credit card. Sorry.”

I unrolled the brown-paper top and stared down into three pints of human blood, sealed in the usual plastic pouches and labeled thusly. I was absolutely dumbfounded. I gazed up at him
with abject adoration and asked, “Adrian … where did you get this?”

He shrugged and began to kick off his shoes. “There’s a plasma donation center at the other end of town. It’s not the world’s cleanest joint; most of the donors are paid, and they obviously need the money. But there’s blood banking on the premises, too. You uh … you don’t want to know what it cost.”

“I couldn’t care less what it cost,” I assured him, lifting the pouches out one by one as if they were filled with nitroglycerin. They were still cool from refrigeration, but not cold. I didn’t care how fresh they were, or if they were fresh at all. Nothing mattered except that I had acquired a snack—a snack via my not-a-ghoul, who had justified his existence like never before. “Thank you. Thank you, thank you,
thank you.
”

I heaved my bruised little self out of the bed and went pushing through the coffeemaker supplies.

“What are you doing?”

“Coffee mugs. You don’t want any coffee, do you?” I asked, holding up both of the provided containers.

“No, why?”

“These cups are microwavable. And if you don’t want one, I’m going to use them both so I can two-fist this stuff. They won’t hold it all at once, but they’ll hold enough to get me started.”

“Ah,” he nodded. “I don’t guess it tastes very good cold.”

“In fact, it does not. It’s better than nothing when it’s cold, but since I have a microwave right here …” I bit the corner of the first blood bubble and squeezed its contents into the mugs. Then I propped the baggie up against the counter and chucked the mugs into the microwave. “I’m prepared to delay gratification a few minutes for the sake of a warm meal.”

He grinned at me. “You’re more human than you think.”

I licked the edge of the tooth that’d punctured the bag. Blood,
yes. Tasty, tasty blood—albeit cold blood. As the microwave counted down, I tapped my fingers impatiently on its door. “I never said I wasn’t human. I started out human, didn’t I?”

“Fine, that’s true. You’ve never said it, but sometimes you act like you’re more different than you really are.”

“Dude, I’m dead.”

“I know,” he said, still giving me that grin. I wasn’t sure I liked the grin; it said that he knew something about me—something I didn’t know. I thought he was wrong. He and I were plenty different, and if he believed otherwise, it was only because I’d never showed him the extent of how different I could be.

Maybe watching me down a few mugs of O-positive would give him a hint.

I opened the microwave door before the final
ding
and pulled out both mugs. I stirred the contents with the plastic coffee stirrers (hey, nobody likes a scalding spot in a chilly drink), licked the stirrer clean, then pounded the mugs like a frat boy at a kegger.

Adrian watched with only the mildest interest, and I’m not sure what that says about either one of us, except that he must’ve been getting more comfortable with me by the day. Perhaps having a sip or two of my bodily fluids had acclimated him to the idea faster than anything else possibly could.

I guzzled every drop. It was laced with preservatives, not quite the right temperature, and it’d been sitting in a fridge for a couple of days. Regardless, it was the best blood I’d ever tasted and I couldn’t get enough. I squeezed the last bit out of bag number one, mashing its edges like it was a toothpaste tube and I was a cheapskate, and then I moved on to bag number two. Two more minutes in the microwave and another moment of stirring to get the temperature even, and I was back in hog heaven.

In this way, I killed off all three bags—despite the fact that I almost never drank that much, and I was full by the end of the second
bag. Didn’t care. Couldn’t let it go to waste, and if I didn’t down it then and there, it’d go bad overnight in the dinky dorm-room fridge with which our room was stocked.

Besides, after a meal like that, I could go for weeks without taking another one. I liked the idea of being all full up before undertaking any further adventures, even adventures so mild as “trying to get a good day’s sleep on those fucking feather pillows.”

When I was finished, I collapsed back on the bed and closed my eyes. “Adrian?” I said softly.

“Yes?”

“That was the most awesome thing you have ever done. And I want you to know, I’ll make it up to you, one of these days.”

“Oh, I know you will,” he said, and I couldn’t see the nefarious grin, but I could hear it. “You’re going to take me to Atlanta to see about my sister.”

I frowned but didn’t open my eyes. “We didn’t agree to that. Not yet.”

“You have to admit, I’m wearing you down.”

“I only have to admit that you’ve made yourself inordinately useful. Which you have. And which I appreciate.”

“Isn’t that a ghoul’s job?” He asked it with a faux innocence that jolted me out of my near-catatonia.

“Hold up now. We didn’t agree to that, either. And when we talked about it last, you didn’t like the idea.” I sat up, determined to square this away once and for all. “You’re not my ghoul. That little swap of blood wasn’t enough to do it—”

“Or so you
think.
”

“So I’m sure. You know why I don’t like ghouls, and I don’t want a ghoul. I think that whole nonsense with Jeffery Sykes ought to be enough to explain why,” I reminded him. Sykes had been a ghoul once, and now he was something much, much worse—and much more dangerous. To vampires, to humans, and
to everything else. He’d been mutilated after betraying his master. They’d left him deaf, blind, and mute. And piece by piece, Sykes was attempting to repair himself—at the expense of the rest of us. Wherever he was, and whatever he was doing, I intended to put a stop to it one of these days.