Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (30 page)

“Okay, don’t move,” the woman said, then made
a short, humorless laugh. “Not that you can anyway. I need to go
get my stuff.”

She wasn’t gone long enough for him to miss
her much, as almost immediately after she left the room she came
back in with a handful of items. His vision was swimming enough by
now that he couldn’t identify any of it, although he could hear the
clink and thonk of metal instruments and plastic bottles.

“Look, I don’t know if you feel pain,” she
said. “Well, I suppose maybe I can guess just by looking at you
right now. So there’s no way that what I’m about to do isn’t going
to hurt like ever-loving shit. Do you want something to bite down
on?”

He almost said yes, but in the end he didn’t
think it would make much difference. Given his teeth and normal
muscle strength, it seemed possible that anything he bit would just
rip or break in half the first moment she poked him with whatever
was in her hands. Instead he let his silence speak for him.

“Suit yourself,” she said. Cory closed his
eyes and tried to think of something pleasant. He gave up when the
only thing that came to mind was a warm juicy rat draining its
blood down his throat.

There was a moment of additional pain at the
wound, but it was surprisingly tame compared to what he’d already
been putting up with. After that the woman fumbled with something
beside him and then stuck something cold and metal into the bullet
hole. It only stayed there for a fraction of a second before she
pulled it out again.

“Whoa. Just… wow,” she said.

Cory got the impression that wasn’t the best
thing for her to be saying right now.

“It’s okay. I was kind of prepared for
this.”

He almost tried asking her if anything she
was saying was supposed to make sense, but even if he could through
his clenched teeth he wasn’t sure he’d be able to remember any of
this moment later. Instead he just stiffened and silently hoped
that whatever she planned to do she would either just get it over
with or stop and let him go.

“Okay, brace yourself. If I’m right then this
is about to hurt you a whole hell of a lot.”

Before he could even make a small movement in
protest the hole in his side erupted in a fresh spurt of torment.
Through the pain he thought he felt something soft, as though she
were applying something to his skin with gauze, but his body would
no longer obey him even enough to let him look down at her
operation. He did at least feel the hurt once again in all the
places that had started to go numb, although he didn’t know if he
could say that was a good thing.

“This better work now,” she said. Again there
was a stabbing ache that might as well have been a tickle compared
to everything else. She did nothing more for several seconds as
though waiting for something. Whatever it was apparently didn’t
happen.

“Good. Okay. So now I…” She trailed off.
Although he felt pressure here and there Cory lost track of all the
sensations as she did her unconventional surgery. Cory lost
consciousness for brief moments, coming back only as she did
something to send a fresh pain wave through him before he faded
again. This process repeated on and on for an unknown amount of
time.

At some point he faded out of consciousness
and stayed that way. When he finally woke up and stayed that way
the room had a new quality to the light, the unmistakable diffusion
that could only be caused by daylight trying to break through
curtains and just partially succeeding.

Cory blinked several times as he waited for
his thoughts to order themselves into something recognizable. At
first he had nothing but confusion at his surroundings, especially
the lack of cold outside air blowing on his skin. It wasn’t until
he realized that he wasn’t outside at all but inside that he began
to piece together memories of the night before. Or at least he
thought it was the night before. He had no idea how long he had
been out. It could have been several days, for all he knew.

As his senses and memories came back it
finally occurred to him to take stock of himself and his
surroundings. The first and most important detail was that the
worst of the pain was gone. He still felt an odd discomfort in his
midsection similar to what had ripped through him as he was shot,
but it was dulled now. He could only assume that meant the bullet
was out but some of its poison remained. Not a lot, probably, not
enough that he wouldn’t be able to recover from it, but he had to
wonder if it was still enough to affect him. He supposed he
wouldn’t know until he had to try later whether his strength and
speed were back to full power.

As for his surroundings they were so
unfamiliar that he almost couldn’t remember the proper words for
the sensations that currently enveloped him. A year on the street
and an unknown number of years in the cage meant he had to fight to
remember what
comfort
was, or
softness
. But that, he
realized, was exactly what he felt. He moved gingerly, almost
afraid that the spongy mass beneath him might swallow him whole if
he let it, and then finally understood he was on a mattress, a
rather comfy (if musty) one at that. There were blankets piled high
on top of him so thick that he had to wonder if they would prevent
him from moving at all. That led to yet another sensation he hadn’t
felt in far too long:
warmth
.

Not that he thought the place he was in would
provide him much in that way if it weren’t for the blankets. Now
that he could see he confirmed what he would have suspected if his
thoughts had been coherent enough the night before—there was no way
this place was considered fit for human habitation by conventional
standards. He could see even through the curtains that several of
the windows were cracked. The paint on the walls was peeling, and
at one point near the doorway of the room—it looked like he’d been
moved into a small bedroom—the plaster on the wall was chipped and
broken enough to reveal bare wood underneath. The carpet had the
distinct smell of mildew, although it wasn’t as bad in here as it
had been out in the hall where the carpet had survived a drenching
at some point.

And yet someone had taken the time to try
turning this drab little cell of a room into something vaguely
resembling a home. The curtains were new, or at least clean enough
for Cory to believe that they had been hung recently. Someone had
hung a couple of thrift-store paintings on the walls, generic
things featuring anonymous farmhouses and barns, with a couple more
against the wall on the floor as though someone hadn’t yet decided
where to hang them. For some reason there was a curling poster on
the wall of some pop star Cory had never heard of called Justin
Bieber, although Cory still didn’t know what he looked like—someone
had scribbled all over Justin’s face with a Sharpie.

Cory listened carefully for any sign of the
woman elsewhere in the apartment, but all he could hear was the
wind howling outside and shaking the windows. The gentle rain had
apparently become something harsher, possibly snow or hail from the
way it pelted the glass.

He gingerly peeled away the blankets,
half-expecting them to come away caked with his dried blood. They
didn’t, although they did reveal him naked from the waist up. He
still had his too-ragged pairs of pants on, but beyond that the
woman had apparently removed everything. He panicked briefly,
afraid that she had thrown them away. It had taken him a long time
to scavenge that much clothing together, and the torn layers of
shirts, pants, socks, and coats were his only possessions in the
whole world. Before he could start to get too upset, however, he
saw a folding chair not far from the foot of his bed with his shoes
and coat. The shirts and socks were missing, but now that his
senses were coming back he realized that the woman might have taken
them to be washed, or at the very least she had probably gone to do
something about the blood.

Although it was still a struggle, Cory sat up
in bed and looked down at the place on his side where he’d been
shot. He could still see the place where the bullet had gone in, a
hot red welt with the slightest hint of scar tissue at the center.
Normally any injury he’d received after being turned into a monster
had healed on its own after only an hour or two without leaving any
scar. About the only bodily damage Cory had ever seen stick with
any of the others was the straight up removal of a body part,
something the guards hadn’t been afraid to do with any of their
little ripening fruit that didn’t cooperate. Cory had gotten out of
there completely intact, at least physically, so this new blemish
was more of an interesting oddity than something he felt the need
to worry about. He wondered whether it would stay or if it would
eventually heal given enough time. Cory, although he knew it didn’t
make a lot of sense, kind of hoped it would remain. It didn’t feel
right to have gone through all that without some kind of physical
mark to show for it.

He poked at the scar and hissed when a small
burst of aches hit him. Whatever the woman had done outside his
sight, she’d apparently gotten the bullet out. However, there had
to still be trace amounts of the poison in the wound, either silver
or garlic still inside. He didn’t know if he would eventually purge
it or if it would stay in him forever, possibly crippling his
vampiric abilities. He would have been okay with that. He knew that
plenty of people would have thought that what he could do was a
gift, but they didn’t understand. They didn’t know the unspeakable
things that had happened in order to make the change, and what that
made him in the mind of whatever had been behind that rickety door
in the dark. Nothing about what he was now was empowering, no
matter what anyone else might ever think.

But now that he was safe (
no, not
safe
, he reminded himself,
I’ll never actually be safe
),
or at least out of immediate danger, Cory had to decide what he was
going to do next. The first and most tempting option was to lie
back down and burrow deep under the covers, almost like he were a
normal person that could just sleep in peacefully on a day off and
enjoy the comfort and security that came with knowing you had a
safe place in life. Of course, he discarded that idea immediately.
He didn’t feel like he deserved it. Things like him didn’t get that
kind of life. And besides, there was no such thing as safety.
Pretending he had it would only make him complacent. Any number of
dangers could come after him when he forgot to always be ready to
run.

He could run immediately, he supposed. As far
as he could hear he was the only person in the apartment at the
moment. The woman was out, and this would be the perfect time to
leave without having to answer any of her inevitable awkward
questions. She would wonder about his teeth, and even though it
hadn’t been as fast as normal his recovery should have definitely
raised an eyebrow. The best course of action would be to get out of
here before she realized what he was and came back with a stake or
something.

Don’t be stupid
, he thought to
himself.
She has to already know
. He thought back to last
night, or at least as much as he could remember, and thought maybe
that was true. If nothing else she wasn’t surprised at the idea of
a vampire, even if she hadn’t expected him to be one. While she’d
flinched at his teeth she hadn’t made the effort to say anything
more about them, and she hadn’t tried to force the issue on taking
him to a hospital. It was a rare person, he had to admit, that
would try to take out a bullet herself rather than take him to a
doctor no matter what he said in protest. That was someone who
either had some idea why he wanted to hide or else herself had a
deep distrust of authority. Especially since she hadn’t called the
police either.

That made sense, he realized as he looked
around the room again. This wasn’t the home of somebody obeying the
law. This was the dwelling of someone who had nowhere else to go,
or maybe something to hide. Perhaps she was hiding from
some
one
. That was the kind of thing Cory could relate to. It
would be nice to know someone else that understood what it was like
to live in fear, someone beyond another vampire. Maybe they could
even hide together.

He immediately pushed that thought out of his
head. No. There could be no trust. Trusting too much was how he had
become a monster in the first place.

(Had it? He wondered for a moment why he had
thought that, but any attached memory broke off and floated away
before he could examine it.)

So it was a terrible idea to trust this
woman, but that didn’t mean he had to run out of here immediately
before she could find him again. That wasn’t even practical. More
than half his clothes were missing, and even though he could
survive the cold where a normal human couldn’t, that didn’t mean it
was pleasant. Even more unpleasant was walking around in the
sunlight. It wasn’t like in fiction where vampires would burn up at
the slightest touch of daylight, but it still itched and burned as
though he were rolling around naked in chili powder. Under normal
circumstances he could go in and out of the sun quick enough that
it barely did anything to him, but he had no idea how long it would
be before he was up to full speed again, if at all.

So his only option apparently was to stay
here at least until nightfall. He promised himself that he would
leave then, whether he had his clothes back at that point or not.
Whatever the deal was with this woman, it wasn’t his deal. Nothing
to do with a normal human would ever be his deal again, and he
would do well to remember that.

In the mean time, though, he saw no reason
not to take advantage of the situation. Lying back down on the
mattress, Cory pulled the cover tight around himself and over his
head. Even if he was partially alert the whole time for some sound
or other sensation that danger was coming, just like always, he
still thought he would be able to get the kind of rest he hadn’t
had in years.