Blood Mate (15 page)

“You need to
sleep so we can work tomorrow. It’s a big day and we don’t have a
lot of time to sort you out.” He meant before no one could legally
keep her here. Unless he could convince them she was sick and get an
injunction from the courts to commit her long term.

“I know my
rights. If you start giving me shit I don’t need for the hell of
it, I’ll sue the hospital.” As she edged back, the doctor and
orderlies moved forward, boxing her in, squeezing out her escape.

“Please, let’s
do this the easy way,” he said as if he were helpless to stop the
big hospital goons from making things hard and ugly.

She knew she
should take the pill. She was in a hospital. She’d be fine. But the
horror of the little orange circle was too great. Her mind locked
down around her choice, the stubbornness rising like steel walls
around her, as her body tightened in response, everything clinched,
every muscle, her mouth pressed into a firm line.

“Don’t come
any closer to me,” she warned after a minute. “Do you know what
crazy is, Dr. Cronan? Crazy is forcing someone against their will to
take a drug. Crazy is locking them up because you don’t understand
their experiences.
This
is crazy.” She was sure he was
breaking about thirty rules already, though he’d pretended to
operate by the books while signing her in.

She’d tell
Dominic. Assuming he even believed her. After all, can a delusional
patient be trusted to testify to the facts of their abuse? Her family
had some pretty vivid imagery of when she’d stood poised with a
letter opener at the ready to slice her skin to prove she had magic
powers.

“Nicole… ”
Dr. Cronan and the orderlies ignored her warning to stay back. Why
couldn’t August have given her useful powers? Like spitting acid.

“My husband is
an attorney. You can’t do this. I know my rights. This isn’t
1922. You can’t treat patients like this.”

“You’ve proven
you’re a danger to yourself and others. The law says I have
twenty-four hours.”

In her mind, she
saw it all fail and go terribly wrong before she acted, but she was
an animal backed into a corner, her lizard brain enacted, concerned
with survival. Her instincts screamed life or death. Fight or flight.
They’d eliminated the flight option. This was the scenario they’d
created.

She tried to
barrel through the doctor and orderlies, managing to slip between two
of them. But they were too fast. They dragged her to a room with gray
walls and flickering florescent lights.

She struggled and
screamed as they strapped her down to a bed. “No! You fucking
psychos! Is this how normal, civilized society is supposed to behave?
Strapping people down? August is going to kill every one of you when
he gets here,” she shrieked, crazy-person spittle coming out of her
mouth.

Her eyes widened
as the needle moved closer. “Please… please don’t do this. I’ll
be good. I’ll calm down. I’m fine. I’ll go to sleep on my own.
Please, please… ”

She winced and
tried to pull away from the pinch, then their faces grew fuzzy and
everything disappeared.

***

She’d been in
the hospital for three days. It was an hour into her daily session
before Dr. Cronan shook his head and said, “You must have the
constitution of a horse. I’m surprised you’re so alert after the
tranquilizers we gave you.” They’d drugged her each night.

Nicole sat in his
office plotting a hundred ways to kill him. But outwardly she was
quiet, submissive, because she’d seen the results of overt
rebellion. If she didn’t heal so fast, she’d have bruises. That
would have been a lawsuit. No way would her husband approve of the
way she’d been manhandled. She wasn’t some homeless vagrant
without family or friends to defend her.

They’d see how
competent she was when they lost their government funding.

The second day Dr.
Cronan had kept her in his office for hours without food, wearing her
down until she agreed to sign herself in for a week. Just a week. She
was afraid they would try to keep her longer if she voluntarily
signed in for any length of time, but surely Dominic wouldn’t let
them keep her longer. He’d promised.

In the daylight,
with the bright afternoon sun streaming in the window, August felt
like a dream. She’d been sure he would come for her, but now…
after three days? Why hadn’t he come? He would be aging rapidly by
now.

As if reading her
mind, the doctor said: “I see your vampire hasn’t shown up to
bust you out yet.”

She couldn’t
tell if he was mocking her. Then she decided he wasn’t. He had a
deeper strategy to employ.

“I don’t know
why he hasn’t come for me.”
Because he’s not real. This is
the truth. This awful place and drugs and doctors.

“I think you do
know. He hasn’t come because he can’t come. He’s a figment of
your mind. Something in there is firing wrong and giving you images
and memories of things that never happened. I know it’s
frightening, but we have a drug called Risperidone that I believe
might help. Alternatively, there is a new drug on the market that was
just approved that has shown a lot of promise in clinical trials.

Before we checked
you in, you said you were telling us because you wanted to get away
from him. Don’t you see? That’s a cry for help, a plea to stop
the delusion. Whatever need or purpose he was filling for you has
ceased. Now he’s become frightening—something you want to get
away from.”

Nicole stared out
the window. That wasn’t right at all. It wasn’t as if August had
started out as a fantasy romance hero vampire, sweeping her off her
feet, showing her the world and buying her fine things. He’d kept
her locked in a cellar for two months when she’d first refused his
advances. It had only been later that he’d made any effort to make
her life with him more bearable.

But the doctor,
like the rest of them, remembered what he wanted to remember, only
what fit into his pet theory.

He shuffled
through his notes, made a few
hmmm
s and
mmm-hmmm
s and
then looked up, his gray gaze boring into hers. “I see you’re
skeptical.”

Brilliant
assessment. She crossed her arms over her chest and squeezed her
mouth tighter. They could inject her with whatever they wanted, but
they couldn’t make her participate in this.

“Delusions are
slippery things, Mrs. Rose. It’s not always happening in real time.
You said he kept you for two months in a cellar. That doesn’t mean
you spent two solid months having that part of the delusion. If you
had, don’t you think your husband would have noticed something was
wrong? No, the delusions may have started much later in the time line
of what you gave me, then, as a self-protective measure, your brain
retroactively filled in earlier memories to hold the fantasy together
and to aide you in seeking help. It got too big for you. And that’s
okay.”

Dr. Cronan seemed
to think the brain was a mystical element. She wasn’t convinced,
and the expression on his face said he knew it.

“Let me try it
this way. If you had been kept in a dark cellar for months with other
prisoners, if you’d watched a vampire kill people in front of you…
those kinds of experiences would cause symptoms you don’t exhibit.
Post-traumatic stress, for example.”

“I-it’s the
bond. He can use it to protect me.”

Now it was Dr.
Cronan’s turn to be skeptical. “I think that’s as far as we can
get today. I’m going to start you on the Risperidone this evening.
If you do well the rest of the week, you can go home. Think of this
as a vacation, a safe space where August can’t reach you.”

“I want to go
home
now
.” She sounded like a preteen enraged by a minor
unfairness, instead of the gravity of what it was. They’d kidnapped
her like August had. At least the vampire had a compelling reason to
need her to see things his way. They only needed the comfort of
keeping their view of reality in place.

“You can go back
to your room, Mrs. Rose. I’ll check back in with you later this
evening. Don’t forget dinner at five.”

The last thing she
wanted to consume was factory-separated chicken nuggets and green
Jell-o. How could modern medicine claim authority on anything about
health if they were feeding patients artificially colored gelatin and
chicken by-products as if it were the elixir of healing?

Nicole lurched
down the halls like a zombie, back to her room, the room they’d put
her in after the first night strapped to the bed. She had a roommate
named Stacy who pulled and ate her own hair. The girl had bald
patches but couldn’t stop. Of all the compulsions to have.

Nicole wasn’t
sure why such a minor mental disorder should require hospitalization,
but from what Stacy said, it interfered with her work and life, and
her parents were driving her around the bend. So this was revenge
healthcare—where she was the one getting revenge.

At least it was
working out for someone here.

Nicole sat on the
bed, staring out the window. Unlike Dr. Cronan’s office, this
window had bars. In his office, it was almost like normal life. She
could nearly pretend she was here of her own free will. But in her
room, the bars on the window reminded her that this was prison
without due process.

She’d managed to
keep the doubt out of her head for most of the day. She’d had an
answer for every objection Dr. Cronan had posed to her vampire story,
but now, alone, it began to gnaw at her again like a rat working its
way through a wall, tunneling through to the truth.

Why hadn’t
August come for her? She’d thought he’d come for her the first
night, or at least the second. But three days without feeding? Except
when she’d run away, he’d fed every night. It wouldn’t be hard
to find her with the bond now stronger than ever. Worst case
scenario, he could force Dominic to tell him where she was, then
erase the interrogation from his mind.

And yet, the only
real thing right now was Nicole Rose sitting in a mental institution,
plagued with stories nobody else believed—just like Uncle Chuck.

Inside the stark
gray room, she was less sure of her version of events. Maybe she’d
taken the bullets out of the gun and done something with them but
didn’t remember. A hazy sort of memory floated to her mind of her
doing just that. But was it a real memory, or visualizing what it
might have been like… like a story someone has told you over and
over about your life that you think you remember, but really only
visualized. Her mother used to tell her stories of things she’d
done when she was a toddler. She didn’t have memories from that far
back, but she could picture them in her head after hearing them so
often. Side by side those pictures were as real as any true
recollection.

Maybe she’d
imagined her scratches healing before her eyes, too fast for anyone
to see. Maybe it really was Dominic’s blood last night. Maybe she’d
needed it to be partly hers because there was so much, and the guilt
had eaten at her for lashing out like that. If she could hallucinate
a whole vampire and elaborate back story that made her his savior,
wounds that healed in seconds were nothing.

Dr. Cronan’s
voice echoed in her mind. Earlier in the session he’d asked: “Do
you feel useful in your life? Perhaps you needed to be needed more.”

She’d said
Dominic needed her, but it didn’t feel true. Her husband loved her,
but he didn’t need her. If she were being honest, her flower shop
job had been a bored affluent housewife job. It got her out in the
world, interacting with others. But did it make her feel useful, like
she was contributing something of value to the world? Not like
Dominic’s job must.

Had she snapped
one day? She stared at her bare wrist. They’d taken the bracelet
off her when they’d put the straitjacket on. Would August have
really let her keep it all that time in the cellar? Was that
realistic, given his supposed goals? Was it her touchstone back to
reality?

She scrutinized
each piece of her memory, seeking signposts that would cause the
illusion to fade out like a bad dream and bring the true reality
forth.

Maybe something
had happened soon after her husband had given her the bracelet. She
tried to force herself to remember. Maybe it hadn’t been as
dramatic as what her mind had created, but maybe they’d grown
distant. Had she filled in the gaps with a man who needed her?

Did need give one
higher purpose than love? But she couldn’t even cheat on her
husband with a fiction, a ghost. Was that why she’d finally had to
escape?

She scooted up the
bed until her back was pressed against the wall, and watched the
door. She waited for it to open, for August to burst through and get
her out of here, but it stayed shut. The hospital hummed along—a
place where magic couldn’t exist—and she closed her eyes.

There never was an
August.

Chapter Twelve

August smiled at
the receptionist in the psych ward. “Buzz me through, dear.”

Her hand trembled
as she pressed the button, and the gate unlocked. He winked at her
and passed through.

He’d pushed
himself to the very edge, right before the worst of things. It had
been painful but the decay hadn’t started. He looked older and felt
older, but he thought if he could try to give Nicolette a few short
days in between their meetings at first, it might make things easier
for her.

She’d been
missing when he’d gone to her house. At first he’d thought she’d
run again. He’d gotten the truth out of her husband, and it had
taken a strong force of will to stop himself from ripping the human’s
head from his shoulders.

She’d made
another escape attempt, this one more desperate than the last. What
would be next? Suicide attempts? Even if she were able to work up the
nerve to end her life, it would do her no good. That door had been
forever closed. The other option would be true madness. If he didn’t
show her the futility of this, she’d never make peace with the turn
her life had taken.