Bone Crossed (19 page)

If my room had been cold, Chad’s was frigid. Frost layered everything in the room like unearthly lace. Chad lay still as the dead in the center of his bed—he wasn’t breathing, but his eyes were open and scared.

Both Stefan and I ran for the bed.

The ghost wasn’t gone though, and Stefan didn’t scare it away. We couldn’t get Chad out of the bed. The comforter was frozen to him and to the bed, and it wouldn’t release him. I dropped the walking stick on the floor and grabbed the comforter with both hands and pulled. It quivered under my hold like a living thing, damp from the frost that melted from contact with my skin.

Stefan reached both hands just under Chad’s chin and ripped the comforter in half. Quick as a striking snake he had Chad up and off the bed.

I collected the staff and followed them out of the room and into the hall, wishing I’d updated my CPR skills since high school.

But, safely out of the room, Chad started sucking in air like a vacuum.

“You need a priest,” Stefan told me.

I ignored him in favor of Chad. “You okay?”

The boy gathered himself together. His body might be thin, but his spirit was pure tungsten. He nodded, and Stefan set him down on his feet, steadying him a little when Chad swayed.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” I admitted. I could see inside Chad’s room to the water that ran down the rapidly clearing window. I looked at Stefan. “I thought ghosts avoided you.”

He was staring into the room, too. “So did I. I ...” He looked at me and stopped speaking. He tilted my chin up and looked at my neck, at both sides of my neck. And I realized that I’d been bitten a second time. “Who’s been chewing on you,
cara mia?”

Chad looked at Stefan, then hissed and used his fingers to make a pair of vampire fangs.

“Yes, I know,” Stefan told him—signing it, too. “Vampire.” Who knew? Stefan could sign; somehow it didn’t seem like a vampire kind of thing to do.

Chad had a few more things to say. When he was finished, Stefan shook his head.

“That vampire isn’t here; she wouldn’t leave the Tri-Cities. This is a different one.” He looked at me, angling his face so Chad couldn’t see what he said. “How do you do it?” he asked conversationally. “How do you go to a city of half a million and attract the only vampire here? What did you do, run into him while jogging at night?”

I ignored the panic in my stomach caused by being bitten twice by some jerk I’d only met once. Calling him a jerk made him less scary. Or it should have. But James Blackwood had bitten me twice while I slept through it ... or worse, he’d made me forget it.

“Just lucky, I guess,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it with Chad right here. He’d be a lot safer if he didn’t know James Blackwood was a vampire.

Chad made a few more hand motions.

“Sorry,” said Stefan. “I’m Stefan, Mercy’s friend.”

Chad frowned.

“He’s one of the good guys,” I told him. He gave me a “fine, but what’s he doing in my house in the middle of the night” look. I pretended not to know what it meant. And I didn’t speak ASL, so he was out there, too. Not fair, I supposed, but I didn’t want to lie to him—and I really didn’t want to tell him the whole truth.

“They need to get away from here,” said Stefan. “And I’m taking you back to the Tri-Cities.” He looked like he was going to say something else, but glanced at Chad and shook his head. Probably something more about Blackwood.

“Let me put some clothes on,” I said. “I think better when I’m not running around in a T-shirt and underwear.”

I dressed in the bathroom—getting a good look at the second bite while I did so. Then I covered them both up with my new used silk-embroidered red scarf.

Go back home?
What would that accomplish? For that matter what had I accomplished here?

I’d come to help Amber and get out of Marsilia’s sight for a little bit. That had succeeded—or at least not hampered Adam’s negotiating. I didn’t know that I’d helped Amber at all ... not yet.

I stared at my pale, sleep-starved face and wondered how I was going to do that. Blackwood had them in his care.

I shivered. Though there was nothing I could pinpoint, no cold spot, no smell, no sound—I could feel something watching me. “Leave the boy alone,” I told my unseen watcher.

And every hair on my head tingled with sensation.

I waited for it to attack or show itself. But nothing else happened, just that momentary connection, which faded more slowly than it had come.

Stefan knocked. “Everything all right?”

“Fine,” I said. Something had happened, but I had no idea what. I was tired and scared and angry. So I brushed my teeth and opened the bathroom door.

Stefan and Chad were leaning on opposite sides of the hallway, discussing something that had their hands moving a mile a minute.

“Stefan.”

He threw up his hands and appealed to me. “How can he think
Dragon Ball
Z is better than
Scooby-Doo?
This generation has no appreciation for the classics.”

I stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. Keeping my mouth turned away from Chad, I said, “You’re a nice man.”

Stefan patted my head.

I checked Chad’s bedroom, but it looked as if nothing had happened, and not even a trace of dampness from the frost remained. Only the two pieces of comforter on either side of Chad’s bed gave any hint of trouble.

“There are a couple of vampires that can do stuff like this,” Stefan said, waving his hand at Chad’s room. “Move things without touching them, kill people without being in the room. But I’ve never heard of a
ghost
with this much power. They tend to be pathetic things trying to pretend they are alive.”

I didn’t smell vampire, only blood—fading as the frost had faded. I had seen the ghost—not clearly, but it had been there. Still, I turned so Chad couldn’t read my lips. “Do you think Blackwood is playing ghost?”

Stefan shook his head. “No, it’s not the Monster. Wrong heritage. There was an Indian vampire in New York—” He looked at me and grinned. He pressed a finger to his forehead. “Indian with a dot, not a feather. Anyway, he and his get all could have done something like what we saw tonight ... except for the cold. But only the vampires he made directly could do it—and he only made Indian women into vampires. They were all killed a century or more ago, and I think Blackwood predated him anyway.”

Chad had been watching Stefan’s mouth with every evidence of fascination. He made a few gestures, and Stefan signed back, saying, “They’re dead. No. Someone else killed them. Yes, I’m sure it was someone else.” He glanced at me. “Want to explain to the kid that I’m more a Spike than a Buffy? A villain, not a superhero?”

I batted my eyelashes at him. “You’re my hero.”

He jerked several steps back from me as if I’d hit him. It made me wonder what Marsilia had said to him while she’d tortured him.

“Stefan?”

He turned back to us with a hiss and an expression that made Chad back into me. “I’m a vampire, Mercy.”

I wasn’t going to let him get away with the morose, self-hating vampire act. He deserved better than that. “Yeah, we got that. It’s the fangs that give it away—translate that for Chad, please.” I waited while he did so, his hands jerky with anger or something related to it. Chad relaxed against me.

Stefan continued signing, and said, almost defiantly, “I’m no one’s hero, Mercy.”

I turned my face until I was looking directly at Chad. “Do you think that means I won’t get to see him in spandex?”

Chad mouthed the last word with a puzzled look.

Stefan sighed. He touched Chad’s shoulder, and when the boy looked up, he finger-spelled
spandex
slowly. Chad made a yuck face.

“Hey,” I told them, “watching good-looking men run around in tight-fitting costumes is high on my list of things I’d like to do before I die.”

Stefan gave in and laughed. “It won’t be me,” he told me. “So what do we do next, Haunt Huntress?”

“That’s a pretty lame superhero name,” I told him.

“Scooby-Doo is already taken,” he said with dignity.
“Anything
else sounds lame in comparison.”

“Seriously,” I said, “I think we’d better go find his parents.” Who hopefully were sleeping peacefully despite Chad’s cry and doors banging into walls, not to mention all the talking we’d been doing. Now that I thought of it, it was a bad sign they weren’t out here fussing.

“We? You want me to come, too?” Stefan raised an eyebrow.

I wasn’t going to tell Chad to lie to his parents. And if something had happened to Amber and her husband, I wanted Stefan with me. Their room was on the opposite side of the house from Chad’s and mine, their door was thick—and they didn’t have nifty hearing like Stefan and I did. Maybe they were sleeping. I clutched my walking stick.

“Yeah. Come with us, Stefan. But, Chad?” I made sure he could see my face. “You don’t want to tell your folks Stefan is a vampire, okay? For the same reasons I told you before. Vampires don’t like people knowing about them.”

Chad stiffened and glanced at Stefan and away.

“Hey. No, not Stefan,” I said. “He doesn’t mind. But others will.” And his father probably wouldn’t believe him about that either—and maybe he’d tell Blackwood about it. Blackwood, I was pretty sure, wouldn’t be happy if Chad knew about vampires.

So we trekked to Amber’s room and opened the door. It was dark inside, and I could see two still figures in the bed. For a moment I froze, then realized I could hear them breathing. On the bedside table next to Corban was an empty glass that had held brandy—I could smell it now that I was through panicking. And on Amber’s side was a prescription bottle.

Chad slid past me and scrambled over their footboard and into bed beside them. With his parents here, he was no longer required to be brave. Cold feet did what all the noise had failed to do, and Corban sat up.

“Chad ...” He saw us. “Mercy? Who’s that with you, and what are you doing in my bedroom?”

“Corban?” Amber rolled over. She sounded a little dopey but woke up just fine when she noticed Chad and then us. “Mercy? What happened?”

I told them, leaving out Stefan’s vampire status. I didn’t, actually, mention him at all except as part of “we.” They didn’t care. Once they heard Chad hadn’t been breathing, they weren’t worried about Stefan at all.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” I admitted to them both. “I’m out of my league. I think you need to get Chad out of here and into a hotel tonight.”

Corban had listened to everything with a poker face. He got out of bed and grabbed a robe in almost the same motion. I heard him walk down the hall, but he didn’t go into Chad’s room. Just stood outside it for a moment and returned. I knew what he saw—nothing but a ripped-up comforter—and was glad he’d been there for the little toy-car demonstration.

He stood in the doorway of his bedroom and looked at us. “First, we pack for a couple of days. Second, we find a hotel. Third, I talk to my cousin’s brother-in-law, who is a Jesuit priest.”

“I’m headed home,” I told him before he could tell me to go away and never come back. I needed to help them do something about Blackwood, who was snacking on Amber, but I didn’t know what. And from the sounds of it, no one had ever been able to do something about this vampire. “There’s nothing I can do for you, and I have a business to run.”

“Thank you for coming,” Amber said. She got out of bed and hugged me. And I knew what she was most grateful for was convincing her husband that Chad hadn’t been lying. I thought that was the least of her worries.

Over her shoulder, Corban stared at me as if he suspected I’d somehow caused everything. I wondered about that, too.
Something
had made their ghost much worse, and I was the obvious place to look for a reason.

I left them to their preparations, packed my own bags, and hugged Amber again before I left.

She still smelled like vampire—but then so did Stefan and I.

STEFAN WAITED UNTIL WE WERE MOSTLY OUT OF SPOKANE, driving past the airport, before he said anything. “Do you need me to drive?”

“Nope,” I answered. I might be tired, but I didn’t like anyone else to drive my Vanagon. As soon as Zee and I put the Rabbit back together, the van was going back in the garage. Besides ... “I don’t think I’ll be sleeping again anytime in the next millennium. How did he bite me twice without my knowing it?”

“Some vampires can do that,” Stefan said in the same sort of soothing voice a doctor uses to tell you that you have a terminal illness. “It’s not among my gifts—or any of our seethe except perhaps Wulfe.”

“He bit me twice. That’s worse than just once, right?” Silence followed my question.

Something wiggled in my front pocket. I twitched, then realized what had happened. I pulled my vibrating cell phone out without looking at the number. “Yes?” Maybe I sounded abrupt, but I was scared and Stefan hadn’t answered me.

There was a little silence, and Adam said, “What’s wrong? Your fear woke me up.”

I blinked really fast, wishing I was home already. Home with Adam instead of driving in the dark with a vampire.

“I’m sorry it bothered you.”

“A benefit of the pack bond,” Adam told me. Then, because he knew me, he said, “I’m Alpha, so I get things first. No one else in the pack felt it. What scared you?”

“The ghost,” I told him, then let out my breath in a gusty sigh. “And the vampire.”

He coaxed the whole story out of me. Then he sighed. “Only you could go to Spokane and get bitten by the one vampire in the whole city.” He didn’t fool me. For all the amusement in his voice, I could hear the anger, too.

But if he was pretending, I could pretend. “That’s pretty much what Stefan said. I don’t think it’s fair. How was I to know that Amber’s husband’s best client was the vampire?”

Adam gave me a rueful laugh. “The real question is why didn’t we suspect that’s what would happen. But you are safe now?”