Craving (21 page)

The pain brought me back to myself. It stabbed through my joint and radiated up my arm and through my hand. Her grip around my throat slackened and as sense returned to me, I looked over to find her greedy mouth sucking at the little trails of crimson trickling down my arm like sap. The gold bracelet was lodged in my flesh and her fingers were wrapped around my palm. Like a woman in the desert, she lapped at my blood and I looked on in horror, until something sparkled in the candles.

Without a thought, in the speed that minds near death are granted, I snatched at it and embedded it into her chest. With a shriek and an impotent gasp, she tumbled backward. I scrambled up, holding my bleeding wrist carefully. Drops slid from my fingers onto the ground in time with the frantic pacing of my heart. I clamped my fingers across the veins and stared at her writhing body in disgust.

She rolled slowly and with the determination of a wounded lioness, pushed herself onto her knees. The knife stuck from her chest just left of center. Hunched and bleeding, she panted up at me, her eyes burning with green fire.

Her laugh was almost inaudible, rattling in her broken chest. “We are . . . the Sangha. We . . . are unstoppable.”

Blood was pooling in my palm. I squeezed harder. “You look pretty stoppable to me, bitch.”

She was losing strength, her eyes glazing over. “Pathetic,” she slobbered. One hand wrapped around the hilt protruding from her blouse. “You will . . . end up . . . . just like her.” She tipped forward and her free hand planted on the ground in an effort to keep her upright.

“What did you do to my sister?”

“Nothing,” she wheezed, laughing until the very end. “She did it . . . to herself.”

I heard shouting at the door. My hand was going numb. I dropped to one knee and looked the witch in the eye.

“What did she do?”

The door thumped with what sounded like the weight of several people and protested with a crack. I reached out and grabbed her hair.

“Tell me what she did!” I demanded.

“Ask Arthur,” she mumbled, then she slid out of my hand and died.

With a smash, the doorframe gave out and Sam toppled through with Unger close behind. The two men looked around and found me when I hit the floor. Sliding in the blood, Sam skidded to a halt beside me and took hold of my arm. Unger’s exhausted face appeared in front of me.

“Did you touch anything!” he shouted.

“Just the knife,” I whispered feebly. “She jumped me.”

His eyes were wide with alarm. He took one look at my wrist and pushed me bodily into Sam’s embrace. “Get her out of here, now. Don’t stop for anything.”

Chapter 15

I woke up because a light was cascading through my eyelids as gracefully as a Mack truck. I could see I was in a hospital, but why? My mouth was dry. I tried to lick my lips, working hard to remember, but couldn’t. When I tried to push the call button and my arm resisted, it came back in indistinct waves like a bad dream.

“Ah, you’re awake,” a voice said. “I’ll get the doctor.”

A few minutes later, the unmistakable sounds of expensive shoes clattered across the sterile tile floor and the rolling wheels of the low stool rattled closer.

A politely interested face leaned over me. “Been a long time since I’ve seen one of these,” he smiled, holding up Ursula’s gold bracelet. “They have a whole display of scarificators at this medical museum I visited when I was traveling through Europe.”

I blinked at him and realized that he would be much less friendly if he knew what had happened. Something was going on.

“Scar . . . what?”

He lifted my arm and began to unwrap the bandages around my wrist. “Scarificators. They’re devices circa Edwardian and Victorian England. Designed for bloodletting.”

I frowned. “Yeah, I kinda figured that.”

He chuckled. “Tough way to learn.” Skin appeared, marred by a deep circular incision stitched shut. “People used to believe that bleeding was a good idea. They thought it drained the body of whatever disease or bad spirits might be living inside it. It was a real treatment for almost two thousand years.”

I wiggled my fingers slowly and watched the tendons move. It hurt so bad I almost wept. “Oooow!”

Eyes glittering in scientific curiosity, he poked my middle finger. “It’ll hurt for a while, but that’s good, it means that the nerves aren’t damaged. It needs to be kept clean and bandaged. In a few weeks, I’ll remove the stitches. This thing”—he tossed the bracelet up and caught it almost lovingly—“has a depth adjustment. It was set pretty deep.”

“Right.” I groaned and leaned back in the bed.

“It must have happened during the fight. The woman probably didn’t even know she’d tweaked the setting,” he mused aloud and set the shimmering cuff on the rollaway table.

I froze. So he knew about the fight, which meant either Unger had gotten me off on self-defense, or I was missing some information.

“Estate sales are lethal, huh?”

My stiffness slid away into the inflatable bed. “Ha ha,” I offered out of sheer relief.

“Well,” he said, lowering himself until he could look at the bracelet at eye level, “I expect you’ll be a bit scarred.” His eyes flicked to mine in expectation.  I gave him a gracious smile.  “So you’ll want to get rid of it, no?”

I lifted my eyebrows.

His tongue traced his lips in expectation. “What do you want for it?”

“Professional interest?” I chuckled.

He gave an embarrassed shrug.

“I’m afraid it’s not for sale,” said that gentle voice from the doorway in its unnamable accent.

I turned and there was Arthur, smiling as sympathetically as ever.

“Too bad,” the doctor said with a sigh, “it’s rare and in incredible condition. It’s an antique!”

Arthur bowed his head. “If you’re a collector, I have some rare books you could buy instead.”

“Any copies of
Gray’s Anatomy
?” he asked with a hungry stare. “My collection kind of has a theme.”

“I could look around.”

Happily, the doctor got to his feet and cast a friendly look at me. “I’m keeping you overnight, but I’ll send you away with enough meds to last you forever and reschedule you to have the stitches out.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

He slid past Arthur with a wave and I was alone with the one person I couldn’t face. He came and sat beside me and I tried to find a way to address what I felt, but wasn’t up to the task. After long moments of my silence, he bridged the gap with a sigh.

“I am sorry I was not there to save you. I fear you have again lost faith in me.”

I looked into his eyes and saw the feeling there. For the first time, I wondered if it was real. Two people in one day had warned me about Arthur. Maybe it was time to confront the issue.

“Estate sale?” I asked, unable to say what I wanted to a face that seemed so honestly worried.

“Sam told them you got in a fight over the bracelet.”

“At eleven o’clock at night?”

“They believed it. You were taken to emergency surgery.”

“I got that,” I said, sitting up, “but what about Ursula?”

Arthur stood up and leaned over me to fluff my pillow. His scent filled my sinuses and made my lack of confidence hurt even worse. I felt like I was betraying him to doubt him, but what else could I do? Nothing made any sense and now I had to interrogate him, a person I had come to believe was above reproach.

“Detective Unger told his coworkers he heard noises and broke down the door, that he saw a woman being choked by Ursula, and that the woman stabbed her in self-defense.”

I covered my face, extending a thought of silent gratitude to the man for protecting me at the risk of his job and freedom. “Weren’t there witnesses, cameras? Won’t they know it was me? How did he explain being there in the first place?”

Arthur sat back down and leaned his chin on the guard rail. “He told them he was there to meet an informant on a case and as far as I know, the only cameras were over the bar.”

“The cash registers,” I muttered.

Arthur nodded. “At the risk of sounding insincere or cliché,” he began, prefacing even though he had always told me not to, “are you alright?”

I sniffled and nodded my head even, though in the back of my mind, I was trying to convince myself that the crazy bitch deserved it. I thought over her words and eventually became frustrated enough to turn to him for help.

“Arthur, what’s a Sangha? Does it share the same root word as sanguine?” It would be just like Ursula to make such a pun.

He went still, looking at me in profound sorrow mingled with concern. “Yes. The oldest word for ‘stone’ is the same as the word for ‘blood.’ From it we get both ‘sac,’ as in ‘sacred,’ and ‘sang,’ as in ‘exsanguinate.’”

“To bleed out.” I shook my head. “What does Sangha mean, then?”

“A gathering of people with a single goal, though it’s usually a reference to a monastic group,” he whispered, and for the first time, looked away.

The time had come. I knew, and he knew from looking at me, that we had come as far as we could without a further exploration of the blank holes in our shared existences; in other words, Eva.

I swallowed hard and gripped the sheets in my good hand. “Why would she tell me to ask you about what Eva did to herself, Arthur?”

He refused to look at me, as if I was scolding him. “I am sorry, Lilith. I kept it from you as long as I could, but now I see I have no choice.”

A shiver went through me, though the room and everything in it was warm. “What are you saying?”

Arthur dropped his face. “She became obsessed and soon I realized that she was not . . . able to survive.” He lifted his eyes. “Ursula is not human. None of them are, at least, not anymore.”

I think my breathing stopped for a few moments until I felt the darkness pulling at me. “What are you saying?”

“It’s complicated,” he said.

I scowled at him. “How do you know?”

“I have been tracking their movements for a long while.”

I stared at him in dumbfounded shock. Was he really going to reach into that magic bag and pull out such a ridiculous excuse? Then I thought about myself and realized it wasn’t that farfetched when compared to my eerily perceptive dreamscapes.

“So what are they?”

“Perversions of a truth,” he said distractedly.

“Meaning what?” I felt trapped, confined inside a stupid horror movie, unable to jump off the celluloid. How could this be happening to me, to Eva? “Vampires? Real, actual vampires?”

He tipped his head in an approximation of a nod. “Among other things. There are as many types as there are types of people.”

“And the Sangha?”

“As you said, some of them crave blood and cannot help it. Perhaps it began with bleedings and evolved into the craving. I do not know.”

“Ursula said Eva had done something to herself, was it . . .” I trailed off, unable to figure out if any words I might know actually applied to them. After all, weren’t they supposed to be immortal, unkillable, afraid of crosses and holy water, unable to walk in the sun?

“It is not as simple as that, I’m afraid,” he replied. Slowly, his hand reached up and tentatively touched my forehead. “An omission is still a lie. Forgive me, but I wanted to keep you from it. Now I see that it is no longer safe, especially in your state.”

“State?” I protested. “I’m fine! The cut didn’t go
that
deep.”

His dark head was already shaking. “You do not understand, Lilith.”

In one heartbeat, my world halted. “Understand what?”

“You are turning.”

I think I retreated into the bed slightly, and thankfully, he let me. “What? What are you talking about?”

He was still, and his face was so sad he looked as if he might weep. “The visions, Lilith, are a symptom.”

“Of what!” I shouted, trying to get away from him.

“Eva seems to have infected you.”

My mouth fell open, but there was nothing to be said. He seemed so sure and when he was sure, he made me feel as if I had no business doubting. How could I question him, especially when his explanation, however preposterous, topped any I might have for the recently discovered psychic powers? Another shiver hit me, stronger than an earthquake.

“This is crazy,” I whispered.

“And serious,” he insisted.

I punched the bed and the compressor clicked on, hissing angrily at me. “Are you trying to tell me that vampires
actually
exist
?”

”They don’t stand a chance,”
I heard and blinked my eyes against tears.

“The myth began somewhere,” Arthur murmured.

“How?” My voice lifted to a dangerously high level. “How did it begin? This makes no sense! I haven’t been near Eva in years!”

He lifted his hand to quiet me and, feeling overshadowed by his empathy, I deflated. “The mind is capable of many things. When it is given the permission, it can even stop death.”

“Stop . . . death?” I repeated in a daze.

He took my hand, closed his long fingers around my palm. “I want to tell you a story. A story about a parrot.”

My eyes darted to his face and bashed at his resolve. “A
parrot
?”

His expression was insistent. He knew how odd it sounded. “A parrot named Himsuka.” I shook my head, but Arthur held sway with a glance. “Himsuka was owned by a king and was so loved by him that often the king would seek his advice. One day, while flying through the jungle, Himsuka happened upon his father and decided to visit his home. He stayed with them for several weeks and because of this long absence from his friend, the king, Himsuka’s family decided to send a gift back with their son. They thought hard about what to give and eventually remembered a tree that grew nearby and bore golden fruit. This fruit,” Arthur revealed calmly, “was the fruit of immortality.”

I thought of the Garden and the Tree of Knowledge, its shiny apples denounced by God.

“Himsuka took it home willingly,” Arthur went on, “but the journey was long and soon, he had to rest. He hid the fruit within a tree and went to sleep on a branch, but this tree was the home of a serpent.”