Eternal Kiss (18 page)

I woke up cold, a chilled-to-the-bone kind of cold, with only a thin sheet pulled up to my chin. Under me, my bed was rock hard. I stretched and my muscles screamed in protest.

Damn, I really needed a workout.

I laughed at the thought. I’d been shot in the chest. Something told me it’d be a while before I was training again.

I inhaled, and resisted the urge to gag as my nostrils filled with the stink of antiseptic and chemicals. The smell of a hospital, bringing back old memories. I shivered. At least I wouldn’t be going back to
that
hospital again. Almost worth being shot.

I wiggled my fingers and toes. God, everything ached and I was freezing. Did they have the air-conditioning on? My bed was so cold it was like lying on a marble slab.

I rubbed the bed … and my fingertips squeaked across the surface. I stopped. Mattresses didn’t squeak. Was it covered in plastic? Did it need to be? Had I pissed myself?

I lifted my head. It took some effort—my head was flat on the bed. No pillow? I looked down and caught the flash of my reflection. I was lying on a metal table.

I jumped up so fast I nearly tumbled to the floor. I looked around. Metal. All I saw was metal. Metal table. Metal equipment. Metal trays covered with metal surgical instruments.

Had I woken up in surgery? Oh, God. Had they
finished
? My fingers flew to my chest, finding the spot under my left breast where the bullet had—

There was no bullet hole. No stitches. No bandages.

And no heartbeat.

I shook my head sharply, and pressed my fingers to the spot and closed my eyes, trying to feel …

There was nothing to feel. My chest didn’t move at all. No
heartbeat and no breathing.

As I turned, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the bank of metal berths behind me. I saw me—just me, same as always, tanned skin, brown hair, green eyes, gold pendant gleaming on my chest.

I caught the pendant and ran my fingers over the points of the star. The Star of David. Now I knew why Marguerite had been so happy to see me wearing my pendant. So they wouldn’t embalm me.

I heard the words of the man who’d shot me.
Like Davidoff’s going to complain. I gave him the excuse to test his secret experiment.

An excuse to test whether their genetic modification had any effect on my supernatural blood-right, my destiny. To die … and rise again.

“Katiana.”

I glanced over to see Marguerite in the doorway. She stepped inside and pulled the doors closed.

I couldn’t have been asleep long, but she looked like she hadn’t fed in weeks. She was pale and unsteady, her eyes sunken and red.

“Guess you were right,” I said. “I’m not a werecat.”

Her face crumpled. I didn’t ask if she’d known I was a vampire. Of course she had. That’s why she’d been assigned to me. Why she’d taken me away. I’d always felt like Marguerite was more my family than my parents had ever been. Now I knew why.

I didn’t ask why she hadn’t told me the truth. I knew. Of
every supernatural creature I could have been, this one would be the biggest blow, and she’d wanted to spare me the truth until I was older. I suppose she figured she had plenty of time before I needed to know. Time to let me grow up. Time to let me be normal.

A thought struck. “So, I’m going to be sixteen forever?”

“No, no,” she said quickly. “That was one of the modifications, with the experiment. You are supposed to live a normal life, with only the other powers of a vampire.”

Supposed
to. That was only a theory, of course. No one could know for sure. I’d age or I wouldn’t.

“Someone’s coming.” The words slipped out before I realized I was saying them. I turned toward the closed hall doors, but didn’t hear anything. Still, I knew someone was out there. I could feel him.

A shark’s sixth sense.

The perfect predator.

I shivered. Marguerite started to hug me, then lifted her head, catching the same weird sense, and quickly handed me new clothing. I took it and we hurried to the corner. Whoever was coming down the hall passed the room without stopping.

“So what happens now?” I whispered as I dressed. “The Edison Group must know I’m here. They’ll be waiting for me to … rise.”

“They are.”

“And when I disappear? They’ll know. They’ll come—”

“I have made arrangements. Money can buy many things.
The records will show you were cremated by accident. You cannot be reborn from that. They will think they have lost you. We are safe.” She helped me into my shirt and caught my gaze. “I know you have questions, Katiana. There is so much you must be wondering.”

There was. So much. So many questions. So many worries and fears.
Too
many. I pushed them aside and focused on the easiest question, the only one I could deal with.

“Can we go home?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“Then, right now, that’s all I want.”

She nodded, put her arm around me, and led me from the room.

One

B
Y THE TIME
the train pulled into the station, and Lauren wound her way down the stairs and out onto the desolate stretch of York Street, the sun was only a pale yellow sliver of warning slipping fast below the darkening horizon. She didn’t like being out after dark—no one did these days—but she needed the job, and so here she was hurrying past empty storefronts, abandoned cars, and long-gone ironworks factories untouched by Brooklyn’s gentrification boom. It was July in the city, the heat bullying in its humidity. In the distance, the half-lit towers of the Farragut Houses rose like an ugly Lego attempt. She glanced at the tiny ad in her hand: Part-time assistant needed for Angelus House. Good pay and flexible hours. There was an address scribbled on the side, an address she’d been given over the phone when she foolishly booked the appointment for eight-thirty, an address she was now trying desperately to find even as her gut told her it was madness to be walking unprotected at this hour. A torn page from a newspaper scuttled along the sidewalk and got caught on her foot. B
LOODLUST
S
ICKO
K
ILLS
A
GAIN
read the headline. Lauren shook it from her shoe and hurried along.

Angelus House occupied a corner on one of Vinegar Hill’s cobblestone streets next to a litter-strewn, weed-choked lot surrounded by a rickety fence. It had been a small Victorian hospital that overlooked the Brooklyn Navy Yards at one point, but now tinted-glass privacy windows, thick iron gates, layers of graffiti, and heavy vines obscured its former limestone glory. Lauren buzzed, and when no one opened the heavy security door, she walked around the side looking for a usable entrance.

“You one of them, huh? You one of those freaks?” A dark-haired guy in a Knicks tank stepped out and dropped into a karate stance, brandishing a spray-paint can.

She screamed loud and high, which sent the guy running. A second later, a door banged open, and there was a guy offering her his hand.

“Are you okay?”

Golden. That was the word that popped into her mind. With the glow of lower Manhattan shining behind him, he appeared like a golden god, his long pale hair falling in thick waves to his shoulders. “Do you need help? What are you on?”

“What? N-nothing!” she said in a shaking voice. “There was a guy. He was spray painting something on the fence over there. He took off when you came out.”

The golden one scanned the empty lot, scowling. “What are you doing out here? It’s not safe after dark, and this is private property.”

“I came about the assistant’s job,” she said, showing him the ad still clutched tightly in her hand. “I have an appointment for
eight-thirty. But nobody answered the buzzer at the front door, so I came back here. I’m Lauren.”

“Oh. Jeez. Sorry. Sometimes nobody gets to the buzzer. That’s why we need an assistant. Come on in. I’m Johannes.”

Lauren sat across from Johannes the Golden Boy in a drab chair in a cheerless square of an office with only one dim banker’s lamp for light. He turned a pen end on end while asking her a series of questions: Was she proficient on a Mac? Did she mind answering phones and filing? Would she be willing to run errands during her shift—go for food or supplies that they might need? Did she understand that this was a place for troubled teens and that she might see and hear things that were kind of rough? Was she discreet? Did she spook easily?

She answered yes, no, yes, yes, yes, no.

He stared at her. He had deep brown eyes flecked with gold, which seemed to burn in the lamplight. “So tell me what you know about Angelus House?”

“I know you’re the last hope for the toughest addiction cases. You take in homeless teens, runaways, kids from the projects, the ones everybody else has given up on.”

He stopped playing with the pen. “Why do you want this job?”

Lauren stared at the ceiling and wondered how much she should tell him about herself. About the last three years. Her sister Carla.

“I just graduated from high school. I need a job, and I’d like to give back somehow.”

He glanced at her flimsy resume that mostly consisted of part-time retail jobs. “No college plans? No rushing off to Gimme Gimme You or something?” She thought she saw a hint of a smirk on his face.

“No.”

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

Somewhere else.
It was uncomfortably cold in the room. The air chilled the sweat on her neck and made her want to go outside into the heat again. “I have no idea.”

“You’re really honest.” Golden Boy stared at her, and she couldn’t begin to know what he was thinking. Had she blown it? She must have blown it. “Congratulations, Lauren,” he said, giving her a beautiful smile. “You’ve got yourself a job.”

Johannes insisted on walking her to the subway in the dark. It had begun to rain a little, which only made the humidity worse. “Great. Just what we needed. Our own hater.” Johannes pointed at the wall where the tagger had come back to finish his work. Over the Angelus House insignia of a lone winged knight, the words
Los Vampiros
had been sprayed in red paint, and the letters dripped like blood.

Two

L
AUREN WAS STANDING
on the mostly empty subway platform when she saw the tagger in the Knicks shirt coming her way. She scanned the few people around her—a homeless guy, an old couple having a fight in Chinese, some oblivious hipsters
across the tracks on the Manhattan side.

“I have 911 on speed dial,” she said, holding out her phone.

“Yeah? You get reception down here? Who’s your carrier—the
Matrix
? Look, I’m just trying to warn you, a’ight?” He wasn’t so scary up close. About five-eight with short-cropped dark hair, a face from a Renaissance painting, and a large cross medallion hanging around his slender neck.

“Warn me about what?” Lauren forced herself to make eye contact.

“You need to stay away from those Angelus House assholes. They are seriously bad news.”

“Says the guy who vandalizes buildings and stalks teenage girls,” Lauren said, trying to put some snark into her voice. She hoped he couldn’t tell how uneasy she was. That was the first rule of survival in New York: a shrug and a
that-all-you-got
attitude.

“I’m serious, yo. They go into the projects, and they take people.”

“Yeah. It’s called helping.”

“They’re not helping. They’re
recruiting
.”

“For what?”

“Something very bad. This guy I know, Isaiah Jones, he told me all about it. He used to roll with them, but he got out. Said they were up to some freaky shit. Now he’s in hiding. Won’t even tell his mom where he’s staying.”

Light filled the tunnel. Lauren could hear the train scuttling closer.

“Don’t take that job, yo. You be sorry.”

“Yeah? Says who?”

“Just a friend.”

The train blasted into the station, sending the trash on the platform swirling around Lauren’s feet. The doors opened and she leapt inside, willing them to close again. The guy stood on the platform, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets.

“I got a name for you to remember: Sabrina Rodriquez. She used to be one of theirs. When the cops found her body, there wasn’t a single drop of blood left in it.”

The doors closed with a loud ding-dong that made Lauren jump, and then the train hurtled into the darkness.

Three

O
N
M
ONDAY AT
two o’clock, Lauren showed up for her first day at Angelus House. The buzzer let her in, and inside, a girl with a purple-blue Mohawk and heavy eyeliner greeted her. She smelled strongly of patchouli and looked to be about Lauren’s age or a little older. She wore a sleeveless sundress, which showed off her many tattoos, including one on her neck of the Angelus House insignia.

The Mohawk girl beamed. “Hey, you must be Lauren. Awesome! Welcome to Angelus House. I’m Alex. God! Isn’t it miserably hot out? We’ve got the AC cranked.”

Alex wore an ankle bracelet heavy with charms that tinkled like bells with every step. “We’re, like, soooo crazy happy you’re
here. Seriously? I cannot keep up with the filing and phones and stuff. Don’t get me wrong—it’s all because Angelus House is a successful program, and that is totally cool. But still. There’s only so much we can do without help. Hey Rakim! Come meet Lauren!”

A tall, skinny guy with an old-school fade and oversized black-frame glasses bounded up, his hand out for a shake. “Nice to meet you, Lauren.” He made up a silly song about her name on the spot, rhyming Lauren with Darwin, Sauron, and Kilimanjaro-n, and Lauren found herself hoping that this was the start of something new and good.

They showed her around, introducing her to more smiling teens working on posters or playing ping-pong in the rec room. The first floor had been turned into “sharing” rooms and common areas. The second and third floors housed a dormitory that could take as many as thirty teens at a time. The staff lived on the top floor. On the surface, Angelus House was like every other drug rehab center she’d visited in the past three years. There were the ratty, secondhand couches and chairs grouped around a wall-mounted TV. Here were the requisite inspirational posters sharing space with cheaply framed photos of rehabbed teens doing inspirational activities—a dance-off, arts & crafts day, basketball, quilt-making. Captions had been supplied: “Brian shows us his moves!” “Grace for two, nothing but net!” “Amber and Gabby love DDR night!” “Sing it, Rakim!”

“You know I make that picture look good,” Rakim said with mock seriousness.

Alex punched him in the arm. “Modest much?”

“Looks fun,” Lauren offered. She was never very good at small talk.

They showed her the kitchen area with its chipped cupboards and an old refrigerator marked by a laminated “Newbies” sign. “You’ll need to keep this stocked with healthy foods for the new teens who come in. Juice is great because a lot of the addicts crave sweets. The rest of us can take care of ourselves, so it’s just this one fridge you have to worry about,” Rakim said, showing off the inside of the fridge with its three juice cartons.

“Sorry. I know it’s kinda disgusting in here,” Alex said, making a face. “But once we take over the Navy Yards to do some new building, we’re gonna have, like, crazy amazing new facilities—almost a mini-city.”

“And then we can kiss this shit goodbye,” Rakim said.

“Is Johannes here?” Lauren asked as they made their way down another long corridor turned faintly green by the bad florescent lighting. She’d looked for the golden one on every stop of the tour but hadn’t seen him.

“Usually he does a lot of field work,” Rakim answered. “Going into the projects and out on the streets. He helped save my ass for real.”

“And he is such the hotness,” Alex said, giggling as if she and Lauren were sharing their first girl secret. “Oops, not that way.” She steered Lauren away from a set of stairs leading down into complete darkness.

“What’s down there?”

“Detox,” Alex said, grimacing. “Not pretty. Don’t worry, though. You don’t have to deal with that.”

“Don’t get freaked out if you hear weird noises and shit coming from there. Just turn up the radio and learn to block it out,” Rakim said. “You get used to it after a while.”

Lauren stared down into the darkness. She heard nothing but the asthmatic hum of the overburdened air-conditioning. “What happened to the last girl who worked here—Sabrina?”

Alex looked confused. “We’ve had a Lisa and now we’ve got a Lauren. No Sabrina. Besides, you’re the first assistant we’ve ever had.”

“And not a minute too soon, ’cause I cannot file another thing,” Rakim said, palms up in surrender. “I just remembered: We’ve got kick-ass brownies in one of the sharing rooms. You like brownies?”

Alex offered her arm and Lauren took hold.

“Who doesn’t?” she said.

Lauren worked at Angelus House Monday through Friday from three o’clock until eight. The job was fairly easy, she discovered. As none of the teens were allowed off the grounds and the staff was needed to look after the place, Lauren was often sent outside to do the grocery shopping or pick up medical supplies. There was plenty of time to read. And everybody made her feel like she was wanted, like she was contributing to something important. No one was really around to miss her at home, any
way. Since her sister Carla had been court-ordered to the Eagle Feather Center for Hope and Healing, her parents made the drive upstate every weekend for visiting hours. Sunday nights, they’d come back looking gray, their words of parental encouragement scooped out of them. The TV was on a lot.

Lauren was glad to have somewhere to be with people who might possibly become friends—or more. And there was Johannes. Whenever he swept through, the air in the room felt different to Lauren, charged with possibility. She watched him—leaning one arm against the door frame, lean and long in a worn-thin Vampire Weekend T-shirt that showed the outline of muscle across his broad back, his deep-set eyes taking everything in, that lazy smile showing up along with a pair of dimples and a low growl of a laugh that did things to her stomach. She’d seen the way he was with the teens who came through the doors, how he calmed them, took in their stories, nodding. It was hard to believe he was only twenty-two. Sometimes he’d drop by her desk or pop into the long, musty filing room where she sat sorting through manila folders with badly-typed patient names on the tabs, putting them in alphabetical order.