Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side (20 page)

I searched her face. "Mom?"

"It's serious, but we have reason to believe he'll pull through. He's getting good care. The best care we could give him, safely," she added cryptically.

"What do you mean 'safely'?" Safe care came from
hospitals.
"And whose car is out there?"

"We called Dr. Zsoldos—"

"No, Mom!" Not Dr. Zsoldos. The crazy Hungarian quack who'd lost his medical license for using controversial folk "remedies" from the old country, right here in the United States, where people had the good sense to believe in real medicine. I should have recognized the car. Long after the rest of the county had shunned him, old Zsoldos and my parents had remained friends, huddling around the kitchen table and gabbing into the night about fools who didn't trust "alternative therapies." "He'll kill Lucius!"

"Dr. Zsoldos understands Lucius and his people," Mom said, taking me by the shoulders. "He can be trusted."

When my mom said "trusted," I got the sense that she wasn't just talking about whether the quack should have a license. "Trusted with
what?"

 
"Discretion."

"Why? Why do we have to be discreet? Did you see the blood coming from his mouth? His smashed leg?"

"Lucius is special," Mom said, shaking my shoulders a little, like I should have realized this fact a million years ago. "Accept it, Jessica. He would not be safe in a hospital."

"And he's safe here? In our dining room?"

Mom released my shoulders and rubbed her eyes. I realized how tired she must be. "Yes, Jessica. Safer."

"But he's bleeding inside. Even I can tell that. He probably needs blood."

My mom looked at me strangely, like perhaps I'd finally just grasped some important truth. "Yes, Jess. He needs blood."

"Then take him to a hospital, please!"

Mom stared at me for a long moment. "Jessica, there are things about Lucius that most doctors wouldn't understand. We can talk about this later, but right now, I need to return to him. Please, go upstairs and try to be patient. I'll tell you as soon as I have news on his progress."

Turning her back on me, Mom opened the door to the dining room, and I heard soft voices come from inside the darkened room. My father's voice. Dr. Zsoldos's. Mom slipped in to join their secret cabal, and the door clicked shut.

Furious, scared and frustrated, I ran upstairs, forgetting poor Belle entirely. I'm ashamed to admit that she spent the whole night in the November cold, wandering around the barns and the paddock, her saddle still on her back. I was too unhinged to think about the horse that had carried me to a measure of personal glory just a few hours earlier. Instead, I climbed onto my bed and stared out the window, trying to figure out what to do.

As I debated calling a real doctor myself, I caught sight of my father slipping out the door and hurrying across the yard toward the garage. The light went on in Lucius's apartment, but only for a few moments. It snapped off again, and seconds later, Dad was back, striding across the lawn. I could see, in the moonlight, that he carried something in his hands. Something about the size of shoe box but with rounded corners. Like a paper-wrapped parcel.

I waited until Dad's footsteps passed through the house and the dining room door snicked shut before creeping downstairs, avoiding all the squeaky spots that might give me away. I practically crawled up to the dining room door and turned the knob, opening the door just a crack. Just enough to see inside.

The fire in the fireplace had nearly guttered out, and the dimmer switch on the iron chandelier had been spun to its lowest setting, but I was able to make out the scene.

Lucius was laid out on our long plank dining table, the one we used only for big occasions. He was bare-chested, the bloodstained clothes gone—cut away, I supposed—and his lower half was covered with a white sheet. His face was completely placid. Eyes closed, mouth composed.

He looked like death. Like a corpse. I'd never been to a funeral before, but if someone could look more dead than Lucius did at that moment. . . Well, I couldn't imagine how they'd manage it.

Is he dead?

I stared at his chest, willing it to rise, but if his lungs pumped, it was too weakly for me to discern in the darkened room.
Please, Lucius. Breathe.

When Lucius's chest still didn't move, something cracked open deep inside me, and my entire body felt like a vast cave with a frozen wind surging through the empty spaces.
No . . . he can't be gone. I can't let him go.
I struggled to calm myself. If Lucius was dead, they wouldn't be hovering over him, caring for him. They'd stop treating him. Cover his face.

My mother paced near the fireplace, one hand over her mouth, watching as my father and Dr. Zsoldos conferred in hushed tones over the package that Dad had retrieved from the garage.

Some decision must have been reached, because Dr. Zsoldos retrieved a knife—a scalpel?—from a black bag.
Is he going to operate on Lucius? On our table?

I almost turned away, too sickened to watch, but no, the Hungarian quack didn't slice into Lucius. He simply cut the strings that bound the package and tore open the paper. He lifted out the contents, cradling it as if he was delivering a baby—a wobbly, slippery baby that almost escaped his grasp.
What in the world?

I leaned closer, pressing my face against the crack and fighting to control my breathing so I wouldn't be caught. No one was focused on the door, though. Mom, Dad, and Dr. Zsoldos were all staring at that. . . thing in Dr. Zsoldos's hands. It looked like . . . what? Some sort of pouch? Made of a material I couldn't identify. Something pliable, though, because the package slipped around in Dr. Zsoldos's grasp, like Jell-O in a plastic bag.

"We should have realized he'd have this, hidden," Dr. Zsoldos whispered, nodding so his white beard bobbed. "Of course he would."

"Yes," Mom agreed, moving forward now, toward Lucius. "Of course. We should have known." At a nod from Dad, they both slid their forearms under Lucius's shoulders and gently lifted him, almost to a seated position. Lucius made a sound then, half a moan of pain, half the roar of an angry, injured lion. My damp fingers slipped off the doorknob at that sound. It wasn't quite human and not quite animal. But it was completely chilling, reverberating off the walls.

I wiped my hands on my riding breeches, squinting harder at the scene in front of me.

Dr. Zsoldos leaned close to his patient, holding out the pouch like an offering in front of Lucius's face. The firelight glinted off the doctor's half-moon eyeglasses, and he smiled a little as he urged, softly, "Drink, Lucius. Drink."

The patient didn't respond. Lucius's head lolled sideways, and Dad shifted to catch him, steadying him.

Dr. Zsoldos hesitated, then grasped the scalpel again, using it to pierce the pouch, right under Lucius's nose. The eyes that I feared had been extinguished fluttered open, and I yelped then.

Lucius's eyes, always dark, were pure black now. Deep, deep ebony, as though the pupils had consumed the irises and most of the whites, too. I'd never seen eyes like that before. You couldn't look away from them.

He opened his mouth and his teeth . . . they'd changed again, too.

My parents must have heard my cry, but it was too late. What was happening was happening, and they, too, were transfixed as Lucius tilted his head, sinking his fangs into that pouch, drinking wearily but with obvious hunger. A bit of liquid dribbled down his chin and ran across his chest. Dark liquid. Thick liquid. I'd seen liquid just like that before, not too many hours ago, staining that same chest.

NO.

I closed my eyes, disbelieving. Shaking my head, I tried to think straight. To banish the image of what I thought I'd seen. What I was fairly sure I'd seen.

There was a smell, too. A pungent odor that I'd never smelled before. Well, I'd smelled it faintly before, but now . . . now it was so strong. And getting stronger. I opened my eyes and forced myself to watch again. That aroma—it wasn't like I was even sensing it with my nose.
I felt
it, somewhere deep in the pit of my stomach, or in the farthest reaches of that primitive part of the brain that we'd talked about in biology class. The part that controlled sex and aggression and . . . pleasure?

Lucius pulled himself more upright, supporting himself on one elbow, still drinking lustily, like he couldn't get enough. Finally, though, there was nothing left. The bag was empty. Lucius sort of fell back with a moan that managed, somehow, to convey both raw agony and pure satisfaction, and Dad grabbed his bare shoulders just in time, easing him onto his back again.

"Rest, Lucius," Dad urged. Mom stepped in with a cloth to wipe his chest, where the blood had spilled on him. . . .

Blood. He was drinking blood.

I squeezed my eyes shut again, more tightly this time. Something strange happened then, because I was obviously crouched on a solid, wooden floor, which could not move, and yet it started pitching and whirling under my feet. The whole house was heaving around me, and even when I opened my eyes, trying to get my bearings, it was only to feel my eyes spin of their own accord toward the ceiling, which faded away like a movie screen at the end of the film.

I awoke later that same night in my own bed, dressed in my flannel pajamas, but confused and disoriented, as if I'd suddenly found myself in a foreign country, as opposed to my own bedroom. It was still dark. I lay as still as possible, eyes open, just in case the room started lurching and the ceiling started to fade again.

The house didn't shift, though, even as I replayed, in vivid detail, everything I'd seen. Everything I'd felt.

I'd seen Lucius drink blood. Or had I? I had been woozy. Confused. And that smell. . . Maybe Dr. Zsoldos had dosed Lucius with some sort of heady Romanian liquor or potion or something. Maybe I'd misunderstood, in my panic and my fear.

But the one thing I couldn't explain away was what I'd felt when I'd actually believed Lucius was dead.

Grief. The deepest grief I could imagine. Like a jagged hole ripped in my soul.

That. . . that was the part that really had me freaked. So freaked, in fact, that I slipped downstairs again in the middle of the night, creeping into the dining room. The fire had been stoked back up, and Lucius was still on his back on the table, but there was a pillow under his head now. A warmer blanket had been placed over the sheet, too, covering him from shoulders to toes. My dad was still in the room, dozing in the rocking chair, snoring lightly, but Mom was gone, and Dr. Zsoldos was gone, and his bag, and the pouch I'd probably dreamed. . . .

I stole up close to Lucius's face. There were no traces of red on his lips, no stain down his chin, no hint of a change in his mouth. Just a pale, injured, now-familiar face. As I watched him, he must have sensed a presence, or maybe he dreamed, because he shifted slightly, and his hand dropped off the table. The position looked uncomfortable, so after waiting a moment to see if he would move again, I gently grasped his wrist and replaced it on the table. In spite of the blanket and the fire crackling just a few feet away, his skin was so cool to the touch . . . cold, actually. He was always so cold. My fingers slipped down, lacing with Lucius's for just a moment, to offer him some comfort or warmth.

He was alive.

I started weeping then, as soundlessly as possible, desperate not to wake Dad. I just let the tears run down my face, dripping onto our clasped hands. Lucius drove me insane. He
was
insane. But no matter. I didn't want to feel that sense of profound loss again. Never.