Secret Vampire (4 page)

"James, would you do something for me? Would
you find out whatever you can about cancer in the
pancreas? Just in case."

"Is that what they think you have?"

"They don't know for sure. They're giving me some tests. I just hope they don't have to use any needles." Another laugh, but inside she was reeling.

She wished James would say something comforting.
"I'll see what I can find on the Net." His voice was
unemotional, almost expressionless.

"And then you can tell me later-they'll probably
let you call me at the hospital."

"Yeah."

"Okay, I have to go. My mom's waitin
"
"Take care of yourself."

Poppy hung up, feeling empty. Her mother was
standing in the doorway.
"Come on, Poppet. Let's go."

James sat very still, looking at the phone without
seeing it.

She was scared, and he couldn't help her. He'd
never been very good at inspirational small talk. It
wasn't, he thought grimly, in his nature.

To give comfort you had to have a comfortable
view of the world. And James had seen too much of
the world to have any illusions.

He could deal with cold facts, though. Pushing
aside a pile of assorted clutter, he turned on his lap
top and dialed up the Internet.

Within minutes he was using Gopher to search the
National Cancer Institute's CancerNet. The first file
he found was listed as "Pancreatic cancer-Patient."
He scanned it. Stuff about what the pancreas did,
stages
of
the
disease,
treatments.
Nothing
too gruesome.

Then
he
went
into
"Pancreatic
cancer
Physician
^-
-a file meant for doctors. The first line
held him paralyzed.

Cancer of the exocrine pancreas is rarely curable.

His eyes skimmed down the lines.
Overall survival
rate
...
metastasis
...
poor response to chemotherapy, ra
diation therapy and surgery ...
pain
...

Pain. Poppy was brave, but facing constant pain
would crush anyone. Especially when the outlook for
the future was so bleak.

He looked at the top of the article again. Overall
survival rate less than three percent. If the cancer
had spread, less than one percent.

There must be more information. James went
searching again and came up with several articles
from newspapers and medical journals. They were
even worse than the NCI file.

The overwhelming majority of patients will die, and die
swiftly, experts
say....
Pancreatic cancer is usually inoper
able, rapid, and debilitatingly painful.... The average
survival if the cancer has spread can be three weeks to
three months....

Three weeks to three months.

James stared at the laptop's screen. His chest and
throat felt tight; his vision was blurry. He tried to
control it, telling himself that nothing was certain
yet. Poppy was being tested, that didn't mean she
had
cancer.

But the words rang hollow in his mind. He had known for some time that something was wrong
with Poppy. Something was-disturbed-inside her.
He'd sensed that the rhythms of her body were
slightly off; he could tell she was losing sleep. And
the pain-he always knew when the pain was there.
He just hadn't realized how serious it was.

Poppy knows, too, he thought. Deep down, she knows that something very bad is going on, or she
wouldn't have asked me to find this out. But what
does she expect me to do, walk in and tell her she's
going to die in a few months?

And am I supposed to stand around and watch it?

His lips pulled back from his teeth slightly. Not a
nice smile, more of a savage grimace. He'd seen a lot
of death in seventeen years. He knew the stages of
dying, knew the difference between the moment
breathing stopped and the moment the brain turned
off; knew the unmistakable ghostlike pallor of a fresh
corpse. The way the eyeballs flattened out about five minutes after expiration. Now, that was a detail most
people weren't familiar with. Five minutes after you die, your eyes go flat and filmy gray. And then your body starts to shrink. You actually get smaller.

Poppy was so small already.

He'd always been afraid of hurting her. She looked
so fragile, and he could hurt somebody much
stronger if he wasn't careful. That was one reason he
kept a certain distance between them.

One reason. Not the main one.

The other was something he couldn't put into
words, not even to himself. It brought him right up
to the edge of the forbidden. To face rules that had been ingrained in him since birth.

None of the Night People could fall in love with a
human. The sentence for breaking the law was death.

It didn't matter. He knew what he had
to do now.
Where he had to go.

Cold and precise, James logged
off the Net. He
stood, picked up his sunglasses, slid them into place. Went out into the merciless June sunlight, slamming
his apartment door behind him.

Poppy looked around the hospital room unhappily.
There was nothing so awful about it, except that it
was too cold, but
...
it was a hospital. That was the
truth behind the
pretty pink-and-blue curtains and
the dosed-circuit TV and the dinner menu decorated
with cartoon characters. It was a place you didn't
come unless you were Pretty Darn Sick.

Oh, come on, she told herself. Cheer
up a
little.
What happened to the power of Poppytive thinking?
Where's Poppyanna when you need her? Where's
Mary Poppy-ins?

God, I'm even making
myself
gag, she thought.

But she found herself
smiling
faintly, with self
deprecating humor if nothing else. And the nurses
were
nice here, and the bed was
extremely cool.
It
had a remote control on the
side that bent it into
every imaginable position.

Her mother came in while she
was playing with it.

"I got hold of Cliff; he'll be here
later. Meanwhile,
I think you'd better change so you're ready for the
tests."

Poppy looked at the blue-and-white striped seer
sucker hospital robe and felt a painful spasm that
seemed to reach from her stomach to her back. And something in the deepest part of her said
Please, not
yet. I'll never be ready.

James pulled his Integra into a parking space on Ferry Street near Stoneham. It wasn't a nice part of
town. Tourists visiting Los Angeles avoided this area.

The building was sagging and decrepit. Several
stores were vacant, with cardboard taped over broken
windows. Graffiti covered the peeling paint on the
cinder-block walls.

Even the smog seemed to hang thicker here. The
air itself seemed yellow and cloying. Like a poisonous
miasma, it darkened the brightest day and made everything look unreal and ominous.

James walked around to the back of the building.
There, among the freight entrances of the stores in
front, was one door unmarked by graffiti. The sign
above it had no words. Just a picture of a black
flower.

A black iris.

James knocked. The door opened two inches, and
a skinny kid in a wrinkled T-shirt peered out with
beady eyes.

"It's me, Ulf," James said, resisting the temptation
to kick the door in. Werewolves, he thought. Why
do they have to be so territorial?

World. I don't want to break any laws. I just want
her well."

The slanted blue eyes were searching his face. "Are
you sure you haven't broken the laws already?" And
when James looked determined not to understand
this, she added in a lowered voice, "Are you sure
you're not in love with her?"

James made himself meet the probing gaze di
rectly. He spoke softly and dangerously. "Don't say
that unless you want a fight."

Gisele looked away. She played with her ring. The
candle flame dwindled and died.

"James, I've known you for a long time," she said
without looking up. "I don't want to get you in trou
ble. I believe you when you say you haven't broken
any laws--but I think we'd both better forget this
conversation. Just walk out now and I'll pretend it
never happened."

"And the spell?"

"There's no such thing. And if there was, I
wouldn't help you. Just go."

James went.
There was one other possibility that he could
think of. He drove to Brentwood, to an area that
was as different from the last as a diamond is from
coal. He parked in a covered carport by a quaint
adobe building with a fountain. Red and purple
bougainvillaea climbed up the walls to the Spanish
tile on the roof.

Walking through an archway into a courtyard, he
came to an office with gold letters on the door.
Jasper
R. Rasmussen, Ph.D. His
father was a psychologist.

Before he could reach for the handle, the door
opened and a woman came out. She was like most
of his father's clients, forty-something, obviously rich, wearing a designer jogging suit and high-heeled sandals.

She looked a little dazed and dreamy, and there
were two small, rapidly healing puncture wounds on
her neck.

James went into the office. There was a waiting
room, but no receptionist. Strains of Mozart came
from the inner office. James knocked on the door.

"Dad?"

The door opened to reveal a handsome man with
dark hair. He was wearing a perfectly tailored gray
suit and a shirt with French cuffs. He had an aura of power and purpose.

But not of warmth. He said, "What is it, James?" in the same voice he used for his clients: thoughtful, deliberate, confident.

"Do you have a minute?"

His father glanced at his Rolex. "As a matter of
fact, my next patient won't be here for half an hour."

"There's something I need to talk about."

His father looked at him keenly, then gestured to an overstuffed chair. James eased into it, but found himself pulling forward to sit on the edge.

"What's on your mind?"

James searched for the right words. Everything de
pended on whether he could make his father under
stand. But what were the right words? At last he
settled for bluntness.