Eternity and a Year (6 page)

Carrie squeezed her eyes shut, and hot tears leaked out of the sides. “Come to the hospital with me,” she said, sure she couldn’t stand to leave his side.

“I want to, but I don’t think—”

“Come with me!”

“Carrie, the blood…there’s too much of it! You don’t know how hard this is for me, just to hold you!”

She sobbed, as much from frustration as from pain.

He stroked her hair. “I would if I could.”

“Then go to the apartment,” she begged. “Wait there for me to get back. Promise you’ll wait there!”

“Carrie, I don’t want to lead her to you. It’s too dangerous!”

“Promise me! Promise me, or I’ll come straight here as soon as I leave the hospital!”

Sirens wailed in the distance.

“Promise me!”

“I promise,” he sighed.

The ambulance turned onto the street, its vibrant lights casting an urgent pattern of red and blue against the alley wall. Brendan slipped into the shadowy building as it stopped, and Carrie’s heart sank as he disappeared from view. The paramedics’ feet beat a hurried rhythm against the alleyway’s dirt floor, and a sharp pang of longing sliced through Carrie’s heart as they carried her away from Brendan, abandoning him to the night and whatever treacherous creature lurked beneath its cover. Perhaps, Carrie thought in anguish, a huntress hid in the next alleyway, thinking about her first encounter with Brendan, anxious for another taste of him.

* * * *

Carrie winced as the long anaesthetic needle burrowed into the gash in her back, pushing deep into her muscle. She wondered if the pain of drugless suturing could really be worse than the agony of injection. She shuddered when the needle was finally withdrawn. Though the nurse set the syringe aside, it still felt as if it were lodged in her body. The doctor began to close her wound, and the tugs at her numbed flesh sparked a fresh wave of nausea.

“Twenty-four stitches,” the doctor said as he replaced his suturing paraphernalia on the steel tray the nurse proffered. “They’ll need to be removed in ten days.”

Carrie nodded and lay still while the nurse covered the wound with a bandage. When the woman had finished and given her care instructions, Carrie rose stiffly from the table and made her way towards the desk near the lobby, still numb.

The night air was cool and crisp outside the hospital. Carrie stood on the sidewalk in the light that poured through the tall, glass doors and windows, waiting for the cab she had called. She sighed. Her adventures of the day had added up to be quite expensive, and her modest income as Anne’s retail assistant left little room to accommodate such anomalies. She had charged the expense of her trip to the hospital to one of her already overburdened credit cards. She and Brendan had lived comfortably together before his disappearance, but now… She surprised herself by chuckling at the thought of a vampire trying to hold down a regular job.

The yellow taxi she’d called rolled up to the kerb, and she settled gingerly into the back seat as she gave the driver her address. Butterflies fluttered in her stomach. Had Brendan kept his promise? She tried not to imagine the vampiress who had converted him entering his dark, dusty lair as the ambulance’s lights faded into the night. A wave of panic enveloped her anyway as a terrible scene of reunion played out before her mind’s eye, and nausea washed through her again. She tried to bow her head towards her knees, but a stabbing pain and an uncomfortable tightness in her lower back prevented it. She rested her head against the cold window instead and tried to think of anything other than what the vampiress might try to do if she found Brendan again.

Carrie’s heart leapt in nervous excitement when her apartment finally came into view. She could see the living room light was on inside, and she knew it hadn’t been when she’d left. She paid the cabdriver with the last of her cash and hurried down the walkway to her unit.

Brendan met her at the door. “How was it? Are you all right?” He pulled her into a hug, careful not to squeeze below her shoulders.

“I’m fine,” Carrie replied. “The numbing was the worst part. I got twenty-four stitches.”

Brendan winced. “I’m sorry, baby.”

“It’s all right. I have to say, I’m actually kind of relieved to know that’s how you would have acted if she’d shown up there.”

Brendan stiffened. “I hope you didn’t think I wanted anything to do with her. I don’t.”

“I know.” She slid her arms beneath his and wrapped them around his waist. The pain and expense of her injury were worth knowing for sure, she thought privately. She never would have confessed that to Brendan—it would have hurt him to know his word hadn’t reassured her completely. A little over a year ago, it would have. But things had changed, and her mind was still reeling with revelations and their painful consequences, leaving her trapped in an emotional purgatory.

“Are you hungry?” Brendan asked. “You haven’t been home all day, and you lost a lot of blood.”

“Yeah,” Carrie replied. “I guess I am pretty hungry.” It felt good to have such a simple, ordinary need to compete with the many more complex emotional wants and demands that had grown tangled in her mind.

“Let me make you something.” He released her and hurried to the fridge. “Uh,” he called from the kitchen a minute later, “there doesn’t really seem to be anything to make.” The sound of cupboard doors opening and closing filled the air.

She sighed. “I’m out of pretty much everything. I need to go grocery shopping.”

“It’s only Monday,” he said. “You don’t get paid until Friday. Do you have any money?”

Carrie sighed again and settled carefully onto the couch. “No.” So much for not tipping him off to her financial troubles.

Brendan crossed the distance between the kitchen and living room in a few strides and sat on the couch beside her. Pity filled his eyes, and it made her feel pathetic.

“It’s not much,” he said, digging into his pocket, “but here.” He placed a few folded bills in her lap.

“Thanks. Where’d you get this?” she asked, thumbing through it. It was about eighty dollars.

He frowned. “That guy who attacked you yesterday. This was in his wallet.”

She stared down at the bills in surprise.

“I took it a little while after you left. He was still around.”

Carrie’s eyes went wide. “You didn’t…I mean…”

“No.” Brendan shook his head. “I didn’t kill him. I just took a few bucks from him, that’s all.”

She frowned down at the money. “Do you…is that something you’ve…”

He laughed a humourless laugh. “That’s nothing compared to what I’ve done, Carrie. It’s a drop in a sea of sin. I told you, I’m disgusting. I’m not human anymore.”

“Have you…” Carrie swallowed and took a deep breath. “Have you killed people?” The thought sent a shiver down her spine, and she struggled not to let it show. She couldn’t imagine the Brendan she’d known—the man who’d knelt before her and asked her to marry him—killing anyone.
He’s changed,
she reminded herself, glancing at his reddish eyes and inhuman pallor as if to remind herself.

“I don’t know.” There was a moment of silence, then Brendan continued. “I don’t know, and it drives me crazy.”

Carrie wanted to ask him how that was possible, but couldn’t bring herself to speak. His tormented expression tore at her.

Eventually, he continued on his own. “I can’t remember everything, Carrie. A few weeks after I was changed, it just all became too much…I felt so hopeless. I blacked out. I don’t remember anything I did for about a month last fall. I woke up in the warehouse—that’s the last place I remembered being before I blacked out—alone. I was thirsty—really thirsty. I hope that means I didn’t hurt anyone, that I didn’t even move. But sometimes I think…what if I did? God, what if I killed someone, and no one knows—not even me?”

He turned to face Carrie, his eyes seeking hers, almost pleading. She half expected them to be rimmed with tears, but there were none, though he certainly looked as if he wanted to cry. She reached out tentatively, taking his hand in hers, her mouth dry.

“I love you, Brendan,” she said, leaning forward to place a kiss on his forehead, as if the simple act of doing so could absolve him of any sins he might have committed.

His shoulders slumped slightly, releasing a little of their tension, and he was silent for several long moments. “As far as I know,” he finally said, “I haven’t killed anyone.”

Her own shoulders relaxed a little, and she was surprised by how relieved it made her to hear him say it, though it certainly brought up another pressing question. “Then how do you…eat?”

“Animals.”

Carrie relaxed a little more.

“People, sometimes.”

 
She straightened, her shoulders suddenly tense again.

“It’s not what you think.” He squeezed her hand, not easing the pressure until she squeezed back. “I lived on dogs for at least a week after I was changed. I don’t kill them either, by the way.” He made a face of displeasure. “It’s a lot easier to resist a dog than a human, especially when your sense of smell is so acute. So I take a little and let them go.”

Carrie wrinkled her own nose, too, imagining burying her nose and mouth in the coat of the sort of ungroomed dog that was likely to roam the city’s alleyways. She suspected there was another element to Brendan’s reluctance to kill than compassion and a dislike for smelly fur, though. What would people think if they found fang-pierced, drained dog corpses strewn about the city?

 
“Then,” he continued, “one night I was on top of a roof when some rival gang members met in an alley below. There was a knife fight. A man was killed and left behind. I—I drained some of the blood from his body. I’ve been trying to do that ever since—look for people who’ve just been killed. I’ve got pretty good at it. I can smell blood from quite a distance. I try to drink from where there are already wounds so people don’t get clued in. And I try not to drain too much of the blood, so that it seems like the blood loss could have occurred naturally from the wounds they’ve sustained.” He paused to laugh bitterly. “As if anyone would believe anything else, anyway.”

Carrie privately agreed with Brendan’s last statement. When he wasn’t around for her to see for herself, only the twinge of the wounds his fangs had inflicted on her kept her from doubting the truth of his new nature.

“And like I said, I try to use animals. Stray dogs…not-stray dogs, deer… Sometimes I go outside the city into the woods.” He paused and frowned, looking away then casting a quick glance at Carrie as if preparing to divulge something of which he was ashamed. “I’ve attacked a few people, too, though I haven’t done that for several months. I didn’t kill them, but…I’m sure it hurt and gave them one hell of a scare.”

“Okay,” Carrie said, steeling herself for further revelations, willing herself to stay calm no matter what he might confess. Whatever he said—whatever he’d done—she wouldn’t tell him to leave again. “What else…are you…I mean, can you die?”

“Not easily,” he replied. “I’ve been shot a couple of times and stabbed even more.”

Startled, she reached out reflexively to place a hand on his knee.

He laughed. “I’m fine. Things like that are no threat to a vampire. To die, we have to have our hearts removed and our bodies burnt to ash.”

“Why remove the heart?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe as one final reminder that we’re not human anymore. We can live without our hearts, but we won’t burn with them intact.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I met another vampire a few months ago. His name was Stephen, and he was passing through the city. He spent a few days in my warehouse.”

A weight left her shoulders, as quickly as it had descended, when he said the word ‘he’, and she breathed a tiny sigh of relief. “Oh.” Apparently she wasn’t as numb as she’d thought. Her heart pounded, still speeding even in the wake of the welcome revelation that the vampire he’d shared his home with had been male.

“So, what else do you want to know?”

Carrie paused for a moment. “How do you become a vampire?” she asked, trying to ignore the twinge of pain the question caused her. “How does it work?” She fought another wave of nausea. She most definitely was not numb, she decided. If she vomited, she would pass it off as a reaction to the pain that had begun to throb in her lower back as the anaesthetic wore off.

“Vampires are venomous,” Brendan replied. “The venom is released from the fangs at will. Normally, it’s released immediately after the bite because it paralyses the victim. To turn someone into a vampire, though, you have to drain all but a handful of the blood from their body without injecting any venom. You have to be able to physically restrain them while you do it.”

 
Carrie withdrew her hand from Brendan’s knee and returned it to her lap, where she began wringing the dirty bills he’d given her as if they were damp laundry.

“Then,” he continued, “you inject the venom. It takes over. The transformation only takes a couple of hours.”

“That doesn’t sound very hard,” she said flatly.

“Well, it’s not easy to leave any blood behind, and it’s difficult to wait until the last minute to release the venom.”

“Why?”

“Because it feels so good.”

“It feels good to release the venom?”

Brendan nodded. “Almost like…” He lowered his gaze.

Carrie turned away—he obviously wanted her to change the subject—and retrieved her purse from where it rested at her feet. “I almost forgot,” she said, “I got you something today.” She withdrew the extra cell phone and tossed it to him. “Now you don’t have to send me infuriating flower messages. We can talk any time.”

Brendan stared down at the device in surprise. “Thanks, but…can you afford this, Carrie?”

She shrugged. “I don’t really care. Until a couple of days ago, I thought you were probably dead. I would have given my right arm to talk to you then, and I still would.”

He leaned in to kiss her forehead. “Thank you. I’ll start helping you out with money.”

She eyed him apprehensively.

“It’ll just be whatever I take from criminals,” he promised. “Just a little here and there. Better to go to you than to buy guns or drugs.”