Kissing Corpses (12 page)

“It's okay now,” I said, trying to reassure my baby brother. “Cody saved me. It will be okay. It's over.”

“
Visiting hours are over,” one of the nurses said.

“I don't really give a damn about visiting hours. This is important,” Gilchrist growled. I opened my eyes. The room was dark but the TV flashed blue light across my bed. “I need to talk to her.”

“Sir, you'll have to go back through the lobby and come again in the morning.”

“Wait,” I said. “Let him in. Please? Just ten minutes?”

The nurse looked down at me. She was a middle-aged woman with over-bleached hair, just trying to do her job. She looked back at Gilchrist, shook her head, and walked back down the hall.

“Where's Cody?” Gilchrist asked.

“I don't know. I've barely been awake all day. Geneva said the police talked to him.”

“That's great. So what happened to the vampire?” he paced around the foot of the bed.

“Cody staked him with a piece of a picket fence.”

“And then?”

“And then... and then the police came and I passed out?”

“What?” he stopped and braced his hands on the rail at the foot of the bed. “You let the police take the body?”

“I'm sorry, I didn't think to protect the big secret. I lost a lot of blood.”

“I don't give a fuck about keeping vampires a secret,” he snapped. “You staked him and then just let the police have the body?”

“Cody staked him.”

“Son of a bitch! Do you realize how many people you may have gotten killed?”

My head pounded. “What are you talking about?”

“He's not dead!”

“I thought vampires were all dead.”

Gilchrist tugged at his hair. “Staking a vampire doesn't destroy it. It freezes it. He's paralyzed. The moment the coroner pulls that piece of wood out, he'll snap to life and go on a rampage. He's gonna be wicked thirsty. He'll need blood to heal and he won't discriminate. Then he's going to come for you.”

“What?” I sat up quickly. Gilchrist ran around the bed and pulled the IV out of my arm. I shouted in surprise. “You can't be here when he wakes up.”

“Excuse me,” the nurse said from the doorway. “What in the hell are you doing?”

“Checking out,” he replied before pulling me to my feet. “Let's go.”

“Sir, you can't just take her--”

“Shut up!” he barked.

“How long has it been dark?” I asked

“Twenty minutes,” Gilchrist said. “We need to find a safe house.”

We ran down the hall to the back stairs. Gilchrist started running down the stairs and I followed, fueled by adrenaline. One of the back emergency doors was propped open at the ground floor, and we ran out onto the loading dock. Gilchrist pulled a key ring out of his pocket and clicked the remote. A couple of doctors were sitting on a smoke break and one of them shouted after us as we ran for the parking lot.

“Excuse me,” he yelled. “This is not a patient exit.”

Fire alarms went off in the hospital.

Gilchrist stopped next to a silver Subaru Forester. The car looked like a Jeep and a station wagon had mated. “I think our friend Rawdy is awake,” he said, opening the driver's side door. “Better hurry.”

When I got in the car, I found that Gilchrist had brought my bag and my purse from Cody's house. He pointed his thumb toward the back seat and told me to change into some real clothes.

“I'm not going to change so you can watch me in the rear view mirror,” I argued.

“I really don't care to look at your skinny twenty-two year-old ass,” he grumbled.

“Twenty three.”

“Don't care. You're still an obnoxious teenager to me.”

When we pulled up outside the Plains Hotel, Gilchrist went around the side of the building to scout it out, and I quickly changed. He sent me in to rent a room. When I came back with the key, Gilchrist had loaded three large bags onto his own back and left mine in the car for me to worry about.

“Why did we pick the historic hotel?” I asked. “Isn't that a bad idea?”

“Nope. It's a great idea. It's the perfect location for my plan.”

We hurried into the building. Gilchrist seemed to struggle with one of the bags, but when I tried to help him, he snapped. “Don't touch it,” he said. “You break this one, our defenses are down.”

We entered a room decorated with barn red bedspreads and statuettes of cowboys. There were two double beds and Gilchrist set the bags on the bed closest to the door and extracted a small, red generator. He set to work starting it up. When it was purring softly (or softly for a generator) he placed it at the open window to ventilate. I watched, unmoving, as he pulled out a pair of light fixtures with long thin bulbs and hooked them up to the generator.

“Are we sleeping with the lights on?” I asked.

“Would you prefer to wake up in a casket?”

I sat down on the bed closest to the window. “I suppose sleeping in broad daylight is better.”

“Good. We'll make it through the night and tomorrow we'll talk about how we're going to get rid of him for good.”

“What about my family?” I asked.

“You'll only worry them if you call them. The less they know, the safer they are. Staying away is the best you can do for them. You're just going to have to hope and pray that if he goes to them, they have the sense not to piss him off.”

I climbed under the covers of the bed I had chosen. I had undergone a blood transfusion last night. I needed my rest.

Gilchrist pulled back the covers on his own bed and placed a device that looked like a yellow space gun on one side before putting the covers back.

“What's that?” I asked.

“Insurance,” he said. “It's a UV drug detection gun. It bounces ultra-violet light off of surfaces and back into the gun, enabling it to read the tiniest traces of the chemicals used to make methamphetamines. Good for busting meth dens and for freezing vampires.” He sat on the foot of the bed and pulled off his work boots before heading to the bathroom to wash his face. When he came back, his blue chamois work shirt was draped over his arm and he was wearing a worn, but clean undershirt. I could see more scars on his arms than just the vampire bite he had shown us on Sunday.

He picked up the TV remote.

“Don't,” I begged.

“We need to know if he got out.”

“We can watch the news tomorrow. Please. Just... can I sleep one night without having to think about how many people I got killed?”

Gilchrist nodded. “Alright. Goodnight, kid.”

“Goodnight.” I whispered, closing my eyes. “Thank you.”

I dreamt of Cody that night. We were laying in bed, dressed in flannel pajama pants and our college t-shirts. We were talking; I'm not sure about what. Then we were making love. The touch of his hands on my arms felt warm and real. When I opened my eyes and looked into his, he had changed. Rawdon stared back at me. His touch was so cold that it burnt my skin. I screamed and fought, but he held on to me.

I woke up in my bedroom. My body was being pressed into my bed. My lungs were constricted. I couldn't move. I couldn't draw enough breath to scream. He was standing at the foot of the bed. He was climbing over me, pressing loving kisses to my legs and hips while I fought to move my limbs and scream.

I awoke with Gilchrist sitting fully dressed on the bed next to mine, staring at me. I sat up, rubbing the sleepy seeds out of my eyes with the odd feeling like someone had just walked in on me naked. Was he watching me sleep? Did I talk in my sleep? Cody had told me once that I did sometimes.

“What?” I asked, put off.

“Took you long enough,” he said. “It's nearly one.”

“In the afternoon?”

“Yep. And you don't even have those happy hospital drugs to blame anymore.”

“Sorry, haven't been sleeping well, what with the vampire trying to make me his bride.”

“Yeah, at least if you had lead a normal psychopath on, he'd have the decency to stalk you during the daylight hours, too.”

“Fuck you,” I snapped.

“I made coffee. You should have one. It'll improve your mood.” Gilchrist got up and walked across the room. I watched him sit down at the desk, which had held a lamp, a cowboy statuette, and a pad of hotel stationary the night before. Now it was covered in crossbows and one gleaming scimitar.

“Gilchrist,” I started, wondering if he would prefer I call him Liam. “About weaknesses of vampires... I feel like last night can't be all Cody's fault, as you didn't give us a full run down of how to actually kill him.

“Fire and beheading.” Gilchrist started to disassemble a crossbow to clean it.

“That's it?”

“Yep.”

“What about silver?”

He snorted. “We chasing a werewolf?”

“No. Wait, are they real?”

“Silver is not toxic to vampires.”

“And garlic?”

“It's unpleasant,” Gilchrist said, glancing over his shoulder at me. “But I would find you unpleasant, too, if you ate a clove of garlic-- not that I don't already find you unpleasant, mind you. It permeates the blood. The odor gets back into your lungs through the bloodstream, giving you terrible breath. As a vampire has a heightened sense of taste and smell, being really, really full of garlic will make you taste unpleasant to most vampires.”

“That's it?”

“That's it. You know, in Islamic tradition, as Satan left paradise, garlic sprang up under his left footprint, and an onion under his right?”

“And where does that leave shallots?” I asked.

Gilchrist laughed. “Get some coffee and shower. We have to talk strategy before nightfall. You may not like it.”

I went into the bathroom. I set my change of clothes down on the lid of the toilet and cranked up the shower. While I waited for it to heat up, I stripped down and stood in the mirror. I had always had good luck with my fair skin as far as acne and blemishes went. I never had to fight too hard to zap more than the occasional pimple. Now I stood, staring at my fair skin, my slender neck, and the white bandage taped over it. How bad was the wound underneath?

Slowly I peeled back the tape. I looked away from the mirror as I tossed the gauze patch into the tiny hotel trash can. I counted back from three and looked in the mirror. The dark red puncture wounds from his fangs were far cleaner than I had expected. It was the bruising around the site that shocked me. Half of my visible neck was black and blue.

He could have killed me two nights ago. If Cody hadn't been there, he would have. And what had I given Cody except a broken heart and a busted truck? No wonder he was so angry with me.

I stepped into the shower. It was scalding, but I didn't turn it down. The memory of Rawdon's cold hand clamped over my mouth, and the even more disturbing memory of his cold body against mine, made the painful heat of the water welcome. My feet were bright red, but I imagined that it was cleansing my soul.

I stayed under the hot water for a long time. When I finally emerged, Gilchrist was refilling the fuel in the generator. “There are more bandages in the outside pouch of the bag under the desk,” he said. “Be careful not to knock anything on the desk over, though.”

“Why are we using a generator?” I asked.

“In case Hale cuts power to the hotel.”

“Oh. That's smart.”

“I've been doing this a while.”

I unzipped the pouch he had directed me to and found a full-blown first aid kit inside. I used the mirror by the minibar to see what I was doing as I put antibiotic ointment on the bite and bandaged over it.

“I have a question,” I said. I couldn't find any little scissors to cut the tape, so I paused to tear it with my teeth. “He said you've been after him for fifteen years. Is that true?”

“Yeah, well, I've killed quite a few other vampires in that time. I hasn't been fifteen years of one failure.”

“Oh.”

“Remember how I said he did turn one girl? That was my closest call with Hale. He ran away to escape me and I had two choices: I could go after him and get him once and for all or leave her behind, feral and hungry. I made my choice; I killed her and he got away.”