The Vampire Shrink (6 page)

It didn't take keen intuition to feel the waves of yearning rolling off Midnight as she stared at her father and mourned what she'd lost.

“He's a very handsome man. You have his eyes, don't you?”

“Yes.” She touched the picture. “I do have his eyes,” she said softly. “I wish I had him,” she said on a whisper, probably assuming I hadn't heard.

She grieves for him as if he's dead.

“Who is this?” I pointed to a rough drawing of a pretty young woman about Midnight's age.

“This is my cousin Anne. She lives down in Durango. We get to see each other every few months or so. She's really the one who turned me on to the vampires. Or on to vampire books, anyway.” She laughed. “She's a
Twilight
fanatic. I can't wait to tell her about all my new friends.”

Ah, the secret imaginary playmates …

“You haven't told your cousin about the vampires?”

“No.” She shook her head vigorously. “I'm not allowed to. Besides, she probably wouldn't believe me.”

Hmmm. Maybe she doesn't totally believe, either. Her emotions are all jumbled up.

“Do you have any sketches of your new friends?” I wasn't sure if she was willing to share any of her vampire fantasy with me yet, but it couldn't hurt to ask.

She hesitated, then walked to another couch, where she'd laid out several smaller pictures. “Uh-huh. I've done several of them. I'm not sure I've drawn them as beautiful as they are, but you can get a general idea.”

I joined her and stared down at the renderings: one perfect ethereal face after another. If these were fragments of her imagination, her creative abilities knew no bounds. “These drawings could be in a gallery, Midnight. They're outrageously good.”

“Thank you.” She smiled shyly and tucked her hair behind her ear. “But I really can't take a lot of credit for these. All I did was copy what I saw—they really do look like this.”

She would make a remarkable fantasy artist. I hope she just has talent rather than delusions.

A lone sketch sat on one of the chairs. But this one was different from the others: she'd created this portrait with colored pencils. Staring back at me from the paper was the most beautiful male face I'd ever seen: pale skin, light-blond hair, indescribable eyes.

What the hell? This looks like the man outside my building. The blond who waved to me from the steps of the old church. Midnight knows this man? No way. That's too weird.

I reached down to lift the sheet and heard a deep male voice call my name.

“Kismet …”

“What?” The room spun. Feeling suddenly dizzy, alternately cold and hot, I dropped the drawing.

“Dr. Knight?” Midnight touched my arm. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.” I took a deep breath. “Of course. I just got caught up in looking at your amazing artwork.”

What the hell just happened? That'll teach me to skip meals. My blood sugar must have taken a dive when I leaned over. I'll make a quick dash out for food after Midnight's appointment. Or maybe I'm coming down with something.

“I'm glad you like the pictures. I was nervous about showing you. I don't ever do that. Show them, I mean.”

Breathe, Kismet.

“I love the drawings. And it's great that you trust me enough to share them with me. I appreciate that.” I smiled and pointed at the images. “Do you want to leave them out while we have our session, or would you like to put them away?”

She thought for a few seconds, then retrieved her portfolio. “I think I'll put them away for now.”

While she gathered the art, I picked up my pad and pen from an end table and sat in my usual chair, trying to recover from the strange sensations. I practiced a few seconds of conscious breathing and felt myself calm.

Maybe I shouldn't keep blowing off my yearly exams. What if I'm prediabetic or something?

She started to sit across from me, then moved farther away. I wasn't surprised. After taking the huge step of exposing her inner world through her artwork, it made sense she'd need to retreat and reassert her defenses.

“So, Midnight, what would you like to talk about today?”

“I want to talk about Dev and the vampires.” She nodded as if she was trying to convince herself, then laughed. “Hey, that sounds like the name of a band.”

What? Really? No way! I thought this would take weeks.

Surprise must have shown on my face, because she grinned. “You weren't expecting that, were you? You didn't think I'd tell you about them yet.”

“You're very insightful, and quite right—I wasn't expecting it. You told me on Friday that Dev didn't want you to talk about him. Why have you changed your mind?”

Is she questioning the control this boy has over her?

“Well.” She tapped her hands on the arms of the chair. “Two reasons. One, I've decided to be honest with you because I like you.”

“Thank you. I like you too.”

“And second, because Dev told me to.”

So much for questioning his control … But that's okay. Don't jump to conclusions. There's lots of time to tweak their relationship.

“Hmmm. I wonder why Dev would ask you to tell me these secrets?”

She unclipped her cape at her throat and shrugged it off her shoulders. “He said therapy wouldn't do me any good if I didn't tell the truth.”

Maybe this boy has more going for him than I thought. Or maybe this is his way of asking for help. Midnight is certainly fixated on him.

“How does the idea of telling me the truth make you feel?”

“A little scared, because I've never told anyone about this before. But I liked what you said last time about me being courageous. So that's what I'm trying to be.”

That's progress.

“Wonderful. Being emotionally courageous can be a difficult thing. It's great that you're challenging yourself.” I gave her an encouraging smile. “So, the vampires. Tell me about them.”

I'm picking up strong intuitive feelings about
Twilight
and
The Vampire Diaries
. I wonder which one most influenced her fantasy?

“What do you want to know?”

“Why don't you just start at the beginning?”

She nodded. “I met the vampires right after I graduated from high school last year. My friends all went down to this cool club that used to be a huge old church in the funky section of downtown—it's called the Crypt. It's only a few blocks from here. We've got the best fake IDs, so we just slide right in. But it's weird—even though we've got the perfect IDs and they let us in, they never let us buy alcohol. If we go up to the bar, the bartender just laughs at us. Pisses me off. What's up with that?”

“Hmmm.” I scribbled notes on my pad. It was always a delicate dance to get the words on paper without letting my clients feel abandoned by my split attention. I always wound up with a cramp in my hand after each session from all the fast writing.

Interesting that the club won't sell drinks to her. Maybe they got in trouble for serving minors before?

She worried her bottom lip with the tip of one of her fangs, as if it gave her time to think before speaking again. “Anyway, there are several levels to the club, and one of them, down in the basement—we call it the dungeon—is private. There are curtains over the doorway, but one time, my friend Emerald and I, we waited 'til the guy who was guarding the door left for a minute, and then we sneaked down and peeked in through the crack and saw all these amazing people,” she reported, an expression of awe on her face from the memory.

“Amazing people?”

“Yeah, two different kinds, really. A whole bunch of kids around my age, maybe a few years older, all dressed up sorta goth, but not really, wearing white paint on their faces and red on their lips. Then there were the others. So beautiful. They wore regular stuff like leather and didn't have the white makeup on, but they were totally awesome. They looked a little older, maybe in their twenties or thirties, and they all had gorgeous long hair …” She stared off for a moment, her mouth hanging loosely open, lost in the vision.

“So they were totally awesome?”

She nodded slowly. “Totally.”

“And then what happened?”

Am I sure I want to know?

“We were just standing there, scoping out the room, and a hand came through the curtains, opened them, and the hottest guy I've ever seen asked if we wanted to come in. Emerald didn't want to go—she's afraid of everything—but I really wanted to check out all those people, so I said yes. The gorgeous man reached out, took my hand, and actually kissed the back of it and said his name was Devereux. I thought I was going to pass out just from looking at him. There was something about his eyes—” She paused and glanced over at me, trying to gauge my reaction before she shared any more details.

Man? Wait! Dev is an adult? Not a kid? Holy shit. That changes everything.

The muscles in my neck and back tightened, which happened sometimes when I worked too hard at holding in all the opinions that wanted to tumble out of my mouth. I bit my bottom lip to stifle myself. Often, having to remain silent was the hardest part of my job.

She met a strange man in a bar. A man dressed in leather, who invited her into a private room. What's wrong with this picture?

“And then?”

“Then he sorta led me inside, and Emerald followed us. There must have been fifty people in that room, and they were all incredible. Dev walked us over to a table, and he was so polite. He pulled out the chairs for us, like in the old movies, and asked if we wanted something to drink. We both ordered beers—we had to try—but he brought us Cokes, and we just sat there, staring at him. He wasn't drinking anything, and I asked why not. He said he'd already had his fill for the night, and he just kept smiling and flashing us with those psychedelic eyes. I didn't know what he meant back then, but I do now.”

Uh-oh.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he drinks blood, ya know? That's what vampires do. So when he said he was full, he meant he'd already ‘eaten' for the night,” she explained, her voice light and casual, as if we were talking about the weather.

He drinks blood? Yuck. Did he tell her that, or is that fantasy? If he really does, can you say “mental illness”?

“Do you drink blood?”

That, obviously, was a loaded question, because Midnight started scraping her lower lip against her upper teeth. She twisted the fabric of her dress in her hands and stared down into her lap.

“Midnight? Are you all right?”

“Yeah.” She squirmed in the chair. “It just feels scary to talk about this.”

“Do you mean because of what your family would think?”

“No.” She hesitated. “Because of what Dev would do if he found out.” Her voice softened. “We're not allowed to drink blood.”

Thank heavens for that.

“We'll come back to the blood in a minute. What's your relationship with Dev?” I was becoming more and more suspicious of this charismatic-sounding character.

Catching the drift of my concern, Midnight shook her head. “He's just a friend. All the girls are after him, but he said we're too young and that he's into older women. We all hit on him, but he never goes out with any of us. He's in charge—the boss, I guess.”

“The boss of what?”

“The vampires. And the apprentices.”

“The apprentices?” I had a sudden vision of several vampire wannabes sitting around a conference table in New York with Donald Trump. A vampire Donald Trump. I fought to keep the amusement from creeping onto my face. My sense of humor was such a challenge sometimes.

“That's what we call ourselves.”

How much weirder can this get? I need to know about the blood.

“Let's go back to the drinking-blood part. You seemed to have a strong reaction when I asked you about that. Why?”

She lowered her eyes. “Dev lets us hang around with him and the other vampires, but he won't let anyone take blood from us, and he won't let us drink blood, either. He said that only real vampires can use blood the way it's meant to be used. Since we're officially still human, we could get diseases that vampires can't get. He has lots of rules about what we can and can't do if we want to be with them.”

Okay, so maybe the guy isn't totally whacked if he keeps them from the drinking-blood thing.

“So what is it you don't want him to know?”

Long pause.

I waited silently and watched waves of conflicting emotions flow across her face as she decided what, if anything, she was going to tell me.

“There's this one guy, Eric, who wants to be a vampire real bad. Dev told him that he isn't ready, that he needs to go out and learn about life before becoming one of the undead, but Eric doesn't listen. He sets up these rituals at his apartment, where the apprentices drink each others' blood. He gave us all these neat little necklaces with tiny knives on them so we can make little cuts in each others' necks and drink,” she said, her voice breathy. “It would be really bad if Dev found out, because he'd be totally angry, and I don't want to do anything to make Dev mad at me.”

My eyebrows crawled up toward my hairline.

The apprentices drink each others' blood? Damn!

I hoped she was simply acting out and all this blood drinking was imaginary. I needed to find a nonthreatening way to convince her that the entire vampire idea was a fantasy.

“Are you afraid of Dev?”

“No. Not the way you mean.”

“But despite Dev's disapproval, you go to the rituals at Eric's apartment?”

“Well, yeah.” She smiled wide. “It's so much fun. I never would have thought that drinking blood could be so sexual—so romantic,” she gushed.