Chapter 21

IN MY EXPERIENCE, there are two ways that newborn vampires wake up: hungry, or hungry and crazy. It’s been a long time since I woke up dead in my crappy little apartment in South Carolina, with my pants around my ankles and my roommate leaning over me, but as far as I recall, I woke up hungry. The first thing I did when I woke up was bite Greg right on his carotid artery, rip through the flesh of his neck, and drain him dry.

The second thing I did was pull up my pants, because when my dead roomie fell on my naked lap, it was a little awkward. Then I started to freak out, because I was covered in blood and Greg, and me sitting half-naked on my sofa, and I was pretty sure I was a vampire.

Then I puked. A lot. Like, everything I’d eaten for several days. Suffice to say I felt like I’d turned myself inside out when I was done. Then I had a dead best friend to deal with, so that was a whole new level of freaking out. The only thing I didn’t do was run screaming out into the morning light, which—while a pretty natural reaction—would have been bad. I’ve always thought that was why there aren’t more vampires. I expect a lot of people wake up dead, freak out, and run out of their house. For about thirty seconds.

Oddly enough, the blood I drank from Greg didn’t come back up. I’ve always just assumed that it was magically absorbed into my bloodstream or something. I try not to think too much about the details of my vampirism. I just accept that it’s magic and move along, until I have to explain the realities of their new life to a fledgling again.

Fledglings like Emily. And that brings me right back to the present, to standing in the Charlotte morgue with a starved twenty-something handcuffed to an autopsy table screaming about her wrists burning. Which they were. The silver-plated handcuffs Bobby used were scorching the crap out of her, but the way she was thrashing around, I wasn’t interested in unlocking her any time soon. Instead, I stepped over to the pull-out drawer where Bobby stores blood and yanked it open. He keeps a half-dozen pints or so on ice in a top drawer, because he knows his boss will never look there. The man is barely five-six and would need a stepladder to see inside. Bobby and I are both almost a foot taller than the Chief Medical Examiner, so we have no problem reaching the stash.

I fished out three pint bags and tossed one to Greg. “Give her this.”

“Why do I have to give it to her?” he asked, looking at the girl straining against the cuffs. Her eyes were completely black, a sure sign that she was both hungry and really pissed off.

“She’s your sister, dude, not mine.”

“Ass,” Greg said, but he stepped up to where Emily thrashed against her bonds and sliced open the top of the blood bag with his pocketknife. As the smell of blood filled the air, the girl went statue-still, her eyes locked on Greg’s hand. “You want some?” he asked. “It smells good, right? Well, calm down, behave, and you can have this and more.”

He held the bag up to her mouth, and she slurped down the contents, greed and hunger making her sloppy. It was also probably the first time she’d ever drank blood from a bag, which is not the easiest thing in the world to do. She sucked the sides flat on the blood bag like a frat boy with a keg, and I pitched Greg another bag. Emily drained that one in seconds as well, and when she came up for air, the black in her eyes had receded, and she was looking a lot more like a young woman, and a lot less like a ravening monster.

“G-Greg? Is that you?” I could see the confusion in her face from across the room as she recognized her brother. The brother she’d thought was dead for most of her life. The only real memories she would have him were from early childhood, and now here he stood, right in front of her, looking just like he did in the old family photos. Well, slightly better than the ones from when we were in middle school, but not much.

“It’s me, Emmy,” he said, using the baby name he used to call her when she was a toddler.

“Am I . . . am I dead?”

She had no idea exactly how tough that one was going to be to answer. But we got a reprieve, because that’s when I saw her body convulse. “Dude, she’s gonna blow!” I shouted, running to her side with a trash can. She turned to me and stuck her face in the plastic container, cutting loose with a stream of vomit that would make Linda Blair blush.

Greg hustled around the table to hold her hair back, but it wasn’t really long enough to get in the way, so he settled on patting her back and murmuring soothing nonsense while she emptied her stomach. I passed off trashcan duty and walked to the minifridge by Bobby’s desk. I looked inside, then closed the door quickly and moved to the one next to it. From the non-evidence fridge, I grabbed a diet soda and carried it back over to the table.

“Can we unfasten the cuffs?” Greg asked.

“Not until we decide if she’s gonna settle into this or not,” I said. I didn’t want to mention to Greg that there was still a better than fifty-fifty shot that I was going to have to kill his sister, but the look in his eyes at my answer said that he knew the score. It also said that the beating he gave me over letting our best friend Mike die was nothing to what he would do to me if I tried to hurt Emily.

I really didn’t want it to come to that. I didn’t want to kill my third fledgling vampire in as many days, but I wasn’t going to let a crazed rogue tear through my city like a toddler with superpowers, either.

But for now, she was handcuffed to an autopsy table and not able to hurt anyone, including herself (as long as we aren’t counting the burns on her wrists), so we could talk to her a little. I looked at the sweating and very confused Emily and held out the soda.

“Diet Coke? Sorry it’s not the real thing, but it’s all they keep in the fridge around here.”

She nodded, then tried to reach for the can. Her wrist rattled against the cuffs, and she winced as it burned a new spot on her skin.

“Sorry about that,” I said. “But the cuffs stay on until we decide you’re not psychotic.”

“Psychotic? Look, asshole, I’m not the one kidnapping women and handcuffing them to tables, then pretending to be their dead brother. If anybody’s the psycho, it’s you two sons of bitches, and when I get loose, I’m going to—”

“Do you want the Coke or not?” My tone stopped her cold, and she looked at me with wide eyes. “Good. Now that you’ve shut your trap, let’s keep it that way for a minute or two. Do you want a drink? I’m not letting you loose, so if you want to wash the taste of puke and blood out of your mouth, I’ll hold it for you.”

She nodded, silent, and I popped the can open, then held it to her mouth so she could drink. After a few seconds, I pulled the can down. “That’s enough. Your body’s still adjusting, and I don’t want you to puke any more than you have to.”

“Adjusting to what, exactly?” she asked.

I stepped back and leaned against the wall of drawers. “You’re dead.”

“I can’t be dead. I’m talking to you. And my wrists hurt too much for me to be dead.”

“Nope. You’re dead. Well, technically undead. You’re a vampire.”

“Oh, come the hell on. Is this your kink? Kidnapping women and telling them they’re dead? Because that’s some pretty weird shit, dude. But whatever. You be you, it’s cool. Just cut me loose and I won’t tell anybody about you and your corpse fetish, and we can even forget about your asshole friend pretending to be my brother. Although how you found out about him . . .”

“I found out about him in middle school when he got swirlied in the crapper after gym class. I found out about you when we were sophomores in high school. You know, when you were born. Emily, I hate to break this to you, but everything I’m telling you is real. Vampires are real, Greg’s alive, kinda, and you’re never working on your tan again.”

She sat there for almost a full minute, and I could see it turning over in her head. After a while, she turned her head to where Greg leaned on Bobby’s desk, his arms folded and his eyes not moving from her. “Greg? Is that really you?”

“Yeah, Emmy. It’s really me.”

“You’ve been here, in Charlotte, this whole time?”

“Yeah. We even met once, when you were in college. But you forgot.”

“How would I forget seeing my dead brother?”

“I made you. We can do that. Mess with people’s heads. Make them do things, forget things. I wiped your memory of me, so you’d never know that I . . .”

“Was alive?” Emily asked.

“Left you,” Greg said.

“Why?” Her voice was very small, but she packed a lot into that one word.

“That was my fault,” I said. “When I got turned, I went a little nuts. Greg was the only one there, so I kinda . . . killed him.”

“You killed my brother? Did you kill me, too?” Now the fire was back in her eyes, and this time it was focused, right on me.

“No!” I protested. “We don’t know who killed you. But we’re hunting him down. You’re the third woman of roughly the same age that he’s killed in the past few days.”

“Did he make them vampires, too? Not that I believe that I’m a vampire, or that vampires exist, but . . . did he?”

“Yeah,” I said. “He turned them, too. That’s another reason we’re after him. That shit isn’t allowed. You don’t get to just randomly turn people.”

“What are you, like the vampire police?” she asked.

“Kinda,” I said. “It’s my job to keep the supernatural community safe, and undercover. If anybody does things that jeopardize our secrecy or our safety, then it’s my job to stop them.”

“Permanently, I assume?”

“Permanently.”

“Well, have you decided whether or not you’re going to try to stop me?” I looked at Greg, and she caught the look. “That’s what this is about, right?” She jiggled the handcuffs for emphasis. “To see if you’re going to kill me or not?”

I let out a sigh. “Yeah, that’s what it’s about. The last two young women he turned, they . . . they couldn’t be counted on to control themselves around the humans. Their hunger got the better of them, and I had to put them down.”

“Is that why you fed me as soon as I woke up?”

“Yeah. I didn’t . . . don’t want to kill you. You’re my best friend’s kid sister, for God’s sake. But I had to know if you could be allowed to live. If you were going to be able to control yourself, or just become a blood-crazed monster.”

She turned to Greg. “Would you have let him? Kill me?”

“I don’t know,” Greg said. “But it doesn’t matter. You’re not crazy. At least, no crazier than you were in kindergarten.” He walked over to the table and unfastened the cuffs holding Emily to the table. “Hi, sis. It’s been a while.”

“I missed you.”

Greg had on his “trying not to cry like it’s the end of Rudy” face, so I handed Emily the last blood bag. “Here,” I said, “drink this, then we’ll dig up some clothes for you.”

She looked at me, confused. “Why do I need new clothes?”

“You’re kinda covered in blood. That’s not the sort of look we try to have when we walk out of a hospital.”

“Don’t worry about that yet. We’ve got a lot more investigating to do before we leave,” Sabrina said, stepping into the morgue. “Sabrina Law, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police.” She held out her hand to the newborn vampire.

I watched Emily like a hawk as she smelled the living blood in Sabrina’s veins. I heard the almost imperceptible click as her fangs extended, then heard it again as she withdrew them. They shook hands, and Sabrina stepped back.

“Good job,” I said to Emily. “That was the last test.”

“What, having a cop come in? What kind of test was that?”

“The last two vampires this guy turned went full nuts the first time they smelled a human, and went after them. I couldn’t talk them down and had to kill them. Now I know for sure that you’ve got better control. So I’m pretty sure I won’t have to kill you today,” I said.

“Well, that’s a comfort, I guess.” The sarcasm was strong with this one. “So now what?”

“Now we run forensics on everything you’re wearing, then you tell us everything you remember about tonight before you died, then we find the guy that killed you,” Sabrina said.

“Then I teach him not to mess with my family,” Greg said, and the look on his face said it was going to be a very painful lesson.