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I TOOK THE STAIRS UP from the subway stop two at a time and pushed myself into a sprint—or as much of one as I could manage with a purse and a tray of cupcakes. I was going to be late for work, and I still had to stop for food. I was starving, and when I get overly hungry...
Well, let’s just say I don’t let myself get overly hungry. I pounded over the plaza to the side door of the hospital and swiped my card twice. It never works in the rain, and it always seems to be raining when I’m late. Go figure. Yanking the door open with a very unladylike curse, I slipped down the hallway and grimaced at the way my shoes squelched on the linoleum. I needed not to be drawing attention to myself just now.
At the door of the blood bank, I stopped. I was already going to be late, but I needed to do this. Checking to make sure no one was in the hallway, I opened the door and peered inside.
“Hello?”
Silence; no one was in there. Good. I walked purposefully to the correct rack, took two bags of O-neg, and slipped them into my purse. Still absurdly carrying the tray of cupcakes—it was Alicia’s birthday, and I’d promised to bring them—I went out of the room and into one of the lesser-used bathrooms.
I was shaking with hunger now, lights flashing at the corner of my vision. My senses were heightened, and I knew that if I didn’t get food in my soon, it would only get worse. Trust me, being in a hospital is hell on someone with heightened senses. Still trembling, I double-checked the door, pulled one of the bags of blood out of my purse, pierced the plastic, and drank deeply.
Did I forget to mention that I’m a half-vampire? Sorry, but that was sort of by design. It’s not something I tell...well, most people. Of course, most people wouldn’t believe it, but in my experience, it’s not them you have to be worried about. No, the people you have to be worried about are the ones who know what being a half-vampire means—though that half isn’t precisely the dangerous half in my case. More on that later.
For people who don’t know what it means, being a vampire sounds great. I’ll be 22 forever, and because normal food usually repulses me, I never gain weight. I can keep going longer than most people, and I’m strong. When normal people say that being a nurse is tough, they say it with admiration, but when I say it, I say it with disbelief. I can barely handle the hours and the physical stress—I have no idea how normal humans do it.
That aside, being a vampire isn’t exactly as wonderful as it sounds. I don’t complain about it, mostly because very few people know what I am, but also because I know eternal youth isn’t something you can really complain about. The thing is, people who age and never die realize just how much their loved ones mean to them. Everyone loses people, it’s true, but only immortals have to look around themselves one day and realize that everyone they knew as a child is dead. Humans don’t experience that, so there isn’t a word for it; if there were, I’m not sure I could bring myself to speak it.
My aunt Martha was the only one I ever talked to about it—and she, who should have resented me most, never said so much as a word of reproach. Her own sister died giving birth to me, a cursed child, the last in their family’s line and not even a real descendant. But Martha always loved me just for me.
You see, my mother was a witch. Martha was never able to have children, but my mother had me. I should have been something special. My bloodline has always been something special. But witch blood crossed with an immortal is a bad combination. When you hear folklore about witches, about the twisted things they do, most of what you’re hearing is real stories...about half-witches. They go wrong in the head. Their power is stunted and twisted. So the way I see it, Martha should have hated me.
But she never did. And when I talked to her when I was little about my father, about feeling like I needed to make up for what he’d done in the world, about wanting to help any way I could, she always hugged me and told me that my goodness would more than make up for his evil. I didn’t tell her, but I never believed that. Who could be good enough to outweigh Vlad the Impaler?
The thought soured me on finishing my meal, and I disposed of the bag in the bottom of my purse, making sure that no tell-tale drips of blood had escaped onto the hospital floor or my scrubs. The people who spill blood on the floor are usually druggies on a trip, but I still didn’t need one of the janitors asking questions and reporting a spill. Sighing, I collected my things and washed my mouth out thoroughly before heading to the emergency room.
I could tell before I even arrived that something was very, very wrong. There were hysterical screams and the controlled shouts of teams coordinated care. I broke into a run, dumping my coat and the cupcakes on the floor of the coatroom without a second thought, and backed my way into the emergency room as I slathered antibacterial soap on my hands. From the level of noise, I was fairly sure a school bus had crashed.
What I saw was even worse.
“There you are.” Alicia grabbed my hand and dragged me over to a closed off area at the end of the room. There were three of them, all enclosed, all surrounded by people craning to get in—and a couple of people with their hands over their mouths and their faces gone gray as if they had seen and it was too terrible to comprehend. “Shut the curtain behind you,” Alicia said curtly as she dragged me into one of the enclaves.
I saw what lay on the table and was very nearly sick all over everything. I held my stomach down with everything I had—I didn’t need anyone asking questions about why I was throwing up blood—and tried to make sense of it.
“Bad drug reaction,” Alicia told me, her voice low. “We don’t even know that this is. It’s gotta be something new. We’re on lockdown until someone can figure out what to tell the press.”
I didn’t say anything at all. The woman’s face had a sickly blue-green cast to it as if bruising and gangrene had taken hold at the same time. Her fingers and toes were beginning to go puffy, and there was something about her that suggested contagion, in the primal sense; humans have learned to look for it over our history. She looked like someone who had been ravaged by poison, and I knew exactly why the doctors and nurses around me had decided she was a druggie.
But it wasn’t drugs that had disfigured the woman before me. It was magic. And I felt horror rising up in me. All my life I had done what I could without the magic that ran in my veins. It was a liability, more dangerous than it was worth. I never really regretted not using it, to be honest. But then, I’d never before been faced with something like this—something I could only cure if I used my forbidden powers.
I took a deep, shuddering breath as something stirred to life inside me.