I STRUGGLED FREE of Phoenix’s hands so I could slide my sunglasses over my eyes. I told Newman, “Help me get her off of me.”
He laid the tray of food on a nearby table and came to help. I gave him points for that. I knew some fully human marshals who would have refused to touch her or me after they saw my eyes glow. He helped me peel her off without hurting her, which is a lot harder than it sounds.
She was saying, “No, no, please, please, don’t stop. Please!” She struggled in Newman’s arms, not trying to fight him, just trying to reach me. I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d done to her, so I didn’t know how to undo it. It was like the ardeur, which was feeding off of lust or love, but it should have stopped when she wasn’t touching me or looking into my eyes. Why wasn’t it stopping?
My stomach cramped so hard from hunger that it nearly doubled me over. Oh, that was why. I went to the table where Newman had set the food down and picked up my hamburger. It wasn’t a great burger, but it was protein and the first food I’d had since breakfast, which was about seven hours ago.
“Blake, behind you!” Newman called.
I turned with the burger still in my hand. Barry the bartender was behind me with a baseball bat, as if being over a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than me wasn’t enough of an edge. “Get out of my club! Badge or no badge, we don’t serve monsters in here!”
Had he seen my eyes? No, if he’d seen my eyes glow from across the club, there’d be more people panicking, and everyone I could see was still watching the show. I mean, a girl-on-girl make-out session and now a fight—it was like a double feature. So why was Barry saying monster?
Phoenix called out behind me, “Let me go! Let me go to her! Please, please!”
“Let’s all calm down,” Newman said from behind me, projecting his voice above her pleading.
I looked at Barry through my sunglasses, and he avoided direct eye contact even through the darkness of the lenses. He recognized the symptoms of someone who had been mind-fucked by a vampire. Technically I wasn’t one, but I was getting to the point of if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck . . . well, you know the rest. I swallowed my bite of burger and tried to think of what to say to de-escalate things. If he swung on us with a baseball bat, then we could shoot him, because one good hit to the side of the head with a baseball bat can kill you just as dead as a bullet. I didn’t want Barry to die today because I’d lost control of my metaphysical extras.
“Put the bat down, Barry,” Newman said. If he hadn’t had to hold the struggling woman, he’d have probably had his gun out by now, but he literally had his hands full.
“You swallowed that,” Barry said, “but you can’t eat solid food.”
Barry had been around vampires enough to know that some of them pretended to eat. They were like people with anorexia who could cut their food up and move it around their plates so that it looked like they’d eaten, but it was another illusion.
I swallowed again and then opened my mouth wide enough for him to see there were no fangs. I even used a finger to draw my lips down so he could see better. “See, no fangs,” I said.
“What are you?”
“Would you believe I’m not sure anymore?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Barry sounded angry now instead of just scared, but he was starting to point the baseball bat toward the floor rather than hold it in a batter-up position.
“Put the bat on the ground, Barry. No one needs to get hurt,” Newman called out behind me. He still had to project over Phoenix’s voice.
Whatever I’d done to her was still done, because she wanted him to let her go so she could go to me, so I could finish. I’d had my moments of being mind-fucked over the years. I had let a vampire nearly drain me to death once, and I’d enjoyed it. I’d probably have enjoyed it right up to the time I died.
“You don’t call that hurt?” Barry asked, pointing with one finger past me at Phoenix. The bat came back up in a one-arm-swing position. Not an improvement.
I took another bite of burger, because until I had enough food in me, I was dangerous to others. I didn’t mind hurting people on purpose. I didn’t even mind using metaphysical abilities on them if it was the best tool I had, but doing it by accident, that wasn’t okay. I wasn’t even sure how to undo what I’d done to Phoenix. I’d had enough control to stop the ardeur from feeding on her, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever bespelled someone this completely without feeding. Luckily for me, I could eat my burger instead of her. If I’d been a real vampire, I wouldn’t have had that option. The real problem was I didn’t know how to fix her. I ate the last bite of burger, hoping that if my physical stomach was full, maybe that would help undo what I’d accidentally done to the woman.
“Barry, please believe me,” I said. “I didn’t mean to hurt Phoenix.”
“I’ll believe you when she isn’t crying for you to feed on her blood.”
He almost snarled that last part, wrapping two hands around the bat. It was in a position to take my head off if I didn’t duck. He was too close for me to even try for a gun. I’d never have gotten it out in time. When you’re this close, a baseball bat beats a gun. I had knives on me, and I had enough training that my knife would beat a bat, but I didn’t want to have to kill someone because of my mistake.
I felt movement behind me in time to move slightly to the side, so I saw Phoenix a second before I might have tried to deck her. She wrapped herself around me so tight that I had to struggle to keep one arm free to defend with and wrap the other one around her waist just so I could maybe keep her out of the fight if it started.
Newman had his gun out and pointed at Barry and his bat. Phoenix tried to kiss me again, but I turned my face so she had to kiss my neck instead. She didn’t see the gun or the bat or the danger. She saw only me. No, not even me. She was chasing the power, the ardeur.
If Jean-Claude had been here, he’d have known exactly what to do, because the power was originally his—the rarest power that could appear in the bloodline he was descended from. Of course, he would never have lost control of it like I had done. I could have dropped my metaphysical shields and contacted him mind to mind, but would that have made things worse or better? Since I wasn’t sure what was happening, I didn’t know. Shit.
“Put the bat down now,” Newman said. His voice was getting calmer.
I knew what that would have meant for me: I’d be getting ready to shoot. You have to control your breathing to aim well. It’s as hard as fuck to shoot well while you’re shouting. You have to control your breath, your heart rate, your pulse. Good aim comes from a place of deep silence. For me it was a place that had been filled with white static once. Now it was just quiet.
A second security guy came up, carrying a cross in his hand and holding it toward me. If I’d been a vampire with glowing eyes, it would have glowed like a star in his hand, but it was just so much metal now.
“Thought you were a true believer, Sam,” Barry said, which meant he knew that holy objects work only if you believe in them, really believe, or if they’ve been blessed by someone holy.
“It should be glowing,” Sam said.
“I’m not a vampire. God as my witness, I’m not a vampire,” I said. I had to turn my face more toward Barry and Sam to keep Phoenix away from my mouth.
“Then let Phoenix go!” Barry said.
I moved my arm from around her waist, putting both arms out to my side. I managed to say, “I’m trying,” before she kissed me so hard and so thoroughly that I couldn’t breathe, let alone talk.
“Put the bat down. I won’t tell you again,” Newman said.
I prayed, Please, God, don’t let Barry die because I screwed up, and suddenly I had an idea. I broke the kiss and said, “Phoenix, take the bat away from Barry.”
She stopped trying to kiss me and launched herself at Barry. She went for the bat as completely and wildly as she’d tried to kiss me. Barry tried to fight her off without hurting her or letting her take the bat from him. He had his hands full, and now Newman wouldn’t shoot him because Phoenix was in the way.
Sam, the other guy, was shaking his cross in his hands as if he thought the battery wasn’t working.
“Your faith is fine,” I said. “It just doesn’t work on me.”
“Phoenix, stop. Stop! I don’t want to hurt you,” Barry was saying.
Newman came up beside me with his gun pointed at the floor. “What did you do to her?”
“I’m not sure,” I whispered because it was true.
“Can you undo it?”
“I don’t know.”
“We have to do something, Blake.”
Newman was right. I drew my own cross out from under my T-shirt, and I prayed again. “God, please help me free her from whatever I’ve done to her.” My cross started to glow—not the hot white glow that happened when a vampire was trying to eat my face, but a soft blue-white glow. Sam’s cross started to glow with mine. We were both true believers.
I prayed out loud. “Please, God, help me undo whatever I did to her.”
Phoenix stopped trying to drag the bat out of Barry’s hands. She went very still, arms going to her sides. I knew without seeing her face that her eyes would be empty, face slack. I’d seen it on other vampire victims. God, I hated that I had done that to her.
The crosses started to glow brighter, but it was blue light, and it didn’t hurt to look at it the way white heat could. I’d been in fights with vampires where my own cross had blinded them and me with its light. This was different, gentler. It felt peaceful, the way praying can when you get that soft touch, as if you can feel God listening.
Phoenix started to fall. Barry dropped the bat, and it clattered on the floor as he caught her. She blinked in his arms, looking around the room as if she’d just woken up. Her dark makeup was smeared over her face almost like bruises, but she wouldn’t remember how that had happened. I wondered what the last thing she did remember was.
The glow of the two crosses started to fade, and I got that sense of peace that I sometimes get when a prayer gets answered. Sam had tears on his face trailing past an almost beatific smile. I knew then that he felt it, too.
“What’s happening?” Phoenix asked. “Did they spike my drink?” So she remembered we’d bought her a drink. Good. She hadn’t lost too much time.
“No, Phoenix,” Barry said, “they didn’t spike your drink.” He was staring at me as if he didn’t know what to make of me. That made two of us.
“Come on, Blake, let’s get out of here,” Newman said. He had holstered his gun.
I grabbed my fries off the table as I went toward the door. I wanted to make sure that I had enough food in me until I went home and had real vampires around me to help me control this shit, or at least had Nicky with me or someone who was already on my approved menu for metaphysical munchies.