Beeping woke me up. For a long, blurry moment I thought I was back in the white room in Dragomir’s cave and the broken leg had been a terrible, though symbolic, nightmare. I contemplated my body under a white sheet. It didn’t look like it belonged to me, not with a cast and braces and bandages like a crazy patchwork quilt under the thin cover. The bruised, red-spackled toes of my left foot peeked out at me from under the sheet and some kind of cast. The room smelled like antiseptic and bleach and old blood, and something left a metallic taste in my mouth as I tried to lick my lips.
“Oh my God, you’re awake.”
I blinked and then Betsy dropped everything she carried in the doorway and launched across the room. She grabbed my face and stared at me. “What the hell happened?”
“Um...”
Betsy kept talking too fast for me to catch all of what she said. “They said you were attacked. You just disappeared — and Henry said...the rangers found you... a helicopter — five days I didn’t know...”
“Good to see you, too, Bets,” I croaked.
She didn’t pause to acknowledge I’d spoken and instead kept up an unending torrent of words. She got in more “hallelujahs” and “sweet peas” in the space of ten minutes than I’d heard in ten months, and the only reason it wasn’t a hell of a lot more was because a doctor walked in with two detectives in tow.
Betsy sat next to me on the hospital bed, aggressively feeding me ice chips, as the doctor ran through the litany of injuries I survived: compound fracture in my left leg, sprained knee in my right, sprained right wrist, various contusions across my torso, a few cuts and scrapes in my arms, dehydration, touches of frostbite on my fingers and toes, and a possible concussion. What could have been an animal bite or two on my arms and shoulder, though they must have been human from the wild man attack.
I blinked at him. “Great. When can I go home?”
Betsy shoved more ice chips at me. “A week at least, right, Doctor? With the kind of shape she’s in…”
“If you can walk around, relieve yourself, and feed yourself tomorrow – and your pain is under control – I don’t see why you can’t head home late tomorrow or early the day after.” He nodded to me, the cops, and avoided Betsy’s furious glare, and disappeared into the hall where breathless interns waited.
The pair of cops were the epitome of matter-of-fact law and order: both good ole boys, a little gruff, professional even though one had a wad of dip in his cheek. I knew them from when Jamie disappeared; they’d investigated and updated the family until a few months passed and no leads turned up.
Detective Schultz flipped open a small notebook and squinted at it under the fluorescent floodlights. “Good to see you again, Doc Montgomery, though we’re sorry for the circumstances. You feelin’ okay?”
“Havin’ more fun than a sackful of kittens,” I said. Betsy eyed me and rattled the ice chips in warning.
Hightower shifted the chewing tobacco to his other cheek. “Why don’t you fill us in on what happened?”
I tried to sit up and blushed as the sheet slipped and reminded me I was butt-ass naked under the thin hospital gown. I hated having to explain my belief in cryptids – and the work I did related to them – to people as grounded in reality as Schultz and Hightower. I didn’t think either of them even believed in evolution, much less the sort of biology that would have produced sasquatches and Snallygasters and black dogs. They’d never rolled their eyes that I could see when I talked about Jamie tracking an Ozark Howler when he disappeared, which I appreciated more than I could have said.
But I started anyway with the reality show needing more footage, filled them in on my route and the weather and everything I saw, but my words slowed down as I got closer to describing the night settling around me and being too far from the campsite, that creeping feeling of being stalked. The heart monitor accelerated. Adrenaline made my hands tingle and my vision narrowed down to just a soda straw view of my toes. Such strange things, toes. My second toe was longer than the others, but the nail on my middle toe was a weird shape and looked almost like it grew sideways.
“Doc.”
I looked up at Hightower and got distracted by the chewing tobacco stains in his whiskers.
He didn’t quite snap his fingers in my face to keep my attention, but it was damn close. “You started running. What happened after that?”
My mouth went dry as my attention drifted once more. “There was a man. W-wild hair, beard. Smelled bad. Bad teeth. Looked – crazy. He t-tried… to bite me, scratched me up. Wanted my rifle.”
The cops nodded, waiting for more. I couldn’t look at any of them, especially not Betsy. She already suspected the worst. I filled in more details of the wild man as they scratched notes, though I stumbled to a halt when I got to the part about plummeting off the trail and into the ravine.
Schultz nodded. “And then?”
A vampire picked me up and carried me to his mountain lair. The thought drifted across my mind and almost slipped free, just like in the helicopter. A mental warning snapped through me and I sucked in a breath. Their attention sharpened, preparing to hear the bad shit.
The lisping voice whispered the consequences between my panicked thoughts and my teeth clicked together as I swallowed the admission.
Even being patient about my belief in sasquatches, the cops would have shit their pants laughing if I said “vampire.” “I don’t remember a whole lot except being in pain and trying to keep moving. It’s all really blurry.”
“What’s the next thing you remember?”
A vampire carried me through the night after he broke my leg to cover up the magic healing he performed in order to save my life. I shrugged. “Mostly dragging my busted ass down a deer track until I got cell reception. I figured people were looking for me.”
And I squeezed Betsy’s hand, just to make sure she knew I appreciated it.
Schultz studied me with his head tilted, though the skin around his eyes crinkled like he wanted to believe me. “The rangers found your pack half a mile from where you made it to the fire road, and other pieces of gear along the trail. It looked all shredded to hell, like animals got after it. Do you think the man you saw could have been a bear or a mountain lion, something like that?”
I looked at him the same way I looked at Betsy when she insisted her psychic told her I would find my brother three states away living with a stripper named Kotton Kandi – spelled with a ‘k,’ of course. “No.”
Hightower nodded, the corner of his mouth twitching. “Right. Anything else you can tell us about this guy?”
I shook my head, attention once more on my toes. Maybe the crazy guy still wandered the mountains. I should have asked Dragomir to find and get rid of him, too, so at least no one else would end up at the bottom of a ravine. If I headed out to the trails again, I’d need more than just bear mace and a rifle. Maybe two rifles.
Schultz folded up his little notebook and slapped it against his palm. “We’re still investigating and we’ve got some search canines out working the area, trying to find this guy. We’ll be in touch when we have updates.”
I wanted to warn them against going out there at night, in case Dragomir got hungry, but I just nodded and let my head fall back against the pillow. Bursts of sustained concentration were more exhausting than when the sadistic nurse made me walk around in my cast and knee brace. There was no greater threat to the dignity than shuffling around a hospital floor in a cotton gown that gapped in the back, an IV pole with one squeaky wheel, and a catheter bag.
The fatigue worked into my bones, and I wished I had just a little hit of vampire blood to get me through the rest of the interview. The thought gave me pause, though. Could the mental exhaustion be attributed to days spent chasing a vampire blood high? Dragomir said he’d monitored for the ratio in my blood so I didn’t take too much, so maybe I could get the data from him and monitor it myself. Then he could give me a bag of blood and I could dose myself when I needed. But only when I really needed it.
Before the detectives slipped away, I cleared my throat. “Schultz, is there — any new information on my brother?”
The detective frowned a touch as he studied me. “Doc, I can’t say that we’ve found anything new in five years.”
“Are you looking?”
Betsy pinched the bridge of her nose. I planned to blame the pain meds for my attitude and questions, though pretending short-term amnesia later would have offered a similar solution. I could have said anything I wanted and no one could have held it against me.
All things considered, there were some positives for being beaten all to hell and doped up on Schedule II pain killers.
Hightower took a deep breath. “Doc, we revisit your brother’s disappearance with the cold case squad, searching for new leads every couple of months. The park rangers haven’t received any reports from hikers about finding clothes or packs or — anything else. If you hear anything, let us know. We won’t stop looking until we find him.”
Schultz eyed me. “Were you out there looking for him, Doc? Is that how you ended up so far off your planned route?”
I didn’t know whether to lie or not. When I didn’t answer right away, Betsy sighed. “Come on, Ada.”
“It didn’t — start that way,” I said. Maybe half-truth would suffice. “But I got farther than I had previously as I looked for cryptid tracks, and I thought... maybe I’d find something.”
Hightower paged through his notebook and made a note before tucking it away. “Doc, we’ve searched as much of these mountains as we safely can and no one has ever turned up anything that indicated your brother is still in the park. When you run off doing this sort of thing, you’re also risking the lives of everyone who’ll have to search for you when you get lost or hurt or killed. You can’t keep doing this. Leave finding Jamie to us.”
“I didn’t intend for —”
A glimmer of sympathy crossed Schultz’s face as he patted my foot over the sheet. “You just had bad luck out there, Ada. Take it easy while you recover, call us if you remember anything, and don’t go into the mountains alone again, okay?”
I’d always hated being lectured. “Sure.”
The detectives departed, though they didn’t believe me any more than Betsy did.
I hadn’t held out much hope after the first year passed and they made no progress in finding Jamie. It fell entirely on Dad and me, and after Dad passed, I swore I’d do anything to make it happen. Even... My thoughts wandered in circles. I really believed I’d do anything, but I never defined what “anything” contained. Were there limits to “anything?” Would I have killed to find him? Betrayed someone? Turned my back on friends? Abandoned my research? Traded someone else’s life for his? It was easy enough to say I’d cross the world or take a bullet for my brother, but when it boiled down to it, what did that really mean?
Hyperbole wasn’t helpful. I gazed at the ceiling as other things went on around me. Was making a deal with Dragomir a devil’s bargain? I’d potentially be unleashing an apex predator into the world without any real constraints: one with super strength and speed, telepathy, and no conscience. To serve myself and resolve Schroedinger’s Jamie. Would I then be morally responsible for anything Dragomir did during the day, since I gave him the ability to venture out?
Betsy stayed in the room long past visiting hours; the one time a nurse tried to kick her out, Betsy reared back with a good Southern “As God as my witness” and scared the stuffing clean out of the poor woman. My best friend guilted me into eating dinner and updated me on all the town gossip I’d apparently missed while being lost in the woods, and not once did she ask about what actually happened. Betsy knew me well enough to know I left out a lot of details in what I’d told the detectives.
But she didn’t push me. She distracted me and threatened me with all sorts of hospitality if I didn’t go home to stay with her after I left the hospital. I only got some peace after the nurse brought my next dose of painkillers and I drifted off to semi-conscious dream-land.
The semidarkness made it easier to think, easier to wrestle with heavy issues. The conversation with Hightower and Schultz just made it clear no one would find Jamie unless I forced them to. After almost a decade, humans hadn’t done much to track him down, and if the detectives were right, they’d already searched every area a human could safely reach.
Which meant there were parts of the park that humans couldn’t reach safely; ergo I needed someone who wasn’t human to search those areas.
Which left me with Dragomir, since I didn’t have any other non-humans knocking down my door. The vampire would be a more effective tracker than any human could hope to be, based on his speed and experience alone. He’d be faster and more thorough, and he’d deal with the guilty parties without waiting for a trial.
My heart jumped at the thought and one of the machines made a warning ping before I started breathing normally again. Maybe Dragomir had been right that I didn’t understand what it meant to ask him to kill whoever took Jamie.
The vampire had done more than his fair share of killing for far less justifiable reasons; so what if he took another life in order to avenge my brother? It wasn’t like he was some innocent lamb gamboling through a meadow. He was a murderer, a cannibal. I just asked him to do what was in his nature to do.
The thought left a sour taste in my mouth. Maybe Dragomir wasn’t that bad. He could have killed me and instead chose not to. He helped me, healed me. Offered me the one thing I wanted more than anything else in the world – my brother. And all he wanted in return was a little research and creativity. Dragomir had his own motives, but those weren’t my problem. I wasn’t responsible for the ‘why’ of his behavior, nor was I responsible for the ‘how.’ The consequences of how he used what I gave him were his to deal with.
I needed Jamie back. And apparently I’d do anything – even help a nocturnal predator stalk in the daylight – to make that happen.