7
Do not allow your childe to subsist on bottled blood alone. Newborn vampires need the nutritional support of live blood, or at least donor blood if the childe has qualms about violence. A bottled-only diet would be like allowing a human kindergartner to live on Jujubes and Mountain Dew.
—Siring for the Stupid:
A Beginner’s Guide to Raising Newborn Vampires
“Ow,” Gabriel said dully, as if he’d just stubbed his toe. He slumped against me and passed out.
Seeing the red-tinged grain of the wooden shaft sticking out of his skin, I felt a surge of panic. Did an arrow count as a stake? I realized that the arrow was lodged in the wrong side of his chest. He’d been shot about four inches too far to the right to do any permanent damage. But obviously, it still hurt like a bitch, because Gabriel was completely unconscious, the skin around his lips white and tense.
Fighting down my panic, I closed my eyes, focused my senses, and opened them to search for any signs of a human or a vampire nearby. There was no scent. No movement in the distance. I could hear a skittering heartbeat, moving away from me quickly. I could hear the faint crackle of tree limbs as the human archer ran from the havoc he’d caused. His mind was racing, so scattered and hyped up that I couldn’t grasp at a single thought stream.
Should I chase him or help Gabriel? Considering how much Gabriel was bleeding and the likelihood of being skewered myself if I caught the human, I decided to stay. I cupped my hand over the wound, thick red blood welling around my fingers and the arrow as I applied pressure.
I thought back to all of the bad Kevin Costner movies I’d seen involving dancing with wolves and Robin Hoods without the proper accent. When the hapless sidekick was skewered, Kevin would snap off the feathered end of the arrow and pull it out. I gently pulled Gabriel toward me and saw that there was no traditional feathered end to the arrow. It was a plain old sportsman’s arrow, like most of the deer hunters in the area would use.
I opened Gabriel’s shirt and saw that the flesh around the protruding arrowhead was withered and crackling. A reaction to the wood?
I reached over his shoulder and snapped off the notched end as close to his back as possible. Waking, Gabriel winced, leaning heavily against me.
“Ow,” he said again, sounding more annoyed. I took this as a good sign.
I wrapped my fingers around the arrowhead. “I’m not going to lie, this is going to hurt.”
“What?”
Without further preamble, I yanked hard. Gabriel yelped as the arrow slid free and clattered to the ground. The jolt of pain seemed to help him focus. His eyes narrowed, snapping to my face.
“Someone shot me with an arrow!” he exclaimed.
A nervous laugh bubbled up through my chest. “Yeah, sweetie, that’s why there was a narrow wooden cylinder sticking out your back.”
“Well, now that the initial panic is over, I find I am really pissed about it!” he grumbled.
I laughed, running my hand over my face. “Let’s get you into the house before he tries it again, OK?”
“You know, this is your fault, Ms. Spontaneous Outdoor Sex,” he grumped as I hauled him to his feet.
“Actually, you’re right. I should have known better,” I admitted, tucking his arm around my shoulders and supporting his weight as we walked. “Nothing good comes from us having sex outside. I just now recall Taseing you after the shop incident and then creepy Jeanine sending me pictures of our activities afterward.”
“We just need to do more thorough perimeter checks from now on,” he muttered.
“Why are you limping?” I demanded. “The arrow didn’t hit you in the leg.”
He stopped, his shift in weight pulling me to a halt, too. “I don’t know. It just seems like the thing to do after you’ve received an arrow wound.”
I sighed as he straightened his gait and walked normally. “You are so the guy for me.”
The wound had closed by the time we reached the front door. Gabriel kept repeating, “Who the hell shoots an arrow at someone? Doesn’t anyone have any respect for the recent advancements in firearms?”
“What happened?” Jamie called as we passed the parlor door. Jettie had him ensconced on the couch with a bottle of Faux Type O, playing a video game while she showed him my high school yearbooks. Where was the loyalty? Honestly.
“Just a little mishap with a stray arrow,” I said through gritted teeth as I steered Gabriel down the hall to the guest bath, where we kept the medical supplies.
Jamie dropped his controller and followed us. The potential to see real carnage was more appealing than killing digital zombies, or whatever he was doing.
“Do you think it could have been a hunter?” I asked Gabriel. “They’ve strayed onto my land before. I try not to get too grumpy with them, because, well, they’re armed.”
“We could go look in the woods,” Jettie offered, appearing at my elbow. “See if there’s a suspicious character hanging around.” I nodded, and my ghostly friends disappeared through the front wall of the house.
“It’s nowhere near bow season,” Jamie said.
“So, you’re familiar with bow-hunting, are you?” Gabriel asked, his tone suspicious.
I smacked his good arm. “If you’re going to be accusatory, at least man up about it. Jamie, did you shoot Gabriel in the back with a bow and arrow?”
“What, am I going to get sent to time-out if I did?”
“That’s not really an answer,” Gabriel noted.
“No, OK, I didn’t shoot you. I was showing Jettie how to play Madden NFL 11 on Wii.”
“When did we get a Wii?” I asked.
“This is what’s disturbing to you in this situation? Heretofore unaccounted-for gaming equipment?” Gabriel demanded.
I shrugged. “How am I supposed to take away privileges if I don’t even know what privileges he has?”
“Damn it, I knew I shouldn’t have told you!” Jamie exclaimed.
“Can we focus the conversation on my nearly being killed by a flying stake?” Gabriel asked, his pallor getting more ashen by the second.
“Jamie, could you grab Gabriel a couple of packets of donor blood from the fridge? Dick brought some by a while ago,” I asked, pulling out my cell phone. “I’m calling Dick.”
“Jane. Wait.”
“Gabriel, I know you’re probably kind of embarrassed. I’m not sure what to do here. Of everyone we know, I’d say it’s most likely that Dick has survived something like this.”
“I don’t feel very well,” Gabriel said, his voice strained as moisture pooled at the corners of his eyes.
Jamie scoffed. “I thought we don’t get sick. Aw, come on, Gabe, tears? I’m gonna find your man card and rip it—”
Suddenly, blood was streaming down Gabriel’s cheeks. Our tears had traces of blood in them, leaving rusty pink streaks on our faces if we cried. Gabriel looked as if he was starring in a PSA about the Ebola virus.
“Jamie, shut up,” I commanded in a tone even Jamie couldn’t argue with. “Gabriel, what’s wrong? What hurts?”
Gabriel opened his mouth to answer, and a tidal wave of dark crimson poured out of his mouth and onto my hands. Jamie shrieked and scrambled back. I let Gabriel sink to the hallway floor and cradled his head in my lap. He coughed, spraying red streaks across an ancient family carpet.
Grandma Ruthie’s tinny, disembodied voice fluttered at my left ear, screeching, “Don’t let him bleed on my rug!”
I ignored her, concentrating on the blood that seemed to be seeping from Gabriel’s very pores. I sniffed at the arrow wound. The skin was starting to re-form around it, although blood had started to gush in waves from the puncture, soaking through his shirt and seeping onto my legs. I’d almost forgotten that Gabriel was still holding on to the arrow. I took it from his hand carefully. It smelled funny, bitter and metallic, with an undertone of sickly sweetness. The wood seemed spongy and weak, as if it had been submerged in water for a while.
“This is what you get when you lie down with a monster.” Grandma Ruthie sighed at my ear, clucking her tongue. “Nothing but blood and death and ruined carpet.”
“Shut the hell up, old woman! You laid down with more men than I ever could!” I screamed as Gabriel retched against me, spilling blood over my jeans. “Gabriel, please, tell me what you need me to do.”
Jamie was kneeling beside me now, holding Gabriel’s legs as he thrashed and twitched. “Do we call an ambulance?”
I shook my head, bit my wrist, and pressed it to Gabriel’s mouth. “We have to flush out his system with new blood. It will help him heal. Same thing happened when I got silver-maced last year. Get my cell from my purse. Call Dick, tell him we need blood, any kind he has. Now!”
When Gabriel didn’t draw from the wound, I opened his mouth and dripped the blood past his lips. I could hear Jamie on the phone with Dick, his young voice pitched by panic. Gabriel’s eyes dropped closed, but I saw his throat working to swallow. This was a hideous feeling. The helplessness, watching as he suffered. This was what Dick had felt when I’d been sprayed last year. This was what Gabriel had felt on the side of the road when I was shot in the back and he came to my house to find me bleeding.
My blood seemed to help. Gabriel’s legs stopped twitching. His fingers wrapped around my arm, holding it to his mouth. I stroked his forehead and asked Jamie for a wet cloth to clean the rust-colored tears from his cheeks. Minutes passed silently, without comments from Jamie or Grandma Ruthie. My limbs were starting to feel heavy, cold. I could feel my body functions slowing down as the blood left my veins. I tried to remember the last time I’d fed and couldn’t. Clearly, my siring schedule was a little more hectic than I’d thought. “He’s going to need more blood than what I can give him.”
Jamie shrugged as if he couldn’t figure out why I was telling him this. “OK.” I smacked his arm and glanced pointedly at his wrist. “Fine. I can’t believe this,” he grumbled, biting into his arm. “Ow! That hurts!”
“Be nice. I gave you my blood when you needed it.” I helped him bring Gabriel’s mouth to the freely seeping wound. This feeding was more detached, clinical. Jamie was leaning away from Gabriel as if he was afraid that someone would burst into the room and accuse him of being bromantic with his grandsire.
I was momentarily sidelined, with less blood circulating around my brain, and the panic was seeping in at the edges of my consciousness. What more could I do? Should I call the Council? What could they do for him? Vampires healed on their own. There were few medical treatments for us other than blood.
Suddenly, Gabriel broke away from Jamie’s arm, spewing all of the blood he’d just ingested over Jamie’s shoulder and onto the floor. Jamie cursed and wiped frantically at his clothes. Gabriel’s skin was cold and gray as I pulled him across my legs. I slid my hands down his cheeks, trying to wipe away some of the sticky crimson from his skin. His eyes wheeled frantically, searching the ceiling behind me. He couldn’t seem to focus on my face. I leaned close to touch my forehead to his. His chest gurgled as he panted against my cheek. His fingers plucked frantically at my sleeve, pulling me closer. My eyes burned with unshed tears.
“Just hold on, please?” I begged him. “We’re going to get married. I want to spend the rest of my undead life annoying the living hell out of you. I can’t do that without you.”
Dick and Andrea burst through the front door, blanching at the sight of Gabriel curled in my lap. Dick murmured, “It looks like a Tarantino movie in here.”
Recognizing a starving vampire when she saw one, Andrea rolled up her sleeve and took my place by Gabriel. She cradled his head with a practiced air and had him latched onto her wrist before I could blink. Reluctantly moving away from him, I felt the hysteria I’d been tamping down clawing its way up my chest to my throat. My knees gave out, and Dick caught my elbows to keep me from collapsing bonelessly onto the floor like a rag doll. “Easy there, Stretch.”
“I don’t know what happened,” I said, wiping at my wet cheeks with shaking hands as Dick led me to the couch. “We were just walking outside. We were talking, laughing, and then there was this noise, a ping. And Gabriel had an arrow poking out of his chest—”
I sprang off the couch and grabbed the arrow from the floor. “Dick, who do you know who might work in a lab? A hospital, blood bank. Hell, I’ll take a high school chemistry teacher if they know what they’re doing.”
“Why? Don’t you think we should focus on Gabriel right now?”
I gingerly held up the arrow fragments. He leaned over to sniff the wood and made a sour face. “I want this tested for poisons, contaminants, drugs. I want to know why Gabriel reacted this way to this arrow.”
“We can be poisoned?” Andrea exclaimed. “Why didn’t I know this? I think that should be in the Guidebook somewhere.”
“I’m serious, Dick. I want to know what’s wrong with that arrow,” I told him.
Dick snickered. “Well, sure, I’ll just scoot on down to my crime lab and fire up the gas chromatograph.”
I glared at him. He grimaced. “Inappropriate humor is how I cope, Jane.”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know a guy.”
He shrugged. “I know a guy.”
“Of course you do. You think you can get me results quick?”
“For a price.”
“There’s emergency cash in the library, stuffed inside a copy of The Great Gatsby. Take as much as you think you’ll need.” Dick lifted a brow. I squeezed his arm. “I trust you, Dick.”
“Shouldn’t I take my turn feeding him?” Dick asked, his forehead creased with concern for his old friend.
“I’ll take another turn before we take him upstairs,” I said, shaking my head. “It would be better to know what we’re dealing with now. Just go.”
Dick gingerly wrapped the arrow bits in a plastic kitchen baggie and told me to wash my hands, just in case whatever poison the arrow contained could be absorbed through the skin. He kissed Andrea on the top of her head as she continued to feed Gabriel, and slipped out the front door.
“You know, it’s at times like this that I’m really glad I’m friends with Dick Cheney,” I said as Andrea squeezed my fingers with her free hand.
“He is handy to have around when you need favors of a secretive and dubious nature,” she acknowledged.
“Honey, I don’t want to know what kind of favors he does for you.”
“See, you made a lame little joke,” she said, nudging me. “Everything will be just fine now.”
When Andrea was starting to feel woozy, we poured the donor blood Dick had brought over down Gabriel’s throat. I took another turn feeding him, hoping that somehow there was enough of his own blood left in my veins that it would be like getting an infusion from a compatible donor. He finally stopped throwing it back up, which I assumed meant that he was getting better. Andrea helped me lift Gabriel and carry him upstairs. I stripped off his bloody clothes and tucked him into bed. Andrea went downstairs to work over the bloodstained carpet, which she seemed to think she could clean with some club soda. When I suggested kerosene and a match, she was horrified.
Stroking his hair back from him his gore-covered face, I pressed a kiss to his temple. Jamie came through the bedroom door with a bowl of clean water and a rag.
His expression was sheepish. “Sorry I freaked out down there. I’ve just never seen anything like that. I mean, I’ve seen horror movies, but that was …”
“Real life, Jamie. There’s no shame in being scared. I was terrified. I’m just better at covering it up.”
Jamie’s brow furrowed as I cleaned Gabriel’s face. “You really love him, huh? Not just the sweet ‘oh, we met in high school and just couldn’t seem to find someone else’ sort of love, but the epic, desperate, ‘move mountains and cross oceans’ sort of love.”
I chuckled. “I think that would be an apt description. When you realize that someone would do anything for you, even if it means separating themselves from you, risking that you’ll never love them again, just to make sure you’re safe and well … There’s no coming back from that. You’ll do whatever it takes to be with them. You might want to kick their ass a few times along the way. But when you find that, you don’t let it go.”
Jamie shuddered.
“Too mushy?” I asked.
“I’ll survive.”
Gabriel grumbled in his sleep and shifted against me. I bit into my wrist and let the blood drip into his mouth.
“Hey, you’ve got to stop doing that. You’ve fed him twice already. Dick said you could drain yourself dry.”
“Look who’s the voice of reason all of a sudden,” I muttered.
“If I was the voice of reason, I would have kept you from giving Dick cash.”
I laughed, an honest-to-goodness bark of sincere laughter, and he grinned at me.
“I mean, seriously, I get why you’re with Gabriel, as much as it pains me to say it. He has that whole sophisticated-older-guy thing working for him. But what’s with Dick? He’s fun for me to hang out with because he’s a total dude. But the old Jane, the Jane I knew growing up, wouldn’t have looked at that guy twice.”
I smiled fondly at him, because I knew he was painfully correct, and nodded to the trunk at the end of the bed. He sat down and folded his long legs under his butt, like a child waiting for story time. “Did I ever tell you about my first night out as a vampire?”
He shook his head, and I felt very remiss in my duties as a sire. Mine was a cautionary tale that should be printed and handed out as a “how-not-to” pamphlet for young vampires as they entered the undead social scene. He said, “You’ve mentioned something about freaking out and trying to bite Zeb.”
“Well, there was that. But I’m talking about my first night out as a vampire, out on the town. Back when Andrea was human. She took me out to this vampire sports bar, the Cellar. It was a completely respectable, nondangerous place. So, really, we should have been fine. Andrea had a little too much to drink. I ended up pouring her into my car and running back for my purse, only to find that the bartender was getting roughed up.”
“By Dick?”
“By some lowlife who thought that being a vampire was a good excuse to shake money out of food-service workers, as opposed to getting a job.”
“So, it was Dick,” he said as if I was missing his point.
I glared at him. “Would you let me tell the story?”
“Said lowlife, whose name was Walter, by the way, turned his less-than-honorable intentions toward me. We ended up brawling in the parking lot. I held my own until Walter tried to crack my skull like a walnut with his bare hands. I kicked him in the nuts. And Dick stepped in to chastise me for unsportsmanlike conduct. That’s how we met.”
“So, the point of this story is … don’t go out drinking with Andrea?”
“No. Well, actually, yes. That’s a pretty important life lesson. But the point of the story is, after the fight, I ended up being accused of Walter’s murder. After meeting me just once, Dick was willing to speak up for me to the Council, to help me clear my name. Even though it was clearly in his interest to stay far away from any sort of law enforcement. That’s just the kind of guy Dick is. Once you’re his friend, there’s nothing he won’t do for you. And yeah, I do trust him. Because I know exactly how sneaky and underhanded he’s capable of being, but he’s never lied to me—even when it would have been better for him if he had. That matters.”
“You’re happier now, aren’t you?” he asked, sort of squinting at me as if he was seeing me for the first time in a long time. “You weren’t ever this … settled before, content, I guess would be the word. You were always sort of sad and stressed out whenever your mama would drag you to church or family stuff. I always figured it was because, well, you were with your mama.”
I snorted. “You weren’t wrong.”
“But you were sad, as a human.”
“I don’t know about sad. But I was lonely. There were things in life I was missing, and I didn’t even know it. My life is more now. I have more. And yeah, I had to give up some things, but in the long run, it’s not so bad.”
He took a sip of bottled blood. “I feel like I should be different, somehow. I never really liked baseball all that much. I mean, I was good at it, and my dad wanted me on the team, but it wasn’t like I woke up in the morning excited because I got to play. And now it’s not really an option, and I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do with myself. But I’m scared to try anything new, in case, you know, I go all crazy and evil.”
“I was afraid of that, too. But that’s not really the way it works,” I assured him.
“Are you the same sort of person you were when you were human?”
“That’s a good question. I don’t think my essential makeup has changed. I still believe in heaven and hell. I still believe that a person should do whatever they can to prevent hurting someone else. Then again, I’ve killed someone. I’ve nearly been killed myself. I’ve got blood … or dust on my hands. And that changes you. But you’re so young, you were bound to change, whether you were human or vampire.”
He frowned. “So, it’s OK if I don’t want to be Mr. All-American Jock anymore?”
I put a hand on his shoulder. “OK, but you should be warned, if you start wearing guy-liner and go all Prince of the Undead on me, I’m going to pull embarrassing mom stunts, in public. Calling you ‘sweetie’ in front of your peers. Discussing your showering habits and questionable stains in public. I’ll put my heart and soul into your humiliation.”
“Why would you do that?”
“To amuse myself. Seriously, do you pay attention when I speak?”
He rolled his eyes and ignored the potential “moming” of it all. “You think I’ll be happy?”
I shrugged. “What do you want me to say? ‘Be a good boy, say your prayers, eat your vegetables, and everything will turn out fine’?”
“Obviously, the vegetables are a no-go, but I wouldn’t mind a little smoke blown up my shorts,” he deadpanned.
I ran a hand over Gabriel’s forehead. I sighed. “Say your prayers. Drink your blood. Be nice to your sire. And everything will turn out fine. Was that enough smoke?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“What are sires for?”