When the cab finally appeared an eternity later, he had it take him to a home and garden store long enough to buy an air mattress in their pool supply section, some vinyl tape, and a bag of potting soil. Which seemed as effective as the earth under the Takananda’s tree since touching the bag sucked away a fraction of daylight’s misery and brought an urge to stretch out right there on the pile of bags.
Back at the house he looked for Harry’s car before having the cab drop him off. No sign of it. He seemed to be in the clear. Inside, Lien sat in the family room reading, never looking up as he peered around the door before slipping into the kitchen to borrow scissors and paper towels.
Upstairs, he cut a slit in the end of each tub in the air mattress — not trusting the potting soil to pass from tube to tube as air did during inflation — and using a paper towel as a funnel, trickled in the potting soil until each tube had a layer. After pressing out any air that leaked in with the potting soil, he taped the cuts closed.
Time to see if this worked.
Garreth spread his makeshift pallet on the bed and lay down. Here and there the soil lumped. His body ignored them. Nerves untwisted. Tension and pain drained away, bringing relief so profound he was falling asleep almost before he realized it. At the edge, he forced himself back…struggled upright and slid the pallet under the bed’s bottom sheet to hide it.
Last, before letting go, he worried the loose teeth free. Pushing his tongue into the spaces left, he felt sharp points coming through and shivered. The teeth signaled a point of no return. Now he could no longer deny the thing he had become. The chill of that thought followed him into sleep.
6
Hunger woke him, violent, racking cramps doubling him up in bed. His throat burned with a thirst that refused denial. Icy dread replaced the mere chill he felt falling asleep. The time had come to face the problem he had refused to think about before: food.
Tonight he had to…eat.
Garreth staggered down the hall to the bathroom and doubled over the washbowl gulping down water. Neither hot nor cold water slaked the thirst, just eased the cramps enough to let him stand upright.
In the mirror his face loomed pale, unshaven, and gaunt. No longer square, he noticed. Cheekbones showed where none had before. He grimaced. After the times he tried to shed a few pounds…
Thought of weight vanished as he stared at his reflected teeth. Drawing back his lips in the grimace revealed fully grown canines…narrower than his previous ones and grooved at the back, his exploring tongue found. As he opened his mouth for a closer look, they extended a half inch or better. As he relaxed, they retracted again. He thought of Marti and gave thanks she had at least been saved from seeing him like this!
The length of his stubble astonished him. How long had he slept, he wondered as he turned on his razor.
Shaving made him feel better…and look better, he decided. Almost human. Which thought made him eye the bandages on his neck. He unwound them. Beneath, only scars remained…silvery pale. Count the recuperative powers of the vampire as fact, then.
But a human could not heal that fast, so after using a pair of nail scissors from his shaving kit to cut and remove the sutures, he carefully replaced the bandages.
The cramps started again.
Garreth slugged down more hot water until he could stand and walk…then put on clean clothes and made his way downstairs.
Voices drew him to the kitchen and a familiar scene. Harry and Lien seated at the peninsula, Harry with coat and tie off, eating a supper kept warm by Lien. But more than the aroma of sweet-and-sour pork drifted into the hall and Garreth halted, recoiling. Blood. If he went in there he would be surrounded by the smell of it. How could he hope to act normal, when he ached with hunger?
He shook himself. Come on, Mikaelian…man up! You’re not a blood-sucking zombie like Miss Lucy. Lane obviously had self-control, despite the club being awash in blood scents. He needed to develop it, too, if he wanted to pass as human.
Garreth forced himself forward…through the doorway.
Lien looked around and smiled. “It lives!”
Harry also turned…for some reason appearing relieved.
“I told you.” She patted his shoulder. “Harry here kept wanting to call an ambulance because he’d look in on you and think you’d stopped breathing. I told him not to worry, that you were the same way the other day, that you’d wake up and be fine. Now here you are. And starved I expect.”
Panic exploded in Garreth. She knew! She had figured him out! Run!
“There’s still plenty of sweet-and-sour and rice left.”
The words needed a moment to reach him through the thunder of blood in his ears. When they sank in he swore silently…in relief and chagrin. What was that Biblical quote: The wicked flee where no man pursuith.
He took a breath to calm himself…regretted it when their scents filled his nose and burned down his throat. “I’ll take tea; otherwise I’m okay for now. I’m still sore from Chiarelli’s punch and trying to go easy on my stomach.” He glanced at the kitchen clock. Nine. It had been a shorter sleep than he thought. “I guess you didn’t notice I made myself a sandwich this afternoon about an hour after we got back from church.”
“Yesterday,” Harry said.
Garreth blinked. “What?”
Lien glanced around from filling the tea kettle. “We went to church yesterday. This is Monday.”
He slept thirty hours? “Yeah, I can see that might worry you. I guess it was good for me.” He gave them a lying smile. “I feel almost normal again.” God…the smell of their blood! Hunger screamed in him. He sat on the stool at the end of the peninsula to keep from doubling with a cramp.
Get a grip, Mikaelian!
“Speaking of normal…” Harry reached over to his coat and dug keys out of a pocket. “…here are your car keys back. Also, your med exam is set for Friday morning. Then you see the shrink after lunch. So eat up and rest up.”
Med and psych exams in daylight! How much power could he exert then? And how could he even think about strategy while fighting hunger?
So think about something else, man.
One distraction occurred to him. Never mind that it violated Lien’s no shop talk rule. “Harry, how are the cases going? Have you caught Wink O’Hare yet…or found any sign of Lane Barber?”
Harry glanced at Lien, who nodded. “Neither one yet. For Barber we’ve got APB’s out for the Barber name and Alexandra Pfeifer.” He paused. “Odd alias, isn’t it? I suppose it sounds more authentic than the standard Anglo-Saxon ones. But it’s all crazy. We dusted her apartment and the only prints we found belonged to your name on the letter, Madelaine Bieber, and she turns out not to be Barber, but a sixty-seven-year-old woman who was arrested for assault in 1941. We can’t find her, either.”
Garreth bit his lip to keep from telling them that Lane and Madelaine Bieber were the same woman. Once he accepted Lane as a vampire, it followed that her apparent age bore no relation to her actual one. No wonder Lane hunted so efficiently; she had decades of practice. “Did the lab recover anything from papers burned in the fireplace?”
Harry shook his head. “Not much…just a partial postmark on an envelope with two of the ZIP numbers, a six and a seven.”
“That doesn’t help?”
Harry grimaced. “It might if we knew for sure where they are in the ZIP. If the ZIP is sixty-seven something, the letter came from the middle of Kansas. If it’s something sixty-seven something, it could have been mailed in any one of nine states. I had the fun of going through a ZIP directory to check the possibilities.” He laughed. “Isn’t being a detective exciting?”