Someone picked up before she even heard a ring. "Sasha?" said a woman with a smoky voice.
Who was Sasha? "Mrs. Faustin? My name is Helena MacAllister…"
"You have my boy safe? He's with you now? He lives?"
"Y…yes…but he's been hurt and he won't let me call for help."
The woman muttered something in Russian, or what she assumed was Russian. "No, you do not call for help. Your hospitals are not for our kind. They wouldn't know what to do with him, then in the morning, poof!"
Our kind? What, were they Christian Scientists?
"Mrs. Faustin, I don't want to alarm you but he's very ill and needs help."
"Ill?" The woman made a spitting noise. "He is fried crispy like bacon, no? All there is to do for him is for you to feed him, then let him rest, then feed him again. Bring others to feed if you can, the more the better."
"Feed him what?"
That question set off a whole barrage of Russian invective. A man's voice asked a question in the background and Mrs. Faustin exchanged some rapid-fire comments with him, all in Russian, before she came back. "He's not told you."
"Told me what?"
"Have you not made with the nookie yet?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"And he takes little of your blood and you like very much?"
"What?"
"Girlie—Yelena—future daughter of my heart—give him your blood to make him well. I beg you this as his mother."
Maybe this was a nightmare. Maybe she'd wake up pretty soon. That would be nice. "I don't understand you, Mrs. Faustin."
"Help is coming to you, but you must help now. Open your veins. Send your blood down his throat."
"What kind of crazy—? What good would that do?"
"Everything. We are vampire."
Mrs. Faustin pronounced vampire like vham-peer. She went on, something about species variation, superstition and hemophilia, but Helena's mind locked on vampire. He was so desperate to get out of the house before six. Before sunrise. And his refusal to see her before five. Sunset. But no. That was absurd. If Alex was a vampire, Scully was a werewolf.
Mrs. Faustin rattled on. She was crazy. Like her son. It was time to call an ambulance. She could only look at Alex's seared face out of the corner of her eye. Otherwise she'd throw up again. Now her furtive glances told her he had gone still as death.
Worried, she touched his shoulder. He screamed in pain, flopped away from her and screamed again.
Mrs. Faustin shouted, "What are you doing to my boy? Feed him!"
"I'm not going to do that."
"You can and you will. If you do not, I will come out there and flay you alive and then you will know the meaning of suffering. I will rip out your liver. I will lay the curse of the House Faustin—"
There was a clatter and another voice came on the phone. It reminded her of Alex's, but was deeper and rougher. It made no introductions, just began to give instruction. "This you will do or my son will die, and none of us want that. Yes, Helena? Find the sharpest blade in the house, a razor blade, perhaps, and sterilize it with flame or alcohol…" He went on, his voice inherently soothing. Helena's mind became clear and calm and she did as she was told.
Kneeling beside Alex, she poked at her left wrist with an X-Acto blade. It hurt. A lot. And it didn't bleed. Wincing through her tears, she made a proper cut across a blue vein. This time the blood welled up and she turned her wrist over and sent the drops down to Alex's lips. His tongue stretched out and caught the drops like he was catching snowflakes. She brought her wrist over his mouth, carefully, because his lips were purple and blistered, and he suckled at it instinctively, half conscious. It didn't hurt.
He was a vampire. A vampire.
Even with the truth sucking on her wrist it didn't make any sense at all. She looked at the X-Acto knife on the ground. It didn't make sense that she'd been brave enough to cut herself either. None of this made sense. How'd he get so burned, anyway?
Suddenly he grabbed hold of her wrist with both hands and tore into her flesh like a pit bull. It hurt, but the adrenalin shot through her too—fight or flight like she'd never experienced. She fought for her life, silently, desperately, kicking at his ruined flesh, trying to pull away from his vice-like jaws. But it made no difference. With amazing strength he flipped her on her back, threw himself over her body and began to suck in earnest. The edges of her vision clouded black as the blood left her body. The room went dark, but her hearing worked until the end. The last sound she heard was the wet, slurping sound of him eating her alive.
Chapter 5
When she woke, she was still on the basement floor, but she was cozy and warm. A pillow was under her head, the quilt off her bed around her. The first thing she did was look at her arm. There wasn't a mark on it. She bolted up out of the blanket. Where was Alex?
"You'll be lightheaded." It was a stranger's voice, deep and resonant. It may have been a warning, or a command, for the moment he said it the room began to spin in giddy loops. Helena dropped back to the pillow and the room stopped moving. Carefully she rolled toward the voice and found a man with long blond hair cradling Alex in his lap. For a confused moment she thought he was an angel because he was too chiseled, too pale, too unearthly beautiful to be human. His black T-shirt was hiked up, his breast sliced open, and in a grotesque parody of nursing, the charred thing that used to be Alex lapped at the cut with a long, pointed tongue.
"Am I dead?"
The man lifted his head. His cool blue eyes were sad. Not momentarily sad, but habitually sad. There was a difference. He appraised her in a single glance, a knowing glance that was not exactly cruel, but so calculating and distant that she realized he couldn't be human. It was like having a staring contest with a big cat at the zoo. "Alex would not kill you to save himself." The angel man looked back down at Alex. "He's the best of all of us."
"And you are?"
"His brother, Mikhail." He pointed his chin at a glass beside her. "Drink your orange juice."
I'm having a psychotic break. This is what it's like.
No wonder crazy people never thought they were nuts. Everything was normal. It wasn't like the houseplants were talking to her. She just happened to have vampires in her basement.
Mikhail had taken over caring for Alex and asked for little from her. No one asked her to feed Alex again, and she hadn't volunteered. Mikhail—Misha, Alex called him—went in and out a lot. Helena figured he was going out and sucking on other people and bringing their blood home to Alex like a sinister mama bird. She tried not to think about it. Don't ask, don't tell.
That first night, Mikhail explained how Alex came to be burned and assured her he would recover from it in time, but he was closed mouthed about vampirism in general. He said she should talk to Alex about these things. Mikhail was a little scary. Not that he wasn't always perfectly polite, but it was he, not Alex, that made her believe in vampires. Or rather, vham-peers. Mikhail pronounced it that way too.
Helena puzzled on the differences between the two brothers. Mikhail was slick, precise, icy and startlingly beautiful while Alex was impulsive, warm, impatient and had been handsome in a more normal way. They did look a little alike—same chin and mouth, same ears, same hands. That was about it. Mikhail carried Alex as easily as he would a child, and moved with a flowing grace that was borderline creepy. Helena had to assume that Alex was that strong and could move like that too if he wanted. But somehow Alex passed for human while his brother did not.