She let go.
He kissed her for a moment longer and then she felt something snap back into place inside his mind.
Shit.
"Em," he said, his voice low with horror again. "What are you?"
She threw Nick out after that. She'd been on the verge of saying something dumb, revealing her true nature, but as she opened her mouth to explain she'd realized there wasn't anything she could say that made any sense. "I'm sorry darling, but I'm actually a thousand year old vampire halfling and I just needed a snack" wasn't going to go down very well. She'd stuffed up, and she knew it.
All she could do was apologize, which she did over and over again as she gathered up his clothes, pressed them into his arms and pushed him out her apartment door. She couldn't stand the look of disgust in his eyes, but she leaned up against the door after she'd closed it on him and listened for a long time. He pulled on his clothes and left. She slid down the door and sat there with her face resting against the wood and sobbed.
What an idiot she'd been.
When Jarek found her she was still there. He materialized in front of her, the hem of his coat trailing black smoke and smelling of the void between the worlds. With his strong hands he dragged her to her feet, then picked her up and carried her to bed.
He pulled the covers up to her chin, and kissed her forehead. She snuffled at him, still in tears.
"You poor stupid thing," he said gently. "You're your father's daughter, that's for sure."
And then he was gone.
The alarm went off at seven in the morning and she dragged herself out of bed, only to stand staring at herself in the bathroom mirror for far too long. Her cell phone bleated in the kitchen and she let it ring, but the noise did a lot to haul her back into reality. She showered, dressed and drove to work still feeling numb, dreading seeing Nick.
At the door of the lab, Robert pulled her aside. He held her arm tightly and whispered angrily.
"I can handle being just a side show for you, but I would have appreciated being told about it. I thought I entirely respected what you and Nick have together, but now I see you've gone and used him too. What the hell have you done to him? He looks terrible, and you don't look any better."
She said nothing, and he squeezed her arm a little harder. "You don't get to do this to people I like, Em. Sort this mess out with Nick and then stay away from him. That's an order."
She shut her eyes and pressed her lips together in a thin line to stop them from shaking. Robert glared at her for a moment and then strode into the lab.
It was a long day.
Nick wouldn't meet her eyes and Robert wouldn't work next to her. They had thirty seven bodies to process and they did it almost entirely in silence. The support technicians and assistants raised their eyebrows at each other and escaped from the room at every chance they could. The atmosphere was poisonous.
Em was on her own.
Toward the end of the day she found herself alone in the lab. The three bodies she was processing were laid out on the stainless steel benches, white sheets draped over their torsos leaving their head and shoulders exposed. All the damage, on all thirty seven victims, was in the neck area, and although she was obliged to double check every victim to make sure, the damage was all the same. Teeth marks.
Em turned to the third of next batch of bodies and was stunned to realize it was female.
A woman? That wasn't right. Em knew she hadn't been paying a huge amount of attention to anything that had been going on today, but she didn't know that there had been one female victim among the thirty seven bodies they'd found in the warehouse. She must have been working on something else when they'd bagged this one. Maybe she'd already left with Nick to go to his family's party. How did she miss this?
She took a closer look at the victim. It was a woman of about twenty three years of age. Slim, attractive, blond. She appeared to have died only a few days ago, definitely much more recently than some of the other bodies in the collection.
This was not good. So far, all the victims in this messed up case had been male. Now there was a break in the pattern, and that meant the killer was getting restless. Bored. And a bored psychopath was never a good thing, human or otherwise.
Em bent down to take a closer look at the victim's neck wounds. Something glistened there. Was it an earring or something mashed into her throat?
Em grabbed some tweezers and prized the sparkling thing out of the gaping hole that was all that remained of the woman's neck. She had it. It looked like a false fingernail, she thought incredulously, as she ran it under the tap to wash some of the blood off it. She lifted the sheet to look at the victims hands. No, no falsies there.
Taking the nail over to a scope Em took a closer look. It was actually organic, she realized, not plastic at all. It seemed to have some kind of reptile print over it, a green snakeskin pattern...
She had the funniest feeling she'd seen this before.
Her cell phone rang, the noise interrupting her train of thought. She tore her gloves off, fished the phone out of her pocket and looked at the screen. Jennifer. Em snorted with impatience. Typical Jennifer. She always rang in the middle of work. Em knew she couldn't cope with Jennifer now. If this was another boyfriend disaster Em had enough of her own to worry about. Jennifer could wait. She dropped the phone back into her pocket and let the call go to voice mail.
Before she'd even had time to turn back to the scale-thing under the microscope the phone rang again. Em groaned with frustration. This had better be important.
"Jenn," she began, but Jennifer was already talking. She was practically screaming.
"Em, Em, I need you please, please come and help me, please." She was panting, sucking in huge gulps of air and choking, choking on something.
"Jenn, what's happened?" said Em urgently. She suddenly had a very bad feeling about this. "Tell me what's going on Jenn."
"She bit me!" said Jenn hysterically. "She's not... she's not..." Jenn's breaths turned into coughs.
She?
Em's eyes flashed to the green reptile scale under the microscope. She knew exactly where she'd seen it before.
"Jenn, where are you?"
"I don't know. It's dark, like a warehouse or something. Em? Em..." Jennifer's voice started to pitch upwards again. "She said she's coming back."
"I'm coming Jenn," said Em and she dropped the phone beside the scope and spun herself into smoke.
Em flew over the city.
With her mind she searched for Jennifer. She threw her energy ahead of her, skimming through the souls of people all over the harborside area. Streets, cars, pubs, clubs, people at work, people at home. She wasn't gentle. She had the most awful feeling she was going to be too late.
She almost missed Jennifer when she did find her. Jennifer's soul was just a whisper, just a flicker, so faint Em nearly passed right over it.
Em landed beside Jennifer, the black smoke of her dark energy snapping back into her usual form in the blink of an eye. Jennifer was lying in the damp corner of a dark laneway that ended at the door of yet another dilapidated warehouse. Her cell phone had fallen out of her hand. It was still on, Em noticed, the call still connected to Em's phone back in the lab. It had only been a few moments since Em had left the laboratory, but for Jennifer it must have seemed so much longer. The cell phone's bright screen spilled a sad and incongruous light over the dying woman.
"Jennifer," Em said, quietly. She knelt quickly and put her arms around the woman, pulling her onto her knees. She hugged her close and looked sadly at the deep gashes and bruises over her friend's body.