The thought made her snicker and Danika slipped away from him to her desk and found a first aid kit in the bottom drawer. She bandaged the wounds, and then held her hand against them, hoping that the pressure would help seal the holes she’d bitten.
But what would she say to him, when he woke up?
A few minutes later, he finally did. And he took her off the hook when he looked at her in total confusion.
“What the hell happened?” he whispered. “I feel horrible.”
“You don’t remember?” Danika said, hope rising in her chest.
“I was sitting here, and you were here and then …” She could see him struggling for the memory. “No, I don’t,” he admitted.
“The fainting seems to be contagious,” she said. “You fell forward, and caught your neck on the coffee table corner there. I bandaged it up for you, but your shirt’s ruined, I think.”
“Wow,” he said, still looking foggy. “How long was I out?”
“Just a few minutes,” she said. “I think you need to rest for a little. Let me take you home?”
“Oh sure, and have you faint again at the wheel? What a pair we’d make on the road.”
“I’m fine now,” she promised, and soon had hustled him out the back of the studio and into her car.
She made sure that Lon got into his house okay, and set him up with a tall glass of orange juice. “You need Vitamin C and fluids right now,” she explained. They always gave you juice when you gave blood to help the body’s sugar levels. Well, Lon had just given a lot of blood.
She had promised to pick him up in the morning too, since they’d left his car at the station. Danika wanted to make sure that he made it through the night. She wondered if he would now become like her. She hadn’t brought him to the brink of death or beyond, as she had her sister. So would he change? Another question.
But the real question on her mind right now was, where the hell was Mila?
— 11 —
The bedroom was small and dark. And hot. Mila threw the covers off, and hitched up her nightgown to expose her legs, but it wasn’t enough. She rolled and turned in the bed, whimpering in frustration, and finally, pulled the nightgown over her head and lay back in the bed, naked, staring at the ceiling fan. She watched the blades go round and round and heard the tick tick tick of the motor as it moved them. She’d been keen to every tiny noise and overcome by every faint smell since she’d awoken on her living room floor, throat ripped up, blood everywhere.
Mila wasn’t sure exactly what had happened; the visit with her sister had taken on a fuzzy, blurred perspective in her memory. But she knew two things: Danika had done this to her, and Danika hadn’t even bothered to eat the soup she’d made. Mila resolved to eat it all herself, once she managed to clean herself up.
Only … later she found, she couldn’t.
She bandaged her neck, and thought about calling an ambulance, but she hated doctors. She knew she’d lost a lot of blood; the carpet told that story well. But Mila knew that if she just lay down on the couch and ate and drank healthy things, she’d build her own blood back. She didn’t need anyone else’s pumped into her, and she couldn’t afford the hospital anyway.
The only problem with her home-cure solution was that every time she tried to eat a spoonful of grandma’s cure-everything soup, Mila felt like throwing up. She found she could drink water, but anything with any flavor threatened to evacuate upon ingestion.
Plus, her neck and throat hurt like hell.
For the first night, she’d stayed on the couch and slipped in and out of consciousness. Friday came and went in a haze, as the world seemed to grow warmer and every motion sent heat tingles down her limbs. She had managed to choke down some soup and milk, but it made her stomach churn and cramp.
When her boyfriend Adrian had dropped by on Sunday and found out how sick she was, he’d taken her back to his apartment. And that’s where Mila had struggled with sleep ever since. As well as other things.
Mila was no fool. She’d known what the bite-marks on her neck meant. And so when the heat and the wanting and the need came — especially, dizzyingly strong when Adrian had sat close to her — she knew only one thing. She had to find a way not to give in to this temptation.
She would not be as weak as her sister and feed on her best friend.
Adrian opened her bedroom door and came in to sit on the side of her bed, asking if she was okay, and stroking the sweaty hair on her forehead. The heat inside Mila spiked with his touch, and she felt the teeth in her mouth move, fangs shoving forward.
She would not.
— 12 —
“I think we should get Luther Swann to come onto the show,” Danika said. Lon had been staring out the window of her passenger’s seat since she’d picked him up at his house. Now he looked at Danika with a frown. “Luther Swann?” he said. “You mean the vampire guy?”
“He’s a folklorist,” Danika corrected. “I saw him on cable last night, and he was fascinating.”
“He’s the vampire guy,” Lon said again. “He’s been doing the circuit for the last couple months thanks to the stuff he’s written on vampire myths.”
“Well, they don’t really seem to be myths,” Danika noted, “since people appear to be turning into blood-sucking freaks every day now.”
“True,” Lon admitted. “But why would we want to bring him on the show? That’s like, serious shit, given the stuff going on out there. We’re a topical show, but not that kind of topical. We’re check-the-brain-at-the-door entertainment, nothing more. We don’t focus on current events.”
“But that’s the beauty of it,” Danika pressed. “Everyone has heard of the whole vampires are real — and more of us are them every day — thing. But it’s not just a news thing. It’s freaky and weird — just like the stuff we usually focus on. “
“Luther Swann has been turning up everywhere lately,” Lon said. “So I don’t know if we can get him. But even if he can, why would we want to?”
“Ratings,” Danika smiled. “Vampires are hot right now. Let’s get some of that.”
Lon nodded. “Okay, I can see that, sure.” He blinked a few times, as if trying to clear his head. “I’ll make some calls.”
“Cool,” Danika said, pulling her sporty little Honda into the station parking lot with an abrupt squeal of a turn. “By the way,” she added, almost as an aside. “How do you feel today?”
Lon squinted at her and shrugged. “I’ve had better mornings,” he said.
Danika nodded, as if she understood. “Coffee’s on me,” she said. “I need to wake you up to find us Luther Swann. And hell, get that Michael Fayne guy too if you can.”
As they exited the car, Danika Dubov wound her fingers together and flexed her hands. “I think this is going to be the start of a great week,” she said with a toothy grin.
Lon moaned, and staggered towards the employee entrance behind her.
— 13 —
The search for Mila ended on Wednesday, when she returned to her apartment, shocking the hell out of her landlord. Danika found out, not from her sister, but from the police, who called to tell her that her missing person/possible foul play case had been closed, since her sister was now back in her apartment, unharmed.
Danika hung up with the police and reached out to dial and call Mila herself, but then hesitated. What would she say? Gee, I tore your throat out last week, I thought you were dead?
She pulled her hand back, and set the phone down. If Mila wanted to talk, she’d call. Until then … Danika had some things she wanted to find out. She needed to know more about what she’d become. About what she assumed both of them had become …
On Thursday, Danika woke in a hot sweat, with her stomach turning cartwheels. The need to feed was back. She told herself that she would control it. She would live through the pain until tomorrow. Because on Friday, Lon had managed to book Luther Swann. Maybe at last, she could get some answers about her condition. As the heat built inside her through the day, she prayed that she would last, especially since every time that Lon came near, she felt a throbbing in her jaw … it was almost as if she could feel her teeth grow.
— 14 —
On Friday, Danika prayed that her makeup wouldn’t run on camera. She was burning up. When Lon came up to suggest a possible question to ask, she snapped. “Just let me handle my own interview, okay?”
He backed off, and Danika breathed a sigh of relief. As soon as he walked into the same room with her, she felt her jaw shift and the change begin. She did not want to feed on him again. So far, he seemed to have recovered from her first attack, and seemed oblivious to what had happened. But she didn’t know if she could stop herself from killing him if she bit him a second time. And she was hungry.
Deadly hungry.
And for some reason, he was the one she wanted to eat. What the fuck? She said it over and over again in her head all week during production meetings, as she tried to muffle the groans from her belly, and smile without showing fangs, because Lon sat nearby.
WTF? WTF?
WTF?
— 15 —
“Luther Swann, you’ve been an expert on vampires for a long time, and a year ago my first question to you probably would have been ‘Do you believe vampires are real?’ ”
Swann grinned in his leatherback chair, but let her continue uninterrupted.
“But now it’s no longer a question of are they real, but why are they real? Why now?”
“That is the question, certainly,” Swann said. “And I don’t have an answer there. I’ve studied the vampire legends throughout history, and I believe they have always been among us, but over the past few centuries, as a truly dying breed — a mutant strain of humanity that has teetered on the brink of extinction. And not just one breed, honestly — there are at least a dozen variants on the vampire mutation alone. And then there are the werewolf strains.”