“I know. I can smell her, her cigarettes. What did she say?”
“Did you know who I was when you ran me over?”
“Of course not!”
“So it wasn’t an assassination attempt?”
“Maddy.” He sighed and massaged the bridge of his nose.
“When did you figure out I was me?”
“After I left your apartment, I saw your mailbox.”
“Then you came back to suck on my feet. Was that a test drive?”
“I felt guilty. I wanted to help you somehow, clean the slate.” He leapt out of the chair, and made a sad attempt to pace in the two square feet available to him, cracking his knuckles and shaking out his hands, like a fighter in his corner. “At least, that’s what I told myself. Now I think I was curious, looking for an excuse…but anyway, I told myself I didn’t want to get married. Not to anyone.” He turned back to her. “I was wrong.”
“Maybe you weren’t wrong at all. What is our history? A cab ride, a beer, one great night of sex? Or is it because of your mother’s dream? Are you doing this because you think you are supposed to marry me?”
“I goddamn love you, Madelena.” He shouted it, pointing at her. Then he seemed to think better of shouting, so he grimaced and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I love your smart mouth. I–I love that you carry a lunchbox and play with toys, and wear awful shoes. I love that you make me laugh.”
The ice around her heart began to give way. It hurt like hell. She fought it. The plan was to keep Gregor safe and die gracefully. She had to stick to it. Finding her voice, she said, “You never laugh.”
“I’m laughing inside. Teach me how to laugh aloud.”
The bastard knew how to hit hard. If she could run, or turn away, she would, but all she could do was close her eyes and feel the tears run down her cheeks.
Knowing he’d struck home, he crouched by her bed so their faces were level. “I love that you aren’t afraid of me. Most people are—but you never were. Remember how you ordered me to drive you home that first night? I love that you can look straight at death. You might be the bravest person I know.”
“Stop, please.”
“And I love your ass. It’s the biggest, roundest, most perfect… I’d really miss your ass if you died, Maddy.”
Maddy rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand, brushing away the tears. She was going to snot up her oxygen if she wasn’t careful. “I told you yesterday why we can’t risk this.”
“Is that your only worry? If the operation were guaranteed to be successful, would you do it?”
“That’s a hypothetical question. What does it matter?”
“What about the rest of it? Do you want to be a vampyr?”
The way he said vampire made her smile. It sounded like vham-peer, all sexy and Russian. She’d been thinking about it, of course, all day long. “I’m enough of a geek to admit I’m curious. It seems like a big adventure. A whole second life, you know? I don’t think I’d mind, really, except I worry about my family. What would I tell them?”
“That’s always tricky, but you wouldn’t be the first to go through it.” He began to say something else, stopped, found something interesting in his fingernails. “Tell me something, and be honest. We can’t afford to be polite here.”
“Gregor, we’ve never been polite with one another.”
“There’s that.” Still he studied his hands. “So, I know you’ll tell the truth. Are you hesitating to do this because you don’t want to be with me?”
“Don’t be an idiot. I just wish we met years ago, when I had the time.” She reached out for him. “My biggest regret is leaving you behind.”
He took her hand, his fingers cool like his mother’s. “Maddy, this is the deal. I started bonding with you the night we met, the first moment I tasted your blood. I’m already in too deep for you to protect me. If you die…” The rest he left unsaid, but she knew it was not good.
“You need me.” The idea took a while to sink in.
With his free hand he reached up to stroke her hair. “So much,” he said, his voice cracking.
It’s okay to love him, it’s really okay. The realization burst on her like sunshine through clouds, like rain in the summer. “Okay.”
“Okay what?” Gregor’s expression looked neutral, carefully composed.
“Okay…I’ll live for you. If you can put up with me.” Now she really was snotting up her oxygen, but she laughed though her tears. “See, I’m going to save you, Gregor Faustin.”
Gregor smiled like she’d never seen him smile before. First it was a smile of relief, but it grew and grew until it became incandescent. He pulled out his phone. “Felix. We’re a go.”
“What are you doing?”
“We’re kidnapping you.” He leaned down and brushed his lips over hers. “I can hardly wait to get all this shit off you.”
Who knew vampires had their own hospitals? Of course they couldn’t go to regular ones, but Maddy just didn’t think they would need them, because in books they were always regenerating in dark, stinky tombs, fueled only by their own diabolical will.
“We don’t need doctors as much as you do,” Gregor said. “But sometimes something gets chopped off, and then we have to get someone to sew it back on.”
“That’s a real sophisticated take on medicine.” Her voice was muffled under her oxygen mask.
“Don’t worry. You have Felix.”
“I know, and you guys have a fiendish plan.”
They were in the back of their own vamp ambulance, which, much to Maddy’s disappointment, did not have bats emblazoned on the side. The only difference between it and any other ambulance was that it had no back windows. They’d left the hospital without the slightest fuss. Felix and some helpers loaded her onto a gurney, and Gregor walked beside them, making drawing gestures in the air, like he had that night in her room. Nobody even looked their direction.
Maddy smiled up at him. “You’re so cool.”
It was easy to get caught in the excitement of the moment, to enjoy just being alive and having hope. She didn’t want to think about how much heart transplantation frightened her, or the pain and the weakness that would follow, or the foreign thing which would live in her body afterward, prodding her heart along. What she thought about was Gregor. He needed her. And Mrs. Faustin said they were supposed to be together. Watching Gregor’s face turn from fierce to tender whenever he looked at her, she wanted to believe this was true.
While Felix fussed with her on-board monitors, Gregor explained a little bit about what was to come. Ordinarily, he said, they’d bind by drinking one another’s blood over many weeks, until she assimilated the vamp blood, or maybe more accurately, the vampire blood assimilated her, and she became what they called a “convert”. Gregor seemed to think conversion was a very romantic, a honeymoon experience they’d miss out on. Things being as they were, though, they were going to speed up the process. Gregor was going to drain her as much as he could without quite managing to kill her, and then he and his whole family would donate blood to her to make her some kind of insta-vamp.
“And of course you’re not worried about blood typing?”
Felix shook his head. “There’s only one type, V, and it will trump yours.”
“Of course it will.” Even their blood was pushy. Maddy closed her eyes and tried to rest, but she was too wound up. Then she remembered: “Mom! I have to call my mother.”
Gregor dialed the number for her and handed her his phone. Maddy tugged off the mask. Appalled, Felix held it near her nose and mouth for the duration of the call. The phone rang on the other end, and Maddy tried to swallow, tried to figure out how to say what she had to say. But the machine picked up. Maddy grabbed Gregor’s wrist and looked at his watch. 10:00 p.m. Maybe she was at late Mass?
When the beep sounded, she said, “Mamá, it’s Maddy. Are you there? Look, I’ve left the hospital. Don’t freak. I’m in good hands, I might be getting better. I’ll call you tomorrow night?” She raised her brows at Gregor. With any luck she would. “Or if I can’t, someone will call you and tell you what’s going on. His name is Gregor. You can trust him, okay? Te amo, Mamá. Siempre.”