It took a second to realize that she was sucking my wrist. I could feel blood spurting into her mouth in great gushes. Her heart, which I could see in the hole still in her chest, didn’t seem to be beating. The rest of her wounds were healing so fast that most were gone in seconds.
I was getting dizzy, but the big wound over her heart wasn’t healing and when I peered close a bit of silver gleamed. A tiny part of my brain offered up a tally of current events. I was in a night club that was supposed to be run by vampires, a demon had tried to kill the most beautiful girl on the planet and said girl was now draining my body of blood, through my wrist, killing me with her mouth. And she had a big hole in her chest.
I don’t know why I did it. By all rights, I should have just jammed that silver bolt right through her still heart as hard as I could. It’s possible that part of me considered the fact that the Hellbourne wanted her dead. Doing anything that screwed up their plans was generally a good idea. It could have been that she was trying so hard to live. I’ve always admired survivors.
It may have been that I’d never had a hot girl suck on my arm, or any other body part for that matter, before and I just wasn’t gonna ruin the experience. It would be a hell of a way to die, I decided. I could hear the boys at the Precinct talking about it. “Hey did ya hear about Gordon? Sucked to death by a super hottie!”
“Really? And here I always thought he was gay!”
Dropping the bolt, I reached my thumb and forefinger into her wound. The blood made it almost impossible to grip the chunk of silver that was left in there and I was getting dizzier by the second, but I got it. My index finger actually touched her still heart, and a shock jumped between us. Her heart beat once, hard. Her eyes, which had been shut, snapped open and met my own as I pulled the piece of metal from her body. It pinged on the floor when my jittery fingers dropped it. The wound began to close instantly. Then my vision started to swim, swirling around two blue pools of light.
But the shock had snapped her frenzy and she raised her head from my arm, watching me. When I started to fall, her arm slipped around my waist, holding me up without effort. It felt like rubber covered steel. She looked at me for a moment, her head tilted to the right, like she was listening to something. She then leaned toward my wrist and licked it. She lapped it daintily, like a cat with a saucer of milk, cleaning the blood from it, revealing two pink dots, healing shut as I watched. Over the coppery stink of blood, I could smell her scent, jasmine and lilac.
I leaned woozily against a stack of crates behind me, while she continued to watch me. After a moment, she wiped some her own blood from her front with a finger. Before I could react, she stuck the gore covered digit in my mouth, depositing the load of cool blood on my tongue then pulled her finger free. She clapped her other hand over my lips, stopping me from spitting it out.
“Sssswallow!” she ordered. Dizzy, cold and confused, I did as she commanded, gulping to clear my mouth and throat, even as the thought of AIDs and other diseases crossed my mind. Laying her finger across her lips in the universal sign for silence she turned her head to look at the metal door from the Club. For a second, nothing happened, and then the door slammed free from its hinges, rocketed across the hallway and crunched into the wall.
The corridor was suddenly filled with a large number of very serious vampires.
Vampires. That’s what they were, it was all that they could be. Part of my brain had already added up the individual parts of the equation and arrived at that conclusion And the beautiful young girl in front of me was most certainly one as well. Gramps was right. Damn! He was so going to say he told me so…if I lived.
My sight centered on the big bouncer leading the pack, Vadim. His right arm was cocked back in a punching position, his hand stiff and flat in a spear hand. Dizzy and confused, I idly noted that his fingernails glittered like they were razor sharp. I’ll bet he can jam his hand right through me.
He started forward, but a sharp “Nyet!” sounded from the girl in the crimson stained dress and everyone froze. They were all watching her, with varying degrees of astonishment. The blonde girl in red pushed through along with the waitress, Lydia. Then the whole group parted down the middle and a brown-haired female walked through, taking charge with her presence. She spoke, in what sounded like Russian, to Vadim and the blonde, but it was my black haired friend who answered in the same language, speaking haltingly at first, then faster. Now it was the newcomer’s turn to look shocked, but as the dark haired dancer spoke, some of the males blurred down the hall to the door. The blonde moved up to look at me, stopping a few feet away. I just sat back on the crates, shivering, trying to stay upright. “He’s lost a lot of blood. He needs fluids, like now!” the blonde said.
My vampire stopped her narrative in mid-sentence and spoke again, speech still not smooth.
“Lydiiia?”
“I’m on it.” Lydia replied, zipping out of the corridor.
“Who are you?” questioned the leader, staring holes in me with blue eyes that were much lighter than the dancer’s.
“Chris….Chris Gordon.” I answered, once I was able to remember my name.
“He’s a cop.” Lydia supplied as she reappeared, handing me an open bottle of Gatorade. It was the red kind, which struck me as funny. Oops, did I just chuckle out loud?
“He’s here with some cop friends. I watched him follow some guy who was following Tanya.”
I sipped my Gatorade, thinking about what to tell them while the blonde watched me. The irony wasn’t lost on me. Demons and vampires…what next? Zombies? How much should I tell them, what would they believe? They probably thought I had attacked the girl. What if vampires don’t believe in ghosts and demons? A sudden image of me arguing with blood suckers over proof of the demonic while they fanged me to death. The demons could obviously cloud vampire senses as easily as human senses. Tired, I was so tired. Maybe getting bled out would be a good thing. I wouldn’t have to fight anymore and it wouldn’t be like I was giving up the demon hunting business. The blonde’s eyes widened as I was thinking this and it was suddenly her turn to start speaking in Russian. That was getting really annoying. I’ve always hated when people speak other languages around me. A French-Canadian father and son vet team back home used to do it to me all the time. Assholes.
“Well you people don’t need me for your private conversations, so I’ll just be going.”
I stood up, wobbled a bit, and then started for the door. One of the males moved to block me, snarling. “You go nowhere human blood bag,” he growled.
His fangs were two inches long, his eyes were black from rim to rim. He scared me. I don’t do well with being scared. I started my career in being scared pretty early in life and now it just pisses me off. The memory popped up unbidden.
I was jammed in the hiding space that Marcus had built in the back of his closet. He had shoved me into that space when the stranger had attacked mom and dad downstairs. “Don’t you move Christian! You stay here till it’s clear! No matter what!” He shook me to make his point, the same way he had shaken me when he caught me in his room leafing through his comics. With one last look, my twelve year old big brother picked up his baseball bat from the closet corner, shoved the panel shut and rushed from the room. Huddled on the floor, my hands over my ears to block the awful sounds, I tried not to breathe, not make a sound. Too scared to move.