The Medium

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

It was still too early to guarantee an empty foyer in Kim’s building, so Coyote went in as a scout. He hobbled across the lobby on his cane and gestured for the others to follow, then crept up the stairs to man the elevator doors. Zeb wrapped Rocky in moving blankets and threw the bundle over his shoulder like a roll of rugs. With help from Kim, they toted him inside and into the elevator.

“Barely weighs a thing,” he commented. “Duran musta sucked ‘im out again.”

“Their inertia’s tied to their strength,” Kim told him wearily. “When they’re weak, they don’t interact with the world as well. All the blood in the body only weighs about twelve pounds, so if he’s light, it’s because he’s so out of it. Mass is still there, but the gravity’s not acting on it. He’s less real right now.”

“So when they lose all their strength…”

“Cells fall apart. Molecules lose cohesion. Everything falls apart. Dust. Poof.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

The doors pinged, and they scurried across the hallway into Kim’s apartment.

“You guys look like crap,” Vickie told them unconcernedly. Zeb dropped his bundle onto the couch, through Vickie’s lap, and the ghost squealed and disappeared.

“Buttwipe,” said her disembodied voice.

Kim ignored her roommate and locked the door.

“You think you can snap him out of it?” she asked Coyote, who shook his head.

“I’m afraid he’d pull me down instead of me pulling him back up,” he said. He fell into a chair and propped his cane against his knee. “You said it wears off. I’ll see what I can do then. In the meantime, I say none of us stays alone until they’ve got tabs on Duran.”

“Oh, right. I was hoping you could help with that, too.” She pulled the fistful of hair out of her pocket and laid it on the coffee table.

“That’ll work,” he said. He snatched it up and shoved it into his jeans pocket. “Gotta go home and get my materials. Maybe in the morning. We can all go, ‘less we hear something before then.”

“Should probably get some sleep,” Zeb muttered. He dug his knuckles into his eyes and shoved his hand through his hair.

“Y’all take the bed,” Kim told them. “I got a little nap earlier, so I’ll take first watch. Besides, someone’s gotta keep an eye on Rocky, in case he starts to come around.”

She dragged a pile of pillows and blankets beside the couch and built herself a pallet, threw the electric blanket over the vampire and plugged it in. His eyes were open, unblinking, and he didn’t seem to see her. She reached over and carefully smoothed them closed.

Zeb and Coyote disappeared into Kim’s room and the door shut. Coyote complained in a low grumble, the bedsprings squeaked, and Kim distinctly heard Zeb’s reply: “Oh, grow up, y’old fart.”

She flicked off the overheads and turned on a lamp, kicked her shoes off, stowed her pistol under her pillow, and curled up on her pallet to read. It started to rain again. A few fat drops splatted against the kitchen window.

Somewhere, there had to be a book that could help with all this. She had surrounded herself with books—new and glossy, old and fragile, handwritten, some that were nothing but stacks of typescript held together with ring clips or rubber bands. Every one of them was filled with knowledge, things the mundanes would have regarded as fantasy or superstition. She’d skimmed through most of them, selecting tidbits to add to Ainslie’s growing index of accurate magical references in literature, and somewhere, she prayed, there had to be something she could use. Sebastian Duran couldn’t be unique in history. Another like him must have cropped up at some point, a vampire who broke the Rules, who could force his will on his own species instead of only on humans.

But instead, she found herself looking for references to the Broken, the Uszkodzone. The word was Polish, which led her to believe that if such creatures existed at all, the majority or at least the oldest of them would be found in Poland. Rocky hadn’t struck her as foreign. He had no accent she could detect, and she doubted the stutter was intended to disguise one. He talked like a news anchor—bland, featureless Midwestern pronunciation.

He also seemed young, though that could have been a result of vulnerability and fear. She wasn’t even sure how old he looked, let alone how old he might actually be. She propped herself up on her elbows to glance at the man on the couch, but that was no help; as sick as he looked, eyes sunken, skin pallid and grayish, he might have been anything between twenty and fifty. It would be impossible to tell until he was healthy again.

There was still packaged blood in her refrigerator. She thought about grabbing a bag and a funnel and trying to get some in him while he was still quasi-unconscious and couldn’t object much. It had to be less traumatic than being held down. But if he did struggle, she couldn’t manage him on her own.

She went back to her reading.

“What is his deal?” a voice hissed in her ear.

Kim jumped and threw an elbow at—and through—Vickie’s face.

“Crap,” she whispered back, “don’t do that.”

Vickie crouched in the middle of the coffee table and ignored her. “Seriously. He stares. Doesn’t matter what I’m doing, he’s always staring at me. It’s weird.”

Kim twisted to look over her shoulder. The man on the couch was staring. Or at least, his eyes were open again and blindly pointed in Vickie’s direction. “Give him a break,” she whispered fiercely. “He’s kind of been going through a lot, if you hadn’t noticed. He can stare if he freaking wants to.”

“Wants to?” Vickie retorted. “Pssh. It’s like he can’t not. He’s out cold, and he’s still staring.”

She stood, flipping her ponytail, and walked through the couch in an expression of ultimate disdain. At least, she tried. Her legs hit the vampire and she tripped, falling forward across him.

His face tightened, forehead wrinkling like he was trying hard to wake up but couldn’t.

“The hell!” Vickie whispered shrilly. “He touched me! How did he freaking touch me!” She shot upright and left the floor behind, eyes huge, and then she fled. His blank eyes followed her until she was gone, then drifted closed again.

It was Kim’s turn to stare.

“Rocky,” she murmured. “Hey, honey. You awake?” She touched his hand gently. He didn’t respond.

“Oh, sweetie. I’m gonna need some help, here. Tony and Edith’ll be back to find out what you know, and honey, if you’ve got freaky extras, I can’t guarantee they’ll be any nicer to you than that bastard was. I mean, that’s kinda why they’re after him in the first place, ‘cause he can do stuff he shouldn’t.”

She gave his hand a squeeze, then tucked it under the electric blanket because it was ice-cold.

She almost didn’t hear the tap on the window; it sounded like the rain.

The tap came again, and Rocky sucked in a sharp little breath. His eyes opened a crack, slivers of red visible beneath white lids. Kim froze.

Once more, a tap on the glass. She made herself look, keeping her gaze firmly on the kitchen cabinets instead of directly at the window, because if she met his eyes, she would be hosed.

It was hard to tell from peripheral vision only, but it looked like Duran had patched himself up with plastic wrap. A band of something shiny wrapped around his midsection, holding in the bits Itzli had tried to tear out. He clung to the wall like a spider, dangling outside her second-story window.

He slapped a small piece of wet paper up against the window with a thwack and grinned. The rain adhered it to the glass. Then he was gone.

Kim pushed herself up and crept closer.

I KNOW WHEN I’M BEATEN, it said in dark, bold strokes of permanent marker. CAN’T BLAME ME FOR NOT WANTING TO GO DOWN ALONE. I’M GUESSING “LET HIM GO” WOULD HAVE BEEN NEXT ON YOUR AGENDA. CONSIDER IT DONE.

Done?

She hesitated, not sure whether to head straight for the phone and call Amarillo or wake Zeb and Coyote first. A sour feeling rose in her throat. When he said he didn’t want to go down alone, he wasn’t talking about the vampires he’d already killed. He was talking about her.

But he couldn’t expect to burn them out when it was raining…

Something shuffled across the floor behind her, and she turned, and she understood.

“Oh, honey,” she whispered.

Rocky stood there between the kitchen and the tiny living room, bracing himself on the wall, watching her with fiery intensity. She didn’t have to check twice to know no one was home. He was too dry to be lucid, whatever mental block had kept him from feeding was gone, lifted, and Kim was the closest living thing. She was dinner.

Her gaze darted from him to the countertop, hoping to find something heavy she could use as a weapon, but she’d never kept decorative rolling pins. A coffee mug sat beside the sink, and she stepped toward it, but he stepped toward her, and suddenly her only defense was behind him.

Her pulse accelerated, and he heard it. He shuffled toward her, left hand outstretched, the right hanging useless by his side, and she swatted him away. He was much slower than she expected and still weak. He moaned sorrowfully and came at her again, and she sidestepped. She didn’t want to hurt him, but that was better than having to kill him, so she caught his right arm by its dislocated elbow and yanked. He gagged and went to his knees.

“Sorry,” she gasped, “I’m sorry, but you can’t have my… Oh.”

There were leftovers in the fridge, a few bags of packaged blood that hadn’t been consumed a week before. It was gross, having them there between the orange juice and the macaroni salad, but she’d thought they might come in handy. She’d almost forgotten that.

“Don’t move,” she commanded, and stepped around him to reach for the refrigerator.

He grabbed the leg of her pants. Her socks slid on the linoleum. The edge of the counter rushed at the side of her head, and she remembered that a crabby shaman and a buff cowboy were a room away, waiting to take care of situations exactly like this one. She drew a breath to scream. Her head hit the counter, tracing a line of fire above her left eye.

“Gk,” she said, and the floor knocked the rest of the air out of her.

I know how this goes, she thought, her inner voice becoming a textbook. The venom they secrete is a combination anticoagulant and muscle relaxant, chemically similar to some barbiturates. Once it’s in you, you’re done, because almost no one has the discipline to fight something that feels good.

She made an uncoordinated attempt to stand again, but her head pounded, and her limbs had no strength.

A weight settled on her chest, and something cold moved against her throat. The cluster of medals on their chain had slid around to hang uselessly down her back. They pressed into her shoulder blade. Her vision began to clear, and she could vaguely see the top of his head. She had seconds, at best.

It only takes a few ounces of pressure to dislodge an eyeball. He would recover from losing an eye a lot faster than she would recover from dying. She reached up and around, thumbs probing. An ear, a nose—anything would do, any handhold to pull him away, any bit of damage that would convince him his survival was better served by leaving her the hell alone.

His weight settled onto her left arm and he caught hold of her right and pinned it to her chest. She brought a knee up hard to hit anything she could reach, but no part of him was close enough. A light sharpness pressed into her skin.

At least it won’t hurt.

She was wrong.

He was dry and injured, all his strength focused on putting himself back together, too dry to waste energy trying to make her hold still. His teeth pierced her skin, sans anesthetic, and it felt like being stabbed. She made one more frantic attempt to get away, but something tugged dangerously, threatening to turn the two little punctures into a ragged gash, and she went still.

It wasn’t like Kim had expected, not that she had ever expected to die by vampire. For one thing, it hurt like hell, like that time in second grade she’d accidentally pushed a pencil through her hand. For another, there was nothing even slightly sensual about lying on a cold kitchen floor while someone sucked the life out of her. Worst, though, was the fact that she couldn’t hate the person doing it. She was ticked at him, and she was scared, but the joints in his crippled arm popped loudly back into place, and he lifted her up and supported her cautiously, minding her comfort while he killed her. Her hands and lips were numb. There wasn’t even gross slurping and smacking to give her an opportunity for disgust. He stroked her back with affection, with gratitude, humming contentedly like a nursing infant.

She was so tired.