The Medium

Chapter Seven-2

“What in the hell? If you die, you’re so out of here. I’ve got exclusive dibs on this place.”

“Psh. Whatev. You haven’t gotten rid of me yet.”

Vickie flounced out of the stove, passed through the kitchen counter, and stood in the middle of the coffee table, fingering the faint, dark mark encircling her throat.

“He’s freaky,” she said. “Why would you even?”

“As you like to point out, I’m dumb. Do I have to have a reason?”

“You know, that’s not a good excuse.” Vickie flipped her ponytail over her shoulder and retreated to the bedroom. The vampire watched the ghost go with a detached expression. Kim watched him watch Vickie.

“You okay?” she asked.

He tucked his head back down against his knees, and there was a knock at the door.

Kim got up and tiptoed closer, putting her hand on the doorknob and pressing her eye to the peephole. She pulled back the bolt and opened the door. “Hey, Zeb.”

Zeb was a beanpole of a cowboy, clad head to foot in worn denim and black leather. He removed his straw Stetson before stepping in, boot heels clacking on the tile inside the door. A bulging backpack squished as it hit the floor. His hat went on top of a pile of books, and he hooked his broad, blunt thumbs behind his belt.

Kim frowned at the backpack. “Is that it?”

“Coyote’s bringing the cooler up the elevator. I came up first to scout things out. You better have a damn good explanation for this, Kimmy.”

Zeb loomed up to stare at the filthy lump on the couch, who didn’t move.

“I found him at that Rocky Heights place,” Kim said. She picked up the backpack and unzipped it. A plastic sack fell out and splatted on the floor, the liquid inside wobbling. “He’s seriously bad off. Don’t have any idea how long he was in there, but he can barely even walk. You can bet Edith and Tony’ll want to hear about this. If we can get him fixed up and up to Amarillo, and he can witness against Duran…”

“He talkin’ any?”

“Not a peep. Too dry.”

“You know as soon as he’s got some muscle back, he’ll go for the live stuff.”

Kim shrugged. “Probably. If he does, me and Coyote can take him down. If we can’t, you can shoot him until he cuts it out. He’ll recover.”

“Couldn’ta just burned ‘im?”

“He’s a witness. Probably the last witness they’ll need. I mean, indiscretion is one thing, but pulling this kind of stuff on one of his own kind… I know they don’t have a lot of lines, but Duran’s crossed pretty much every one they do have.”

“You sure that’s it?”

Kim rolled one shoulder. “Okay, so I might have felt sorry for him, too.”

Zeb muttered about bleeding hearts bleeding so much they get brain damage, and the elevator pinged. An older man strode out, dragging a rolling cooler.

For a man called Deaf Coyote, he looked remarkably like an aging hippie—baggy blue jeans with the knees worn through, hemp sandals, outsized tie-dye t-shirt in shades of blue and green, and a long gray braid falling to his waist. He was also five and a half feet tall, tops, and leaning on an aluminum cane. He dragged his cooler to Kim’s door, rapped once on the doorframe with the handle of his cane, and strode in.

Sharp black eyes took in Kim, took in Zeb, and took in the lump on the couch.

“Told you to torch it,” Coyote growled.

Zeb took a seat on the corner of the coffee table, the corner furthest from the end of the couch.

“Kim thinks Tony and Edith will want to talk to ‘im,” he said. “Assumin’ he comes around without killin’ anyone. And assumin’ he ain’t lost his mind.”

“You know what they say about assuming.”

“Thought had crossed my mind, yeah.”

Kim made a rude noise and rolled her eyes. “Or we could get this show on the road and find out for sure one way or the other. And anyway, even if he is completely off his nut and never speaks again, he’s still technically an innocent bystander. I brought him here, and nobody’s doing squat to him except in self-defense. Got it?”

Zeb and Coyote looked at each other and shrugged in unison.

Kim shoved a few strands of dark hair out of her eyes and nodded. She grabbed the backpack from the floor and scooped up the plastic sack that had fallen out.

“‘Kay, guys. Stand clear.”

Coyote backed up against the wall and held his cane like a bludgeon. Zeb stood and backed up with him, hands hovering at his belt holster like an Old West gunslinger.

Kim sucked in a sharp breath and, carefully, using a slow underhand swing, tossed the bag of packaged blood. It hit the vampire’s knee with a soft bloop and bounced off. He didn’t move.

Kim straightened. She blinked.

“Hey,” she said.

The lump on the couch turned his head fractionally toward her voice but didn’t look up.

Zeb cleared his throat and rubbed his thumb across his chin. “Might be he can’t smell it through the latex.”

Kim glanced around, then bent and snatched a pencil stub from beneath a drift of yellow sticky notes. She poked a hole in the corner of a second bag and squeezed out one tiny, glistening drop of red. It quivered on the surface of the plastic and began to roll off toward the floor.

A shiver rippled through the shriveled body, lightning-fast, starting in the ridge of his spine and crawling outward through his limbs. His head snapped up, and he locked huge, despondent eyes on the bag in Kim’s hands.

Peripherally, Kim caught the crackle of Coyote’s knuckles as he tightened his grip on his cane and the soft click as Zeb drew back the hammer of his revolver. The vampire began to unfold from his tense ball, and rather than wait for him to get any closer, Kim tossed the second bag. A few drops pattered onto the carpet, and a knobby hand flickered out to catch the offering. He fumbled it, uttered a frustrated hiss, and snatched it up from where it had fallen on the couch.

“Left-handed,” Zeb observed. “What happened to it?”

“Hit him with my flashlight the first time he came after me,” Kim explained. “Grabbed me, and I bashed him, smashed his hand. It’ll heal when he gets a little juice back in him.”

But the vampire didn’t juice up. He dropped the bag and tumbled off the couch, landing half on a pile of textbooks. A low rattle escaped him as a spasming diaphragm forced air through his constricted throat. His right hand tightened, and the fingertips twisted for an instant into gleaming black talons. Then he relaxed, pulled himself up, and made another grab for the bag. And his back arched, and the rattle faded into a dry gulping noise. A thin film dusted the carpet where skin had torn away and crumbled into ash.

“Holy hannah,” Zeb breathed. “What in howlin’ Hades was that?”

Kim bit her lip and folded her arms, making her milagros jingle.

“Did the same thing when he tried to bite me earlier,” she said. “I figured it was self-preservation. You know, don’t tick off people who could kill you if you can’t even walk.”

Coyote shook his head. “They won’t pick on things stronger than them, but they’re more likely to play possum than try and… My money says this is Duran’s doing. Post-hypnotic suggestion.”

“Come on. He’s a freak, but there’s nothing can stop a starving vampire from feeding. Definitely no mind tricks.”

“Depends on how long he’s been working on it, doesn’t it?”

Kim thought about that, keeping one eye on the quivering mass huddled half under her coffee table. She couldn’t decide whether a vampire unable to feed made her job easier or harder. The bagged blood oozed onto her couch. The past five minutes had generated a full week of cleaning. She huffed.

“It fits with his MO,” Coyote pressed. “He likes taking people down a notch, breaking their strength. You can’t do a lot worse to a vampire than keep him dry. If it’s even possible, you can bet he’d be the one to figure out how to do it.”

She bit her lip. “And Tony and Edith would absolutely flip. They’d be down here tearing his head off before you could sneeze.”

Coyote nodded. “Exactly. And that’s a good thing.”

Kim ran her tongue over her teeth, and the silence began to lengthen. There were several different possibilities.

The first was preferable. They would fix up the vampire, who would be rational and polite, find out exactly what had happened to him, pass the report on to Tony and Edith of Amarillo, and stand back and watch while Sebastian Duran was summarily executed.

Or they would fix up the vampire, who would turn on them in rage and fear, and they would have to kill him. They would pass the report on to Tony and Edith, but without solid proof, they might stay on the job for months longer.

Or they could fix him up and find he was nothing but a gibbering, shattered wreck incapable of communicating. They could ship him to Amarillo anyway, and that would probably be enough, but possibly not.

Or they would be unable to fix him up and would never know what was going on.

Or…

“Crap,” Kim grunted. “Okay, muscle men. You guys hold him down. We’re force feeding him.”

It took some cajoling, but she finally got the vampire back on the couch with Zeb on his left arm and Coyote on his right. He bucked, and he cried, and then he fell still with his eyes squeezed shut, resigned to whatever torture was coming.

“That is kinda sad,” Zeb admitted, his voice soft.

Kim grappled with the vampire’s jaw, wedged his teeth apart with a pencil, and began the tedious and messy process. She found herself apologizing every few minutes as he seized again and again, but whatever mental block prevented him from sitting up and taking over the procedure didn’t seem to prevent him from swallowing what was in his mouth.

And it worked.

There was a crackling noise as his veins engorged, bulging beneath his shriveled skin. The flesh beneath the swollen lattice of veins began to fill in, pressing outward as the skin began to soften and smooth. Suddenly, the skull had a real face, and the skin had a tinge of color, and the eyes brightened from dead maroon to flaming scarlet.

But the dusty cracks had concealed other things, and as they smoothed over, Kim could see puncture marks. Hundreds of them clustered around his throat and wrists, crowning the thick scar tissue left by older wounds. Blood escaped from broken arteries and pooled beneath his skin in vast expanses of dark bruising. The corner of his mouth blackened and swelled.

Kim kept going. She finished off the bags from the backpack and yanked the cooler over to start on those. The face rearranged itself as broken bones shifted and started to knit back together.

She paused for a moment to lean around Zeb and watch the vampire’s crushed left hand straighten. A shard of bone pushed out of his palm and turned to dust, and the hole closed behind it.

When she looked back, the red eyes had gone blue, and they saw her, and she’d never seen that much terror in her life.

“Guys,” she said quietly. “Guys, get off him.”

But Zeb and Coyote had seen, too, and they both shook their heads. Coyote leaned down, braid snaking over his shoulder, and glared into the vampire’s face.

“I get up,” he growled, “and you are going to stay right the hell where you are. You got that?”

The vampire’s head jerked.

“You get up, or show fang, or try to look anyone straight in the eye, and I will whoop your sorry white butt so hard they’ll be finding your teeth in Norway. You got that?”

His head jerked again.

Coyote narrowed his eyes and reached out to pluck one dirty blond hair from the vampire’s head. Then he shifted and stood up. Zeb followed suit.

The vampire curled around his healing hand and pushed himself as far back into the couch cushions as he would go.

“Oh, nice.” Kim made a face. “Very diplomatic, Coyote. Way to make everything that much worse.”

Coyote shrugged and nudged aside some textbooks to plant his cane on the floor. “No one’s dead or eaten. That’s a good thing.”

Zeb cleared his throat.

“What he meant to say,” he clarified, “is that we won’t hurt you ‘less you’re askin’ for it.”

He raised an eyebrow at Kim, who nodded. The words didn’t seem to make much of an impact, though; the man on the couch shrank further into himself and watched the floor intently, unwilling to meet anyone’s eyes.