Bring On the Night (18 page)

The car stopped. He jerked open the door and helped me lean out over his lap.

I gagged and spat as loud as I could. One hand clutched the car door handle while the other one snuck my cell phone out of my pocket and pressed the screen to unlock it. Moaning with all-too-authentic pain, I opened my draft messages.
At the top of the list sat the one-word text:

NOW.

Off it went, my last chance to live.

I shoved the door wider to see the dark glistening waters of the Sherwood community pond. Beyond it lay the farm museum and agricultural center, where we went for fireworks last Fourth of July. That meant…

The hospital loomed behind me, on the town’s highest hill. David was right. We were almost there.

No!
I kicked against the seat and spilled myself out of the car.

“Ciara!” Shane grabbed me as I tried to crawl away across the shoulder’s rough pavement. “Where are you going? We have to take you to the hospital.”

“Not yet!” I scrabbled at his arms like a feral cat. The pain and itching and dizziness faded into the background, subsumed by fear and the drive to survive.

“She’s delirious.” Shane’s pained voice turned back to me. “Shh, listen. Calm down. You’ll make your fever worse. It’s gonna be okay.”

“No!” I clutched at his shirt. “I don’t want to lose you. I love you. Just hold me.”

“Okay, okay.” He stroked my hair and rocked my body slowly. “I love you, too, with everything I have. With every last fucking piece of me, I love you.”

“I never meant to hurt you,” I whispered into his chin.

“Now you’re really goofy.” He kissed my forehead. “You’ve never hurt me.”

I started to cry. Shane loosened his hold so my lungs could heave and sob.

After a few moments he said, “Can we get back in the car now?” His voice was soft but urgent. “The meter is running.”

“Ha-ha.” I drew out each syllable, buying time. We would never be like this again. “Hey, let’s get married right now.”

“Okay.” He laced his right hand with my left one. “We’re married.”

“Yay.” I giggled as the delirium soaked my brain like a bath of boiling acid. “Congratulations, Mr. Griffin.”

“Ciara, please.” Lori’s voice shot from the car, loaded with tears. “Come back. We love you so much.”

Her sadness broke my heart. I let myself go limp.

Shane lifted me into the car, and we were on our way. I felt the incline of the giant hill. The emergency room was on the far side of the hospital campus from this entrance, through a maze of lanes that David was taking at top speed.

After two more violent turns, which made me want to puke for real, we screeched to a stop. The back door opened, and Shane lifted me into David’s arms.

I whimpered and tried one last time to fight. Too late. It hadn’t worked. I’d be dead by morning.

Then, like the trumpet clarion of an approaching cavalry, I heard it: the bowel-shaking roar of a 426 Hemi V-8 engine.

David’s arms tensed around my shoulders and knees. “That looks like Jim’s car.”

Shane slid out of the backseat and stood next to us. “It is. What’s he doing here?”

I lifted my chin to see the bright white ER sign reflected in the midnight blue hood of a ’69 Dodge Charger.

Both doors of the muscle car opened. From the driver’s side emerged the world’s most unlikely pair of saviors.

“Let her go,” Jim said.

“She’s coming with us,” Regina added as she crawled out of the backseat behind him.

“What are you talking about?” Shane planted himself in
front of me. “She’s dying.”

“Yes, she is.” Regina’s combat boots thumped the pavement as she strode forward. “But not like this.”

“This is crazy!” He backed up to shield me, pressing my body between his and David’s. “She needs a doctor.”

“She needs a vampire.” Regina shoved Shane aside and held him against the frame of David’s car.

“Shane, let me go,” I managed to croak. “I want to live.”

“Bullshit!” He looked at Regina. “She doesn’t know what she wants. She’s not in her right mind.”

“She was today.”

Everyone turned in response to Jeremy’s voice. He stood on the curb beside the Charger’s passenger door.

“She called me this afternoon,” he said to Shane. “We arranged it.”

I almost wished the coma would take me right then, so I wouldn’t have to see Shane’s face.

He turned to me, eyes filled with hurt and bewilderment. “You asked them to do this?”

I couldn’t speak past the thickness in my throat, so I just nodded. Inside David’s car, Lori started to cry.

“And you didn’t tell me.” Shane looked at me as if I were a stranger who’d murdered the love of his life. Which I guess I had.

“Don’t do this,” he whispered. “You could still live. You had half the vaccine.”

“I can’t take that chance.” Tears garbled my words. “I can’t leave you.”

His eyes softened, and for a moment I thought he would acquiesce.

Then Regina said, “She’s made up her mind. Get over it already.”

Shane’s shoulders tensed. His narrow gaze shifted from David and me to Regina, then back again. He was no doubt calculating whether he could overcome her long enough for David to carry me inside the ER. Given his determination, he probably could.

“Let her go.”

I jolted at the sound of Monroe’s voice. He stood a few feet behind Regina, his clothes and skin as dark as the shadows enveloping his frame. His hands were in the pockets of his Sunday best suit, but we all knew he could tear out Shane’s throat in half a heartbeat.

The hope drained from Shane’s face, and he turned his eyes back to me one last time.

“Please…”

I shook my head.

David spoke behind my ear. “Ciara, are you sure about this?”

I focused on keeping my voice strong and steady, for at least two words. “I’m sure.”

His grip loosened. “Then go.” He stepped forward and laid me in Regina’s arms.

I fumbled for Shane, but he was out of reach. “Forgive me.”

He stared at me, hands folded under his elbows.

“Come with me,” I pleaded.

“There’s no room in the car,” Regina said, “but he can follow if he wants.”

As she hurried me away, I reached out to Shane again. “Please! Or I’ll let myself die.”

Regina stopped, her dark gaze piercing me. “You won’t do this without him? You mean that?”

“Yes.” At least I think I did. Looking back, I might’ve
been partly bluffing. But at that moment, I didn’t want a life—or unlife—without Shane, and I sensed that what I had done could break us in two forever.

His face crumpled. “Fuck,” he said through gritted teeth. He clenched his fists and pressed them to his temples for a long moment, then dropped them.

Without looking at me, he nodded to David. “Let’s follow them.”

* * *

“You’re not gonna upchuck in my car, are you?”

“Bite me,” I said to Jim from the backseat. The two-word sentence exhausted me.

“You heard it, folks.” Jim slapped the steering wheel. “She picked me. I knew it.”

“Did not.” I tried and failed to raise my head from Regina’s shoulder. Her arm wrapped tight around me, steadying my body against the car’s lurching.

Monroe sat on my other side, silent as ever.

“Ciara, it’s all set,” Jeremy said from the front passenger seat. “They got everything ready at the station after you called me today.”

“Thanks,” I whispered, not sure he could hear me.

“Have you decided who you want to make you?” Regina asked me quietly. “We’re all up for it except Noah. He’s like Shane—religious precepts against killing. Simple-minded boys.”

“S’okay,” I slurred. “I respect that.”

The ultimate question. Whose life would I connect with my own forever? Definitely not crazy Jim’s. And picking Regina would make me Shane’s blood sister—
ew
.

That left Spencer and Monroe. Could Spencer pass his
poker skills through his blood? The thought would’ve made me laugh if it didn’t hurt to breathe.

I opened my eyes. Even now, the impenetrable, ancient Monroe wouldn’t meet my gaze. A cultural thing, David once told me, from Monroe’s days in the Jim Crow South. Black men had been lynched for much less intimate contact with white women than what a turning would involve.

Maybe he was just being polite in offering to make me a vampire, assuming I’d say no. Maybe he’d be scared, and I’d die while he got up the nerve to drain me.

We turned onto the station’s long gravel driveway, where the only illumination came from the headlights and dashboard. I stared at Monroe across the dark car as we rumbled down the quarter-mile lane. I thought about the way he played guitar, the mystery he wove with his hands and voice in a way that made even Shane sound as mundane as an
American Idol
reject. Monroe was magic.

I whispered his name. After a long moment, he turned his head slowly and met my gaze.

His eyes held no trace of civility. They challenged me. Was I strong enough? Did I want this for the right reason? Or was I playing with blood and fire and life itself?

My blinks came faster, but I forced my eyes to hold still. A thousand tests lay ahead of me. I wanted to pass the first.

Monroe dipped his head.

“Thank you,” I said. My heart twisted with fierce hope—that I would make him proud, that I would be worthy of my maker.

That I would live.

Famous Last Words

I’d wanted to see the vampires’ apartment ever since I met them, but they enforced a strict No Humans Allowed policy. Even Jeremy, their fellow DJ, had never been admitted.

“Huh,” he said behind me as we entered through the heavy steel door. “Not what I expected.”

In Regina’s arms,
I could see nothing but her cascade of black hair—and beyond it, the dropped ceiling’s white tiles. I tried to turn my head to look around, but the motion had become impossible. My headache was now more of a me-ache. The only parts that didn’t hurt were the parts I could no longer feel.

“It’s all ready,” I heard Spencer say in his calm, steady drawl.

Regina laid me on a bed in the middle of what I assumed was the common room, since we hadn’t gone through any other doors. The mattress felt thin and creaky, like that of a pullout couch.

Spencer appeared in my dimming vision with a large sippy cup. “Here, darlin’, try to drink something. Being hydrated makes you easier to bite.”

Regina rolled me so I could put my lips around the end
of the straw. It tasted like blue Gatorade, the world’s coldest drink. I whimpered in gratitude.

“Easy. Go slow.” Spencer sat on the edge of the bed and wiped my forehead with a cool wet cloth. I wondered if I’d made a mistake in not choosing him to turn me—his maternal qualities would have been comforting.

Then I saw Monroe standing behind him, and I knew we were right. Like my blood already called to him, and his to mine.

He passed a clipboard to Spencer, who held it out to me. On it was a sheet of paper with the Control sun logo in the top left corner.

The infamous VBC form. Vampire by Choice.

By signing it I was consenting to be killed and (hopefully) resurrected. Without a VBC, the Control could prosecute Monroe for murder.

I scanned the form, though it hurt to move my eyeballs. The others must have known I didn’t want to be a vampire, that I just didn’t want to be dead. But they were willing to create a monster to keep me around. I could never repay them.

“Regina, it’s quarter to nine,” Jeremy said. “If you want, I can do your show. I’m doing Shane’s as it is.”

“If you spend nine hours straight on the air, OSHA will be on our ass for worker abuse.” She pointed to the end of the bed. “Stay there. You need to see this.”

I gripped the pen so hard my knuckles cracked. Regina wanted Jeremy to witness the horror of vamping, so he would stop wanting it so much for himself. He needed to see that no one with a choice would ever do this.

I signed the form and slipped into darkness.

“Open your eyes, ma’am.”

I wrenched my lids apart to see Monroe, his body stretched out next to mine.

“You ready?” he said.

“Where’s Shane?”

Spencer spoke from my right. “He’ll be here any minute, sweetheart.” He rested a light hand on my forehead.

“Lori just called,” Jeremy said from the end of the bed. “David got pulled over for speeding. She managed to convince Shane not to eat the cop, so they’re on their way.”

I looked at Monroe, wanting to ask if we could wait for Shane. I wanted my lover’s face to be my last sight.

But Monroe’s ink-black eyes were the ones I fell into.

It was like soaring into another galaxy, like those movie shots where they enter hyperspace and the stars around them stretch and shimmer. My pain faded, and even the itch felt like it belonged to someone else’s body.

Then my fever spiked, the heat spreading over my scalp and through my skull until it seemed like my brain would roast. The tunnel of my vision constricted to a point.

From a distance, I heard Spencer draw in a sharp breath. Then Noah asked him, “What’s wrong?”

He didn’t answer, only said, “Monroe, you better start now.”

I felt them all draw closer but saw nothing except the eternity in my maker’s eyes. Caught between freezing and burning, I reached out.

Monroe took my hand, touching me for the first time ever. “Say your prayers if you got ’em.”

I closed my eyes and sent a mind-whispered message out to whatever force in the universe had brought me to this moment:
Please end this pain.
(Either way, it would soon, so I
was hedging my bets, prayerwise.)

Monroe’s lips touched my throat, as soft and cold as dry ice. They parted, and I felt his tongue flick against my skin, searching for the heat of my pulse.

A familiar hand slipped against my empty palm. “I’m here,” Shane said. “I love you.”

The same words were on my lips when Monroe’s fangs sank into my flesh, his teeth like twin hot pokers.

I let out a strangled shriek. My muscles seized as I fought the instinct to shove him away. Every cell in my body screamed
No!
and if I’d been anything but near comatose I’d have pounded Monroe’s face until my fists shattered.