Legally Undead (3 page)

I even managed to save the couch by super-gluing the edges of the torn fabric back together and flipping the cushions to the other side.

Millie spent her time jumping in and out of boxes, meowing loudly to announce her displeasure at the disruption in her life. “Yeah, well, you’re not the only one,” I told her, taking her out of a box and dropping her onto the floor.

In the middle of all this, Tony showed up and announced that he’d found an apartment near the Rose Hill campus of Fordham, deep in the Bronx. At least I would no longer have to ride the Ram Van every day just to get to school.

The rest of the team was cleaning the new apartment, and it would be ready by two o’clock. When we finished salvaging what we could, Nick and his guys loaded up all my stuff into a white van. Nick drove and I rode in the front seat. Neither of us spoke on the way to my new place, a pre-WWI era building with cracked marble in the entryway and faded red carpeting in the hallway.

It turned out that it was a good thing that most of my furniture had been destroyed. The apartment was one room with a small kitchen off to the side in what had probably once been a large closet. The bathroom was tiny, even by New York standards. And there was only one miniature closet. But I could see the entire place from anywhere in the apartment, and that felt oddly comforting.

By the time Nick’s team had helped me unpack, it was nearly dark. The last thing Nick did before he left was hand me a new cell phone and a large wooden crucifix.

“You might want to keep this by your bed.”

“Which one?”

Nick laughed—a short, barking laugh of surprise. “Both of them, I guess. My number’s already programmed into the phone. Seriously, Elle, I don’t think Greg knows where you are. And I don’t know if he’d even care if he did know. I don’t know what vampires care about besides feeding and killing, and I don’t know if they care who they kill.” He paused for a moment. “But after what I saw last night, I do know that you’re tough, and that you can handle yourself in a fight against one of these things. You’re a survivor. I like that. So you just call me if anything else comes up. Okay?”

I nodded, and Nick and his men filed out of the apartment. I took my engagement ring out of my pocket and stared at it for a long time, turning it from side to side to watch it sparkle.

Then I put it away in a shoebox in the closet.

I flopped onto the mattress on the floor—my bedframe was in pieces, probably on its way to the New York City dump—and stared at the ceiling high above me, contemplating the strange new shape of my life as it stretched out before me.

What I didn’t know then, of course, was exactly how strange that life was going to be.

Chapter 2

I woke up the next morning determined to find out everything I could about vampires. I called the number Nick had given me, but no one answered, so I left a message.

No Nick today. Okay, then. I’m a researcher, I reasoned. Surely I could learn enough to keep myself safe.

I got up, showered, got dressed, slipped the teak letter opener into my purse, and marched over to the library, making mental plans to skip all my classes for the next few days while I learned everything possible about vampires.

It didn’t take a few days. It took one day.

I had considered starting with the older fiction—
Dracula
,
Carmilla
,
The Vampyre
—the classics of vampire literature. But I didn’t want to know about fictional vampires. I wanted to know about real ones. Turns out that everyone thinks vampires are a myth.

I did discover that Fordham had a copy of an eighteenth-century text about vampires written by a Benedictine monk who actually believed in vampires. So I made my way up to the rare book room and spent some time skimming it. It didn’t tell me anything new—just that vampires were inhabited by the “spirits of the devil.” Great. My ex was a devil spirit.

And at the end of my research, I knew hardly any more than when I started. The few sources I’d found made conflicting claims about vampires’ habits.

So in a way, I was right where I’d been that morning. I knew that vampires existed. I knew that they drank blood because I’d seen one doing it. I’d killed one, so I knew that a stake through the heart was fatal. But I didn’t know why one had picked Greg. I didn’t know how a vampire had “turned” him, or for that matter, if it even really had. For all I knew, another vampire altogether had come back and trashed our apartment because he was irritated with me for killing the first one.

At least, that’s what I told myself. I knew in my heart of hearts that Vampire-Greg existed. I knew he was the one who had torn that picture of the two of us in half. And, no matter what Nick had said, I knew that he was out there somewhere looking for me.

So in some ways, the attack on my way home from the library that night was my own fault. I had planned to get home long before dark. But back in the stacks, far from any windows, I’d lost track of the time. When I came out of the building it was dusk.

I stood just outside the library doors and checked my phone. No messages. And Nick still wasn’t answering.

New York has long twilights in the spring, but this one was ending—the sun was almost completely over the horizon. Although it had been warm that morning, the temperature was dropping along with the sun, and I wished I’d brought a sweater. Shivering with cold, and perhaps more than a touch of fear, I scurried across the lawn to the campus exit, waving to the security guard as I swung out onto Fordham Road. People crowded around the Metro North train station, but the crowd thinned as I headed east along the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the university.

Across the street from me, the ground-level offices had all closed for the day, their doorways cast in shadows. On my side of the road, street lamps cast pools of light separated by long stretches of shadows. Trees overhung the fence for two blocks until the campus gave way to auto supply stores. But the shadows were clear and seemed unlikely to hide any vampiresque lurkers. I scrabbled in the bottom of my purse for the letter opener, gripped it tightly, and made the decision to stay on the university side of the road.

It was the wrong choice.

I was so busy scanning the shadows and peering behind the tree trunks on the other side of the fence that I forgot to look up.

I thought I was ready for any sort of attack. But I don’t know that you’re ever ready for someone to pluck you up off your feet and haul you into a tree. And that’s what happened. I never even saw it coming. He just reached down from above as I passed and lifted me by the back of my shirt as if I didn’t weigh an ounce, pulling me up over the fence and into the tree with my back against his chest and my legs swinging beneath me.

“Hello, sweetheart,” Greg’s voice whispered into my ear. But it wasn’t exactly Greg’s voice, either. It had more sibilance to it, almost a lisp. Like maybe he was still learning to talk around fangs. I shuddered.

You know those dreams where you’re running from something horrible and you can’t even scream? It felt like that. All the air had left my lungs and the only sound I could make was a sort of breathless squeak. My legs flailed and I scraped my knees on tree bark, but I couldn’t find any purchase for my feet.

I flashed back to the image of Greg dangling from the first vampire’s grip.

I remembered the letter opener in my hand and stabbed wildly behind me. I felt the tip of it penetrate the skin, but then it scraped up against something—probably a rib—and stopped.

That’s when I found out that if you miss the heart, vampires get angry.

He hissed.

That doesn’t really describe it, of course. Humans can hiss, but not like a vampire hisses. This hiss was like a cross between the sounds made by cats and snakes, with a low growl thrown in for good effect. Human throats can’t make that sound. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and my skin tried to crawl off my body.

He let go of one shoulder and reached up to rip the letter opener out of his chest. Blood streamed out of the wound and dripped hot onto my arm.
Does that mean he’s fed recently
?
Has he killed someone tonight
? I wondered frantically. That thought drove me to move, and quickly. He was still holding the back of my shirt, but I twisted my shoulder out of his grip and lifted my arms straight up. One hand hit the letter opener and it went flying across the lawn; the move was pure accident on my part, but it served to distract Greg long enough for me to do the only thing I could think of to get away.

I was wearing one of the oversized t-shirts I’d taken from the apartment. With one wiggle I slipped out of the shirt altogether.

I’d like to say that I hit the ground running, but that would be a lie. I hit it sprawling and gasping, but my feet were already moving, so I scrambled up and took off across campus.

I heard Greg laugh behind me. It sounded almost as horrible as his hiss, almost as inhuman—much like I would imagine a hyena’s laugh sounds. It was a predatory sound.

Graduate courses in history don’t prepare one for running away from a vampire. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to the gym. “Out of shape” was an understatement. He caught up with me easily, just as I reached the corner of the nearest building. I felt his hand brush the back of my neck, felt his fingernails—claws? something sharp—dig into the top of my back.

With a final burst of speed I didn’t know I had in me, I rounded the corner into a pool of light. And ran smack into a man walking out the door.

I think “bowled him over” might be an accurate description. He’d been carrying a stack of books, and they went flying everywhere as he and I went down. I think I skidded across him and rolled to a stop—I know I ended up flat on my back on the concrete apron in front of the door, staring up at the sky, just in time to see Greg do some complicated flip over me.

Again, the best comparison I have is to a cat, the way that they flip around in the air and still manage to land on their feet. Vampire-Greg landed on all fours, one knee on the ground, about five feet away from me.

I twisted around and had just enough time to register that he was dressed all in black and that his eyes were also all black—no whites anywhere—before he hissed that awful hiss again, and was gone.

Just like that. I didn’t see him get up, didn’t see him move away. He was just gone.

It was a good thing, too. I don’t think I could have stood up if I’d tried, and I certainly couldn’t have run any farther. And my letter opener was under a tree somewhere behind me.

I sank back to the ground and put my hands over my face, groaning. It’s never easy to see an ex for the first time after you’ve broken up. Seeing an ex for the first time after he’s been turned into a bloodthirsty evil creature of the night is possibly even less easy. Especially if he pulls you into a tree. Then chases you.

“Um. Hey. Are you okay?” The voice came from somewhere above me. I spread my fingers wide and opened my eyes to peer between them.

The guy I’d flattened was standing over me, looking concerned.

And no wonder. I was wearing athletic shoes, jeans, and a lacy black bra. I had Vampire-Greg’s blood—black and foul-smelling—smeared down one arm, and I suspected I had my own blood welling out of my back where he had grabbed me. My jeans were ripped, my hands and knees were skinned, and I had dirt smudged across my hands, my face, my torso. I was a mess.

And for one insane moment, I was intensely grateful I’d chosen to wear my nice bra that day. God forbid someone should see me running for my life in a tatty bra. I giggled a little wildly.

The guy frowned and knelt down beside me. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to choke off any impending hysteria.

“Yeah. I’m okay. I think,” I said.

“Who was that guy?”

“Um. I don’t know.” Well, that was true enough. I didn’t know him anymore. He certainly wasn’t the man I had agreed to marry. That guy wouldn’t lurk about in trees and chase me across campus.

“Did he hurt you?”

“Not much. No.” I reached behind and touched the scratches on my back. My fingers came away with only a little blood—the scratches hadn’t been too deep.

He held out his hand and I took it. Shakily, I worked my way to my feet. I was shivering.

“Here. Take my jacket.” He wrapped it around me and pulled out a cell phone. “I’m going to call 911.”

“No!” I almost shouted, and he looked at me as though I’d lost my mind. I thought quickly. “I… I just want to go home. I couldn’t really tell the police anything, anyway.”

“Let me at least call campus security. They can make a police report if they want to.”

I could tell that I wasn’t going to get out of this without making some kind of report—and when I thought about it, I realized that thinking some crazed maniac was attacking women on campus might actually make security beef up patrols. That might make the campus a safer place for everyone.

When the security guards showed up half an hour later, I was glad that the guy’s jacket covered up the blood on my arm; that would almost certainly have meant a trip to the police station. I told them as little as possible, but stuck to the truth: some creep dressed in black had grabbed me by the shirt, I’d wiggled out of it, and I’d run. Then this guy had appeared and my attacker had fled. They asked where he had grabbed me.

“Right beside the library, just as I came out,” I lied. What else could I say?
From a tree. I was on the sidewalk on the other side of the fence. He was in the branches.
Right.

I gave them my name and my phone number, and when they pressed, I gave them my address. I didn’t want to, especially not with a stranger standing next to me. I didn’t trust anyone at night, not even someone who was willing to step in to help a screaming shirtless woman. Even if he was, I suddenly realized, beautiful. Classically beautiful. Model beautiful. Stop-your-breath-in-your-throat beautiful.

I shook my head to clear it and tried to focus on the conversation.

I listened carefully when Mr. Beautiful gave the cops his information. His name was Malcolm Owens, and he was a Ph.D. student in the math department. He lived on the other side of campus. I hoped he was telling the truth and wasn’t connected to Vampire-Greg. I hoped his presence was sheer accident.