Outer Banks (17 page)

Chapter Fourteen

I fell asleep next to Emery while trying to figure out what to say. Maybe I
could
tell her I loved her, since it was undeniably true. But somehow it didn't feel that easy.

I was awakened by the security system alerting me to a vehicle coming up the driveway.

I jumped out of her bed and went to check the house perimeter. From the entertainment center I scanned the external cameras and recognized the car that had parked outside.

Mr. Mitchell was entering the house as I reached the front door.

He chuckled as he took in my bed head and sleep pants. “Good morning, Dillon.” It was three in the afternoon.

“Still on a night schedule,” I informed him with a smile.

“Is she well?” he asked.

“Yes. I think. She made me do an LP last night. That was not fun.”

“She
made
you?” He raised his brow, knowing exactly how his daughter was. Like him.

He put a fresh supply of food for Emery in the refrigerator and went into the sun room—Emery's idea room—looking at the odd collage of fish, cars, human skeletons and equations.

“It hasn't been that long, but she really seemed to think she's onto something after the LP. She has an idea, I could see it on her face.”

“You can read her face?”

I shrugged it off. “I could see an idea forming. I know that much.”

“That's good. I know I might seem like I'm being a tyrant. But Emmie works better under pressure. If you hadn't set the three month time limit, I probably would have.”

I frowned. “Don't you think she's under enough pressure already?”

“I guess she is.” He nodded. “Are you telling me to back off?”

I shook my head. “I don't pretend to know your relationship or want to interfere. All I see is how scared and frustrated she is. She only started to relax and make some headway yesterday.”

“I'll keep that in mind.”

We chatted about other things going on in the world for the rest of the afternoon. The last highway reopening, the repairs on the Eiffel Tower. Stuff like that.

All things considered, we humans had put ourselves back together fairly quickly. The bigger cities still had massive reconstruction projects underway, but everywhere else seemed back to normal—for the most part.

Time flew by fairly quickly all things considered. Mr. Mitchell and I sat on the deck and looked out over the forest with a beer as the sun began to dive for the horizon.

“Has Emmie said anything about her stepmother?” he asked.

“No.”

“Does she know I was having an affair?”

“Yes.”

“Damn.” He looked disappointed. “I don't want her to feel like she can't trust men, but I'm hardly a role model for her, am I?”

“This isn't the first time this has happened?” I guessed, taking a sip of my beer.

“No. Heather was my fourth wife.”

“I see.” I didn't say anything else for a moment. “Why get married if you know you can't be faithful?” I really wanted to know the answer.

“To be honest, I always think I'm ready to settle down. Then some young girl looks at me and you know how it is. I'm sure you have the women eating out of your hand.”

“I try not to feed women from my hand.”

Mr. Mitchell chuckled and looked over his shoulder towards the door. “When will she wake up?”

I looked at the clock. “A few minutes. Excuse me.”

I made us some coffee and heated up Em's blood in a cup, hoping it wouldn't have the catastrophic effect as the night before if I got it to her right away. Adam raised his brow.

“I thought it might make her feel more normal to drink out of a cup,” I explained.

He nodded. “It's the little things.”

Emery came out wearing a robe with her hair everywhere. I wanted to kiss her in the worst way, but this was hardly the right time. We couldn't tell him about us until the two of us knew for certain what we had.

“Morning, Daddy. Good morning, Dillon.” I handed her the cup and relaxed when she took a sip. “Thanks.” Much better.

“How did you sleep, sweetie?” Adam asked.

“Like the dead. As always.” She shrugged and then stretched. “I had a new idea when I woke up.”

“That sounds promising.”

She smiled at me. “I have the chassis of the formula in my head now.”

“Chassis?” Adam questioned.

“Car metaphor,” she explained.

“That sounds like the best place to start.”

“Did you know it's in the spinal fluid, not just the blood?” She frowned.

His brows creased. “That makes sense, given the areas of the body it affects.”

“Right.” She nodded. “I have a plan.”

“So why are you sitting here in your pajamas instead of making it happen?” Adam held out his hands.

“Oh, fine!” she muttered and got up, taking the mug with her. “You could at least let me finish my not-coffee first.”

“This is why she needs deadlines,” Adam said with a smirk.

Mr. Mitchell didn't stay long. Once he'd unloaded some fresh supplies and equipment and finished his business, he left after giving her a kiss on the forehead.

Emery was now back in the sun room, erasing some of the fish to make room for her new ideas. She left the chassis picture up though, and occasionally while she was thinking she would draw her own fish.

Like before, I sat with her most of the night, keeping her company. She would chatter at me about compounds and bases and I would just smile and nod. I hadn't a clue what she was talking about, but she looked cute when she said it.

She took some more of my blood and forced me to take hers. After performing the LP I wasn't going to get out of a simple blood draw.

“Thank you for staying with me again. It's nice to have someone to bounce ideas off.”

It was a pretty accurate metaphor, since most of the time it felt like they ricocheted off my skull rather than sink in. “As long as you don't expect me to bounce anything back to you.” I chuckled.

“It helps to hear it out loud.”

I nodded. “I get that. I talk to someone whenever I work on a car.”

“Who?”

“Someone who isn't there.” I shrugged, not wanting to tell her I had heated discussions with my father about why things weren't engineered better at the factory.

“I'm sorry. I didn't leave much time for us tonight.”

“You have a job to do. That has to come first. Don't worry about it.”

“Will you stay with me when I sleep?” she asked.

“Sure.”

Before dawn I snuggled in bed and kissed her. It reminded me of the morning before when she had declared her feelings and I said nothing in return. She must have remembered too.

“I'm sorry about what I said before I fell asleep yesterday.” She looked at her hand, picking a string from the edge of the blanket.

My eyebrows creased as I watched her. “You're sorry?”

“Yeah. I mean, this can't be anything serious. I know that.”

“You shouldn't be the one to apologize, Em. I'm the one who messed up. I have…
issues
with saying…you know,” I stammered.

“The ‘L' Word?” she said in a joking tone. “Most guys do.”

I didn't want to tell her how I had loved my parents and after they died I became leery of saying it to anyone else. As if it was a precursor to some grim event. I wasn't ready to share any of that.

“I have more than just the normal issues, but it doesn't mean this isn't
serious
.” I put my hands on her face and pulled her chin up gently so she would meet my eyes. “This is definitely
something
, Em.” I kissed her lightly at first and then put some energy behind it. When I released her she looked a little dazed. “I'm sorry I can't tell you exactly what that something is.” Here I was, only able to allude to my feelings like a chicken.

“I think maybe you kind of just did.” She smiled at me and then her eyes closed and she was out. The smile lingered on her face for a few seconds before sleep washed the expression away.

I pulled her close and closed my eyes.

Chapter Fifteen

She worked the next night without a break. And the next.

I nodded off now and then as Emery stopped explaining things and focused more on the task at hand. It wasn't like saving the world was boring, but the process to get to that point…well, it sure wasn't that exciting.

As my eyes closed, surrounding my mind in darkness, I dreamed of another dark place.

An alley in Philadelphia. An icy frost covered everything, and I could see my breath as I waited. The street light reflected in the prismatic blanket that covered the otherwise ugly location.

I knew what was going to happen in this place, filled with trash and the smell of urine, and tried to force myself to wake up. It never worked.

It was a recurring nightmare. My first recovery that had gone bad. An older woman, surviving on rat blood died when she woke up in the van, terrified worse than Emery had been. It wasn't unheard of, but it had been the first time it ever happened to me.

I could still see her face in my dream. Every detail.

“I'm sorry,” I leaned over to close her eyes, just as I had the night it happened.

Only this time it wasn't her face anymore. It was Emery's.

I banged the back of my head against the wall as I jerked awake. I was still sitting on the stool. Emery jumped and put her hand over her heart.

“Are you okay?” she said.

“Yeah. I'm fine.”

“What happened?”

“Bad dream.” I answered.

“Are you all right?”

I got up and hugged her tightly, then kissed her. “I think so.”

The next week it was back to work. We were spending more and more time in the lab instead of what we'd come to call the thinking room.

She started some experiments and made a few calls to her father to request other materials she needed.

I was getting quite an education. She liked to explain to me what she was doing, and some of it was actually starting to make sense.

I was making a sandwich in the kitchen one night when she came in with her familiar instruments of torture. The tourniquet, needle and cotton ball.

“Can I get another sample from you?” She tilted her head.

I crossed my arms tightly. “What's in it for me?” I grinned mischievously.

“The chance to save the world.” I twisted my mouth to the side, thinking it over. “Hmmm. I don't know. This is Grade A Texan blood here. I should probably hold out for a better offer.”

“A better offer?” she repeated incredulously.

“Something more…
personal
. Like, I don't know, making out with me.”

“We'll see what we can do.”

“I do still have that rain check for the begging, you know,” I reminded her.

“You want me to beg you to make out with me?” she asked amused.

“Well, what do you know! The begging worked! I'm putty in your hands!” I pulled her shirt up a little and then picked her up so I could kiss her bare stomach. She giggled as I moved up to her neck.

“Fine, let's just be quick. I have a lot of work to do and I'm starting to wind down.”

“Quick?” I chuckled against her shoulder. “I'm from Texas. We don't do anything quick in Texas.”

“I thought that was a stereotype.”

“Stereotypes are based in reality,” I informed her.

“All right,” she laughed. “I can save the world tomorrow night.”

We moved into her bedroom. I laid her on the bed and slid in next to her. Once we'd gotten to a certain point, the familiar frown crossed her face.

“Em,” I said flatly.

“I wish I could—”

I kissed her to interrupt her. “I've never been more intimate—truly intimate—with any other woman in my life. I'm perfectly—”

It was she who interrupted me this time, she didn't seem to believe a man could be happy without sex.

“The way you look at me I forget that I'm not—” She stopped when she saw my frown and rephrased. “I forget that I'm a Haunt.”

“I was hoping to kiss you until you forgot your own name, but at least I made you forget
something
.”

She laughed and brushed her fingers along my jaw.

“Seriously. How do you look at me like that, when everyone else…” She trailed off.

“Emery, you are an amazing, beautiful woman. That's all I see.”

She smiled as she pulled me down and kissed me.

Usually my encounters with women were only about sex and often more of the kind you regretted in the morning. But with Emery I wanted to push back her sleep cycle so it wouldn't take her from me. Just to spend more time like this with her.

“It's almost time, I can feel it weighing me down,” she whispered. “I didn't save anyone tonight.”

“There's always tomorrow.” I said as her eyes closed in sleep.

I held her while I slept next to her, waking on my own around three-thirty in the afternoon.

I went to the refrigerator to get some eggs for my afternoon breakfast and realized there was no blood in the refrigerator.

I moved some things around on the shelves hoping a bag had slid behind something else, but no. I ran back to the lab and checked the little refrigerator there. It was full of petrie dishes, a couple of samples and a Yoo-Hoo, but no blood.

We were out.

I called Adam immediately.

“Yes, Dillon?”

“Are you coming up here today by any chance?”

“No, tomorrow, why?”

“Em's out of blood.”

“She is? How? She should have had more than enough.”

I wondered how too, then I realized she'd gotten carried away with some of her recent experiments that required larger samples to time alien H-cell conversion rates or some such, and had raided the food supply more than once. I also realized she hadn't eaten yesterday morning. She was going to be hungry when she woke tonight.

“I'm not going to be able to come up tonight. Not without raising suspicions. I'm in Cincinnati at a conference. I fly back tomorrow morning. Can you get her some? There's a hospital about an hour south of the cabin.”

“Okay. She might not need any when she wakes.” This was a lie, but there was no sense in making him worry.

“Tell her I'll be there by the time she wakes tomorrow night, I promise.”

“I will. See you then.” I tapped my leg restlessly.

“Right.”

He hung up and I pulled out a map to look for the closest hospital. It was a lot more than an hour away—almost two and a half. I wouldn't be back to let her out when she woke, and I didn't want her to panic being locked in her room. I could leave her here with the door unlocked, but what if someone came in? She'd be completely vulnerable.

I decided to wait until she woke and then I would leave. She would be hungry, but at least she would know food was on the way. I might have to hold out the blood bag to her on a ten foot pole by then, though.

During my shower I noticed my arms were riddled with needle marks, to the point I almost looked like a heroin addict. They'd been tiny samples, though, barely enough for a test tube. Since the blood at her disposal came from a wide variety of sources, she'd taken to using me as a kind of control group to compare results against.

I wondered. Why couldn't I give her a cup or two of my own to get her through tonight when she woke? Ugh, the very idea made me a bit dizzy, but it was the best option.

After I was dried off and dressed I went to the lab and got the necessary items. I took a breath and ran the alcohol swab over my skin. I snapped the elastic tourniquet around my biceps using my teeth, and then as the needle got to my skin I pulled it away.

“Come on, Dillon! Don't be such a baby.”

I tried again after rolling my shoulders and taking a breath, but I pulled away again. It was a reflex, as if someone else was aiming the needle.

“She won't do this for herself and she won't let you do it once she wakes up. Man up!” I stuck the needle into my vein. “Huh,” I said in surprise as the bag began to fill. I did a pretty good job. It didn't hurt that bad at all.

I watched as bright red blood ran through the clear tube to collect in the bag, feeling pretty proud of myself. When the bag was almost half full I loosened the tourniquet and pulled it free. I removed the needle and affixed a bandage with a cotton ball across my arm.

Emery's door was already unlocked, but I opened it slightly as I walked to the kitchen. I poured the contents of the bag into a coffee cup and threw the bag in the trash. For once there was no need to heat it up. It was a perfect ninety-eight degrees.

I set her cup on the table and started some coffee as she emerged from her room. She went into the lab briefly, then came out with a frown, her eyes on the fridge. There was a hint of panic on her face until I pointed to the cup.

She picked it up and drank it down, skipping any sense of formality. She wasn't too bad off considering but I knew she wouldn't want me to stare. I went into the living room and changed the channel to CNN.

“What the hell is this?” she said, causing me to jump. I ran back into the kitchen. She had a little bit of blood left on the corner of her mouth.

“What? What's wrong?” Maybe it had too much cholesterol from all the bacon and eggs?

She watched my expression while pointing at the mug. “Where did this come from?”

“I… Is something wrong with it?”

“This is your blood, isn't it?”

“How did you know that?”

“It smells like your blood. Also, I was pretty sure I'd finished off the last bag the other day.”

“You did. Thanks for the heads up on that, by the way. Exactly what did you expect to do when you woke up? And what's wrong with my blood anyway?”

“Don't you think it's a little sick for me to be drinking your blood?”

“It's fresh and relatively healthy. I've had all my shots.”

“Stop joking around. You know what I mean.”

“I thought you'd be hungry.”

“I'm starving.” She laid her head on her folded arms and stared at the cup. It was over half full.

I sat down on the stool next to her and moved the cup away. She made a small sound of protest.

“You don't have to finish it if you don't want to. I can go get you more, but it will be a while before I get back.”

“I
do
want it. It smells delicious.” Her voice was muffled by her arms.

“Then go ahead.”

“You don't think this is weird?” She finally looked up at me. “Me, drinking your blood?”

“I don't think it's weird. I knew you would be hungry and I have blood to spare. I'd give you a kidney if you needed it. Are you saying you wouldn't take my kidney? What the hell is wrong with my kidney? What is it, chopped liver? 'Cause it's not. It's a kidney.” I mocked with a grin.

She rolled her eyes and picked up the cup. I got up to get myself a drink.

“Mmm. Damn, this is good,” she said after a moment.

I snickered as I poured my coffee. “Grade A Texan pure,” I reminded her, making her laugh.

“Thank you, Dillon.”

“Does it happen to taste like bacon? I've been filling up on that stuff lately. Should give it a nice smoky aftertaste.” She thumped me on the arm. “Emery, I'd give you anything,” I said seriously and kissed the top of her head. “Don't think about it. Just drink.” I let my hand slide down her cheek and she smiled.

I left her to finish her meal to go back to the living room. I changed the channel, then again and again. Every station seemed to be broadcasting the same scene.

It took a moment for me to figure out what I was seeing. Then I realized I was trying to block it out.

“Em?” I said loudly. “You'd better come see this.”

“Why?” She hurried into the living room.

“They found another queen.”

Found was not really the correct word. The queen wasn't found in a subway in Lower Manhattan. She actually came to the surface that night on her own.

Worse, she had a small heard of Haunts under her control. The situation had gotten ugly before the military could take her down.

“Oh, no!” Em gasped as she lowered herself to the edge of the sofa next to me.

We watched the grainy footage, taken with smartphones and security cameras, over and over. Then the interviews began.

“There was a Haunt living in that tunnel. Then that big Bug came out of there. Don't you see? Those Haunts turn into Bugs. They're dangerous. What if they all turn at the same time on that island?”

The woman speaking was filthy with wiry gray hair. She looked like a bag lady or a witch. Soon I realized she wasn't the only person who thought this.

Next they talked to a teen with enough piercings to get him stuck to a magnet. “There was this Haunt that used to hang out in the tunnel. We called him Ernie, you know, because he looked like the guy from Sesame Street. Wore a striped sweater in the same colors. We'd seen him a few times, stuck to feeding on sewer rats, so we figured, live and let live, you know? What did I care if he was down there? I'm tellin' ya, that Bug that came out of the subway with the same damn sweater hanging off its back. Ernie turned into that giant Bug. He had to of, man. I know it.”

“He doesn't know shit!” I yelled and waved my hand at the screen.

Emery didn't say anything. She was looking at her hands as if she'd never seen them before.

“Em?”

“What if they're right?” she asked.

“They can't be right. How would a human turn into that?”

“I turned into this!” she said as she stood.

“You're still you. You wouldn't be able to grow an exoskeleton and fangs, Em.”

“There's no way to be certain some metamorphosis isn't happening in us.”

“Come on! You're a doctor. How can you believe this crap?”

“You only have to look at insects here on earth to see unbelievable transformations happen. Caterpillars into moths, fungal infections that turn ants into zombies—for all I know that could be what causes us to claw our way out of the ground and lose control when we're hungry. I might not be me, just what's left of me slowly dying until…”