The Vampire's Release, A Paranormal Romance (Undead in Brown County #4) (11 page)

“Damn.”
  My voice came out as a little squeak that reminded me of a kitten.

“Relax, dear.”  I searched out the source of the voice and
found
Teddy sitting beside the bed in a plain
wooden chair.  She patted my arm and smiled at me.  “How are you feeling?  You had quite an eventful few days.  You had us all worried to death.”

I swallowed and tried to clear my thr
oat, but when my words came out
it was in the same weird tone.  “What happened?”

“You were in an automobile accident in Indiana.  Alex brought you here.”

There was a crash.  I remembered hearing it, but nothing else.  Surely this was all just a dream, I thought.  But before the collision, there was something that happened in the car that had scared me.  I couldn’t exactly remember what it was.

“
Where
am
I
?”

“Chicago, Sarah,” she replied.
“Alex was able to get in touch with me and told me you were hurt.  You’
ve been seen by a doctor.  He wants us to keep a close eye on you, but it doesn’t appear that your concussion is very serious.  He did have to stitch up the cut on your head
, though
.”

“Where is Michael?”

Her hesitation frightened me more than anything else.  She paused for several moments before speaking in a mild tone.  “He is close by.  He wanted me to tell you that he’ll see you soon.”

Something was very wrong.  Teddy’s eyes were steady on me, but I sensed something horrible coming—some revelation that might change everything for me.  For all of us. 
I almost didn’t want to know.  Too much had gone wrong already.  But if Michael was in danger, I had to find out.

“Tell me what’s going on.  Please.”

She sighed and shook her head.  “Not now. 
I am going to bring you something to eat
.”

I reached out for her, my fingers making contact with the unnaturally cold surface of the skin on the back of her hand.  “Is he okay?”

“He
i
s healthy.”

That wasn’t enough.  She got up gracefully and disappeared through a doorway without a sound, coming back
in a few minutes
with a tray of soup and tea.
  She helped me to sit up and put the tray on my lap.  But I didn’t want anything to eat.  Food was the last thing on my mind.

“Tell me what’s going on, Teddy.”

Her black eyes closed and she looked as if she were trying to summon a great deal of patience.  When she opened her eyes again, she smiled at me
stiffly
.  “You will be told everything when the time is right.  That time is
not
now.  So you just relax and have some soup.”

Teddy hadn’t personally known me for a very long time.  What s
he did know was that my temper wa
s easily provoked.  So she didn’t look particularly surprised when I dumped the tray from my lap onto the floor, soaking the burgundy carpet with chicken broth and warm tea. 

I really couldn’t help myself.  If something had happened to Michael, I certainly had a right to know about it.
  She was denying me information about someone I loved.  I had considered her to be a friend, but she was giving me cause to doubt that idea.

“Teddy, something is going on.
  And I want to know what it is!
”
  My throat ached with the force I’d put into the words.

With a cloth napkin from the tray, she dabbed delicately at a spot of broth that had splashed onto her gray slacks.  “No.  Perhaps later.”  She laid the white napkin on the foot of the bed and turned to go.  “Someone will be up shortly to clean up the mess.”
  Then
I heard
the sound of a door closing and the click of a lock being turned.

“What the
fuck
?”

I took stock of the room.  The bed was king-sized and covered with a somewhat plain white duvet and white sheets.  There was a wooden dresser against the opposite wall that appeared to be a well-maintained antique.  Other than the plain chair that Teddy had been sitting on, there was no other seating in the room.  From my place on the bed, the carpet looked a little worn in some places but generally seemed clean. 

Where was I?  She had said Chicago.  But it definitely wasn’t a hotel room because I could see no indication of anything with a hotel name on it and there was no television.  Virtually all hotels that I had ever
been in
always
had a TV.  So I was in someone’s house
.  But whose?

With a groan, I drew the sheet and duvet away from my legs and
put my feet on the floor.  Then I noticed that I was not wearing my own clothes.  At some point, someone had dressed me in a pair of flowery pajamas made of flannel.  I touched the bandage on my head and winced. 

Avoiding the spill on the floor, I got up and edged my way towards where Teddy had disappeared.
  There was a thick oak door at the end of a short hallway.  When I went forward and tried to turn the knob, I found that I couldn’t.  She really had locked me inside.

With my f
rustration rising, I smacked one hand against the door.
“
Teddy!
  Open the door!”

There was no answer. 

CHAPTER 15 – Alex

The headaches were getting worse.  I had picked up a pair of dark sunglasses at a nearly deserted corner store near Washington Park in Chicago.  Afterwards, I walked down 55
th
street towards the shore of Lake Michigan.  I wasn’t in a hurry.  My meeting with the Council was still hours away.  It had seemed pointless to hang around Teddy’s
townhouse, waiting for Sarah to wake up.

The streets were quiet.  Here and there, I saw a few couples leaving the bars after a few too many beers.  A man in an old, unraveling sweater and stained yellow pants asked me
for some money.  I gave him a twenty-dollar bill and waved off his words of thanks.  He should have been thanking me for not killing him.  I had wanted to. 
The bagged blood Teddy’s assistant had given me had helped with the thirst, but not alleviated it. 

It was snowing in Chicago.  The temperature was in the teens. 
The snowflakes hit my face but didn’t melt.  It was another hazard of being a reborn vampire. 
The cold didn’t matter much to me.  What bothered me were the lights—seemingly millions of them in the city, coming at me from every direction.  When I was human, I’d suffered from migraines.  The pain shooting through my skull reminded me a great deal of how the migraines used to feel.

Selena had predicted that I would be indestructible.  She said that I was some kind of “Guardian” and that no one could kill me after becoming a vampire again and then drinking Sarah’s blood.  But I hadn’t told Selena about the headaches.  No one knew.  If it had just been headaches, I guess I wouldn’t have been too worried.  But I was also beginning to lose sensa
tion in my toes and fingers.  So far, I hadn’t noticed a change in my strength.
  I wasn’t sure what to think about it. 

A few blocks from Lakeshore Drive, I realized that I was being followed. 
Judging by the scent, I knew it was a vampire. 
I continued on at the same casual pace for a few hundred feet and then began to jog.  I ducked into the doorway of a grocery that was closed.  The windows and doors were covered in
metal bars, but the entrance offered a small alcove in which to hide myself.

A few minutes later
, I heard the sound of women’s heels on pavement.  One vampire.  But there were more.  I could feel them out there somehow, calling me.  It wasn’t even audible.  It was just a feeling of being summoned.
  I didn’t like it.

A shadow appeared in front of the store.

“Alex, it’s me.”

I yanked her into the alcove.  It was Selena. 

She pushed me away with a hiss.  “Keep your hands off me.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I should be asking you that.  You were supposed to take Katie to the island.”

I used a hand to wipe the snow from my hair.  “I’m not your employee, Selena.”

“Obviously,” she replied. “If you were, I would have fired you long before now.”

“What do you want?”

She crossed her arms and rolled her dark eyes.  “Nothing from you.  But if my contacts are right, you should be meeting the Council tonight.  I want you to give a message to Vincent for me.”

“Give it to him yourself.  They’ll all be at the
Dwight
Tower in a few hours.”

“No.  I need to stay clear of all that.
”

“That’s your problem, not mine.”

She changed tactics quickly, the tone of her voice growing soft and her movements languid in the darkness.  “Alex, would you be interested to know that the Breath-Giver is here?”

That stopped me.  It even stopped the headache, if only for a few precious moments.

“What do you mean?”

She smiled slyly.  “She’s here.  In Chicago.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true.  She will be at Isaiah’s hearing.”

I didn’t believe her.  Not only because she was a good liar, but also because the only time I’d seen the Breath-Giver she hadn’t been in the form of a human.  She had spoken to me, but at the time it hadn’t seemed to be any kind of language spoken by humans.  The whole scene seemed as if it had been written by some
evangelical preacher.  A light came out of the sky, talked to a doomed soul and promised salvation. 

The rest of the story had bee
n relayed to me by Selena
.  I hadn’t known much about Selena’s dark past at that time.
  Right before my transformation from vampire into human, she told me about Sarah and Katie and explained what she wanted me to do.  I didn’t consider that I might have a choice, given the fact that she had summoned the Breath-Giver
.  I assumed that she would find a way to make me obey her.

Then I met Sarah, which changed everything.

“What
is
the Breath-Giver?” I asked Selena quietly.

Her face lost some of its allure and her eyes became hard with suppressed malice.  “She’s a spirit.  A very powerful one.”  The leather surface of the jacket she wore was wet from her walk in the snow
, and the moisture picked up the lights beyond the storefront and magnified them, sending more waves of pain through my head.  But I listened.

“A spirit?”

“Yes.  She helped the Indian create the containment border around the farm.  William was a rogue.  He probably still is.  When the Indian called out for help
against him
, she was the one who came.  She has an issue with vampires.  She wants to get rid of
us
all.”

That wasn’t what I expected to hear.
“What’s her name?”

“I don’t know.  She came to me a few years after I left the farm and told me that unless I provided some protection for my daughter, horrible things were going to happen.”

I stopped and looked at her.  “Daughter?  You mean daughters.”

Carefully, she avoided my gaze.  “No.  Daughter.”

“What are you saying?” I grabbed her by the arm.

“Let me go,” she complained.

“No.  Not until you tell me.”
   I shook her, sick of the lies and tired of the manipulations.
  I felt cartilage and bone begin to crack under the pressure of my fingers, but I didn’t want to stop.  Her expression sang of fear.  I almost hoped she wouldn’t tell me so I would be forced to kill her.

“Katie is my daughter!” she shouted hoarsely, “Not Sarah.”

CHAPTER 16 – Michael

“You have violated our laws.”

I turned from the sight of the snow falling outside the window and looked at Vincent critically.  He had dispatched agents to meet me and bring me to his high-rise apartment in downtown Chicago.  It was a sterile place, far too white and modern for my tastes, but the view was attractive. 

“What did you do with my guards?” I asked.

“They are being detained under orders of the Council.”

The fireplace operated from a switch on the wall and didn’t seem to burn real wood.  I had never seen such a thing before.  I flipped the switch a few times, watching the flames go up and then disappear completely.  Moder
n technology puzzled me
.

“Your actions at the scene of the accident were recorded on a cell phone.”

The Spaniard.  I remembered seeing him hold the phone out towards me, but hadn’t made the
connection.  The urgency of Vincent’s words resonated somewhere inside me, but I could not seem to care very much.
 
I was disconnected. 
It wasn’t like me.