The Vampire's Revenge (31 page)

“They’ll only let two people in at a time and then only every half hour for ten minutes,” Jerry complained. “But you and Werm could probably sneak in with those getups.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Come on, Werm.”

We pushed our way through the double doors and nearly ran into a nurse carrying a bag of IV fluid. “Who are you?” she demanded, her eyes narrowing.

I looked into her eyes and did my glamour thing. “We belong here. We’re here to help,” I said.

She nodded and continued on her way. Nobody else from the nurse’s station in the center of the ICU cubicles even looked at us. Rennie was in the second room we came to.

He was unconscious, deathly pale, and hooked up to too many tubes to count. I took a deep breath. “He’s dying. I can smell it,” I said.

“What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to turn him. It’s what he wanted. That’s what he said when he told me about the cancer.”

“We can’t turn him here.”

“I know. We’ve got to move him.”

“Where to?”

“I’ve got an idea, but we have to act fast. He doesn’t have much time left.”

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Werm asked, peering out the tiny window of the morgue into the corridor. He was watching for anyone who might come along and catch a vampire draining a defenseless man’s blood.

“It’s got to. I imagine that the pathologists around here mostly work nine to five so we should be okay. I’m going to drain Rennie’s blood right here. Then I’m going to let him feed on me. Then he’ll pass out, and we should have just enough time to get him back to one of the coffins at William’s before daylight and before he starts . . . screaming.”

Werm turned around to face me and Rennie. “Is there anything I can do?”

I’d already started sucking Rennie’s blood, so I disengaged from his throat to say, “Just make sure nobody comes through that—”

The door hit Werm in the back so hard he flew a couple of feet into the morgue, bounced off a stainless steel table, and landed in a heap on the tile floor.

“. . . door,” I finished.

A tall slender woman with honey-colored hair and blue eyes halted right inside the door and blinked at me, her lips parted in shock as she tightly clutched a clipboard loaded with medical forms. She wore a small name tag that read dr. sandra barton, pathologist.

I glanced down at myself and Rennie. His blood stained the front of my scrub top and his hospital gown, and my chin was sticky with it. Werm cringed and crawled under the autopsy table.

“Uh, this isn’t what it looks like,” I said hastily.

After a moment’s hesitation, she said in a sultry voice, “Oh? What is it, then?”

“I, um, that is—” I came around the gurney Rennie lay on and looked deeply into her eyes. “There’s nothing wrong here,” I said soothingly. “Everything’s fine. We’re just here to help.”

“Oh, yeah? Because it looks to me like you’re trying to drain that guy’s blood and turn him into a vampire like you. I don’t necessarily call that helping.”

I stared at her in shock. For the first time my glamour hadn’t worked. She grabbed a sharp pencil from under the clipboard’s fastener and held it in her fist pointy-side out.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” she challenged.

“Uh, not exactly.”

“Jack!” Werm shouted from under the table. “Are you crazy?”

Intrigued, I ignored him. “You’re not supposed to believe in vampires.”

“I believe my own eyes.”

“Nobody else does. Most people would be able to think of a normal explanation for this in no time flat.”

“I’m not most people.”

Now this was downright extraordinary. Not only was she absolutely sure of herself and her own sense of reality, but she showed no fear whatsoever. Not even an inkling. Her flinty gaze never wavered as she stared at me.

“Jack! What are you doing?” Werm cried.

I looked back and forth between Werm and the doctor. I had exactly no time to weigh my options, not that I had any good ones, so I went with my gut. “Listen, lady, er, doc—it’s like this. That’s my best friend over there on that gurney. He was injured in a bomb blast earlier tonight trying to save what passes for my sorry life. I only have a couple of minutes to start the process. I know it’s what he would want. In fact, he’s got pancreatic cancer and he told me so awhile back. I was going to turn him anyway, but I have to do it now or he’s not going to make it.

“Now, you can try to stab me with that pencil, but you can’t stake me and my little friend under the table there both at the same time. Whichever one you go for last will put the bite on you. I promise if you let me work on my buddy over there, we’ll be out of your way in fifteen minutes and you can forget you ever saw us. Do we have a deal?”

The lady doctor shifted her weight on her feet, still holding the pencil in an offensive position. She drew her plump bottom lip between her even white teeth and thought for a couple of the longest moments in my existence. Then she thrust out her chin and lowered the pencil.

Finally, she said, “We have a deal. But only if I can watch.”

Also by Raven Hart

THE VAMPIRE’S SEDUCTION

THE VAMPIRE’S SECRET

THE VAMPIRE’S KISS

THE VAMPIRE’S BETRAYAL

The Vampire’s Revenge
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Ballantine Books Mass Market Original

Copyright © 2009 by Raven Hart

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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ALLANTINE
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eISBN: 978-0-345-51345-8

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