The damage to her neck was too obvious, too vampire-y.
Someone wants us to believe it’s a vampire, I thought.
But why? came Sanchez’s voice.
You’re still in my head?
I guess, he thought back. Your words just keep appearing, and I keep answering like an idiot.
You’re not an idiot, but I’m going to close you out now. No offense.
Believe me, none taken.
I laughed and put up mental wall, thus sealing Sanchez out. The wall only stayed in place for so long. I’d noted that after a few hours, it tended to fade away, How all of this worked, I didn’t know, but I’d learned to work with it, rather than against it. Swim downstream, not upstream, as the saying went.
I’d long ago learned how to continuously tune out others. Generally, when I was with Detective Sherbet or my friend, Allison, I mostly pushed aside their own thoughts. Yes, I heard them, but they existed as small background noise that I could tune into, if I chose to. Mostly, I chose not to.
Only with Fang—and sometimes, here and there with Allison—did I pick up long-distance thoughts. Meaning, they didn’t have to be nearby. But with Fang’s ascension to immortality, well, he was forever cut off from me, just as all immortals were cut off from me.
Hey, I didn’t make the rules. I just did my best to live within them.
So, with my mental wall up, and with Sanchez’s own internal chattering reduced to low background noise, I approached the dead girl and stood before her.
Chapter Six
“Yes, I can see you,” I said. “And I know you can see me.”
She didn’t say anything. I had actually conversed with a ghost only a few times. And only then, I’d simply received impressions from them.
This girl wavered in and out of existence. I suspected I might lose her, and so I said quickly, “I want to help you.”
I was getting a very strong impression that she was terrified, even in death. Terrified by what had happened to her, and by what was happening now.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said. “No one can hurt you now...or ever again.”
Whether or not she heard me, I didn’t know. She continued staring at me, sitting there on the rock, her knees pulled up to her chest, head slightly tilted, revealing the ghastly wound that that somehow looked even more awful in death, a wound composed of tens of thousands of glowing light particles. The wound, I saw, was deep. Someone had literally torn open her neck. Yes, she would have bled to death quickly.
“I’m sorry someone hurt you,” I said.
She hugged her knees tighter. Her feet were mostly not there. Sometimes they wavered into existence, but mostly, her legs stopped at the ankles. She had been wearing Asics running shoes.
She’d been attacked in the park, while running.
As that thought occurred to me, I caught a psychic hit of her running up a trail. I turned...that trail there, which led off down the hillside and through a tangle of gnarly little trees. Yes, she’d been running up there when something powerful had overwhelmed her...knocking her down, pouncing on her.
And then pain. So much pain.
And that was it.
Her next memory was of sitting beside her dead, broken body.
That had a familiar ring to it. I, too, had been attacked in a different park, while running. Of course, I hadn’t been left to die, to bleed out, as I’m sure this girl had. I had been given vampire blood...no doubt by my attacker himself.
Of course, I would never know the truth, since my attacker—a very old and powerful vampire—was now dead at the hands of a vampire hunter named Rand. I’d recently had the pleasure of working with Rand and his merry band of vampire-hunting misfits, in a faraway land in a remote mountaintop castle. Lord help any vampire who crossed paths with those badasses.
Anyway, her plight was familiar to me, even if the end result was far different.
This could have been me, I thought. Dead and lost and wondering what the hell had happened to me.
Truth was, had I been killed that night, I probably would have never known what had happened to me. I had been hit hard and ravaged and it all had been a blur...and I had awakened the next morning in a hospital, lucky to be alive.
Lucky to be able to see my kids.
This girl wasn’t so lucky.
Then again, I had a certain fallen angel named Ishmael who had, no doubt, something to do with keeping me alive. Which led to another question: how had Ishmael managed to convince the old vampire to attack me—and to keep me alive? To feed me his blood?
I didn’t know...but suddenly, I wanted to find out.
But this girl hadn’t been part of a fallen angel’s nefarious plan to find love, to break his immortal bond with the living by turning a mortal immortal, thus freeing him from servitude.
A twisted, reckless way to go about love.
If it was love.
I suspected it was closer to an obsession. Anyway, luckily, the fallen angel, Ishmael, had mostly kept his distance. For now.
“Do you remember who attacked you?” I asked the girl. “What did they look like?”
She didn’t move, but the light filament around her, the thousands and thousands of light filaments, shook and scattered and reformed. She was sobbing.
Her attack had been violent, sudden. I knew this. She might not have seen her attacker. I hadn’t seen my attacker.
Or, if I had, I couldn’t remember.
But maybe someday I could remember.
And if I could remember the night I was attacked...maybe a lot of what happened to me would make sense.
Maybe.
As she wept, her etheric body shuddering, I saw something else: a bulge at the back of her neck. The bulge was undoubtedly caused by a protruding bone. Of course, in her current state...it was only a memory of a protruding bone. Not actual bone.
I went back to the edge of the clearing, where Sanchez was watching me. He had been intently scanning the surrounding area, ever the homicide cop.
“Had her neck been broken?” I asked.
“Did the ghost tell you that?” he asked. “And did I just ask you if a ghost told you something?”
“You did, and, no, you’re not losing your mind. At least, not at the moment. We’ll see how you hold up when this is all over.”
“And what’s this?”
I thought about that. The night was chilly, but nothing my immortal flesh couldn’t handle. The detective, on the other hand, kept both hands in his jeans pockets in an effort to look both cool and keep warm. Guys.
I said, “Someone wanted to make sure this attack was obvious.”
“Obvious that it was a vampire attack?”