“What, am I going to get sent to time-out if I did?”
“That’s not really an answer,” Gabriel noted.
“No, OK, I didn’t shoot you. I was showing Jettie how to play Madden NFL 11 on Wii.”
“When did we get a Wii?” I asked.
“This is what’s disturbing to you in this situation? Heretofore unaccounted-for gaming equipment?” Gabriel demanded.
I shrugged. “How am I supposed to take away privileges if I don’t even know what privileges he has?”
“Damn it, I knew I shouldn’t have told you!” Jamie exclaimed.
“Can we focus the conversation on my nearly being killed by a flying stake?” Gabriel asked, his pallor getting more ashen by the second.
“Jamie, could you grab Gabriel a couple of packets of donor blood from the fridge? Dick brought some by a while ago,” I asked, pulling out my cell phone. “I’m calling Dick.”
“Jane. Wait.”
“Gabriel, I know you’re probably kind of embarrassed. I’m not sure what to do here. Of everyone we know, I’d say it’s most likely that Dick has survived something like this.”
“I don’t feel very well,” Gabriel said, his voice strained as moisture pooled at the corners of his eyes.
Jamie scoffed. “I thought we don’t get sick. Aw, come on, Gabe, tears? I’m gonna find your man card and rip it—”
Suddenly, blood was streaming down Gabriel’s cheeks. Our tears had traces of blood in them, leaving rusty pink streaks on our faces if we cried. Gabriel looked as if he was starring in a PSA about the Ebola virus.
“Jamie, shut up,” I commanded in a tone even Jamie couldn’t argue with. “Gabriel, what’s wrong? What hurts?”
Gabriel opened his mouth to answer, and a tidal wave of dark crimson poured out of his mouth and onto my hands. Jamie shrieked and scrambled back. I let Gabriel sink to the hallway floor and cradled his head in my lap. He coughed, spraying red streaks across an ancient family carpet.
Grandma Ruthie’s tinny, disembodied voice fluttered at my left ear, screeching, “Don’t let him bleed on my rug!”
I ignored her, concentrating on the blood that seemed to be seeping from Gabriel’s very pores. I sniffed at the arrow wound. The skin was starting to re-form around it, although blood had started to gush in waves from the puncture, soaking through his shirt and seeping onto my legs. I’d almost forgotten that Gabriel was still holding on to the arrow. I took it from his hand carefully. It smelled funny, bitter and metallic, with an undertone of sickly sweetness. The wood seemed spongy and weak, as if it had been submerged in water for a while.
“This is what you get when you lie down with a monster.” Grandma Ruthie sighed at my ear, clucking her tongue. “Nothing but blood and death and ruined carpet.”
“Shut the hell up, old woman! You laid down with more men than I ever could!” I screamed as Gabriel retched against me, spilling blood over my jeans. “Gabriel, please, tell me what you need me to do.”
Jamie was kneeling beside me now, holding Gabriel’s legs as he thrashed and twitched. “Do we call an ambulance?”
I shook my head, bit my wrist, and pressed it to Gabriel’s mouth. “We have to flush out his system with new blood. It will help him heal. Same thing happened when I got silver-maced last year. Get my cell from my purse. Call Dick, tell him we need blood, any kind he has. Now!”
When Gabriel didn’t draw from the wound, I opened his mouth and dripped the blood past his lips. I could hear Jamie on the phone with Dick, his young voice pitched by panic. Gabriel’s eyes dropped closed, but I saw his throat working to swallow. This was a hideous feeling. The helplessness, watching as he suffered. This was what Dick had felt when I’d been sprayed last year. This was what Gabriel had felt on the side of the road when I was shot in the back and he came to my house to find me bleeding.
My blood seemed to help. Gabriel’s legs stopped twitching. His fingers wrapped around my arm, holding it to his mouth. I stroked his forehead and asked Jamie for a wet cloth to clean the rust-colored tears from his cheeks. Minutes passed silently, without comments from Jamie or Grandma Ruthie. My limbs were starting to feel heavy, cold. I could feel my body functions slowing down as the blood left my veins. I tried to remember the last time I’d fed and couldn’t. Clearly, my siring schedule was a little more hectic than I’d thought. “He’s going to need more blood than what I can give him.”
Jamie shrugged as if he couldn’t figure out why I was telling him this. “OK.” I smacked his arm and glanced pointedly at his wrist. “Fine. I can’t believe this,” he grumbled, biting into his arm. “Ow! That hurts!”
“Be nice. I gave you my blood when you needed it.” I helped him bring Gabriel’s mouth to the freely seeping wound. This feeding was more detached, clinical. Jamie was leaning away from Gabriel as if he was afraid that someone would burst into the room and accuse him of being bromantic with his grandsire.
I was momentarily sidelined, with less blood circulating around my brain, and the panic was seeping in at the edges of my consciousness. What more could I do? Should I call the Council? What could they do for him? Vampires healed on their own. There were few medical treatments for us other than blood.
Suddenly, Gabriel broke away from Jamie’s arm, spewing all of the blood he’d just ingested over Jamie’s shoulder and onto the floor. Jamie cursed and wiped frantically at his clothes. Gabriel’s skin was cold and gray as I pulled him across my legs. I slid my hands down his cheeks, trying to wipe away some of the sticky crimson from his skin. His eyes wheeled frantically, searching the ceiling behind me. He couldn’t seem to focus on my face. I leaned close to touch my forehead to his. His chest gurgled as he panted against my cheek. His fingers plucked frantically at my sleeve, pulling me closer. My eyes burned with unshed tears.
“Just hold on, please?” I begged him. “We’re going to get married. I want to spend the rest of my undead life annoying the living hell out of you. I can’t do that without you.”
Dick and Andrea burst through the front door, blanching at the sight of Gabriel curled in my lap. Dick murmured, “It looks like a Tarantino movie in here.”
Recognizing a starving vampire when she saw one, Andrea rolled up her sleeve and took my place by Gabriel. She cradled his head with a practiced air and had him latched onto her wrist before I could blink. Reluctantly moving away from him, I felt the hysteria I’d been tamping down clawing its way up my chest to my throat. My knees gave out, and Dick caught my elbows to keep me from collapsing bonelessly onto the floor like a rag doll. “Easy there, Stretch.”
“I don’t know what happened,” I said, wiping at my wet cheeks with shaking hands as Dick led me to the couch. “We were just walking outside. We were talking, laughing, and then there was this noise, a ping. And Gabriel had an arrow poking out of his chest—”
I sprang off the couch and grabbed the arrow from the floor. “Dick, who do you know who might work in a lab? A hospital, blood bank. Hell, I’ll take a high school chemistry teacher if they know what they’re doing.”
“Why? Don’t you think we should focus on Gabriel right now?”
I gingerly held up the arrow fragments. He leaned over to sniff the wood and made a sour face. “I want this tested for poisons, contaminants, drugs. I want to know why Gabriel reacted this way to this arrow.”
“We can be poisoned?” Andrea exclaimed. “Why didn’t I know this? I think that should be in the Guidebook somewhere.”
“I’m serious, Dick. I want to know what’s wrong with that arrow,” I told him.
Dick snickered. “Well, sure, I’ll just scoot on down to my crime lab and fire up the gas chromatograph.”
I glared at him. He grimaced. “Inappropriate humor is how I cope, Jane.”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know a guy.”
He shrugged. “I know a guy.”
“Of course you do. You think you can get me results quick?”
“For a price.”
“There’s emergency cash in the library, stuffed inside a copy of The Great Gatsby. Take as much as you think you’ll need.” Dick lifted a brow. I squeezed his arm. “I trust you, Dick.”
“Shouldn’t I take my turn feeding him?” Dick asked, his forehead creased with concern for his old friend.
“I’ll take another turn before we take him upstairs,” I said, shaking my head. “It would be better to know what we’re dealing with now. Just go.”
Dick gingerly wrapped the arrow bits in a plastic kitchen baggie and told me to wash my hands, just in case whatever poison the arrow contained could be absorbed through the skin. He kissed Andrea on the top of her head as she continued to feed Gabriel, and slipped out the front door.
“You know, it’s at times like this that I’m really glad I’m friends with Dick Cheney,” I said as Andrea squeezed my fingers with her free hand.
“He is handy to have around when you need favors of a secretive and dubious nature,” she acknowledged.
“Honey, I don’t want to know what kind of favors he does for you.”
“See, you made a lame little joke,” she said, nudging me. “Everything will be just fine now.”
When Andrea was starting to feel woozy, we poured the donor blood Dick had brought over down Gabriel’s throat. I took another turn feeding him, hoping that somehow there was enough of his own blood left in my veins that it would be like getting an infusion from a compatible donor. He finally stopped throwing it back up, which I assumed meant that he was getting better. Andrea helped me lift Gabriel and carry him upstairs. I stripped off his bloody clothes and tucked him into bed. Andrea went downstairs to work over the bloodstained carpet, which she seemed to think she could clean with some club soda. When I suggested kerosene and a match, she was horrified.
Stroking his hair back from him his gore-covered face, I pressed a kiss to his temple. Jamie came through the bedroom door with a bowl of clean water and a rag.
His expression was sheepish. “Sorry I freaked out down there. I’ve just never seen anything like that. I mean, I’ve seen horror movies, but that was …”
“Real life, Jamie. There’s no shame in being scared. I was terrified. I’m just better at covering it up.”
Jamie’s brow furrowed as I cleaned Gabriel’s face. “You really love him, huh? Not just the sweet ‘oh, we met in high school and just couldn’t seem to find someone else’ sort of love, but the epic, desperate, ‘move mountains and cross oceans’ sort of love.”
I chuckled. “I think that would be an apt description. When you realize that someone would do anything for you, even if it means separating themselves from you, risking that you’ll never love them again, just to make sure you’re safe and well … There’s no coming back from that. You’ll do whatever it takes to be with them. You might want to kick their ass a few times along the way. But when you find that, you don’t let it go.”
Jamie shuddered.
“Too mushy?” I asked.
“I’ll survive.”
Gabriel grumbled in his sleep and shifted against me. I bit into my wrist and let the blood drip into his mouth.
“Hey, you’ve got to stop doing that. You’ve fed him twice already. Dick said you could drain yourself dry.”
“Look who’s the voice of reason all of a sudden,” I muttered.
“If I was the voice of reason, I would have kept you from giving Dick cash.”
I laughed, an honest-to-goodness bark of sincere laughter, and he grinned at me.
“I mean, seriously, I get why you’re with Gabriel, as much as it pains me to say it. He has that whole sophisticated-older-guy thing working for him. But what’s with Dick? He’s fun for me to hang out with because he’s a total dude. But the old Jane, the Jane I knew growing up, wouldn’t have looked at that guy twice.”