Page 16 of Red Rooster

3

A few blocks west, morning sunlight fell through the gaps in the curtains and woke Jamie Anderson from the deepest, most restful sleep of his life. He turned onto his side and took a deep, unrestricted, pain-free breath; he smiled. His lungs worked beautifully, in a way they never had, and the sun touched his face with warmth and gentleness. The mattress cradled him like a cloud. Comfortable and content, he basked a moment, untroubled by any of the daily worries that gave him chronic indigestion.

And then he remembered last night.

He sat up with a gasp, eyes flipping wide, heart slamming against his ribs. “Oh my God, oh my God,” he said to the empty room that wasn’t his.

All of it came flooding back: the shadow following him home, the knock on the door, the stranger who’d invited himself in, the fogginess of his own thoughts and resistance. He remembered a kiss that had turned to a bite on his neck, and clapped his hand to the spot now, feeling only the sensitive, slightly-raised flesh of a new scar. He recalled waking up, the faces hovering over him, the chill of the morgue.

The morgue. Oh shit, he’ddied. Hadn’t he? But then those people…the two cops, Lanny and Trina, and the other guy, with the pale hair. Sasha. Who could growl like a freaking dog.

They’d told him he was a vampire, and brought him here, to this apartment, and somehow, he’d managed to convince himself that he’d imagined the whole thing.

But here he was, and he couldbreathe.

He’d been born with asthma; had almost died when he was two, and then again at six. At twelve, the one and only time his mother had let him go away to a boys’ summer camp upstate, when a bee sting had triggered a panic attack, which had triggered the worst asthma attack of his life. According to his then-best friend Evan, he’d been dead a whole thirty seconds in the ambulance before the paramedics revived him. It was normal for him: the diminished lung capacity, taking hits off his inhaler, staying indoors when it was too cold, or too hot, or too smoggy.

But this was a completely foreign sensation: breathing deep and free and easy. He wasn’t dizzy, or shaky, or achy. Air moved through his open throat into lungs that worked like bellows, and it took him a long, stupid moment to recognize the euphoria in his blood for what it was: oxygen. For the first time in his life, he was getting enough oxygen.

A mirror sat positioned across from the bed and he looked up into it, reaching out of habit for his glasses on the nightstand. His hand froze. He didn’t need the glasses; he could see clearly. He stared at his reflection, his own familiar, narrow face made new by the lack of wire frames, and he saw color in his cheeks and lips. No longer waxy and china-white, his face glowed with the subtle pinkness of health.

He smiled, and then startled hard when he saw the fangs. Carefully, watching himself in the mirror, he probed the point of one canine with the tip of his tongue and watched as both fangs descended a fraction; he could feel it in his jaw, some new muscle that forced those new, wicked teeth longer, more dangerous. Moreuseful. When he pulled his tongue back, and relaxed his mouth, they retracted again, so they were proportionate. They didn’t push at his lip like the fake fangs in movies. No, these were designed by nature, sophisticated predator camouflage.

“So that’s that,” he said aloud, and took a deep breath just for the joyous novelty of it. “Now what?”

~*~

Nikita didn’t drag Lanny out of the apartment, but it was a near thing. “Go with him. It’ll be fine,” Trina said with an encouraging smile she didn’t feel. Much to her shame, when they were gone, and she’d heard their footfalls go down the stairs, she was flooded with relief.

“Shit,” she muttered, sinking down onto the couch.

Sasha made a low sound in his throat that she found strangely comforting and came to sit in the overstuffed chair across from her. He didn’t sit like a human would, she noted with a touch of amusement, but pulled his legs up in the seat and flopped across the armrest like a dog getting comfy. He settled his chin on the back of his hand and looked at her with a blend of sympathy and lupine attentiveness.

“Why would Alexei do this?” she asked. There were so many other things she’d meant to ask, but Sasha’s presence had a way of inviting honesty. She didn’t want platitudes right now, only answers.

“Maybe he wanted to help.”

She sent him a look. “You really believe that?”

He made an apologetic face. “Not really, no. I mean – I think he knew he was helping, but I don’t think he did it out of the goodness of his heart. Sorry.”

“No.” She waved off the apology. “It’s what I figured. Got any magical Russian insight?”

“Maybe.” He shifted, curling up tighter in the chair. “Vampires – the ones I’ve met – are really territorial. They have families, sometimes, people who are close to them. But they don’t get along with each other all that well. Nik killed Alexei’s sire. So.” His nose scrunched up. “There is bad blood there.”

“In more ways that one,” she said with a halfhearted smile. “What are we going to do about him?”

“Alexei? I don’t know. Maybe we can reason with him.”

It was a lie and they both knew it.

Her phone pinged, and it was a text from her captain.

“Boss wants to see Lanny and me about the, quote, ‘missing goddamn body problem.’” She blew out a breath. “Feel like taking a walk?”

Sasha picked his head up, grinning. “Always.”

~*~