I didn’t get to sleep for very long, though. It seemed that almost as soon as I had closed my eyes, Nick was pulling me out of the van and carrying me.
I opened my eyes and peered around. We were in a parking garage of some sort. John had pulled up in front of the elevator and Tony was helping Malcolm out of his seat.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“I decided to bring you to the shop instead of taking you home.”
“The shop. Nick, I told Deirdre about the shop.”
“But you didn’t tell her where it was, did you?”
“No. I didn’t know where it was.”
“Right. So don’t worry about it now. We’ll deal with it in the morning. You need to get some rest.”
“But first I need to take another look at that shoulder wound of hers,” Tony said. “I think it might need a couple of stitches.”
Malcolm was silent through all of this, looking around the garage dazedly.
We took the elevator up to the top floor, then walked across a short walkway to what looked at first glance to be an office building. Numbered doors lined the hallway, much as they had in Deirdre’s dungeon. I shuddered at the memory.
Nick gently set me down. Tony led us to a corner suite, number 401, and unlocked the door. The nameplate beside the door read “Anthony J. DeLuca, M.D.” I looked at Tony.
“You’re a doctor?” I asked.
He laughed. “No need to sound so surprised.”
“No. It’s just that you’re so young. And… um… I don’t know. Tough? I guess I just think of doctors as old and kindly looking, not the sort to go chasing after vampires.”
“But chasing after vampires sure does give me a lot of business. You, for example. Come on,” he said, opening the door and flipping on a light switch. “Let’s get you two taken care of.”
The outer room of the suite looked exactly as I would expect any doctor’s office to look. There was a reception desk directly across from the door. Off to the left was a small waiting room, complete with uncomfortable chairs and boring magazines. Tony led us to a closed door at the other end of the waiting room, which led to a long row of small examining rooms. He ushered Malcolm into one, then told me to wait for him in the next one.
“Will you be okay alone?” Nick asked me.
“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want him to think I was a complete wimp. I sat in the chair in the corner. I could hear a murmur of voices from the other room, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
Posters of various body parts and illnesses adorned the walls. I examined a depiction of the workings of the inner ear for a moment.
I think I must have drifted off to sleep again, because the next thing I knew Tony opened the door and said, “Okay. If you’ll get up on the examining table, we’ll get you all fixed up.” His voice had taken on that cheerful professionalism of doctors everywhere.
“How’s Malcolm?” I asked. I stood up and hoisted myself onto the table, with Tony’s help.
“He’ll be okay. I stitched him up and gave him a shot to help him sleep; he’ll need a lot of rest over the next few days, but physically, he’ll be just fine.”
“Physically? Does that mean you think he might not be okay mentally?”
“It’s hard to say. He’s been through a pretty traumatic experience. People process those sorts of things differently. I’d say there’s a good chance he’s going to have some sort of reaction. It’s just the extent of that reaction and how well he’ll handle it that’s in question.”
I nodded. I knew that I’d had a pretty intense reaction after the attack on Greg.
Tony took out a pair of scissors. “How important is this dress to you?” he asked.
“I hate it. You can burn it, for all I care.”
“Good.” He snipped the sleeves off to reveal the elbow and shoulder wounds.
“I’m going to give you a shot to numb this shoulder. It might sting a bit.” Tony made several injections around the wound. I tried not to flinch.
“There,” he said. “We’ll give that some time to take effect. In the meantime, let’s take a look at that elbow.” He took my arm gently in his hand and looked at the crook of my elbow.
“This one’s a lot cleaner than the other one. Neater.” He looked up at me questioningly.
“Deirdre. She was the one in charge out there.”
He nodded. “They seem to learn a lot about how to deal with their dinners effectively as they age. The younger ones are more likely to rip out a hunk of skin than the older ones. As you learned.” He gestured at my shoulder.
“First I’m going to take some swabs of this so that I can take a look at it in my lab. Then I’m just going to clean it out and cover it; puncture wounds often heal best if they’re left to their own devices. Have you had a tetanus shot recently?”
“No.”
He rinsed the punctures on the inside of my elbow out with some sort of stinging liquid, then again smeared them with an antibiotic ointment. He finished taping a bandage over it.
“Same instructions as last time. Put this ointment on it every day, then bandage it back up. Let me know if you start to see any signs of infection: if the skin around it swells up or turns red, if you start running a fever, or if you start getting a lot of discharge out of either of the wounds.”
I nodded.
“How does your shoulder feel?”
“Numb,” I said.
“Good. Lean forward just a bit. This might take a little longer.”
I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he cleaned the wound, but I was afraid to really look. I didn’t want to know what had made Dom whistle when he saw it. I turned my head away entirely when he began stitching the skin up.
“Okay, then,” he said as he placed another bandage over the stitches, “Let me just get the tetanus shot ready.” He left for a moment, then returned with three different syringes.
“I’m also going to give you a shot of antibiotics and the same thing I gave to Malcolm to help him rest,” he said, setting the syringes down on the counter that ran against the left wall of the room.
The first shot was fine. I’ve never had the horror of needles that many other people seem to have.
“I think I’m going to hold off on giving you the sedative until we get you set up with a bed,” he said as he pocketed the second syringe.
Then he picked up the third syringe.
“This is the tetanus shot. This one might actually hurt a little.”
The needle going in didn’t hurt much, but I could feel whatever he pumped into my arm as it slid in, and it did more than hurt. It ached abominably.
“And now I’m going to take just a small sample of blood so I can run a few tests on it, as well.” Wonderful. More blood loss. Just what I needed. He pulled a small kit out of one of the drawers in the room. He did at least take the blood from the otherwise undamaged arm.
“Okay. All done,” Tony said cheerfully. “Now let’s get you to a bed so you can get some sleep.”
I nodded woozily. Tony helped me off the table and led me down the hall, away from the waiting room, and through the last door on the right. We walked through a small storage room with another door in the back. When he opened that door, I realized that it led to yet another hallway much like the first.
“This used to be two different suites of offices,” he explained. “Alec Pearson owns the building. When I got hooked up with Nick and his gang, Pearson gave us these suites and did a little remodeling. The other office is my public office; I actually have regular patients I see there a couple of days a week. This is the private office—the shop.”
He pointed out various features of the shop as he walked past open and closed doors, including one closed door that he identified as belonging to Nick’s private office. Some of the examination-size rooms had been set up as small bedrooms, “In case anyone ever needs to crash here,” Tony said. Given the inherently sterile nature of former examining rooms, the bedrooms weren’t too bad. For the most part, they contained single beds, small bedside tables, and televisions mounted on the walls. A couple of them looked like they might be in more-or-less regular use; those had posters or prints hanging on the walls and books or computers on the built-in cabinets.
One room held what looked like a ridiculously large arsenal of weapons, mostly old-fashioned things like bows and arrows, but also a few more modern and, to my eyes, more lethal-looking guns.
In another room, some of the interior walls had been knocked out and the rooms combined to make enough space to hold a complete, if small, gym. A similar-sized room held a conference table, a dry-erase board, and a video monitor. “We call that the War Room,” Tony said.
“I see you have the requisite Big Board,” I replied. Tony grinned.
He led me all the way to the end of the hall. The door there opened up on a set-up much like the one in the front of the other suite. At the reception desk, however, was a bank of computers and other electronic equipment. Dominic sat at a terminal, typing rapidly. Whereas the waiting room on the other side consisted of typically uncomfortable waiting-room furniture—perfectly functional, but designed to seat a maximum number of people in a limited space—this waiting room held an over-stuffed couch and several cushy chairs. A large-screen TV took up most of one wall.
Nick and John were seated in two of the chairs, deep in conversation. They looked up as I came in.
“Hey, Dixie,” Nick said. “Come have a seat for a minute.”
I wobbled over and collapsed on the sofa. “Yeah?”
Tony quietly left the room.
“I just wanted to check in with you for a minute. You can tell me everything later, but I just wanted to make sure I’m clear on the basics.”
“Okay,” I said.
Tony returned with a small carton of orange juice and handed it to me. “Drink this,” he said. “You need to keep your blood sugar levels up.”
“Thanks,” I murmured, opening the carton and drinking almost half of it in one swallow.
“What do you want to know?” I asked Nick.
“You said you told Deirdre about the shop,” he said. “Did you tell her anything else about us? Names? Anything?”
“Nope. I told her I didn’t know anything except that you called your headquarters ‘the shop.’ I figure there’s a pretty good chance she knows some things, though, since she’s got Greg, and he knows Pearson.”
“And you’re absolutely certain that Greg is on her side.”
I shuddered. “Without a doubt.”
Nick looked at me speculatively.
“Look, Nick,” I said. “It was horrible. But I’ll go over every last second of it with you. Tomorrow.”
Nick nodded and breathed out a sigh. “You’re right. Tomorrow. You go get some rest. Tony? Show her to her room?”
I made it to the door before I turned around. “Hey.”
Nick looked up again. “Yes?”
“This isn’t anybody’s home, is it?”
“No. Not really.”
“Then how safe are we from vampires? Could they come in here even if no one invited them?”
Nick looked at me levelly for a long time before he answered.
“I don’t know, Elle. Right now, you and Malcolm have spent more time with the vampires than anyone else I know. Anyone alive, anyway.”
I nodded. That was the thing I liked best about Nick: he was always straight with me, even when he knew I wasn’t going to like the answer.
“But hey—don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll all be here while you sleep.”
Make that the second-best thing. My very favorite thing about Nick was that ever since I’d met him, he had been around to help me every single time I’d been in trouble.
* * *
I woke up the next morning—or afternoon, rather—with a start, wondering where I was. It took me a moment to decipher the sterile surroundings. Tiny room, white walls, mounted television. The shop. I remembered Tony showing me to this room the night before and giving me the final shot. He’d also handed me some sweatpants and a t-shirt.
“They’re probably too big,” he said, “but they’re bound to be more comfortable than that dress.”
I’d been glad for them; the thought of sleeping naked made me feel vulnerable. And it would be a long time before I felt comfortable with being vulnerable again.
I padded out of the room on bare feet and followed the smell of coffee out to the waiting room area. A little exploring revealed a small kitchenette off to the right of the reception desk. It held a sink, a coffeepot, a microwave, a one-burner hotplate, and a dorm-room-size refrigerator. Unlike most of the rooms in the suite, this one had a window looking out across the city. I hadn’t even been certain that we were in Manhattan until I saw the view. John stood over the counter with a measuring cup in one hand and a box of pancake batter mix in the other. He was reading the directions.
“Hey,” I said by way of greeting.
“Hey yourself. Sleep well?”
“Much better than I expected to.” I leaned against the edge of the counter. “You making breakfast?”
“Attempting to.” He smiled at me.
“Okay. So Nick’s the boss. Tony’s the doctor, and I’m guessing that Dominick’s the computer guy, right?”
“Right.”
“So what are you? Other than chauffeur. And den mother,” I said, pointing at the pancake mix.
“Chauffeur. Mechanic. Den Mother.” He opened the box and measured out some of the powdered mix. “And weapons specialist,” he added, pulling eggs and milk out of the refrigerator.
“So you’re really the guns guy.”
“Guns, crossbows, longbows, short swords, broadswords; you name it, I’ve probably learned a little bit about it over the years.”
I suspected “a little bit” might be an understatement.
He finished stirring the batter and poured out several pancakes into the skillet.
“I’d offer to help,” I said, “but I’m a total disaster in the kitchen.”
“No problem. Want to serve the coffee as people get up?”
“Sure. How do you take yours?”
“Black. Nick takes sugar only, Dom takes milk only, and Tony won’t touch the stuff. He makes some vile-smelling tea. I suggest you just let him do it; don’t offer to help. You’d only be sorry.”
He pointed out the mugs and sugar and handed me the milk. I poured our two cups and handed John his, then poured a third.
“Know where Malcolm’s room is?” I asked.
“Third door on the right.”
“I’ll be back.”
I walked back down the hall with more than a little trepidation. I was worried about how Malcolm might handle the horrors he’d seen over the last couple of days. I was hoping that he wouldn’t blame me too much for not having told him sooner what we were really up against.
But I wouldn’t be able to hold it against him if he did.
I knocked softly on the door, then went in without waiting for an answer. Malcolm was lying on the bed with his eyes closed, curled up as tightly as possible. I could tell he wasn’t asleep.
“Hey, Malcolm,” I said softly. “I have coffee.”
He just curled tighter.
I sat down on the bed beside him.
“I think you’ll start feeling better if you sit up and drink this.”
There was a long silence. Then he slowly uncurled and gingerly eased himself to an upright position. But he didn’t take the coffee from my hand.
Nor did he look me in the eye. Instead, he stared at the floor.
“I’m not sure I’ll ever feel better again,” he said.
I leaned around so I could see his face.
“But coffee’s a start.”
He didn’t answer.
“Okay. I’m going to set it down on the bedside table here. I’ll be in the common room at the end of the hall. Just follow the smell of pancakes if you want to join us.”
I stood up to go, but he put his hand out and grabbed my wrist to stop me.
“Those really were vampires, weren’t they?”
“Yeah,” I said softly, “they really were.” I sat back down.
“At the end there, when you came in, I thought I was hallucinating. You came for me, right?”
“I did. I’m so sorry it took me so long, Malcolm. I didn’t know they had you.”
“But you knew what they were.” His hands played with the borrowed t-shirt he wore, rubbing the hem between his fingers.
“Yes.”
“Your boyfriend, too.”
“Ex. But yeah, him too.”
He looked up and met my eyes directly. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought I was protecting you.” I wanted to say more, but anything else would sound like an attempt to justify myself. I didn’t want to do that. I’d been wrong, and if Malcolm thought so too, I wasn’t about to try to convince him otherwise.
He looked away again and the silence stretched out between us.
Finally, he broke it by saying, “At the end there, I thought I heard… Did you trade your blood for me?”
“Yes.” My voice was barely audible. I didn’t want to answer that, but Malcolm deserved the truth.
“So you know.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“The worst part of it is… the worst part…” his voice broke and be began to cry. “By the end, I was begging them to bite me.”
I wrapped my arms around him and he buried his face in my neck. I rocked him back and forth, whispering over and over, “It’s okay. You’re safe now. Shh. You’re safe.” We sat that way for a long time.