Ah, the flexibility of youth.
“What are we going to do about them? Do we have to kill them?” Sophie sat on the kitchen counter and drummed her heels against the cabinet doors.
“I don’t know,” I said as I filled the teakettle and put it on a burner. It was a reasonable question. However, it was one I hadn’t had time to even consider. “I haven’t exactly sat down to chat with them, but they seem kind of tricky to reason with when they’re trying to eat my flesh.”
Sophie stopped drumming her feet long enough to give me a slightly dirty look. “I just thought you might know.”
I shook my head. “These are my first
kiang shi
. I didn’t even know they existed until last week.” And to think, I’d thought things were bad then, what with the vampires and werewolves and elves and gnomes and all. I didn’t know when I had it good, did I?
“What do they want with you?”
Ben came back in then, still brushing dirt off his hands, and saved me from having to answer.
“Planters all planted?” I asked.
He nodded. “She might notice. She might not. We’ll see.”
It would have to do. With everything I had on my plate, I didn’t think I could make Valerie’s basil a priority at that moment despite my deep affection for a good fresh pesto.
A few moments later, the teakettle began to whistle, and I dropped a tea bag in a mug, poured hot water over it and handed the drink to Sophie. Then I checked my arm again. It hurt. The
kiang shi
had more ripped my flesh than bitten it, and the wound wasn’t healing the way I was used to healing. I’d gotten the bleeding to stop, but the edges of the wound were still ragged, and frankly, it didn’t smell too good.
Ben hopped up onto the counter next to Sophie. He’d taken off the hooded sweatshirt. Sitting next to Sophie in my kitchen, he looked younger somehow. Maybe it was the scare we’d all had.
“So what do we do now?” he asked.
I glanced at the clock. Alex should be in the ER. “I go to work.”
“What about us?” Sophie asked, holding the mug of hot tea between her hands as if she was still cold.
“I guess you guys stay inside and practice holding your breath.”
16
MY ARM WAS ON FIRE BY THE TIME I GOT TO THE HOSPITAL. IT felt as if fire ants were crawling inside my veins. Someone needed to look at it, but I couldn’t show it to just anybody. Alex was the only person who would have both the medical knowledge and the arcane knowledge necessary to know what to do. I knew he was on duty, so I figured it wouldn’t be so hard to nudge him into an empty exam room somewhere and have him take a quick peek. Plus, I wanted to talk to him about what was going on to see if he had any ideas about what I was supposed to do next.
I bandaged the wound up as best as I could and wore a long-sleeve cardigan to cover my arm.
Have you ever noticed how when you’re trying to avoid someone, that person seems to be lurking around every corner, but when you
want
to run into someone, you never see them?
I wanted to run into Alex. So, of course, he was nowhere to be found. Every time I walked through the ER, he had just gone somewhere else.
I finally tracked him down as he was striding through the double doors that went from the ER to the open corridor.
I scurried after him. He turned down the corridor past a gurney that a little boy who’d fallen out of a tree had been lying in earlier. It still needed to be cleaned. As he went past, Alex trailed his index finger through the blood pooled along the edge, like a kid might trail his finger through chocolate icing. Then he licked his hand clean. “Mmm,” he murmured. “B positive. My favorite.”
I would have been totally grossed out if I hadn’t known he’d done it half for effect. He’d known I was behind him. He had better senses than I did. He’d probably smelled me twenty paces back. Plus, my arm hurt too much for me to be grossed out. My head felt hot and my eyeballs felt scratchy.
“Nice,” I said. “Thinking of having the blood of a baby for dessert?”
He licked his lips and smiled, his mouth still too red from the blood he’d just consumed. “Yummy. Baby. There’s a treat I haven’t had for a long time.” He turned to look at me. His eyes had changed from deep chocolate brown to the golden color of a cat’s eye.
I felt a chill. Every once in a while, I forgot that Alex was the real deal. He might keep his vampire urges under garlic lock and key better than most, but those urges were still very real and very present. I knew he was saying it to make me uncomfortable, to make me squirm, but I also knew underneath he knew what it was to be a vampire.
I gulped. “I wanted to show you something.”
He smiled. “Dear
Penthouse
, I never thought anything like this would happen to me . . .”
I slugged his shoulder with my good arm. “You wish.”
He shrugged. “You’re the one having the dreams.”
I blushed. Stupid dreams. Stupid big mouth that told about the dreams. Stupid vampire. I shoved up my sleeve and unwrapped part of the bandage. It looked worse than it had when I’d left the apartment. Purple streaks ran up my arm from the wound, and the flesh around it had started to turn a color I really didn’t associate with my skin. “I wanted you to look at this.”
He grabbed my arm and turned it to get a better look. The cool of his fingers felt good against my skin. Maybe I should have iced it. “What the hell happened?”
I explained about the
kiang shi
attack on my porch.
He gritted his teeth together. Hard. I actually heard them squeak. I shivered a little. Vampire teeth gritting is worse than chalk on a blackboard. “They attacked at your house? How did you get away?”
“By stacking the herb planters on my porch high enough that they couldn’t jump over them and holding my breath.”
He looked up from my arm. “How did you know to do that?”
“I googled them.”
He nodded, a twitch of a smile at his lips. “Nice work. Does it hurt?”
I nodded.
“A lot?”
I nodded again.
He looked at me closer now, eyes squinted as he appraised my condition. “You’re running a fever, too. How long ago did this happen?”
“It’s been a couple of hours.”
“Dammit, Melina, you should have come to me sooner.”
“I tried! You were impossible to find.”
He looked a little ashamed. I was glad. He was the one who’d gotten me into this mess in the first place. The least he could do was treat my undead bite wounds.
“Fine. Fine. What we need now is some sticky rice. Is anybody in admitting getting take-out Chinese?”
I shook my head. “They’re all doing South Beach right now and treat carbs like they are the devil’s own enticement.” There was a funny buzzing in my head.
“We need to send someone out for rice, but it has to be the right kind. We need the kind that they use at the sushi places. Is there anyone you can call?”
A few days ago, I would have called Mae without a second’s hesitation. Now thinking about asking her for help made me press my lips together in a hard straight line. Ben didn’t have a drivers’ license. Sophie apparently did, but I didn’t think I wanted either of them leaving the safety of the apartment right now.
The only person I could think of was Ted. He’d said to call when I was ready to accept his help, hadn’t he? Plus, didn’t that kiss earn me enough points that I could call him for a rice delivery. “Let me get my cell phone.”
I extricated myself from Alex’s grasp, but that turned out to be a mistake. My legs were no longer steady. My knees buckled. Alex caught me before I hit the ground.
“The toxin is spreading. We need to get you treated fast. I’ll go get your cell phone. While I’m there, I’ll let Doreen know you’re sick. You wait here.” He hustled me into an empty exam room and lifted me onto the gurney.
I stared at the ceiling. The patterns in the tiles started to swirl on me. What exactly had Alex said about toxins? I didn’t remember reading anything about toxins on the Internet.
Before I could formulate in my slightly foggy mind what I wanted to ask, Alex was back with my purse. I pulled out my cell phone and called Ted. He sounded groggy.
“Did I wake you?” I asked.
“Melina? Is that you? Are you okay?” Wow. He woke up fast. My mom was like that. She could sleep through the loudest movie with massive explosions and car chases, but if a small voice at her side said the word “Mommy,” she was wide awake in a nanosecond.
“Not exactly. I need a favor.”
“Name it.”
That was amazing. Just like that. No bartering or bargaining. No trying to figure out what was in it for him. Just name it. “I need some sticky rice from a sushi place.”
“Tell him to get it from Zen Toro,” Alex said.
“Is there someone there with you?”
“Alex Bledsoe. One of the emergency room doctors. I have this, well, this boo-boo, and Alex says I need sticky rice to treat it.” Had I really just referred to the place on my arm that had been ripped open by an undead Chinese zombie vampire thing as a boo-boo? Yep. I had. Apparently having
kiang shi
toxins race through your system was a little like being drunk. “He says to get it from Zen Toro.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
I hung up my phone and turned to Alex. “He’s on his way.”
He took my wrist and checked my pulse. “You should rest until he gets here.”
I closed my eyes, but my mind remained restless. Finally, I said, “What would
kiang shi
want with a lot of marijuana?”
He turned a chair around and straddled it, resting his arms on the back of the chair. “Is this a riddle? Like why did the zombie cross the road?”
Everyone knew the answer to that one: for
brains
!!! I thought about my question. Was it a riddle? It was certainly some kind of enigma. “No. It’s not a joke. I followed the guys in the SUV to a house in Elk Grove. My aunt did some checking, and the same real estate agent sold a bunch of houses in Elk Grove all at the same time.”
“Isn’t that kind of what real estate agents do? Sell houses?” I felt his cold touch on my arm and glanced down, but he was only taking my pulse.
“Yeah, but this guy is mainly retired.” I explained about all the buyers using the same bank as well.
“Okay. So what else makes you think these houses have anything to do with marijuana?”
“I think they’re grow houses, Alex.” I explained about the security systems and the funny smell. “Have you seen those news reports about the extrastrong marijuana that’s started circulating around here?”
Alex doesn’t get pale. He doesn’t flush. His heart doesn’t race. He’s dead so there’s no blood coursing through his veins to make that stuff happen. He can, apparently, look entirely dumbfounded. “Did they see you?” he finally asked after staring at me for several long seconds.
“Maybe.”
“What does maybe mean in this particular context?” His voice was damn near as icy as his hands.
I explained about the security cameras, catching glimpses of black SUVs on my ride home. “So I’m figuring the grow houses and the Chinese vampires and the gang warfare on the streets are all connected, but I can’t quite figure out how. I thought you might be able to piece it together for me,” I said brightly, hoping a little sugar would take me a little further with him.
“It does make a certain kind of sick sense,” he murmured.
“What does?” I had a feeling Alex would see a pattern here. One thing about living for a long, long time, there’s not much new under the moon.
“I think it might be all about drugs, Melina.” He straightened up and brushed that thick hair off his forehead and stretched.
I swallowed hard. “Drugs?” I squeaked. “You mean the marijuana?”
He nodded. “I do mean the marijuana. Think about it. Who controls the drug trade around here? Especially the weed.”
It was an easy question. “Gangs.”
“You bet. Any idea which gangs might have the biggest drug territories?”
I shook my head.
“The Norteños and the Black Dragons.”
What a coincidence. Those just happened to be the two gangs that were trying to mutually destroy each other with a little help from our undead Chinese friends.
“So who might profit from having those two gangs at each other’s throats?”
This was interesting. I tried to struggle into a sitting position. “Someone looking to break into the drug trade in Sacramento?”
“I told you to lay still and rest.” He pressed me back down. “Close but not quite. You wouldn’t need to weaken both the Black Dragons and the Norteños to do that. You could find some little corner of the city to do your business. Right now, though, supply is disrupted because of the gang fights and both gangs are only looking at each other. How about someone looking to
take over
the drug trade in Sacramento? Wouldn’t this be the perfect time to try something like that?”
“Do you think this is that big?”
“I don’t know what to think,” he said, rubbing a thumb at his forehead. Could vampires get headaches? “I do know that you need to stay out of it.”
“Kind of hard to do at this point, don’t you think? They seem to know where I live.”
He frowned. “There is that.”
“They’re more than just Chinese American businessmen, Alex.” That was another piece to the puzzle that frightened me. Whoever those men were, they were scary dudes, scarier than the
kiang shi