Blood Groove (23 page)

Now Leslie was on all fours on the bed, with Skitch behind her. Danielle drew her knees to her chest and felt her eyelids grow heavy with weariness. Her injuries no longer hurt, she was fully sexually satisfied, and the exhaustion at last caught up with her.

She closed her eyes. At the moment she lost consciousness Skitch finally had his orgasm, exploding into Leslie with a roar of release that drew more pounding from the irate neighbors. Leslie was seized with a mix of excitement and revulsion as he held her hips tight against him, twitching inside her as he emptied himself. Finally he released her and she scampered quickly into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Skitch collapsed onto the bed, exhausted. “Wow . . . nigger poon . . . is outta sight, man . . .” he said, and laughed.
In moments he was as sound asleep as Danielle. Neither of them heard Leslie crying.

   Outside in her car, Lee Ann suddenly snapped awake. She had heard both Fauvette and Zginski in her head, ordering her to return to the warehouse. Before she even realized it she was turning the key in the ignition.

Nothing happened.

She tried again, then remembered. She’d fallen asleep with the engine running and the radio on. Now the car was out of gas and its battery was dead.

Lee Ann jumped out and looked around frantically for help. The parking lot was now filled with other cars, but she saw no people. She had to get back to them, to
him
, and once again she desperately needed to pee.

“Oh, God,” she said to herself, “they’re going to kill me for this.” She pushed her matted hair out of her face and tried to think.

She began trying the doors on the other cars, searching for an unlocked one.

“W
HAT
,” Z
GINKSI SAID
, “is
this
?”

Lee Ann stood beside the stolen vehicle in the field behind the warehouse. Its headlight beams cut through the dust raised by her arrival and its idling engine silenced the normal insects. “It’s a 1972 Chevy El Camino with a 402 eight-cylinder engine,” she snapped. “Does that tell you anything useful?” Between stealing the car and having to pee in the bushes beside the parking lot, she was in no mood for his disdain, no matter how great his hold on her.

He stared at the low, long vehicle with its empty cargo space behind the cab. It appeared to be a drab tan color, with darker brown highlights. “It is not aesthetic at all.”

Lee Ann turned off the ignition and closed the door. In the sudden darkness, the scene became instantly menacing and creepy, and she felt goose bumps despite the heat. Zginski and the others, standing still in the moonlight, looked like stone sentries outside the warehouse’s crumbling visage. “Yeah, well, it was unlocked and I found the spare key under the floor mat, that’s all that concerned me.”

“You
stole
it?” Fauvette said, surprised. “Why?”

Lee Ann glared at her. “You wanted me back here in a hurry, didn’t you?”

“But you
have
a car.”

“Ran out of gas. And the battery died.”

“Both?”

“Yes.”

“How’d
that
happen?” Mark asked.

“Mainly because I met him,” she said with a nod toward Zginski. Then she looked from him to Fauvette and back. “There’s something different about you two,” she said guardedly.

“What do you mean?” Zginski and Fauvette said together.

Lee Ann stared. “Okay, that was weird.”

Fauvette and Zginski looked at each other. The moment of connection they’d shared when their blood mingled had been brief but profound; Fauvette felt more naked to him now than she had when she stood before him unclothed. But she had learned little about him, except the vague feeling that he was hiding things. She needed no arcane ritual to tell her that.

For his part, Zginski was trying very hard to ignore the emotions Fauvette had roused in him. They weren’t the ones he expected, not lust or desire or rage. Instead he felt sad, and wistful, and almost profoundly aware of beauty he’d never noticed before. She was, despite everything, still an inherently innocent creature, and their bond had shared that quality with him. He could not wait for these sensations to fade.

“We should get going,” Mark said. “It’s nearly midnight, and summer nights aren’t very long.”

“I will go alone,” Zginski said.

“Why?” Mark asked, eyes narrowing with suspicion.

“Yeah, why?” Leonardo echoed. He watched from back near the entrance, Olive beside him.

“Because a single man arriving at a woman’s door in the
middle of the night is indiscreet, and decent neighbors will look away,” Zginski said. “If half a dozen people arrive, those same neighbors will blatantly stare.”

“How do we know you’ll come back?” Mark said.

As he answered Mark, Zginski turned to Fauvette. “She will know if I betray you.”

Fauvette said nothing. Basically she
felt
nothing, either, but she kept that to herself and simply nodded.

Zginski turned to Lee Ann. “Take me back to the woman’s home.”

“But that’s where I stole this car,” she protested. “If I drive up in it—”

“I will handle any difficulties. We shall return it none the worse, and the good doctor will provide any further transportation we need.”

   Danielle awoke suddenly, as if startled by a noise. She sat in the dark listening, but except for the normal city sounds outside, all was silent. Had it been a gunshot? A car backfiring? A scream?

The noise came again. It was a knock at the front door. Firm, no-nonsense, yet soft enough to avoid startling the neighbors.

She uncurled from the chair in her pitch-black bedroom. Her lower back and inner thighs protested; the muscles were as sore as if she’d run a marathon. Her robe lay on the floor, and she snatched it up as she went into the living room. Images from sleep remained fresh in her brain, a vision of Skitch and Leslie, of all people, making love on her bed. What had she eaten for dinner to give her such weird dreams?

“All right, I’m coming,” she said, and had a strange déjà vu moment where she remembered saying almost the exact same thing to Skitch. She seemed to recall looking down at him, his bare chest and sweaty face visible beneath her . . .

She turned on the lamp beside the door.
Wait a minute
, she suddenly thought,
why was I sleeping in the chair?
Before she could puzzle this through, the knock came again. “Who is it?” she said.

A deep, commanding voice said softly, “I met you at the warehouse earlier today.”

And then it all came back to her.

She sank to her knees, her empty stomach roiling as it sought in vain for something to vomit. She began to hyperventilate as every moment, from the cemetery to the warehouse to the events of that very night, hit her like a sledgehammer to the stomach. She looked at her bedroom door in terror, wondering what she would find when she turned on the bedroom light.

The knock came again. “I will break down the door if necessary,” he said quietly.

Danielle stood and undid the chain lock, then turned the dead bolt. When she opened the door, the man who had rescued her—if she could call it that—stood in the hall. He was as pale as she remembered and also as handsome, clad in tight jeans and a black button-down shirt. His long hair fell around his collar, and the neat beard outlined his strong jaw and inviting lips. “Good evening, Dr. Roseberry,” he said.

“Who are you?” she said, clutching her robe closed with one hand and the door with the other. Her voice was ragged again. “
What
are you?”

“I am Rudy Zginski. I am exactly what you think I am, as were the ones who accosted you at the warehouse. I have need of your expertise.”

“It’s late, come back in the morning,” she said, desperate for any reason to refuse. It sounded lame to her own ears.

He smiled. The tips of his fangs showed. “Do not dissemble. May I enter?”

“I have to invite you, don’t I?” she said, with a moment of hope. A vampire could not cross a threshold without an invitation.
Then he put one hand firmly on her sternum and pushed her back until he was inside. He closed and locked the door while she sank onto the sofa.

“Folklore is seldom accurate in its specifics,” he said. “Now, to the point. I need your scientific know-how to tell me what this is.” He held out the bag of gray powder.

Danielle barely heard anything he said as she went through recent events anew. “I’m sorry . . . what? You want me to what?”

Zginski knelt before her and looked into her eyes. There was nothing kind or human in his own, just dark and surging will. “Most immediately, I want you to pay attention to me. At the moment, you are more valuable to me alive, as you are, than either dead or under my control. That can change. So please, give me your attention.”

Suddenly he frowned and looked toward the bedroom. “Is there—?” he started to ask, then abruptly got to his feet and strode from the room. After a moment Danielle followed.

He stood in the middle of her bedroom, looking at the bed as though he could see it plainly in the dark. She turned on the light, saw what he did, and drew breath for a scream. His hand slapped over her mouth before she could emit it.

Skitch lay on the bed, naked. His pallor told her instantly he was dead, and had been so for at least a couple of hours. His eyes were open but foggy, and his mouth had oozed saliva and blood onto the pillow. More blood, from his freshly cut throat, soaked the bedclothes, and despite herself Danielle’s professional mind instantly assessed the wound: from beneath the ear to the base of the collarbone, opening the length of his jugular. Not a wound he could give himself.

Memories of what she had done with him, done
to
him, flooded her mind. She’d had sex with him, and hit him; had she also killed him?

“This man is dead,” Zginski said. He’d sensed the
distinctive presence of death the moment she’d opened the door, but thought at first that it was merely some carryover from the woman’s job. “As is the Negro woman in the bathroom.”

Danielle froze again, then tried to pry his hand away.

“Do not scream,” he warned softly. Then he released her.

She rushed to the bathroom and turned on the light. The sight that greeted her burned itself into her brain in every detail. Leslie’s nude brown body was slumped forward over the edge of the bathtub, stark against the white tile and porcelain. Her arms lay in the basin, wrists slashed with a blade taken from Danielle’s razor and discarded on the rim. Blood ran in an almost straight line down the length of the tub into the drain.

Danielle sagged against the door frame. She could barely breathe. Leslie had killed Skitch, then herself, because of Danielle. Because of what her best friend had made them do.

If any man ever rapes me
, Leslie had told her more than once,
I’ll kill him, then myself. Neither of us would deserve to live
.

That’s insane
, Danielle always said.
You’d be blaming yourself for being a victim
.

Maybe, but that’s how I feel. Call me old-fashioned
.

“This is unfortunate,” Zginski said behind her.

She threw herself at him with a shriek of fury, but he easily wrapped her in his arms and immobilized her. “They’re dead,” she whimpered. “My
friends
are
dead
.”

“Yes,” he said with no emotion. “If you wish to join them, continue to be difficult. If you would like to survive this night, then listen to me and
be quiet
.”

She was in shock, so it took very little for her to nod in agreement. She was also freezing cold, but his embrace gave her no warmth at all.

   Mark stood on the loading dock and looked out into the night, following the flights of bats as they swooped
and dove after insects. They were a constant, and it was nice to see them on a night when so many things had apparently changed.