Pack a Bag

"Okay, that's a tattoo," Farah says.

"It's not a tattoo."

"It's shiny and it's on your wrist and it wasn't there on Tuesday. That's the legal definition of a tattoo."

Farah Qureshi has been your best friend since nursing school, your roommate for three years, and your ex-roommate for six months, ever since she moved in with a firefighter who turned out to own one fork. She's a paramedic now. She sees things for a living. She is currently sitting on your counter at six p.m. eating your cereal out of the box and refusing to take you seriously.

"Farah. A man was dying in the alley and I brought him here and pulled a metal spike out of his heart with kitchen tongs."

"Mm-hm."

"And then he bit me."

"Like, kinky bit?"

"Like, drank bit."

Farah stops chewing. She looks at the crescent. She looks at you. "Babe, I love you, but you worked six nights in a row. Did you hit your head?"

You did not hit your head. You know that the way you know your own handwriting. You've also scrubbed your kitchen floor twice today and there's not a single drop of blood anywhere, and the tongs are back in the drawer like nothing happened, and you spent the afternoon googling silver bolt heart no pulse until your search history looked like a cry for help.

"Forget it," you say. "I'm going to be late."

Farah hops down and squeezes your arm. "If tall, dark and bitey shows up again, you call me. I'll bring the defibrillator."

Mercy General at night is its own small country. You know its weather. Thursdays are car accidents and chest pains. Fridays are bar fights. By two a.m. the waiting room is a mix of the miserable and the unlucky, the vending machine has eaten four people's dollars, and someone is always singing.

Tonight, nobody is singing.

It's a little after one when your wrist starts to burn.

You're hanging a saline bag in Bay 6 when it hits, a hot sting under the skin like you've touched a stove. You hiss and nearly drop the bag. Mr. Abiodun in the bed looks up from his crossword.

"You okay, sweetheart?"

"Fine. Static."

You rub your wrist against your scrubs. The crescent is warmer than it should be. It pulses, slow and steady, like a second heartbeat that isn't yours.

When you come out of the bay, Marcy is waving at you from the front desk.

"There's someone asking for you," she says. "By name. Says she's family."

You don't have family. Not since Nana Rose. You look past Marcy to the waiting room.

A woman stands by the window. Tall, very still, in a long camel coat. Dark hair pinned up perfectly. Her skin is the kind of pale that makes you think of fluorescent lights and anemia. She's not sitting, not fidgeting, not looking at her phone. In a waiting room full of shifting, coughing, restless people, she is the only thing that doesn't move.

She's looking straight at you.

Your wrist burns so hard your eyes water.

"I don't know her," you say quietly.

Marcy's smile fades. "You want me to call security?"

When you look back, the woman is gone. The automatic doors are sliding shut on an empty sidewalk and blowing snow.

You stay two hours past your shift because you don't want to walk home. You tell yourself it's charting.

At four-thirty Marcy finally pushes you toward the door. "Take the garage," she says. "Corbin's on security tonight. He'll walk you to your car."

"I don't have a car."

"Then get one, you lunatic. Take the garage anyway. It's warmer."

The parking garage is connected to the hospital by a glass skybridge on the second level. It's warmer, technically, which means it's thirty-five degrees instead of twenty. Your footsteps echo off concrete. Half the fluorescent tubes are dead. The other half hum.

Corbin isn't at the security booth. There's a coffee cup on the counter, still steaming.

"Corbin?"

Nothing. Just the hum.

You stand very still and think about turning around. You think about calling Farah. You think about how stupid you'll feel if you call 911 because a security guard went to the bathroom.

Your wrist ignites.

You gasp and fold over it, and that's what saves you, because something passes through the space where your head just was. It slams into the concrete pillar behind you hard enough to crack it.

It's a man. Or the shape of a man. He straightens up from the pillar with dust in his hair, and he's smiling, and his teeth are wrong. Too long. Too white. His eyes have a red sheen, like a dog's in headlights.

"So you're the one," he says. He sounds almost delighted. "You're tiny. I thought you'd be taller."

You back up. Your hand finds the trauma shears in your pocket, which is ridiculous, which is like bringing a spoon to a war.

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"He drank from you." The man sniffs the air, slow, like a sommelier. "Oh, you can smell it. He's all over you. Do you know what you are? You're a loose thread. And I was told to pull it."

He moves.

You don't see him move. One second he's ten feet away and the next his hand is around your throat and your back hits the side of a parked SUV so hard the alarm starts screaming. Your feet leave the ground. The shears clatter on the concrete. You claw at his wrist and it's like clawing at a steel pipe.

"Nothing personal," he says over the alarm, and opens his mouth.

Then he's gone.

Not gone like vanished. Gone like removed. One instant his hand is crushing your windpipe and the next he's flying sideways across three parking spaces and into a concrete wall, and you're on your knees on the floor, coughing, and someone is standing between you and him.

Dark coat. Black hair. Not a speck of snow on him this time.

Lucien doesn't look like a dying man anymore. He looks like the reason people used to lock their doors at night. He stands with his hands loose at his sides and his head slightly tilted, and the air around him feels colder by ten degrees.

The other vampire scrambles up from the wreckage of the wall. He sees who it is, and every bit of delight drains out of his face.

"Your Majesty," he says. His voice cracks on it.

"Marek," Lucien says pleasantly. "Who sent you?"

"I wasn't, I didn't know she was, it was just a..."

"Who. Sent. You."

Marek bolts. He's fast, blur-fast, gone up the ramp and into the dark. Lucien doesn't chase him. He watches him go with an expression of mild, terrible patience, like a man watching a fish swim around a bucket.

Then he turns to you.

The silver in his eyes softens. He crouches in front of you, careful, not touching. Up close you can see that he's not as calm as he looks. There's a muscle jumping in his jaw.

"Are you hurt?"

"He..." Your voice is a wreck. "He said I was a loose thread."

"He's an idiot. Are you hurt, Ava?"

"My throat. I'm okay." You look up at him. "You're alive."

"Thanks to you." Something flickers across his face. "Which is the problem."

He reaches out, slowly, and turns your wrist over in his cool fingers. The crescent gleams in the half-light. His thumb brushes it, and you feel it in your whole body, a jolt like missing a stair.

He closes his eyes for a moment.

"I'm sorry," Lucien says. "I'd hoped to have more time."

"Time for what? Who are you? What was that?"

He opens his eyes. Somewhere far off, a security door bangs and Corbin's voice yells, Hey! Who's there?

Lucien stands and offers you his hand.

"Pack a bag, Ava," he says. "As of tonight, half my court wants you dead."