“I’m okay, really.”
“Are you on any medications?”
“No.”
I want to be Maris. That’s all I want.
Please. Why can’t I just be Maris again?
Where did she go?
“Right then.” Julian clicks his tongue and then looks out the kitchen window and towards his house. “I’m going to go get yousomething for sleep. We’ll work on the rest after you’ve rested some.”
“The rest?” I ask but he’s moving, halfway through the back door by the time I realize it. The back door shuts and the next thing I see is Julian crossing the lawn towards his house.
“He’s fast,” I mutter. I watch him vault over the fence between the houses. “And strong.” That’s definitely not what I expected from a doctor but I guess he is young. Maybe he’s outdoorsy or a fitness nut like the Iron Man competitors that come to swim in the bay to train for races. I watch him for a second more before I go back to working on the coffee. I think about what Julian meant when he said ‘the rest’ while I work.
Fifteen
JULIAN
Maris needs help.
I want her to need me. I fucking need it.
As twisted as it is, the need to be needed is what drew me to be a doctor in the first place. Killing is easy especially for a vampire or supe. It’s so fucking damn easy that even humans do it. All vampires go through a bloodlust phase when they’re newly made and the high of killing is on par with feeding and fucking. We’re hungry and horny, everything turned up to eleven on the 1-10 scale and killing is a mix of both, or at least it was for me. The attention you get from someone when they know it’s their last moments, the begging, the fuckingyearninglook in their eyes when they realize you’re the only one that cansave them.
Save them by not taking the last of their pathetic life for yourself.
But that attention is fleeting, it’s a flash in the pan of life. If you want attention, real attention that stays and works itself under your skin, feeds your ego in the same focused, desperate way then healing is the game you want to play.
I learned that the year I left Rosanna briefly. I vanished into the countryside and there I happened upon a craggy-facedhealer in a backwoods village in France. The woman was frail, so slight she looked like a stiff wind would finish her off. One might have thought she’d be lonely, forgotten, only sometimes remembered in the village she lived in, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I watched as the little old woman that set up shop with the help of her daughter in one corner of the town market be the belle of the fucking ball.
From sunup to sundown she worked her healing, and each and every time she was given praise, gifts and tears. The looks of adoration and desperation piled on like thick slabs of butter on perfectly toasted bread. It was decadent the way the people knelt and wept, crying out to her that she was their only hope as they offered her what they could.
She took payment, sometimes livestock, sometimes a barrel of spirits, or a few bolts of cloth. Whatever it was they brought it was enough but even I could see that she would have done it for free because she knew what I knew. The attention was all the payment she needed. She wasn’t forgotten this way, she never would be forgotten this way and that was living forever in its own way, wasn’t it? It was as close to what a human could manage in any case.
I stayed with her for nearly a year to understand it. To learn from her. She changed me fundamentally as a vampire and that witch was my first teacher. She taught me how to heal and how to command equally. The need, the desperation, the sobbing, hysterical begging. The belief that I’m the only reprieve, the only chance any of them have to survive is not something that comes instantly. It’s seeded and tended patiently until it’s ripe for harvest.
I want fruit from Maris.
Darkness and vulnerability, bitter and sweet, a mix that’s uniquely all Maris calls out to me but first, the woman needs help. She’s falling apart like a badly stacked house of cards.Every move she made was laced with an edge of exhaustion that made even me ache. Yes, I’m a vampire well removed from the pretty notions of a soul, and I don’t lie to myself that humanity still lives in me, but being a doctor for as long as I have means I’m more attuned to humans than the average bloodsucking undead. I understand their emotions, the rhythms of their bodies, the way pain seeps out of them into the world. I’m trained to assess the damage and do what I can to keep them standing.
Maris is going to take some work to get back in working order. If I hadn’t come along, I’d give her inside of a year before she’s six feet under.
She’s not sleeping. At all. I can tell that from the way her voice shook when she talked about the break in. There’s more at play with Maris. She’s wound tight. She’s going to lose her shit before I can taste her if I don’t calm her down. I didn’t miss the way she sidestepped my question about family and friends. She went straight to her mood at work, no mention of anyone because there is no one. If there was, she’s run them off. Even if I wasn’t interested in Maris, I’d be able to tell that from a long way off if the way she decked the man in the coffeeshop is anything to go by, add a murder on top of that and I don’t think Maris’ social calendar is exactly booked and busy.
She’s alone. It’s not safe for a human to be alone. Safety in numbers and all that. It makes them vulnerable, easy to influence. It’s exactly perfect for my needs. I won’t have to isolate her to get her to come to me. She’s done that all on her own.
I enter my rental through the back door, Maris’ injuries on my mind and head for the bathroom on the ground floor. I put some of the stash I normally carry with me there. It’s nothing too drastic–Xanax, Valium, a few benzos. Nothing that would raise eyebrows if anyone saw a doctor with them. I open the medicinecabinet and scan the bottles for what I need to put Maris down for the night.
Trusty Triazolam.
Just enough to put her to bed quick and get her rested. Her body needs rest to heal and I can tell she’s not had near enough of it. I grab a roll of gauze, disinfectant and swaps. I bring a healing salve a witch gifted me in thanks for saving their kid. Maris might not need stitches but she’s going to need more than some disinfectant to rid her of the damage that dead fuck did to her face and the salve is the perfect cover for what I’m planning to do. I dump the lot of it in my work bag that I left sitting on the kitchen counter and sling it over my shoulder on my way back out the door. I’m halfway across the yard when I hear my name being called.
“Julian!”
It’s not Maris so I keep on walking. I’ll pretend I didn’t hear whoever it is that’s screeching from the sidewalk.
