Tal was the only one who did go home after Jules and Tom categorically refused to leave Fros and Peter alone. Muttering something about this place being smaller than a matchbox he bid everyone good night and left.
“I should probably look for some criminals for you, too, right?” he asked Fros who’d accompanied him to the door.
“I can wait another couple of days, don’t worry about it.”
“Okay.” He took the knob and turned it before looking up at her. “Don’t be too hard on Peter. Please. He’s doing his best.”
Then he opened the door and closed it behind him while Fros stood glaring after him. This was the first time she was hearing she was being too hard on anyone other than herself. And since when were vampires so sensitive, anyway, she wondered, the tone of her mind’s voice implying they were not supposed to be sensitive at all, the older ones, at least. Before she could answer her own question a vision brought her to her knees with its force and clarity.
As far as plots and suspence went, this vision was subpar. Marlena was speaking on the phone and she was speaking in a language that sounded vaguely like German and not so vaguely like someone slowly choking on their own throat. Fros couldn’t understand a word. Marlena was speaking fast, loudly and agitatedly, like she was berating the person she was speaking to.
When Fros opened her eyes she found herself lying on the floor with Jules slapping her cheeks gently.
“I’m all right. Get Tal back,” she said as she scrambled back to her feet. There was a strange taste in her mouth, a metallic one, like she’d drunk blood. Maybe Marlena had fed before her phone conversation.
“What did you see?” Jules asked while Tom ran out of the flat, phone in hand.
“Marlena was talking on the phone but I couldn’t understand the language.”
“German?” Peter said.
“It sounded like German but crippled. There was a lot of “eh”, like every word ended in “eh”,” Fros said, forcing her brain to remember a word.
“Could be Dutch. Could be Danish.” Peter shrugged.
“And Tal could unlock Marlena’s phone so we can check her call history,” Fros said.
“Clever,” Jules murmured and yawned.
Tal and Tom were back in ten minutes, Tal wearing the expression of someone who’d been rudely awaken only to be punched in the chin.
“What is it now?” he asked.
Fros pushed Marlena’s Motorola into his hands.
“I saw her talking on the phone. I thought maybe there’s some record of her rabies plot on it. And you’re the only one who could unlock it.”
Tal raised an eyebrow.
“You need to work on your complimenting.”
“I know. But you really are the only who can hack the phone.”
Tal put the phone in his pocket with a sigh.
“Sure, I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
“Exactly.” Fros started to raise a hand as a parting gesture when a word swam up her mind. “Tisday,” she said. “She said something that sounded like Tisday.”
“Tirsdag means Tuesday in Danish,” Peter supplied and narrowed his eyes. “There are almost no vampires in Denmark. Too few people except during tourist season.”
“Do you know any Danish vampires?”
Peter shook his head.
“But Marlena obviously did.” A wince from Peter cut her off and she watched suspiciously as he bent slightly over.
“You need to eat,” Tal said. “You both need to eat before you become dangerous for everyone around.”
Fros and Peter exchanged the barest of glances before nodding almost in unison. Tal shook his head like a parent in despair and turned to go. Fros followed him.
“Call us as soon as you crack it, okay?” she said. “Today’s Sunday. There isn’t a lot of time.”
“Of course, I could certainly do with some more pressure,” Tal said sourly.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do.” He stopped by the open door and glanced over her shoulder. “Will you take care of him or should I rush this so I can do it?”
“I’ll take care of him,” she said after only a fraction of a second of hesitation.
“You two take the bedroom,” she told Jules and Tom when she went back to the living room. “And we should probably take that straightjacket off Sam. It’s stupid.”
“We don’t know how far along the infection has got,” Tom said. “Theoretically, she could be dangerous.”
“Well, I know for a fact that she wasn’t infected before Marlena showed up at that shop. Her smell was different. She didn’t smell of rabies when we came. Now she does.”
“Rabies has a smell?” Jules made a disgusted face and cuddled into Tom’s side. He tightened his arm around her.
“Not the rabies really. The infection.” It was a sharp hot smell that made Fros nervous, like there was danger lurking around the nearest corner, just out of reach. Most infectious diseases she’d come across in her life smelled of some version of bitter and hot but none had made her nervous – a fact she chose to not share with the room. “Let’s all try and get some sleep.”
When Jules and Tom retired to the bedroom after a few feeble protests along the lines of “But it’s your bedroom, you should take it” silence descended on the living room. Peter was still at the kitchen counter. He hadn’t really moved for hours and Fros was only realising it now.
“Are you all right?” she asked. It was beginning to get tedious, all this anxiety about other people’s well-being while fending off the images of her mother’s and her brother’s death. Tedious and exhausting. Fros stifled a yawn.
“I’m fine.” He moved then, walked around the counter and stood over Sam.
Fros bit her lip to stop herself from continuing the well-being line of inquiry with “Are you sure?” or something equally pathetic and stepped closer to the body in the chair.
“She doesn’t smell well,” she said.
Peter reached down and moved Sam’s head from side to side. This didn’t tell him what he wanted to know because he leaned further and carefully turned Sam’s whole body to its side. He then lifted her hair off her neck and leaned closer.
“What is it?” Fros tried to peer around his body at Sam. There was a tiny dark point on the back of her neck. Right in the centre.
“A needle mark,” he said. “A big one. They injected it straight into her spinal cord so it reaches the brain more quickly.”
Fros gritted her teeth. Yes, she’d killed her mother and her brother, her kin. But they had planned to do much worse to a lot more people. As far as rationalisations went this was a crude one but Fros would dare anyone any time to dispute the validity of her argument. Right now, she could kill her mother again.
Peter straightened Sam and started rolling his sleeve.
“What are you doing?” Fros’s anxiety levels soared in an instant.
“I’ll try to wake her up.” He opened his mouth and for the first time since she’d met him Fros saw his murder weapons up close – a couple of thin needle-sharp fangs that descended over his regular canines and that he now used to bite into his arm, a little above the wrist.
There was absolutely nothing erotic in what he was doing. It was, in fact, a pretty disgusting sight. Yet some specific parts of Fros’s body begged to differ and they did it loudly. In self-defence, she backed into the couch, plopped down and crossed her legs. Then she also crossed her arms for good measure and because a shiver shook her when Peter put his dripping arm to Sam’s mouth.
“What is supposed to happen?”
“Vampire blood is known to have healing properties. It may wake her up.”
“Known by who?” Fros said and tried to smile. It couldn’t be common knowledge otherwise vampires would already be in laboratories, contributing to world peace, universal health, and prosperity.
“By vampires,” was Peter’s curt answer after which he looked at his watch.
Fros looked at Sam’s face. It was pale and drawn, and it wasn’t changing magically fast as Fros discovered she’d expected. Neither was Sam’s smell. The hot, bitter stink of impending death was wrapped tightly around her.
“Can your blood cure rabies?” she said. “Or should we take her to a hospital to get a vaccine?”
Peter turned to look at her. It was a flat look with just a hint of curiosity.
“I don’t know if it can cure rabies. I guess we’ll see,” he said. “As for a hospital – she was injected close to the brain. I don’t think a vaccine would work.”
Fros met that with silence. She was going through her blood relatives like a fork through an overripe banana.
“You weren’t the one who did this to her,” Peter pointed out.
Fros didn’t speak.
“She tried to kill you. Twice.”
“I know,” Fros said finally. “But I’ve already killed enough family members to last me a lifetime. If she survives, they’ll lock her up anyway, so we should be safe.”
“You know it couldn’t have gone any other way, right?” he said.
“Maybe it could have,” Fros countered. “Maybe we could have convinced them to give up their plan and maybe try and accept basilisks won’t rule the world. Maybe we could have saved them,” she said, uttering word after word as though they were pills and if she took enough of those she would believe this was indeed possible.
Peter sought her eyes and held them. He hesitated. Then he overcame the hesitation, walked over to her, perched on the edge of the sofa and put a cool hand on hers. Fros tensed to pull her hand away and he let go.
“It couldn’t have gone any other way,” he said quietly and turned to Sam. “Sam? Can you hear me?” Sam didn’t move. “Sam, open your eyes,” Peter ordered.
“Maybe she can’t,” Fros squeezed out through an unusually tight throat. He had tried to reassure her they had done the right thing and Fros wanted to be grateful about it but it was impossible because try as she might to rationalise events, she had murdered the woman who had brought her, Fros, into this world and had raised her to be the person she was today – the killer of her own mother. The first stab of a headache pierced the left side of her head.
“She should be able to,” Peter said and stood. “Her heart’s beating faster, she’s awake. She just doesn’t want to open her eyes.”
Fros shook off the pointless loop of guilt and sniffed the air. Sam’s smell was changing. It was still bitter and hot but it was also the smell of someone awake, stronger than it had been a few minutes ago. So, Sam was pretending to be asleep – and the bite marks on the sides of her neck were gone. Peter reached for the clasps of the straightjacket.
“Don’t take it off,” Fros said. “Leave it on. She’ll get tired of pretending at some point. When she gets thirsty, I expect. I’d rather she was restrained.”
“She can’t do anything, I’ll be watching her.”
“You might fall asleep,” Fros said as gently as she could. His skin had an ashen tint and there were dark shadows under his eyes that she was only now noticing. “When did you last feed?”
Peter spared her the briefest of glances.
“I’m fine.”
“Repeating it won’t make it true,” she pointed out. “If you need me, I’ll be on this here sofa.”
She was trying to reverse on an obscenely narrow street with a sheer cliff on one side and no guardrail in sight. Not only was it narrow but it was also steep and Fros broke out in sweat as she juggled the car, the street and the slope. Halfway through the reversal a loud crash shattered the dream and had Fros jumping up from the sofa.
The room was dark except for the window to the backyard of the building where the moon hung fat and full in the clear sky. For a second Fros could not understand what she was seeing and why the moon looked so clear it was as if there was no glass in the window. Then her brain caught up and informed her that this was because there was, indeed, no glass in the window. The window was shattered. Tom stood beside it. The chair where Sam had sat was empty. There was no trace of Peter.
“No!” Fros lunged forwards but she was too slow and too clumsy, and hit the coffee table with her shins. “No!”
“She jumped,” Tom said, his breathing heavy with either shock or exertion, or both. “I heard the crash and ran but she jumped before I got to her.”
Scrambling back to her feet and ignoring Tom’s words, Fros ran to the window as if that could change anything. They were on the third floor and the straightjacket was no parachute. With a sharp feeling of déjà vu, Fros peered down and saw the pale figure on the black tarmac right next to the garbage bin shed.
“What happened? Tom? What happened?” Jules’s insistent voice broke through the night silence.
“Sam jumped off the window,” he said.
“Peter!” Fros called into the void outside the window. A rush of air from sudden movement washed against her as Jules swept in, carrying a cocktail of horror and fascination laced with disgust. “Peter?” she called again. No answer came from the moonlit outside.
She turned around slowly, her brain sorting through the possibilities. As she did, Fros met Tom’s eyes for a second. All she could see in them was worry. All she could smell on him was sadness and a whiff of cold regret. It smelled of melting ice cubes. Tom could not have thrown Sam out of the window. She would’ve woken up and screamed. Peter would have woken up. Fros would have woken up.
“I fell asleep,” she said. “Peter was supposed to watch her but…”
The room burst into light. Jules had done the obvious thing.
“Peter!”
The panic in Jules’s voice and the sudden change in her smell dragged Fros’s attention down to the floor. Peter was lying on his side in the corner, facing the wall.
“She must have butted him with her head,” Tom said as he looked around for a blunt object suitable for hitting people’s heads and failed to find one. He squatted by Peter and frowned at the stain. “I guess when you’re desperate you can overpower even a vampire.”
Fros’s nose twitched on its own. From up close, it registered an error in its earlier report. It wasn’t sadness that Tom smelled of. It was resignation. These both smelled of years-old dust and ancient books but Tom’s aromatic aura right now had an additional note of peace that sadness didn’t. Fros’s heart rate picked up.
“He’s not waking up,” Jules said but at this moment in time Fros was uncharacteristically disinclined to mock her about stating the painfully obvious.
“Move,” she said and for once Jules did, without questions. “Call the police about Sam, make up a plausible story.” She rolled Peter on his back and, ignoring the fact she was not alone in the room, pressed her wrist to his mouth.
A small gasp indicated Jules was not looking away like a polite person would have done.
“It’s the only way,” Fros said. “He’s been starving himself and here’s the result.”
Jules stepped away with her phone in her hand, her eyes pinned on Peter’s face.
“What do I tell the police?” she mumbled.
“I’ll handle the police,” Tom said. “Fros, do you need help?”
Peter wasn’t biting. She pressed her wrist harder to his mouth and the teeth below the lips.
“I’ll be fine. What’s our story?”
“We found her in an abandoned house and were bringing her back to the authorities. She waited until we all fell asleep and jumped.”
Peter’s mouth moved. Fros exhaled. A moment later the fangs pierced her skin and he drank.
“Sounds good,” she said, smiling to cover the wince. “Jules, could you look around in case we’ve missed something incriminating. An earring, maybe, or a sock. Did we put all of Marlena’s things away?”
“I did,” Jules said, her eyes still glued to Peter’s mouth, which had now latched properly onto Fros’s wrist. “I threw them in the garbage. Doesn’t this hurt?”
“What? Oh. Just a bit.”
“Oh.”
“And we hoovered all the ashes,” Fros said, ticking off a mental list while Tom dialled the police and told them the short version of the story, namely there was a jumper at this address.
“We did.”
Peter’s eyes fluttered and opened. He let go of her wrist and sat up.
“Where is… Shit!” He was on his feet and at the window in an instant that drew another gasp from Jules. “Shit!”
“The police are on the way,” Fros said as she straightened up and went to tear off a piece of kitchen roll to wipe the wound. Her head felt light from the loss of blood and smells were muted – and so were her thoughts, for a blissful moment. “The story’s we found her in an abandoned house, restrained her and brought her here to take to the authorities.”
“She must have hit me from behind,” Peter said gloomily. “I nodded off for a second and then something hit me. I dropped like a bloody sack.”
“And I was sleeping like a log but this is not helping us.”
“I don’t know how to help us,” he snapped. For a moment everyone froze. “I’m completely out of ideas,” he added more softly.
“Why do you think you’re the one who needs to help? We’re all in this together, apparently. There’s no need for a special savior,” Fros said, knowing as she said it that it had failed to mask her thoughts. They’d sneaked up on her, those thoughts of guilt and accusation.
“Because that’s what I do,” Peter said, his eyes pinned to the broken window. “I solve problems. I try to save people. I make bad things and bad people go way – often after I bring them into good people’s lives.” He barked out a laugh. “But right now,” he turned. “I don’t know what to do. I really don’t know what to do.”
Jules nudged Tom in the ribs and they slunk out while Fros tried to not stop them, especially Tom. Peter seemed to be in the mood for a serious conversation complete with self-flagellation and she wasn’t. She was hungry and tired, and guilty, and now there was another dead body to deal with, and that was too much.
“You don’t have to always know what to do, Peter. None of us do. I don’t even know why I’m telling you this. It should be obvious.”
“Not to me. I was supposed to fix things. I was supposed to come back for you, get you to safety and deal with Alexandra and the rest. Instead…” He laughed again. “I messed up everything I could mess up. It didn’t even occur to me that Marlena could be involved, how stupid is that?”
Fros caught herself tapping her foot on the floor.
“I don’t know how stupid that is and I don’t care. This is not 1835 and I’m not a damsel in distress. I can’t argue the same for Tal but he seems to be quite capable of taking care of himself. You really don’t have to carry the whole world on your shoulders these days. We all cope with that somehow. Now, is this going to continue forever or are you going back to normal at some point?”
Peter started to say something but stopped and frowned.
“You still feel guilty about Alexandra and that boy, don’t you?”
“Well, I killed them savagely so yes, I’d say I do feel certain guilt. I know they deserved it and all but still.”
“That’s it,” he said with a bitter smile that only pulled half of his mouth up, making his face asymmetrical and desperate. “It’s the guilt. I took it in with the blood. It happens sometimes.”
“Oh, brother,” Fros said and didn’t even try to suppress the eyeroll that almost made her eyes snap off their nerves and drop out of their sockets. “We need to find you some normal food right away.”
“It will have to wait,” Tom said, popping his head in. “The police are here.”