I hadn't been able to sleep after my shift. Too restless after a particularly unsatisfying hypothermia code. My mind was racing with the alternatives and possibilities...if I hadn't waited to initiate more aggressive rewarming, if I'd held out for one more round of compressions... I should have tried something else. I should have done something more. I almost did not hear my phone.
Dr. Bishop, I—I shouldn't have called, but please I need help.
It took me a moment to place the caller's voice. Memories of dark eyes and another unsatisfying case.
Julia? What's happened?
There was silence. Then panic.
Julia's voice came in a breathy rush, dotted with Russian expletives: I shouldn't have called. Shit! I fucked up.
Tell me where you are.
I can't. I can't. Oh God, she's going to die.
I mentally inventoried my first-aid kid built from the wayward hospital supplies that found their way home in my pockets. An expired bag of Lactated Ringer's. A couple of vials of lidocaine. Sutures in various sizes. A tourniquet or two. Nothing advanced, but enough to provide some basic medical care while I convinced Julia to take her friend to the hospital. She'd been so nervous, when she had been in the Emergency Department. She'd begged not to get law enforcement involved. No social workers. The track marks. The tattoos. The repeat visits for broken bones and venereal diseases. I could help her, if she would trust me.
Tell me where you are, Julia. Let me help. No cops. Just me.
I—I—I'm at the port. We've been staying in one of the ships.
The empty train to the port. The break in the chain link fence. The abandoned ship. Julia appearing from the darkness, pale and shivering. Her dark hair was lank, shielding her darker eyes. She hastily pulled down her sleeves to cover the fresh bruises and track marks on her arms.
Where is your friend, Julia? I looked for another person, but we were alone in the shadow of the rusted vessel. The sound of the water against the hull surrounded us. Julia's backs stiffened. Her face as tear-streaked when she turned.
I'm sorry. I-I'm so sorry.
My chest cramped with sudden fear: I should have told someone I where I was going. I should not have come. I reached for my cell phone despite knowing that I'd have no reception in this ironclad deathtrap.
A hand circled around my wrist. We were suddenly not alone.
Good work, Julia. You've done well.
I hadn't remembered that voice. A man's voice. A soft, pleased baritone. The surprise shattered the grip of the fractured memory. But she was here. I could ask her. I could know.
The narrow face that stared back at me wasn't the one I'd expected. I imagined the shadowed eyes, the gaunt cheek bones... but they weren't there. The nose was too long. Julia's eyes weren't blue. My stomach sank. It wasn't her. I was losing it.
"Sorry," I said weakly, drawing my hand back. It obviously wasn't Julia. She was too tall, too tan. I swallowed and apologized again. Despite the fact that my brain knew that no one in the busy market cared that I had chased down a stranger, I could not shake the prickly, skin-tight feeling that everyone was watching and judging. That I was trapped in a crowd of enemies. My pulse scratched against my throat. My legs ached to run. You're fine. I forced myself to still. You're fine. To smile. It came out like a grimace. "I thought you were someone else."
The stranger shot me a half-irritated, half-accosted frown before waving me off. Her friends laughed breathily as they returned to their conversation and pulled her away. Even without their side-eyed glances and half-smiles, my skin still hummed with a live-wire pulse. Run. Run. Run. It was stupid and irrational to feel endangered in the nondescript crowd of a farmer's market, but I couldn't make my heart slow. My ribs snared each breath until the only thing that left was strangled and hollow. There had been someone else at that shipyard. Something was stalking me, hunting me. I wasn't safe. I needed to run. To flee.
A breath of the sun-soaked breeze swelled and caught me. It smelled like sweet grass and sage. Like memories. I could taste the smoke as my grandmother promised to ward off bad dreams and evil spirits. The surge of adrenaline eased. It could not exist next to that near-forgotten peace of my childhood.
Tiny chalkboard signs boasted of soaps and candles made from sweet grass and lavender and cedar. With each scent, I could see the crinkles in my grandmother's eyes, the blanket on the back of the chair, the garden in the yard.
"Are you alright?"
I turned. The vendor could have been one of my cousins. Stocky, grinning, and with the same dark eyes and hair that favored my maternal grandmother's side. My black sheep mother included.
"I'm fine," I said. My smile felt less forced. "Do you sell smudge sticks?"
In world where neopaganism was stylish, I'm sure my question seemed woefully close to appropriation. He took a closer look at me.
"Chumash?" he asked. The Chumash reservation in Santa Ynez was one of the larger reservations in Southern California. As a medical student, I'd entertained the idea of volunteering at their clinic before chickening out. I hadn't been a part of that community since before I could string complete sentences together. Said black sheep mother could never settle in one place for long, much less Montana, and it left me feeling just as outsider as every other person who claimed some fraction of Native American blood.
I shook my head. "Crow. My mom's side."
He smiled encouragingly. "I get it. I'm mixed too. My mom never really figured out how to live on the reservation." He bent beneath the table to retrieve a small packet of bundled herbs and gestured towards an older woman who was wrapping a candle in tissue paper for another customer. "Don't tell my auntie, but I don't think it's so wrong sell smudge sticks to hipsters. We all have to find peace somewhere, you know?"
I thanked him for the smudge stick and waved off his offer to include feathers and abalone. I already felt like I was encroaching on traditions I had no right to, but where hundreds of coping mechanisms had failed, a whiff of white sage had cut straight through my panic. It was irrational, but I felt safer, grounded, for having that tiny tied bundle of herbs in my purse.
All of the feelings of misplaced anxiety and terror gone, I smiled genuinely when I returned to pick up the bags and boxes of vegetables. I double checked Anna's list for the odd assortment of ingredients as I packed them into the trunk of my car. The fruits and veggies, along with the combination of chicken liver and oysters, suddenly made sense.
It'd been years since I'd taken a course in nutrition, but the theme of this menu was iron. Apricots and broccoli greens and and even a dash of citrusy vitamin C to increase heme absorption. In a world of keto and gluten-free and paleo, maybe iron-rich was the latest fad. I shot Anna a text with my hypothesis: either iron-laden foods were the newest nutrition trend, or this dinner she was catering was for a contingent of art-loving anemics.
As I pulled out of the busy lot, the sun just beginning to set, I heard the ping of her reply. Although I reminded myself to check it when I arrived at the gallery, traffic made the thirty minute trip into something closer to ninety. Anna had asked for a quick twenty minute window for me to pop in and take photos of the venue. The LA sky's polluted orange-and-pink sunset faded to dusky purple. My phone chirped with another flurry of text messages. Anna was probably wondering where the photos were. The twenty minute window had long since passed.
I groaned at the full lot behind the gallery. Groaned louder as no vacant spot magically appeared as I searchingly crawled up and down the streets. When I did finally find somewhere to park—a cramped street space with a broken meter—I swerved with such violent relief that I nearly flattened a pair of skateboarders who were sitting on the curb.
"Sorry!" I said as I hurried down the alley and towards the entrance, mentally rehearsing the excuses I could make to still get a few minutes to take photos. Why Anna needed pictures of the venue to plan the menu was entirely beyond me, but I had promised to do it for her and I determined to get one thing right today. It wouldn't matter that the first client had been a wicked apple-hating witch or that the vegetables were spoiling in the trunk of my car...if I got these photos then the day wouldn't be a complete wash. My hand found its way to the smudge stick at the bottom of my purse. I knew it was irrational, but if I got these photos, then it meant that I was still a capable, dependable human being that didn't have mental breakdowns in farmer's markets.
Though I was perilously close to having a mental breakdown at the front entrance of an up-and-coming art gallery.
I swallowed down the sting of frustration that pricked at my eyes. I wasn't above begging. "Please? For Anna, at least."
"Look, I'm sorry. There's another event about to start. Black tie. I can't just let you in." The woman, bluetooth headset buzzing in her ear and clipboard in her manicured fingers, was clearly some sort of coordinator or event planner or something. In addition to the black button down and wide-leg slacks, she wore all the brisk efficiency of someone who was used to managing difficult and unmanageable people. Judging from the one-over she gave my torn jeans and the shirt that had been perfectly white this morning, she had deemed me a difficult and unmanageable person.
"Isn't there anything I could do?" I asked. "I just need a few shots. You could take them for me!"
She raised a single, perfectly threaded eyebrow. My heart sunk.
"Kate?"
Lightning strike me dead.
I turned. Of all the people I'd expected to ever meet on the trash-studded streets of LA, I hadn't imagined running into the body-builder-runway-viking himself. He was dressed in a perfectly tailored suit that was, annoyingly, having a very real effect on my heart rate. And the color in my face.
"Dane," I said with a very forced smile. I hoped it distracted from my cheeks. Maybe he'd think it was a sunburn. Yeah. That spontaneously showed up when did.
He smiled at the woman. "I've got this, Angela."
She returned inside with a tight nod and only a very quick look back at us before disappearing into the crowd of cocktail dresses and suits.
Dane turned the full weight of his charm towards me. It almost erased the memory of sharp darkness. It almost erased the fact that he bit me. His smile widened. I felt myself lean forward. Or rather, I was pretty certain he bit me.
"If you were so desperate for a second date," he said, his voice low and intimate, "you could have just called."
My jaw dropped. The red in my face burned from attraction to and indignant prickling.
"I mean, stalking, Kate? It's a little much, don't you think?"
"Stalking?" I coughed out. Indignant prickling became righteous irritation. Before I could think better of it, I matched his mocking tone and words. "A little much coming from the man that bites his dates, don't you think?"
As if he'd seen a ghost, Dane stilled. He stepped toward me, bathed in the unforgiving neon glow of the falafel restaurant next door.
"You remember?"
His whisper was slightly strangled, and I imagined my face matched Dane's pale surprise. With my current difficulty with memories, I had almost convinced myself that the bite was another figment of my anxious imagination. A shadowy materialization of all the fear that I was determined to shove behind breathing techniques and good-old-fashioned denial. Despite the ghost of pain at my throat, there hadn't been the faintest mark. I had almost convinced myself that I was losing my mind.
In the dusky twilight, every twitch, every flicker of expression on Dane's face echoed. It would be impossible for any of the coiffed crowd inside the gallery to have heard him, but the conversation paused. The comfortable burbling of voices stuttered to a trickling silence. Heavy glances, burning against my skin, sent my heart racing, made my mouth dry.
My jaw clenched. I forced myself to remember the bundle of white sage at the bottom of my purse.
"Hard to forget being bitten in a public place," I said darkly. Although my pulse thudded uncomfortably in my ears, I felt steady. In control. This wasn't some unknown fear. This wasn't some missing memory. Dane was solid and real and, in a word, proved I wasn't crazy. I wasn't crazy. "Is it a sex thing? Like some sort of vamp-"
Before I could finish the word, before I could blink, the world lurched. A blur of darkness and wind. Cold hands. Arms like a vice around me. The sharp sting of salt and sap against my nose. Sudden, relentless nausea. Just as my inner ear protested and my stomach decided to heave, everything shuddered to a stop. I tried to rationalize what happened. Sudden onset vertigo? A stroke?
Because it was impossible.
I was no longer standing in front of the gallery.
I was sitting.
Not outside the entrance. Not in the alley.
In a car. With Dane.
"Drive."
In the space of a breath, we had moved to the sleek leather interior of a dark-windowed vehicle. A vehicle that pulled out of the gallery's lot and onto the busy boulevard. An inch away, sat Dane, focused and taut. Despite his perfect stillness, he was like a stalking lion. Every line of his posture, every saccade of his blue-gray eyes was fixed on his prey.
Me.
"That is exactly what it is." The low purr of his voice made the hair on my arms shiver. A wave of gooseflesh bloomed across my skin. His face was hard angles, inhumanely beautiful, in the dim light. Blue became black, and I stared straight into the pitch dark eyes of Dane the vampire. "So what exactly are you?"
Looking for another good read? If you're in the mood for some rom com mischief, check out authorelizasolares's Vegas Knot.
After seeing the man she's loved since grade school is about to be married, Bianca Daleman spends one drunken night in Las Vegas and winds up married to a guy she just met. And when her old flame comes back into town, she simply has to make her new marriage look like it's working. It's a matter of honour.