I was airborne for one second. Maybe two. Then I hit the ground so hard that my knees crunched, folded, and I rolled. It hurt, which didn't surprise me. What surprised me was that I could still get back up.
I ran, ignoring the excruciating shocks of pain from my knees. I jumped the fence, and when I say jumped, I mean jumped. I hit the ground on the other side and bit back a cry of pain. Then I slipped behind a line of trees and limped back to my house. The whole thing happened so fast that I was in my own backyard when I heard the cop yell, "Hey, Simes, there's an open window!"
I slipped into my house through the back door and sank into a kitchen chair. I was gasping, from fear and pain, exertion and shock.
Parva.
In my earlier stupor, I'd thought she'd let me live out of generosity or something. But now I remembered what she'd said right before she bit me, and the horrifying implication finally sank into my brain.
Maybe I'll teach you some empathy instead.
She'd changed me.
Not just changed me, but killed me. I could actually remember when my heart stopped. There had been a beat, another beat several seconds later, and then nothing. Yet, here I was. Breathing. Heart beating.
What was I?
A vampire, or something like it. Some real monster that all the fictional vampires were based on. A monster that might have killed Emily Harding. She wasn't my friend, but she was a person. And I'd come very, very close to killing that cop. I'd wanted to do it. Even now, the memory of the temptation made my teeth ache.
I touched one of my canines. I already expected them to be all long and pointy, just like in all the stories. But when my finger actually ran up against one of these fangs, I gagged. I couldn't. I didn't want to know. These were not my teeth.
I don't know how they got in my mouth, Officer, but they're not mine, I swear.
I needed to call the cops and tell them. Just be honest about what I'd done and let them put me in jail or a padded room or a science lab or whatever. If I didn't do it, I was going to attack someone else. Like my mother, who set the security alarm every night and would have no idea that the biggest threat to her life slept under the same roof as her. I thought back to the way she'd smelled when she'd hugged me goodbye, all warm and nourishing and comforting, and I gagged again. This time I tasted bile in the back of my throat, along with something else. Something sweet and rich, and . . .
. . . oh, no. I refused to think about that.
I made myself get up and go upstairs to my bathroom. My knees cursed me the whole way. When I opened the door and turned on the light, a scene straight out of Psycho greeted me. The inside of the tub was splashed with pink, bloody water. There were rusty footprints on the white bathmat.
The clothes I'd been wearing when Parva attacked me were strewn all over the floor. My shirt and jacket were too dark to make out the blood, and my mother had probably never seen it. But I could smell it. Not just my blood, but hints of Parva's meat-locker odor and marijuana smoke from that other guy. Parva's first victim.
It hit me how much trouble this was going to get me in. If Emily lived, she'd tell the cops that I attacked her and they would tear this house apart looking for evidence. They'd find these clothes, do a DNA test, and link me to a murder across town of a victim who'd been attacked in the same way as Emily. And my mother would, in her innocence, corroborate their theory. She'd have to tell them how she'd found me down there, all beaten up as though I'd been in a life-or-death battle.
I couldn't afford to be implicated in a crime I didn't commit. I was going to be in big enough trouble for the one I did. Of course, if Emily didn't make it, I might not get in trouble for anything. But I didn't want that, either. Much better to be an attempted murderer in jail than an actual murderer on the lam. If Emily lived, I could live with myself. If she didn't, I had no idea.
I looked at myself in the mirror. A pale, drawn face stared back at me, one that no longer looked like Nathaniel Papadakis. My eyes had always been sort of a dull, grayish blue, but now they burned like blue fire. My glasses were gone, probably smashed in an alley somewhere. Even without them, I could see just fine. There wasn't a mark on my face anymore, not a cut, not a scratch, not even a zit.
I remembered how soft my skull had felt in the back after Parva's beating. I reached up, bracing myself for something horrible, and gently prodded the back of my head. It was solid. I touched my face where she'd punched me and shattered my jaw. Smooth bone resisted me. There was no pain. The green-blue bruises were gone.
My knees. They'd taken the brunt of the fall when I'd jumped out the window. I'd broken or torn something, definitely. They hurt only a few minutes ago, while I was climbing the stairs. But now they felt fine.
My teeth. My canines looked normal. I tried to convince them to come out, but I had no voluntary control over it. So I tentatively thought back to that moment in Emily's house when I believed the cop was going to catch me. I remembered my fear, my anxiety. I could smell the cop through the door, and the scent tempted me to defend and satisfy myself in one quick move.
My canines ached like they'd been injected with molten lead. Then, as I watched, they lengthened, sharpened, and reached toward my bottom lip. I flashed back to Parva smiling up at me, her fangs glinting in the street light, and I grimaced. I didn't want to be like her. I didn't want to look like her.
I left the bathroom and went downstairs to the kitchen. The beef I'd tried to eat was warm and bloody on the counter. I put what was left of it in the trash.
I found some disposable latex gloves in the same cabinet as the cleaning supplies. Then I put my bloody clothes in a trash bag and scrubbed every surface of the bathroom with bleach. The smell was unbelievable. The smell of the bleach, I mean. My nose and eyes and ears were so sensitive now that I could barely stand it. Light was too bright. My head contained a cacophony of traffic and animal noises and human speech from houses nearby. And the smell of the bleach made me retch. I tried plugging my nose, but it didn't help. Even through my mouth, I could "smell" it. Taste it. However you want to say it. Smell and taste had blended into one indistinct but powerful sense.
I washed and bleached the bathmat, along with the shower curtain and anything else in the bathroom that was made of cloth. While I attended to the minutiae of evidence-destroying, I thought back to all the evidence I must have left at Emily's house. Fingerprints? There had to be a thousand of them. What about footprints? Maybe not in the house, but anyone with half a brain would study the ground outside the open window and see the tracks I'd left behind that led over a fence and right into my backyard. I don't know, maybe I was giving law enforcement too much credit. Maybe I'd watched too many forensic science dramas. It didn't matter, anyway. There was no way I was getting out of the attack on Emily. All I could do was make sure I didn't also get blamed for the death of the anonymous stoner, too.
When the bathroom was clean, I picked up the trash bag with the clothes inside. What the heck was I supposed to do with this thing? Put it on the curb like normal? Burn it? Chuck it into a vacant lot? Nothing I thought of sounded right. In every scenario, I could imagine myself getting caught or drawing more police attention to myself than I would have otherwise.
Burning sounded like the best bet, but the cops were still at Emily's house and if I set something on fire at this time of night it would definitely bring them sniffing around. My second best option was the man-made lake in the neighborhood behind mine. Maybe I could get everything lost in there.
I turned all the lights off in my house and slipped out the back door. My nemesis, the sun, had finally disappeared behind the horizon. Even so, I had no trouble seeing my way through the yard. It was as bright as if it was illuminated by the brightest full moon.
I left my yard, picking my way through the azalea bushes that made up the back perimeter of our property. The ground sloped downward after the bushes and led me into a ditch. I hunched down and followed the ditch in the opposite direction from Emily's house. Criminals always returned to the scene of the crime, I remembered, so I wasn't going to do it.
The ditch led me past several houses and spit me out on a residential street. I waited until a car passed and then, sticking to the shadows, I crept behind the houses until I reached the "lake." It was too small for boats, and it didn't look like anything I wanted to swim in. But it was big enough for hiding evidence.
I was tempted to just throw the whole bag in, but I didn't want to end up preserving the evidence inside it. So I took the clothes out and wrapped them around stones I found near the edge of the pond. One stone for my shirt, one for my pants, one for my jacket. I tossed the bundles into the water, and then I turned the plastic bag inside out and rinsed it in the lake. I twisted the bag into a tight knot and headed back the way I came, pausing just long enough to put the trash bag and the latex gloves I was wearing into someone's garbage can.
When I got home, I didn't turn the lights back on. I didn't want them or need them. I slumped into a chair and gazed at the kitchen, unseeing. The adrenaline that had kept me focused, kept me moving, seemed to have abandoned me all at once, and with nothing left to distract me my mind drifted back to Emily Harding. Oh, god. Poor Emily. I didn't know what I was going to do if she didn't make it. A lump grew in my throat as I remembered her waxy skin, the flutter of a pulse that was all she had left as they loaded her into the ambulance.
I rarely thought about God these days. But I'll admit that, at this moment, nothing could have helped me except an all-powerful entity. So with no other ideas, I closed my eyes and prayed:
Dear God. Please don't let Emily Harding die.