Chapter Thirty-Six: Turf War

Gloria returned from wherever she'd been not too much later - it still wasn't even midnight. Still no sign of Lisa - Vera had messaged her a few times already, but Lisa hadn't even read them. She was starting to worry. Gloria came in, Vera immediately led her to back to Maxie's room, where Vera had blacked out all the windows and set Maxie upon the bed. Vera wasn't entirely clear on what the deal with Maxie and Gloria was - she gathered that they sometimes slept with one another but mostly kept to their own rooms.

She took Gloria's hand and led her back. "When vampires turn, we slowly die… it takes a day or two from what I gather. Maxie died in my arms tonight, and from what I read, there's a chance she'll stay dead. But she should come back. When I turned, I just died in my sleep and woke up a vampire, like awakening from a long and dreamless slumber."

"She looks like she's sleeping," Gloria said, tears streaming down her cheeks. She knelt by the bed and held Maxie's hand. "Her hand's so cold, though…"

Vera nodded, trying to control her own tears. She hadn't told Gloria about Eva yet - she wasn't sure how to break it to the oldest witch in the trio that she was soon to be the only non-vampire in the trio. "Her hands'll probably stay cold. Our body temperature is a lot lower than humans', except for when we're sated on blood. It's about ninety degrees, but it spikes to human levels or a bit above in the hour or two after we're blood sated."

"All of my vegan recipes…" Gloria muttered. That she was concerned about recipes at a time like this almost made Vera laugh. Almost.

"She can still enjoy them. She just won't be able to digest them…"

"But she might just be dead…"

Vera squeezed Gloria's hand and then brought her into a hug. "Maybe, but I don't think so. Can't you feel Maxie? She's still around here, still in the air and everything surrounding us, just waiting to come back."

Gloria nodded and smiled. She ran her fingers through Vera's hair, looking deep into her red-rimmed eyes. "You're right. You're exactly right, Vera. I think we'll make a decent witch out of you some day."

They sat there for a while in the dim bedroom, Vera sitting next to Gloria. She lapsed into meditation, feeling the older woman's hand clutching hers, listening to her breathing, her heart beat - da-thump da-thump da-thump. She focused on her own feelings, wondering whether she'd done the right thing with Eva instead of just killing her or beating the shit out of her. No - that had been the third time that Eva had tried to kill Vera and simply beating her wouldn't do. And Vera was done with killing people if she could possibly help it. If she'd killed Eva, Maxie would never forgive her.

Vera heard the noises outside the house, all around for yards and yards. Crickets in the garden, a stray mouse or two skirting the outside of Gloria's wards, the rustle of leaves, and the hush of wind. Maxie's dogs panting and occasionally whining - they knew that something was wrong, but Vera had kept them out of the bedroom. And the slow tap… tap… ti-tap movement of a tarantula creeping about nearby. Bella or Stella - Vera couldn't tell the difference.

It felt like they'd been there for hours. Surely, Maxie had been dead for more than five hours, which was about what turning took. Vera bit her lip, forgetting about her sharp canine and poking herself a bit too hard. She glanced over to Gloria, who looked to be in deep meditation, just like Vera was supposed to be. Maxie isn't coming back, a voice in the back of Vera's brain whispered. You killed her. And, as she thought it, she felt that vague sense of Maxie's spirit hovering around the place starting to ebb and dissipate. Maxie was leaving! The turning hadn't worked and she was leaving for good, her soul gone off to parts unknown…

Vera started crying, though she did her best to hide it. But when she looked over, Gloria was crying, too. She also knew. Vera closed her eyes and tried to convince herself that the feeling was just her being pessimistic… but, no, when she opened herself to her senses, she could feel the last little whispers of Maxie draining from the world just as surely as she could hear the crickets outside, the dogs whining in the hallway, or Gloria's heart beating: da-thump da da-thump da-thump -thump da-thump. There were two other heartbeats in the room, one nearly as slow as Vera's own!

"Maxie!" Vera rushed to her bedside, jostling Maxie's near-lifeless form.

Maxie's eyes cracked open, her irises the same hazel ringed with blood-red as Vera's. She groaned, tried to say something, and collapsed back to unconsciousness, her glacial vampire pulse thumping erratically… her face grew more ashen and little black veins started popping up under her skin. Something was wrong!

"Blood! She needs blood!" Vera said. Why hadn't she thought of that? Why hadn't she got more blood?'

"It's okay. I've got blood," Gloria said. She nudged Vera aside, stabbed into her own wrist with a sharpened fingernail (Vera wasn't clear on why Gloria had a single sharpened fingernail, but it was currently very convenient), and held her wrist to Maxie's lips, squeezing out drops of crimson blood.

For an interminable minute, nothing happened. Then Maxie's eyes popped open and her hands shot up, clamping around Gloria's arm, drawing her wrist into her mouth. Vera could hear Maxie slurping blood down, could hear her vampire heart speeding as the blood nourished it, spreading that joyous warmth throughout her body. She heard Gloria gasp and try to pull away, unable to overcome Maxie's new vampire strength. Vera stepped in and pulled the older witch's wrist away, wrenching it from Maxie's iron-hard grasp with her own powerful hands. Maxie hissed, wild fury in her eyes and made to lunge, but Vera held her down.

"Maxie! Maxie, it's me! You've got to clear your mind of your instincts - remember your mindfulness!"

Finally, Maxie took a deep breath, focus returning to her wild eyes. Vera lessened her grip, allowing Maxie to struggle to a sit. Maxie held her head between her hands, shaking her head back and forth… as she did, Vera could see black wicking up many of her gray hairs, could see the black veins under her skin receding along with many of her wrinkles, the overall effect taking ten or fifteen years off of Maxie's appearance. Finally, she looked up, violet tears streaking down her cheeks.

"It's… everything's different," Maxie whispered. "I… I can't feel the goddess. She's left me."

Gloria squeezed Maxie's hand - she looked pale and a bit unsteady, since Maxie had just gulped down about a pint of her blood, but she put on a strong face. "Can you see my aura Maxie?"

She nodded. "I can. Better than ever - green and blue and sparkling."

"I can see yours, too, darker and slower but stronger than ever. I don't think the goddess has left you, but you may have to relearn how to feel the connection with your new aura." She bent down and kissed Maxie's forehead. "I thought we'd lost you."

Maxie smiled weakly. "It's good to be back."

+++++

It was downright odd going back to work the next morning. It seemed to Vera that each one of her shifts was a little island of normalcy amidst a life of increasingly violent vampiric madness. Lisa never made it back to Maxie's that night and Vera was worried sick. She texted her probably a dozen times, hoping that Lisa wouldn't get annoyed at her the way that Vera did when her mom pulled the same exact thing when she'd send a battery of increasingly-panicked texts every three to five minutes as she worked herself up. Vera promised herself she wasn't going to do that. She texted Lisa on the bus ride to downtown and promised herself she wouldn't text again until after her shift was over - if Lisa was in trouble, it wasn't as if Vera had the first clue where to look for her.

V: <Lisa, I'm worried, please msg me and tell me ur ok,  she messaged.
V: <I promise I'm not mad.
V: <News about Maxie… won't discuss over text…
V: <If ur in danger let me know
V: <I love you, pls text

She hoped that didn't sound too desperate. And if it did? Well, she'd already sent the messages. Vera slipped her phone into her purse, stepped out of the bus, and deployed her parasol, a dark violet umbrella with sparkling, swirling patterns on it. It had probably belonged to Ellen, or maybe it was Maxie's, but Vera thought it suited her.

The first half of her shift at work was thankfully normal - regular scans, some equipment troubleshooting, and a thirty minute training session from Ram on the new PET software. Vera took it in quickly and managed to troubleshoot the system when the settings glitched on their second scan. Soon enough, it was time for her lunch break and Vera wandered out, as she sometimes did, down to Longstreet. It never took too long for somebody with vampire senses to track down a strung-out heroin user and nip them with enough yellow venom to give them a few days' respite from their drug cravings in exchange for a pint of blood. Vera saw herself into a flophouse and browsed around until she found an addict who looked healthy enough to donate some blood and withdrawn enough to want some venom. She tapped at her neck to indicate what she wanted and the man just nodded, stretching out a bit and exposing his throat. His hands trembled from the detox.

"Some people been looking for you," he mumbled.

"Looking for me?" Vera didn't hesitate to bite in the man while waiting for the response - she only had thirty minutes for her break.

He nodded, sighing as she gave him the first spurt of yellow venom - opioid addicts could take a lot more than regular folks before being incapacitated by it, but they could feel it easily enough. "Looking for vampires. Said they'd pay me a thousand… oh… thousand bucks if I told them."

Vera pulled away for long enough to say, "What did they look like?"

The man shrugged. "Like special ops guys, I guess? All black, fancy guns and equipment. You gonna pay me not to rat on you?"

"No," Vera said, and she dosed the guy with enough yellow to put him out for a day. By the time the guy ratted on her, if he did, she'd be long gone. She licked the last of the blood from his wound, wiped her mouth, and made her way back to work.

As she walked to Imaging East, Vera's phone buzzed up a storm. It buzzed and she nearly broke the thing as fast as she reached for it, just because it might have been Lisa. It wasn't… it was Salvador.

S: <Lisa's with me,   he messaged.
S: <She ditched her phone for now. Too dangerous with everything going on

V: <WTF? Does she know that I was fucking worried sick?   Vera messaged back.

S: <She says yes and she's sorry. U should keep your phone off, too. If they have any decent tracing people, they might be following u,   he replied.

V: <Not until Lisa calls me,

Vera hoped that this would work, though she didn't have high hopes. Lisa could just call on Salvador's phone, but Lisa hated voice calling for some reason. She'd always said that she hated how her voice sounded, though Verne had always loved Lisa's voice. And now that Lisa had the soothing voice of an angel, she had no possible excuse - but she still hated phone calls. A picture of Lisa would have sufficed, but she wasn't getting it for the time being.

Vera had another message, too, this one from her father. Vic wasn't exactly a big texter, so any text message from him was akin to a Herculean effort. And he'd sent not one, not two, but three texts to Vera's phone.

Vic: <Vernon, Pastor Mooney has suggested that we sit together as a family and try to reconcile.
Vic: <He says your state is partly my doing, my failing as a father. I can't claim to understand what's happened to you or what you must be going through.
Vic: <For whatever it's worth, I'm sorry. Whatever you are, I don't think it's the devil.

V: <Ok. I'm willing to meet again, no funny business,   Vera replied.
V: <We'll have wings and beer like during the Panthers games.

Vera couldn't digest wings, but she could eat them. She'd tolerate the nastiness of pushing out mushed-up, undigested chicken if it would put her father in a favorable mood (and she couldn't think of much he liked more than wings and beer). Converting the pastor into her first familiar was paying off famously. A blood meal buzzing  at her senses and two significant problems dealt with, Vera returned to work with a skip in her step, and she didn't even need her parasol.

+++++

The first hour of her afternoon passed like a breeze and Vera felt like she was running on all cylinders, like she could run the whole place by herself if she had to. That might have been a stretch but, having access to vampire strength and vampire speed was a huge boon, even if she couldn't let anybody see her using it. The trick was to find times to do things that required speed when nobody else was there to see it, like clicking through options and clacking away at the keyboard to enter patient data and set scans up as quickly as the computer could run the software.

Mr. d'Amato was getting a follow-up brain scan after recovery from trauma when Vera heard scuffling in the front office. A normal human wouldn't have heard it, but she heard the muffled voices of an unfriendly conversation followed by somebody going back into the clinical area and jimmying open the loading dock doors without using a key. More people came in - people carrying heavy equipment from the sound of it.

"That's it, Mr. d'Amato, very good," Vera said. "If you can just keep looking forward, chin down on the plate, the scan will be over in about ten minutes."

Then she left to see what the hell was happening. She scampered out of the tech room, rounded the corridor, and froze. There were five guys in black tactical gear holding five terrified Imaging East employees and three equally-frightened patients at gunpoint, pinning them against the wall as a man with a big ultraviolet gun of some sort flashed at them. Vera spotted a familiar's tattoo on one man's wrist - something blue and helical that looked quite different from the Abaddon-influenced tattoos of the Palmetto City coven. These were familiars from another coven… presumably Charleston… and they were looking for a vampire. They were looking for Vera.

"Leave them alone!" Vera shouted.

"Hey!" one of the men shouted back.

Shots rang out - they had compact but very effective submachine guns. Submachine guns that, apparently, fired fragmenting silver bullets. Before Vera could run back around the corner, one hit her. Vera's shoulder bloomed with lancing prickles of pain and the black splatter of vampire blood sprayed out. At least three of the guys were charging in her direction. She crouched, ready to give them a rude reminder of why vampires required special equipment to fight. Then she waited… waited… and their footsteps stopped. Something clattered down the hall, rolling to a stop about six feet from her… a grenade.

Vera dove away as the pink-violet bloom of intense ultraviolet pulsed the hallway. Parts of her skin burned… parts blistered and cracked, and she hissed in pain. She found herself balled up and reeling in pain in the supply cabinet. Somehow, she'd hauled herself into safety in there. Another ultraviolet grenade clattered around the corner, but Vera could only see its brilliant pulse from around the gaps in the doorframe.

"Did we get her?"

The guys tromped to the quarter. Maybe they had a way of seeing around the corner.

"Coast clear."

They continued down the hallway - cautiously and audibly checking each room as they passed. But, Vera recalled, the supply closet she'd lucked into was semi-hidden for aesthetic purposes. It matched the wall, differentiated only by the little groove of the wall and a small door handle. They'd walked right past her. She heard one of them go into the MRI suite, followed by another.

"Hey, what the hell is going on?" Mr. d'Amato shouted.

Vera opened the door and charged at the guy still in the hallway, and she could accelerate about as quickly as a Ferrari. The vampire hunter spotted her, brought his SMG to bear, and was flat on his back in under two seconds. Vera ripped the gun out of his hands, smashed it into the guy's visor, and then ripped his whole helmet off, injuring his ears and chin in the process. Then she sank her fangs into his neck right behind his jaw, since the rest of his neck was still covered by a tactical harness. She injected him with a healthy dose of yellow venom, maybe enough to kill, and gulped at the modest flow of blood her poor biting spot allowed. The circulation there wasn't great and it took three or four seconds for the man to stop struggling, by which point his comrades in the MRI suite knew that something was amiss.

"Shit! She's out there!"

An ultraviolet grenade clattered out of the room, but Vera threw the incapacitated man on top of it and then rushed through. Gunshots cracked out, but the two men were down on the scanning floor and didn't have a good angle. Vera tore one of the monitors away from its cables, leapt out into the MRI room, and hurled the monitor as hard as she could (which was pretty damn hard). It hit the front man full in the chest, sent him stumbling back into the back man, and both of them tripped over poor Mr. d'Amato who'd just about given up trying to put his shirt back on and was trying to get the hell out of the room. Vera didn't blame him. She grabbed the first vampire hunter and almost tossed him into the MRI machine before considering how expensive that damage would be to fix. Instead, she tossed him at the wall and lunged at the second man just as he detonated another ultraviolet grenade right in his hand.

Vera hissed, her skin crackling and burning with pain, but the blast of light wasn't enough to kill her or even really slow her down. She kicked the man's groin and, if the cracks and crunches she heard below didn't constitute grave bodily injury, it was certainly dire when she bit into his femoral artery through his tough tactical pants and gave him plenty of yellow venom while gulping down blood. She heard more cracks of gunfire, but barely noticed the bloom of pain as she sucked the man dry. When the flow of blood slowed, Vera's instincts eased off and she was able to turn to take in the scene behind her. The man she'd thrown into the wall was seriously injured and another man was performing first aid. Meanwhile, the third remaining vampire hunter was up in the booth firing at her. He'd only scored some superficial hits before needing to reload, and now he gasped, his eyes going wide in horror, as Vera turned to face him.

"Jesus fuck! She's an elder vampire! She's a fucking elder vampire!" the guy shouted.

The guy administering first aid to his comrade turned to face her, sliding his gun across the floor to her and raising his hands in submission. "They told us to come here and kill a baby vamp, mistress… I swear we didn't know. Please… please let us go," he said.

They cannot go - kill them all, a voice in the back of Vera's mind said. She shook her head and gritted her teeth.

"You haven't harmed any of the employees or patients?" she asked.

The two men exchanged a befuddled look before the medic responded: "No… not seriously. We didn't know. Our master told us this was sanctioned."

"It is sanctioned under vendetta, but I am not your enemy. Leave now before I change my mind."

The two men left, dragging their two injured colleagues along with them. The familiar that Vera had just drained through the femoral artery, though, was beyond help. Vera could hear his pulse waver… waver… and finally stop. And she burned with shame knowing that her instincts and the raw, burning rage of vampire anger had driven her to kill somebody and nearly killed two others. They'd been trying to kill her, sure, but she could have dosed them with modest yellow venom and not simply killed them because her instincts demanded it.

Mr. d'Amato limped back into the damaged control booth and peered down. "Um… is my scan done?"

"Yeah."

Vera felt a bit light-headed and it took her until Dr. Parvolog dashed around the corner wielding a spray tube of mace before she remembered that she'd been shot at least twice with silver bullets. She was still bleeding, if not all that quickly. When the doctor reached out to help Vera, she let herself slump into the doctor's arms and be led along to an examination table, where Dr. Parvolog cut away her bloody, tattered shirt.

"Vera… can you please explain what in the blue blazes I just witnessed?" Dr. Parvolog said. She fetched a pair of forceps and began picking tiny bits of silver bullet from Vera's shoulder. "And why is your blood black?"

"It's very dark purple," Vera said. She bit her lip. "Okay, I'm going to be straight with you, but it you're going to have to take some of it on faith… vampires are real, I'm one of the good ones, and some bad people want to kill me."

OvidLemma

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