URBAN NOSGOTHIC

Chapter 13

*bounces* I just realised! This is my first fic to get over 100 reviews!! *cheers* Thankyou all so much for reviewing, and proper responses soon ^_^

Awake.

Am I really awake? everything's so bright. White lights, white sheets, white cotton swabs in a little dish at my bedside...

I must be in hospital after all. I twist my neck experimentally. If this has all been a dream, then my neck shouldn't hurt...ow.

Damnit. Puts paid to that idea, then.

I am in hospital. In one of the smaller wards. Judging from the occupants of the beds either side of me, this is the "Drive-By Shootings and Crimes of Actual Bodily Harm" ward.

I think the guy in the bed on my right has actually died, and no-one's noticed yet. Help.

No-one seems to care that I'm awake, either. There's a nurse on duty at a smallish desk a few beds away, but she's not looking my way. The vampires. Where are the vampires?

Maybe they were arrested when I passed out in the club. Maybe they were gunned down by the police. Hell, they might even have to have called out a SWAT team to take those two down. I feel really odd. I wonder if they've given me new blood to replace that which Kain took? Maybe I should go back to sleep for a while...I feel tired still.

When I open my eyes again, there's a policewoman sat in the little wooden chair next to my bed, and she's looking at me shrewdly. "Glad to see you're awake," she says. "Do you feel up to answering a few questions?"

I say nothing. To be honest, I' m not even sure my vocal chords still work after the savaging my throat has taken. I pretend to drift off again, my eyelids fluttering, but really I'm in the first stages of panic. What should I say? what can I say that will possibly make any sense?

"Rhianna, can you hear me?"

I try to twist in bed. They've got me hooked up to an IV drip, and it pulls painfully at my hand.

"Rhianna, it's very important that you help us if you can."

And it's then that I feel it. Like a little twitch in my mind, like hearing someone laugh several rooms away. I open my eyes to see if the cop feels it too. She's watching me the way a lion-tamer watches his charges - as if I were something large and dangerous in a cage. Strange. No-one's ever looked at me that way before.

The laugh in my mind comes again, and with it a scent in my mouth and sinuses - a musky scent like summer and tom-cats. Kain. I'll remember that scent till the day I die.

But where is he?

The cop frowns slightly. "Did you hear -?"

Then her eyes go wide and blank, and she stands up from her chair with a dislocated, swaying motion that reminds me of a marionette with half its strings cut, and she moves to the door of the ward, goes through it, without a word or sound.

She does not come back.

I reach out, manage to locate the call-button, and am about to press it when I hear that low mental chuckle again.

Don't push...your luck, little human girl.

The sound of his voice makes me tense up and my stomach knots viciously. I tuck my hand back under the coverlet pointedly. Not disobeying Kain. No way. Uh-uh.

Instead I sit up against the pillows, start checking out my surroundings in more detail. There are six other people in beds in this room, including the guy I'm sure has left this mortal realm for good. The nurse - why look, she's getting up too, walking to the door with her eyes as blank as a piece of zerox paper, going through it with all a sleepwalker's grace. How's about that? Now there's only me, the dead guy, and five other people in various stages of insensibility.

Oh, I am going to need soooo much therapy for this. I start giggling rustily in my throat, and stop it in a hurry as Raziel pushes the door quietly and enters the ward, his claw-hooves clicking on the floor.

He looks so utterly out of place in this white, sterile world. After all, this is a place where life is restored to the dying - not where the dead walk in of their own accord.

"Rhi." He shears through the IV with one claw and pulls back the covers. Thank God they left me in my street clothes. "Let's go."

Hey, don't I actually need that drip? Shouldn't I stay here until I'm better?

He lifts me quickly from the bed. "Raziel...you should go...leave me...I'm sick.."

"No, I really shouldn't," he responds.

Ooh, I love the concern. But still -

"Because your mate is here."

Oh. Not concern, then. Fine.

"And I won't be able to hold Kain off from killing people for much longer."

I can see Kain, now. He is standing outside the ward with his hands pressed to his temples, as if suffering some vampire migraine, and in front of him the cop and the nurse are standing like zombies in some bad movie, their expressions slack. Of course. Charm. Not a quality I think I'll personally ever associate with Kain again.

Raziel backs through the door, carrying me in his arms as if I weighed no more than a kitten, and Kain doesn't even acknowledge I am there. His concentration is palpable, although I can still feel his touch in my mind - it feels like he's amused at my being alive, amused at his own reaction to me.

But of course he realised how this worked long before I did. He opens his bright red eyes for a second, looks at me.

Your...wish is my...command...

How many people is he controlling? How long before he over-taxes even his immense abilities?

I look up at Raziel, and he turns his white-blank eyes down to me. Trusting. Serving me faithfully. Oh, no. Please.

"Take me back to my home, Raziel," I say.

It turns out the boys have been pretty busy since I blacked out.

They skipped the club before the police came, and on Raziel's insistence, they left me behind. He must've figured that other humans would see to it that I got the treatment I needed. Kain, apparently, had been dragged away under pain of pain, because he wanted to fight all comers.

They had hidden out in the park a few streets away until the ambulance came for me, then they'd both jumped the ambulance and ridden on its roof all the way to the hospital. Once there, Kain had charmed half the staff in order to get Raziel into the wards without arousing suspicion. No mean feat, considering how much he'd been trying to kill me a short time previous.

And once there, Raziel had seen what I, thankfully, had not.

My boyfriend had been there, in the same hospital, being treated for a severe laceration wound in the shoulder. According to Raziel, who is bringing me up to speed while he carries me through the backstreets of my city as the dawn is just beginning to pale the sky on the horizon, he had his arm in a tight surgical sling and was raising hell with both the police and the medical staff.

"They won't believe him if he tells them," says Raziel, as he sets me down gently outside my front door. The door itself is closed, and there is a thin strip of police cordon across the wooden panels. Kain tears this off. He must just be a natural vandal.

I wish I could tell Raziel that it's not what my boyfriend tells the police that I'm worried about anymore. It's what will happen if he comes home and finds me. And he will come, I know it.

I unlock the door and walk back into my house, leaning a little on Raziel's arm.

The box of the Soul Reaver game is still on the sofa where I left it, minus its manual (must ask Raziel what it was he did with that) and I can see Kain eyeing up the Blood Omen 2 case with interest. I pick the Soul Reaver case up, look at Raziel. His eyes narrow slightly, and he makes an empty gesture with his claws.

If you say jump...I say, how high?

I turn to Kain. "Thank you," I manage to say. "Thank you for coming back for me."

He looks, for one unguarded moment, completely bewildered. "I had very little choice in the matter," he snaps, and I know he doesn't mean Raziel's threats.