CHAPTER TWO
Sano woke slowly, groggily. Even when he'd been alive, he'd hated getting up in the mornings. Now his 'mornings' were evenings.
The red flashing light of his answering machine on the bedside table caught his attention immediately. He didn't have the sort of human buddies who left messages on his answering machine, and he knew he hadn't had any messages when he'd fallen into that dead dreamless sleep at dawn that claimed vampires as soon as the sun rose.
It took a lot to wake a vampire during the day, and even then they had a tendency to go comatose within a few minutes of being woken. Who could have been woken from their sleep and been coherent enough to leave a message? Pressing the button, he played the message.
"Sano. When you get this message, get to my place immediately. I've got a problem. I need your help."
It was Katsu. Sano recognized the voice on his answering machine the minute he heard the first word. Even when when Katsu and Sano had been part of the Sekihoutai as children before they were turned, Katsu had never sounded this panicked.
Sano pulled on his clothes and sped through the streets to his friend's house, cursing Katsu's desire to live in the seedy suburbs of L.A. rather than in a nice clean shiny high-rise apartment building like him.
He shoved open the wooden door in Katsu's wall and strode quickly up the concrete path, stopping dead at the unmistakable smell of blood at his feet. There was a large patch of it, and even in the chill of the evening, flies still worried at its edges. It was clearly human blood, not vampiric. Gathering himself, Sano leapt over it gracefully and pushed open Katsu's door.
"Sano. You came."
Katsu was there, head lolling back against a cabinet, sitting on his kitchen counter. Sano drew in a breath with a hiss. A convention, that. Vampires really didn't need to breathe anymore.
Katsu's right cheek was marred with a line of blisters. So were the arms that lay at his side, and his feet and lower legs, which dangled against the cabinets below the countertop on which he sat. He'd been sun burned. His shoulders and chest looked OK, and his upper thighs and torso must have been as well, for he was wearing boxer style shorts, and Sano knew from experience that putting clothes on over sun blisters was too painful to contemplate.
Katsu's gaze shifted from Sano's shocked face to the granite kitchen workstation in front of him. On it lay a girl, a big red hole in the middle of her cream colored chemise, and blood stained towels on either side of her.
"How is she?" Katsu asked tiredly.
"Screw her. How are you?" Sano got straight to the point.
"I'll live." Katsu smiled wanly, then winced as the expression pulled at his burned cheek.
"What happened?" Sano felt his anger rising. Katsu was his friend, one of the few he could still hang around with from his human days, and if someone was responsible for burning him, they would pay.
Slowly, Sano got the whole story out of Katsu, how he'd picked up a girl in a club – nothing unusual in that, Katsu was a chick magnet and found his human blood supply that way. He'd asked her to be his partner for the night and she'd seemed happy to go along with it. Again, not unusual. There were a lot of kinky chicks in L.A. willing to try anything, whether they believed in vampires or not. Some even became addicted to the sensation, enjoying the physical act that often accompanied bloodletting. They'd no more betray a vampire's identity than an addict would the drug supplier he depended upon. Others panicked afterward and had to be hypnotized to forget that they'd donated blood, and not to the Red Cross. Either way, clubs were a good way to pick up a blood source for the evening. If a vampire didn't get human blood at least once a month or so, he or she would get restless, irritable, and twitchy. Twitchy vampires became desperate ones, and that caused trouble no one was willing to allow. The rest of the time animal blood would do fine.
This girl had been drugged. Since it was past time for Katsu to get his human blood fix, he hadn't looked at her too closely, just assumed from her behavior and her laughing assent to his questions, that she was willing to give him what he wanted. So he'd taken her home only to find she'd woken with no memory of what had gone on the night before, seen the bite marks and assumed that meant she would become a vampire. So she'd walked outside in the sun where she thought Katsu couldn't follow, and staked herself. Now she lay on the granite table; it was night, and she still hadn't woken.
"So let me get this straight." Sano said, leaning against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed, and nudging the base of the workstation with his foot. "The girl is so upset at the thought of turning vampire that she stakes herself. Then you go and turn her while she's unconscious. And now you're wondering why she won't wake up? Hell, if I were her I wouldn't want to wake up to my worst nightmare either."
Katsu winced and turned his face away. "I didn't know what else to do to save her."
"Why didn't you just let her die, if that's what she wanted?"
"I couldn't. This was all my fault."
Sano snorted. "Yeah, right. Like you put the date rape drug in her drink. Like you knew she wouldn't remember agreeing to let you drink from her. Like you…"
"She was a virgin."
Sano closed his mouth with a snap and abandoned what he was about to say. Cripes. What could he say to that? Vampires purposely chose blood suppliers who were jaded simply because they didn't panic like the innocent did. It wasn't a hard or fast rule, it was just common sense to pick people who lived fast lifestyles and were used to off the wall requests from the strangers they went home with.
"I should have known. If I hadn't been so hungry, if I'd gone a bit slower, taken my time with her more…I should have sensed it."
Katsu looked so dejected that Sano knew he had to do something to keep him from wallowing in his depression. It was time to get tough. "Go to bed."
"What?" Katsu lifted his chin and stared at his friend.
"Go to bed." Sano repeated. "This was an emergency turning. The girl probably won't wake for another day. You've still got that coffin in your basement I got you for a joke on your last birthday, right?"
Wordlessly, Katsu nodded.
"I'll put her in there and lock it so if she wakes she can't hurt herself until we have a chance to talk to her and explain what's happened." Sano kept his voice low and soothing as he put an arm around Katsu's shoulders and pushed him gently off the kitchen counter and onto his feet, and began moving him in the direction of his bedroom. "You're burned. It's gonna take you a couple of days to recover. Luckily you just fed."
Sano pointedly ignored the way Katsu shuddered at the memory of the fiasco that had been, and continued. "So you won't have to go out for a few days. Just in case, I'll get some of the blood bags from my freezer and put them in your refrigerator to defrost. You really should have your own supply on hand, you know."
"I never needed to before." Katsu objected, more from habit than any real desire to argue.
"Yeah, I know. You didn't want the chicks to open your refrigerator and freak out. But honestly, Katsu, how many suppliers have you brought home who wanted to cook for you, even before they knew what you were?"
It was an old familiar argument between the two of them, and it got them companionably to the bedroom and Katsu tucked up into bed before it ended.
As soon as the bedroom door closed, Sano went to work. Vampires healed much faster than regular humans, but sun burn worked differently. It damaged their tissue deeply, and took a lot longer to heal. Same thing with holy water burns. Katsu would be out of it for a while, sleeping both day and night until he was better.
The girl, on the other hand…
Sano stared down at her in cold dislike. She was one of those humans who looked younger than they were. She had to be in her mid to late twenties, though she looked barely out of her teens. The main reason why she looked young was her size. She was on the short side, with soft, delicate features. Bangs and a blunt cut page boy style haircut framed her cheeks with two chestnut colored wings of hair falling down by her cheekbones and ending just over her collarbone and shoulders. She looked a bit like a china doll.
Shrugging, Sano scooped her up, carried her downstairs and dumped her into the black coffin with the white silk lining. He locked it firmly and set a few cinder blocks on top for good measure. Newly turned vampires were weak, but there was no sense taking chances.
OOO
Six hours before dawn she woke. Reading the newspaper in Katsu's living room, Sano heard her soft cry of terror. He heard too, the scrape of her fingernails against the silk lid of the coffin. Soon the noise of shredding silk was replaced by splintering wood, but the cinder blocks kept the lid on tight.
Ignoring the girl's panicked breaths – she hadn't discovered yet that respiration was optional – he turned to the sports pages and read the stories leisurely. This girl caused Katsu to get burned to save her. Let her wait.
Eventually, about an hour later, Sano decided it was time to let her out and introduce her to her new life. He jumped down the basement steps in one leap, just because he could, and sauntered over to the coffin. The lid was thumping faintly, and he could hear her fists pounding monotonously against it, so he brushed the cinderblocks to the floor. The crash sounded loud in the enclosed basement, but Sano knew that Katsu was in a deep healing sleep and wouldn't hear it.
He flicked the lock off the coffin's edge with one fingernail, and allowed the girl to shove the lid open violently.
She instantly sat up, gasping, and leaned over the edge, hands dangling over the side. All of her fingers were bloodied with the black thick vampiric ooze that had replaced her human blood.
Schooling his face into a nonchalant mask, Sano refused to allow pity to color his treatment of the girl. She might be one of them now, and knowing Katsu he'd probably take her under his wing until she learned the ropes so she'd be around for a while, but he didn't have to like her.
"So, you're awake."
The girl stiffened and swung her head around to look at him.
Sano had found a toothpick in Katsu's kitchen and was chewing on it, hands thrust into his pants pockets and his usual smirk on his face. He wasn't going to baby her. Why should he?
"Who are you?" she asked, her voice hoarse with having choked back screams for the past hour.
"I'm a friend of Katsu's." Sano spit the toothpick out of his mouth and smiled, deliberately baring his fangs. "You remember him, right? The guy you…"
She must have kicked as she twisted and fell out of the coffin on the side away from Sano, because the whole thing fell off the two wooden sawhorses it had been resting on.
"Get away from me! Don't come near me! Don't let him come near me!"
She sounded frantic, looked it too the way she'd backed herself right up against Katsu's worktable. She stared around the basement, saw the stairway behind Sano, and turned wide, frightened eyes on him, the obstacle in her way.
"Calm down, missy. No one's going to hurt you. It's not like it's all that easy to hurt a vampire."
She sobbed when the last word left his mouth. It was a harsh, terrified sound, and it grated on Sano's nerves. It was time he sat her down and told her the cold hard facts about her new existence. He took a step forward.
She turned, scrambled up the worktable and thrust herself through the small window with the painted panes that lay in the wall at the ceiling of the basement. Sano had forgotten it was there, and stepped back as the shower of glass shards she left in her wake rained down on the worktable, the fallen coffin, and the floor. He liked the suit he was wearing, and didn't want it to tear.
He stepped up to the table, but realized he was too big to fit through it. Her new strength, though less than that of a seasoned vampire, had allowed her to propel herself through the window just by lunging up from the tabletop. That strength hadn't, however, protected her from the glass. Her blood stood out on the edges of the broken glass remaining in the frame.
Sighing, Sanosuke turned and bounded up the stairs to go after her, when he heard a moan coming from Katsu's room. Abandoning the chase, he rushed to his friend's bedside.
Katsu's head was twitching from side to side. Vampires usually didn't dream, but in the throes of sun sickness all sorts of unusual and unpleasant things happened to their bodies. Pulling his cellphone out of his pocket, Sano dialed a vampire who'd been a doctor once upon a time. Forget the girl. When Katsu felt better enough to ask, he'd just say she was still pissed off at Katsu for turning her without her permission, and she'd gone to find another vampire to show her the ropes. After all, hadn't the girl said, "Don't let him come near me?" You couldn't get any clearer than that.
She'd probably fall asleep out in the open somewhere and burn to ashes in the sun, not having the sense to get under cover. Or if she started acting wildly, another vampire would kill her to prevent their kind from being discovered. Either way, if she disappeared then Katsu would eventually forget her. His loyalty was to his friend, not to the girl who'd gotten him burned. If he'd been a human still, he might have thought differently, but becoming a vampire had hardened him. You had to be hard to survive.
