Ember’s defences dropped a fraction as she stared at her stranger, partially in relief, but primarily due to being bewildered as to what the hell he was doing there.
It was only when her eyes adjusted further, when she dared to take another step up for a closer look, that she saw it: dark liquid having spilt out from beneath his coat.
Blood.
Fuck.
She dropped back down a couple of steps. Injured vampires eventually self-healed. They self-healed even quicker if they fed. His instincts would dictate he fed.
Prospects of sabotage struck. A set-up. It was too much of a coincidence for it not to be – him being there in the café all that time and now on her stairwell. She thought back to the blonde woman’s wink. How easy it had been to get through that final stage. How maybe she hadn’t got through it at all. How maybe the conspiracy theories were right. How maybe the guys outside had been a part of it too.
Driven by her instincts for survival, she sprinted up the steps.
Despite her hand trembling, she eventually unlocked her door.
She glanced back down the stairs. He hadn’t moved a fraction.
Inside, she slammed her door behind her, bolted it, and fell back against it.
But if the authorities had intended sabotage, they could have done so long before then. And if he had been placed in the café as some kind of test of her resolve, they surely would’ve done better than some guy who, despite being good-looking to the point of inevitable distraction, hadn’t even been arsed to string a sentence together. Acknowledging her paranoia, she steadied her breathing. He was nothing to do with the authorities. And he’d be OK. He was a vampire – of course he’d be OK.
But there was also a chance he wouldn’t be; that maybe the injuries had been too severe.
She reached into the inside pocket of her coat for her phone. Unlocking it, she keyed in the emergency number.
But held back from connecting.
Any calls would be registered. The second she got through, everything would be recorded – her report of a vampire on her stairs. A vampire she couldn’t disprove a connection to. A vampire she couldn’t prove hadn’t come to visit her by prearrangement. Simply reporting his presence near her home would leave her implicated. It would throw open a whole raft of questions. Questions meant delaying her application – maybe even by months pending further investigation. It could destroy her chances altogether. One shadow of a doubt was all they needed. They didn’t need proof to condemn her: she needed proof of her innocence. And, right then, she had nothing.
Besides, she couldn’t call the emergency services anyway without knowing more. They were slow enough responding to human cries for help in Lowtown, let alone vampires.
As thoughts of her aunt’s final hours filled her head, reminding her of the cruel negligence of the system she’d turned to for help, pleaded with for help, she pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead to block out the pending spiral of despair she always teetered on the edge of when revisiting those memories.
She yanked herself back to the present. At the very least, they’d want to know if he was still alive. Her stomach churned, her heart beating a little faster at the prospect she might already be too late.
Stepping into her kitchenette, Ember grabbed a paring knife from the drawer. Phone in one hand, keys swapped for the knife in the other, she tentatively opened the door and peered back outside.
The stairwell remained silent. Her stranger remained face down and unmoving.
Leaving her door open behind her, Ember warily descended the steps, ready to make a hasty retreat at any moment.
Placing her phone down within easy reach on one of the steps, knife still gripped in her hand, Ember crouched beside him to press the fingers of her free hand against the pulse point on his wrist. His flesh was ice cold. She’d heard the rumours, just like anyone else growing up in Lowtown, but she’d never touched a vampire before. Had never actually made physical contact with one of his kind. But all her medical research for her college application supported her concern that he was too cold even for one of his kind. A glimmer of unwarranted grief tightened her throat as she waited for any sign of his characteristically slow-beating heart.
Waited in the silence. In the stillness.
Eventually, she felt it. Relief consumed her. But as she retained her fingers over his pulse, it was definitely too slow – weak too. She leaned a little closer to hear his breathing. It was shallow, intermittent.
It didn’t make any sense. Even if the injury had occurred a matter of minutes before her arrival, he should have been self-healing by now.
Something was wrong. Something was definitely wrong.
Knowing he was too far gone to wake up yet, or to have enough strength to do anything even if he did, she collapsed onto the step.
She had to make that call. Call and implicate herself in order to have any chance of saving his life. Unless…
He had a phone. He always had a phone with him. She’d seen him tuck it into the inside pocket of his coat enough times. She could call someone he knew. They could deal with it.
But then they could implicate her. Maybe use it against her.
She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead again as she cursed under her breath. She had to at least try. She had to at least test the water.
She reached for his hand and eased it aside to free up access to the inside of his coat, and caught sight of a glint of metal.
Keys. No doubt the keys he’d used to get in prior to collapsing. If she had any doubt he lived there, it dissipated.
Bypassing them, she reached inside his coat; she heaved a sigh of relief as her fingers brushed plastic. Removing his phone, she withdrew back up to the top of the steps. She slid the bar across the screen. Of course it was locked.
‘Shit.’
Knees to her chest, elbows resting on both, knuckles pressed to her temples, she stared down at him.
She couldn’t leave him to die. Not only because she didn’t believe herself capable, but because he’d done nothing to deserve it. He’d done nothing to her. He’d never even shown the slightest indication of wanting to hurt her. He’d had more than enough opportunities if he’d meant her any harm. He could have been waiting in the stairwell for her at any point – if he knew she lived there.
She eased back down to rejoin him. Switching her phone light on, she peeled his jacket back – and recoiled at seeing his shirt sodden with blood.
He wasn’t just injured, something was badly wrong. There was no way he should have been bleeding out that much. Vampire coagulation was more advanced even than that of the lycans. She knew enough about vampire physiology to know that. Everyone knew that.
Ember ran back up to her apartment and grabbed the nearest towel. Crouching beside him again, she abandoned her knife on the steps to bunch up the fabric and apply pressure to his wound.
Holding the pads of her fingers on his pulse point again, she counted. Easily fifteen seconds passed between beats. She counted nearer twenty seconds a couple of minutes later.
She knew exactly what was happening. It was all the confirmation she needed: he was dying.
‘Shit, shit, shit,’ she hissed under her breath as she continued to check her watch, her own pulse lifting as his slowed.
If his beats dropped to three a minute, he wasn’t coming back. What he needed was human blood, and fast. He would self-heal then, unless he was at the point where he was already too weak.
Unless her continued delay meant she was already far too late.
Heart pounding, keeping pressure applied to his wound, Ember unlocked her phone and dialled the emergency number.
Out of the choice of human or third species related incidents, she picked third species. Out of the sub-categories of vampire, lycan, or other, she picked vampire. Out of crime related or medical related, she picked medical.
And she waited.
And she waited.
She checked her watch.
Ten minutes later, which felt more like twenty amidst his weakening pulse, she was still waiting.
‘We will get to your call as soon as we can. All lines are busy. We will get to your call as soon as we can. All lines are busy. We will get–’
With a growl and a ‘fuck!’, Ember conceded and disconnected.
She could call Harry. But that would only implicate him too. And there was no way she would risk him coming up that back alley with no idea if her attackers were still out there waiting.
But she couldn’t sit there doing nothing, waiting for some miracle to happen.
Flapping his jacket back again, she lifted his T-shirt to examine the wound more closely under the light of her phone’s torch. It was deep, most likely a stab wound. But as she wiped away the blood with the towel, the shape of the wound, the type of abrasion and the ring of dirt told her exactly what it was: a gunshot wound.
Only gangsters could afford guns in Lowtown. The guns themselves weren’t the issue; it was the availability of bullets that had depleted over the decades. Yet someone had obviously deemed her stranger worthy of taking one. A hate crime maybe. Or he’d got himself embroiled with the wrong people.
She pressed the towel over the wound again. She stared back down at the keys under his hand. There was only one option left unless he was to die in front of her.
She knew it was insane, negligent, but the prospect of not helping him felt even more ludicrous. She couldn’t let him die in front of her. Couldn’t let him die because she was more concerned about bettering herself.
She tugged off her coat and pulled off her sweater. She used the latter to wrap around his waist to keep the towel pressed over the wound. Laying her coat over him to offer some extra warmth, she grabbed his keys. She ploughed up the stairs. She shoved the key in the lock to Cam’s apartment. She heaved a sigh of relief when it turned.
The place was the exact mirror image of her own, so she knew exactly where she was going.
She hurried into the kitchenette and yanked open drawers and cupboards, searching for where he might keep his spare syringes. Because all vampires had syringes. For a multitude of reasons, connected feeds – or ‘bites’ – had long been outdated in exchange for syringe feeds.
Finding none, she headed to the bathroom next to it. There was only one cabinet and it was bare.
She pushed the bedroom door open. And halted at the threshold as the sight in front of her confirmed her situation was a hell of a lot worse than she’d first thought.