I dumped my covers on the floor. The rare old book met the same fate - but I was too worried about Chad to stop and rescue it. I ran out of my bedroom and took the requisite four steps to the boy's room. The door wouldn't open.
The knob turned, so it wasn't locked. I put my shoulder against the door, but it didn't budge. I tried to use the walking stick, which was still warmer than it should have been, as a crowbar, to force the door open, but it didn't work. There was nowhere to get a good place to pry.
"Let me," whispered Stefan just behind me.
"Where have you been?" I said, relief making me sharp. With the vampire here, the ghost would go.
"Hunting," he said, putting his shoulder to the door. "You looked like you had everything under control."
"Yeah," I said. "Well, appearances can be deceiving."
"I see that."
I heard the wood begin to break as it gave reluctantly for the first few inches. Then it jerked away from the vampire and flung itself against the wall with a spiteful bang, leaving Stefan to stumble into the bedroom.
If my room had been cold, Chad's was frigid. Frost layered everything in the room like unearthly lace. Chad lay still as the dead in the center of his bed - he wasn't breathing, but his eyes were open and scared.
Both Stefan and I ran for the bed.
The ghost wasn't gone though, and Stefan didn't scare it away. We couldn't get Chad out of the bed. The comforter was frozen to him and to the bed, and it wouldn't release him. I dropped the walking stick on the floor and grabbed the comforter with both hands and pulled. It quivered under my hold like a living thing, damp from the frost that melted from contact with my skin.
Stefan reached both hands just under Chad's chin and ripped the comforter in half. Quick as a striking snake he had Chad up and off the bed.
I collected the staff and followed them out of the room and into the hall, wishing I'd updated my CPR skills since high school.
But, safely out of the room, Chad started sucking in air like a vacuum.
"You need a priest," Stefan told me.
I ignored him in favor of Chad. "You okay?"
The boy gathered himself together. His body might be thin, but his spirit was pure tungsten. He nodded, and Stefan set him down on his feet, steadying him a little when Chad swayed.
"I've never seen anything like that," I admitted. I could see inside Chad's room to the water that ran down the rapidly clearing window. I looked at Stefan. "I thought ghosts avoided you."
He was staring into the room, too. "So did I. I..." He looked at me and stopped speaking. He tilted my chin up and looked at my neck, at both sides of my neck. And I realized that I'd been bitten a second time. "Who's been chewing on you, cara mia?"
Chad looked at Stefan, then hissed and used his fingers to make a pair of vampire fangs.
"Yes, I know," Stefan told him - signing it, too. "Vampire." Who knew? Stefan could sign; somehow it didn't seem like a vampire kind of thing to do.
Chad had a few more things to say. When he was finished, Stefan shook his head.
"That vampire isn't here; she wouldn't leave the Tri-Cities. This is a different one." He looked at me, angling his face so Chad couldn't see what he said. "How do you do it?" he asked conversationally.
"How do you go to a city of half a million and attract the only vampire here? What did you do, run into him while jogging at night?"
I ignored the panic in my stomach caused by being bitten twice by some jerk I'd only met once. Calling him a jerk made him less scary. Or it should have. But James Blackwood had bitten me twice while I slept through it... or worse, he'd made me forget it.
"Just lucky, I guess," I said. I didn't want to talk about it with Chad right here. He'd be a lot safer if he didn't know James Blackwood was a vampire.
Chad made a few more hand motions.
"Sorry," said Stefan. "I'm Stefan, Mercy's friend."
Chad frowned.
"He's one of the good guys," I told him. He gave me a "fine, but what's he doing in my house in the middle of the night" look. I pretended not to know what it meant. And I didn't speak ASL, so he was out there, too. Not fair, I supposed, but I didn't want to lie to him - and I really didn't want to tell him the whole truth.
"They need to get away from here," said Stefan. "And I'm taking you back to the Tri-Cities." He looked like he was going to say something else, but glanced at Chad and shook his head. Probably something more about Blackwood.
"Let me put some clothes on," I said. "I think better when I'm not running around in a T-shirt and underwear."
I dressed in the bathroom - getting a good look at the second bite while I did so. Then I covered them both up with my new used silk-embroidered red scarf.
Go back home? What would that accomplish? For that matter what had I accomplished here?
I'd come to help Amber and get out of Marsilia's sight for a little bit. That had succeeded - or at least not hampered Adam's negotiating. I didn't know that I'd helped Amber at all... not yet.
I stared at my pale, sleep-starved face and wondered how I was going to do that. Blackwood had them in his care.
I shivered. Though there was nothing I could pinpoint, no cold spot, no smell, no sound - I could feel something watching me. "Leave the boy alone," I told my unseen watcher.
And every hair on my head tingled with sensation.
I waited for it to attack or show itself. But nothing else happened, just that momentary connection, which faded more slowly than it had come.
Stefan knocked. "Everything all right?"
"Fine," I said. Something had happened, but I had no idea what. I was tired and scared and angry. So I brushed my teeth and opened the bathroom door.
Stefan and Chad were leaning on opposite sides of the hallway, discussing something that had their hands moving a mile a minute.
"Stefan."
He threw up his hands and appealed to me. "How can he think Dragon Ball Z is better than
Scooby-Doo? This generation has no appreciation for the classics."
I stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. Keeping my mouth turned away from Chad, I said, "You're a nice man."
Stefan patted my head.
I checked Chad's bedroom, but it looked as if nothing had happened, and not even a trace of dampness from the frost remained. Only the two pieces of comforter on either side of Chad's bed gave any hint of trouble.
"There are a couple of vampires that can do stuff like this," Stefan said, waving his hand at Chad's room.
"Move things without touching them, kill people without being in the room. But I've never heard of a ghost with this much power. They tend to be pathetic things trying to pretend they are alive."