Blood Ties Book One: The Turning. Jennifer Armintrout

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      The first malady to show itself was a body temperature of one hundred and four degrees. This struck the night of my heart failure and subsequent resuscitation. I was still heavily sedated, and I can’t say I’m sorry to have missed it. After forty long hours the fever broke and my body temperature lowered beyond the normal range, leaving me a cool 92.7 degrees.

      It wasn’t until I read over my medical files that I determined this was the first indication of my change. It baffled the doctors. One doctor noted such a thing wasn’t unheard of and cited evidence of low resting temperatures in coma patients. It was the equivalent of throwing his arms up in defeat, and it seemed to be the end of the matter as far as they were concerned.

      The second symptom was my incredible appetite. A nasal-gastric tube fed me without disturbing the repairs made to my throat. Still, every time the pharmaceutical fog lifted, I requested food. The nurses would frown and check their chart and then explain that while I received adequate nourishment through the tube, I missed the chewing and swallowing that accompanied the act of eating. And when the tube was removed, my voracious appetite didn’t show signs of decreasing. I ate astonishing amounts of food and, when I was sent home, smoked nearly a carton of cigarettes a day as though I’d been possessed by some nicotine-craving demon. Conventional wisdom held that smoking after major soft tissue repair was a bad idea, but conventional wisdom wouldn’t sate the maddening hunger. The masticating emptiness that plagued me was never satisfied. And the more I consumed, the wider the void became.

      The third sign didn’t become apparent until I had been discharged. After weeks of being immersed in the submarinelike interior of the hospital, I expected natural light to irritate me. But nothing could have prepared me for the searing pain that burned my skin when I stepped, blinking and disoriented, into the blazing white sunlight.

      Though it was mid-December, I felt as if I’d been tossed into an oven. My fever might have returned, but I wasn’t about to spend another night in a hospital bed. I took a cab home, shut the blinds and obsessively checked my temperature every fifteen minutes. Ninety, then eighty-nine, and it kept falling. When I realized my temperature matched the one displayed on the thermostat in the living room, I decided I’d lost my mind.

      Whether it was a subconscious need to protect myself from further shock or a conscious decision to suppress the reality of my situation, I refused to acknowledge how odd these things seemed. It became necessary to wear sunglasses during the daylight hours, inside or out. My apartment turned into a cave. The shades were closed at all times. I stumbled around in the darkness at first, but I eventually adapted to it. After a few days, I could easily read by the flickering blue light of the television.

      When I returned to my duties at the hospital, my strange habits did not go unnoticed. Because of my sudden light sensitivity, I requested night shifts. But focusing on anything amid all the beeping monitors and endless intercom pages proved impossible.

      But too many things defied explanation, too many questions science couldn’t answer. I wasn’t sure I wanted the most obvious explanation, either.

      I couldn’t hold out forever, though. It would only be a matter of time before I exhausted the knowledge available in medical journals and textbooks. Eventually, I came to accept the conclusion I’d dreaded.

      I paced in front of my computer for a full hour. What was I thinking? Grown people didn’t believe in the things that went bump in the night. Maybe I really did need the psychologist my doctor recommended.

      As a child, I’d never been allowed the luxury of watching Dark Shadows reruns, and any reading I’d done was strictly of an academic nature. Flights of fancy were discouraged in our household. My Jungian-analyst father considered them a warning sign of an underdeveloped animus and they were a red flag to my career-feminist mother who taught these things would lead me to become another foot soldier in the unicorn-lover’s army. I sat down and fired up the modem. If they were looking down on me from the heaven they’d insisted couldn’t logically exist, I’m sure they shook their heads in disappointment.

      In a bizarre way, it was their fault I had the courage to explore the possibility that I was a vampire. Occam’s razor was a theory my father constantly spouted around the house. God forbid an expensive item in our museum of a home ever be broken or misplaced. I’d always lie and say I wasn’t there, it was a statistical anomaly. Whenever I did this, my father would fix me with his best stare of paternal disapproval and quote, “One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.”

      In other words, if it looked like a duck, etcetera, I probably broke that lamp. Or, in the current case, if it looked like I’d become a vampire…

      “Thanks, Dad,” I muttered as I lit another cigarette. I’d accepted the fact they did nothing for me physically, but the routine soothed my jagged nerves. I typed vampire into a search engine and held my breath.

      Marginally more reliable than tea leaves or a magic eight ball, the Web offered possibility and anonymity, two crucial components to my quest for knowledge. Still, I felt a little silly as I clicked the first link.

      The number of people interested in—and even claiming to be—vampires astounded me, but the amount of information their Web sites offered was negligible. I found one promising lead, a professional-looking site with an area to post messages. Figuring it was as good a place to start as any, I began to explain my predicament to the dispassionate white text area.

      I’d never been good at expressing myself with the written word, and I felt sillier with each one I wrote. After several frustrated drafts, I gave up and shortened my entry to two fragmented sentences.

      “Attacked by vampire. Please advise.”

      I didn’t have to wait long for a reply. Before I could get up for a bathroom break, my e-mail program chimed.

      The first response informed me I was a psycho. The second suggested I might be watching too many late-night movies. Another tried to lovingly counsel me away from my obviously abusive relationship. For people who were supposed to believe in vampires, they sure didn’t seem very open to the possibility one might actually exist.

      I began deleting responses as they rolled in, until one subject line caught my eye.

       1320 Wealthy Ave.

      I recognized the street. It wasn’t far from where I lived. Just outside of downtown, it was a street where the college students spent money from home on Georgia O’Keeffe prints in poster stores next to bodegas where migrant families bought their meager groceries. I’d driven through the neighborhood, but I’d never stopped.

      The content of the e-mail was simply this: after sundown, any night this week.

      The digital clock in the corner of the computer screen’s display read 5:00 p.m. After sundown.

      I didn’t have to go to work for six more hours.

      I only had to get in my car and drive.

      But it seemed a dicey proposition. Curiosity had nearly killed this cat already. The sender could be a deranged groupie or vampire fanatic. Sure, he or she might be perfectly harmless and just having a bit of fun, but I didn’t relish the thought of spending another month in the hospital.

      How could I go to an unknown address at the advice of an anonymous e-mail? Well, it wasn’t exactly anonymous. [email protected] wasn’t exactly the most common e-mail address I’d ever seen. I logged on to usmail.com in hopes of finding a user СКАЧАТЬ