A Vampire's Desire

Chapter Three

Rose

The ambulance siren whirred overhead, but the thud of my heart against my eardrums drowned it out. I squeezed Mom's cold hand tight as the paramedics went about their job. One wore a stethoscope that she roamed around Mom's chest while the other inserted an IV into Mom's arm. "What did you say happened?" asked the one with the stethoscope, her face a mask of bewilderment.

I struggled to pull myself together to answer her question. "I heard a loud bang, then I rushed out into the hallway and she was just lying there." I thought of the bizarre wounds in her neck, the twin holes that shrank away while I stared at them. Do I tell them? They disappeared from Mom's neck without so much as a bruise. It didn't make any sense. How could markings like that just vanish?

An hysteric, glib voice in the back of my head was busy drawing connections. You know what they looked like, Rose. And with blood bank thefts on the rise...you know. Put it together.

But it was absurd. Even if someone pretending to be a vampire snuck into our house, how could the physical evidence left on Mom's body just dissolve like that?

Because it was a real vampire.

"Stop it," I muttered to myself. Thankfully, the paramedics were too busy saving my mother's life to pay my crazy ramblings any attention.

But the voice refused to back down. It blared in my thoughts, Vampire! Vampire! Vampire! like a mantra.

I told myself it was work exhaustion, mixed with the sudden shock to the system brought on by Mom's fall. Because that's all it was, I told myself. She was officially a senior, and sometimes seniors fell. Age made us brittle, it was a simple fact of life. All living things eventually grow weak. I hadn't actually seen anything strange on her neck, it was simply vestiges of a nightmare overlaying reality in a moment of panic.

"Are there any wounds?" asked one paramedic to the other.

"None I see."

The first turned to me. "Did she bleed at all as a result of the fall?"

I furrowed my brow, the voice growing louder in my thoughts. I tried to beat it back down. "No."

They shared bemused looks, then retrieved a blood bag and fed its contents through her IV tube.

Vampire!

"Shut it!"

"Huh?" the woman paramedic questioned.

"Oh, uh, nothing, sorry, just...tired."

She nodded and went back to deciphering the mystery, while the voice in my head went on whispering its one word refrain. I couldn't shake it. In the same way I could never quiet my sixth sense for onlookers, I couldn't stop my brain from trying to convince me of the impossible.

What's worse, by the time we reached the hospital, I kind of thought I was starting to believe it. What is happening?

I followed behind the gurney that conveyed Mom to an emergency room, all the while thinking to myself this couldn't possibly be happening. They wheeled her into the room, then shut the doors, closing me out.

I paced for an indeterminate amount of time. Terror like that plays a funny game with time. Five minutes can feel like five hours or five seconds in its distortion. The hospital was otherwise quiet, almost eerily so. When I checked the clock, it read 1:32. Other rooms were occupied by ICU patients, resting soundly in the dark. A nurse sat behind the desk, filling out paperwork. At the far end of the hall, a janitor sloshed sudsy water across the floor and dragged an old mop back and forth in a slow, methodical motion, untouched by the frenzy happening in room 213. I envied him. Never thought I'd envy a janitor.