Blood Therapy (Kismet Knight, Ph.D., Vampire Psychologist) (48 page)

I hugged him. “Yes. Thank you.”

He gave a quick bow and vanished.

“Oh no! The Master’s gone,” Dennis said.

“The Master’s gone,” Walter echoed.

“Doctor Knight! Doctor Knight! I want you to meet Wanda!” Nicky raced over, pulling a short, ample red-haired woman by the hand. She was wearing a uniform from a well-known Mexican fast-food restaurant. “This is Wanda, Doctor Knight. Isn’t she beautiful?”

“Hello, Nicky. It’s nice to meet you, Wanda.”

“Same here, Doctor Knight. Nicky talks about you all the time.” She looked at Nicky, who had wrapped himself around her. “Nicky, could you give the doctor and me a minute to talk alone?”

He pouted, but reluctantly let go of her. “Okay. I’ll go and look out of the window and chew on myself.”

Great.

She waited until Nicky walked away, then grabbed my arm. “Doctor, you’ve got to help me.” She let go of me. “He won’t go away—I’ve been trying to get him to move out for years, but he’s too afraid to make the change. Please! As you can see”—she pointed to her clothing—“I have a career. I work the night shift, and I’m up for a promotion to taco-maker. That’s a very important position. I’m so stressed out all the time about Nicky’s neediness that I’m afraid I’ll lose my job.”

Oh, geez. So Nicky hasn’t been leveling with me.

“I’m sorry you’re feeling so stressed, Wanda. What would you like me to do?”

“Hi, Doctor Knight. I got rid of all my dead bodies—even the cats. But it’s so hard. I miss them. I had a small relapse yesterday and Eleanor got so mad—”

“Hey, buddy, I’m talking to the doc. Beat it,” Wanda said, shoving Marvin aside.

Marvin, who had a fear of being touched, screamed at the top of his lungs.

“What’s wrong? Are you all right, Doctor Knight?” Apollo, my very first vampire client, rushed over. He’d made great progress in his ability to deal with the sight of blood. “Why is he screaming?”

Everyone in the room closed in.

“I’ll get more chains, Doctor Knight. We’ll take care of this.”

“We’re gonna die, we’re gonna die—” Dennis wailed.

Medina, who hadn’t completely grown her leg back since diving off a skyscraper, hobbled over on crutches. “Who’s going to die?
I
want to die—”

“I can’t breathe in here,” Betty said, dramatically resting the back of her hand on her forehead. “Someone open a window—”

“Everything’s okay, Betty,” I said. “You really don’t need to breathe.”

“Doctor, Marvin brought home another body yesterday. Can I talk to you privately?”

“Let’s make an appointment, Eleanor—”

“Hey! I’m standin’ right here! Don’t push in front of me. I need to talk to the doc.” Wanda, who appeared to have quite a bit of muscle under the padding, started pushing everyone away from me.

Walter and Dennis jumped up and down, slapping themselves on the head, as was their habit.

All at once, vampires started punching and kicking one another. Arms and legs flailed. Blood dripped and spewed from cuts, scrapes, and amputated limbs.

As I backed away, I saw Wanda leap into the air and throw herself down like a professional wrestler on top of Eleanor, who surprised me by holding her own against the much larger taco-maker.

I backed into the waiting room and listened to the carnage.

“Are you all right?” Devereux asked.

I started. “What are you doing here? I thought you left.”

“I thought I should check back in a few minutes. I had no idea Chain was going to invite quite so many vampires. And Nicky’s friend Wanda seemed especially … energetic. I can see I was right.”

“I know they meant well.”

“Yes, they did. Would you like to leave now?”

“Leave? But they’re trashing my office.”

“Never fear.” Devereux glanced off to the side for a moment, and several vampires dressed in Crypt security black leather popped into the hallway. “Take them all home, then arrange for the office to be thoroughly cleaned.”

The men—er, vampires—in black rushed into my office, grabbed two or three fighting vampires each, and disappeared. Within a minute, the office was empty.

Beautiful silence.

“It appears you have finished work early, my love. What shall we do to celebrate?”

“I know just the thing.”

February really is the dreariest month, even in the magical Rocky Mountains. Despite the fact that we had a couple of seventy-five-degree days last week, when Denver inhabitants donned shorts and T-shirts, and sunbathed on roofs, now the front range is socked-in by low clouds, impending snow, and below-zero temperatures. But still, there’s no place quite like Colorado.

After all the events of early January, it took me a couple of weeks to sort myself out and to begin to feel somewhat normal again—well, as normal as someone who counsels the undead, drinks the blood of ancient vampires, has stellar sex with a master bloodsucker, and communicates with ghosts can feel.

Thankfully, my unexpected vacation left no permanent scars on my private practice. It’s as busy as ever. Many human clients told me they appreciated the “chatty” call they got from my answering service representative. I shudder to think what Anne Boleyn might have “chatted” about, so I didn’t ask, and nobody volunteered the information. I imagine I could ask her, but she and I have created a connection of sorts, and I wouldn’t want her to think I don’t trust her. Even though she’d be the first to acknowledge that she’s usually less than trustworthy. But is any vampire?

To my surprise, Anne asked recently if she could come to see me as a therapist. With my new ability to sense vampires’ emotions, I got the clear hint that, rather than coming for actual therapy, she thought it would be amusing to shock me with tales of her wild life—not that I can really be shocked anymore. Well, never say never. But perhaps underneath her quest for a good time is a need to be listened to—who knows? Maybe we’ll try a session or two and see how it goes. I hear she’s been visiting a certain European monarch’s castle late at night, teaching the twentysomething grandson her own version of the
Kama Sutra
.

Anne tells me that despite my ongoing relationships with vampires, my brain is still unharmed, and, for the most part, uninfluenced.

Cerridwyn says the same. I went to her house for another reading and she verified that not only is my brain healthy, but it’s stronger. She said I’ve done a good job practicing the hum. I’ve discovered that sound magic is a potent, fascinating branch of the occult, and I haven’t even begun to utilize the possibilities. Of course, Cerridwyn knew about my drinking the elders’ blood before I mentioned it, and she agreed it was a necessary precaution. She also said I would be surprised by the new manifestations of my abilities over time—although, she wouldn’t be specific—and that I should prepare myself for another personal and professional challenge thanks to my affiliation with vampires. Besides sounding ominous, it strikes me as exhausting. Challenges because of the vampire world? So, what else is new? She agrees that it’s a good idea for Devereux and me to start over, to take things slowly. She says both of us need to learn more about ourselves before trying to forge a union—or whatever it is we’re forging. I couldn’t agree more.

Nicky disappeared. Since he’d been so disciplined about keeping all his appointments with me, I became concerned when he missed one. After all, he
had
been actively suicidal and self-destructive. But even taking his mental state into account, I strongly suspected that Wanda had found a way to get rid of him. After watching their interpersonal dynamic the night of the gathering at my office, it didn’t take my new ability to guess what had happened. Unfortunately, I was right. At my request, Devereux assigned a few members of his security force to search for the young bloodsucker, and they easily read the murder details (is it murder if an already dead creature is killed again?) from Wanda’s mind. She’d beheaded and staked him in the basement of the fast-food restaurant where she worked. Apparently she’d desperately wanted the job as head taco-maker and was more than a little insane herself. Nicky was young enough that his remains could still be identified. At Devereux’s command, Wanda was destroyed on the spot—not because the Master has any particular interest in the fate of any random individual, but as a gift to me. I still don’t know how I feel about that. I’ll miss Nicky.

Esther has discovered an unscented sparkling body paint that she can wash off every few days and have a new friend reapply for her. The friend— Fred, a gangling boy who suffered a catastrophic brain injury right before being turned—shares her
Twilight
addiction. They’re both joyfully sparkling.

Marvin and Eleanor broke up. Despite Devereux’s insistence that he stop collecting dead human bodies, Marvin’s compulsion prevails, and Eleanor refuses to accommodate him. She has moved back into her old apartment in one of the Master’s buildings and has adopted a few cats. Well, actually, a lot of cats. We might have a new therapy issue to confront.

Marvin’s depression has increased since he lost both Eleanor and all his hoarded bodies, but he comes to individual therapy regularly and is exploring the underlying causes of his addiction. We experienced a setback recently when Marvin lost control of himself and brought a couple of his favorite—particularly ripe—dead bodies to a session. He’d dressed them like Civil War soldiers, one in blue, one in gray, and he threw such a panic-driven temper tantrum when I said he couldn’t keep them that building security had to be called. He was held at a “vampire jail” that nobody will explain to me and kept in solitary confinement in a coffin for days. I don’t know yet if his switch to talking about his fear of the dark is a positive change from his dead-body fetish or not. I suppose we’ll find out.

My Fear of Fangs group celebrated recent biting breakthroughs for Chain and Betty, who has also been practicing not breathing. Chain was so proud of himself that he got carried away and bit everyone in the group last week. I had to schedule individual sessions for everyone to manage the fallout. I’m thinking of putting the group on hiatus for a month to give them time to recommit to the process. And besides, after the last bloody session, my office needs new carpet.

Olivia kept her word about counseling. She’s still grieving the true death of Colin, and she will be for a long time, but she has begun to venture out of her penthouse occasionally. At Colin’s insistence, she has stopped inviting mediums to channel him, because he told her it felt like a violation—a psychic rape. But as he promised, he joins us regularly for our psychotherapy sessions, sometimes listening as Olivia pours out her heart about losing him, but more often giving encouragement and suggestions for her healing and growth. He makes quite a wonderful co-therapist. He has asked if he can have his own private consultation with me in the near future. Apparently, he has some otherworldly decisions to make. I’m hoping he’ll answer a few questions I’ve come up with about the afterlife—or as he describes it, the parallel dimension he inhabits now.

Despite saying he wouldn’t be available to me in the future—that he didn’t interfere in the lives of humans—Zephyr has shown up in my dreams a few times. I suppose it’s possible that he’s only a figment of my nocturnal imagination, but I think it’s really him. Each visit, he takes me back to the vast underground caverns in South America and shows me yet more priceless artifacts and treasures. I get the feeling that he likes having an appreciative audience. Sometimes I go to bed early, just in case he wants to play tour guide that night. He informs me he’ll collect me on the same date yearly so I can drink the elders’ blood. And he did drop a bit of a bombshell: it turns out the magical concoction slows my ageing process—so what will that mean for me?

Speaking of effects from the ancient blood, my ability to communicate with ghosts is definitely increasing. They’re everywhere, some more intrusive than others. Mostly they show up as reenactments of previous events—loops that play again and again. It has been very gratifying to verify that I can stop those replays with a combination of my words, emotions, and intentions. Discrete manifestations aren’t as easy to control. Discovering I’m being followed by a dead person—as opposed to an
undead
person—is becoming a regular occurrence. Some don’t speak to me; others do. So far, there’s no rhyme or reason. My not-really-serious question to myself when I met Colin, about whether or not I’d be counseling ghosts, was answered because the specters are showing up in my psychotherapy office now—whether there’s another client already present or not. I need a new game plan. Vampires and ghosts—what’s next?

Brown Hat’s videos—I just can’t get used to thinking of him as Jack Kent—are as educational and intriguing as he said they’d be. He gathered hours and hours of interviews with various vampires, including anecdotal accounts of their transformations, very powerful and evocative journalism. If he’d gone public with the recordings, the lid really would’ve been ripped off the coffin. If even only a few mortals believed them, the wall of secrecy protecting humans from vampires would have been breached, encouraging the bloodthirsty Dracul-sympathizers who want to return to being visible predators again. As horrible as it is to even contemplate, Brown Hat’s death was probably a good thing. He was right that the recordings would help me understand my blood-drinking clients better. I made a copy of the videos for Devereux, because he needed to see what some of
his
vampires are up to. Apparently, his coven is harboring many traitors who were captured on tape, draining humans regularly behind the Crypt. He isn’t happy.

Dr.—call me Ham—Taylor and I have begun meeting every other week to discuss all things paranormal. He was flabbergasted to learn about the “reality” of ghosts and magic. His view of the world has definitely been upended, but he’s coping. As much as I enjoy his company, I’m not sure meeting me was such a great thing for his peace of mind. He said he has scheduled his sex reassignment surgery and has decided to keep Hamilton as his first name. He said he’ll tell clients he is named after both sides of his family, which is true, and he’ll change the nickname from Ham to Hammy. I’m hoping I can persuade him that another nickname might be more appropriate for a professional. I wonder how long it will take me to remember to refer to him as she?