Fangtabulous (12 page)

Nelson reached for Bobby before Marcy could change her mind, and I got the side door open for us in an instant. I could have carried Bobby. I
wanted
to. But with the difference in our heights, it would have been an awkward thing. So much easier for Nelson in his near-giant form.

“Marcy, out,” I prompted.

She glared as she went, the blood tears now smeared across her face where she’d unsuccessfully wiped them away. It was a fierce look, but I could barely spare it the attention it deserved. Bobby still hadn’t awoken, and with that immense blast of power, I had a horrible fear that he’d burned himself out until there was nothing left.

“She’s not thinking straight right now,” Nelson comforted me as he jumped down after her. Like
he
was the voice of experience and not younger than us all.

“None of us are.”

We ran off into the woods alongside of the road. Waist-high grasses, brambles, and branches caught at us as we raced the onrushing sirens.

11

W
e stopped when we were far enough away from the road to be sure we were out of sight and earshot. No doubt someone would come looking for the girl who’d reported the accident, but we had a little time. The first responders would be too focused on helping those who needed them.

I’d purposely left my cell phone back at the van. There was nothing incriminating in the call history. Not much at all beyond the call to Eric, who they’d already have, and Bobby’s calls to me. His phone would have to go as well.

Marcy’s cell was our best bet to call for help. She’d been with Brent practically non-stop. They’d have had no reason to call back and forth.

“Marcy, give me your phone,” I ordered. She didn’t ask why. “Nelson, frisk Bobby for his. Separate the battery from the body and toss them as far as they’ll go in different directions.” Bobby moaned, as if in weak protest at being frisked, and my heart nearly restarted at the evidence that he was alive … or at least, undead.

“He’s waking up,” Nelson said unnecessarily.

“If you need someone to punch his lights out again,” Marcy said, “I volunteer.”

“
Marcy—
”

“Gina,”
she countered.

I had no answer for that. Or anything else. I fell back on the one thing I did have an answer for—our stranded state. That answer could be summed up in a word: Ulric. I dialed, and he picked up on the second ring. “Everything all right?”

I was baffled, until I remembered that he’d been worried about Bobby’s reaction to seeing the two of us together. It was just to question Olivia, but still …

“Did I wake you?” I asked.

“No, and you didn’t answer my question.”

“Everything’s not all right, but it has nothing to do with Bobby.” Marcy gave me a
look
. “Well, it does, but not what you’re thinking. Can you pick us up? We’ve had an accident out on I-95 and had to leave the van behind.”

“Where are you exactly?”

I told him as best I could.

“Find a mile marker,” he ordered, “and call me back. I’m leaving now.”

“Thanks, Ulric, I owe you.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll put it on your tab.”

He hung up and I looked at the others, a little afraid to leave Marcy alone with Bobby while I went searching for a mile marker. But she wouldn’t really be alone with him. Maybe it was best, anyway, for us all to stick together.

“We’ve got to hike down the road,” I told them. “Figure out where we are so that Ulric can come for us.”

“W’as goin’ on?” Bobby slurred from his sack-of-potatoes perch on Nelson’s shoulder.

It
sounded
like Bobby. I rounded Nelson to check his eyes. Blue. Awesomely, blissfully blue.

Marcy hip-checked me out of the way to get right into his face. “I’ll tell you what’s going on. You went all psycho, tried to kill Gina, and maybe did kill Brent. His heart stopped. It
stopped
… ” Marcy ended on a sob.

Bobby’s eyes met mine, as if he was hoping I’d say it wasn’t so, but I couldn’t. Instead, heart breaking again, I looked away and put an arm around Marcy. “It wasn’t him. You know that.”

She shook me off. “I don’t know anything but that we’re trapped. We can’t leave. We can’t stay. If Eric and Brent didn’t dump their IDs, the cops or the scrubs are going to find out who they are when they go looking for info to fill out their paperwork. You think the Feds don’t have us flagged in every database known to man? You think we didn’t all just sign our own death warrants?”

“
I think
,” Nelson cut in, “that we need to get a grip. Freaking out won’t do us any good.”

He started off at an angle toward the highway, so that we wouldn’t end up too close to the stalled van. He put Bobby down after a few feet. Apparently, an unconscious guy bumping against his back was one thing. A fully conscious Bobby, nose smooshed to his spine, was another matter entirely.

“
Behave
,” Nelson warned. “Or I let Marcy at you.”

Bobby looked back at me in appeal. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t remember any of it,” he said.

“We do,” Marcy answered coldly.

I let Marcy stomp and Nelson trudge ahead of us, and I stayed back with Bobby—only partially to keep an eye on him.

“How do you feel?” I asked, all caution.

“Like I’ve been tasered.”

“Yeah, that was you.”

“Me?”

“You let out a huge burst of power that hit us all.”

“That’s what made Brent’s heart stop?”

I nodded.

“I really tried to kill you?”

I looked up into those beautiful blue eyes and ached for him. “Yes.”

He took my hand—gently, tentatively. First just brushing me with his fingertips to see if I’d flinch away, and then sliding his palm against mine, twining our fingers together. “You know I would never, right? Not in my right mind … ” He raked his free hand through his hair, leaving it sticking up and out at crazy angles. Those shaggy brown locks did haphazard really well. Luckily, disheveled worked for him. “What’s happening to me?”

“That’s what we have to find out. We can’t leave town without the answers, but the others … we may lose them.”

He used our linked hands to haul me up short and look at me. Desperately. Like a starving man might look at a burger and fries. “You said ‘we.’ You’re with me? Even after I tried to kill you?”

“Wouldn’t you stand by me?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“Well then—”

He kissed me. A sudden, hard kiss that turned sweet. I didn’t let myself tense up, even though I flashed for a second on him coming for me back in the van, murder in his dark eyes. No, not his eyes. Someone else’s.

I drew back at that, unable to stop myself, and covered with, “We’d better catch up to the others. We’re not out of the woods yet.”

“Literally,” Bobby said with a smile, but it was bittersweet. He knew I’d pulled back, sensed that no matter what I’d said, we weren’t quite okay. Not really. But he wasn’t going to call me on it.

I wanted us to be okay. I really did. But until it was just him in there … until I knew that the person who leaned in for the kiss would be the same person involved in the follow through …

Oh, Bobby.

I grabbed his hand again. That much I could do. I pulled him along with me. Marcy was already on the phone to Ulric when we burst out of the bushes and onto the side of the road. I hoped that all the vegetation would spring back into place before too long—it’d been way too easy for me to follow the path Nelson had bulldozed. Of course, our trail would dead-end at the road.

“He’ll be here in two,” Marcy reported. “He’s only a mile or so down the road.”

She’d barely finished speaking when Ulric rolled up in a really retro Crown Vic in powder blue. It was so not him that I could only gawk.

“It’s my aunt’s,” he said defensively as he leaned across the passenger seat to get a look at us. “Get in.”

He didn’t have to tell us twice. I put Bobby next to Ulric in the shotgun seat, since I didn’t trust Marcy with him in the back.

Ulric had never taken the car out of gear. We rolled forward as soon as the final door was shut and pulled a U-turn the first chance we got, nearly bottoming out the car when the median wasn’t as low as it looked.

We were just getting up to speed as we passed the ambulance, with an EMT slamming the doors shut and a police car right behind it.

Marcy rolled down her half-frosted window, but I didn’t know what she hoped to see. “Is there any way to find out how they are?” she asked. “Maybe a radio station will have something?”

“So soon?” Ulric asked.

“Try traffic,” Bobby suggested. “Morning commute is only a few hours away. They’ll say if an accident or police investigation will slow things up.”

“How will that help? We already know there’s a stalled vehicle. We were
in
it,” Nelson said.

“They’ll say if it’s a
fatal
accident,” Bobby answered.

Marcy made a small sound and Bobby shut up, fiddling instead with the radio knobs.
Knobs
, not buttons … and the windows had been crank. Just some of the totally unimportant details the brain noted to avoid fixating on the really big stuff.

The traffic advisory channel was silent, so Ulric suggested a local station and Bobby dialed it in.

“How did it happen?” Ulric asked, nodding at the scene in the rearview mirror, which now showed the ambulance and police unit pulling out onto the road. Lights flared and whirled, but there were no sirens. I didn’t know if that was good, meaning Eric and Brent weren’t in imminent danger, or bad, meaning they were beyond help. The fast food commercial playing on the radio wasn’t any help. Rather than making a U-turn over the median, the ambulance rushed ahead to the next exit.

“I didn’t see any damage to the van,” Ulric commented. “Wait—before we get to that, where am I taking you? Home?”

“Not safe,” I answered. “Take us … ” Take us where?

“What about your place?” Marcy asked.

Ulric glanced at her. “I’m staying with the aunt I borrowed this car from. All I’ve got is a room. You’d be welcome to it but my aunt cleans like a fiend, leaving tread marks like Zen garden patterns when she vacuums. She’d be bound to notice the passing of so many feet.” He got a sudden evil grin on his face. “I’ll take you to Donato’s. You’ll fit right in.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nelson asked.

“Oh, you’ll see.” The expression on Ulric’s face said he was looking forward to it.

“Shh, everyone. Listen.” Bobby reached for the radio and turned it up.

“—found strangled in her room at North Shore Medical Center, where she’d been taken after surviving an earlier attack. Until tonight, no one had been assaulted in any place other than the Old Town section of Salem. However, sources say that given the strange serial nature of the crimes, the girl, who was being held for observation at the Medical Center, was left with a police guard outside her door. Where this guard was at the time of the attack is unclear. An investigation is underway … ”

I cried out. Zebra-stripe girl! But—but I’d
saved
her. She should have been fine. I couldn’t imagine what she needed observation for, unless it was hysteria or an abundance of caution on the part of the police. I wondered whose idea it had been to take her to the hospital. Hers? Her sister’s? Did she feel safer at the hospital with an officer on the other side of the door?

And who was that officer?

“Follow that ambulance!” I called.

“Is that where they’d take Brent and Eric?” Marcy asked, already knowing the answer.

“It would have to be,” Ulric said. “It’s the closest hospital.”

“Then step on it,” Marcy ordered.

If the Salem Strangler had taken possession of the cop back at the Old Jail, as Ty-the-Ghouligan had implied, at least we’d have a physical enemy to fight. But what if the cop was as innocent as Bobby? Would he do jail time for a crime he didn’t commit, just as Nelson would have if he’d ever gotten his own body back? And what was with this sudden rash of possessions, anyway?

I glanced over at Nelson and he looked sick, even paler than his usual white-bread vampire self. He had to be thinking about the parallels with what had happened to him. And did the cop’s compatriots know that he’d committed the murder? If so, they’d never believe he hadn’t been himself at the time. At best they might settle on temporary insanity. But if they didn’t know … if he hadn’t been caught in the act … then we had a killer cop on the loose with a badge, a gun, and the drive to use it.

So we had no plan, a life-sized liability in Bobby, a cop to corner, and a rescue to mount. Oh yeah, piece of cake. Moldy, maggot-infested sewage soufflé.

“What are we going to do about Bobby?” Marcy asked, echoing my thoughts.

We all looked at him.

“Knock me out,” he said.

“How?” Nelson asked. “You’re a vampire. You know us—super-fast healing and all. Plus, who’s to say your psycho side won’t wake up before you do?”

“The trunk,” I said, shooting an apologetic glance at Bobby. “I’m so sorry. I don’t see what else we can do. You’re too big a risk. We’ve got to secure you until we can figure out and fix the problem, and that’s all we’ve got.”

Bobby wanted to argue; I could see it in his face. It was on the tip of his tongue. Then he shut his mouth on whatever he was about to say and his face went all-over hard. I had a terrible feeling I was losing him, and that it was all my fault. “You do what you have to do,” he said, his voice just as hard as his face, which could have been set in stone.

“Bobby,
I—”

“Later,” he barked. Then, softly, like he wasn’t sure he meant me to hear it, he added. “I’d never lock
you
in the trunk.”

“And I’d never try to kill you,” I said, quicker than thought. Because if I’d given it even a moment, I’d have known better than to let it come out of my mouth. Bobby was hurting. Bashing him upside the head with reality was only going to make it worse.