Biting Bad

A LITTLE B AND E BETWEEN FRIENDS

The move went smoothly. So smoothly, in fact, that I was already making plans to return to the House. Rioters might have ruined Valentine's Day, but I wasn't completely giving up on the possibility of dinner with Ethan. I could get Tuscan Terrace to go, and I hadn't yet met a man who could resist the siren call of their penne with vodka sauce.

The vans moved like coordinated dancers. One van dropped vampires off at the apartment building about every twenty minutes, while the other made the trip back to Hyde Park.

Grey House vampires weren't wilting lilies - they were mostly big, strapping guys - but they knew when to move. Like military recruits, they hopped off the van, duffel bags in hand, and jogged in line into the building, where Jonah sent them to their respective condos.

I saw non - Grey House vampires only twice. A member of the Red Guard - a cute girl in a Midnight High School T-shirt, the RG uniform - stepped out of the car and waved at me when I positioned myself outside the building.

I also saw a dog walker, a man with the largest Great Dane I'd ever seen. The dog pawed through the snow fearlessly and with obvious joy as his owner, muffled from toes to head, was dragged along behind him.

"This is the last one," Jonah said, a couple of hours and one chai later. "Last van approaching you now."

I put my hand on my sword, feeling a sense of inevitability strike. If drama was going to happen, it was going to happen now.

But the handoff came and went without so much as a stutter. The Novitiates disappeared inside, and the van driver handed me a receipt and took off into the night, no doubt seeking a warm bed. Jonah emerged from the lobby, looking tired but relieved.

I handed him the receipt. "I will not be paying this. But you can pay me for my services, if you'd like."

"I owe you a steak."

"That works." I chuckled and stuffed my hands back into my pockets, when a low moan echoed from the street.

I froze, squinting into the darkness.

Jonah must have picked up on it. "Merit?"

"Did you hear that?"

Jonah paused, silent. "I don't hear anything."

I heard it again, then spied a low, dark figure moving up the sidewalk. I didn't stop to explain, but I took off at a run down the sidewalk, my hand flipping open the thumb guard on my katana.

And then I reached her.

She was a vampire. A woman, blond and pale, wearing lounge clothes that had seen better days. And she was thin, brutally so. She didn't look sick; she just looked like she hadn't eaten in days.

"Good God," I muttered, hitting the ground beside her. "Are you all right?"

She moaned, and it was a pitiful sound.

I looked back at Jonah, who had nearly reached us. "Jonah! Help me."

"What the hell - ," he began, then fell to his his knees as well. "Brooklyn? Brooklyn? Are you all right?"

I looked up at Jonah in surprise. "You know her?"

He looked up at me, completely bewildered and plenty afraid. "She's the girl I had a date with. Was supposed to have a date with, anyway. What the hell happened?"

"I don't know. But she looks like she hasn't had blood in a really long time."

I immediately thought back to the room where Michael Donovan, McKetrick's minion, had locked up the vampires he intended to kill. Michael was dead, but McKetrick was alive and well. Had he done this? Had this woman escaped death by his hands?

"We need to get her inside, and we need a doctor. Do you have someone on staff?"

"We do," he said, and then lifted Brooklyn into his arms as if she weighed nothing at all.

I ran down the sidewalk and opened the door, and he hustled her inside and onto a couch in the lobby, as the few remaining Grey House vamps who lingered there looked on.

Jonah looked at the guard. "Can you call Dr. Gianakous? He just went upstairs?"

The guard nodded and picked up the receiver.

Brooklyn looked even worse in the light than she had outside. Her pale skin stretched thin across bone and muscle; her eyes were shadowed and sunken.

"I saw her a week ago," he said, looking up at me. "That's when we met - had coffee. She was absolutely fine. Utterly healthy. Curvy, even."

"She couldn't lose that much weight that quickly."

Jonah shook his head. "Something else happened. Maybe that's why she didn't call me. She couldn't."

The elevator door dinged, and an attractive man with a head of thick dark hair rushed toward us.

"What happened?" he asked, instantly reaching for Brooklyn's wrist and checking her pulse.

"She walked up and collapsed on the sidewalk outside. We don't know why."

Dr. Gianakous leaned down over Brooklyn's head, presumably to listen to her breathing, then sat up again and checked her eyes with a small flashlight.

"What's her name?" he asked.

"Brooklyn," Jonah said.

"Brooklyn," Dr. Gianakous said, snapping his fingers in front of her. "Brooklyn, do you know where you are?"

"Jonah?" she weakly said.

"I'm here," Jonah said, grabbing her hand. "I'm here."

There was a sweetness and affection in his voice I hadn't expected. Not that I didn't wish Jonah well; I just hadn't gotten the sense when he'd initially told me that this date was anything more than casual.

"Brooklyn, do you know what's happened to you?" the doctor asked.

"Medicine," she said.

"You're taking medicine?" he asked, obviously surprised. Brooklyn was a vampire, with presumably the same quick-healing propensities as the rest of us. She shouldn't have needed medicine.

"Taking it," she confirmed with a weak nod.

The doctor looked at Jonah. "Why does she have medicine?"

Jonah shook his head. "I don't know. I mean, I don't know her that well. We were supposed to have a date earlier this week, but she didn't show up."

"Brooklyn, what medicine did you take? Brooklyn?" The doctor snapped his fingers again, but Brooklyn's gaze was unfocused.

An ambulance, lights and sirens on full, screamed to a stop in front of the building, and two EMTs rolled a gurney inside.

"Will they be able to help her?" Jonah asked.

"I'll go with her," Gianakous said. "I'll make sure she gets what she needs."

"Call me if there's an update?"

"Of course," he said, and began reciting her stats to the EMTs as they placed her on the gurney. Within seconds, she was in the ambulance, and it was roaring away.

Jonah looked completely out of sorts, shell-shocked by the quick turn of events.

I put a hand on his back. "Are you okay?"

"I hardly know what to think. I'm just - this just happened so fast."

"You haven't known her very long?"

He shook his head. "We met for coffee. That's all. Then she stood me up for the date."

And yet she showed up here, looking for Jonah, and at a location to which the Grey House vampires had only just decided to move. That seemed oddly coincidental.

"Jonah, if she was looking for you, how did she know to find you here?"

He looked at me apologetically.

"You told her you were moving," I said as the realization hit me.

"It's Valentine's Day," he said. "I was thinking about her, so I left her a message. I told her we'd be here."

The always cool, always careful captain of the Grey House guards sounded remorseful, guilty even.

"It was Valentine's Day," he said again, as if that justified and explained every stupid thing people did for love and companionship. To be fair, it probably explained a fair percentage of them.

It was time to be a friend, as well as a partner. "She came to you for help. If she hadn't known where you were, she might not have made it."

"It was such a stupid thing to do," he said. "To reveal where we were going."

"And it probably saved her life."

Jonah reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He held them out to me.

"What's this?" I asked.

"The keys to her apartment. I can't leave, but you can. See if you can find anything there."

I took the keys, and stared at them. Exactly what did "coffee" mean these days? "Where did you get her keys?"

Jonah rolled his eyes. "Her pocket, about three minutes ago. Merit, she's a good person, and a smart one. She's got military training. She wouldn't starve herself. Something happened to her."

"I'm not sure she'd be thrilled to learn I was breaking into her apartment."

"As you pointed out, she came here for help. We're helping. And you aren't breaking in. You have the keys."

I wasn't sure the CPD would find that argument compelling, but I agreed it was important to find out what had happened.

"What about my invitation? I can't go in without one."

"That's etiquette," Jonah said, growing exasperation in his voice. "I'm pretty sure she'll forgive the breach."

Under the circumstances, I guessed he was right. So I nodded and put the keys in my pocket. "Are the RG members still outside?"

He nodded. "They're in the cars. They'll stay until I give them the all-clear."

I popped out the earbud and handed it to him. "Give this to them, so you have someone immediately accessible. I'll call you if I find anything."

"Thank you," he said, his relief obvious.

"No problem. This is what partners are for."

I just hoped I could find out something that helped him - and Brooklyn.

-

Brooklyn's brownstone was in Wicker Park, not far from Mallory's. It was narrow from front to back, and had windows along one side of the front fa?ade. The windows were dark. A set of covered brick stairs on the other side led into the building.

I got out of the car and headed up the sidewalk. The front door was locked tight, so I pulled out the keys Jonah had given me, selecting the one I thought looked most like a building key.

"Sorry for the intrusion, Brooklyn," I quietly said, then slipped it into the lock and felt the tumblers shift and drop.

The door popped open, revealing a small foyer with a rack of mailboxes that led to a staircase. So the brownstone had been parceled into apartments.

I walked inside and pulled the door shut behind me, feeling a little like the heroine in a caper movie. On the lookout for prying eyes, I quietly climbed the stairs, which squeaked beneath my feet like unintentional intruder alarms.

I heard steps on the landing above me and faked nonchalance as a guy in his twenties passed me on the stairs. He smiled, just a little.

"Hey."

"Hey," I said, politely but without interest, hoping that would be the end of it. When the door opened and closed downstairs, I breathed again.

Brooklyn's door was at the top of the landing, the brass "2" hanging sideways beside the "B." I unlocked the door and stepped inside, closing it quietly behind me again.

The apartment was nice, but small, with hardwood floors and arched passageways. The furniture was sparse, mostly vintage, but good quality. Nice chests of drawers and buffet tables, a long, low couch with a built-in table at one end. There was an inset area along one wall that probably would have held an old-fashioned telephone back in the day. Today, it held a vase of wilted flowers. Whatever had gone wrong, maybe it hadn't gone wrong here.

Otherwise, the apartment looked completely normal. Not too tidy, not too messy.

A kitchen was tucked beside the living room. The refrigerator was ancient, but humming steadily. I pulled it open. It was bare, but for two unopened bottles of blood and milk two days past its expiration.

A carton of orange juice sat on the counter. I picked it up and found it empty. An empty glass sat nearby.

I stepped on the trash can's pedal and peeked inside. It was empty. No evidence of drugs or empty bottles of juice from a "cleanse" that might have explained Brooklyn's condition.

Floors creaking beneath me, I walked back into the living room, and then into the small hallway off to the side. There was a small bathroom, mostly clean. The medicine cabinet held the usual suspects. Toothpaste, mouthwash, lotion . . . but there were no mysterious "medicines" a vampire wouldn't have needed, in any event.

Thinking the bedroom was at the other end of the hallway, I tiptoed across the wooden slats, which creaked beneath my feet, and peeked inside. The bed was unmade, the sheets tossed around as if Brooklyn had had a few bad nights of sleep. The room smelled unwashed, as though the odors of many nights of sweaty bodies had collected there.

So she got sick, lay down in the bed, and didn't get up for days? How could that happen to a vampire?

I wandered back into the living room. How did a woman who seemed otherwise healthy just stop eating and drinking? As a vampire, her bloodlust should have kicked in long before she got to her current state. She'd have been biologically driven to drink, even if she didn't have the emotional capacity for it. I'd have expected a blood-drinking frenzy - even attacks on her neighbors - instead of the normalcy I'd found.

I looked around the room, searching for anything that might give me a hint about her condition, or the "medicine" she'd ingested.

I spied a pile of mail on a table behind the couch and walked over to inspect it. I flipped through the stack but found only bills, magazines, and solicitations from charities. Nothing that hinted about a problem.

A postcard fell from the stack that I tried to rearrange on the table in its previous position. I bent down to pick it up, when a glint of something on the carpet caught my eye.

I put the postcard back on the table and walked closer.

There, in the middle of her living room rug, was a silver and glass syringe, with an old-fashioned plunger of two circles of metal pressed together.

I was smart enough not to touch evidence with my bare hands. I walked back to the kitchen and searched through drawers until I found a box of zip-top plastic bags. I took one, apologizing for my thievery, and walked back to the living room.

The bag opened with a snap, and I turned it inside out, using it like a glove to pick up the syringe - and give it a closer inspection. Unfortunately, the plunger had been fully depressed, the chamber empty. Not even a drop of liquid remained inside. I wasn't sure it could tell us anything about Brooklyn's problem, but it was still the best clue we had at the moment.

I flipped the bag around so it enclosed the syringe, then sealed it shut. I locked up the apartment again and hightailed it to my car again as if monsters were on my heels.

When I made it to the car again, I pulled out my phone.

Jonah answered quickly.

"It's Merit. I found something. A syringe."

"A syringe? Of what?"

"I don't know. It's empty. It was lying on the living room floor. And it's the old-fashioned kind - glass, not plastic. Maybe that's the medicine she mentioned?"

"It could be, but I don't know. What was she doing with a syringe? She's a vampire."

"Could it be something, let's say, recreational?" A few months ago, a vampire drug called "V" had made its way around the city, but we'd shut down the supply.

"God, I don't know. She doesn't really seem the type. She's into clean eating and fitness. What was she doing with a syringe?" He asked me, but it was clear from his absent tone he was musing over the question himself.

"I don't know. Maybe we can ask Detective Jacobs to take a look at it. Catcher said my grandfather's doing him some favors, so maybe we can get a little quid pro quo."

"Yeah, maybe. Do you think someone broke in? And used the syringe on her?"

"I don't know. The apartment didn't look disturbed, and it didn't look like there was a break-in. Maybe she let them in?"

"Did you find anything else?"

"Not a thing. Everything else in the apartment looked completely normal. There wasn't much food. She hadn't had blood, as far as I could tell. There were untouched bottles in the fridge, and no empties in the trash. Wilted flowers in the living room, and the bed was unmade. I'm not sure if she's been gone, or stayed in bed."

"Thank you for checking."

"You're welcome. Have you heard from the doctor?"

"Only that she's checked in and he's running tests. He doesn't expect to know anything for a little while."

"Let me know what you find out. Are you okay otherwise?"

"Yeah, we're all tucked into Grey House 2.0. Security's set."

"Glad to hear it. Give me a call if you need me. And I'll let you know if we find anything with the syringe."

"Thanks, Merit."

The line went dead, but I still had calls to make. I needed to check in at the House and make arrangements to get the syringe to someone who could take a look at it.

"Ops Room," said Lindsey.

"It's Merit."

"Speakerphone?"

"Yes, please."

"And you're live," Lindsey said. "Luc and I are in the room with the temps. Say hello, temps."

"Hello, temps," they ridiculously muttered in tandem.

"The Grey House vamps are tucked in," I said. "Everything okay on your end?"

"Fine," Luc said. "The transition was smooth. Jonah's very good at his job."

"Yes, he is," I said. "But we've got a new wrinkle. A vampire wandered up to the new Grey House digs. She was nearly unconscious, and completely emaciated. Turns out, she's a friend of Jonah's. They were supposed to meet earlier this week, but she didn't show up. The Grey House doc rushed her to the ER."

"Does he know what was wrong?"

"Not a thing. She kept mentioning 'medicine.'" I cleared my throat, preparing for my confession. "So, I might have used her keys to get into her apartment. And I might have wandered around a little bit and found a syringe, the old-fashioned glass kind."

"I am surprised and pleased, Sentinel. You're getting some balls on you after all. No offense."

"None taken."

"I presume you grabbed the syringe?"

"I did, and in a plastic bag to keep my contaminates off, since I'm a forensic expert after hours of crime scene shows in Lindsey's room." We tended toward pizza and television for girls' nights.

"I'm going to see if my grandfather can get it to the CPD and figure out what might have been in it."

"Good girl. Random, though, isn't it?"

"It is. And that's what's bothering me. Even if she'd injected herself, or been injected by someone else, what was the point? She's a vampire. She'd have healed from any illness. As far as I could tell, she was in her apartment for days, then crawled out to find Jonah."

"Weird," Luc said. "That's an odd set of circumstances, not that we're low on those right now. Anyway, I'll tell Ethan."

"Please do. I'm going to call my grandfather and take the syringe over there."

"Got it," Luc said. "Stay in touch. Things are calm here for now, all things considered. But that could change at any minute."

I took that as a hint to get to work. Two calls down, I prepared to dial up the third. Catcher answered immediately.

"Catcher."

"Hey, it's Merit. Are you guys around? I've actually got something I'd like you to take a look at."

"What's that?"

"A syringe. We think it has something to do with a sick vampire that's also a friend of Jonah's."

"How does a vampire get sick?" he asked.

"Presumably from whatever was in the syringe. I checked out her apartment. It was on the floor. I grabbed it, was hoping you could get it to Detective Jacobs."

"You've escalated to breaking and entering?" Catcher mused. "I'll not mention that to your grandfather."

"Please don't."

"I'm out," Catcher said. "Jeff and I both left early. It is Valentine's Day, you know."

"I'm aware," I said dryly.

"Your grandfather was talking to Jacobs about their little forensic mystery, but he's home now. He'll be happy to see you. I'll check in when I'm done here."

"Roger that," I said, and ended the call, then sent Ethan a message: TAKING EVIDENCE TO GRANDFATHER. LUC HAS DETAILS. HOME AFTERWARD.

I tapped the screen for a moment, thinking about the surprise I'd planned and debating whether to tell him. But if I couldn't actually give him a decent Valentine's Day, the least I could do was tell him I'd tried.

I HOPED TO GRAB TT FOR DELAYED VALENTINE'S DINNER, BUT VAMPIRES INTERVENED.

TT? Ethan asked, and I sighed with pity.

TUSCAN TERRACE, YOU TROGLODYTE. SORRY AGAIN FOR POSTPONEMENT.

LIFE GOES ON, Ethan philosophically answered. EVEN FOR TROGLODYTES. AND UNLIKE TROGLODYTES, I'M NOT GOING ANYWHERE.

God, I loved that man.

-

Now that I had toured northern Chicago, it was time to head south. My grandfather lived in a working-class house in a working-class neighborhood, precisely the type of place my father avoided. Unlike my father, Grandfather didn't believe he had to prove himself by having the biggest or fanciest of anything.

The streets in this neighborhood weren't plowed as well as other places, and the street signs were in need of repair. But the people were good, and that was what kept my grandfather here.

The driveway held only my grandfather's giant boat of an Oldsmobile; Catcher, Jeff, and Marjorie, the admin, were gone. The living room light was on.

I pulled up to the curb and grabbed my katana and the plastic bag from the passenger seat. Maybe it was time to find a messenger bag to compliment my leathers, something I could transport my goods in. As I locked the door, I wondered if they made specialized messenger bags for vampires with straps for Blood4You bottles, hidden pockets for emergency weapons, and a flap for the registration cards we were required to carry.

I am a nerd, I thought to myself, slamming the car door.

I carefully navigated the ice at the edge of the street, then hopped onto a dry spot of sidewalk.

I was excited to see my grandfather, glad I had evidence in hand, and optimistic we might find something useful.

But in that excitement, I was oblivious.

The push came from behind, a strike that sent me reeling forward into the snow. I dropped the plastic bag and used my free hand to unsheathe my katana, but the push, like so much else, had been a distraction.

Time slowed to a crawl. I jumped to my feet, snow glinting off the steel in my hand, and ran toward the front door.

But they'd been ready, the plan under way. Three more ran from the back of the house to the front, the bottles already lit in their hands.

"Grandpa!" I screamed as they tossed the Molotov cocktails through the windows, still running through the snow.

The front of the house exploded, flames rushing through the windows and sending a spray of glass and fire and heat into the yard. The barrage hit me, full force, and threw me backward into the snow.

But I felt no pain, no fear.

There was no thinking, no rationalizing, no weighing of cost.

There was only do.

I dropped my sword, ran toward the flames, and leaped into the fire.