I want to leave the hospital so badly. I know I'm still weak, but it feels like there is so much I need to do: make sure Vivi is really okay, straighten things out with Michael if that's even possible, and see how the Agency has held up without me. And, most importantly, talk to Victor.
Unfortunately, the nurse who came into my room isn't carrying my discharge papers. Instead, she gently guides me into the wheelchair and leads me down a hallway, saying that the doctor wants to "run some tests." I expect those tests to involve having some blood drawn, maybe getting an X-ray or two. Instead I find myself wheeled to a psychiatrist's office.
The lighting is dim, just enough to reveal the wooden walls, potted plant, and old furniture. A man, who I can only assume is the psychiatrist, spins around from his place at the window, like we've surprised him. Small but incredibly thick glasses make his gray eyes bulge, giving them an all-seeing, all-knowing glare that betrays a cold, calculating intelligence. He's unnaturally thin, as though he spends all his time lost in books and journals, nourishing his mind but forgetting the needs of his body. His black hair and mustache are perfectly trimmed.
"I'm Dr. Schwartz," he says after the nurse leaves. "Don't worry, Miss Montgomery. Your being brought to me is nothing to be concerned about. We just need to verify that you're firing on all cylinders."
"You need to make sure I'm not crazy," I say.
"We don't like to use those kinds of terms. But you have been through a very stressful experience, which can create certain anxieties. Compound that with a week in a light comatose state, and, well … we just want to make sure you're as healthy as possible before leaving our care."
And before I return to work. I can feel Clive's influence in this room. He cares about me, maybe too much. I've been through more than most seventeen-year-olds and he has to be questioning how much more I can take before I break. Or if I'm already broken.
Can't have a schizo delegate negotiating to protect Denver's citizens. But I know I'm fine, and I need to get out of here. So I sit down on a couch across from the doctor and he runs through the basic questions with me. I know exactly what he wants to hear, so at times, I fudge the truth just enough.
No, I've had no thoughts of self-harm.
No, I haven't felt "the blues."
Yes, I'm eating fine—or as fine as one can when dining on hospital food.
Yes, my grades were good before the incident.
Yes, my relationships are steady. Steadily falling apart, but I keep the last to myself. I've lost Michael and I'm not sure where things stand with Victor.
"Before all of this," I say, "everything was great. And my friends came to see me as soon as I woke up, and it was like nothing changed. I'm looking forward to getting back out there."
"Good. Good," Dr. Schwartz says. "I know you're lying to me, but good."
Uh-oh. I swallow hard and want to backpedal through my answers, but he just raises his hand.
"I have no plans to put you in a straitjacket," he says. "You're a teenager; you've been through a lot; you have a very stressful job. A certain amount of leniency must be given in light of all that. In fact, if anything, you're too sane. Most people in your position would've cracked by now under that much responsibility. But not you. I'm worried that you might be repressing things. Does that sound reasonable to you?"
"Yes. I've always thought that if I bury my feelings now, I can dig them up later when I have time to deal with them." Good answer, but the truth is that I don't ever want to dig them up. They're too painful, make me feel weak. I have to be strong, make my parents proud of me. Finish the work they started.
"That can create a very shaky foundation," he says.
A silence falls and I try to psychoanalyze him. What's he thinking? Have I sealed my own fate? So what if I keep certain emotions from getting out of control? It's worked, hasn't it? What's the alternative? Cry my heart out in a darkened corner every night? No thanks.
"I'd like to try something with you, Dawn," he says. "Dr. Icarus told me you had a dream that seemed very real."
"It was nothing. It was just …"
"Most dreams are nothing, just little neurons in your brain still firing while you're trying to sleep. But what interests me is what was going on inside your mind while you were in that coma. Your psyche may have taken the time to … rearrange things. To catch up. To unbury all those repressed feelings."
"Fine. I'm up for anything that will get me out of here. What do you want me to do?"
"Draw."
He brings out a pad of paper and pencil, then hands them to me.
"I'm not a very good artist," I say.
"All the better."
Dr. Schwartz goes around the room and dims several of the lights further until my eyes have to adjust. I struggle just to see the sketch pad on my lap.
"Okay, now lean back and relax." His voice has shifted to something soothing, mesmerizing.
Tilting my head back, I close my eyes.
"Think about that dream," he says softly. "Where were you?"
"A mountain," I say.
"Draw it."
This is really stupid and I open my eyes in protest.
"No," he says. "Keep your eyes closed. Just let your hand do the work. And think. What else was there?"
Fine. Let's get this over with.
"The moon," I say, eyes shut, pencil on paper.
And the stars, of course. A lot of them. It was a clear night. I was in the middle of nowhere, far away from a city.
I groped along the walls. My fingers touched something—a deep groove, deliberately created, not something formed by erosion. I outlined it. Too many lines, too many curves. Why is it here? What does it mean?
"I turn to look at it," I say.
It's just a symbol. But it's familiar. I've seen it before, but where? In another dream? No …
The symbol is complex, like several characters combined into one.
"I can't really explain it."
My heart was beating fast. My heart is beating fast. I can feel my pulse, the blood pumping through my veins, ending at my fingertips, controlling the pencil.
Enough of this.
I open my eyes. I'm no longer in the room, but on that mountain. Rocky cliffs surround me. And a voice calls from within the stone.
"Find me."
I put my hand against the symbol, feeling its contours, knowing every little detail. No bigger than the palm of my hand, but I can sense that it's significant. It's pulsing, drawing me in.
I never woke up from the coma. The hospital, the visitors—none of it was real. I'm still trapped in my own mind.
"Find me."
The voice is growing louder, raspier. I don't dare answer. I don't know who it is. I don't know what he wants. But I'm scared, scared that I've become lost. I'm compelled to move toward the voice.
"Find me!"
Someone grabs me—
Help! Oh my God, help me!
"Dawn!"
I'm back in the dark room. Dr. Schwartz is across from me.
"I was there," I say.
"You were dreaming."
"No. No! I was there!"
"It felt very real, that's all," he says. "Made more powerful, perhaps, by your time spent in a comatose state. You may be having some difficulties differentiating one reality from another. Don't worry. That'll fade in a matter of days as your sleep cycle returns to normal."
He turns on the lights. The world seems so hazy, a gigantic fog settling over my mind. Nothing seems real and I have to convince myself that it is.
"I heard something. A voice. It said, 'Find me.'"
"Hmmm … interesting."
He writes it down on my chart and I'm frightened of what else is on there. Then I look down at the drawing I made: It's scribbled nonsense, completely blacked out. The pencil in my hand is worn down, the sharp point eroding as I dragged it across the blank paper.
But then I see it. The symbol. The one in my dreams.
Knowing that he'll collect this drawing, possibly to record my psychosis, I flip the page and quickly copy the symbol, then quietly rip it out and place it in the folds of my hospital gown.
I hand the sketch pad back to Dr. Schwartz and give him a reassuring smile.
He smiles back.
I just hope that my smile doesn't look as fake as his.
After the session I'm wheeled back to my room. I hate feeling like an invalid, but I take some comfort in the fact that they didn't deliver me to a padded cell.
I wake up to find the sun has set. The blinds at the window are raised and I can see the night. The session with Dr. Schwartz must have been more tiring that I thought. He told me that getting my sleep cycle regular again was important, but that doesn't look to be happening anytime soon. My schedule is still really off. Of course, as a delegate, I wasn't on much of one anyway. School during the day, but dealing with Valentine and vampire problems at night. I wonder if Victor is awake.
I wonder a lot of things: mostly how soon before I go out of my mind. I have nothing to distract me from my thoughts—no newspapers, no TV.
I buzz for the nurse. She's a different one from this morning: large and bulky. Her uncompromising expression tells me that I'd better be dying to have bothered her. Unfortunately for her, I've dealt firsthand with vampires. It's going to take a lot more than a stern look to cause me to retreat.
"Can I get a TV in here?" I ask.
"No TV. Doctor's orders."
"Why?
"He doesn't think it would be good for your health."
Since the war that pitted humans against vampires, programming is limited to what we can produce in the city. For the most part, it's awful low-budget soap operas, but as far as I know they never killed anyone. Even though sometimes they make me gag. We have local news, but we get very little communication from the other cities.
"How about a newspaper, then?
"We don't have any here."
"None? It doesn't have to be current. I want to catch up on what's been happening since I've been out of it."
"You really don't."
With that cryptic statement, she turns toward the door. "Be sure to eat your supper. The more quickly you regain your strength, the sooner you can leave."
The door slams in her wake. I glance to the side and notice the tray on wheels standing nearby. Reaching over, I pull it toward me. I lift a domed lid to unveil a gelatin that wiggles, potatoes, and grilled fabricated chicken. Yuck! I'm in the mood for a hamburger. Or steak. A real steak with warm juices oozing out of it. My parents splurged and bought the real stuff to celebrate when Dad became delegate to Lord Valentine. Only it wasn't really a celebration. We were all just trying to pretend it was good news. We knew how dangerous it would be for him to travel outside the city walls at night. We were trying to show we weren't scared.
I place the cover back over the food. Not interested.
I notice a small white box. I open it. Inside are two pieces of chocolate. There are places for four. A note is scribbled on the inside of the top of the box.
Sorry! You should have woken up while I was here. A girl can only resist so much temptation. Figure best friends share anyway, right?
Vivi was here? Maybe I'm not as recovered as I think. Now I'm fully awake. Maybe I should call her—but I have no cell phone. I'm doomed to boredom.
But just as I think that, the door opens, and I know my next visitors will not be boring. Vampires never are.
"Where's Victor? Is he okay?" I ask.
"Relax, my brother is fine. Almost recovered and back to full strength." Faith is quite possibly the most beautiful creature I've ever seen. She has perfect skin, vibrant red hair, and an hourglass figure. Her eyes are the same sharp blue as Victor's, but they look more seductive, if that were possible. Her red leather pants hug her legs all the way down to her six-inch matching heels. How does she stay upright in those things? Her scarlet blouse doesn't leave much to the imagination and I'm tempted to point out that she has a couple of buttons that are feeling neglected. She looks to be nearly my age, although she's been around for two hundred years.
"Then why isn't he here? Why are you?"
Richard Carrollton takes my hand and presses a kiss to it. "Victor's new responsibilities as overlord keep him pretty busy. I'm glad to see you've regained your color."
Old Family vampires are elegant, suave, sophisticated. Comfortable with what they are. Humans who are turned—Lessers—never quite achieve that beauty. Richard Carrollton is Old Family and it shows with each movement he makes. Like Victor, he's well dressed and well manicured. His jeans and buttoned shirt are crisp. A small clump of his long brown hair is braided and decorated with leather wraps that line one side of his face. Like all Old Family vampires, he's gorgeous. He's different from Victor. More party boy than poet. But they're two sides of a similar coin. I can understand why they're good friends.
"You've been here before?" I ask.
He gives a casual shrug. "Victor had us keeping watch."
"Were you in the city that night?" I ask, knowing I don't have to clarify.
Richard nods. "We did what we could to contain it."
"What about Sin? What happened to him?" If they destroyed him, they might not have told the Agency. Vampires have a tendency to keep vampire business to themselves.
Faith moves nearer to the bed. "My creepy half brother got away. We don't know where he went. Victor has hunters out looking for him."
"He … he turned my brother. Brady."
"He's apparently obsessed with your family," Faith says. "He may even be the one who killed your parents—possibly at Father's bidding. We don't know."
"But your father said it was rogue vampires—"
She purses her lips as though I'm the silliest thing. "Well, he certainly wasn't going to confess that he was behind their deaths, now was he?"
"But why would he kill them? What would he gain?"
She gives me a pointed look. "Think about it, Dawn. What did he gain?"
The answer slams into me, making me dizzy. "Me as delegate," I whisper, forcing out the answer, trying to make sense of it.
He had requested me, and what the mighty Lord Valentine wanted, he got. No one questioned why he would want a seventeen-year-old girl, still in high school, to serve in such an important role, yet I had always wondered.
"But why?"
"Who knows? But you were there the night he confronted Victor. He kept saying you were special."
"Special how?"
"That's the mystery," Richard says. "Victor has been going through Murdoch's journals searching for some clue, but as you can imagine, almost a thousand years' worth of handwritten text is slow going."
I sigh with the futility of it all. "Waste of time. I think Valentine was just referring to me being a pawn because he knew that Victor and I … I mean, that Victor … that I—"
"That my brother would die for you?" Faith asks.
"He wouldn't—"
"He almost did." She rolls her eyes toward the ceiling. "And that is strange because vampires are not normally emotional creatures. Not when it comes to matters of the heart."
"I disagree," Richard says. "I believe vampires can love. Deeply."
He's not looking at me anymore. He's focused on Faith, not bothering to mask his feelings for her. She refuses to meet his gaze. How can she ignore him? I know they have some sort of history, but I've only recently met them, and we're not yet to a phase in our friendship where we pour out our souls to one another. I can't imagine that we ever will be. She starts to fidget with her pearl necklace, running her slender manicured fingers over it, creating little clacking noises. Seeing the usually calm and cool Faith flustered makes her seem almost approachable.
"Hospitals give me the creeps," she finally says. "Let's find the blood-storage room, grab a midnight snack, and get out of here."
"Your wish is my command," Richard says.
She rolls her eyes again. "You can be so—"
"Romantic?" he asks.
"Banal." She turns her attention back to me and lays a small package on my lap. "Hospital gowns have never been very fashionable."
She walks from the room.
"She's not as uncaring as she acts," Richard says. "Valentine didn't tolerate weakness in his children, including showing emotions."
"You love her, don't you?"
"Let's just say I understand her." He turns to leave, stops, looks back at me. "Just so you know: What you did for Victor means a lot to us. You could have left him to die."
"No, Richard, I couldn't."
I see in his eyes that he understands. I didn't save Victor because I knew that his being alive was best for Denver. I gave him my blood because I didn't want to live in a world without him in it.
When he's gone, I open the package that Faith brought me. A crimson nightgown shimmers in spite of the dim lighting in the room. I run my fingers over it. It has to be real silk. Only the fabulously wealthy can afford something like this—and Old Family vampires have wealth beyond measure.
I imagine wearing this for Victor. I slam the box closed, then my eyes.
In spite of Victor being willing to die to save me—and me being willing to die to save him—the reality remains: He's a vampire. I'm not.
I lay back, stare up at the ceiling, and listen to the nighttime streets far below. The hum of the city, so subtle now, slowly fades until I hear nothing but the wind. Then that, too, disappears, and I hear the night. The quiet, the silence of the moon.
I turn off my lamp, welcoming the plunge of shadows. Whereas so many of us now fear the darkness, I'm beginning to draw comfort from it. This world without light, this world of midnight sounds calms my breath, calms my heart. I feel its grasp slowly enveloping me, and all I can do is thank it for being there.
For always being there.