Page 4 of Ever Dark Academy: Vol. 1

Grayson was about to make another offer when the bell jangled more harshly than usual as something burst through the door. He turned his head in annoyance as the figure--a man in a trenchcoat, half keeling over--stumbled into the store. At first, Grayson thought it was another drunk person as they staggered over to him. But that thought fled as soon as they leaned heavily on the counter and bright, red droplets of blood dripped onto the counter before Grayson.

The man looked up with wide, frightened eyes, and begged, “Help me! You’ve got to help me! They’re trying to kill me!”

TRICK OF THE LIGHT

“Help me!” The man repeated and this time he spat up blood.

“Oh, my God,” Grayson breathed as he realized the man had been stabbed.

Beneath the trenchcoat the man wore a suit with a white shirt. A dark, red stain was spreading all across his chest like a new continent. Grayson pulled off the button down shirt he had on over his sleeveless black t-shirt. He immediately balled it up and pressed it against the center of the wound.

“Sam?! SAM?!” Grayson called to the homeless man who was hovering at the back of two aisles, lips parted in shock and rheumy eyes wide. “I need a little help here!”

“I–I don’t know, Grayson,” Sam warbled, looking pale and swaying on his feet, but he did take a step towards Grayson and the man. “I don’t want to get involved in this. You shouldn’t either.”

“C’mon, Sam, I need your help! I just need you to hold this shirt over his wound really tight,” Grayson begged. “Then I can call 911.”

“Cops?!” Sam’s head jerked right and left as if looking for the dreaded police.

Grayson winced. While many of the police officers were kind to Sam, some of them weren’t. But all of them were constantly telling him to “move it along” and “you can’t sleep here” and “publicly intoxicated again, Sam? Got to bring you in” and other unpleasant things. So the homeless man feared them all.

They weren’t Grayson’s favorites either. For a moment, he saw the swirl of red and blue lights, a man in uniform squatting in front of him asking him questions he couldn’t answer, and the world blurred by tears. But he pushed those thoughts away. This man was dying. Old fears would not control his present actions. That was something the streets had taught him. Get too locked onto the past and one missed things in the present that would keep one alive or kill one stone dead.

“He needs an ambulance,” Grayson said gently, but firmly. “Sam, please!”

“Okay, okay, I’m coming.” Sam wobbled down the aisle, knocking a few chip bags off the shelves before making it to them. He wiped his hands on the front of his none-too-clean plaid shirt before he took over putting pressure on the wound.

“There’s no–no time. They’re coming!” the man gasped and sagged against the counter, trapping Sam’s hand and his bunched up shirt between the man’s chest and the counter’s edge.

“Who’s coming? Who did this to you? Why did you stab you?” Grayson asked as he fished his phone out of his back pocket.

The city was dangerous. There were muggings, rapes and drive-bys every night of the week, but stabbings like this? Not so common. Grayson had lived on the streets since he was 10-years-old and thought of himself as pretty damned jaded, but watching this man bleed out had his movements shocky and quick. He was dialing 911 on his phone’s cracked screen before the man answered.

“S-Sect of D-Dawn,” the man spat out and more bright blood formed a starburst pattern on the peeling counter.

Grayson froze. Had he heard the man right? Not a drug dealer or a prostitute or a gangbanger, but the Sect of Dawn?

“911. What’s your emergency?” the female operator asked, her voice tautly professional, even as Grayson stared at the man in shock.

“They don’t exist. They’re an urban legend,” Grayson found himself saying.

The Sect of Dawn was allegedly a group of virulent anti-Vampire humans who stalked their immortal prey giving them their Second Deaths. Unlike most anti-Vampire humans, they were said to actually be good at hunting and killing Vampires. But to Grayson the group had sounded like the Illuminati or other secret society that there was no real proof for and seemed to exist only in heated imaginations.

But then again Vampires were once thought imaginary too. And most people would never believe I can do what I’m able to, Grayson reminded himself.

Not to mention that this man was not a Vampire. He had brown eyes, not silver. All Vampires, excluding Julian Harrow and King Daemon who had purple and red eyes respectively, had silver eyes like liquid mercury. So unless this man was wearing colored contacts, he was human enough. Besides the stab wound that hadn’t stopped bleeding proved that anyways. A Vampire surely would have healed by now.

“They’re all too real,” the man said almost sadly.

The man smiled at him with gray lips and glassy eyes that he kept turning towards the door as if waiting for his attackers to follow him into a brightly lit shop with two witnesses. Yet the skin between Grayson’s shoulders twitched. He had found that ignoring his sixth sense was a bad idea, and yet he was doing so now. He realized it was because he wanted to. He didn’t want this man–with all he brought with him–in his shop. It was like when one was desperately trying to avoid the cops, but police cruisers kept showing up every block.

“911,” the operator repeated with a touch of annoyance in her voice, “What is your emergency?”

Grayson shook himself out of his shock and inaction. The man was here. He was Grayson’s responsibility. He had to get over it and handle it. He explained firmly and succinctly, “A man’s been stabbed. I need an ambulance and the police.”

The 911 system automatically picked up his address. The operator asked him to confirm it, which he did.

“An ambulance is 10 minutes out,” she told him. “Now, describe the wound to me. Can you put pressure on it?”

---