Page 29 of Surface Scratch
She yanked the tape off one strip at a time until she reached her inner elbow and pulled the cannula from her vein, placing another pad of gauze on the puncture wound before bending her arm. Caleb looked from her arm to his, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
“Relax, I checked your blood type with a test strip before I did the transfusion,” she said, backing up and plopping into a metal folding chair against the wall. “You’re welcome, by the way.”
Transfusion? His eyes darted from her to the abandoned tubing on the ground, then to where he held the gauze in place on his own arm. His knuckles were a single swollen mass on the back of his hand, the skin scabbed and purplish. Then it started to come back to him.
His date with Marcus flooded in first, not granting him a moment of peace before blood and cold and fear raced through his mind. So much blood.
And the black eyes. And sharp teeth.
He bolted into a seated position and looked at Ophelia, who had her phone pressed to her ear as she stared back at him. His chest tightened, the memory of her knee in his back making his spine ache. None of it made sense.
“Yeah, Dad, he’s up. You should get back here ASAP,” she said. “I’m stepping out of here in five minutes because I need to lie down. I’ve given him two pints at this point and I feel like shit.”
Caleb felt a spark of relief when he realized she was speaking to Marcus, then a sense of dread filled him. Marcus had been on the ground, bleeding, coughing up blood, and then… the eyes and teeth. His hand drifted up to the left side of his neck, but something pulled at his wrist, stopping it in midair. His eyes widened when he looked down at a long chain pulled taut, connected to a cuff on his wrist with the other end looped around the steel-framed headboard.
He yanked at it again, the metal squealing as the connecting end scraped up and down. He twisted his body, pulled as hard as he could on the cuff, planting a foot against the headboard so he could get some leverage. “Ophelia, what is this?” he asked, panic rising in his voice as the cuff refused to budge.
“Dad, I gotta go. Just hurry up, okay? He’s about to lose his shit,” she said. She clicked the phone off and set in on the ground next to her, replacing it with a half gallon of what appeared to be orange juice. “Stop trying to deglove your hand and I’ll explain what I can before I pass the fuck out.”
Caleb pulled halfheartedly at the cuff around his wrist again before dropping his hand. He pressed his lips closed in a tight crease, forcing himself to breathe through his nose to calm down. Why was he chained to the bed? What were they going to do with him? What if this whole thing was some sort of elaborate serial killer ritual and he was about to become another face that was ignored on a missing poster?
“Why are you doing this?” he asked. He reached up with his free hand and rubbed the left side of his neck where the skin felt sore and tight. It was tender and raw, burning as his fingers pressed over the wound. “What did you do to me?”
Ophelia held up her hand as she took a drink directly from the half gallon of juice. Caleb grabbed the comforter, pulling it over his shoulders as a cold chill fell over him.
“One, what I did to you is I just gave you about two pints of my blood, which I don’t usually like to part with, so again, you’re welcome,” she said as she lowered the half gallon back to the ground. “Two, you’re stuck like that right now so you don’t do anything stupid before Marcus gets back.”
Caleb closed his eyes and shook his head, the words barely registering. “Tell me what happened… I-I feel like I’m losing my mind.” He buried his face in his hands, flinching as the metal clanged against the headboard again.
“Pinky, I don’t even know where to start,” she said. “I’m just going to rip off the bandage. Marcus is a vampire.”
He mouthed the word into his hands.Vampire. Marcus is a vampire. Okay. Yeah, sure, why not.He startled himself when he started laughing, his entire body shaking as bitter, anguished laughter poured out of him.
He had finally snapped. That was it. He’d been driven mad by his grief over his mom and his shitty life and this all must have been some elaborate hallucination. For all he knew, he was locked up in the psych ward in the hospital being pumped full of so many drugs that he’d straight-up imagined the last month.
“Is that funny?” Ophelia deadpanned.
Caleb lowered his hands from his face. “I don’t even know if you’re real,” he said, shaking his head.
“I am very real, as are you. In this room. Chained to my dad’s bed. In any other circumstance, this would be a very uncomfortable situation for me, but seeing as you still have pants on, I think I can live with it,” she said. “Look, you can choose to believe me or not, I don’t care. Do you want to know what happened? If not, I’m fine just leaving you in here until he gets back so he can deal with your manic ass.”
Caleb forced his mouth shut and gave her a wary look.
“Those dipshits that jumped you guys in the alley are latest iteration of your friendly neighborhood vampire hunters. They gave themselves a dumbass name like ‘The Sunshine Society,’ or something like that,” she continued. “Dad can usually tank a lot, but that crossbow fuck got him in some major arteries, and I wasn’t going to let him bleed out in the living room. You were the closet food source.”
Caleb sat in stunned silence. If he were to entertain the notion, did it make sense? He thought back to the first time he saw the black color in Marcus’s eyes in the office, but he’d thought his eyes were playing tricks on him that day. And then when Marcus had hidden his face during the walk-in incident. Those couldn’t have been coincidences. He chewed on his lower lip. Had he ever seen Marcus outside of the club during the day?
“Are you one too?” Caleb asked quietly, embarrassed about going along with what his mind was beginning to believe was true.
“No, of course not. You’ve seen me outside, haven’t you?” She sounded incredulous. “You’re not either, by the way. It doesn’t work like it does in the movies. Being bitten usually just means you’re somebody’s meal. Honestly, I didn’t think you were going to make it, but here you are. You’ve been very surprising throughout this whole thing.”
“What do you mean?”
She reached down to the jug of juice, taking another long pull from it. “Dad has been on a blood bag diet for a while, and that shit isn’t great to be on for too long. I hired you because I wanted him to have a few cheat days and you wouldn’t really ping on anyone’s radar if you went missing, but he thew a wrench in that plan when he decided he wanted to suck faces with you instead,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “I guess I owe you an apology for trying to feed you to my dad.”
Her phrasing was enough to make him let out a small laugh. His hand went back to the wound on his neck. “What’s going to happen to me when he gets here?”
Ophelia leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. “I don’t know. He probably won’t bite you again if that’s what you’re worried about. You got too much of my blood in you and he thinks its incestuous, so you’re good on that front.”
