Four, page 36
“I see,” Georgia said, turning away from him. She jerked away as he tried to grab her shoulder. “Is he putting you up to this? Did he find out why you’ve been sneaking away during the day?”
“What? No!” Ren said, crawling around to look her in the eyes. “I’m sure he knows I’m seeing you, but not that—”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“He’ll know for sure as soon as Minerva makes me tell him everything. She does it every year. She tells me that confession is good for the soul, and I will give her every secret in a heartbeat. She already asked me about you once, but I was still able to control myself back then.”
“Jesus, Ren!” Georgia said. “So are you just trying to let me down easy? Why would you even—?”
He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her close. “I am an idiot sometimes, but when you’re faced with an unstoppable force like you, what was I supposed to do?”
“Then this is my fault?” she snapped.
“It’s both our faults. Maybe it’s because we’re human. What do humans love more than a good tale of star-crossed lovers?” he asked. “For the first time in years, I found something that I want, to hell with what the Jaeger family thinks. I just thought . . . I just hoped—”
“Hoped you’d finish a train of thought?” she asked.
He got up and rooted through his coat until he found a little green booklet. He tossed it in Georgia’s lap. She opened it slowly and saw his face staring back at her.
“What would you do if you knew your boss was taken care of and there was a place where my masters couldn’t find us?” he started as Georgia’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped. “What I’m about to say is so crazy that I know you are going to say no—”
“Yes,” Georgia said softy.
“It’s ridiculous, I know. There is only one place on earth where—wait a second, did you just say yes?”
“Yes,” she said again, this time a little louder.
“Just listen to me. We would have to disappear entirely and go halfway around the world—”
“I said . . .yes.”
“I don’t think you realize just what I’m asking. The only place the Jaegers can’t go is Hong Kong—”
“Ren, in all those months you watched me, did you ever see me change my mind once it was made up?” she asked. She looked back at the passport. “Lee, huh?”
“It’s the kind of name that could be Asian, could be not,” he said weakly. “It was easier to forge an identity if it was already connected to one that I’d faked, but I realize now that it was terribly presumptuous of me—”
She silenced him with a kiss and kept kissing him until his protests stopped. “Ren,” she said, brushing the hair out of his eyes, “I don’t make the best decisions. I make them fast, but I never, ever regret them. I said, yes . . .”
Gail broke into a huge smile as the pieces fell into place at last. She pounced on Georgia and gave her a huge hug. “I understand now,” she said while squeezing tight. “I finally understand what you’ve been doing this whole time. It was a test, right? You needed a replacement so that you and Ren could run off together!”
Georgia patted the young girl on the back and eased out of the hug. Gail cocked her head as her once-bubbly interviewer was suddenly stone-faced. The blonde was staring angrily toward the door. Gail looked back, but no one was there.
“Georgia?” Gail asked. “That is what’s happening, right? You need someone to take care of Mr. Lambley—oh no, is Minerva—?”
Georgia stood up and stretched before moving over to their original seats. She dug into her purse and pulled out a pair of plane tickets. Gail clutched her skirt and squealed in delight as she saw the letters HKG in the corner.
“You’re right,” Georgia said. “It’s always been a test.”
“When are you leaving?” Gail asked. She quickly lowered her voice. “Can you tell me? Should I shut up in case she comes back?”
“Oh, I have one more story I need to tell you, you know,” Georgia said. “Earlier tonight, I told you about the second-worst Saturday of my life, didn’t I?”
Gail nodded.
“It’s time I told you about the worst. It’s important that you know before any decisions are made,” Georgia sighed.
Both women froze as the other blonde drifted in. Georgia put her mask back on and waved to Gail. “So, you were telling me that you were a nurse, right? Did you just work at home, or did you ever fill in at clinics or hospitals?”
Gail nodded and all but gave a wink to Georgia. “Um, I mostly worked at home. I did do Fridays and Saturdays at Mass General, usually the outpatient clinics, sometimes for the geriatrics department. A girl’s gotta eat, you know,” she said as she eyed the vampire.
“True words,” Minerva said as she drifted by. Her cheeks were pinker than before, and she picked her teeth a few times as she slid into a seat next to them. “So, have I missed anything interesting?”
“No,” Gail said quickly. “I was just telling her about my work experience. I, um, am familiar with chronic care. I usually work with the elderly, but I’m familiar with blood, you could say. I mean, I’ve worked with a lot of it—transfusions, blood work . . .”
The vampire rolled her eyes. “Are we still at zee boring part? I want to know something juicy, something truly, terribly interesting,” she said.
“I still have to tell her about Mr. Lambley’s schedule and about the final plans for transition,” Georgia started.
“Don’t you have a few months more on your contract? You have loads of time for a human!” Minerva whined. “Mein bruder has been calling too. He wants to know when you’ll see him again.”
“I want to make sure this transition goes smoothly, Minnie. Now we have at least a half hour more of boring details.”
“I need dessert then. Maybe I’ll get a jelly doughnut,” she said with a pointed look at Georgia. She waved and said, “I’ll be back.”
Gail darted over to Georgia as soon as the vampire was gone. “So?” she asked.
“So?”
“When are you leaving with Ren?” Gail hissed.
“These things take time to plan. I needed to make sure that someone would be able to take my place before I could leave, and we had so many details to take care of. You’re a nurse, so you know what it’s like to account for a medical condition. As good as Ren can be, it takes time to fake a medical record,” Georgia said.
“But couldn’t you just take care of that in you know where?” Gail asked. “It’s not like it’s a third-world country.”
“Don’t you remember what Dr. Pang said? There’s a chance that trying the old treatment could kill him. It’s the problem all bondsmen face, that the antibodies of one strain of vampire could react badly with the one in their system. The last thing Ren wanted was for me to be stuck, alone, in a foreign country. I’d never be able to come back because of them.”
“Don’t you see? I can help you,” Gail offered. “I’ve worked the hospitals around here. I could help slip in his chart.”
“You would really do that for me?” Georgia asked.
“It’s not every day you find true love, right?” Gail gushed. She looked down. “You know, there is something I should tell you since you’ve been so honest with me.”
Georgia led her new confidant back to the sofa. Both of them did one more sweep for prying eyes before daring to speak.
Georgia started, “You don’t have to say anything . . .”
Gail let out a deep breath. “You’ve looked up so much about me. I’m sure you know that I’m from a family that can be a little organized. Sometimes they have me spy for them at the hospital. You never know when it’s useful to know when someone has a drug allergy or a habit, and of course, they want me to tell them if anyone they know is seriously ill.”
She sank back into her seat. “I’ve never told anyone what I’ve had to do,” Gail said. “But I guess you know what it’s like to have to keep secrets.”
Georgia smiled and snuck out the tickets again. “That I do,” she muttered. “You really want to help now, don’t you?”
“Vampires can’t be worse than the people I’ve dealt with,” Gail offered.
Georgia set the tickets on her lap. Gail looked on quizzically.
“He already went in to get his treatment. Everything was already set in motion long before tonight,” Georgia said.
“But that would mean . . .” Gail said, shaking her head. “Wait, what does it mean?”
“Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith, Miss Filipovic,” Georgia said. “If you love someone, you’d do anything, wouldn’t you?”
Gail looked down at the tickets. “Wait a second, these are from November.”
“Like I said, he already got his treatment. We had everything so perfectly planned. Ren was always great at making plans. My bags were packed, and I wrote this great letter to Mr. Lambley explaining to him how lucky I was to have met him, but that I was going to have to end our contract a little early. Ren gave me cash to get the tickets. That was my job while he got worked into a clinic. Do you know how many days it took for him to build that whole damn health record?”
“I don’t understand,” Gail said.
“He had gone in on a Friday to get his infusion. I got his text. Everything was fine until I got a call at eight in the morning on a Saturday. Now, even before I started working nights, I never got up that early on a weekend. But he told me that we had to meet before our flight. I could hear something different in his voice, so I got my keys and I rushed over to our special meeting spot. Lucky for us, Alice and Paul were heading to his hometown for Thanksgiving already . . .”
Georgia fumbled with her key as she tried to balance a travel mug of Joe, her purse, and her phone in the crook of her arm. The wind ruffled her Muppet fur collar around her neck, and the rare-in-New-England late-autumn sun made her squint. She finally got in both sets of doors and dumped her stuff on the counter. “Hey, you here?” she called as she saw the water still running in the sink and an open bottle of ibuprofen on the counter. “Ren?” she called again.
The door was open to her bedroom, but there was no light coming into the hall. She approached it cautiously as she heard heavy breathing from inside her room.
“Ren?” she asked.
He was lying half-dressed and facedown on the bed. The tattoos across his back didn’t quite conceal all of the deep red lines running from shoulder to spine, and two large welts stood out on the base of his neck.
“Ren!” she cried as she ran to him. As she rolled him over, all of the blood rushed from her head, and she let out a choked cry, “Ren!”
His eyes opened slowly, and he reached for her face. “Hey, you,” he said.
“Ren, what’s going on? You said you were fine,” she said as she felt his ice-cold hands.
“It will be . . . it will be fine,” he whispered. “I made her . . . I made her promise.”
“Ren!”
He closed his eyes for a moment. Georgia started shaking him awake.
“We need to call the hospital. Something is wrong,” she said. “Ren, baby, please—Ren, wake up. Wake up!”
He cracked his eyelids open again and pointed to the nightstand. Georgia looked over to see a folded-up piece of paper that was spotted in red. “Georgia—” he said.
“No, no, no,” she repeated as his eyes closed again and the terrible rattling breathing started all over. “Ren? Ren, please?”
The rattle stopped.
“You mean . . . ?” Gail choked.
Georgia looked away as she put the tickets back in her purse. Slowly, deliberately, she pulled out a wrinkled, nasty scrap of paper. Gail looked on in horror as she could see a few faded words.
“It’s funny. When you watch people cry in movies, it’s so quiet really. People’s eyes well up, and there is sad music,” Georgia said. “I remember crying until I threw up. Believe me, there was nothing pretty about those tears, Miss Filipovic.”
“I don’t understand—”
“This letter is a promise of protection, a contract of loyalty,” Georgia read. “May the bearer of this be granted pardon and immunity from all harm from the Jaeger clan.”
“A promise made is a promise kept,” a thickly German-accented voice finished.
Gail whirled around to see Minerva standing right behind them. She jumped to her feet but ended up tripping and landing on the floor next to Georgia. Her interviewer neatly tucked the paper back in her purse, stood up, and straightened her skirt. The blonde vampire smiled widely to reveal all of her now-bright pink fangs.
“I don’t understand. What kind of test is this?” Gail cried.
“Oh, sweetie,” Georgia said, her voice suddenly as cold and biting as Minerva’s. “Did you really think that this was a test . . . for you?”
Gail scrambled backward along the carpet until she ran into another chair. In the blink of an eye, the vampire was next to her. Minerva scooped up her prey with one hand and plopped her unceremoniously in a velvet armchair. “You, stay,” the undead blonde commanded.
Gail looked around desperately and tried to push her arms down, but her strength failed her. Minerva continued to stare at her. “You, stay,” she said again, this time much more calmly.
“I don’t understand,” Gail whimpered.
“I told you how sometimes the three of us—Steve, Geoffrey, and I—would have these bullshit conversations, didn’t I? We’d ask each other what we’d do in certain scenarios, as if we were still a bunch of pricks in college. Here’s one for you,” Georgia said. “If it came down to a choice between saving yourself and saving a complete stranger, what would you do?”
Georgia didn’t wait for the flush-faced little pixie to respond. “How about a better one?” she asked. “Would you sacrifice one innocent life to save a bunch of others?”
“What kind of question is that?” Gail asked, still eyeing the vampire next to her.
“It’s supposed to be difficult, but it’s not. It’s easy to be noble and say you wouldn’t sacrifice one to save the many if you’re talking about an innocent,” Georgia said. “But what happens when you slide that moral scale just a touch? What would you do if you were given the choice between saving yourself or someone who hurt you so badly that you’ll never, ever recover?”
Gail just shook her head. “I don’t understand. I’ve never even met you before today—” she stammered out.
“We had everything planned,” Georgia said, wiping the corner of her eye. “All we had to do was take a cab to the airport on Sunday morning. We only needed one more day.”
“I don’t—” Gail started to say. Her eyes widened with horror. “The tattoos. You said Ren was covered in tattoos, didn’t you?”
Georgia nodded. Now it was Gail’s turn to tear up.
“No—no, that guy didn’t have green eyes,” she said quickly. “There was a guy who seemed suspicious—really tall, with scars and tattoos. He had this name that sounded vaguely familiar, like one of the triads my uncle worked with. All I did was make one call, but that guy was Taiwanese, not Japanese, and he didn’t have green eyes—I swear!”
“Are you sure?” Georgia asked.
“I’m sure I’d remember an Asian guy with green eyes,” Gail said. “This guy’s name was weird—Ty something, not Ren!”
“Tyrone Lee, perhaps?”
“That was it!” Gail said. “All I did was tell my uncle that he was in the hospital. How? What happened?”
“I tried to warn zee little Berliner that I didn’t like it when other girls played with my toys,” Minerva said. “But she didn’t listen.”
“At first I didn’t know exactly what happened, how Minnie ever found out about our plan to run away,” Georgia said. “Frankly I didn’t care, but I was given a choice.”
“Georgia?” Gail whimpered. She then dared to address Minerva. “You killed him? You killed Ren? Why?”
Minerva paused for a moment with an unusually thoughtful look filling her sanguine eyes. She crouched next to the trembling girl and set her ice-cold hands on Gail’s shuddering shoulders. “It was never my intention to kill zee boy,” she said. “I just couldn’t have him leave. Zee scandal, zee shame that would fall on our house if we let zee help run off with some Pendragon’s little crumpet would be so dreadfully annoying.”
“So she forced him to drink her blood,” Georgia said.
Minerva clucked her tongue and waved her finger in shame. “Oh no, little Berliner, I didn’t have to force him,” she corrected. “I simply made him a better offer than you ever could, but your stupid human sheisse science had to go and ruin everything!”
“You knew something was wrong when you fed off him, Minerva!” Georgia snapped. “You knew it was wrong, and you gave him your blood anyway.”
The vampire whirled around and started cursing in German. Gail took the brief distraction to try to run for the door. Their waiter took this inopportune moment to walk into the room. Gail grabbed his arm and looked up into his big brown eyes with a face of pure desperation.
“Help me!”
The waiter smiled, finally revealing his own fangs. Gail suddenly felt the cold radiating from his arm. She stumbled back and found Minerva waiting. “You’re—you’re—” Gail sputtered.
“Is there anything I can get you?” he asked. “You’ve done so much for me already.”
She took in the pretty face, the big brown eyes, and the floppy waves of chestnut brown hair. For the first time all night, Gail was able to notice just how pale her waiter really was. He gave a neat little bow to her.
“Such zee showman, mein bruder,” Minerva said, rolling her eyes. “Why don’t you tell her about your little connection with zee Filipovic family?”
“I’ve never met you before in my life,” Gail said.
“True,” Steve said. “That’s why it took me a while to find you. Your uncle, on the other hand, has been a good friend for a long time, and I found a way to convince him that it was in his best interests to tell me all about his sweet little bratanica. It’s been enough time, and I think my little sweetheart here is ready for some closure, so I figured it was a good opportunity to introduce you two.”
