girl back into her empty shell.
Suddenly wanting a closer look, Aubrey pushed back the sheets that had tangled themselves around her legs. Shifting her weight, she placed one foot flat on the prickly carpet, then the other. Then she tried to put her weight on those feet for the first time in two weeks.
She wobbled and nearly fell. And it was the struggle that awoke some of the old Aubrey in her.
If she was going to wither and die, it would be by her choice. Not because Malcolm had made choices for her.
She hadn’t sampled this new existence yet, hadn’t seen if she could bear it.
Tonight, she decided, she would. She would hunt. She would drink.
Then she could make an informed decision.
Though she’d pretended not to listen, Malcolm’s words had actually sunk through the undulating waves of grief, when he’d bothered to talk at all, that was. He’d given her the most cursory of explanations of her new life, the minimum that he could get away with without setting some council down upon his head for abandoning a newborn.
As she walked down the street, the soles of her boots clicking decisively on the wet pavement, Aubrey was suddenly grateful for the bits of information that he had imparted.
Go hunting someplace where you won’t know anyone, he’d told her. It was harder to take what you needed when the victims were a part of your old life. Bite from the neck, the wrist or the inner thigh. That was where the blood flowed hot and rich.
And most important, don’t drink too much from one person. If you drank too much, the person either died or was turned. And then either the humans fell into an uproar, or you were responsible for a newborn vampire.
Like many a person who’d had an unplanned child and hadn’t had the grace to accept it as a gift, Malcolm had been disgusted with the responsibility of an infant. Aubrey had had no idea that he was a vampire—she’d thought he was simply the man who made her mocha latte at the coffee shop she frequented every evening. His shift had ended; he’d asked if he could walk her to the hospital. Though she had been reserved around many people, Malcolm had been both unassuming and sweet, and she’d enjoyed his company—at least, she had until he’d bared his fangs at her.
He hadn’t meant to turn her—he’d simply taken too much from her wrist
He’d made it quite clear to Aubrey that siring a newborn was the worst thing that could happen in a vampire’s life.
Like a child feeling the sting of rejection from a parent, it had hurt Aubrey to hear it. And perhaps that was why she decided to disobey the first of her maker’s orders.
Instead of going to a place she’d never been, she went to the hospital where she’d been a resident. With every step closer that she took, the weaker she felt.
The hospital smelled of blood. Old blood, new blood. The bittersweet smell saturated the area for the entire city block, and Aubrey inhaled deliberately to draw the scent in.
It made her thirsty. It made her hungry. It made her want.
The thirst warred with longing as she stepped close to the automatic double doors of the front entrance. She’d spent so many hours there, closed inside the building where the smell of acrid antiseptic tried to wash away the delicious tang of blood. She’d spent more time here than she had in her own home.
The snaking hallways, the small, windowless rooms. She knew them all.
The people, too. So many familiar faces. It was comforting, a soothing balm on her grieving soul.
If she even had a soul anymore.
But surely amongst all the new faces that appeared in Admitting and the emergency room, she could find someone she didn’t know. Someone whose scent appealed to her in the way that cinnamon rolls and freshly brewed coffee once had.
Maybe she could even find someone who was sick, sick enough that their fate was already decided. Then it wouldn’t matter how much blood she took. She could drink and drink, drink until this dreadful, ever-growing thirst was finally assuaged.
“Dr. Hart!” Slowly, Aubrey turned her head. She’d just reached the front doors of the hospital, and the fluorescent lights that were placed around the perimeter of the musty brick building cast everything with a minty-green tinge.
A man sat on a dilapidated wooden bench that was set back into the grass. Huge goose bumps prickled his skin from the kiss of the chilly breeze—he wore nothing overtop his flimsy hospital gown. An intravenous line carried something that smelled sickly sweet to his hand from a clear plastic bag, and Aubrey could smell the blood that was crusted around the tiny wound.
She recognized the man, but it was as if she was seeing someone she’d once known a very long time ago. He had been a patient that she’d tended a few times, and she couldn’t remember his name.
She stared at him openly, fascinated with the changes in him. Or rather the changes in how her new eyes saw him, she supposed.
More than anything, she saw the flow of blood through his veins, moving with every beat of his heart.
“Dr. Hart?” The man lowered his contraband cigarette from his mouth slowly, and Aubrey admired the beautiful tangerine ember of the lit end. She cocked her head curiously, studying the man as he studied her.
He seemed to be growing uncertain, and slightly embarrassed with it.
“I’m sorry.” He stubbed out the cigarette on the wood of the bench with nervous fingers, the lit stick burning a round circle into the grain. “You just… you look like someone that I haven’t seen in a while.”
Aubrey nodded. The mirror had told her how different that she now looked, but it was still surprising to have it confirmed. But more curious was the knowledge that she could bite this man here, could drink from him, and it would be easier than anything she’d ever done in her life. He was here, waiting, like a gift.
But she didn’t want him. Something in the smell that wafted off of him was slightly distasteful to her senses, and she knew that she couldn’t—wouldn’t—drink from him.
Dismissing the man, she turned, walked away from the entrance to the hospital and instead found herself compelled to walk around the side of the building to the poorly lit loading dock where the staff of the hospital made their way to and from work.
The concrete beneath her shoes was damp, and its dark tone seemed to swallow the flickering robin’s-egg light of the fluorescents and the silvery gleam cast by the moon.
She liked how things looked through her new eyes.
More, she liked the smell that intensified with every step that she took. There was someone back here. Someone who smelled like chocolate, rich, silky chocolate.
She could hear the steady thump of the person’s heart, and the quiet fizz of that chocolate-infused blood as it was pumped through iridescent veins. She could already taste it, that first taste of blood from the vein, and she wanted it like she’d never wanted the disgusting, congealed sludge contained in the plastic bags that Malcolm had brought her.
“Could I get a hand with this?” The voice attached
