Negative Space Ch. 08

"It's okay, Lana. I sense them too. Knox will be out in a moment. Don't worry." She led me to the kitchen table and sat me down before heading to the fridge to pull out a dark red, stiff bag. She popped it in the microwave and I watched the seconds count down as I felt the vampires walking closer. Moments before the microwave dinged, there was an ominous single knock on the door. Knox stepped out of her room, then, and opened the door. Sandra took the blood bag out of the microwave and snipped off a corner, pouring the warm blood into glasses.

"May I help you?" Knox asked the hallway, and I shifted impatiently to see who was out there. Sandra shook her head at me, and I settled down, straining my ears to hear the words being exchanged. I watched Knox nod, glance at me, and the step back, as Stevens and a vampire I did not recognize walked into the apartment. The other vampire was an Asian woman who stood taller than Stevens with a waist-length braid down her back. Her clothing clung to her in ways that the most graceful human could never achieve--it seemed first as if there was nothing there at all, and then as if the view could not possibly have any idea of what lay beneath that dress. Her eyes were a cool grey that pushed into me, and I lowered my head, knowing innately that this woman was extremely powerful.

Knox turned to me, her eyes wide and blank. "Lana, this is Iyasu Akemi, His Majesty the Prince's Sire and mentor. She would like a word with you." Knox's voice was strangely unlike normal. I allowed myself to re-enter the state of calm I had felt earlier and I saw a glimmering web of strings of light wrapped about her. They lead back to the strange woman, whose body warped slightly in my plane of vision as if she were standing behind a heat vent. No, I realized, that wasn't quite it. It was as if she were the heat vent, as if she were merely a beam of light wavering back and forth. I felt as if she wasn't even there at all, as if I could pass my hand right through her body. Her eyes narrowed--I realized she was still staring at me. I stood, feeling the heaviness of the energy in the room that I had previously never noticed.

"Madame Iyasu, nice to meet you. How may I help you?"

She was close to me suddenly, and I felt high with the energy that was swirling through the room as it began to enter my body. Up through my throat bubbled a golden sensation of loss of control and suddenly I felt my mouth move of its own accord, and I heard my voice.

"You are privy to things most humans have never and will never know exist. They do not know because upon understanding the limitations of their own life, they must protect themselves from the dreariness by either refuting the evidence, or by condemning the otherworldly by insisting on their evilness. Clearly, this presents a problem, as either the human has a mental breakdown attempting to protect themselves through proving the impossibility of what they see, or they undergo a religious conversion that pushes them over the side of insanity. However, you have done none of these things. As Theodore's Sire, I am particularly sensitive to his emotions, and the spike of emotional activity that I have been accosted with over the past few days has outstripped any I've felt from him in the past. Tell me what you are, and who you are working for."

As she spoke I struggled to pull away from the trance of her eyes. I hated the calmness and acceptance that surged through me, and I pushed away from her in the same way that I pushed against Theo the other day. She didn't cry out in pain the way he did, but with a polite cough she released me, and I gasped, breathing on my own finally.

"I thought," I panted, "I thought that Theo's Sire was a man."

The woman's image flickered, and before me stood a handsome man of about thirty. "Is this what you had in mind?" He said. Something in my reality was peeling away from what I saw—something was not right. Although his mouth was moving, the sound I was hearing was coming from within my head.

"Yes, that was just what I was imagining. Only a little shorter, and darker." The man made a little noise I assumed to be a forced laugh. "Now tell me why you're here, sir."

"I'm here to asses you. Theodore is, shall we say, concerned. For a human, you have a few unprecedented abilities. Even to begin with, you accept our presence with calm. That is unheard of. Beyond that, though, you can feel when a vampire is hearing your thoughts. And even more than that, you can respond, not only controlling the vampire when he is within your mind, but within is own as well. And so I'll ask you again, what are you?"

The silent hum in the room, the eerie vacancy of both Knox and Sandra, and my enhanced sensitivity to the shimmering light that indicated some form of magic made the ticking of my watch even louder. I stared at it a moment before I actually registered the time.

"Oh, Madame, or Sir, excuse me. I can only tell you what I know about that. I am a human and a healer. Most important, right now, is that I am able to tend to my patients—the clinic should be open already, and I'm not even dressed. Please do excuse me, but I'm certain we can, and will, pick up this conversation another time."

I grabbed Sandra's hand, jolting her from the strange spell, and we hurried about the room to prepare. As we finally turned to leave, however, the stranger was still standing in the way. I had been thinking as I got ready to leave, though, and I had come to a rather risky conclusion. This person was probably not here at all. And if so, it was merely our acceptance of his, or her, presence that allowed him to be there. I closed my eyes, and began to feel through my mind. Where were the cracks? Where were the places he could have seeped through to place himself? When I found it I almost laughed—he had simply placed this image where he could not himself go. As we saw the apparition, it would move, talk, act, but it was only a light show. The words and sounds came from within our own heads. I snapped the space shut, building a rudimentary fortification about Sandra and myself. There was a look of small surprise on his face, and he disappeared.

"What did you do?" Sandra asked, her eyes wide.

"I just... I closed him out. But come on! Let's get to the clinic before anything else happens."

The elevator doors opened with a whirring, and I stepped through to face a line of vampires, each staring at me with thirsty eyes. I nearly stepped back into the elevator, but the whirring took up again and the doors shut behind me. With a deep breath, I walked between them, forcing myself to stare over their heads at the door behind, unlocking it quickly and closing it behind Sandra and myself. One more deep breath.

"Okay, so where is Elliott?" I asked, shuffling through the papers on the desk and trying to tidy as quickly as possible.

"I'll call him. You should leave this all to me, Lana. Go into an exam room and set up. As soon as I'm ready, I'll open the doors, and you can start seeing patients with or without him." She reached out to me, elongating her body and gracefully pulling my hand out towards her. She squeezed it. "Don't worry. You've managed to take care of everything just fine so far. This will work out."

I smiled and nodded, rushing into the first exam room to set up, putting out sterile gloves, medications, and turning on the machines. I listened to Sandra's voice echoing through the hallways, catching moments of her conversation with Elliott, but not enough to know what was going on. I went to the next exam room and set up there as well. Now I listened to her inviting the waiting vampires in, taking names, information, and asking about ailments. Her voice mingled with the lower or higher tones of women and men, even a particularly young sounding voice that startled me—would someone honestly turn a child?

As I placed syringes in a row, I felt a change in the energy of the room. I spun around to find Elliott standing in the door way.

"So you finally got here just to stare? What am I even paying you for?"

"I was here on time, actually. However, there is only a certain amount of pacifying I can do with an anxious, eager group of vampires. When it became clear you were held up somehow, I stepped out, telling them I'd return with you. But that's enough for now. What can do?"

I sighed. This was a rocky start for all of us. But it would be okay. It would be okay. "Alright. Just... please bring the first patient in. Check with Sandra—I'm sure she has a way of evaluating who was here first."

I swung the door almost closed behind him and pulled my white coat from the hook behind the door. Certain things, like white coats, do a great deal to inspire a sense of authority, even when one has no idea what one is talking about. That was one of the most important things I learned in med school. Act as if you are a god, and everyone else will assume you are. I leaned against the counter and pulled out a note pad so I could seem busy as the patient came in.

Elliott knocked politely, and let the door fall open to present a young man with an arm missing. Where it should have been was instead a large gauze pad that was dark with blood.

"Oh dear. Where's your arm?" I chuckled, helping him to sit down on the exam table.

"I lost it last week in a... well, an altercation, but that's not the problem."

"Okay, so tell me what is."

"Well, I've never lost a limb like this, but I've lost fingers before, and they always grow back. It takes a while, for sure, but by a week the skin has always healed over already. This one still looks the same as the night I lost it. I've had to drink four times as much blood as normal to keep up with the amount I'm loosing."

I nodded. That could certainly be a problem. "Well, can I have Elliott here take off that bandage so we can have a look?"

The young man nodded, nervously gripping the side of the table. As Elliott began peeling back the bandage, the man's face blanched. I placed my hand on his back.

"I'm so sorry, I realize I forgot to ask you your name!"

"Oh, it's okay," he grimaced. "I'm Jacob."

"Well Jacob, don't you worry about this. We'll take care of it no problem. Tell me, how long have you been a vampire?" I squeezed his remaining arm, and brushed the hair out of his face. He smiled at me somewhat like how a little boy looks at his mother. I smiled back and engaged him in small talk, rubbing his back, and helping him to get in the most comfortable position. When the bandage was off I moved to the other side of the table, listening to Jacob tell me the story of how he met his wife, and began to examine the wound. It was clearly a knife wound of some sort, in fact, it seemed like it had been a difficult endeavor. The person with the knife must have held Jacob down somehow, and labored to use a short, non-serrated knife to hack at Jacob's arm until he had managed to cut it all the way off. The joint had been cut just so that the ball of the humorous just popped out of the socket.

I decided that the best thing to do to begin with would be to wash it out, since the only thing I could think of was that there was something, either on the knife or sprinkled into the socket, that was stopping the vampire's natural healing abilities to function. Elliott fetched a basin and saline solution, and I carefully poured it over the wound, catching the bloody water beneath in the basin. Jacob's voice hesitated, the knuckles on his remaining hand going completely white.

"So what were you studying at college when you met her?" I asked, hoping to prompt him to continue his story. He sighed thankfully, closing his eyes and retreated to his happy memories.

"Well, it was my third BA, so I figured I'd study something totally different that time. My true passion is history, but there's only so much an unchanging vampire can do in the history field, while all his colleagues whither and age."

I lifted a flap of muscle, and poured some saline below it.

"That time I was studying French poetry, and luckily too, since I had to take Intro to French Literature in order to pass my sophomore year requirements, and Leah was a Lit major. We were put together for a class project."

After I finished cleaning the wound, I took the basin of water, and on a hunch, I dipped in a tab of paper covered in a chemical designed to detect silver. The little beige tab slowly turned a deep shade of blue, the sign that there was indeed silver floating in the water. Now confident in my guess, I filled a clean basin with water and poured in some of the solution I had created to counteract the effects of silver on vampire flesh. As Jacob kept telling me about his first date with Leah, after the class project, that is, I sat him up on the table in a way that he could let his arm stump hang into the basin. I let him soak there for a moment, and gave Elliott instructions to dry and bandage the wound after it showed signs of reduced blood loss. I thanked Jacob for his patients and good will, and stepped into the waiting room to bring the next person in. There were more vampires than before, some even standing about, waiting. I took the chart from Sandra, and invited a young woman into Exam Room 2.

"Clara?" I asked, and she nodded. "Hello, I'm Dr. Crane. It's nice to meet you." We shook hands, and I noted a softness and quietness about her that made me take note to be particularly careful to make sure she was being heard. "What can I do for you, Clara?"

"Um, I just, oh..." She trailed off, nervously fidgeting with the button on her sleeve. "You know, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have come here. You have so many other patients. I'm just in the way."

I let her finish her apologies, and I placed a hand on her arm. "Clara, I'm really glad you came in today. Even if we don't talk about the big stuff right now, it's really good to meet you and get to know you. That way, if you come in another time, we can talk more like friends, and less like strangers." Her fidgeting slowed, and she looked at me with a mixture of suspicion and relief.

"Why don't you just tell me about yourself right now?" I continued. "Tell me how long you've been a vampire, and about your family." When she realized I wasn't going to quiz her on whatever reason she came in for, she relaxed. I listened to everything she told me about her background, her job, the things she loved, and took notes. I encouraged her as much as I needed to, and after 20 minutes, I took advantage of a natural break in the conversation.

"Well, Clara, again, I want you to know that I'm really happy that you came in today. If you're willing, I'd love to make an appointment for a less crowded day, so that we can talk for longer. What do you think about that?"

Clara agreed, and after arrangements were made, I walked her out, and invited the next person in. This time it was a woman with a child. A distinctly vampire child. I brought them into the exam room and excused myself for a moment to check on Jacob. Elliott was just cleaning off the stump as I entered, and I saw that the wound was already beginning to heal again. Jacob was thrilled, talking a mile a minute about how he couldn't wait to tell everyone how good of a doctor I was. I laughed.

"What a great advertising ploy! Unfortunately I can't pay you, though, Jacob."

"Oh, I wouldn't dream of doing it for money. This is really fantastic."

"Well, let's be sure to make a check-up appointment for next week so that we can make sure it's still healing correctly, and this hasn't been some sort of fluke."

I took a deep breath before I stepped into the other exam room—the child disturbed me. There was something beyond unreal about the porcelain look to her skin and the glassiness of her eyes. I opened the door to find the little girl sitting on the woman's lap, rooting through her purse, just like I used to do as a child. In boring places my mother would just hand me her purse, and I would take everything out, organize it, and put it back, content to have something to occupy my mind. I smiled, reminding myself that she really was just a child, no matter her pristine prettiness.

"Hello! I am Dr. Crane."

"Nice to meet you Dr. Crane," the woman said. "My name is Sarah, and this is my daughter Lucy." She hesitated a moment, searching my face, and continued. "Lucy is my daughter by birth—I didn't turn her. And I just, I just thought, you know, all the human children have check ups, make sure they're growing right and all that, and I thought I'd ask you to give her a check up too." Lucy had looked up from the purse and was staring intently at her mother's face. She didn't care about being here, she wasn't at all bothered, but her mother's nervousness was incredibly important to her, and it was clear she was worried about her mother.

I sat down facing them and smiled again. "I have to come clean with you, Sarah. I'm entirely new at this. I know how to do human pediatric check ups, but I don't know even the slightest bit about vampire growth. I will absolutely check her out, make notes, and set an appointment with you to give her another check up next year so we can track her growth. In the meantime, I'll do some research, and together we'll figure this out." I turned to Lucy who was staring at me now. "What do you think about that Lucy? Do you want me to show you how humans have figured out how to listen to heartbeats with our weak ears?" Lucy nodded, too intrigued to play coy. I showed her the stethoscope, took her measurements, and chatted with her and her mother about her health, energy, appetite, growth spurts, and so on. I assured Sarah I would let her know as soon as I had some more information, and escorted them back to the waiting room. It seemed as if I hadn't even made a dent yet, but I brought the next patient back and set to work.