"Explains what?" Rachel asked, then grimaced as she realized she was talking to her hallucination. Which maybe wasn't much worse than talking to dead people, she reasoned, and she did that all the time. Besides, the stiff had a really nice voice, kind of warm and whiskey smooth. She wouldn't mind some whiskey. Tea, lemon, honey, and whiskey. Yes, a hot toddy would fix her right up and nip these hallucinations in the bud. Or simply make it so she didn't care about them. Either way would be fine.
"Why you won't come to me?"
Rachel glanced back at the corpse. He wasn't making much sense, but then who said hallucinations had to? She tried to reason with him. "Why would I come to you? You aren't real. You aren't even sitting up."
"I'm not?"
"No, I just think you are. In reality, you're still really lying there dead. I'm just imagining you sitting up and talking."
"Hmm." He grinned suddenly. It was a nice grin. "How do you know?"
"Because dead men don't sit up and talk," she explained patiently. "Please lie back down now. My head is starting to spin."
"But what if I'm not dead?"
That stumped her a minute, but then Rachel recalled that she was feverish and he wasn't really sitting up at all. She decided to prove her point by stepping forward and swinging out, expecting her hand to sail through thin air. Instead, it slammed into a hard chin. The corpse cried out in surprised pain, but Rachel hardly noticed--she was busy shrieking and leaping away again. Her hand stung, but she was too busy yelling to care. The dead man was sitting up.
The room that had been spinning moments before suddenly stopped. It began to darken. "Darn. I'm going to faint," Rachel realized with horror. She told her corpse almost apologetically, "I never faint. Really."
Etienne watched the tall redhead slip to the floor, then slid carefully off the cold metal table and peered around. He was in the morgue. The realization made him grimace. This was not somewhere he'd ever, in three hundred years of living, aspired to be.
Giving a shudder he knelt to examine the woman. The moment he bent to touch her forehead, though, the room immediately began to revolve. It was a result of his weakened state. He'd lost way too much blood--first to the chest wound, then to healing it. He would have to replace that blood soon, but not with this woman's. She was obviously ill, which meant her blood would do little good. He would have to find another source, and soon. But for the moment he would have to ignore his need and weakness the best he could. There were things he had to do.
Etienne brushed the hair away from the woman's face and took in her pallor. Her head had hit the floor with an audible crack. He wasn't surprised to find a bump and an abrasion there. She would have a terrible headache when she awoke, but otherwise she would be fine. Reassured that she was relatively unscathed, he concentrated on attempting to ensure that she wouldn't recall his arrival--that memory, combined with his disappearance from the morgue, could raise all sorts of questions he didn't need. Etienne sought her mind with his own, but found her oddly elusive. He couldn't seem to get into her thoughts.
He frowned over the turn of events. Most minds were open books to him. He had never run into this problem before. Except for Pudge, he admitted with a touch of regret. He had never been able to get through the pain and confusion in that boy's head to reach his thoughts and eliminate his knowledge of Etienne's family's special situation. Had Etienne been able, things would have never reached this juncture.
He blamed himself. Etienne considered his inability to sort through the pain and loss in Pudge's mind as a personal failure. Pudge had suffered greatly in the last six months or so: the loss of Rebecca, a woman he had loved and been engaged to marry. Etienne had known her. She had been a processor of high caliber and as sweet as a sunny summer day. She had been something special. Her death in a car accident had been tragic. For Pudge, it had rocked his world. The subsequent death of the man's mother had finished pushing him into a world of pain.
Etienne simply wasn't strong enough to suffer with the lad. The one time he had tried, the loss tearing at Pudge's thoughts had touched Etienne in ways he wouldn't even admit. He didn't know how anyone could suffer the heart-sore state Pudge did without losing his mind. Etienne had barely touched those feelings and had come away both sad and terribly depressed. Pudge experienced it twenty-four hours a day on a daily basis. Etienne fully understood how the other man would seize on the knowledge he had garnered regarding Etienne's supernatural status and use it to give him a purpose in life. It gave the boy something of a shield between himself and his loss.
Etienne had experienced such pain and compassion for the fellow, he had refused to try to sort through his thoughts and try to eliminate the more dangerous memories. But that had left him wide open to attack by the man, which wasn't the most ideal scenario--as tonight's latest murder attempt proved. It was time to try a different tactic. The problem was, Etienne didn't know what that should be. Eliminating the problem seemed easiest, but such a solution was always a last resort. Besides, Etienne couldn't accept the idea of killing someone who was suffering so horribly. It was rather like kicking a dog when it was down.
Shrugging away his upsetting thoughts, Etienne contemplated the redhead again, wondering why he couldn't seem to get into her mind. Loss and pain and teetering on the verge of insanity were not what he was sensing from this woman. The only sensation he had felt was an infinite sense of loneliness, something Etienne was used to feeling himself.
His difficulty now must be because he was so weak, he decided. Well, the woman's fever combined with the knock on her head should convince her she had hallucinated. The woman had claimed he was an hallucination while still conscious, so perhaps that was enough.
Etienne's fingers were smeared with blood when he set her head back on the floor. After a moment's hesitation, he lifted his fingers to his nose, sniffed the sweet scent, then chanced a lick. He frowned. The poor woman needed vitamins or something; she was bordering on anemic. Or perhaps that was just a result of her illness.
Despite himself, his gaze went to her neck. He was so hungry. Etienne fought the temptation to bite her. He needed blood, but it wouldn't help him to take it from someone who was ill. And this woman was definitely ill. Her skin had felt on fire under his cool hand, and her face was flushed with blood. The scent of it was driving him wild and making his body cramp with hunger. His body didn't care that she was ill and would do him little good, it smelled blood and wanted some.
Forcing his basest instincts away, he straightened, grabbing weakly at the edge of the table he had been lying on to keep his balance when the room again swayed. He was waiting for his legs to regain some strength when the swinging doors behind him suddenly opened. Etienne turned his head slowly. A man had entered and stood frozen just inside the room.
"Who--?" The guy's gaze went from Etienne to the woman crumpled on the floor, then back to Etienne's na**d, bloodstained chest. "Oh, man!"
Much to Etienne's amusement, the guy glanced around wildly, then held out the coffee he carried as if the hot liquid were a deterrent. "What did you do to Rach? What are you doing here?"
"Rach?" Etienne glanced down at the woman on the floor. Rach. Short for Rachel, no doubt. A pretty name for a pretty lady. A pretty sick lady, from what he could tell. The woman should be home in bed. He glanced at the newcomer. "Are you sick too?"
"Sick?" The fellow straightened somewhat, bewilderment crossing his face. Apparently that was the last thing he'd expected to be asked. "No."
Etienne nodded. "Good. Come here."
"I--" The man's mouth froze in the refusal he'd been about to make, then his hands lowered and he moved forward as if compelled. Which, of course, he was. Allowing the orange juice he held in one hand and the coffee he carried in the other to hang at his side, the man continued forward until he stood directly before Etienne.
"I need some of your blood. I need a lot of blood but will only take a bit from you," Etienne explained. Not that it really mattered or he expected permission; the man stood silent and still, his gaze unfocused.
Etienne hesitated. He hadn't bitten anyone in a long time. In years, really. Doing so was frowned upon by his people now that there were blood banks. Still, this was an emergency. He had lost a lot of blood, and it had left him extremely weak. He needed to feed to restore himself enough to get home.