M Sellars - Miranda

I glanced down at my blood-covered shirt and briefly tried to imagine what the photo she had just snapped must look like. The image I conjured wasn’t pretty. “You really think that picture is going to calm her down?”

“Believe me, I mentioned that to her myself, but she insisted.”

“Yeah,” I grunted. “Sounds like her. But I guess she’s seen me looking worse than this.”

Constance nodded. “She said something to that effect when I gave her a description. You’re still going to need to call her though. She wanted to talk to you right this minute, but I convinced her to let them finish checking you over first”

“Yeah, I know I will. Thanks.”

“Sir, I really need you to put the oxygen mask back on,” the paramedic insisted yet again.

“No,” I said, giving my head a shake as I pulled the mask up over my head before he could stop me, and then handed it to him.

He took it but continued trying to convince me it was necessary. “You need to leave this on while we transport you to the hospital.”

“I’m not going to any hospital,” I replied.

“Sir, you’ve obviously lost a significant amount of blood for some unknown reason,” he pressed. “I would really suggest that you allow us to take you to the hospital.”

“You should probably listen to him, Rowan,” Constance told me.

“This isn’t anything new,” I told her. “Trust me, I’ll be fine.”

“This has happened to you before?” the paramedic asked.

“A few times, yeah.”

“Then you should definitely let us take you to the hospital. They can run some tests to determine what caused this,” he pressed.

“I can tell you exactly what caused it,” I replied. “The spirit of a hundred and fifty-year-old sociopath.”

He furrowed his brow and glanced toward the police officer who had responded to the call with them then looked back to me, “I’m not sure I understand. Are you saying that you were attacked?”

“Not like you think I mean…” I grumbled.

“How then?”

“It’s a long story with too many chapters for me to get into at the moment.”

“But when you said spirit, did you mean like a ghost or something?” he asked.

“She’s definitely an ‘or something,’ that’s for sure.”

“Mister Gant, I need to ask if you are under the care of a psychiatrist, or…”

I looked up at my friend then sighed heavily and spoke over the paramedic, “Constance? A little help here.”

She shook her head as she extracted her credentials from her pocket and gave the case a practiced flip so that she could display them to both him and the police officer. “Special Agent Mandalay,” she said. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll vouch for him. Mister Gant is one of our consultants. He isn’t insane that we’re aware of. Just a little…” She paused thoughtfully then added, “Quirky would probably be the best way to describe it.”

I shot her an annoyed look. She returned fire with a glare that said in no uncertain terms “shut up and let me handle this.” Since I had asked her to intervene on my behalf, I figured it best to comply. Besides, she could have easily told them something quite a bit worse and still been completely truthful.

The paramedic objected, “Unexplained hemorrhaging isn’t ‘quirky,’ ma’am, it’s possibly a life threatening issue.”

“Believe me,” she replied. “He knows.”

He turned back to me. “Mister Gant, you really need to go to the hospital.”

“I appreciate your concern, but my vitals are pretty much normal, right?”

“Yes, but that…”

I interrupted again. “And I have the right to refuse medical treatment, am I correct?”

“Yes, sir, you do.”

“Okay then. That’s what I’m doing.”

“Sir, if you still insist on refusing treatment then I would strongly advise that you call your personal physician as soon as possible,” he told me. “You might have a serious underlying condition.”

“Trust me, I’m not the one with th…” I started but noticed Constance glaring at me once again before I could finish. Changing my tone midstream, I nodded and lied. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll make sure I do that.”

Once the paramedics had gone, Constance and I headed back up to our rooms. The restaurant staff gave us a wide berth, which was fine as far as I was concerned. At this point, the light of my earlier brightened mood had officially been extinguished, so I definitely wasn’t up to the intrusion, no matter how well meaning it might be.

Constance finally broke the silence as the elevator gave a slight jerk and started upward to the seventh floor. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

I turned toward her and nodded. “Physically, yeah. Mentally, that’s a whole different story I’m afraid.”

She leaned back against the side wall and crossed her arms. “So, is this whole incident about what I think it is?”

I backed up and imitated her posture by resting against the opposite wall. “Guess that depends on what you’re thinking. I experienced spontaneous hemorrhaging just like this in connection with the case I worked last month.”

“Ben told me about it, and yeah…that’s exactly what I’m thinking,” she said. “The guy the media was calling Count Dracula.”

I gave her another nod. “Then yes, I’d say we’re probably on the same page.”

The elevator stopped with a quiet thump, and then the brushed metal doors parted down the center, revealing the opposite wall of the corridor. Fortunately, no one was waiting on the other side, so for the moment at least, my somewhat gory appearance was a non-issue. If I could make it to my room without running into anyone else, all would be fine. I motioned Constance ahead of me and then followed her out and to the left.

“But isn’t that investigation closed?” she asked as we walked down the hallway. “As I recall the suspect is dead, correct?”

“Suspect, yes,” I replied. “But maybe he wasn’t the actual killer. Or maybe there was more than one… I don’t know… All I can say is something felt very wrong about the way that case ended.”

“Wrong how?”

“Wrong unfinished. Like it was some kind of a set up.”

“Set up how?”

“It was too convenient. Especially from my end with the visions and such. The answers came too easily.”

“Okay, then set up by whom?”

“That’s the burning question. I’m beginning to think maybe Miranda.”

“How could she do that?”

“Another good question, and one I need to find an answer to before it goes any further.”

“Did you tell Ben about this?”

“Of course I did. And to his credit, he was perfectly willing to follow up on it too… But no more victims surfaced, so in the short term it appeared that the killings had stopped… Plus, I didn’t have any more episodes… And then there was all the hard evidence at the scene itself…” I allowed my voice to trail off for a moment before continuing. “We pursued it for a couple of weeks, but I couldn’t give him anything solid to go on. All I could say was that something still didn’t feel right.”

“And now this happens.”

“Yeah. Now this. Which also feels very wrong to me.”

“Because of the timing?”

“Yeah… Pretty much.”

“I haven’t seen all of the details on the original case,” she said with a shrug. “So I only know what Ben told me, but wasn’t it all actually connected to the vampire subculture?”

“That’s how it appeared on the surface,” I said. “Sanguinarian vampirism. People who have actually convinced themselves that they are vampires and really do drink blood. Everything from Renfield’s syndrome to kids looking for attention. It’s pretty strange, even by my standards. But in the end, everything stopped at the dead suspect. No solid connections to the local vampire community that we could find.”