The Vampire Won't Bite Without My Yes, and I Keep Giving It novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Fourth

The white van stopped forty feet from my blade with its brakes squealing.

Its headlights pinned me against the orange flash of my own beacon.

I stood in front of the truck with my hands open and my heart in my teeth.

The driver's door opened.

A woman in a blood bank parka climbed down with a travel mug.

She was about fifty and looked like she had seen everything twice.

"Ma'am, you can't block the highway."

"I know. I need to talk to your passenger."

"He's cargo. I don't talk to cargo." She sipped her coffee. "He signed himself out of the Hall. Nobody's holding him."

"Then he can talk to me."

She looked at the plow, and at the keys in my fist.

"I get paid by the mile," she said. "You've got fifteen minutes."

She walked to the back and rapped on the steel.

"Visitor."

The latch clanked from inside, and the door swung open.

Emlyn stood in the dark of the cargo bay with his coat buttoned to the throat and one suitcase at his feet.

His glasses were crooked, and he looked like a man who had been dead for a day.

"Vinnie," he said. "No. You mustn't be here."

"I'm here."

"The release is signed. If the Chair hears you broke it..."

"There's nothing to break." I climbed up into the bay and took his coat in both fists. "Listen to me. The law is a lie."

He closed his eyes.

"Please don't."

"Ole showed me his arm. She has been drinking from him every night since 1962."

He stood very still.

"That's impossible."

"Then she lied to you, and she did it with Ruth's life as the reason."

His eyes opened.

The cargo bay was so quiet that I heard the courier's boots creak outside.

"She wept," Emlyn said. "When I knelt. She held my head."

"I know."

"She wept, Vinnie."

"I think she meant it. I think she was sorry for you and she did it anyway."

He sat down on the steel bench.

"Sixty-four years," he whispered. "I have counted every bite. I kept a book."

"I know. I read it."

He put his face in his hands.

I did not have time to hold him properly, and it nearly killed me.

My radio crackled in the cab behind us.

"Fourteen, where are you? Fourteen."

I went back down the steps and keyed the mic.

"Dewey, I need a ride, a man who can't see daylight, and a motel with blackout curtains."

There was a long pause.

"Two Harbors," Dewey said. "There's a place on the lake. Twenty-five minutes, kid. Don't move that truck."

He was there in twenty-two, in his crew-cab pickup with a pile of moving blankets.

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