The Last Reason
The next day Schroder turned up at sunset. Vampires didn’t like the sunlight, so I couldn’t help but wonder where he had gone during that time.
He came lugging a sizable crate full of groceries.
“Wow,” I murmured, looking at the pineapple leaves coming out of the top of the box.
He dropped it on the counter and said, “For you.”
I was completely despondent. “This is a lot of food for just me. Are you ever planning to let me go?”
“Once you’ve been here for a while, you won’t want to go.”
“I seriously doubt that.”
“So even after you thought about it, you didn’t believe my first piece of evidence?”
I winced. From where I was sitting, I could clearly see the place where Dudley had shot him in the head a couple of nights ago. It was just above his left temple. I had deliberately avoided looking at it the night before, but now I couldn’t help it. The mark was dark with a hideous black scab and the skin was pulled over it with two metal stitches.
“Thank you for not hurting me back then. It was worth something, but not as much as you hope,” I said, seeking to meet his gaze rather than stare at his wound, but it was hard since he still wore sunglasses. “I have often wondered how I managed to take on a vampire and win, and if you weren’t willing to hurt me then that makes everything make a little more sense. By itself, it makes you seem like you might be a good sort of guy since you let me kill you and all...” I trailed off.
He sighed. “I suppose it would have been unrealistic to expect more. I expected you to doubt me, which is why I came up with the plan—the four-day plan. Every day for four days I will tell you one reason that should prove to you that I have always loved you. Last night was the first reason and it seems to have had an impact.”
I turned my face away saucily. His plan wasn’t going to work. “What am I going to do here while you finish your plan? There’s nothing to do.”
“Like what?”
“There’s no T.V. No computers. No books.”
Schroder looked at me like he had never seen me before. “Those are the only things you can think of?”
“Well, I’ve never had this much spare time in my life. I’m always busy. I have to earn a living. I have to take care of myself—shop, cook, clean, wash, work. I have to help London meet deadlines, so sometimes I spend the whole weekend beading.”
“While she sleeps?” Schroder asked suspiciously.
He was absolutely right. That was usually what happened, but it wasn’t that London didn’t work. She got a lot done at night, but she couldn’t keep herself awake during the day. I had stopped trying to keep the same schedule as her. My system couldn’t handle the constant change in times especially when I had to work nine to five, so I usually just saw her for a few hours in the evening and then went to bed while she stayed up.
All the same, I couldn’t let Schroder bad-mouth her. “And you don’t sleep during the day?”
“Not usually.”
“Don’t vampires hate daylight?”
“If you’re asking if I want to go sun tanning, then the answer is no, but that doesn’t mean I don’t keep normal hours. A vampire sleeping all day is a sign they’re unhealthy.”
My eyes narrowed. London had never stayed awake during the day. “Did you make her wrong on purpose?”
He scoffed. “It’s nothing I did. Vampires are all made the same way, even if they steal the blood. You think I don’t know her? It’s her attitude that’s sour.”
“Well, you’re the thing that’s been bothering her. She was crazy about you. When she thought you were dead, she was lifeless, too.”
“Whatever. She was like that before I changed her into a vampire. Nothing is different. Besides, haven’t you clued into the fact that I wouldn’t have bitten her if I thought she could overpower me?”
I averted my eyes. Yeah, what he said sounded true. I just didn’t like it. Dudley said the same thing and I didn’t want to face it when he said it either.
“After hearing you say such despicable things about my sister who I have protected with my life for the past eight years, how do you expect me to fall in love with you? Are your reasons really that great?”
“They are—especially the last one.” He took off his sunglasses and looked at me. His blue eyes looked especially pale now that he had no eyelashes.
Seeing him thus defaced, I couldn’t hold it in anymore. “I’m sorry for what I did to you. I wish there had been another way,” I whispered.
At first, he didn’t respond, and when he did, he asked, “Would you feel better if I forgave you?”
I put a hand to my forehead. “Probably not. Part of me wishes I really had killed you if it meant that you would never come after London. I’m not sorry for cutting and burning you when I remember what I saw in the basement of your shed. You were ordering your weasels to drain her. You pointed her out to Garth and asked him to seduce her, right? I can’t forgive you for that, so what good is your forgiveness if I still wish I’d killed you?”
He gulped down on something hard in his throat. “I didn’t realize you saw that. My mind has been cloudy lately.”
“You’re forgetting things?”
“All the time.”
“And now that you’ve remembered, do you still think you can convince me your feelings for me are real?”
“I have to try.”
“I’m listening.” I rolled my eyes rudely. I was only putting up with his nonsense because I was completely trapped. I crossed my arms and waited for him to give me the second piece of evidence.
“I didn’t turn you into a vampire.”
He’d already told me that, so nothing felt new. I let his words ring through the house for a moment and then said coldly, “If you’re not trying to kill me then please don’t bore me to death.”
***
Schroder didn’t disappear the next day. He spent the morning in the basement—painting. I sat on a stool behind him and watched him work. With nothing else to do, it was kind of entertaining. He knew what he was doing and he worked so quickly it was hard to believe he had the stamina, especially with the thick blue fishing line keeping the cuts in his fingers closed.
“I didn’t come after you for revenge after I healed from being burned and decapitated,” he said, suddenly giving his third piece of evidence late that morning.
“That’s true.”
“And even now, I’m not keeping you here for revenge’s sake.”
“I know. If you wanted to kill me, you could have done it twelve times over.”
“Are you beginning to believe me?”
I snapped my fingers impatiently. “Even if I do believe you, it doesn’t change my feelings for you.”
“So, tell me. How do I make you feel?” he asked, turning his back on me and concentrating on his painting.
“I don’t want a vampire lover. I want a human.”
“Like Tate?”
My head nearly spun off my shoulders, but I managed to collect myself. “Technically, he was the one who killed you.”
“Yeah, he was a little shit.”
At this point, I realized that maybe Schroder didn’t see Dudley the other night. He was outside. Maybe Schroder thought I was the one who had shot him. Also, he bothered to question London about Dudley’s whereabouts. Luckily, London didn’t know I had met up with him. Maybe Schroder was still looking for him—for revenge.
“Did you go after him?” I asked quietly.
“Are you worried about him?” Schroder asked, cleaning out one of his brushes.
“Well, yeah. He was a friend of mine.”
“That kid may not have been a vampire, but he always looked hungry whenever you walked by. I wanted to kill him long before that fateful night. I didn’t want to do it with you watching, so I was stuck with him hacking my head off. Actually, I had forgotten all about him. That was why I had to ask London who he was. You know, to jog my memory.”
I exhaled heavily. So, that was how he thought with all those bullets in his head. “So you haven’t found him?”
“No. He seems to have dropped off the face of the earth. But you don’t have to be so happy about it. What was he to you anyway?”
“A good friend. I don’t want you to murder him, so if you have a shred of affection for me—don’t go after him.”
“Do you have good memories of him?”
“Not really, but he did save me when I was in too deep with you. Here’s a question for you. What would you have done with me if he hadn’t interrupted?”
Schroder started cleaning his brushes. Then he took off his apron and mumbled, “I have no idea.”
***
That evening I sat by the setting sun and sipped a bottle of cream soda. Schroder had brought me a whole crate of it. Watching the sun go down across the water was something I’d never experienced before. I relaxed. The next day Schroder would tell me his last reason. I planned to reject him and then it was just the ticking of the clock until I convinced him that there should be a fifth reason to prove he really loved me—he should let me leave. If you love someone, let them go and all that crap. I hoped he fell for it.
The sun went down. The sky turned deeper and deeper shades of crimson until it turned navy. Then Schroder came in and took a seat next to me. He was carrying a black leather bag with him.
“Is that the last reason?” I asked cynically.
He nodded and set it down beside the couch out of my view. He turned and looked at me. Not a word passed his lips. Not a greeting. Nothing. He just looked at me with his probing blue eyes and searched my face.
Talk about unnerving!
“Is there something on my face?” I finally blurted.
He didn’t answer immediately but kept staring at me. Finally, he said in low tones. “You know, I don’t think the woman I see right now is the version of you that I’m in love with.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m serious. The Sweeper I’m in love with wouldn’t have acted the way you have. She would have taken up the brush and paints and shown herself in them. She would have run out to the water like a maniac and played until the sun came down. Windsurfing? Have you ever tried it?” He read his answer in my blank expression. “All the equipment is in the shed out by the water. I like to do it at night, but you would do it during the day when the sun was at its hottest just to show me what you could do that I couldn’t.”
“You must have a lot of strange ideas about me,” I said caustically. “I’ve never had the slightest interest in windsurfing or painting.”
“You’re missing the point. I don’t want the Sweeper that sits in front of me. You need to grow up.”
“I am grown up!” I cried.
Schroder shook his bald head like he wasn’t even hurt. “You are a baby, but don’t let that get to you. I know why it happened.”
This maniac was really losing his grip on reality talking about me like he knew everything. “Really?” I asked crossly.
“London.”
Now I was pissed off. Why did he keep ragging on her? “Stop it! My life has not been lacking because she’s been in it.”
“Of course, it has been. We’ve talked about this before. You just don’t see it,” he paused, “but my plan is perfect. Not only will you grow up, but you’ll change into the woman I love.”
I shuddered. “Are you waiting until midnight to tell me your last reason?”
“I was. Would you rather we got on with it?”
“Yes.”
He opened the bag in front of him and pulled out a rolled-up piece of black fabric. Then he undid the string holding it together and unrolled it, exposing a grand selection of shiny surgical tools.
“What are those for?” I asked—my voice toxic.
“The last reason. I’m going to let you remove all five bullets from my head.”
I was on the verge of snapping if I didn’t take things slowly. “What?” I whispered. “There is no way I can do that.”
“You can do it,” he said briskly. “Doing surgery on a vampire is nothing like doing surgery on a human. We’re not delicate. There are only two things you need to worry about. One is not causing any more damage to my brain. The second is managing blood loss. I don’t know if you’ve figured it out by now, but blood loss is the only way to actually kill a vampire and fire helps our blood clot.”
“You should have let The Scissor Man take them out, rather than asking me to do this. I’ll bet he has a steadier hand,” I said thinking of his hand tremors.
I was half hoping Schroder might say something about how he went berserk that night or whether or not The Scissor Man was still alive, but he bypassed it completely.
“You’re missing the point of the exercise,” he said. “When anyone—human or vampire—allows someone to do surgery on them, a tremendous amount of trust is involved. I imagine it must be easier for humans because usually there is nothing to be gained from murdering the patient on the table. In my case, you could easily kill me and sell my blood for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Maybe more, if you got an interested buyer. Usually, a full dose of vampire blood procured by draining the vampire to zero will provide half the needed blood to turn a human. I wouldn’t really expect you to sell my blood, but if you wished I were dead badly enough—you could kill me and let my entire blood supply spill onto the floor.”
“How would I leave the island then?”
He clasped his fingers into a steeple and said, “That’s the question. Do you think you could leave without my help? Do you want to kill me badly enough? Could you kill me when I’m intentionally lying at your mercy?”
I sucked in my breath. This was a risky game to play. If I did the surgery, would he let me leave? What if I screwed it up? What if I injured his brain even more and made him crazier? Then what would he do to me? Or what if I accidentally killed him and was stuck on his island forever? Crap!
“What if I refuse?”
“You can’t. You shouldn’t. You should accept this experience and move forward. This is the only way you can shake off the slave you are and become everything I dream of when I look at you.”
“So, I’d be doing this for you?”
“I’d consider it your first act of love for me.”
“Then I can’t do it,” I groaned. “I don’t love you.”
He licked his lips and shifted his position. For a moment, I thought I was making him desperate. “There are a lot of reasons why you should team up with me. I’ll let you think them over.”
With that, he got up, leaving all the tools on the table, bright and shining and terrifying.
***
I lay in the upstairs bedroom while Schroder went away. I was starting to understand what he meant and I didn’t like it. He meant that if I played by his rules he would give me something I wanted. He said he didn’t want blood, which was good, but if he didn’t want blood, what did he want?
Control over me.
I rubbed the back of my neck and looked out the window at the night sky. The moonlight was glimmering on the surface of the water. A red sail skimmed through the white road of water. That was Schroder—windsurfing.
Did I really have a choice?
***
The next day, I sat with him in the living room and talked to him about the process involved in doing surgery on a vampire. It was creepy. I wasn’t even good at cutting up meat.
“And there’s no anesthetic?” I had asked for the third time.
“No. Drugs don’t work on vampires, but don’t worry, I will hold still for you.”
“It’ll hurt, won’t it?”
“Of course, it will.”
Then I asked another question that had been nagging at me. “Why were you shot in the head those other times?”
He touched a scar behind his temple. “This one was a tragedy. It happened years and years ago, long before London. I knew a woman who wanted me to make her a vampire. I refused. I told her I was going to leave her. Her plan was to kill me by shooting me in the head and then commit suicide because she couldn’t bear to live without me.”
“Did she kill herself?”
“No. As a matter of fact, I would have completely drained her if I had been in phase four, but I was only in phase three and completely disinterested in her as a potential mate. I unloaded her clip into the air and then shot myself in the head with the last bullet.”
I gasped. “Weren’t you afraid?”
“My self-destruction knew no bounds when I had already damned myself by killing my brother’s murderer. I actually didn’t start to feel like living until I was faced with real death—vampire death. That’s different.”
I cleared my throat. “So, what happened to that girl?”
“I don’t know. I was unconscious. When I woke up, she was gone. The rest of the bullets in my head are from business deals gone bad.”
“What kind of business deals? Don’t you deal in art?”
He laughed. “It pays some of the bills. Mostly it’s a cover. I need money. I need so much more money. I haven’t even finished paying for half the things here.”
“So, if I let you die, someone will be here eventually to collect on your debts?”
He smiled. “Yes, eventually someone might come here if you're thinking of killing me and waiting for them. It would be a mistake. Those guys are too much for you to handle.”
I started to squirm. “And if I refuse to do the surgery at all?”
“My condition may worsen and I might forget I wanted to keep blood out of the picture. Don’t be afraid of doing the surgery,” he said, putting his hand on my knee. “It’s completely possible. I’ve done it on myself any number of times when I’ve been shot in places I can see—my stomach, my thigh, my arm. I just can’t see the back of my head.” He pulled up his sleeve and showed me a bullet mark on his forearm.
This was a terrible mess.
***
Freeze the area, dig out the bullet, cauterize the wound, and bandage it. It sounded simple enough.
Who was I kidding? It wasn’t simple. It was horrible.
I piled up all the ice I could fit in an old laundry tub, covered it with a plastic sheet, and put it at the head of the bed. Then I clipped the magnifying lamp Schroder used for painting details to the headboard.
“I’m backing out of this if it turns out I can’t do it,” I warned him.
He smiled slowly—mostly to reassure me—and put his head on the plastic. “You can do it.”
“Sure I can,” I said loathingly.
Then I set a timer for an hour. He and I had decided that an hour with the ice would be enough to numb him out. If he wasn’t frozen by then, he thought he’d never be, so we might as well get on with it.
When the buzzer rang, I got started.
I began with the bullet Dudley had put in his head. I picked up a pair of tweezers and pulled out the staples that were keeping the wound closed. When I pulled the folds of skin away, I saw how deep the bullet went and how hard it would be to remove. I took one of the long skinny tools with a little bit of a hook on the end of it and hooked it on the lip of the bullet. It slid right out.
This was amazing!
Then I took a sparkler and lit it with a lighter. Using the end of it for a couple of seconds, I burned the wound, and the little stream of blood that had been dribbling from the hole stopped. I shoved the sparkler under the plastic and put it out in the ice water. I sewed the wound shut with a star pattern and snipped the thread. Then I got a square bandage and taped it to his head for good measure.
I hadn’t believed him, but this actually was easy.
Then I started on the next one. The next one was a little harder to get out, but it did come out.
On the third one, Schroder started talking—mumbling to himself the way he had in the car—except this time he made sense to me. “The Scissor Man would have killed me.”
At first, I hesitated. I wasn’t sure I wanted him to talk. I needed to concentrate, but maybe I could have an unguarded conversation with him. “Why would he have done that?” I asked.
It didn’t work. He didn’t answer me.
After that, he lay totally still—even after I had removed all the bullets and finished up. I moved the bowl of ice and laid his head down on a pillow so he could rest the remainder of the night.
As for me—I was amazed. I couldn’t believe such a thing was possible. I had been able to do surgery successfully on a vampire.
***
Schroder slept for five days. He breathed, so I knew he wasn’t dead.
On the evening of the fifth night, he rose and came down to the living room. I was ready to get down to business with him. I’d played by his rules. Now he could give me what I wanted.
“How do you feel?” I asked as he hobbled down the stairs. He looked much better—kind of like a cancer victim instead of like a bloodsucker.
“Different. My mind is clearer,” he said, and his voice sounded somehow looser than before. It was almost as if he had had something lodged in his throat and now it was gone. “Thank you,” he said peacefully.
“So, if surgery on a vampire is so simple, why didn’t you get it done before?”
He lowered himself carefully onto a seat on the couch. “You know, the first time I shot myself, things weren’t much different when I woke up. I didn’t think it made such a big difference. I knew I had a problem by the third one, but I didn’t have anyone I could trust to do it for me. You can’t underestimate how much someone will pay for vampire blood. Your best friend might sell you out. I’ve heard of plenty of cases where it has happened. Marshall is good at catching vampires who like to turn on their friends. He’s been doing it for years.”
“That’s why you used him?”
“All I was saying was I’d trust him to do an errand for me, not that I’d trust him to handle my surgery. He probably wouldn’t sell my blood, but he’d probably drain me anyway just to have one fewer vampire crowding the world.” Then Schroder leaned forward and looked into my face meaningfully. “Have I convinced you?”
I drew my breath in. This was when I found out if he was really saner without additional metal addling his brain. “Let’s see,” I began, attacking the situation with my own spin. “You wanted to convince me I was better off without London in my life? You know, whether or not I want her as my roommate does not mean that I want her drained by an unspeakably large coven of humans. I want her safe whether she lives with me or not. I love her, and as better proof that you love me—you should have offered to undo what you did to her by sending Garth to be her new mate. Even now, you should be helping me find her.”
“Find her?” Schroder repeated. “She was with those goons back in the city. Pierce has probably got her in protective custody for the time being—at least until he can educate her on the dangers of mating.”
“That’s what you think? Garth double-crossed you and ran off with her before you were supposed to meet in your shed that night.”
“What?”
“Do you have any idea where he could have taken her? I couldn’t find out anything about that sack of crap to give me a lead. Where does he live? Where does he hang out? Where did you find him? Where did you point London out to him? Details!”
Schroder looked shocked. “You’re not thinking about you and me, are you?”
“Of course not. Have you read me wrong all these years? I was trying to protect her. You steal her away to sell her blood and you expect me to fall into your arms? All you have proven by what has happened on this island is that you don’t want revenge on me and I don’t want revenge on you. I want you to fix what you’ve done. I want you to help me find London and I want her safety assured.”
“Nobody can do that, even if I hadn’t interfered. She’s a vampire.”
I breathed, heavy with patience. “If you really want to prove to me that you care about me—take me off this damn island and give me a lead.”
He peered at me. This wasn’t what he wanted.