How're you feeling?"
"Ummm . . a little weird. I can't get a deep breath."
"Neither can I," Phil said. He was breathing hard and wiping his forehead. "I didn't know grave digging was such hard work."
James gave Poppy a searching look. "Do you think you can make it back to my apartment?"
"Hmm? I guess." Poppy didn't actually know what he was talking about. Make it how? And why should going to his apartment help her to breathe?
"I've got a couple of safe donors there in the building," James said. "I don't really want you out on the streets, and I think you'll make it there okay."
Poppy didn't ask what he meant. She was having trouble thinking clearly.
James wanted her to hide in the backseat of his car. Poppy refused. She needed to sit up front and to feel the night air on her face.
"Okay," James said at last. "But at least sort of cover your face with your arm. I'll drive on back roads. You can't be seen, Poppy."
There didn't seem to be anyone on the streets to see her. The air whipping her cheeks was cool and good, but it didn't help her breathing. No matter how she tried, she couldn't seem to get a proper breath.
I'm hyperventilating, she thought. Her heart was racing, her lips and tongue felt parchment-dry. And still she had the feeling of being air-starved.
What's happening to me?
Then the pain started.
Agonizing seizures in her muscles-like the cramps she used to get when she went out for track in junior high. Vaguely, through the pain, she remembered something the P.E. teacher had said. "The cramps come
when your muscles don't get enough blood. A charley horse is a clump of muscles starving to death."
Oh, it hurt. It hurt. She couldn't even call to James for help, now; all she could do was hang on to the car door and try to breathe. She was whooping and wheezing, but it wasn't any good.
Cramps everywhere-and now she was so dizzy that she saw the world through sparkling lights.
She. was dying. Something had gone terribly wrong. She felt as if she were underwater, trying desperately to claw her way to oxygen-only there was no oxygen.
And then she saw the way.
Or smelled it, actually. The car was stopped at a red light.
Poppy's head and shoulders were out the window by now-and suddenly she caught a whiff of life.
Life. What she needed. She didn't think, she simply acted. With one motion she threw the car door open and plunged out.
She heard Phil's shout behind her and James's shout in her head. She ignored both of them. Nothing mattered except stopping the pain.
She grabbed for the man on the sidewalk the way a drowning swimmer grabs at a rescuer. Instinctively. He was tall and strong for a human. He was wearing a dark sweatsuit and a bomber jacket. His face was stubbly and his skin wasn't exactly clean, but that wasn't important. She wasn't interested in the container, only in the lovely sticky red stuff inside.
This time her strike was perfectly accurate. Her wonderful teeth extended like claws and stabbed into the man's throat.
Puncturing him like one of those old-fashioned bottle openers.
He struggled a little and then went limp.
And then she was drinking, her throat drenched in copper-sweetness. Sheer animal hunger took over as she tapped his veins. The liquid filling her mouth was wild and raw and primal and every swallow gave her new life.
She drank and drank, and felt the pain disappear. In its place was a euphoric lightness. When she paused to breathe, she could feel her lungs swell with cool, blessed air.
She bent to drink again, to suck, lap, tipple. The man had a clear bubbling stream inside him, and she wanted it all.
That was when James pulled her head back.
He spoke both aloud and in her mind and his voice was collected but intense. "Poppy, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It was my fault. I shouldn't have made you wait so long. But you've had enough now. You can stop."
Oh ... confusion. Poppy was peripherally aware of Phillip, her brother Phillip, looking on in horror. James said she could stop, but that didn't mean she had to. She didn't want to. The man wasn't fighting at all now. He seemed to be unconscious.
She bent down again. James pulled her back up almost roughly.
"Listen," he said. His eyes were level, but his voice was hard.
"This is the time you can choose, Poppy. Do you really want to kill?"
The words shocked her back to awareness. To kill ... that was the way to get power, she knew. Blood was power and life and energy and food and drink. If she drained this man like squeezing an orange, she would have the power of his very essence. Who knew what she might be able to do then?
But ... he was a man, not an orange. A human being. She'd been one of those once.
Slowly, reluctantly, she lifted herself off the man. James let out a long breath. He patted her shoulder and sat down on the sidewalk as if too tired to stand up right then.
Phil was slumped against the wall of the nearest building.
He was appalled, and Poppy could feel it. She could even pick up words he was thinking-words like ghastly and amoral. A whole sentence that went something like "Is it worth it to save her life if she's lost her soul?"
James jerked around to look at him, and Poppy could feel the silver flare of his anger. "You just don't get it, do you?" he said savagely. "She could have attacked you anytime, but she didn't, even though she was dying. You don't know what the bloodlust feels like. It's not like being thirsty-it's like suffocating. Your cells start to die from oxygen starvation, because your own blood can't carry oxygen to them. It's the worst pain there is, but she didn't go after you to make it stop."
Phillip looked staggered. He stared at Poppy, then held out a hand uncertainly.