SEVENTEEN
Rash of Chicagoland Blood Bank Break-Ins Confounds Local Hospitals [from page 5 of the November 14 Chicago Tribune]
John Weng, AP—Chicagoland hospital administrators are scratching their heads over a wave of recent blood bank break-ins among donation centers in Chicago’s Near North Side.
“We expect a certain number of donations to go missing each week,” said Jenny McNiven, volunteer coordinator at Michigan Avenue Children’s Hospital. “Our blood drives are mostly volunteer-run, and mistakes happen. But what we have seen in the past forty-eight hours cannot be explained by simple human error.”
According to McNiven, three different centers had break-ins over the weekend. In each case, volunteers showed up to their morning shifts to find refrigerators’ doors hanging off their hinges and most of their contents removed. A pair of elbow-length white satin gloves left behind at one of the centers is being analyzed by the Chicago Police Department’s forensics team for clues.
“I don’t know why anyone would do something like this,” McNiven said. “As pranks go, this might be one of the worst. Blood saves lives.”
Frederick—and his bare chest—were waiting for me in the living room when I stumbled out of his bedroom at dawn the next morning. He was on the sofa, leafing through a newspaper with a slight frown on his face.
“Good morning.”
At the sound of my voice he looked up, setting his newspaper to the side.
“Good morning.” He smiled at me, a bit shy—which was a bit ridiculous, given how we’d spent a good portion of the previous evening. I was a little surprised to see how coiffed and put-together he looked, given that I could tell without even checking a mirror that I was sporting the most ridiculous bedhead in the history of the world.
Then I remembered that he’d left the bedroom with an apology shortly after midnight and hadn’t slept beside me at all.
“What time is it?” I asked. “I need to be at work at eight-thirty.”
“It’s just after six.” He stood and walked over to me, placing his hands on either side of my waist. Or, more accurately—on either side of the general vicinity of my waist. I was wrapped from chest to toe in one of his soft red satin sheets. Anatomical accuracy was difficult. “My bedsheet suits you.”
I snorted. “I didn’t get dressed again last night after . . . well.” I trailed off, blushing. “Wrapping up in this sheet was easier than finding where you’d tossed my underwear.”
He hummed, and pressed a kiss to my cheek. “You look divine.”
“I do not.”
“I hope you never wear anything else.”
He kissed me then, chaste and tender. I placed my hands on his chest and leaned in, enjoying the soft brush of his lips against mine.
“I’m surprised you’re not dressed,” I mused. “It’s not like you were asleep all this time.”
My fingertips traced the outline of a jagged, prominent scar just below his right nipple. I wanted to ask him how he got it. If it happened while he was still human, or after. But now wasn’t the time.
“Going forward I intend to spend as much time shirtless as possible.”
I huffed a surprised laugh. “What?”
“You like it when I don’t wear a shirt,” he said, as matter-of-factly as if he were telling me rain was in the forecast. “You like it a lot, in fact. I like doing things that please you.”
I hadn’t exactly tried to hide how into his body I was, but the way he’d phrased this made me wonder something.
“Can you tell that I like it when you don’t wear a shirt?” I ran my hand down his fabulous chest for good measure. “Beyond me simply telling you that you have a great body, I mean.”
He smiled, bashful. “Your scent changes subtly, but unmistakably, when you are aroused.”
My eyes widened in surprise. That was a new one.
“It does?”
He nodded. “Until last night I told myself I was mistaken, that it was simply wishful thinking on my part.” His smile turned devilish when he leaned in and pressed his lips to my ear. “I know now, though, that I was right.”
I thought back to the way he’d all but breathed me in last night, and I shivered, gooseflesh erupting on my arms. It should have weirded me out, the idea that my scent changed when I was turned on and that Frederick could sense it. But for some reason—maybe because it was Frederick who was telling me this—it didn’t.
His hands started working their way beneath the place where I’d cinched the bedsheet closed around my body. “I want to be inside you again, Cassie,” he whispered into my ear. He pulled me closer, until I could feel every inch of his need jutting hard and urgently against my stomach. “Last night was glorious beyond anything I could have imagined. But I want more.”
I shuddered, throwing my arms around him and burying my face in his shoulder.
I mentally screamed at Marcie for signing me up for a Saturday morning shift.
“I want that, too,” I said. “But unfortunately, I have to go to work.”
Frederick groaned and pulled back from me. My body was screaming at Marcie now, too.
“Fine,” he said, tersely. “I hope, however, that you are not averse to picking up where we left off when you get back home.”
Then I kissed him. Because no—I was not averse to it at all.
I floated more than walked into the library for my shift.
When I got there, I sat down at the circulation desk in the children’s section and went through the motions of putting away my purse and logging into the station’s communal desktop. But my mind was miles away, back in the apartment.
The sun had risen about an hour ago. Frederick was likely getting ready to go to sleep. This morning was another art day, and I needed to get the watercolors, canvases, and plastic floor coverings all set up. Kids had already started showing up for the event, milling around book displays with their parents until we were ready to get started.
While art days were usually a highlight for me, right now I wished I were back at home, cuddling with and sleeping next to Frederick.
“Good morning.” Marcie was tying her hair back into a ponytail, rummaging around for supplies in the closet behind the circulation desk as she greeted me.
“Morning.” I looked down at the plan for this morning that I’d come up with a few days ago, glad Marcie had printed it out and placed it in front of the computer. “What do you think of my idea?”
“Paint Your Favorite Book’s Setting?”
“Yeah.”
Marcie smiled at me. “I think it’s great.”
My chest warmed. “I’m glad to hear it. I’m pretty proud of it.”
“You should be,” Marcie said. I blushed a little at the praise, then grabbed a ponytail holder from my own bag and pulled as much of my still too-short hair as I could into a messy knot on top of my head. “We’ve done book characters before, and Disney princesses, but not settings.”
“So many children’s books take place in amazing locations,” I said. I crouched down and started hunting beneath the desk, trying to find where I’d stashed the box of brushes and colored pencils. “I hope the kids have a lot of fun with this.”
I didn’t have to wait long to get confirmation that the event was a wild success.
“Miss Greenberg? Is it okay if I add a dragon to my castle?”
I turned away from a little girl I’d been helping who was painting a vibrant picture of the sun. She’d chosen a nearly neon shade of purple for the sun’s rays. It was easily my favorite of all the projects the kids were working on.
“Of course it’s okay,” I said to the little boy who asked the question, who’d earlier introduced himself as Zach. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
Zach gave a one-shoulder shrug. “The instructions were to paint our favorite book’s setting,” he said. “I already did the castle, and I thought painting a character, too, would be breaking the rules.”
I crouched down so I was eye-level with Zach. His canvas was covered in shapeless swirls of browns and greens. It didn’t look like any castle I’d ever seen—but then again, I’d never seen a castle in person, so who was I to judge? Maybe in his favorite book, or in his imagination—or both—this was exactly what castles looked like.
“I think a dragon would look great right here,” I said, pointing to the one corner of the canvas that hadn’t been covered in watercolor paint.
“But Fluffy is the main character of the book, not a setting,” Zach pointed out. His tone was as serious as if he were giving a lecture on the current state of American politics, which—given that he was all of six years old—was so adorable I nearly burst out laughing.
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep that from happening and pretended to study his canvas. “I see your point,” I said. “But you know—the only real rule in art is to make something you enjoy.”
His eyebrows shot up his little forehead. “No other rules at all?”
“None,” I confirmed. “We wanted kids to paint the settings from their favorite books today, but if you want to add Fluffy, go for it. In fact,” I added, “I can’t really picture a castle without a dragon. Maybe Fluffy actually is part of your book’s setting, and not just a character.”
Zach chewed his bottom lip as he considered my words. “That makes sense.”
“I agree,” I said. “In the end, though, this is your painting. Make something you love.”
And with that, Zach dipped his paintbrush in the pot of orange watercolor in front of him, painted a giant swirl in the only spare corner of his canvas, and smiled.
By the time I made it back to the apartment it was nearly sundown. I took the stairs two at a time, grinning as I imagined throwing myself into Frederick’s arms and picking up where we’d left off this morning.
When I got to the third-floor landing, however, I knew that something was very wrong.
For one thing, Frederick was shouting from inside the apartment.
“How dare you come to my home unannounced and behave in this way!”
For another, a woman whose voice I did not recognize was shouting, too.
“You dare to ask me how I dare?” the woman scoffed, the sharp click of her heels echoing so loudly on the hardwood floors I could easily hear her footsteps from where I stood. “I would have thought your manners better than that, Frederick John Fitzwilliam!”
I hesitated at the door, unsure what to do. The only other person who had been in our apartment the entire time I’d lived there was Reginald—another vampire. And that had ended in disaster.
From the sounds of things, another disaster was brewing in there right now. But what should I do? This argument, as bitter as it sounded, had nothing to do with me. Even inadvertently hearing what I had so far felt like an intrusion.
“Cassie will be home shortly,” Frederick said. “I ask that you please leave before she returns home. I do not wish to discuss this matter with you any further.”
“No,” the woman said flatly. “I intend to meet this human girl to whom you’ve taken such a fancy.”
Frederick barked a humorless laugh. “Over my dead body.”
“That’s easy enough to arrange.”
“Edwina.”
“No need to get snippy with me, Frederick.” The woman started pacing again, her heels clicking so loudly across the hardwood floors it sounded like she was determined to break a hole through to the apartment on the second floor. “If I cannot make you see reason, perhaps this Cassie Greenberg will be more malleable.”
At the sound of my name, my heart thundered so loudly in my ears it drowned out the rest of whatever Frederick and the woman shouting at him were saying. I guess this argument concerned me after all.
Maybe I should intervene.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I threw open the apartment’s front door.
The woman in the living room looked roughly my parents’ age, with crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes and graying hair at her temples. Any similarities between the woman currently glaring ice daggers at me and Ben and Rae Greenberg ended there, though. Her dress was an all-black silk-and-crepe affair with velvet puffed sleeves, made in a vaguely historical mash-up of a style that would have looked right at home on the set of Bridgerton.
Her eye makeup, though, was what really drew my attention. The last time I’d seen face paint that dramatic I’d been in middle school, when Sam’s older brother dragged us to see a KISS cover band on a night their parents were out of town. It stood out in such sharp contrast with her overall pallor it made my eyes ache to look at her.
“Is this her?” The woman pointed an accusatory finger with a perfectly manicured bright-red fingernail in my direction. But her eyes stayed fixed on Frederick. “The hussy you have thrown everything away for?”
“Hussy?” I couldn’t believe my ears. Who talked like that? “Excuse me, but who are you?”
“This,” Frederick said, hissing the word, “is Mrs. Edwina Fitzwilliam.” A pause. “My mother.”
Time seemed to stop. I closed my eyes, trying to make sense of what Frederick had just said, and of the ridiculous situation I now seemed to be in the middle of.
His mother?
But how was that possible?
Shouldn’t his mother have been dead for hundreds of years?
Then Mrs. Edwina Fitzwilliam bared a set of sharp, pointed fangs at me, and it all clicked into place.
“You’re a vampire, too,” I breathed, feeling dizzy and weak-kneed.
“Of course I’m a vampire,” Frederick’s mother said, before sauntering across the room like she owned the place. Which, I realized with a start, might be true. I didn’t know anything about Frederick’s finances—or really very much about him at all.
That had never been clearer to me than it was right then.
“I am not going back to New York with you, Mother. That had never been my plan.” His eyes flicked to mine, filled with guilt. “Cassie has nothing to do with it. Leave her out of this.”
Mrs. Edwina Fitzwilliam waved a dismissive hand at me. “Fine. In that regard at least I will do as you say. In fact, out of respect for you, I won’t even eat her.”
“Mother—”
“There is no need to return to New York with me,” his mother cut in. “The Jamesons are arriving in Chicago tomorrow evening. You will speak with them here.” I had no idea who the Jamesons were, but Frederick clearly did. At her words he took a small, involuntary step back. He looked stunned, as though she’d just slapped him.
“I would have thought by returning Esmeralda’s gifts both she and her parents would have inferred my lack of intent to marry her.” He paused. “The last time I wrote I told Esmeralda in no uncertain terms that I would not go through with it.”
It’s a good thing I was standing near the couch. If I hadn’t been, my legs giving out upon hearing the words marry her would have resulted in my landing on the floor—and would have been a whole lot more uncomfortable.
“The message was received, my dear.” Frederick’s mother glared at him. “You could not have been clearer in your intent if you had announced it at a dinner party full of guests.”
“Then why are they coming here?”
“Because the Jamesons interpret your actions, as I have, as a clear sign that you have not been in your right mind since your awakening. They agree with me that this matter cannot be left to correspondence, and that a personal meeting is necessary.”
“I am as sound of mind now as I have ever been.” Frederick crossed his arms across his broad chest, adopting what he likely meant as an assertive stance. The effect was undercut by the fact that he was wearing pajama pants with Kermit the Frog on them that I definitely didn’t buy him at Nordstrom. But it didn’t matter. He was still hot.
Mrs. Edwina Fitzwilliam, however, didn’t seem impressed.
“I will leave you to explain that to your in-laws directly. You and I will meet them in their rooms at the Ritz-Carlton tomorrow evening at seven to discuss your impending nuptials.” Mrs. Fitzwilliam sniffed the air and cringed. “A human girl, Frederick. Honestly.”
With that, Frederick’s mother gave a theatrical curtsy to us both and breezed out the front door.
Deafening silence filled the room. I stared at Frederick, willing him to say something—anything—that would turn the chaos of the past few minutes into something that bore some resemblance to sense.
After what might have been eighteen years, he cleared his throat.
“There’s more I haven’t told you.” He had the decency to look sheepish.
“You think?” He flinched at my hostile tone, but I didn’t care. He’d promised me he would never withhold important information from me again. “Frederick, what else is there I don’t know?”
He sighed and dragged a hand through his hair. “A lot.” He swallowed. “Do you want to hear it, or are you finished with me?”
“Tell me one thing first,” I said, holding up one hand. “Is it true that you told this Esmeralda person you wouldn’t marry her?”
“Yes,” Frederick said, earnestly. “In no uncertain terms, and repeatedly. This whole thing . . . all of it . . .” He trailed off and ran an agitated hand through his hair. “None of this should be happening.”
He looked absolutely tormented.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll hear it.”
He reached for my hand, eyes tentative. “Sit with me?”
I nodded, and braced myself for the rest of his story.
He sat beside me on the living room couch, his hands folded neatly on his lap.
As recently as ten minutes ago I’d planned to take him to bed to pick up where we left off this morning. But all that would have to wait. Right now his need to be completely open and honest with me was written all over his face.
And I needed to hear what he had to say.
“In certain segments of vampiric society,” he began, eyes on the floor, “arranged marriage is still a thing. When I left England to move to America—and especially when I left where my people settled in New York and came to Chicago—I thought I had left that nonsense behind me.” He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “My mother clearly has other ideas.”
I expected him to elaborate. When several long moments passed, and he didn’t, I asked, “Who is Miss Jameson?”
“Someone I hardly know.” His voice was low and sheepish. “We . . . had a fling, once. Nearly two hundred years ago.” He paused. “And now, apparently, we are engaged to be wed.”
My heart flopped a little in my chest as an irrational pang of jealousy stabbed through me. My reaction was irrational, of course. Expecting someone to be celibate for centuries would be unfair. Whatever happened between him and this Miss Jameson more than a century before I was even born had nothing to do with me.
It still stung, though.
“Oh.”
He turned to me, his eyes sad. “I haven’t always lived as I do now, Cassie. In my younger days I ate as others of my kind did, and fucked anyone on two legs. Men, women, humans—everything.” He looked away. “There was a party in Paris during the Regency period where Miss Jameson and I—”
“I get it,” I said quickly, cutting him off. I put my hand on his. “I don’t need all the details.”
“Good. Because I’m not quite up to sharing them.” He closed his eyes. “I am not the person I was in the early nineteenth century, Cassie. I haven’t been that person in a very long time.”
I had so many questions I wanted to ask him about how he became the person he was today. But there were other things I wanted to know first. “How long have you been engaged to her?”
“It happened during my coma,” Frederick said dourly. “My mother never approved of the changes I made to my life when I decided to live among humans instead of viewing them as dinner. She thought that when I woke, marrying me off to someone with more traditional values would be a way to bring me back into the fold.”
“Traditional values?”
“Yes.” He gave me a humorless half smile. “Drinking human blood from the source, rather than acquiring it from blood banks. Or, if blood banks are necessary, leaving nothing behind after raiding them.” He paused, then looked away. “Murdering humans indiscriminately.”
I shivered at the thought of Frederick living that way. “But that isn’t who you are.”
“It’s not,” he said fervently. “Not anymore.”
“But it is who Miss Jameson is,” I guessed. “And your mother.”
“Yes.”
“And Reginald?”
Frederick paused, considering his words. “He’s . . . changing. I think I’ve had a moderating influence on him.”
I stood then, and made my way over to the window overlooking the lake. The enormity of what he was telling me was sinking in little by little. I needed space to think about what all of this meant—for Frederick, and for us.
“I don’t know what to say,” I murmured.
His solid presence was at my back a moment later, his strong arms going around me before I had a chance to protest. He rested his cheek against the top of my head. I breathed in his reassuring scent, wishing that everything that had just happened here with his mother had been nothing more than a nightmare.
“I’m not marrying her,” he murmured fervently into my hair. He kissed the top of my head so gently it broke my heart. It felt like a promise. “I was never going to marry her, not even before I met you. That’s the only reason I didn’t tell you. I thought I had the situation handled. It never crossed my mind that my mother or the Jamesons would take things this far.”
His assurances went a long way towards loosening the knot of pain that had settled in my chest. I sighed, turning in the circle of his arms until my head rested against his chest. His hold on me tightened.
“I made a serious miscalculation when I assumed they would drop this,” he continued. “I know now that they will not take no for an answer from afar.”
My mind caught on the words from afar. I pulled back a little so that I could look at him. “Are you planning to tell them in person?”
He blew out a breath. “The Jamesons are expecting me. My mother is here and will not leave without me. Yes, I believe I need to go to them directly. It’s the only way they will understand I am serious about staying here in Chicago and living my life the way I have chosen to live it.” He swallowed, and pressed a kiss to my forehead. “If I don’t, it’s only a matter of time until they all show up on my doorstep. And I will not allow that to happen. Not while you are living with me.”
I tried to ignore the way my stomach sank like a stone. I had a very bad feeling about this. “So you’re going to the Ritz-Carlton tomorrow night, then?”
He nodded.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I hated how needy I sounded. But it had been a wild twenty-four hours. I’d had myself some glorious sex with one vampire and an unplanned altercation with another. I got rejected from one professional opportunity and landed an unexpected job interview with another.
I probably needed to cut myself some slack.
“Yes.” He brushed a lock of my hair that had fallen into my eyes behind my ear. His free hand came up to cradle my face. “All I intend to do is go to the hotel, tell the Jamesons I will not marry Esmeralda, tell my mother she can go to the devil for all I care, and then come right back.”
“Somehow I don’t think it will be that easy.” I’d only spent a few minutes in his mother’s presence, and had only known he was in the middle of a messy Regency-era betrothal situation for the past half hour. Even still, I saw at least five different ways this could end badly.
“I do,” Frederick said, with a confidence I absolutely did not feel. “I don’t remember Miss Jameson well, but it’s the twenty-first century, isn’t it? She can’t want to marry someone she barely knows any more than I do.”
He sounded so confident, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a terrible plan.
“Do you trust any of these people?”
At that, he paused. “No,” he conceded. “But they won’t take no for an answer by missive, and I’m out of options.” I opened my mouth to protest, but he shook his head. “It’ll be fine, I promise. And then I’ll come right back home to you.”
My heart fluttered at his words, despite my misgivings.
“I like that part of the plan,” I admitted.
He paused, his eyes suddenly growing dark with mischief. “Since I’m not going anywhere until tomorrow evening, why don’t I give you something to remember me by before I go?”
His mouth was at the pulse point of my throat, his hands tangling in my hair before I could even answer his question. All at once it was like the past half hour, and all the complications and new entanglements that came with it, had never happened.
I melted against him.
“That sounds good to me,” I breathed, throwing my head back to give him better access.
He growled his approval, then carried me into his bedroom.