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  Lucy unzipped the bag. Alex could see the woman had nearly been decapitated, a ragged gash across her neck.

  Lucy started working to undress the corpse, not saying much. Alex didn’t know what else to do, so she helped. Once they got the woman’s clothes off, Lucy picked up Alex’s discarded, bloody clothes and began the awkward task of dressing the corpse in them. “Her injuries look enough like yours that this should work well.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Lucy stopped for a second, looking at Alex before answering. “She was a working girl who had the bad luck to be picked up by a drunk trick who ran his sports car under the bed of a semi on Elysian Fields. They were moving fast enough at the time that the shear almost took off her head. Stupid trick died, too, if that’s any consolation.” She swapped out the toe tags. “This poor gal didn’t have ID on her, and it’s not likely anyone will come looking for her. The Janes that are working girls don’t tend to get claimed as no one is interested in picking up the tab for disposal. Their families wrote them off long ago, typically, and most of them are from other places. Their pimps aren’t interested in being connected to them either. They are disposable.”

  Alex wasn’t sure if she was more surprised by Lucy’s callous attitude or by her own lack of reaction to the whole situation. She felt numb, though, and couldn’t quite manage enough energy to question or do anything she wasn’t instructed to do. She did notice that her replacement looked a bit like her and she felt a pang of panic as Lucy slid the zipper back up, closing Jane in the bag. It was an otherworldly feeling, as if Alex really were simultaneously inside the bag and outside of it. She shivered again, this time from a different coldness.

  “You said her injuries were similar to mine. What did you mean?”

  Lucy looked up from the body bag that was now zipped closed. “Your friend Wren did a number on you. It was a sloppy job, and she tore into your throat. The wound looked worse than it was, I suspect, since you were able to recover.” She watched Alex and knew that she didn’t believe her. “The scene was so gruesome that the cops could barely look at you.”

  Returning to her work, Lucy attached a wire lock onto the zipper and started wrapping it in electrical tape. Once that was done, she slid the drawer shut and picked up Alex’s former body bag and the clothes, if they could be called proper clothes, from the prostitute. “Less to dispose of, at least. Can’t imagine wearing such skimpy things myself.” Alex saw that Lucy also picked up two cut wire locks like the ones she had just placed on the zipper of the body bag Jane was in. Finally, she removed the small identification tag from the now empty drawer where Jane had originally been.

  The clothes, the tag, and body bag went down an incinerator chute.

  “Let’s get you out to my van before my partner wakes up from his nightly nap break. The couple of shots he drank after we went on pickup rounds earlier are likely wearing off.” Lucy headed out of the storage area and Alex didn’t know what else to do but follow.

  In the parking lot, Lucy led Alex to an old Volkswagen van that looked to be in mint condition. “I am on duty for a few more hours. You need to rest. You’ll be safe here. Once I’m off work, I’ll answer your questions. I know you have a lot of them.”

  Alex climbed into the bed that was made up in the back of the van. “You’re just going to leave me here?”

  Lucy laughed a bit and simply said, “You want to wander aimlessly in scrubs with no identification or personal effects? Be my guest.”

  Alex realized as she watched Lucy walk off that she was right; she had no phone to call a cab even if she had enough money to take one. She wasn’t even really sure where she was other than a parking lot. The bed also looked so much more comfortable than a slab in the morgue. She was exhausted.

  Seeing no better options, she pulled the covers over her head and went to sleep.

  Chapter Two

  Lucy returned to the morgue office where the night shift morgue attendant Daniel was still sound asleep. Daniel had been working the night shift just long enough to develop a pretty good drinking habit, which made Lucy’s undercover duties even easier. She bumped him intentionally on her way toward the computer terminal where she would enter the tag numbers and clear out the information on the pick up of the Jane Doe. She was glad that Alex had been too much in shock to ask a lot of questions just yet. The reintroduction into the world was always a horrible process for those Lucy found who were not still alive but not truly dead. And, she knew that Alex wasn’t just any half-turned vampire. She was someone important.

  Earlier that evening, Lucy arrived to pick up the body after the CSI team did what they had to do on the scene. The house seemed to vibrate with energy. Even if there hadn’t been a few officers still in the room where Alex’s body was, she would have been drawn to the spot. Her head buzzed with the energy emanating from Alex and the energy that hung in the room. She could sense old forces there, older than anything she’d sensed in a long time. Olivia had been here.

  For Lucy, reading the lingering energy was like trying to hear someone whispering on the other side of the room during a packed cocktail party. Different energies overlapped each other, but the quieter tones were the ones that she knew were most important to listen to at the moment. Alex’s voice was the one she had to focus on for now. She knew as time went on and as she helped Alex transition that she’d learn more about Alex’s true identity and her role.

  By the time she’d shown up, the police had taken statements from Alex’s partner Liz Camp and from two other witnesses, John Kirby and Mike Courtland. There would be no need for further identification of the body, as Liz had positively identified Alex. Lucy shuddered to think how that must have been for Liz, and she thought of her own lovely Mina who had tried her best to protect her and save her from herself. She wondered if Alex and Liz would ever find each other again as she and Mina had.

  “Oh, hey, doc.” Daniel called her “doc” even though he knew she was just a coroner’s technician. “You get everyone in ok?”

  She smiled as she started logging from the handwritten notes in her tiny notebook. She’d dropped the locks she’d taken off the two body bags in a lockbox in her van when she led Alex out there; she’d dispose of them properly once she got home. “Yep. It’s a relatively slow night, so if you want to keep taking a break, no problem.” While she talked Daniel pulled a flask out of his back pocket and took a pull off of it. He passed it to her, and she took a swig and passed it back.

  “I still don’t get how someone as hot as you are winds up working with stiffs all night. I mean, for me, this is just a good desk job where I get to drink a bit and hear some good stories, but you. . .you really like this shit, don’t you?”

  Daniel had a tendency to try to flirt with her or figure her out once he’d had enough to drink. Lucy always humored him, but she was an old hand at not revealing the truth. She’d had more than enough practice with attendants before him. The guys who worked the desk at night usually were writer wanna-bes who did more drinking than writing and hoped to be the next Stephen King or J.A. Konrath. They took the job as “research” that never led anywhere.

  “Um-hmm. I do. It feels good to be of service to others, don’t you think?”

  Daniel just shook his head and took another swig off the flask before sliding it into his pocket. He picked up his ragged paperback and settled in for a bit of reading. Lucy hated the way he always folded his paperbacks backwards, hiding the cover and ruining the binding.

  She’d been working at her current job for a very long time; Zofia had been the one to suggest it and she was the one who orchestrated everything. No one questioned how Lucy stayed so young or how she had worked there for so many years, or if they did they forgot to question it after a visit from Zofia. Lucy was grateful for the protection her group of vampires offered her, and she reasoned that at least they were nice vampires.

  Over the years she’d worked in the morgue, she’d awakened several vampires. She was their first po
int of contact in their new world. And, often, she could just destroy the evidence and not worry about replacing the body. No one missed a local working girl or a street kid who didn’t have ID anyway. But Alex would be missed if her morgue drawer was empty, so she’d been relieved to find that there wouldn’t be any need to identify the body and that there was a Jane Doe that resembled her enough that there wouldn’t be questions later. And, if there were, Lucy knew Zofia could take care of it. The bigger question was what to do about Alex once Olivia realized she was not dead.

  Chapter Three

  Alex slept deeply without dreaming. She had no sense of time, but when she woke and sat up in the bed in the back of Lucy’s VW van, she could see that it was daybreak. She vaguely remembered Lucy leading her out to the van in the dark. She’d been so grateful that it was warmer in the van than it had been in the morgue, and she’d immediately fallen asleep. She barely remembered Lucy sliding the door shut before going back in the building. She did remember being confused about the whole situation and that she had nothing other than a set of scrubs and Lucy’s help to rely on.

  She closed her eyes and flopped back down on the bed, her hands over her face. She tried to make some sort of logic out of waking up in a morgue drawer in a body bag. Surely this was some sort of prank. Otherwise how would Lucy have known to help her out? And who was this Lucy, anyway?

  Her memories before waking up in the body bag were hazy. She remembered Wren’s eyes, her lips on her own, and then sensation she’d never felt before--a sweetness so wonderful it bordered on horrible. The only word she could think of was ecstasy. And with her ex. In the bedroom she shared with Liz. She groaned just as Lucy opened the driver’s side door and slid into the seat.

  “You hanging in there, Alexandria?” Lucy didn’t wait for an answer before she started the engine and backed out of the space.

  Alex groaned again before sitting up. “First off, you’ve got to start just calling me ‘Alex.’ I am doing ok, I guess, for someone who just woke up in a morgue and is now sleeping in a stranger’s van. Let me guess--this is some prank that Wren worked up.”

  Lucy grinned. “Well, in a sense, yes, I suppose it was. The problem is that even though Wren Anderson is the one who put you in the morgue, she doesn’t realize you are alive.” She eased the van into traffic. “We’re headed to Algiers. You need anything before we get to the West Bank?”

  Alex snorted. “Um, yeah, you can take me home. I’m really not in the mood for this shit.” She saw a pack of cigarettes in the front and snatched them up, lighting one before sitting back down on the mattress. She found an empty soda can in the back she could use for an ashtray. She smoked angrily, hot boxing the cigarette.

  “Oh, honey, you are going home with me. I’ve got to explain some things that you aren’t going to want to hear. I promise you can do far more harm to me than I could ever do to you, so that should make you feel a little safer or better about this whole situation. Light me one of those, will ya? I wasn’t sure if you were a smoker, but I have to say I’m glad that you are. I need one of those after the night I had.”

  Alex chuckled this time as she lit a fresh cigarette off the one she had going. “Tell me about it.”

  “Oh, I will.” Lucy took the cigarette and smoked quietly as she drove toward the ferry. “I hope you don’t mind the ferry. Because I live in Algiers Point it’s more direct than taking the Crescent City Connection. I will warn you that you might feel ill or strange as we cross over the river. That would be true whether we take the bridge or the ferry, so I figure I’ll go my usual route.”

  Alex didn’t understand why the ferry or bridge would be a problem--they never had been before. But, once the ferry got underway, she started to feel disoriented and her stomach churned. “Thanks for planting the idea in my head that I’d feel weird. I almost feel like I’m about to have a panic attack.”

  Lucy shook the pack of cigarettes at her. “Smoke another cigarette; it’ll help take your mind off things. We’ll get you home and you can rest some more. Once you’ve had some sustenance, I’ll answer your questions.”

  Lucy’s house was really close to the ferry drop off. It was an older house on Belleville Street that had been well cared for. There was a carriage house and bricked in courtyard. Alex wondered if Lucy were renting it or if it was family money.

  “You will be staying in the carriage house. Let me see if I have some clothes that might fit you for now, and you can make me a list of what you need and we’ll get you fixed up.” Lucy got out and walked toward the house. Alex followed her inside.

  “Nice place. You renting it by yourself?”

  “Oh, no, I own this place. I bought it when I got here some fifty years ago.” Lucy kicked her shoes off and started for the kitchen where she ground some coffee beans and got a pot started.

  Alex sat at the small kitchen table. The house had an open feel to it, and she wondered what the upstairs looked like. “Fifteen years ago? You’re kidding me. You’re not a day over 25 by my guess.”

  Lucy got some cups down from the cabinet and leaned back against the counter, shaking her head. “No, not fifteen. Fifty. You may as well suspend your disbelief, as that’s probably the least surprising thing I have to tell you.”

  Alex laughed. “This has to be some joke that someone at The Ruby set up. We can stop playing games here. Let me guess—they decided to have some fun with me since I’ve gotten way too wrapped up in the whole vampire fiction and film stuff.” She walked toward Lucy and put one hand on the counter on either side of her hips, pinning her in. “I have to admit that whatever you put on your arm earlier was delicious, but I don’t buy this vampire act at all.” She felt pulled toward Lucy, her body heat palpable as Alex leaned in close. She thought maybe if she butched it up, it might crack Lucy’s veneer and she’d fess up. But standing here, she felt dominated by the desire to put her mouth on Lucy’s, to run her fingernails over the tender skin on her back.

  Lucy threw her head back and laughed, making her neck and shoulder all the more tempting to Alex. “Oh, honey, I’m not a vampire. I’m a donor. You’re the only vampire here at the moment.”

  Alex’s ears started buzzing as Lucy talked, and she felt her knees go wobbly. She leaned into Lucy to keep from hitting the floor. She still didn’t believe it, but she couldn’t explain what had happened or how this could all just be a joke. She felt Lucy shift against her, and she managed to steady herself against the counter, breaking contact for a moment.

  “You’re weak from not feeding properly; newly turned vampires are always susceptible to this, especially if the ones who turn them don’t make sure they feed immediately after they are turned. Let me drink some coffee, and I’ll prove it to you.” Lucy motioned toward the table. “Why don’t you sit back down for a bit. Do you want some coffee, too? It might take some of the edge off.” Alex nodded and took a seat at the table. Lucy brought two cups over to the table and sat next to her. They sipped coffee in silence for several minutes, Lucy draining her cup faster than Alex and refilling it. When she came back to the table after replacing the coffee pot, she had the same kit with her that Alex saw her use in the morgue. She handed it to Alex.

  “It’s not a prop. Those are actual scalpels. Try one out on yourself.”

  Alex opened the case and picked up one of the scalpels. “These are clean?”

  “Yes, all except for the one I used earlier, which as you can see still has a blood dried on it. I sterilize them and I only use them on myself. You don’t have any illnesses--you’re incapable of illnesses that would harm me anyway.” She lit a cigarette. “Go ahead. You’ll find it a bit entertaining, I suspect, once you get over the alarm.”

  Alex pressed the cold blade to her arm and put just enough pressure on it to break the skin. The blade was razor sharp, so it didn’t take much. Blood slowly beaded at the site of the cut. It didn’t hurt, but she felt her heart race when she saw the blood well up, this time in excitement rather than fear. “Ok, so they are r
eal. I’m not entertained, really.”

  “Oh, just wait.”

  As they sat, Alex watched as the blood beads seemed to evaporate and the cut disappeared. She looked at Lucy.

  “Try a deeper cut; it’s more dramatic and makes the point better.”

  Alex shook her head. “This is stupid.”

  Lucy took the case back from Alex. “Here, just trust me.” She took the scalpel and made a deeper cut. Again, Alex didn’t feel pain, just an opening up of her skin. The amount of blood was significant this time and panic rose up in her throat. The blood welled up more quickly due to the deepness of the cut, but by the time Lucy’s cigarette was done, there was no evidence of the wound at all. The blood seeped back into the opening and the cut closed itself completely.

  “You are pretty impervious to injury. There are things that can hurt you, but you’re safe here.” Lucy took a clean scalpel from the case. She drew it across her own forearm. Her own blood rose faster and the cut was deep enough that the blood flowed rather than merely seeping. As it threatened to trickle onto the table, Lucy said, “Drink.”

  Alex didn’t need to be told twice. The demonstration had caused her hunger to grow unbearable, and the need to feed overcame and fears or doubts she still had. She somehow knew, just as she had known Lucy’s name, that this was the only way to feel better.