CHAPTER TWO: TRICK OF THE LIGHT

“Help me!” The man repeated and this time he spat up blood. 

“Oh, my God,” Grayson breathed as he realized the man had been stabbed. 

Beneath the trenchcoat the man wore a suit with a white shirt.  A dark, red stain was spreading all across his chest like a new continent. Grayson pulled off the button down shirt he had on over his sleeveless black t-shirt. He immediately balled it up and pressed it against the center of the wound. 

“Charlie?!  CHARLIE?!” Grayson called to the homeless man who was hovering at the back of two aisles, lips parted in shock and rheumy eyes wide. “I need a little help here!”

“I--I don’t know, Grayson,” Charlie warbled, looking pale and swaying on his feet, but he did take a step towards Grayson and the man. “I don’t want to get involved in this. You shouldn’t either.”

“C’mon, Charlie, I need your help!  I just need you to hold this shirt over his wound really tight,” Grayson begged. “Then I can call 911.”

“Cops?!” Charlie’s head jerked right and left as if looking for the dreaded police.

Grayson winced. While many of the police officers were kind to Charlie, some of them weren’t. But all of them were constantly telling him to “move it along” and “you can’t sleep here” and “publicly intoxicated again, Charlie? Got to bring you in” and other unpleasant things.  So the homeless man feared them all. 

They weren’t Grayson’s favorites either. For a moment, he saw the swirl of red and blue lights, a man in uniform squatting in front of him asking him questions he couldn’t answer, and the world blurred by tears.  But he pushed those thoughts away. This man was dying. Old fears would not control his present actions. That was something the streets had taught him. Get too locked onto the past and one missed things in the present that would keep one alive or kill one stone dead.

“He needs an ambulance,” Grayson said gently, but firmly. “Charlie, please!”

“Okay, okay, I’m coming.”  Charlie wobbled down the aisle, knocking a few chip bags off the shelves before making it to them. He wiped his hands on the front of his none-too-clean plaid shirt before he took over putting pressure on the wound.

“There’s no--no time. They’re coming,” the man gasped and sagged against the counter, trapping Charlie’s hand and his bunched up shirt between the man’s chest and the counter’s edge. 

“Who’s coming? Who did this to you? Why did they stab you?” Grayson asked as he fished his phone out of his back pocket.

The city was dangerous. There were muggings, rapes and drive-bys every night of the week, but stabbings like this?  Not so common.  Grayson had lived on the streets since he was 10-years-old and thought of himself as pretty damned jaded, but watching this man bleed out had his movements shocky and quick. He was dialing 911 on his phone’s cracked screen before the man answered. 

“S-Sect of D-Dawn,” the man spat out and more bright blood formed a starburst pattern on the peeling counter.

Grayson froze. Had he heard the man right? Not a drug dealer or a prostitute or a gangbanger, but the Sect of Dawn?

“911. What’s your emergency?” the female operator asked, her voice tautly professional, even as Grayson stared at the man in shock.

“They don’t exist. They’re an urban legend,” Grayson found himself saying.

The Sect of Dawn was allegedly a group of virulent anti-Vampire humans who stalked their immortal prey giving them their Second Deaths. Unlike most anti-Vampire humans, they were said to actually be good at hunting and killing Vampires. But to Grayson the group had sounded like the Illuminati or other secret society that there was no real proof for and seemed to exist only in heated imaginations.

But then again Vampires were once thought imaginary too. And most people would never believe I can do what I’m able to, Grayson reminded himself. 

Not to mention that this man was not a Vampire. He had brown eyes, not silver. All Vampires, excluding Julian Harrow and King Daemon who had purple and red eyes respectively, had silver eyes like liquid mercury. So unless this man was wearing colored contacts, he was human enough. Besides the stab wound that hadn’t stopped bleeding proved that anyways. A Vampire surely would have healed by now.

“They’re all too real,” the man said almost sadly.

The man smiled at him with gray lips and glassy eyes that he kept turning towards the door as if waiting for his attackers to follow him into a brightly lit shop with two witnesses.  Yet the skin between Grayson’s shoulders twitched.  He had found that ignoring his sixth sense was a bad idea, and yet he was doing so now. He realized it was because he wanted to. He didn’t want this man--with all he brought with him--in his shop. It was like when one was desperately trying to avoid the cops, but police cruisers kept showing up every block.

“911,” the operator repeated with a touch of annoyance in her voice, “What is your emergency?”

Grayson shook himself out of his shock and inaction. The man was here. He was Grayson’s responsibility. He had to get over it and handle it.  He explained firmly and succinctly, “A man’s been stabbed. I need an ambulance and the police.” 

The 911 system automatically picked up his address. The operator asked him to confirm it, which he did.

“An ambulance is 10 minutes out,” she told him. “Now, describe the wound to me. Can you put pressure on it?”

“We’re doing that,” Grayson began, but then the man reached over and closed his hand over Grayson’s, the one that held the cellphone.  

Grayson thought he wanted to speak to the operator and released the phone into the man’s possession.  But the man stabbed the “End Call” key.  Blood smeared across the keypad.  He tossed the phone on the counter.

“No,” the man rasped.

“What are you doing?” Grayson cried.

The ambulance and police were still coming, but the operator might have been able to help until they arrived. 

“Can’t--can’t trust them. Can’t--can’t trust anyone,” the man told him.

“I agree!” Charlie nodded eagerly. 

The homeless man licked his lips and glanced down at the bottles of beer in the refrigerator at the end of the aisles. Grayson didn’t blame him. He could use a beer about now. Maybe ten.

“I’m not a big fan of authority either,” Grayson told him, “but you need medical attention and--”

“Not going to make it. I can’t fucking believe it,” the man let out a phelgmy laugh that was filled with bitterness. “Just when I was almost--almost beyond all of this.  When a knife couldn’t hurt me.”

The man laughed again, the sound was wetter and thicker than before. He sagged further over the counter. He gave out a choked sound and his legs nearly went out beneath him. Grayson grabbed him just before he went down hard on the ground. The man felt so fragile under Grayson’s hands. Almost as if the blood leaving him had reduced his mass until he was little more than twigs and frayed twine. 

“Maybe he should sit down, Grayson?” Charlie suggested, looking a little queasy  as blood oozed through Grayson’s shirt and over his grimy fingers.

"He should lay down," Grayson suggested, looking at that pasty white face, blanched of blood.

But the man shook his head, "No, no, not laying down. Not going to just lay down and die."

"What about sitting? Will you sit?" Grayson asked as he watched the man sway.

After a moment he nodd.

“Yeah. Here. Let’s use this,” Grayson said. 

Grayson let go of the man before he took his own stool and lifted it over the counter. He came around the counter as well and, between him and Charlie, got the man on the stool. Grayson had to keep hold of the man’s shoulders though to keep him from toppling off. 

“Is this better?” Grayson asked the man.

He coughed wetly. “There’s nothing to be done.  I don’t think death should be comfortable. It should make you feel it. I want to feel every last, damned bit.”

“You’re not dying. You’re going to be all right,” Grayson insisted.

But he’d seen people dying before, mostly of drug overdoses and all of them had become this grayish color and their eyes hadn’t focused and this man was like them.  Charlie looked up at him and he saw that Charlie thought the man was dying too. 

“You’re going to be all right,” Grayson repeated as if his words would somehow change things. 

They never had before, even when they were the truth. Why did he think that lies would cause a different outcome?

“The ambulance should be here soon,” Grayson said.

He thought the man murmured “no” but it was drowned out by a fit of coughing. More blood splattered the ground.  

Heart slamming against the interior of his chest, Grayson looked out the door towards the dark, wet street. 

Where the Hell is the ambulance? She said 10-minutes! It’s nearly been that long!

But he did think he saw something outside through the rain-spattered glass. Was there movement across the street? Was there someone hanging about the mouth of the alleyway that was just opposite the convenience store?  On a cold, rainy night not even Charlie would stay there. He squinted. 

It’s nothing. Just a trick of the light.

A cold chill ran down his spine as he thought that. How many times had he explained away his own gift to people by using that very line?  People didn’t want to see the paranormal. Not really. Not when they weren’t separated from it by a television or movie screen.

“Grayson! He’s fading!” Charlie shouted.

Grayson’s attention snapped back to the wounded man.  He had started to slide off of the seat again, his eyes closing and his breathing becoming shallower. He was on the edge of death. Grayson could almost see his soul clinging with the lightest of touches to his body, about to slide away towards whatever was after.  

“Hey! Hey! Stay with us! C’mon, you need to stay awake!”

Grayson slapped the man’s cheeks and started asking him more questions to keep him conscious. He doubted that the answers would be lucid. The Sect of Dawn answer showed him that.

But who would make that up? And why?

“Why do you think the Sect of Dawn is after you?” Grayson asked, seeking something to ask the man about to keep him conscious.

“Maybe we shouldn’t ask, Grayson,” Charlie suggested. His big bushy eyebrows lifted, showing that his eyes were bloodshot, but they were surprisingly lucid.  “Maybe it's best we don’t know.”

But before Grayson could take the question back the man was answering, “Because I got the ticket. The golden ticket.” 

The man winced and sweat started to pour down his clammy forehead. His eyelids were fluttering wildly as if he was having a seizure.

But Grayson was caught up in what he had said. “Golden ticket?” 

It can’t be. He can’t have an invitation to the academy, Grayson thought and almost let out a wild laugh of disbelief. One hundred people in all the world get them and one of the students just happens to walk into the convenience store?! No. No way.

He had thought he was safe here. In this obscurity. No Vampires or the Vampire-adjacent--as he thought of the wannabes and worshippers--would bother coming into this run-down neighborhood to this even more run-down store. It wasn’t like the Vampires desired Doritos, Coke, or some candy and he was sure that the wannabes would wish to keep their bodies pure by “eating clean”.  There was nothing here except the week-old oranges that would fit that bill.  Yet here this man was.

It can’t be possible. It’s like I’m being hunted.

“To the--the academy. They want it. Eliminate me and send their own person in,” the man wheezed.  “Can’t let them do that.”

“The Sect of Dawn wants to send in one of their own people to the academy with your golden ticket?” Grayson asked, his eyebrows lifted.

The man didn’t answer. His eyes were closed and he was leaning over as if he were about to be sick, but Grayson knew the man simply didn’t have the strength to sit up. Yet he managed to stuff his right hand into the inside pocket of his trenchcoat and draw out an envelope. He left a blood fingermark against the pure, white paper. A name was written in gold calligraphy. It was Gregory Starn.  The man shoved the envelope at Grayson as if he wanted to be clear of it or, like the ring of power in Lord of the Rings, as if he desperately wanted it but knew it was bad for him.

“I can’t use it. Can’t let them have it,” the man wheezed. “Not going to let them win.”

“Don’t take that, Grayson! He got stabbed for it!” Charlie warned as he looked at the door over his shoulder just like the man did.

The paper felt expensive under Grayson’s fingertips. There didn’t seem to be much inside the envelope. Maybe a single sheet of paper.  He recalled that the students were to be given directions to a gate to get to the Ever Dark. Maybe that was all that was in the envelope. Coordinates to the Vampire World. For a moment, he wanted to rip the envelope open and see what was inside. He shook himself. He was avoiding Vampires, not seeking them out. 

But still, this envelope was worth… well, he couldn’t imagine how much. Yet wouldn’t the golden ticket be attached to an individual? It wasn’t like the Vampires would let someone else in even if they had the right ID. The Eyros Bloodline Vampires would know they were lying about their identity. But then again maybe the Vampires would be impressed by a person’s ingenuity and cruelty to get in?   But there was one thing that Grayson was sure of.

“The Vampires will know if their enemies take your place, Gregory. Those mind-reading Vampires will figure it out right quick.”  He grasped the man’s trembling hand and tried to put the envelope back into it. “You need to hold onto that.”

“They’ve figured out a way to--to pass. Why--why do this to me otherwise?” Gregory asked.

Grayson didn’t want to say that it could be just terrible luck. Or that the Sect of Dawn was dumb. But either answer would minimize what this man was going through.

So Grayson tried to change the subject to something important, “Is there someone we can call for you? A wife? A husband? Kids? Parents?”

The man shook his head and he wouldn’t take back the envelope. Only more of his blood stained it. Grayson grimaced and stuffed the bloody envelope into the back pocket of his pants. He would deal with that later. The man was clearly not going to the academy tonight regardless. 

The front door gave a shudder and the bell rang once. All three of them snapped their heads towards it. But no one was coming in. It was just the wind. The storm had evidently increased in fury. 

“Lock the door,” Gregory said through trembling lips. Whether he was cold from loss of blood or fear wasn’t clear to Grayson.

“We need to keep it open for the ambulance,” Grayson said.

“They said ten minutes. Should be here soon,” Charlie agreed though he couldn’t quite take his eyes off the door either.

“No ambulance is coming,” Gregory said softly. 

“Of course they are. But I can call again,” Grayson said, reaching for his phone.

But Gregory was shaking his head. His brown eyes were open fully again, and though they were glassy, they were full of intelligence. “If an ambulance were coming we would be hearing its siren by now. The police too. But there’s nothing. The street is empty, too. Strange for this road at this time of night, no?”

Grayson slowly looked back over at the door. Gregory was right. How often had he heard the wail of sirens in the night even when they weren’t coming down this street? Plenty of times. And the road should have been thick with traffic. People honking at pedestrians who threaded their way through cars rather than crossing at the cross walks.  Even with the rain, he would have expected the prostitutes and the drug dealers who lingered in doorways to be out. But he didn’t see one person.

Without realizing he was doing it, Grayson had walked over to the door. His eyes scanned the night. He squinted again as he stared towards that alleyway opposite the shop where he had thought he had seen someone lingering. The barrels filled with broken furniture or crates were not lit. No homeless clustered around them, trying to keep warm and dry. 

Grayson slowly reached up to the turn bolt on the door. Turning it would lock the door. He snapped it shut. The sound was awfully loud. It echoed. Grayson backed away from the door, wishing that there was a curtain or set of shades he could pull down to block out people’s view of the inside of the store. With the lights on inside and the darkness outside, they were illuminated as if on stage. 

“When the ambulance comes, I’ll open the door again,” Grayson said in a voice that sounded like he didn’t believe what he was saying.  He forced himself away from the door and back to the counter where his phone was. “I’m going to call 911 again.”

“You won’t be able to get through,” the man said.

“That’s insane. Of course, I will,” Grayson said.

He punched the numbers in with a slightly shaking hand. He brought the phone to his ear, but there was no sound. No ringing. No electronic sounds. Just silence. He brought the phone down and looked at it. He had bars. He had put in the right numbers. He had pressed the “Call” button. Even if he’d run out of minutes--which he hadn’t--calling 911 was always available. He ended the call and tried again.

And again.

And again.

He couldn’t get through to anyone.

“I told you,” the man said with a large, gulping breath between each word.

“Why? Why is this--”

“The Sect is everywhere. Like dawn, they always come,” the man gasped and spat crimson on the cracked, linoleum floor.

There was another gust of wind that shook the door again. The bell jangled as did Grayson’s nerves. 

“It’s the wind,” Charlie said, but it sounded more like a question than a statement. 

“What else could it be?” Grayson murmured. “The Sect is made up of humans. They’re not magical.  If the Sect even exists.”

But wasn’t there one Vampire Bloodline that could control the weather? Horys?  Was that their name? Grayson had both read about the Vampires obsessively, but also ignored what he knew at the same time. It was like a guilty pleasure. That Vampires existed should have made him feel less singular, but instead it made him angry. The Vampires had one another. He had found no one like him. And because of that, he had been alone when things had gone wrong. 

“They’re coming for me and I can’t get away, but you can.” The man grasped the front of Grayson’s shirt in a surprisingly tight grip. “I see that now. You need to take that golden ticket and go.”

“I’m not you. They won’t let me in,” Grayson responded even as something in his chest expanded and curdled at the same time.

“They’ll take you. I think… something about you,” Gregory’s voice drifted off. “You’re different. I’ve always been able to tell--”

Gregory got nothing else out. The door to the convenience store blew off its hinges. But it didn’t fly straight back into the shelves as it should have. No, it angled. 

It came right for them.

Without thought, Grayson put up one hand. The door froze in mid-air. It hung there. Suspended in space.  The fragments of metal that had wrenched off the frame also levitated. 

“W-what are you doing, Grayson?” Charlie’s voice quavered.

Grayson turned his head to look down at where Charlie crouched, hands over his head, big eyes flickering between him and the door. Cold washed through Grayson.

“W-what are you, Grayson?” Charlie’s voice cracked.

Grayson closed his eyes for half a moment before another voice came from the doorway. It was a female voice that asked in a softly, sibilant voice, “The real question is who is he.”