Vanessa nosed the car towards the exit and they left the freeway, heading back towards the suburbs.
“Both.” She said. “You don’t take needles from people in alleyways and you don’t show up at a place after that same needle guy tells you how painful and scary it’s going to be!”
“Well what do you want me to do? Forget everything? This morning I was ready to blow myself away, and all because I didn’t have a clue what was going on. I mean the guy didn’t tell me a lot, but he told me enough that I know I need to know more. There’s something else going on here and maybe I’m a part of that now or maybe I’m not, but either way, I definitely need more information.”
“Yes, and if the guy had been trying to sell you a set of supernatural steak knives, I would agree with you. But pumping weirdo liquids into your veins and showing up at random addresses is not the smart way to go about this.”
“It’s the only way to go about this.” Ryan exclaimed. “This guy is the only one who knows anything about anything. Besides, if he wanted me dead he could have done it a hundred times, a hundred different ways by now.”
“Well that’s comforting.” Vanessa replied as she chewed her lip.
Light rain began to speckle the windshield and it filled the silence that had fallen between them.
“How is it you’re taking all this in stride?” Ryan asked finally. “Werewolves and shape-shifters and…murders.”
She took a deep breath, then exhaled. “I guess I haven’t really had the time to think it all through, but now, after seeing what we’ve seen, not much point in denying it.”
“I have a feeling we’re going to see a whole lot more.”
Vanessa looked down at the syringe in Ryan’s hand. “I think you’re right. Probably starting tonight.”
Vanessa didn’t like any of it, and it was written all over her face. Still, Ryan could tell she was on board. For the moment, that was good enough for him.
They spent the rest of the ride hashing out the details of the coming night. It was tricky and dangerous and Ryan wished he could have had weeks to plan, rather than minutes, but that wasn’t an option.
Vanessa slowed the Honda to a crawl as they neared Ryan’s street. Their luck was still holding: his mother’s car was not in the driveway. His Cherokee, however, was still parked at the curb where he had left it the night before.
They finalized their plans and Ryan said goodbye to Vanessa as he stepped out of the car. He’d be with her again in less than an hour, but they had endured so much together that day that it felt strange to be alone again. Ryan shook himself and focused.
With Vanessa’s mother out of town, they had agreed that her house was the safest option for a place to spend the night. Ryan had protested, of course: Vanessa was the last person he wanted near him when he transformed. However, she had made the argument that it was better for someone to keep an eye on him rather than simply lock him in a house and hope for the best. They both knew they were putting a lot of faith in Daniel’s compound, and Ryan could only pray that its effects would last the night.
He approached his house nervously. Something about the situation made him feel like a criminal returning to the scene. He didn’t have his keys, but the window to his basement bedroom was still unlocked. He slipped down into the room and felt goose bumps rise on his skin.
He had been on such an emotional roller coaster in the last day that it felt like he had lived two lifetimes since he had left this room that morning. To Ryan this didn’t feel like his bedroom anymore, it felt like it belonged to someone else entirely: someone with zero life or death problems, someone living a life so blissfully simple, yet they didn’t even appreciate it. Someone human.
The pool of blood on the bed was still there and it had dried into a deep brown. Ryan stripped all the bedding and stuffed it into a duffel along with his other bloody clothes. He stashed the duffel in the back of his closet and covered it with some of the odds and ends already on his closet floor.
His bedroom door was still locked from the inside, just the way he had left it. Ryan breathed a sigh of relief. This meant that his mother had not been in his room since this morning, that she hadn’t seen the blood.
There was a putrid stench from where Ryan had vomited on the floor, and the odor itself made him gag. He set to work quickly, breathing as little as possible, and cleaned it as best he could.
Ryan picked up his phone and scanned the one new text. His mother had tried to wake him that morning, but she’d had to leave before she could see him off. There was banana bread on the counter. Ryan replied to the text, apologizing for this morning and informing her where he’d be tonight. Lying was much easier this way, and Ryan hoped his mother wouldn’t check her phone for a few hours until he was safe at Vanessa’s.
He pulled off the borrowed clothes and got into the shower again. He dried off, threw on some fresh clothes, grabbed his keys, phone, wallet, the syringe, the business card, and he was out the front door.