* * *
Had I known then what I know now.
Over the next several months, I went from being a goggle-eyed travel junkie to a world-weary explorer. My life didn't exactly turn out how I had pictured it would when Jakob first invited me on this adventure. Maybe all the blood took the fun out of it for me.
Oh, by the way, it turned out Jakob was a real vampire.
As soon as I agreed to join him in this mad eye-of-newt scavenger hunt, we left the U.S. Our first stop was Amsterdam, where Jakob began to feed again. The first night he returned to our hotel room all rosy-cheeked and covered in blood, I understood why vamps wore black.
When Jakob saw that his blood-soaked clothes didn't revolt me too much—I was a trained phlebotomist, I reminded him—he let me tag along on his nightly feedings. What did freak me out? He saw no difference between chewing on a rat or a human being.
"Blood is blood, Abby." The more Jakob fed, the more his appetite grew, and he soon fed exclusively on people. After all, normal humans have ten pints of blood, compared to only twenty-five milliliters in a rat.
I didn't like all the killings, Thou shallt not kill was listed pretty high on the list of Ten Commandment no-nos, and I strongly suggested that he might want to drink a couple of pints each from a larger number of victims rather than drain and kill several of them. He promised me he would try, and the fact he was willing to accommodate my prurient demands reassured me of his love.
We even made a game of it. I'd lure a homeless guy into an abandoned alley, where Jakob would do his Houdini thing and silently materialize behind the victim. While the man was occupied with me, Jakob would dig those razor-sharp teeth into the hobo's neck. After the initial rustiness wore off and he got his groove back, Jakob rarely wasted a drop of blood, which made his feeding a bit more pleasant for everyone involved—well, everyone except the victim.
I kept at him to feed from me, and that caused some friction between us. "Why do you take their blood, but not mine?" I whined.
"Because I don't worry about killing them."
But I saw the rapturous looks on his victims' faces. I wanted to feel what they felt when he fed. I saw my chance and took advantage of Jakob's dry spell of victims a few times while we were in transit, coaxing him to feed from me, trusting he could stop before sucking all the life right out of me. I never felt any pain, not even when he sunk his teeth into the skin. It was such an intimate touch, beginning with a kiss. I offered him my neck, but he chose to feed instead from the artery in my thigh. I ran my hands through his hair as he kissed my flesh and then bit me. I pressed his face against my thigh, driving his fangs deep and releasing whatever anesthetic made the whole experience so mind-blowing.
When he finished feeding, he took me in his arms and sometimes we made love. The other times we had done it there'd been fireworks. He was a passionate, attentive lover. But these explosions happened inside my head and in my soul, and afterwards I thought I might never recover.
Jakob assured me he was getting stronger with each feeding. He likened the changes in his body to a renewed sense of strength and endurance. I associated it with the human growth hormones that dumb athletes took. Jakob filled out his shirts more, seeming to grow muscle mass and flesh in spite of the rigors of travel. The hungry flame never left his dark eyes anymore. I chose to think of it as a craving for me.
He seemed to be well on his way of curing himself. Meanwhile, I was left feeling listless and anemic, a combination of the advanced leukemia and Jakob's feedings. It got so bad that he refused to feed from me any more, and there was nothing I could do or say to change his mind. I begged to receive some of his vamp blood, and I knew before he said so that it would kill me. Hematology 101: not all blood types are compatible, especially inter-species.
So he fed from 'strays', and we continued to travel, propelled as much by necessity to escape suspicion for the string of corpses left behind as by the mysterious clues Jakob uncovered in his research for my cure.
It wasn't all blood and corpses, though. Ever been around a vampire? Sometimes Jakob would playfully scare me, just to remind me of what he could do. We'd be in the hotel room, him by my side, his hand caressing my face—which, sigh, was sometimes the only caressing he did—and when I'd lean in for a kiss, he'd suddenly disappear. Then I'd hear him shout up to me from across the street, spewing love poetry through the open window. He'd be back in my arms before I had a chance to catch my breath. Yeah, stunts like that always gave me the willies.
Jakob's enemies revealed themselves shortly after we landed in Buenos Aires. Crucifixes nailed to our hotel room doors. Bibles left in places we were sure to pass. All seemingly innocent events, unless you knew Jakob was a vampire. Cloaked figures in flowing robes wearing crucifixes trailed after us in dark alleys, hidden in shadows and pursuing us from one country to the next. Several times Jakob raced into our room in the middle of the night, covered in blood and flesh wounds that would've killed a normal human being, only to announce we had to leave immediately.
I was scared to death more often than not. One night Jakob paused outside of our door long enough to stop me from going in. Before I could ask what was the matter, he flew into our hotel room and dragged a squirming man out of the closet. Jakob had smelled the assassin from the hallway. With a hard shake, he made the man drop a wooden stake and a hammer.
Then Jakob attacked.
Fleshy bits flew everywhere, and Closet Man was no more! Afterwards, we were both covered in sticky blood. It took hours to clean up the room, but the remains fit nicely in a small kitchen garbage bag.
I received roses everywhere we stayed. I would wake up and find myself surrounded by flowers. Dozens of roses, placed around the room, on top of dressers, in our bed, in vases. All de-thorned, most of them a luscious red, the rich color of healthy hemoglobin.
I fell in love with Jakob over room service steaks and five-star hotels. Most of the time, I could deal with the homesickness that snuck up on me. Okay, I admit that I did leave him once, while we were in Cairo. He'd stayed back at the hotel, out of the hot sun, while I visited the ancient city. I started out wanting to do some shopping, which reminded me of my friends back home, which reminded me of my abandoned parents.
One step led to another and, before I knew it, I'd bought a ticket for a steamer headed to Halifax, Nova Scotia. From there, I figured I could make my way back home. But some unknown delays prevented the ship from leaving port on schedule, and I wasn't totally shocked when Jakob found me shortly after sunset, as I was preparing to board the boat. He claimed to have used his sense of smell to follow my beautiful scent through the city.
Now, if that's not love . . . .
Each time I had my fill of all the traveling—and his constant feedings and killings—and threatened to leave, Jakob convinced me that he was getting closer to finding all the parts for my cure. Through our travels he claimed to have learned about incantations and that the ceremony needed to be performed in a ritual place that he hadn't figured out yet. I mentioned Stonehenge because we had yet to set foot on English soil on our Save Abigail Andrews World Tour, and he told me he could never go there because Stonehenge was sacred ground. Oh well, so much for visiting the Queen and seeing Baby Prince George.
With the two of us on the job, we could research twice as fast. Jakob took off at sunset to feed and track down leads while I slept, and then I'd hit the local library archives with a list of books he'd give me upon his pre-dawn return. We were a team. We would succeed together. Or I would die trying.
All in all, the months passed in relative calmness. Jakob's vampire constitution got stronger the more he fed. He could now withstand the dawn's feeble rays, although not painlessly; his hearing and eyesight increased to supernatural levels, as did his abilities to charm victims. All these powers he'd allowed to fade by not feeding for so long.
Each minute spent in the company of this amazing man made me want to live more than ever, and I'd do whatever Jakob asked of me to ensur
e that. I became convinced that he was my ticket to a happy life, just as surely I was his.
It took us two more months of crisscrossing the world several times before Jakob had pieced together the massive jigsaw puzzle of my cure. If I never got on another United Airline plane I'd be a happy person.
Usually, Jakob would send me off to get a book, or sometimes to track down artifacts in museums. Then, in Stuttgart, he returned one night claiming to have remembered something and demanding all the information I could find on the Lascaux caves. When he awoke at dusk, I had stacks of books on art history, magic, geography, and even astronomy. He went out to feed, and I stayed in to browse through the art history books, looking at cave art and taking notes.
Jakob soon returned and dove into the material, starting by comparing the geography of the caves with astronomical charts dating back thousands of years. I fell asleep while watching Breakfast at Tiffany's in German.
He woke me up later. "I've found the last clue," he exclaimed.
"Great." I yawned, intending to go back to sleep.
"Pack your things. We're leaving for France!"
"Right now?"
"We don't have a minute to lose," he said, stacking all the library books and maps into a neat pile for the hotel staff to return.
We spent half an hour on a short but turbulent flight from Stuttgart to Paris. Jakob couldn't sit still, and it wasn't because of the lightning flashes that bounced off the plane. I'd never seen him so excited. To calm him down, and to send me into a delicious swoon, I offered him my neck and he discreetly fed.
I awoke in a drunken stupor as the plane touched down. I stood up, my legs heavy and unsteady beneath me as I navigated the narrow aisle. Lucky for me, my boyfriend was a big strapping vampire. With an arm wrapped around my waist, he supported me effortlessly, and my feet barely touched the ground as we slipped off the plane and streaked through the airport terminal.
Now that we were in cold, soggy France I wondered for the thousandth time what I had gotten myself into.