Free One of Them (Vigil #2) by Arvin Loudermilk

Wakey-Wakey
    Initially, I felt no different at all. I was in a strange place, yet I did not feel changed in any way. I was tired and confused, but shouldn’t that be expected? As I sucked in the first breath of my new life, all I really wanted to know was where I was.
    Best as I could tell on that front, I was inside of a fifteen foot by fifteen foot box. The walls surrounding me were metallic, as was the ceiling. The surfaces themselves were not reflective, not exactly, but they were shiny enough to make you think that they could be. I saw no doors, no windows, no way out.
    I stretched my legs out, lying flat on my back on some kind of medical bed in the center of the space. There were no sheets or blankets beneath me, only a plain mattress and a stitched in pillow for my head. All I had covering my body was a puce-colored gown made of this obnoxiously crinkling tissue paper. The garment was scant at best, and it left my legs and arms exposed, though I felt neither hot nor cold. The temperature inside the box was decent, this despite the fact that I had no idea how air was even circulating—the walls were really that blank and featureless.
    I sat up, and at the same moment, realized that I could sit up. Last I remembered my spine had been broken in two places, both up high and down low. For a moment there, I did not know if my brain was fucking with me or not—did the attack in the townhouse complex even happen? It didn’t take long and the memory of the pain came flooding back in full force. Feelings that intense would probably never go away, not for as long as I lived. And I was living. I had died, and then I was alive. It was loony, but also indisputably real. I hated to think about what that meant.
    The task force I’d been working with had been on the trail of a man they claimed had vampire-like characteristics—enhanced strength, aversion to light, bloodlust, and so forth. I didn’t buy it for a second, but there was something unusual about this Jessup guy, and he needed to be apprehended before anybody else was killed. I was only involved because Jessup had taken a liking to me after I’d been called to the scene of his latest kill. After that encounter, he began to stalk me. The task force itself was primarily a specialty detail within the LAPD, where I served as a patrolwoman. The higher-ups commandeered me during my suspension and put me to work as bait. This sad tale ended with my spine being broken by Jessup, right before he choked me to death with a mouthful of his blood. As I was lying there dying in the grass, no one who I thought was going to protect me did so. I’d been abandoned, left as a hearty meal for the piece of shit who had killed me.
    My thought process wound back to the whole ‘aversion to light’ thing. It was then that I realized the room I was in had no light sources to speak of, yet I could see perfectly, as if my eyes themselves were creating the illumination all on their own. The more I strained to look, the more it became obvious the space in front of me was neither light nor dark; it was just visible.
    I twisted my legs off the elevated bed and dangled my feet over the floor. The surface beneath me was like the surface above. The drop to the metallic flooring was shallow, relatively speaking, about eighteen to twenty inches at most. I took my time before I attempted to climb down. I wasn’t sure how strong I was going to be after my injuries. Somehow, some way, I’d been repaired, but that did not mean I was healthy enough to be walking around on two feet.
    Erring on the side of caution, I brought my foot down softly. The coolness of the floor was a shock. Everything else in the room had been so blah. Encouraged by the lack of any shooting pain, I set my other foot flat and shifted all of my weight onto my ankles and stood up in one continuous motion. There was no hint of discomfort, so I started to twisting my hips from side to side and stretching out my stiffened arms. A