The Turning-Blood Ties 1 Read Free Page A

to the floor, overturning and spilling their contents. I fell to my hands and knees in a mire of formaldehyde and human livers, unable to efficiently crawl through the slippery mess.
    A hand grabbed my hair and dragged me upward. When I tried to regain my footing I slipped to my knees again and writhed painfully in the grasp of my attacker. I looked up. John Doe looked down at me.
    His once-mangled face showed only the faintest remnants of injury in the form of purplish scars. His pale chest bore no marks at all, save for a long, straight scar that bisected it, obviously an old wound. His jaw was no longer torn, but had twisted, along with the rest

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    of his features, into a demonic visage with a crumpled snout and weirdly elongated jaws. Dried blood stained his long blond hair, though his skull had neatly closed. The clear, blue eye that had stared so intently at me as he lay helpless on the gurney in the E.R. was piercing and ruthless. The other, formerly empty socket held a brown eye, the white occluded with blood.
    The missing eye of the morgue worker.
    John Doe bared his teeth, revealing needle-sharp canines.
    “Fangs,” I whispered in horror. Vampire.
    He laughed then, the sound distorted by his changed facial structure as though it had been slowed on a tape recorder.
    Everything about the creature suggested the calculated fury of a predator who killed not from necessity, but from love of carnage. He stroked my cheek with one talonlike fingernail. He was a cat playing with a mouse, a thief admiring his stolen prize. I would not be that prize. My hands groped the floor and seized a piece of broken glass, and I stabbed the shard into his thigh. His blood sprayed across my face. I tasted the coppery wetness on my lips and gagged.
    Howling in rage, he wielded his free hand like a claw and slashed my neck. The burning pain followed seconds later, but I didn’t care. I was free. I held one hand to my throat, desperate to stop the warm blood that flowed between my fingers. It was hopeless, and I knew it. I would bleed to death on the morgue floor before anyone found me. Then I saw the white shoes of the code team as they entered. I raised my free hand weakly to signal them. Only one moved toward me. The rest stood petrified by the scene.
    “You’re going to be all right,” the young nurse said as he pried my fingers from the wound at my neck.
    It was the last thing I remembered.
    Two
    A Few (More) Unpleasant Surprises
    I spent nearly a month in the hospital. Detectives visited me on several occasions. They took down my description of John Doe, fangs and all, but no doubt wondered what kind of painkillers I was on. The first to arrive on the scene didn’t see him. The last police interview was short, and though they assured me the case was still being investigated, I didn’t hold out much hope for justice. Whatever John Doe was, he was probably smart enough to evade capture.
    A few nurses from the E.R. came to see me. They looked uncomfortable and didn’t stay long. We joked about the Day-After-Thanksgiving sales I’d missed and the frantic shopping I’d have to do if I got out in time for Christmas. I didn’t bother mentioning I had no one to buy gifts for.
    The bright side of the interminable visits were the newspaper clippings that people brought. While I wasn’t about to make a scrapbook of them, the articles offered more details of the crime and investigation than the vague answers I’d been given by the cops. According to the press, the morgue attendant, Cedric Kebbler, had been attacked and killed by an unknown suspect, possibly an escaped mental patient. I had walked in on the murder in progress and had been attacked myself. I’d struggled, and the murderer fled through the morgue’s only window. I wasn’t interviewed due to my “critical medical

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