Chapter 70
The information was difficult to process. His own body was telling him it was true, but he didn’t want it to be. “Well, I won’t,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “I don’t want to. I won’t do it.”
Felicity looked up and caught his eyes. “What’s that, darling?”
“I said, I won’t do it. I don’t want to.”
“Dear, just because you go through the process doesn’t mean that you have to go chasing Vampires for a living. You can stay here with us, continue your practice, marry a nice human woman….”
“No,” James interrupted. “I don’t want there to be some sort of a distinguishable species identification between my wife and myself. I want to be a human, Mother.” The words sounded so absurd, but they also seemed necessary.
“I want that for you, too, Jamie. The life your uncle lives is perilous to say the least. Even though there isn’t much that can kill him, I would think it would grow tiring. But, he said….”
Despite the fact that she was sitting on his blankets, he managed to pull himself out from the other side of the bed before she could finish her sentence. “I need to speak to him,” he said, grabbing a dressing gown and throwing it on over his nightshirt. “I want to talk to Uncle Culpepper.”
“Very well. He’s just downstairs. But perhaps you should dress first. He has a few of his associates with him.”
Without pausing to consider his mother’s statement, James headed out the bedroom door and down the stairs. He could hear Uncle Culpepper’s boisterous voice before he even reached the landing, and it sounded as if the chatter was coming from the parlor.
“And then, I just swooped in, right in front of the Hunter, and tore the Vampire’s head clean off!” The room exploded in a loud barrage of laughter, and James heard the familiar tinkle of his sister’s voice above the others.
He rounded the corner and peered in at his uncle who was sitting precisely where Margie’s bleeding, broken skull had laid the last time he’d entered this room. He locked eyes with the massive form of his uncle, whose weathered face broke into a grin upon seeing his nephew up and about. “Jamie!” he exclaimed, clapping his monstrous hands together. “It’s so nice to see you!”
Dressed in a long trench coat of black leather, his uncle’s hair hung in unruly locks around his face down past his shoulders, his bulbous nose by far his most dominant feature, though his bushy brown eyebrows also gathered attention. He wore black slacks and a black button down shirt as well, though it was hard to see with his duster on. His head was uncovered, though James knew sometimes he wore a black slouch hat.
Other voices greeted him as well, causing him to break the trance his uncle had him under and look at the others in the room. There was a woman who appeared to be in her mid-thirties with short orange hair mostly hidden beneath a purple derby hat with a large flower on the side. The rest of her outfit was also black, and she wore pants which looked much more form fitting than his sister’s.
In another chair across the way sat a man who appeared to be only a few years older than James. He had blonde hair and a sharp nose. His outfit was also all black, except he wore a white button-down shirt beneath his waistcoat.
James suddenly felt under dressed, but he hoped they wouldn’t notice. Leave it to Margie to keep that from happening. “You came downstairs in your knickers when you knew we had company?” she asked from her spot next to Culpepper. She began to giggle and threw a hand over her mouth as if she might actually be trying to control herself. For once.
Despite his outfit, or lack thereof, James took a step into the parlor. “Uncle Culpepper, Mother says that this likely isn’t reversible for me—that I’m about to become… one of you. Is that so?”
Uncle Culpepper’s dark brown eyes shifted from one associate to the other before falling back on his nephew’s face. “Well, Jamie, I’d say that’s likely so. There’s no way to know for certain, but I’d think, after what you did last night, there’s probably no going back.”
He absorbed that information, breathing in deeply through his nostrils as if he might need to mull it around in his lungs. “Well, I don’t want to. I should like to go back to my life before yesterday, thank you very much.”
“Why?” the voice was shrill and unfamiliar. He turned his face to look at the orange-haired woman. “Why would ye wanna do that?” Her accident sounded cockney, and James instantly didn’t like her. Why was it her business?
“Jamie,” Culpepper said, leaning forward. “We won’t have to give you the Transformation serum, and if you want to go back to being human, it may happen. You’d just need to stay away from Vampires, that’s all.”
“But we need ‘im,” the woman interjected, looking at Culpepper in earnest.
“Cornelia….”
James interrupted. “Pardon me, miss,” he began, trying to keep his composure, “but I never asked for this. It was her,” he pointed at Margie. “She’s the one who wanted to join your ranks and chase the undead. Not I.”
“But we need you,” she repeated, only this time directly to him.
“I don’t rightly care what you need….”
“James,” Culpepper cut in, “as I said, there’s no guarantee that it won’t happen anyway, but you can certainly take some time to see. However, I will tell you, it will get painful rather quickly. Or at least it might. You could get lucky like Hezekiah here and have an easy Transformation.”
James cast his eyes at the man in the other chair, whom he took to be the said Hezekiah. He said nothing, only nodded.
“But with that sort of power soaring through you, I somehow doubt that.” Culpepper shook his head slowly from side to side.
“I’ll take my chances,” James said. Forgetting his manners entirely, James turned on his heel and headed back to his room. He needed to dress, and collect his thoughts, and relieve himself. He had been asleep for fourteen hours after all.
But he didn’t even get three steps up the stairs before his sister had his arm. “Jamie! Wait! What are you doing?”
James pulled away from her. “I told you. I don’t want this, Margie. I want to be a regular human doctor. That’s all I want to be.”
“But think of all the people you can help!” She took a few steps up the stairs, trying to keep up with him despite his stomping footfalls and her constant bouncing from one foot to the other.
“I can help plenty of people just now, thank you.”
“Not the way you helped me last night,” Margie argued. “You can actually save people’s lives. You can practically bring them back from the dead. Uncle said the only reason I even lasted until you got me home was because you must’ve zapped me back there on the street enough for me to last.”
He was at the top of the stairs now, and he no longer wanted to listen to his sister’s voice. “Go away, Marjorie.”
“But Jamie….”
“Stop calling me that!” he shouted. He turned to look at her. “I told you, I don’t want any of this! I don’t want to be a Guardian or a Vampire Hunter! I don’t want to be related to any of those people downstairs, I don’t want to help them, and I don’t want to help you! Leave me alone!”
The look in his sister’s eyes conveyed a shattered spirit. Her bottom lip began to quiver, and for once in her life, Marjorie looked at him as if he’d actually wounded her soul. “All right, James. I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry you followed me last night. I’m sorry I made you begin to Transform. I’m sorry you saved me.”
James let out a deep breath. The expression on her face was crestfallen, and it tugged at his heart, despite his angry outburst. “I didn’t mean I’m sorry I saved you, Margie….”
“No, it’s fine,” she said taking a step backward. “I can’t undo that, but I can promise you I’ll be out of here as soon as possible, once Uncle Culpepper administers the serum and I wake up.”
“Margie, I don’t want you to go.”
“It’s all right. It really is. Then, you’ll be an only child, just like Mother and Father always wanted.”
He opened his mouth as if to argue, but their mother came out of her room then. She had to have heard the remark. “Oh, Marjorie! Why would you ever think that?”
Without another word, Marjorie bounded down the stairs, back toward the parlor, their mother on her heels. What sort of an end that conversation might have, James wasn’t sure, but it didn’t involve him. He had enough worries of his own just now to continue to take on anyone else’s. Regardless of what anyone else thought of him, he wasn’t designed to be some sort of a super-human, demi-god, lifesaver. He only wanted to be a doctor and nothing more.
