“Ow,” she gasped, wincing as she ran over a sharp little stone embedded in the wound. She dug it out and tossed it into the sink with the other shards of gravel she’d recovered in her cleanup.
God, she was a mess.
Her new skirt was torn and ruined. The hem of her sweater was frayed from scraping the pavement. Her hands and knees looked like they belonged to a clumsy tomboy.
And she’d make a public, total ass of herself besides.
What the hell was wrong with her, freaking out like she had?
The mayor, for chrissake. And she had run from his car like she feared he was a…
A what? Some kind of monster?
Vampire.
Gabrielle’s hand went still.
She heard the word in her mind, even if she refused to speak it. It was the same word that had been nipping at the edge of her consciousness since the murder she’d witnessed. A word she would not acknowledge, even alone, in the silence of her empty apartment.
Vampires were her crazy birth mother’s obsession, not hers.
The teenaged Jane Doe had been deeply delusional when the police recovered her from the street all those years ago. She spoke of being pursued by demons who wanted to drink her blood—had, in fact, already tried, as was her explanation for the strange lacerations on her throat. The court documents Gabrielle had been given were peppered with wild references to bloodthirsty fiends running loose in the city.
Impossible.
That was crazy thinking, and Gabrielle knew it.
She was letting her imagination, and her fears that she might one day come unhinged like her mother, get the best of her. She was smarter than this. More sane, at least.
God, she had to be.
Seeing that kid from the police station today—on top of everything else she’d been through the past several days—just set something off in her. Although, now that she was thinking about it, she couldn’t even be sure the guy she saw in the park actually was the clerk she’d seen at the precinct house.
And so what if he was? Maybe he was out in the Common having lunch, enjoying the weather like she was. No crime in that. If he was staring at her, maybe he thought she looked familiar, too. Maybe he would have come over and said hi to her, if she hadn’t charged after him like some paranoid psycho, accusing him of spying on her.
Oh, and wouldn’t that be lovely, if he went back to the station and told them all how she’d chased him several blocks into Chinatown?
If Lucan were to hear about that, she would absolutely die of humiliation.
Gabrielle resumed cleansing her scraped palms, trying to put the whole day out of her head. Her anxiety was still at a peak, her heart still drumming hard. She dabbed at her surface wounds, watching the thin trickle of blood run down her wrist.
The sight of it soothed her in some strange way. Always had.
When she was younger, when feelings and pressures built up inside of her until there was nowhere for them to go, often all it took to ease her was a tiny cut.
The first one had been an accident. Gabrielle had been paring an apple at one of her foster homes when the knife slipped and cut into the fleshy pad at the base of her thumb. It hurt a little, but as her blood pumped out, a rivulet of glossy bright crimson, Gabrielle hadn’t felt panic or fear.
She’d felt fascination.
She’d felt an incredible sort of…peace.
A few months after that surprising discovery, Gabrielle cut herself again. She did it deliberately, secretly, never with the intent to harm herself. Over time, she did it frequently, whenever she needed to feel that same profound sense of calm.
She needed it now, when she was anxious and jumpy as a cat, her ears picking up every slight noise in the apartment and outside. Her head was pounding. Her breath was shallow, coming rapidly through her teeth.
Her thoughts were careening from the flash-bright memories of the night outside the club to the creepy asylum she’d taken pictures of the other morning, to the confusing, irrational, bone-deep fear she’d experienced this afternoon.
She needed a little peace from all of it.
Even just a spare few minutes of calm.
Gabrielle’s gaze slid to the wooden block of knives sitting on the counter nearby. She reached over, took one in her hand. It had been years since she’d done this. She’d worked so hard to master the strange, shameful compulsion.
Had it truly ever gone away?
Her state-appointed psychologists and social workers eventually had been convinced that it had. The Maxwells, too.
Now, Gabrielle wondered as she brought the knife over to her bare arm and felt a surge of dark anticipation wash over her. She pressed the tip of the blade into the fleshy part of her forearm, though not yet firm enough to break the skin.
This was her private demon—something she had never openly shared with anyone, not even Jamie, her dearest friend.