“It’s been around that long?” Blake asked, teasing.
She gave him a melancholy look. “Longer. My mother used to sing it to me before I’d fall asleep. Funny, I can’t remember her face, but I remember her voice.”
Blake swallowed hard. In time, she’d forget his face, too.
“How did you become a vampire?”
Elise fixed her gaze on Mencheres’s van in front of them. “I was twenty-one when the Great Depression began. My husband, Richard, lost his job that first year, along with so many other people. After several months, we lost our house, too. My parents were dead, but his mother was alive, so we stayed with her for a while. I gave birth to my daughter, Evangeline, during that time. Two months after she was born, Richard’s mother died. She’d been behind on her house payments, so the bank took it, and there was no life insurance, so we were turned out into the street. Some friends of Richard’s lived in Hoovervilles in Central Park, so that’s where we went.”
“What’s a Hooverville?” Blake asked.
“It’s what everyone called the tent villages, after that bastard, President Hoover. Richard scraped together enough cardboard, wood, and trash-can scraps to make a shelter. Every day, he looked for work, but there wasn’t any. Winter came, and my baby got sick. I took her to the hospital, but they sent us home. She died three days later. Two weeks after that, Richard jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge.”
“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” Blake said, imagining Elise as the young, grief-stricken woman she must have been.
She swiped at her eyes. “I try never to think about that time.” Her voice was amazingly steady. “It hurts too much. It hurt too much then as well, which was why shortly after Richard’s death, I jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, too.”
Blake gasped. “What?”
Elise nodded, a faraway look on her face. “I don’t remember hitting the water. I just remember the cold. There had been chunks of ice in the East River that day. I should have died; most people who jump off that bridge do, but Mencheres found me floating in the water and saved me…”
Her voice trailed off—and then she screamed, “Stop!”
Blake slammed on the brakes so hard, his head almost hit the steering wheel. He looked around, but there was nothing in the road or any other reason he could see for her reaction.
“Jesus,” he exclaimed. “Don’t do that again. If I hadn’t been wearing a seat belt, I’d have gone straight through the windshield and made Xaphan’s day!”
Elise swung to look at him, her eyes blazing green and an expression he couldn’t name on her face.
“The river,” she muttered. “The ice. Of course.”
Blake felt like she was speaking an unfamiliar language. “What are you talking about, Elise?”
In reply she kissed him. Then she shot out of the car, turning the ignition off and taking the keys with her.
Elise stood next to Mencheres. The two of them were outside by the car, close enough that they could quickly reach Blake if Xaphan took him over but far enough away that Blake couldn’t hear what she was saying.
“You told me when you first found me in the river, I didn’t have a heartbeat,” Elise said in a rush. “For all intents and purposes, I was dead, but the river was so cold that day, it gave me hypothermia. My body slowed down to clinical death, but when you pulled me out of the river, you warmed me, gave me your blood, and brought me back. If we induce severe hypothermia with Blake, his heart will stop, as will his breathing. He’ll be dead enough to force Xaphan out onto the salt flats. Then, once the demon is gone, we’ll bring Blake back. It’s a long shot, but it could work.”
Elise desperately wanted Mencheres to agree. But he’d had so much more experience with demons than she did; maybe there was something she was overlooking. What if it took too long from when Xaphan was expelled from Blake’s body until his essence was destroyed? How many minutes could Blake be dead before there was no pulling him back from it?
“Come with me,” Mencheres said.
He led her around to the side of the van. Elise’s heart sank. Was Mencheres taking her out of Blake’s eyesight to tell her that this couldn’t be done? Did he want to give her privacy while she broke into tears when he delivered that hammer of a verdict?
Mencheres opened the back of the van. Inside it was an oblong container several feet long, with various medical devices she didn’t recognize stacked around it. But the generators and portable defibrillator she knew at a glance, and there was only one reason they’d be there.
“You knew,” she whispered. “You knew all long that there was a chance Blake could be saved this way. Why didn’t you tell me?”