And despite all his efforts to resist, Cade shuddered with pleasure as he drank.
JOHNSON RETURNED SIX DAYS LATER.
Cade watched him enter. He was stronger now. The soldiers had forced buckets of pig’s blood into him. Until two days ago, when he learned he didn’t need to breathe anymore. They couldn’t choke him, so he didn’t have to swallow. Still, he’d already fed, whether he wanted to or not, and the change was working in him.
Johnson apparently wanted him presentable. With their bayonets fixed at his throat, the soldiers had watched Cade while the garrison’s barber groomed him. It didn’t take much effort. The hair sloughed off almost by itself His hair came back, but his beard had not regrown since. The soldiers washed him by dumping buckets of icy water over and over until the last of the blood and grime was gone. Then they tossed him a freshly laundered prison uniform and watched him dress at gunpoint. He noticed something: aside from the aroma of soap, he had no scent. His body had stopped sweating—nothing was left to interfere with his ability to sniff out prey.
After that, he began to hear the other prisoners in their cells, despite the stone walls.
This morning, the soldiers couldn’t hold him down. He shook them off like fleas. The last scab flaked off his chest where the bullet holes had healed, revealing fresh, unmarked skin.
Cade figured that in another day, two at most, he could pull the chains out of the wall. If he wanted, he could feed on the soldiers when they came.
But he wouldn’t. The fact that he even considered it told him what course of action he had to take. He would do the only sane thing: he’d end his own life.
He was considering how he’d accomplish this when the door opened.
Johnson was not alone. In addition to the blue-uniformed guards, he had a Negro woman with him.
No, not Negro, Cade realized. Mixed race. Her eyes were almond-shaped, her skin the color of dark gold. She carried a cloth bag and wore a headscarf, both dyed in bright colors that shone in the murk of the cell.
Two things struck Cade: he couldn’t tell how old she was. She could have been anywhere from twenty to fifty years old.
And she didn’t look the slightest bit afraid of him.
Cade inhaled, and could name each soldier by his odor. He smelled Johnson’s hangover like a cloud around the president’s head.
The woman smelled like nothing he could name. Some exotic flowers, perhaps. Or a kind of spice he’d never tasted.
“He’s just a boy,” she said. Cade knew she meant him.
“He was a boy,” Johnson corrected her. “Now he’s something other.”
Cade tried to ignore this, as he had the soldiers’ insults and the sounds beyond his own walls. But he was intrigued. He looked at Johnson.
“Cade, this is the Widow Paris, Mme. Marie Laveau of New Orleans. I had to go to some expense to bring her to you.”
The woman—Laveau—had not taken her eyes off Cade yet.
“You’re certain your Negro hoodoo will be able to do this?” Johnson asked her.
“It’s called
vodou
, Mr. President, and I am Creole,” she said, something of a schoolmarm in her tone. “It will work.”
Johnson nodded and handed her a piece of paper. “These are the words. Exactly these, do you understand?”
She nodded.
“You can read, correct?”
She gave him a withering look.
Johnson looked away, almost sheepish.
“You brought it?” Laveau asked him.
Johnson nodded. “It’s never left my side. Though I still don’t see why you need this.”
“There is a great deal you don’t see, Mr. President. Please.”
She held out her hand.
Johnson reached into his waistcoat and came out with the handkerchief, still wrapped around the bullet that killed Lincoln.
“As you asked,” Johnson said. “Just as it came out of his skull.”
Mme. Laveau took the bullet and held it in her palm. She turned away from the president and his guards.
“You need to leave,” she said. “All of you.”
“Impossible,” Johnson said. “We don’t know what he will do—”
“I do,” she said. “Go.”
Johnson hesitated and then nodded to the soldiers.
“Very well, then.”
They left the cell, and Cade was alone with Mme. Laveau.
She set her bag on the ground and began taking things from it. A small leather pouch. Some bones, and plants. And then, finally, a long knife.
“Do it,” Cade said.
She looked at him, a question on her face.
“Use the knife. You can end this.”
“That’s not why I’m here,” she said. She was starting a very small fire, lighting the green plants so they smoked on the floor of the cell.
“But you could,” Cade insisted. He tried to keep his voice even. “Please.”
Before he could say anything else, she had the knife in her hand and pointed at his throat. She had covered the distance between them too quickly for even Cade, with his new senses, to see.
Cade flinched back involuntarily.
“Do you really want to die?” she asked.
Suddenly the question was no longer a far-off possibility. It was right there, at the point of the blade.
“Yes,” Cade said, after hesitating a moment.
“You a Christian, child?” she asked.
He nodded. Carefully. The knife hadn’t moved.
“What makes you think God wants a thing like you?”
That stopped Cade. He hadn’t considered that. But it made sense. There was no place in Heaven for what he had become. His soul was damned. It had to be.
“You still want to die?” she asked.
This time, Cade couldn’t open his mouth. Still, there was only one answer. Even if he was condemning himself to Hell, he could not go on. Not like this.
He nodded.
Mme. Laveau looked disappointed. “You are a coward, then.”
Some remnant of pride surfaced in Cade. “I am not a coward.”
“It’s easier to die than fight,” she said. “There is much good you could do, even now.”
“I’m damned,” Cade said. “You just said—”
“Yes, you are damned. There is no chance of redemption for you. You are a vampire, and you drank the blood of an innocent. You are an abomination before God.”
“Then what hope is there for me?”
“For you? None,” she said. “But you can still do good in this world.
This man, your president, will ask you to fight. You are lost to the darkness, but you can still save others from it.”
“What do you mean?”
Mme. Laveau sat back. “I could use the
bokor
paste, and make you a slave. That’s what he wants.” She nodded back at the door Johnson had exited. “But without free will—without your mind, your spirit—you would be little more than a club, and you would fail at any job that required more than simple battering. I don’t think this world can afford that. You have to be better than that.”
She paused, an odd look on her face. “Besides,” she added, “I find the idea of slavery ... distasteful.”
Cade got the idea they were bargaining, but he didn’t know what for.
“There is another way,” she said. “The
gris-gris.
It ties into you, becomes part of you. But then, the magic is only as strong as the thing it’s tied to.”
She pointed. While they were talking, she had put the leather pouch, open, on the floor between them. The herbs were like a nest for the bullet that had killed President Lincoln. It sat there, still crusted with his blood.
Cade looked at her, curiosity overcoming his fear for the first time in days. “What do you want?” he asked.
“I need to know how strong you are.”
Cade didn’t know what to say. To live like this, with no chance of redemption ... he didn’t know if he could take it.
“You don’t know what this is like,” Cade said. “This hunger, this thirst ...”
“Is it stronger than your faith?”
Cade had always believed. Always. He learned to read from the family Bible. He knew that this world didn’t matter, not the poverty, or the work, or the pain. It was a test on the path to salvation.
But it was easy for that boy. Those tests were nothing, that pain barely registered. That boy hadn’t been turned into this thing. He hadn’t fed on the blood of his friends.
That boy was dead. Cade was all that was left. But he wouldn’t turn his back on everything he was. He refused.
In the end, there was only one answer.
“No,” he said. “It’s not.”
She looked into his eyes—seemed to look even deeper than that—and took something from the folds of her dress.
Cade looked at it, and winced. It was a small, rough cross of some base metal, covered in silver.
It felt like needles in his skin, in his eyes.
She placed it in his hand. Agony shot through his fingers.
But he didn’t drop it.
She nodded, as if he’d passed some test.
She struck a wooden match on the stone floor and lit the herbs.
Then she slashed quickly with the knife.
It stung, but the pain of the cross drowned it out. He saw that she had sliced deeply into his cheek and cut a chunk of his hair out in one stroke.
His blood pooled in the leather pouch, right where she had placed it.
It hissed as it extinguished the burning herbs. Then his blood covered the assassin’s bullet, briefly turning the brown crust fresh and red.
Mme. Laveau took his hair and knotted it, expertly, into a tiny doll—arms, legs and head, like a straw man. Then she waved it through the smoldering herbs, chanting some language Cade didn’t understand.
When she looked back at him, her eyes were glassy, and she dragged the hair-doll through his cut—wiping up his blood, soaking it into the hair.
He noticed that the cell had seemed to shrink, down to just the two of them. The air thickened with smoke, and something else, something unnamable. It felt as if there were another world, crowding in around the edges of his vision, trying to get his attention.
She spoke in a voice that wasn’t quite her own, without looking at the paper Johnson had given her, but just holding it:
“By this blood, you are bound, ” she
intoned
. “To the President of the United States; and to the orders of the officers appointed by him; to support and defend the nation and its citizens against all enemies, foreign and domestic; and to serve it faithfully for all the days you walk the Earth. ”
More of the strange language, then the hair-doll was used to crush out the smoldering embers of the herbs. She gathered the bloody, sooty doll into the leather pouch, along with the bullet, and cinched it tightly shut.
Cade could feel the cut on his cheek healing already. And he felt something else. Like a new spine, growing down his back. A certainty that had not been there before. He knew what he had to do. He knew what his unnatural life was for, now: to protect and to serve.
The smoke dissipated and the cell seemed to snap back to its normal size.
Mme. Laveau rose and gathered her things, as matter-of-fact as a woman picking up her knitting.
He still had the cross in his hand. It still hurt. But the pain helped him focus. Helped him see clearly. It gave him something other than the thirst.
“What did you do?” he asked, not sure he wanted to know.
“About your hunger? Nothing,” she told him. “You will have many chances to take human blood, if you want. Your president will give you that. But the choice is always yours.”
She leaned down again, took the cross gently from his hand. The pain stopped, but Cade found he wanted it back.
She took a length of cord and looped it through a ring on the cross, then tied it around his neck.
She held his gaze for a long moment.
“You are bound to this man now, and all the ones who will follow him. You will fight the dark forces. You will have to fight.
“But you are not a slave,” she said, holding his hands in her own. “Remember that: no man is a slave.”
She stood quickly and picked up her bag. The leather pouch was in her other hand.
She knocked on the door, and Johnson and a soldier reappeared as it opened.
“It’s done,” she said, and gave the pouch to Johnson. “You may remove those chains.”
“You’re certain?” Johnson asked.
She gave him the same scowl as before. Johnson gestured to the soldiers to unlock Cade.
Mme. Laveau looked at Cade one last time before she walked out the door. Her eyes were full of pity.
“I can see your road, child,” she said. “It is not easy. You might have been better off dead.”
SIX
There is no known physiological reason for the pain Cade experiences when exposed to the sight or touch of a cross, or other religious paraphernalia. While there are no lasting effects, a cross can be enough to keep a vampire at bay.
It appears that prolonged and repeated exposure can build a resistance, or at least, an accommodation with this pain. Unlike other vampires, our subject wears a cross around his neck. (He claims the pain helps him focus on beating his thirst for human blood.) Some in the research group have suggested that the pain is psychosomatic, an abreaction to the vampire’s disgust and self-loathing at his or her transformation. However, this does not explain why religious symbols affect all vampires more or less equally, without regard for the individual’s religious background.
—BRIEFING BOOK: CODENAME: NIGHTMARE PET
Z
ach sipped his coffee and grimaced. It was awful. The only stuff he’d ever had that was worse had been in the mess of an aircraft carrier, during a visit with the president. But a single cup kept him awake for twenty hours.