Authors: Garon Whited
Neither had keys. Not one. I even checked their shoes. After stripping them in the bathroom, I found another thing; they both bore a tattoo on their backs, a sort of stylized mace with streams of light radiating from the fist-like head. It matched the thing Joe Priest had waved at me.
I’d never seen it before.
Travis gave me a look when I started cutting clothes off the bodies. I shrugged. I’m no pervert. Well, not that kind, anyway. But when I’m dealing with people who are trying to kill me I get downright irked. I got thorough. If I’d really thought it might lend me a clue, I’d have gutted them in the bathtub and checked the contents of their stomachs before washing the mess down the drain. I would probably have thrown up a couple of times, too; this is one of the reasons I didn’t feel it worthwhile to check on their most recent meal.
Anyway.
I’d never seen the design before, and I’ve seen a lot of religious artwork. So I felt that this was important. I got the digital camera and took a couple of photos, then printed the best of them. I’d look it up later.
“So what do we do with the bodies?” Travis asked.
“I’ll deal with them; leave them in the tub for now. Want to help me clean the kitchen?”
“Okay.”
We did that, and I felt sunset starting just as we were finishing. “Excuse me.”
I went and hid in a closet, wishing I could take a shower afterward. Icky. When it was over, I came back out. Travis applauded. I eyed him, suspecting a joke at my expense.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“You finally came out of the closet.”
Arrrrgh. But he
is
my friend.
“I may go back in. There’s a lot of prejudice, it seems.”
“So I’ve noticed. Even your friends get beat up.”
“Let’s deal with the bod—” I began, opening the bathroom door, and staggered back. It was like a blazing wave of hatred, pushing on me with physical force. I braced, recovered my balance, stood there, and endured it. I kept one arm up to shield my face from the blinding glare. It was like trying to stare down a semi on a dark highway. I felt a decided need to get
away.
“What is it?” Travis asked.
“I’m not sure. I… I think it’s the bodies. They’re… I don’t know. I don’t think I can touch them.”
“You’re serious?” he asked. I realized he couldn’t see anything wrong.
“I’m very serious.” I managed to shut the door and the feeling cut off immediately. Whew.
“So there’s something paranormal or supernatural or something?” he asked.
“You didn’t see a blinding light?”
“What light?”
“The bodies. They were glowing like searchlights.”
“Not to me. They didn’t bother you before,” he observed. “Why now?”
“Because the sun went down. Oh, wait… no, you haven’t been brought up to speed. Come on. Let’s sit down; I have to tell you a lot of things about daybloods and nightwalkers…”
So I told him what I’d found out about vampire ecology and reproduction—in general terms—and the basics on the care and feeding of a bloodsucker. That took a while. He ate while I was talking and asked a lot of questions while I made mental notes for future research.
“What
I
want to know is what they wanted with you—and how they knew to interrogate you.”
Travis looked sheepish.
“Oh, no,” I said, pretending to be grief-stricken. “What did you do?”
“Well… I was curious about your lab results, so I did a comparison search through the hospital network.”
“And?”
“There aren’t a lot of people with similar clinical results. Maybe two dozen in the last ten years in hospitals nationwide.”
“Really? Maybe they’re daybloods, too.”
“Or used to be. All of them also had a ‘cause of death’ listed somewhere in the file.”
“Arrrgh.”
“Yeah.”
“So you think these yahoos might have been working for someone who could flag the database for queries?”
“That seems reasonable. Your name wasn’t on the lab tests; mine was.”
“And when they came over and grabbed you—”
“They realized I wasn’t the guy they were looking for.”
I nodded. “That makes sense. So what did they want to know?”
“‘Who was the patient?’,” he said, mocking someone’s voice. “They kept asking that; I felt like they were going to start calling me ‘Kenneth’ and quiz me about the frequency next. I told them I didn’t remember the patient’s name—‘We see bunches. They’re all just a collection of symptoms to me.’ But I did ‘remember’ he was a football player for the university, and I did a good job of describing Mulligan.”
“The senior, the fullback on the football team?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, that could be entertaining. Isn’t he the one who’s been taking tae kwon do since he was eight?”
“That’s why I thought of him.”
“Pity they didn’t go looking for him. Any idea why they stayed here?”
“One of them suggested that my ‘master’ would be back to check on me. They decided to set an ambush instead of going hunting.”
“Sounds like a good plan, at least in general.” I glanced at the bathroom door. “Or usually.”
“So what do we do now? I can’t have a pair of bodies in my bathtub indefinitely.”
I thought for a minute.
“Okay, I’m going to go get some body bags. You’ll have to stuff ’em, though. Whatever it is that’s giving me the quivering nasties seems to stop when there’s something in the way; with luck the body bag will count for something. Then I can get rid of them.”
“You’re the vampire; you know your business.”
“Be back in a minute.”
So I popped down to the SUV and grabbed a couple of bags. Travis loaded them up and I found that once they were zippered in, everything was fine. If I can’t see them—or if they can’t see me?—then it seems to be all right.
As I hefted one to each shoulder, Travis shook his head.
“It doesn’t seem fair, you know?”
“What?”
“All the powers of a dark lord of evil and the night, and you still get to go out during the day. Any chance I can talk you into handing me immortality?”
“Maybe later, sure. I think I better get the hang of this first; there could be downsides we don’t understand. You’ve still got that neuropsych investigation to do, and there are people who don’t want immortals wandering around.”
“Fair enough. What are you going to do with the bodies?”
“You know where the chute is for the hospital incinerator?”
“The medical waste disposal? Sure, but—“
“—it’s too public a place and it’s locked, right?”
“Right.”
“Trust me.”
“I guess I have to.”
I loaded the bodies up and headed back inside.
“I remembered something.”
“What?”
I wrote a note:
Dear Travis,
Thanks for all you help with the lab work. Please don’t say anything about the results—just lose them. I’m going on extended leave of absence to talk to a private practice doctor who specializes in these sorts of things. Brazil is lovely, I’m told. If you don’t hear from me, you’ll know I didn’t pull through.
Regards,
—
E.
“Leave this on your desk, like you read it already. Next time someone tosses your house or roughs you up, you’ll have an excuse to plead ignorant.”
“Good plan. It should save me from a matching black eye. But I want to ask a favor.”
“Anything I can.”
“If you find out who’s responsible for this invasion of my home…”
“Yes?”
“Let me take a swing at him first, would you?’
“I’ll do my best.”
The hospital incinerator is a nasty piece of work. It’s designed to take a whole garbage bag down the chute at a time and kill anything that might be living on the remains of disposable medical equipment. But, with a garbage cart, a ball cap, and a set of scrubs, anybody could do what I did. I just loaded the meat in a garbage wagon, pushed it down the hall and around a couple corners to the incinerator. I checked for anyone around and then forced the lock. It
pinged
like a hot engine as it broke.
I dumped the bodies first; then I finished dumping the rest of the garbage.
THURSDAY, JUNE 16
TH
I
made it home without incident. Sasha was up and waiting for me; she met me at the door, kissed me a welcome home, and handed me a nice, hot drink.
I was thirsty, actually. I slugged it down quickly and she refilled it.
“You will be very thirsty for the first week or so; there are some adjustments that still need to take place, and your full powers are not yet achieved. You grow most rapidly in power the first few days, then more slowly as you age. But you will never stop.”
“So the older I get, the more powerful I become?”
“Yes.”
“There are perks to being old. Good to know. What is this, anyway? It isn’t human.”
“Beef.”
“Ah. That’s right, you own a slaughterhouse, yes?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. You do.”
I choked as I drank and tried not to waste any of it. Admitted, I don’t need to breathe, but it isn’t good to try and exclaim loudly while swallowing any fluid, breathing or no. Besides, I didn’t want to get blood on my shirt.
“
I
do?”
“Of course, my lord.”
I thought about that.
“Should I ask what else I own?”
“Not unless you really want me to read you a big list of properties.”
“Um. No. Thanks, anyway.”
“Does this disturb you, my lord?” she asked, taking my arm and squeezing it.
“It’s just… sudden. Here we have centuries of time, and you’re moving awfully fast.”
Her eyes were dark and solemn. “I know how short time can be.”
I could have argued with that; I don’t feel time is short. I’ve just become immortal, after all. But I’m not the one with a couple of centuries of experience. Ask me again in a hundred years and I might feel differently.
Especially with people trying to kill me.
“All right. That brings me to another question. Are there people who actively hunt us?”
“Yes,” she answered. “There are more than just a single organization, as well as the occasional random person out for our blood—for whatever reason.”
“Tell me about them, please.”
So she did. There are three main groups:
The first and most dangerous calls themselves the Fist of God. For the smiting, apparently. They are the best organized, best funded, are extremely motivated, and apparently have Someone or Something on their side. It’s disturbing to be burned by a naked human hand. I guess the two who recently made Travis’ life so difficult were part of this outfit.
The second is the Blades of Night. They don’t have a holy war, they just don’t like the idea that humans aren’t the top of the food chain. Also motivated, but not too organized or well-funded. Something like a human-supremacist group composed mainly of superstitious survivalist types—to describe by drawing on stereotypes, anyway. They seem to favor the old-fashioned method: drive a stake through the heart, cut off the head, burn the remains. While the whole process isn’t necessary to killing a vampire for good, they either don’t know that or don’t care. Then again, there are other kinds—species?—of vampires; maybe all that
is
necessary for one or more of them. I don’t know enough.
The third “organization,” if it can be called that, is more of a bunch of librarians trading vampire stories. They aren’t interested in actually
killing
anyone—other than in self-defense—but are intensely interested in cataloguing the species and activities of
Homo Sapiens Sanguineous
. If anyone would know about the various subspecies, it’d be these people. I wonder if they’d be willing to have a polite talk?
Of course, there’s always some poor soul who has lost a loved one or who likewise has an axe to grind—the independents. Some join up with the first two organizations, but most just have a nice, quiet obsession… when they don’t have a padded cell, somewhere.
When she finished her explanation, I pulled out the pictures I’d taken and showed them to her. She stared with a look of mixed horror and fascination.
“Where did you get these?”
“I took the pictures this evening, shortly before sundown. There were two of them and they were not nice to me.” I decided to leave Travis out of it; somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking that if vampires existed, they wouldn’t want normal people knowing they did. And since vampires manifestly
do
exist… the fewer people that knew Travis knew…
“Where are they now?” Sasha asked, looking at me sharply.
“I would guess they’re where every martyr longs to be. Whatever heaven they picked.”
“And the bodies?”
“Charcoal, by now. Maybe ashes.”
“Any witnesses?”
“God. Maybe some angels. A couple of new ghosts. Me. That about covers it.”
She hugged me hard, then. “Good! You did wonderfully!
“This is the symbol for the Fist,” she confirmed, releasing me to take the picture and trace the symbol. “See how the sunburst around the head of the mace is shaped so…”
“Yes, it does look sort of like a fist of light, now you mention it.”
“It is well that you faced them during the day. Much of their power lies in their faith, and cannot harm you in daylight.”
“I found that out. Unfortunately, they like weapons, too. The thing I don’t understand is why it matters whether it’s day or night. That, and why the bodies became impossible to handle,” I added. I explained about the sudden glare from them.
“They are field agents,” Sasha said. “They are consecrated before a mission. At least, I think that is the reason; it fits the facts. Why they cannot harm you with that power in the day—I believe it is because we are more human than undead. Their power afflicts the magical portion of our beings, and that is dormant, unreachable, except at night. But, oh, at night! I do know that touching them will hurt; it is as though their very skin were acid. You dare not feed from them—with fangs or otherwise. They are
protected.
”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks.”
“Good.” She took my hand and gazed keenly into my eyes. “They are dangerous, my lord; very dangerous. They have powers mortal men should not have. They do things that no mortal can do.”
I considered that. Maybe the easy victory over two nasty men had me heady and overconfident. Maybe I was just still reeling with the shock of being something other than human. Had I adjusted? Or was I repressing everything and just going with the flow, not thinking? Or was Travis right and I was going a little bit insane from rapid changes to my neurochemistry?
Whatever the reason, I said, “I’m not a mortal man, either.”
She hugged me hard. I was glad I wasn’t mortal or I would’ve had fractured ribs.
I spent the rest of the day reading in the library. There were a lot of notes this guy had taken. Moreover, it was a treasure-trove of magical information, written in a cookbook fashion. It fascinated me and made me want to twist my mind like a bright ribbon of power and hang words in letters of fire on it.
I did, however, manage to pry myself out of the house for a while. It took the techno-geek portion of my nature to do it. It started when I asked Sasha where the computer was. She looked puzzled.
“Why do you think I have one? I don’t understand the things.”
“No computer?” I asked, aghast.
“No.”
“But how do you get email?”
“Email?” She cocked her head to the side, regarding me. “I don’t. If someone needs me, they call me or my answering service. Sometimes I receive letters.”
“You don’t even have an Internet connection?’
“What for?”
“To get online.”
“Why would I?”
I thought about that for a second. The idea was… well, alien.
Not
get online?
Not
surf the web?
“Well,” I said, “you haven’t seen an internet shopping site, that’s certain. I’ll have to bring my computer over and a dialup modem. You’ll like it.”
“If you think so, I will await it most avidly.”
So I went back to my place—I couldn’t think of it as “home” anymore—and I loaded up a lot more stuff. I resolved to get DSL or cable out there as quickly as possible; dialup connections are so slow! I did pause to do some surfing and preliminary shopping first.
I showed Sasha the Internet. Search engines, shopping channels… and a lot of other things. She became fascinated with it in short order. We found the local ISP’s and discovered we were way outside DSL range, but cable was available. Online ordering made that a snap, and with a bit of extra cash fronted up, installation could be tomorrow. We went for it. I pointed out a few other things I would like, if she would be so kind as to order them; she agreed readily, and did so. I kissed her and left her to play. She played.
Is it studying when it’s fun? I wonder. Studying implies work, and I’ve always hated the thought that acquiring knowledge has to be a laborious, tedious process. I always tried to make classes
interesting
for the students. We tend to forget things that are unpleasant, but cling to the memories of things we find enjoyable. So if there is a way to make all learning fun, we learn faster and better. At least, that’s my theory.
Magic was something I
liked
. Studying a spell and trying it out tickled me more than playing with kittens. It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to walk into a room and watch the candles all flare to life at once—or all go out. But I also like melodrama, so maybe that’s just me.
It was late when Sasha came into the library.
“The Internet is an evil thing,” she said, without preamble.
I looked up, blinking. That’s when I noticed it was pitch black, or, rather, monochrome. I had forgotten to turn on the lights. The library has no windows, so sunset was merely an inconvenient interruption, quickly forgotten.
Sasha had blisters along her right arm.
“What happened?” I asked, rising and approaching, abandoning an essay titled
Sacrificial Efficiency.
“I was so wrapped up in ‘surfing,’ as you put it, I did not pay attention to the time… and the phone we disconnected is near the western windows.”
“I’m so sorry!” I replied, moving forward and holding her. “Is it bad?”
“No, I got away quickly. My mouse-wielding arm got the worst of it. But take me out this evening, please. I feel I need a drink.”
“Done.”
And I did. I made it a point to get her that drink from the kitchen stores, first; I didn’t like the idea of vampire-hunting lunatics wielding their own brand of power finding us at less than peak fitness.
I learned something. Sasha took a mouthful of blood from the bottle, spit it into her hand, and rubbed it over her blistered skin. The skin seemed to suck it up like thirsty earth drinking rain. Where the blood sank in, the skin was whole. She smeared blood up and down her arm until every trace of the burn was gone.
“It’s not good for deep burns,” she said, “but it has a wonderful cosmetic effect.” Then she swigged from the bottle and gulped the rest down.
We went to a club and enjoyed another buffet. Life pulsed in tiny bits through the dark webwork we wove, in time to the heavy thud of the woofers. The place—
The Fire Gate
—was a loud, flashing, chaotic place, with a flame motif and lots of flickering neon. I would’ve hated it a week ago; now I enjoyed the stimulation it gave my senses.
By the time we got home, we were both effectively drunk. It’s not really intoxication, as such, but it’s definitely a feeling of euphoria. Imagine how it would feel to combine that floating, dreaming feeling after a powerful orgasm with the replete fulfillment of an excellent meal. Now add a feeling of boundless energy and optimism, along with a mild hyperactivity. Now double it. That’s close.
The blood is physically pleasurable, a thousand times better than rare beef to a starving man. It fuels the body of a vampire to do things—it grants physical strength and speed, durability, stamina, regeneration, the works. The spirits we tapped, however, fed our life essences, our souls, if you will. While Sasha could not truly use that energy for anything aside from a stockpile against her next feeding time, I had the capacity to take that power and use it to work magic. When I expended energy, it hastened the next time I would need to feed on life.
We were well-fed on blood and spirit.
We were also moving a bit too rapidly for normal humans, that’s certain. I dropped my keys while unlocking the front door; Sasha caught them before I could—they never had a prayer of reaching the ground. She dangled them in front of me, teasing, and I tried to snatch them. She laughed and hid them behind her, smiling at me.