Voice of the Blood

by Jemiah Jefferson

  Daniel looked at Lovely. "It's not helping," he said.

  "What? But you're—you're—"

  "I can't," Daniel cut him off. "I'm still not me. I can't see into your head… or hers… and I can't smell… and I can't see… and I'm as weak as a baby."

  "You look fine to me," Lovely bit out impatiently.

  "Bullshit. If someone took your eyesight, you'd look fine to them, but you'd feel like shit, wouldn't you? My senses. They aren't my own. I'm not me!"

  "Maybe you're not meant to be! Can't you just deal? Look at Ariane. She's fucked up. Look what she did for you!"

  " 'Just deal'? Are you out of your mind?"

  "Shut up, " I snarled. "Shut up shut up shut up! Daniel, get him out of here. Now, before I kill him."

  They left. They left me alone. I heard them going out the door and Dolores starting her massive engine. Maybe they were leaving me to die. There was shit I could do about it, in my state. I couldn't hear anything after a while, only the weak pulse in my ears, every second or so, then slower. I rolled to and fro on the floor, then slid on my side to the closet, where I touched my tongue in vain to the dried spot on the floor. It didn't give me much.

  I spent an eternity there.

  "Ariane… here… lift your head…"

  Something against my lips—the smell overwhelmed me and I was nearly sick, but it was going into my mouth and I gulped at it desperately, hoping it was the right thing. It was. My mouth came alive and I was a swallowing machine, efficient as a parasite.

  I sprung up and opened my eyes.

  Lovely held an empty Big Gulp cup, stained to the brim with blood. He looked as startled as I felt. "Got damn," he said. "You drank that in, like, half a second."

  "Where did you get that?"

  Daniel stood behind him, in the doorway. I guess he'd had time to get dressed while I was writhing on the floor; he looked almost like his normal self, just without his brilliant aura and without his devastating force of personality. "I always hated that dog," he said with a smile.

  "That was dog blood?"

  "Well, it's eleven o'clock in the morning, what was I gonna do? It worked, didn't it?"

  I shivered. "Oh, God, gross… and I could still use some more."

  "It'll have to do for now. I really think it's time we got out of here."

  "And go where?"

  Daniel rubbed his palms against the legs of his jeans. When he looked at me again, he looked old and strung out. "I need help," he sighed. "The best thing for me, and it might be the only thing for me, is to go back to my source."

  "What source?" I looked at him in confusion, and he hung his head. "You can't mean—"

  "It won't take us long to get to San Francisco. I've got enough money."

  I laughed out loud. "You're even stupider than I thought if you think that Orfeo Ricari is going to bail you out of this. He can't even say your name. What makes you think he'd do it for you?"

  "He won't do it for me," Daniel said. "But he'd do it for you."

  I looked at Lovely, as if he could explain this descent into madness. "Did you put him up to this?"

  Lovely shrugged, and Daniel broke in again. "No, I know what I'm doing here. Risa told me about it. She lost a lot of blood once, a long time ago, and she never got better until she drank blood from Alex again. She even tried others—me, for example. It made her stronger, but she was never able to take care of herself until she drank from the one who made her. I can't even hunt, I can't feed myself. If the dog hadn't been chained up, we'd have never—"

  "No. Don't tell me. This is insane."

  "He can help you too," Daniel said. "There's really nothing else to do. I don't like it any more than you. We have to get out of L.A. anyway. Too many people know about me here. I'm in danger. You're in danger."

  The dog's blood was wearing off already. I wanted to sleep, to escape this wretched cycle. I was hungry for food, for water, not this… this substance. I was slipping into denial, too tired and wound up to protest the idea of returning to San Francisco. "I need to sleep," I sighed, closing my eyes.

  "Let's sleep," Daniel conceded. "Tonight we'll fly to S.F., and the next night we'll go somewhere else."

  I closed my eyes. Always we. I didn't want to go wherever he was going. The honeymoon, as far as I was concerned, was over. Ricari would hate me for even going along with this scheme, and there was no way I could face San Francisco after all this. If I were even seen there, all hell would break loose. All I wanted right now was to go to sleep.

  "I'll stay up and watch," Lovely said.

  Daniel and I, clothed, lay down together on the futon in the front room, the drawn curtains making it as dark as midnight, and with our backs turned to one another, we both slipped away.

  * * *

  Chapter Fourteen

  In the darkness someone was shaking me. I opened my eyes to Lovely's haggard, pale, sleepless face. "Get up, hurry," he begged. "Your flight's in two and a half hours and we have to get all the way to LAX and the traffic is a nightmare!"

  I was awake at once. Daniel handed me one of his leather jackets. He looked like hell—it was beginning to wear on him, as if the loss of his supernatural powers was sapping his will to live. "C'mon, Ariane," he said wearily. "I woke up a couple of hours ago, but I couldn't wake you up. You sleep like the dead."

  I wasn't given time to dwell on this little crack; we piled into the Caddy and Lovely tore away down the road. Daniel put in a tape, then turned to look at me sulking in the backseat. "Don't be angry," he said mildly.

  "Don't be angry? How can you possibly say that? You've ruined my life, Daniel Blum, and I'm not supposed to be angry?"

  "I didn't do anything you didn't want me to do," he replied. He sipped from a silver flask. "Granted, I made a mistake, but I was trying to correct an earlier mistake."

  "With your other ventures?"

  "I gave them too little. It's not as easy as it looks, Ariane. The balance is very delicate. Give them too little, and it kills them, or it makes them crazy, destroys their brains. Give them too much, and you yourself… you lose."

  I shook my head. "I can't believe how right Ricari was about everything," I said bitterly. "About you, about me… everything."

  He rolled his eyes. "Perhaps I'll be right for once," he said with a sigh. "And if I'm not, then great, I'm dead, and you can get on with your wonderful life which I so callously ruined."

  "What did I do to deserve you!" I moaned.

  "Will you two quit bitching?" Lovely snapped. "Just move on."

  We were all silent for a while, listening to the moody tones of Bowie's Lodger. "Ever been to San Francisco before?" Daniel asked Lovely.

  "Nope," Lovely said. "I flipped a coin between it and L.A. L.A. won. Plus, it was cheaper to get here."

  "You'll like S.F.," Daniel said.

  Lovely shrugged. "Wherever you're at, is fine with me," he said.

  I put my head against the armrest. So if we divide in S.F., I lose Lovely, I thought morosely. Do I have to be shackled to Daniel for the rest of Lovely's life? Do I have to wait patiently while Daniel louses up another transformation? Then it occurred to me that the rest of Lovely's life was only three years, if Daniel was to hold true to his vow to take his life on his twenty-first birthday. This did not cheer me, but it limited my travels with Daniel to only three years, which, I figured, if I was going to live to be three hundred years old, wouldn't be so bad. What a great deal.

  Daniel was talking some more. "I wasn't there for very long, and it was a long time ago," he said, handing the flask to Lovely. "It's very nice if you like fog. I rather like fog myself. I miss it. It was foggy a lot in Berlin. I miss Berlin. Should we go back to Berlin? Ariane, what do you think?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  He didn't seem to be really addressing me, or listening to me. "We should get on the freeway soon," he mentioned.

  "I'm getting there." Lovely paused to sing along. "Red sails! Chain reaction…"

  "I hate t
his song," I muttered.

  "It's a great song! What would you rather hear?"

  "I don't care," I said. "I'm hungry. I can't think."

  Lovely reached behind him, searching for a tape amongst the heap on the backseat next to me. I closed my eyes and leaned back into the squeaky surface of the red vinyl, wishing the whole thing was over with.

  "Shi—"

  A jolt roused me, and before I could do anything but begin my fall forward into the space between front and back seats, another turmoil of G-forces lifted me off my seat into the air and then flung me back against the vinyl. I hit my head on the armrest and lay there, dazed, feeling a knot rising on my forehead, right between the eyes. "What the—"

  Daniel began thrashing in the front seat ahead of me, tearing madly at the upholstery, wrenching at the door handle. It came undone and he fell out of the car, onto the road. Everything was very quiet except for the sound of my own breathing. Daniel's face appeared at the window above me, sideways. His mouth formed the phonemes of my name, but I didn't hear them at first. He opened the car door on my side. His face was a mess of blood, and he was digging a cube of safety glass out of the hollow just under his eye. "Ariane, get out of the car. Please get out of the car."

  I spilled onto the pavement. I couldn't stand for a moment, but he held out his hand and helped me up. "What happened?" I murmured vaguely. I looked back at the car.

  There was another car attached to our rear bumper, and the front left corner of Dolores had become an accordioned chunk of black and silver and rusty metal, half on the sidewalk. Gasoline and antifreeze ran down the road and pooled in the gutter. In a second, gleaming red joined the stream, and together they formed a swirling rainbow at my feet.

  "He's gone," Daniel breathed. "Oh, God, he's gone."

  I looked closer, my stomach in a shaking knot. I saw Lovely's white shoulder, streaked with blood, his black tank top absorbing it. Above that, I saw nothing. The strut of the front window had gone quite through his neck, pulling his head to the left, where, I assumed, it was partially out the side window. His fingers still moved feebly against the steering wheel, crushed against his chest.

  I put my back to it. "This is bad," I said. I almost laughed.

  "We have to go," Daniel said softly. "We can't be late. Especially not now."

  "We can't leave him," I said. My voice was flat and distant, a desert voice.

  "He's gone," Daniel shook his head. He grimaced as a tear stung the wound under his eye. "That's a corpse. That's not Lovely. We have to go, Ariane."

  "No," I said, letting him lead me away, into the road.

  The old woman driving the car behind us slumped against her dashboard, dead or unconscious. The driver of the car who had hit us head-on cried out for someone to help him, his legs were trapped. "I'm gonna bleed to fucking death!" he yelled. Another man was trying to pry his door open without success; people were gathering on the street, standing around, gaping. At least no one was taking pictures. Yet. We did have to get out of there.

  "Stop a taxi," Daniel said, wiping his face with a twisted hand. "Stop a taxi. You can do it. There's one coming right now. Just make him stop."

  I stood in the center of oncoming traffic and held up my hand. A yellow cab screeched to a halt a inch away from me, so close I could feel the heat of the engine. "What the hell are you doing?" the cabbie screamed out the window. "I could have run you right over! Are you high or something?"

  I stared at him and spoke with a voice that didn't feel like it was coming from my own throat. "Take us to the airport."

  Daniel stared at him also.

  The strangest feeling, this. I could almost see the chain between us, locked to his mind, the other end held in my hand. I could reel it in, bring him closer, make him walk when he didn't want to. I could make him kill himself, fall in love with me, or simply never think again—or, easier, keep him doing what he did all night, every night, just do it for me.

  The cabbie blinked, and the traffic behind him began to honk and shout. "LAX?" the cabbie asked, as though he were in a dream.

  I envisioned the center of his brain, thought of my words snaking their way from his auditory centers to all parts, and told him, This makes sense. "LAX. Take us there."

  "All right," he said softly, reasonably. It made sense. In the road, people had gotten out of their cars; several people were calling for ambulances and police on their cell phones. I heard vague phrases that I recognized—car wreck, dead people, two of them are walking away, blood everywhere. I heard them, but I wasn't listening. Someone was having screaming hysterics about the blood and how sick it was making her. I almost looked back to see Lovely's face one more time, but I knew it wasn't Lovely's face, it was the startled, robbed face of a cadaver, probably horribly crushed, ripped to shreds, jeweled with safety glass. Daniel held the door of the taxi open for me, and we climbed in.

  "Keep your eyes on the road," I said to the cabbie. "Don't listen to us." His eyes straight forward, he flipped the meter off and moved smoothly into traffic, leaving the chaos behind.

  Daniel sank down beside me, his injured hand quivering. He took a bandanna out of one of the pockets of his own coat and wiped his face more carefully with it, wiped his hand, spat on a corner of the bandanna, and wiped his face again. He touched the knot on my forehead. "Ouch," he whispered. He had a huge bruise already forming, covering his whole forehead. "My head broke the windshield," he explained. "It's not going to heal anytime soon."

  "Your head, or the windshield?" I took the bandanna from him and touched up a spot that he'd missed. "I'll do what I can when I can," I said.

  "You scare me," he said. "You're strong. You're damn strong. Stronger than you ought to be right now."

  I didn't feel strong. I felt like shit warmed over. But my head didn't hurt anymore, and my fingernails were on their way to becoming proper claws. All this from the blood of a dog, and a couple of friends, and a little girl. I began to break down, tearlessly. There wasn't enough fluid in my body to spare for tears. "Good thing too," I replied. "You certainly can't take care of us."

  "Everything's going to be all right," Daniel said. "It has to be."

  "Everything's not all right," I cried. "Lovely is dead."

  Daniel was crying for me. Tears, streaked with blood from his cut, ran over his cheeks. He needed a shave, badly, and his lips were almost as pale as they had been when he was in the closet. He needed blood as least as badly as I did, perhaps more. "He didn't have the death he wanted," he choked out, "but almost none of us does. The best thing… the best thing we can think of is that he didn't… hurt… for very long."

  "I'm trying… but it's so hard."

  "We all have to live with this," he sighed. "We all have to see the ones we love die. Either they grow old, and gray, and die in a hospital hooked up to tubes and machines, or they die of accidents, or something takes them. War took a lot of the ones I loved. They were young and beautiful as Lovely, and they were sweet guiltless people who got shoveled into ovens or got blown to bits… or shot… and I had to watch… and it's hard, it's bloody hard. But we have to go on. We have to go on."

  "We have to live on it," I said.

  He nodded. "Yes, we do. We're alive. We have to feed on the dead. We always do. Everything does."

  I let him take me in his arms, and took what comfort I could against his chilly, hard body, as light and bony as a dead bird's. He stroked my hair. "I don't know if I can stand this," I said.

  "It'll be better when we're healthy. Nothing seems impossible then."

  "Daniel, did you know Lovely's real name?" I asked.

  Daniel smirked a little. "Sheldon Sherman Boyd," he replied. "Horrible, isn't it?"

  "Oh, God, poor kid."

  And we both managed to smile, if only for a moment.

  That cabbie floored it the whole way to the airport, passing and merging like a madman. We gunned into the airport ticketing area, jumped out, and the cabbie picked up another fare as if he did this every ni
ght. I was completely unfamiliar with the airport, but this was one of Daniel's main pickup joints, and he dragged me along to the correct ticketing area. "Has Flight 445 to SFO taken off yet?" Daniel gasped out to the woman behind the counter.

  She glanced at us, two ragged, somewhat bloody freaks in leather jackets and jeans, and examined her computer terminal. "It took off nine minutes ago," she told us.

  Daniel squeezed his eyes shut as if he'd been shot. "Shit!" He rubbed his forehead and tried to think. "Next flight… I need to transfer these—two of these—tickets to the next flight. When is it?"

  "It's at… one o'clock. Last shuttle of the night. What was your name?"

  "Uh… Weiss: D-Donald Weiss."

  I couldn't help smiling at his consternation. We had a good three-hour wait ahead of us; there was no point in getting impatient and forgetting your assumed name.

  "Do you have a photo ID and a credit card? There's a thirty-dollar transfer charge per ticket."

  Daniel produced a generic California ID and a well-worn credit card. "So that's your name," I murmured, amused. "Pleased to meet you, Donald."

  He squinted. Be quiet, he thought furiously at me. I heard, it like a shout through a tin can and a wire. The ticket agent calmly processed us, and handed us boarding passes. "That'll be at Gate G-14. Enjoy your flight."

  Daniel and I staggered through the megaplex that was LAX. It was too bright in there, too vast, and even at this time of night, insanely crowded. "It's Wednesday night," I said under my breath. "Don't these people have anything better to do?"

  "Ariane," Daniel said, wrapping his arm around me and speaking into my ear, "it's time."

  Yes, that. In a brightly lit, insanely crowded, security-heavy airport. What was I supposed to do? I felt like a beleaguered lioness, forced to hunt on a vast plain with a hundred poachers ready to strike at any moment. But I needed it too. The smell of so many people, so much potential blood nearby, was driving me insane.

  Daniel went inside a bar and grill and sat in a booth near the door. He worried at the cut on his face with the bandanna. "Go," he said simply. "Be discreet, be quiet, and for God's sake, be careful."