“Crim?”
He glanced at me, panting, with eyes gone nearly feral, and shook his head. This was the tricky part, he’d explained once. Did the Bludman have enough control to stop when the human’s body was on the brink of death, and did the dying person have the good sense and the proper chemistry to accept blud into their system? Criminy’s red-splashed teeth ripped into his wrist, and I cried out at seeing the man I loved dripping with a fresh wound.
Beautiful and mostly naked, he draped himself beside her and pressed the wound to her lips, but she wouldn’t drink. The urge to check her pulse was strong, but just as in the OR, my interference could be what tipped the scales, possibly in the wrong direction. I barely breathed, watching viscous blud dribble from my grandmother’s mouth as she stubbornly refused to swallow, her lips pursed tightly just as they’d been when I’d tried to give her the witch’s potion.
“Nana, please,” I whispered.
“You must drink,” Criminy said in his commanding voice, talking around his fangs, “or believe me, you will die.”
Nana shuddered, and her throat moved. I was holding my breath, expecting every rise of her chest to be her last. I’d always assumed that moment would happen in her bed on Earth, while I was there to hold her hand and smile and ease the transition as I had for so many other patients. I had never in my wildest dreams expected to watch her latch onto Criminy’s naked, bloody arm and start drinking, greedy as a baby at the breast.
It was downright disturbing.
At least at first. And then I had to stop myself from cheering.
Nana’s eyes had gone rheumy and jaundiced recently as her body started to give up the fight, but now they were pinned to Criminy and beginning to sparkle a glimmering grayish blue. As she gulped, her insubstantial puff of hair seemed to turn like fall leaves reversing their transformation, from grayish white to tan to brown to a brilliant chestnut shade I’d seen in pictures of her wedding. Her gulps were audible and insistent now, her strong fingers clutching tightly where she held Crim’s wrist to her mouth, where he was trying to pry it away.
I’d been so busy watching her that I’d forgotten to watch him, and he was drained and beyond pale. I couldn’t tell if the hand he was using to pry her off was being uncommonly gentle or rapidly losing strength. My gut told me it was the latter, and after calling his name several times and receiving no response, I hurried to help.
Nana was stuck to him like a tick, her eyes resentful as I approached. When I put a hand on her forehead and one on his arm, I thought she might snap at me.
“You’re taking too much, Nana. It’s his turn to drink again, or it won’t work.”
I yanked hard, and she hissed at me and muttered, “Mind your own beeswax.” She clamped down harder and shook me off.
And so, like any well-bred Southern woman and experienced nurse, I pinched her nose closed, put an elbow in her face, and tried to pry her decidedly less fragile body away from my declining husband.
It worked finally, and she popped off and jerked back against the bed, nostrils flaring wide. “Sugar, you’d best get out. You smell just like a big, juicy steak just now.” Nana licked her lips and started to move into a crouch, her eyes glued hungrily to me, and that’s when Criminy pounced right back onto her neck.
She growled and pushed him away, but even with her newfound strength, she was no match for him. I could only watch, fascinated, as they kept on like that, trading blood and blud and barbs, alternately drinking and yanking away and being drunk from. It was like watching a nature documentary about a particularly foreign creature that you couldn’t quite understand but couldn’t stop watching, and they kept rewinding the bloodiest bits and forcing you to watch them in slow motion.
Finally, Crim yanked his arm away from her and somersaulted backward to a standing position, leaving Nana looking perplexed . . . and about forty pounds up from the seventy-pound bag of bones she’d been when I’d brought her here. She didn’t quite look young—there was something soft around her jaw, some smoothing of her wrinkles—but she had a woman’s shape and looked altogether more healthy and strong than I’d ever seen her. Criminy held out a hand, and she looked at it as if she might bite his fingers off, then took it and let him pull her up to stand.
“How do you feel?” Criminy asked, back to his usual level of murderous politeness.
“Like getting out of this old-lady dress and eating a goddamn hamburger.”
Criminy smiled, and Nana smiled back, her teeth shiny and strong and framed by fangs.
“I can help with that,” he said.
4
Time always ran strangely when I was on Earth. When I’d run away from Criminy tonight, it had been dusk, right as the crowd arrived and the night’s show started; but Nana and I had reappeared in the glass box in the morning, just in time to whisk her, half-naked and bloody, through the empty caravan as the carnivalleros finished their usual late breakfast.
Nana had always been stubborn, both in dealing with my parents when I was a kid and in facing off with cancer three times and refusing to die. Now she turned her hell on the caravan’s costumer, our third in six years. The position was apparently cursed. The first one I’d met, Mrs. Cleavers, had been killed by Coppers who were hunting for me. The second, Criminy’s former best friend Antonin, had run off with a murder-minded automaton lover (don’t ask). And the third, well . . .
I knocked on the door of the costume wagon, waiting for the usual irritating hmph from inside before ushering Nana into the crowded, spangled space.
“What’s this, then? New act for the freak show?”
Her voice grated on my nerves, as it had since my first day in the caravan.
“Emerlie, this is my grandmother, Ruby.”
“You sure you’re not her grandmother, dove?”
Emerlie leaned back on her chaise and smirked, high pink boots crossed and an apple in her gloved hand. Our cockney tightrope walker had sucked up to our previous costumers in order to design her own outlandish getups, and the last one had eventually just brought her in as his assistant so that she’d be forced to sew her own lurid leather tutus. Now she languished in the solo wagon she’d always coveted and made anyone who approached her feel like a burden. The costumes had become decidedly brighter and altogether more difficult to obtain since Emerlie Fetchings’s reign had begun, and I’d looked forward to the larger cities we approached so I could deal with costumers who didn’t try to punish me with haberdashery and take joy in poking me with pins. I had money enough, but I was out of patience when it came to Emerlie.
Born into a circus family, she still couldn’t let go of the fact that I’d stolen Criminy’s heart, stomped on Casper’s, and become the star of the caravan without really wanting to. Glancers, after all, were higher on the totem pole than unicyclists.
“If I were your grandmother, missy, I’d wipe that smug smile off your face and teach you some damn manners. Now, are you gonna dress me or leave me standing around in my drawers?” Nana finished her tirade with an overly pointy smile that I still wasn’t accustomed to. She was looking younger by the minute, and it didn’t escape me that her hands were now smoother than mine. Her tone was almost as sharp as her chin—but at least it seemed she was that way with everyone, not just me.
“Another bloody Bludman,” Emerlie muttered, standing and dusting off her turquoise pantaloons. “Suppose you’ll be wanting to dress in illegally bright duds, eh?”
Nana held out the sides of her polyester dressing gown as if she couldn’t stand to touch it for another second. “I was thinking a pair of pants like yours might suit. Tight fit but darker colors. Never did get the hang of floof.”
My head swiveled to stare at her. I’d never seen my grandmother in anything but shapeless slacks and housedresses, and the thought of her in Emerlie’s tight leather ballerina costumes was mind-boggling. Emerlie looked her up and down, eyes narrowed, but then she nodded and went to rummage in her trunks. When she turned around with an armload of
leather and cloth, she had a smile friendlier than anything she’d ever given me.
“Nice to hear someone ’round here has taste. See what takes you, and I can hem up whatever works.” And she winked.
And then possibly the most terrifying thing I’d ever witnessed occurred: I watched my grandmother strip naked.
The second most terrifying thing? Thanks to her recent transformation, she had a hotter bod than mine under her housedress. Soon she was laced into tight leather pants, with Emerlie pinning the ankles. She waved a hand at corsets and bound up her chest with a long strip of linen before putting on a man’s shirt and waistcoat and an old pair of Crim’s boots, their toes stuffed with rags. My little old Southern grandmother was cross-dressing as a vampire dandy, giggling with one of my worst enemies, and letting Emerlie cut her auburn hair into a vixen’s sharp bob and line her eyes with kohl.
The world was upside down. I had everything I thought I wanted, but it wasn’t what I wanted at all. And then something even stranger occurred.
It happened while Emerlie was helping my grandmother put on earrings. They were having trouble with the clip, and Emerlie was cursing in her cockney gibberish, and my grandmother jerked away and went over very still.
“You yellow-bellied hussy!” she shouted, pointing at Emerlie. “He’s a nice boy. What’s wrong with you?”
Emerlie went red with fury and then white with fear, backing away. “Witch!” she hissed, pointing first at Nana and then at me. “Just like that one!”
Nana swiveled to me. “She’s sleeping with that nice Charlie Dregs on the sly. Right here in this room! But she won’t even sit with him in the dining car, no matter how he begs. Won’t make him an honest man.”
“Nana,” I said, sounding more like her mother than her grand-daughter, “did you get a little jolt and see her future?”
“Not exactly her future.” Nana thought about it, cutting her eyes at Emerlie. “More like her present and her past, all rolled up in a ball. But who’s Lydia?”
“Get out,” Emerlie growled, and I held open the door.
Nana took a last look around the jumbled wagon, grabbed a heavy black cape off a dummy, and sashayed out the door. As I followed her, she grumbled under her breath, “Can’t stand a damn hypocrite.”
Once we were safely on the trampled grass, I looked her up and down. “Nana, did you know that you’re a glancer, like me? That you can touch people and see their fate?”
My grandmother, now looking like a fabulous, forty-year old, cross-dressing flapper, cocked her head and considered me with cloudy blue eyes, so like my own but glittering with a Bludman’s magic.
“Call me Ruby, sugar. I don’t feel much like anybody’s Nana anymore.”
She frowned and walked away. She didn’t answer my question.
She didn’t have to.
“She’s a glancer, Crim.”
He stroked my hair back, curling it over my ears. “What of it, love?”
“My grandmother is a glancer, and a Bludman, and a cougar, and maybe a MILF, and she says I need to call her Ruby.” Hard as I’d been trying to keep it in, a hot tear streaked down the side of my nose.
“Don’t know what a GILF is, but I fear I’m going to have to give you a speech similar to the one you gave me about Demi when she wanted to leave the caravan. Time to let the little bird fly from the nest?”
I sniffled. “This little bird jumped out of the nest, landed among the bludbunnies, and is now spitting out their bones and whistling ‘Yankee Doodle.’ ”
“Is she happy?”
I had to look away at the frankness of his gaze. He could always see right through me. “She walked away before I could really ask. I don’t even know where she is or what she’s doing. I thought . . . I don’t know. I thought I could show her the caravan, get to see her enjoy the magic for the first time. There’s no magic in our world, on Earth, not really. I thought she would be grateful. Or at least friendly. That she would still want to spend time with me. But she doesn’t even seem to like me.”
He pulled me closer, wiping tears away with a glove. “What did you think would happen, darling? You would bring her to Sang, and I would turn her, and she would remain a happy old woman content to bake cakes for you? She was a corpse, and now she’s a predator. She’s been dying for years. Maybe she wants to live a bit now.”
“But I miss her.”
The corner of his lip lifted. “So join her. If you truly want to know what she feels like, let me blud you. You’ve always said she was the only thing that kept you human.” He leaned over, and the rasp of metal on wood brought my attention to my locket, where he dragged it around on the bedside table. The bright-red stone was gone, just a curled black smudge twisting the metal where it had been set. “You can’t go back now, you know. It took me years to find that ruby and bewitch it, and we both paid dearly for our happiness. I believe I can say with confidence that your world is permanently closed to you. The witch’s magic always takes its price. So whatever’s left to hold you back from being bludded is merely . . . fear.”
“No, it’s . . .”
He waited, patient as ever. I racked my brain. As was my tendency, the worst images pushed to the fore: Bludmen stoned in the ghettos of large cities, the violence and mess of my grandmother’s recent bludding, the thought of putting aside coffee and ice cream and rabbit dumplings and chocolate mousse and ingesting nothing but human blood for the rest of my life. I’d never wanted it, never longed for Eric Northman and glittering eyes and Gothic sensibilities. Perhaps, faced with terminal cancer and trapped in a frail body, I would have seen it as Nana—sorry, Ruby—had. But even here, in my rapidly aging body that ached and wrinkled more than it should have, I wasn’t done being human.
Criminy held my bare hand up, turning it to show me the age spots speckling the back before he kissed it. “Think about it, pet. The process is different between lovers. You’ll enjoy it. I promise.”
But still, I wasn’t ready.
I found her in the dining car—after I’d cleaned up the tears and picked my guts up off the floor. She’d raised me to have a spine, and I wasn’t going to turn tail just because she’d hurt my feelings. I had to try seeing things from her point of view: she’d been given a second life, and it wasn’t reasonable to expect that her first priority would be her granddaughter’s desire to take her to the fair.
The wagon smelled of stew and was mostly empty, as the carnivalleros had acts to practice, props to maintain, and a ringmaster who wouldn’t hesitate to excoriate them in public if they spent too much time being lazy. My friends Imogen and Jacinda shared a table, both writing furiously as a small swarm of butterflies floated lazily around their hats. Eblick the lizard boy was stretched out in a booth, asleep, tongue flapping. My grandmother sat with Catarrh and Quincy, the two-headed Bludman, her head thrown back in an unselfconscious laugh. Although I’d come here intending to bond with her and didn’t want to say anything negative, I couldn’t help disapproving of her choice of friends. Catarrh and Quincy were unpredictable, dangerous, and constantly in trouble with Criminy, who refused to fire them, as they were the only known conjoined twins currently on the caravan circuit. As Crim put it, we needed them but didn’t need to like them.
As I approached, the twins glared at me over my grandmother’s shoulder, and Quincy hissed. My grandmother turned around, her face set in a snarl that disappeared as soon as she saw me. Not that she smiled, but at least she put away her teeth.
“Oh, sugar. It’s just you.”
She relaxed and sat back, her elegant fingers toying with the delicate porcelain of her teacup. Blood vials littered the table, some empty and some full, far more than the daily allotment for the three of them. Her eyes didn’t leave mine as she tossed back the dregs of her cup and poured in another vial, as if daring me to say something. She’d always been proudly frugal, back home.
“Can I sit?” I asked.
She smirked and slid over to make room. Catarrh muttered somet
hing rude under his breath, and Quincy chittered. They both gulped and went silent when my Nana kicked them under the table.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
Nana cocked her head at me, and I fidgeted with the wedding ring she’d never seen before. It had once fit perfectly; now it spun freely on my bony finger. Feeling silly and more fragile than ever, I dropped my hands under the table, to my lap.
“I think you know how I feel, sugar. I was dead, and now I’m alive.” She sipped her blood, drew a deep breath, closed her eyes, and smiled that same old smile I remembered, the one that meant the pie had set just right or her Christmas present was perfect. A rare smile of satisfaction. “Haven’t felt hope or hunger in twenty years. This new world of yours is mighty fine, you know.”
I turned toward her, but my hand stopped before I could pat her shoulder. Something told me she didn’t want to be touched. “I thought you might like to see the caravan tonight. We could put you in a cravat and gloves and go in with the audience together. My first night was so amazing. I swear there was glitter in the air, and—”
“Wait. Cravat and gloves?”
With a chuckle, I pointed to her hand, which had already turned a medium shade of gray as her transformation settled. Soon her hand would be covered in fine black scales and tipped with sharp white talons like a cat’s claws. It took some getting used to, but once I’d seen Criminy stalk and attack a deer five times his weight, I understood the usefulness of the Blud adaptation.
“Humans here tend to get riled up around Bludmen. If you’re going to join a crowd, it’s best to pretend you’re harmless.”
She jerked away and scooted back on the bench. I’d been close enough to lean my head on her shoulder, but now she was looking at me as if she’d bite me for trying. “Hide? Just to make some small-minded idiots feel safe? Sugar, that’s not how I’m going to live my life here. If this is what I am, and if this is what saved my life, then I’m damned well going to be proud of it.”
Wicked Ever After (A Blud Novel Book 7) Page 3