by D. N. Hoxa
“Everybody feared my father in my village. And he was the biggest asshole I’d ever met. Being feared isn’t something people should be proud of.”
“You’ll soon learn that in this world, being feared means being respected. And being respected means your words count. Hammer wasn’t cruel. Quite the opposite, actually. He had the biggest non-beating heart I’ve ever seen,” she said.
I felt a little claustrophobic all of a sudden, though I knew that wasn’t possible since I couldn’t breathe. And then, the fact that I knew what claustrophobic was made me feel like the walls were closing in on me even faster. It was a weird state of being that I was in. So I closed my eyes and changed the subject fast.
“Why Bugz? And what’s your real name?”
Bugz laughed again. “You don’t tell vampires about your real name, Matias. Not ever. Nobody knows my name. Except for Hammer.”
“You know my real name,” I pointed out. Dublin hadn’t mentioned anything about names.
“Yes, I do, but considering the circumstances…” her voice trailed off and I could tell she was smiling.
I stood up and opened the door.
“I don’t think it’s going to work without me knowing yours, too,” I said, shrugging.
She laughed hard. I didn’t think what I said was that funny, but she explained soon enough.
“That’s exactly what Hammer said.” The expression on her face turned nostalgic all of a sudden. I didn’t want to see it, so with my bottle in hand, I headed for the Giant Room. She followed. “But you’re right. Since I know yours, it’s only fair that you learn mine.”
“So,” I said impatiently.
“Promise me you won't laugh.” She was serious now.
“I won't,” I said, shaking my head.
“Okay. It was Bernadette. Everyone called me Berni, though. Or girl. I was a slave before I turned,” she confessed.
“Bernadette,” I said.
“Now, you can’t speak that name, ever again. Nobody should hear it,” she said, a little panicked.
“Why not? I mean, why aren’t other vampires supposed to know your name?” It seemed kind of stupid.
“There’s power in a name,” Bugz said. “The old ones say that by knowing the real name of a vampire, you can summon him, control him, make him your puppet with the right words and power.”
“Have you seen anybody do that?” I asked.
“When you live for as long as vampires have, time has a different meaning. The legends are so old that nobody has dared tell their real names to anyone but their Doyens in a long, long time. So no, I haven't seen it. But there are old ones who have witnessed things like this. And they passed the word to us, as we’ll pass it on to new ones so that nobody ever has to go through it again,” she explained.
“Why Doyens? Why can they know and not others?”
“There’s a strange bond between a vampire and his Doyen. You feel connected to them in a way that nobody can explain, and they, in turn, are connected to you with a bond that doesn’t allow them to control more than they already do, which is a lot.” I didn’t want to think about Ray more than I had to, so I steered away from him.
“Who’s your Doyen? And why aren’t you with him?” I asked next. The questions kept coming as soon as things began to click into place in my mind. It was weird that the clearer the picture got, the more questions I had.
“Mine is in the Yukon,” she said, and when she saw the look on my face, she added with a smile: “Yes, mine and Dublin’s are the same Doyen. There are those that give up on their vampires, they set them free in a way. Release them from the connection. And that’s what my Doyen did with us.”
“That’s the only way you get disconnected from your Doyen?” A shiver ran through my spine, and Bugz saw it. Because I was already thinking about how to separate myself from Ray.
“No, that’s not the only way. You can become a Doyen yourself, or you can wait for your two or three hundredth birthday. Also, if you can kill your Doyen, then you set yourself free,” Bugz said.
“But how can you do that? If you’re connected and you’re compelled to do what he says, how the hell can you kill him?”
“It’s very hard, that I know.” Bugz shrugged. “Hammer killed his Doyen,” she added like an afterthought.
Hammer. Hammer, everywhere. I was beginning to hate the vampire without even knowing him.
“Where is Hammer?” Perhaps if they saw him, they would finally understand that I was just Matias.
Bugz looked away. She kept silent for a while, and even though I wanted to push her, I didn’t.
“He’s dead,” she finally whispered. She turned to look at me. “Hammer’s been dead for almost eight years now.”
“Because he broke a promise?” Her eyes grew wide instantly, and she came close to me, so close that her nose touched my mask.
“How do you know that?” she hissed.
“I don’t. I guessed,” I said. She raised a brow. “The first thing Dublin told me when he found me was that if you break a promise, you die. It was just a guess,” I assured her.
She finally stepped back and looked away. “Right.”
It was no use to tell her that she was delusional, so I settled for a change of topic again.
“So, what are we supposed to do now? Dublin wasn’t very specific about your role,” I said.
“Yeah, he’s not a man of many words. He wasn’t specific with me, either. But we’ll figure it out,” she said, and she sounded somehow tired now. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“So, what’s next?” I tried again.
“I guess we should start from the very beginning. I’ll teach you history first, but not with books or anything. I’ll tell you the stories about the world before and the world now, and how everything works in the vampire circles, and you better listen and remember because I don’t like to repeat myself,” she said. “After that’s done, I’ll teach you the second most important thing, which is fighting. You need to be prepared for the bad ones you meet up there. And then….I guess I’ll teach you how to behave around others. What to say and what not,” she said and shrugged.
“I think you’re forgetting the most important thing of all,” I reminded her. “Blood.” When I said the word, it was like I tasted a drop on the tip of my tongue, and I grew crazy with hunger. I swallowed a mouthful of my wine.
“Oh, yeah. I keep forgetting you’re a newbie, on top of everything,” she said, flinching. “Tomorrow night, then. Right now, I’m going to crash and wait for the sunrise.”
“Wait,” I said, a little hesitant. “Afterwards, when…you know, when we’re done. What happens? What will I do?”
She smiled sadly. “You’ll figure it out.”
XV
Three months later
I watched my hand as it burned. The morning’s first ray had barely caught me—less than half a second—and it burned my skin with a red flame that looked hungry. It was fascinating how fast it spread up my arm.
Even though my legs barely held me and my arm hurt so much, I was mesmerized by the way the flames danced to some song only they seemed to be able to hear.
“For hell’s sake, turn that off,” Bugz called from behind me.
Her voice brought me back, and I slapped the flames with my good hand until they disappeared. And I fell to my knees.
“You’re too close to the door,” she called again. I tried to speak, but my jaw was already numb. I envied how she could still stand and speak so easily after sunrise. I was much better than I had been three months ago when she first started training me, but I could last only a minute, no more.
When unconsciousness left me the next night, the first thing I did was look at my hand and arm. My shirt was burned and it definitely smelled bad, but even the hair on my arm was in perfect condition, like nothing at all had happened to it.
“You know, you get adorable when you focus on something so hard,” Bugz said.
For the past month now, sh
e’d been throwing comments like that at me. You’re adorable when you focus, you’re very handsome when you’re lost in thought like that, you’re hot when you’re angry. It made me uncomfortable, but I tried not to show it. I hid it with jokes and insults.
“You would know—you do nothing but stare at me all day.” It was meant to embarrass her, but instead, she only grinned and winked at me. “Are we moving today, or what?”
We had arrived in Georgia a few nights ago. We were headed for Florida. When I asked why, she said because currently, that was the safest place for vampires to be in. She said there was a whole community of independents there—vampires with no Doyens, and it would be a good place for me for now.
Most importantly, she said that the chances that we would encounter Ray there were very, very slim. That made my decision for me in the end.
“I think we should stick around here for a while. Get back on your training,” Bugz said.
“I don’t need any more training.” I’d beaten her three times in the last week of sparring.
“I was taking it easy on you, M,” she said, grinning. She decided she would just call me M, because she felt weird calling me Mask, and since both my name and my nickname had the same initial, she stuck to it. I didn’t mind.
“In that case, let’s go,” I said, and like a kid eager to show all he’d learned, I jumped her.
It took no more than a minute to see that she, in fact, had really been taking it easy on me the last week of training. She was faster than I remembered, and her blows hurt much more. Ten minutes in and all I’d done was hit her legs and arms a few times while my skin was bloody in too many places.
“Feeling lucky yet?” Bugz said.
“Your feet are wrong,” I said, a lame attempt to distract her for a second. But I really got lucky. Her eyes moved for half a second to check, and I had my opening. I hit her so hard in the jaw that she flew back and hit the wall behind her with a loud noise.
I was at her again, and I managed to get in a few more fists to her ribs before she recovered completely. When she did, she easily pushed me against the wall and immobilized me with her body.
“Get off me,” I hissed, mad that I was allowing myself to be this weak and this easy to trap.
Bugz wasn’t smiling. “Take off your mask,” she whispered.
“What the…” before I could even finish my sentence, she knocked the mask right off me. The way she looked at me made me a little uncomfortable.
“What the hell, Bugz?” I said, still trying to free myself. It was no use.
“I wanted to see your face,” she whispered.
I could feel her getting closer and closer to me, while every feature of her face became sharper. I hadn’t noticed before just how full her lips were, or how smooth her skin was, or how defined her cheeks were. For a second, the image of us kissing filled my head. Her eyes shone, and I could swear she thought the same thing. The next second, she let me go and went for the door.
“I’m going to feed.” And she disappeared.
***
The next night, Bugz came to the Giant room soon after my eyes opened. She found me lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling.
“Are you dead?” she asked when I didn’t react to the noises she made while she put everything she needed in her bag. Maybe we weren’t staying in Georgia anymore, after all.
“Just bored,” I said, flinching. The word tasted sour in my mouth.
“Wish I was bored,” Bugz said. I stood up, then.
“What do you mean? What else do you have to do except babysit me?”
“I’m not babysitting you.” She rolled her eyes. “And I have lots of other stuff going on in my life.”
“Like what? Come on, tell me. What do you do?”
I’d been panicking more every day trying to figure out what I’d do with the rest of eternity. I had no idea how I was going to spend all that time.
“Nothing that you could do, trust me. Nothing that you would want to do,” she said.
“I’ll be the judge of that, Bugz. Come on, sparring with you all day long isn’t going to help me out there without some real experience. And I have to have something to do, don’t I?”
“You will be fine in Florida, M. Trust me, there will be a lot of booze and a lot of women,” she said.
“And then what? What did you do when you first turned?”
She sighed and leaned against the wall. She looked at me like I was this impossible kid who wouldn’t leave her alone, but she answered my question.
“I followed my Doyen everywhere, as newbies should. There is no one better than Doyens to teach a newborn our ways. All I’ve taught you in three months, your Doyen would’ve taught you in two weeks.”
That was exactly what I was afraid of. I didn’t know if others were as afraid of their Doyens as I was of mine, and I didn’t want to know, either. I just wanted that option completely eliminated.
“And since I am not going to go after my Doyen, what else is there to do for a vampire out there? Other than the women and the booze.” Maybe the panic had simply gotten the best of me. Maybe I would’ve liked to spend time with women and booze—it sounded like such an easy life. But I wanted to know that I could do something else if I wanted to.
“It’s dangerous out there right now, M. There are things going on that force us to run and hide and not trust each other like we used to. It wasn’t always like this, you know?”
I sat down next to her. “Then how can I help? I can help you, Bugz. I can help Dublin,” I said. That brought a smile to her lips. “Three months ago when I asked you what I was going to do when we got here, you said I’d figure it out. Well, I haven't, so I need you to help me.”
She sighed loudly. “There’s all kinds of things going on outside, M. Vampires are preparing for war,” she said reluctantly.
“War? With who?” As far as I was concerned, a vampire fighting against his equal was pretty stupid.
“With humans,” Bugz said.
“What?” I felt a shiver run down my spine, created by someone else’s blood. “What do you mean? How can there be a war against humans when we’re so much better than them in every way?” The way I had been as a human was still fresh in my mind. I knew of my limitations now. Humans didn’t stand a chance against vampires.
Bugz laughed. “Have you heard nothing I told you? Humans may be weak physically, but they sure as hell are smart. They have weapons, M. Silver. Devices that can detect us before we can even smell them. They are not weak, and you should never consider them as such,” she said.
“But that’s insane! We were humans before we became vampires, right? I mean, we can’t be that heartless, can we? We can't destroy our fathers. And…” I stood up as the thought hit me. “Blood,” I whispered. “Why would a vampire want to fight humans, when they are our life source?”
The thought of never tasting blood again terrified me.
“Yeah, about that…” Bugz said and looked down. “With what the vamps have discovered, we won’t need blood to survive anymore, M.”
I could only laugh. She was definitely crazy. How the hell would we survive without blood when all we ever thought about was blood?
“There’s a drug being made. Almost finalized, actually. They say it numbs the craving completely, and it keeps us alive and going,” Bugz said.
“Who the hell would think that?” I asked. It was so ridiculous that I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.
“Mohg,” she whispered, and the laugh died on my lips.
“Mohg wants to go to fucking war with the humans?” I asked incredulously. Is that why Jordy and his friends had wanted Dublin?
“No, not Mohg,” Bugz said. “Another vampire started all of it. Everard was his name. He was a Doyen.” She looked up at me then, with a look of hope and curiosity, and a little suspicion.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she whispered. I sat next to her again.
“So this Everard wants to start a
war with humans?” I asked.
“No, not him. He’s dead,” Bugz said, and again, she gave me that look. Like she thought I was hiding something. “Have you heard his name before?”
I shook my head. “Yes, once. Jordy, the vampire I killed, mentioned him.”
Bugz nodded. “Everard started it, by building bombs against both humans and vampires. He believed that we were superior, that humans were to be our slaves. He hated the solution that Mohg had found and fought him for it, and he was ready to send all those against him to hell. He was going to enslave all humans and take on the world. Rebuild it just for our pleasure,” Bugz said.
“That’s actually a pretty great idea. If we never were humans,” I said. “Was he out of his fucking mind? This world is theirs. They were here first, right? We were here first as humans, weren’t we?”
“Yes, we were, and thankfully, a lot of people agree with that. Mohg included,” Bugz said.
“Since Everard is dead, why are they still preparing for war?” I asked.
“Because there are still others Everard left behind. A lot of others who have been playing hide and seek for a long time now, preparing,” Bugz said.
“We can help the humans, then. We can fight with them, against whoever it is we’re fighting against,” I said.
“Didn’t you hear me? They have bombs. Bombs—exactly like the ones that made the world what it is today. And I can tell you right now that if those go off again, earth will not be able to take it. They’re made of silver, M. They can kill us just as easily as they can humans,” Bugz said. “It’s not that easy.”
“Wars aren’t supposed to be easy, right?”
“The best thing to do is to stop the war from ever happening,” Bugz said. “That is what Mohg is trying to do.”
“Are you helping him?”
“Yes, I am. Most of us are,” she said.
“And Dublin?” I said.
As soon as I thought of him, I thought of Jordy and his friends. The way I’d killed them just because I thought the Mohg guy wanted to do something to Dublin. Something bad. Shit. I felt terrible.