by Unknown
I walked to the crumpled Dixie cup, put it to my nose and smelled the remnants, ran my tongue along the cup’s rim.
“It’s diseased,” he said.
I shook my head and smiled gently. Though I knew little about my condition, I was certain that I’d drunk every disease on the planet by coming here and accepting Alia’s offerings.
“Doesn’t matter. It can’t affect people like me.”
“This one does.”
His tone stopped me. He cried softly as he said, “My dad made mom drink blood like that. One day she wasn’t there anymore and he told me he got rid of her. He told me he took bad blood from a foreigner who lived in this building and he gave it to her. He knew she would die from it. You get sick first and then diseased and then you die.”
“How long do I have?” I asked him, confident that this tiny amount of diseased blood would do me no damage.
Peer shrugged, stared at the floor. “I don’t know.” He wiped his tears on the wrist of his sleeve.
“Why do you want to kill me, Peer?”
He looked so vulnerable and frightened. Coping the only way he knew how with a situation beyond his years, defending his friend Alia with a story meant to frighten me away.
“I don’t want you to hurt Alia, but I like you,” he said in a small voice. “Sorry,” he sniffed through his tears.
Maybe the blood would kill me. In that case Peer would have done me a favour. But I was sceptical and wondered how Peer’s father had actually rid the boy of his mother.
I didn’t want to frighten Peer by insisting that his small “dirty” blood offering wouldn’t harm me and very likely hadn’t killed his mother. So, I played along. “If I survive the blood you gave me tonight, promise me that when I get thirsty, really thirsty, and I cry for Alia, you’ll bring your dad around to me.” If I ever hurt Peer, or Alia, I’d visit the man who could possibly kill me.
He nodded. “I hate him for killing my mom.”
Peer gave me a sense of purpose. Many like Peer scrambled around, neglected, shivering in dark holes like this. Maybe I could help some. I hoped to make a new life for him.
I took his hand. He stood up. I pointed to the story book. He kissed the sleeping Alia goodbye and tucked the book under her arm.
“I don’t know how to fly when I’m not thirsty,” I said.
“It’s okay.” He sniffled. “We can take the stairs.”
He pulled me toward them. All my visits and I never remembered the stairs. But then I’d always been in the throes of withdrawal, or high on blood. Suddenly I wasn’t afraid to live; for the first time the thought of carrying on intrigued me.
In the time I had left with Peer, I was happy to hold his warm hand and have him lead me down.
When I’m Armouring My Belly
By Gemma Files
Much later, he would recall the exact moment when he finally forgot his own name: Face-down on a bumpy mattress smelling of semen and Vick’s, with Goran pushing and biting into him at once — dry drag and relentless ache, icy and burning in equal amounts, the full Isobel Gowdie daemon-lover treatment. Wasn’t like it’d never happened before, and yet, that particular time … something broke, never to be repaired. He felt it run out of him like the blood itself, greedily lapped and savoured: Waste not, want not.
When they flipped him over, meanwhile, Cija came settling onto him from above like Fuseli’s nightmare or Munch’s red-headed whore-dream, her teeth almost meeting around the bed of one nipple — with him in too much nethermost pain even to fuck forward ‘til she made him, reached back to dip her too-sharp thumbnail right into the seat of his deep, laid-open hurt and pressed inward. His hips bucked in a jerky frenzy, and she just laughed to see it; that same laugh they all had, a rippling silver-glass trill, delighted most by the spectacle of damage. Her insides milking him hard enough to bruise all the while, wet and tight and numbing-cold as a close-packed box of snow.
They gave him a bath that night, let the grime and blood soak off in rivulets, exposing all his wounds — healed and unhealed alike — to their careless exploration. Cija ran some sort of hotel shampoo-packet through his hair that smelled of sage and lemon, and exclaimed in surprise at the result: “Ver-y pret-ty,” she said, her ‘outside voice’ (as he’d come to call it in his own mind, to distinguish it from either the half-glimpsed roil of thought or that off-putting sub vocal communication they used amongst themselves) just a bit too rough, too slow, still tinged with whatever original accent she’d had, even after being run through their million-year proto-tongue Creole as a filter.
Combing her claws carelessly outward from the roots of his overgrown mop, bangs drooping almost to his lower lip now, and scoring away a bit of beard as she did; he damn well knew he’d looked a whole lot pret-ti-er a half-year back, ‘round when he’d first started his tour through the circuit — before he’d stopped bathing, or shaving, or talking to anybody he could tell had a pulse. And complaining, as she did: “You smell like us, but you taste like them. It’s very confusing.”
Goran shrugged, licking his fingers clean. “Smells like us, specific, ‘cause we just got done rubbing ourselves all over him. He’s not a toy, Cija,” he warned.
“But he could be.”
And: Yes, he wanted to say, yeah, I could. I can be anything you want. Let me, please. Let me.
Please.
But it hurt too much, and he didn’t know who he was anymore, and then he was gone for a while — extinguished, snuffed out, like a black wax Sabbat candle. He’d been up for what seemed like months, always in transit, passed like a party favour from pride to pride; his fever for assimilation through emulation had spiked at last, and he slept well, dreamlessly. Cradled between corpses.
That first bunch of ‘em he’d met in an all-night highway strip-mall drugstore, somewhere considerably closer to home. He’d seen them coming from a literal mile away, knowing in his gut how they could see him, too: Not just background noise, potential prey. That he stood out to them in some way which intrigued, itched at them the way scar tissue did — some frequency they were all tuned to, him and them alike, though he only got the fuzz and the beat, most-times. Static and hiss, lost between stations.
“You smell like us,” the first one to look directly at him said, words echoing magnified through his skull’s orbit, in-mouth/in-mind. And: “I dreamed of you,” he replied, eagerly. “Knew you was gonna be here.”
“Of vampires? Not so special. Many do.”
“No, I dreamed you: Saoirse, Owain, Chuyia. Y’all met near the Black Sea, on a pilgrimage to Chorazin, right? ‘There to salute the Prince of the Air.’”
The first one (Owain) simply kept on looking at him, blinkless eyes almost all-white between slitted white lashes, with a faint black ring ‘round each iris and pupils like chips of ice. While the second girl, Chuyia — chai-scented hair in a braid to her waist, one gold strand fringed with small coins linking nostril to earlobe on the left-hand side — cast her red-tinged gaze down at her bare, clawed feet, and murmured: “…perhaps worth examining at … closer quarters…”
Saoirse tittered and stroked his cheek, her own eyes eight-ball hemorrhage black, each twisted nail frosted a different, inappropriately candy-bright color. “He’s certainly warm enough to seem edible, at least. Whatever else he might turn out to be.”
Owain shrugged the idea away, like someone ugly-drunk was trying to feel him up. Said: “Just another bug-eater, another would-be tool. There’s a new one every mile in this damn country.”
“No, I ain’t like nothin’ you seen before — nothin’ like them, anyhow. Never have been. But I am like you. I mean…” Adding, desperate, as they just kept on staring, fixedly: “Why would I dream you, your names and lives and all, if I wasn’t?”
“Why indeed?” Chuyia murmured, as Owain hissed, dismissively. But there was just enough room for one more in the van, as it happened — and after all, they were already hungry.
Their nightside existence turned out to be b
uilt far less on glamour and magick than on endless boredom, constant flight. Enabling it was steady yet stultifying work, almost as brain-dead as any other crap job he’d ever had — all but the blood part, coming hand-in-whatever as it did with sex parts of every possible combination. Though even that wasn’t exactly the way the books and movies had warned it might be: They needed far less than anyone seemed to think in order to keep going, far more often. Five small meals a cycle, just like that Caveman Diet the girls’ magazines kept talking up.
So he settled into the routine, head-first. Drove during the day, when they were asleep, booked the rooms, rented storage spaces, made sure the windows were well-taped over by the time they woke and the evenings well-stocked with a steady stream of treats — hookers fresh enough not to be too diseased, experimenting students, runaway junkie-wannabes who hadn’t quite connected with the habit that’d kill ‘em yet. And now, never would.
He healed fast, thought on his feet, made a nice chew-toy — and he could at least pass for human, still, which none of them could. Once they’d all done him enough in enough different ways, though, that really was it; they were done with him, and made it more than plain, no matter how he pleaded. The most (and least) they could do before leaving was throw him to a new pride, so he could at least try getting what he wanted out of them awhile.
But the next bunch didn’t come across either, in the end — nor the next, nor the next after that. And slowly, he came to recognize that whatever mild affection any of ‘em might eventually develop for him was entirely predicated on points of difference rather than shared similarities, equally disturbing as they were on both their parts … that what had driven him towards them, in the first place, was exactly what inevitably drove them away in the opposite direction. That they liked him as he was, all (comparatively) weak, confused and buzzing with random pain — strong enough to take their abuse and live, to heal, but not scar-free. And never quite strong enough to stop them doing any damn thing they wanted with him, even if he’d thought to try.
Oh, they could enthrall, all right; he’d seen it done, on more occasions than he could count. But he was not in thrall to them, and never had been. What he did, he did with a clear mind and an even clearer conscience, willingly, in sure and certain hope of due recompense to come. Of the Resurrection, and the Life.
What remained to be seen, however, was how many times a man could be lied to and still keep on believing; much like any other faith in that way, he guessed, which he had to admit wasn’t really enough to keep him from being at least a little resentful.
Backsliding, his Momma used to call it, way back when — you KNOW how to do right, just don’t wanna, do you, boy? ‘Cause there’s something in you that don’t fit with this world, something mean and dead and rotten to the core … and I’m gonna have to beat it from you like a damn rat-killing dog, ain’t I, so’s you’ll get at least a little better. Or so’s you won’t get no worse, anyhow…
Ignorant swamp-French bitch.
Momma kept Daddy in the old fall-out shelter under her own Daddy’s house, locked down fast, while her and him slept in a trailer in the front yard. At first, growing up, he’d thought it was some game they played between the two of ‘em, like other people’s parents did — but it went on far too long, never stopped. And one time she’d dragged him down there by the hair, twisting and kicking, with a cat she’d found him playing with hanging slack from her other hand: Let’s make this Daddy’s supper! Threw it in, then, and slammed the door again real quick. Made him watch what happened, after.
Holding him still all the while, his eyes peeled open with a thumb jammed in either corner ‘til stars bloomed at the limits of his vision, and whispered: This is why. Why you are the way you are. Why I gotta do like I do. ‘Cause you don’t wanna end up like THAT, do you, boy?
Nobody left alive could tell him exactly what had happened, though some certainly speculated (outside his earshot, as well as in it). Seemed fairly common knowledge how Daddy and Momma had married while still in school, Daddy swapping a low-grade sports career for injury and addiction, while Momma waitressed or hooked just enough to keep them both in generic prescription drugs. How he’d went out to score one night and came crawlin’ back at the crack of dawn, burned lobster-red, almost smoking; knocked Momma down when she answered the door with a slap that unseated her left upper bicuspid, opened a wound in her shoulder, and got busy.
And nine months later, in a sanguinary haze of emergency transfusions, that’s when he was born — with a full set of teeth, already snapping.
When he was old enough to make the highway on his own recognizance, he ran away; authorities brought him back real quick, so he just did it again and so on, ‘til she beat on him like he was a rug hung up to dry; daily, habitually, offhandedly. Like hurting him was her hobby.
The last time, he made sure to wait ‘til she was asleep (roofies stirred in her beer, when she wasn’t looking), then set the house on fire. Tried to get Daddy to come with him when he saw him peering out through the shelter grate, but he just spat and yowled, and then it got too hot to stay. So either he survived or he didn’t, and then maybe they were back together in some better world, or at least well out of this one; he sometimes mused on how maybe he’d run across him on the circuit, one of these nights, so high he wouldn’t even remember how they were related.
Monsters are defined by what they prey on, what they hunt, Chuyia told him, once, in a quiet moment. In the jungle, the most fearsome killers are those who know how to hide, to wait. To pretend. Because the best mask of all for strength is weakness, do you know that? Like Saoirse, with her I’m-lost, I’m-scared, Mister-help-me-please game; you’ve seen how efficient that is. And you would know that better than most, I think, at any rate: Little trap-door spider, so expert at concealment … do you even remember who you used to be, earlier that same night? Before you found us?
He hadn’t wanted to agree with her, then; just shook his head and looked away, agonized, as she picked his half-healed neck-scars open again and bent to lick the blood surface-wards. But now, trapped in Cija and Goran’s diffident embrace, he knew at last how right she really was … how nice she’d been trying to be, in her own way. The way even he (most-times) was to those tricks and treats he brought Chuyia and the others, not because he had to, but just because he could. ‘Cause it cost him less than nothing.
He couldn’t feel anything for ‘real people’, not at all — never before, probably not in future. But at least he felt an attraction, one-sided and screwed as might be, for things like them; that had to count for something, didn’t it?
So: Thank you, he’d told Chuyia, as her teeth slid out. And felt her nod against him in reply, ever so slightly, as the pain washed back up over him like a black wave, tinged with red: Oh no, thank YOU…
Kissing the whip-handle, the branding iron. Kissing the hand that stroked his hair, stroked him to full attention then slid down even further, all the better to slit his pulsing throat.
“Bad teeth,” Cija said, examining them closely, running her finger over their ragged grey edges — a dirty old snow bank to her fresh salt-ice, opaque as hematite. “Do they pain you? They must.”
“Naw. They come back in like that, after my Momma took a hammer to the first set.”
Cija, to Goran: “A joke?”
“Have you known him to?” They both turned to look at him at once, this time with slightly more interest. “So. Not a fanatic, after all — a dresser-up, a … poser? Is this the word?”
“It’s one. But no, I ain’t that, just like I keep on tellin’ you. Jah sh’te oupir, kom toy.”
“Oupir? Necht, merkecht.” Goran paused. “Dhampir, perhaps. You know this word?”
“Means — halfbreed? Born, not made. But not like—”
“Us, no, never. Not even if we drain you dry. But if your father was very fresh when he got you, this might explain; dead man’s sperm lives for some time after, viably. Why is it you want this so badly, though? You’
re not them, born meat, so find your own way, your desire. Hunt accordingly. Why be hyena if you can be wolf? Don’t have to eat our leftovers forever…”
Cija: “You don’t have to let us hurt you, either. But maybe you like that.”
“Maybe I do.”
“Then it’s settled. It’s what he wants, Goran — you heard him. So very little, really.”
“No, I think not. Do you even remember their names, who had you last?”
“Why should I? They didn’t want me. Passed me on to you. You even remember my name?”
“Benjamin Boucher. Says so, on your driver’s license.”
He looked down, oddly shamed. Muttered, resentfully: “Y’all say it boo-SHAY. ‘Sides … I know your names.”
“Mmm, no doubt. But, as I say: We leave tomorrow, travelling fast … so fast, you cannot keep up. This is goodbye, little virus. You are … too much work.”
“How? How am I? I do everything for you. Everything! Y’all don’t do nothin’ for yourselves—”
Cija: “But we don’t have to, Ben-ja-min, not while we have you. Or someone like you. They are so easy to find, too, always—”
—YOU know that.
“We can of course pass you on again, if you want. There are more coming always, even now: Mortlake, Hu-shien. Marival, and her get…”
Despair welling up in him, sharp yet removed as the sight of someone else’s tears: “But you won’t, that it? Never? Not under no circumstances?”
Goran just shook his head — not unkindly, if not exactly kind.
Which only made him snarl, already near weeping: “Well, why the God shit Hell fuck not?”
(And Cija, cutting in subvocally, from what seemed very far away: Oh look, he’s CRYING! Such pure wonder in her voice, such a depthless, awful joy. As though his pain was the sweetest thing she’d ever seen.)
“Because…” Goran said, eventually; a pause, long even for him. And then— “…I don’t know what you would become, after.”