by Becket
“Lowen,” I said in a hushed voice.
It was Theo’s mouth that smiled at me, but it wasn’t Theo’s smile, not the one I knew so intimately.
“Hello, Mary Paige,” Lowen said to me in Theo’s voice. “You have something that belongs to me.”
I gripped the Red Man’s coffin tighter.
Theo.
Part of me could not believe what I was seeing. It was as if my whole world had been turned upside down. I felt sick to my stomach. I wanted to spew from my mouth the ocean of my sickness.
“You know,” this Theo imposter, this Dark Man, Lowen went on conversationally, grinning as if nothing were wrong, “I have wanted you for a long time. And I’ve come to discover that this body has wanted you too. It is interesting how life comes full circle, how the very thing that we most desire can be ours if we—”
He shut up because I threw the coffin at his face.
Sorry, Theo.
Ms. Crystobal and I hurried over to Wyn.
She grabbed him and flung him over her shoulder. Then while carrying him, she leaped out of the hole in the room.
I grabbed the Red Man’s coffin and followed.
Leaping down 120 floors was kind of fun. Had my heart not been so utterly crushed right then, realizing that Theo was gone, I might have enjoyed it.
I left an impact crater the size of a Volkswagen beetle. I had an urge to tear down the whole Black Building brick by brick and screw by screw.
I wanted to open my mouth and swallow the whole world.
Lowen, that evil and dark man, he had been prepared for us to leap from his building. He had already sent a sea of his Sleeper Devils to that very spot.
They had been waiting for us when we landed and now they surrounded us.
Ms. Crystobal opened a dimensional portal. We went through it, returned to Idyllville, and were instantly standing before Wyn’s mansion.
Ms. Crystobal closed the portal as quickly as she could, but with Wyn over her shoulder, she was not fast enough to stop the Sleeper Devils.
Over a thousand had flooded through in a second.
They chased us to the mansion.
We hurried inside. Ms. Crystobal set Wyn down. He leaned on her with a bad limp, but he was healing.
The quarter ton coffin of the Red Man was starting to weigh on my shoulder, but I could carry it a little farther.
Yes, being a Blood Vivicanti means that you’re that mind-blowingly strong.
Once we were through the door, Wyn told Ms. Crystobal to pause at a portrait painting. He swung it open. Behind it was a touch screen.
Wyn placed his hand on it to activate it. He typed in a code.
Immediately the mansion locked down. Sheets of strong metal covered the doors and windows.
Wyn knew that that should keep out the Sleeper Devils, but he also knew that Lowen would not be far off.
We mounted one last defense.
The Sleeper Devils surrounded the mansion. They pounded their rotting fists against the doors and windows, trying to get in.
Then they stopped.
The sound of the silence concerned us.
A minute later we could smell smoke.
The Sleeper Devils had set fire to Wyn’s mansion. If they could not get through the metal doors, they would get around them.
Wyn’s injuries healed. He led us upstairs to the beautiful sarcophagus that I had seen numerous times. I had studied the woman’s face carved all throughout its white marble, but I had not understood who she was to Wyn, not until then.
“Aemilia,” I gasped, nearly dropping the coffin in amazement.
It was the resting place of his wife.
Or so I thought, because without a pause, Wyn walked through the sarcophagus and entered a hidden room.
The Winchester Mystery House can’t hold a candle to the surprises in Wyn’s mansion.
The shape of the sarcophagus wavered for a second as he passed through it, like a glitch of bad reception on an old television.
Ms. Crystobal smirked at me and raised her eyebrow. Then she walked right through the sarcophagus too.
The glitch in the sarcophagus happened once again.
I had no idea what was going on. I could smell the sarcophagus. I could see it. But could I feel it?”
I had never touched it before. It was never something I felt the need or desire to do, not until then.
So I reached out and tried to touch it.
My hand passed right through the sarcophagus, through its seemingly white stone.
It was a hologram.
I carried the Red Man’s coffin through it.
On the other side was a whole new laboratory that I had not seen yet. It was filled with Wyn’s personally designed computers and machines.
Also at the center of the laboratory was an egg-shaped spaceship, colored robin’s egg blue.
“The Red Man’s ship,” I said.
The spaceship was roughly the size of a roomy recreational vehicle. In it, the Red Man would be able to walk and move and read and sleep and do many other activities. Two people could get along comfortably in there.
I wondered if he would take us to the stars.
I took the Red Man’s coffin nearer to it and it came alive.
Lights lit up and flashed.
The ship lifted off the ground and hovered.
I could hear the Red Man starting to move inside. His proximity to the ship had shorted out the music in his ears. He was awake again.
He knocked on the lid.
I set it down. But it was Ms. Crystobal who opened it.
The Red Man sat up and she immediately stared at him. She had opened a telepathic connection to his mind. They were talking.
The Red Man blinked. He looked a little shocked having to communicate without blood dripping from his mouth.
Finally she nodded at him and he nodded back, consenting to something that neither Wyn nor myself could hear.
The Red Man stood up and stepped out of his coffin. He walked passed me, glancing into my eyes as he went. He seemed to know me somehow.
He stepped before Wyn and looked at him. The Red Man towered over the Blood Vivicanti, his genetically mutated child.
Wyn met his eyes.
It was like watching two silverbacks sniff each other.
There was an explosion. The mansion shook.
Wyn looked at us. “Lowen,” he said.
I didn’t know how Lowen had gotten to us that quickly, but I knew that Wyn was right: Lowen was there because the mansion was suddenly filled with Theo’s scent, along with the stench of a thousand Sleeper Devils, all filling the mansion too, packing themselves tightly inside.
They were coming up the stairs. They would find us in minutes.
“We can take them,” I said to Wyn.
But he shook his head. “Ms. Crystobal and I will handle them,” he said to me. “You get the Red Man as far from Lowen as possible.”
The Red Man then touched his spacecraft. A hatch opened along the ship’s glossy surface.
I hoped our first stop might be to the Orion Nebula.
Ms. Crystobal looked at the Red Man and spoke with him telepathically. He nodded, she went inside, and he followed her. Wyn gestured for me to follow them both.
Inside, the spaceship was impressive. Everything looked white and cool and smooth and neat.
Ms. Crystobal and the Red Man went to the cockpit. It was made of curves and lights. She was entering a command into the illuminated controls.
“Wyn and I need you to escape with the Red Man while we deal with Lowen and his Sleeper Devils,” she replied. “I’ve reprogrammed the automatic pilot. You’ve got a new destination now. It was set to return to Khariton. But we can’t have you going back there.”
My heart was crushed.
I studied the controls. They were written in a language that I could not understand.
“Where are we going?” I asked her.
The spaceship started to rock. Lowen and
his Sleeper Devils had found us. They were outside, clamoring to get in.
Wyn looked at Ms. Crystobal. She opened a portal to the library.
“We’ll distract them while you get away,” she said.
She and Wyn stepped through the portal and into the library.
“Wait,” I called after them. “Where are we going?”
Inside the library now, Wyn and Ms. Crystobal turned to look at me.
She started to close the portal. Slowly it shrunk inward.
“You’re going to a place I used to live a long time ago,” she replied, “during what you would call the Old West. At that time it was called Junction Station, where several railways converged.”
I searched through my photographic memory, but I could not recall any information about it.
“What’s it called today?” I asked.
Ms. Crystobal raised an eyebrow at me just before she closed the portal. She had shrunk it to the size of a pinhole when I heard her response.
“You’re going,” she said, “to the Locomotive Deadyards.”
To be continued…
Coming next in
The Blood Vivicanti
Part 6
I left the safety of the Locomotive Deadyards. The Red Man went with me.
I had started calling him, “Red,” and I was beginning to enjoy his company very much. Yes, I was glad that he was by my side. He was a good helper and friend.
Together we flew in his Kharetie spaceship to New Orleans.
It was the season of Mardi Gras. The streets were thronged with parades and beads and Bacchic festivities.
Strangely, I felt right at home.
Red parked his spacecraft in a warehouse packed with parade floats. It blended in perfectly.
So did he. We walked up and down the crowded streets of the French Quarter. People put thick beads around his neck and kissed his cheeks because they thought his costume was the best they’d ever seen.
I’d never seen him look so nervous. His red cheeks blushed a deeper shade of purple.
Only his reserve stuck out like a sore thumb.
We spent a few days looking for the right set of people whose blood I should drink and whose Blood Memories I should eat.
We squatted in empty mansions and shot gun houses. And one desperate night we slept in one of the haunted crypts in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.
Incidentally, a ghost woke me up that night. She was carrying a ghostly lantern and looking for her lost lover.
I told her to try the next sepulcher over, the one with the stone cherubs over the mantle.
The ghostly woman nodded and thanked me in a wispy voice. Then she left us alone for the rest of the night.
But she had scared Red half out of his wits. He didn’t like the strange ways of human ghosts. And he couldn’t get back to sleep. He was fearful that she would return any moment to shine the ghostly light of her lantern in his face.
I held him all night. I stroked his bald head. My fingernails stroked his red skin. I hummed a human lullaby.
He was so big. I was so tiny.
It was nice to hold in my arm such a reversal of power.
It was nice to hold him too.
It took a few days and nights, but soon we made a list of everyone from whom I should drink.
The first person on the list was my personal choice. It was an old homeless man whom I’d seen several times.
Red did not like this choice at all. He had learned through his own Blood Memories that shaking his head was a great way to say, No! without saying a word.
He was shaking his head a lot.
But the old homeless man impressed me, in the same way that Theo’s old man had impressed him, all those months ago – it seemed like centuries by then. Theo had drunk that old man’s blood because he had wanted to drink the blood of someone who might not have been skilled in life, yet was skilled with living.
My old homeless man was like that. He had never been a drunk since he never drank. He begged for money all day and all night, but he used only a little bit of it for himself. He took most of his earnings from begging to a small church that was in disrepair, a church begging for money to fix a hole in the roof, and he put it in the collection box. He did this every day, several times a day too, lest some cowardly thief try to steal that money from him. My beggar was helping other beggars.
I loved him for that!
It actually happened on the day I decided to drink his blood. A thief tried to take his money. But I got there right in the nick of time.
Red was following me reluctantly, his arms cross, his head still shaking, No! in disagreement.
I caught the thief right as he drew out his knife. I lifted him off the ground and threw him over the nearest roof.
My old homeless man looked at me the same way he had looked at the thief – with a kind smile and a twinkle in his eye. Most people would have been terrified.
“You’re an angel,” he said to me in an old man’s gravelly tone.
“Maybe I’m a devil,” I said.
“Devils are angels,” he said.
“I need something from you,” I said.
“Will it hurt?” he asked.
“For a second,” I said, “and then there will be happiness.”
“Okay,” he said. “Take what you need from me.”
I told him to close his eyes. He did.
I went around behind him. My Probiscus extended from the tip of my tongue. The shadows in my mind would not let me forget the horror of drinking Nell’s black blood. But the determination of my mind to destroy Lowen the Dark Man scattered the terror of those shadows.
“For Theo,” I said as I saw the sweet spot on the back of the old man’s neck. But then, almost as an afterthought, I added, “And for me too.”
I pierced the old man’s neck and drank his blood and ate his Blood Memories.
He said, “Oh!” and then he went limp in my arms.
No one else had ever done that before. They usually stumbled way with a euphoric smile on their face, remembering nothing from my pierce, except for a foggy sense of pure pleasure.
The Blood Memories of my old homeless man filled me. I saw the world through his eyes and I realized that the pint that I had swallowed down was the last pint his heart had pumped. It stopped beating the instant the tip of my tongue slipped out from his neck.
My old homeless man died in my arms with a contended smile on his face, but I don’t think it was from my venom. I hadn’t released it.
For a moment I was tempted to believe that I had killed him.
But I knew that that was not true. The early surging of his Blood Memories told me so. His heart simply gave out. It was just his time. It was as if it was meant to be. Call it fate. Call it a Divine Plan. Yet I cannot allow myself to believe that my pierce and his death were some sort of happy accident.
Serendipity exists when only accidents do not hurt. Otherwise it would be called a tragedy.
The old man’s Blood Memories went to work in me.
He had been homeless by choice. He had no fear of death, no fear of the future, no fear at all. He took life one day at a time, and when that was too much, he took it one minute at a time because sometimes a whole day can be lived in sixty fleeting seconds.
I knew that I had made the right choice.
The old man’s Blood Memories would be the fire that tempered all the others I would soon swallow down and digest in my photographic memory.
I admit: I had gotten my appetite back for blood.
It really only takes a pint or two.
Red and I then went down the list that we had made. It was filled with fighters and thinkers.
Red approved it. He stopped shaking his head.
I drank the blood of seventeen martial artists, each skilled in a different style. There was Kung Fu and T'ai chi and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and Nguni Stick Fighting and West African bare-knuckle boxing, and let’s not forget that wonderful Canadian martial art, Defendo.
I also drank the blood of three chess grand masters.
All those Blood Memories were teeming within me like a perfect storm.
And I was the perfect storm.
I was ready for a fight.
Look for more in
The Blood Vivicanti
Part 6
OTHER BOOKS BY BECKET
Key the Steampunk Vampire Girl and the Dungeon of Despair
Key the Steampunk Vampire Girl and the Tower Tomb of Time
The Christmas King
The Door to Heaven
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
BECKET
Becket has a BA in music composition, an MA in Systematic Theology, and an MS in Industrial/ Organizational Psychology. He was a Benedictine monk for many years. For the last nine years, he has worked as Anne Rice’s assistant, and has spent that time learning from her. He is also the author of Key the Steampunk Vampire Girl and the Dungeon of Despair. You can find Becket at www.becket.me
ANNE RICE
Anne Rice has written over 30 books about vampires, werewolves and other such blood drinkers. Her works include Interview With the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and most recently The Wolves of Midwinter. You can find Anne at www.annerice.com