Blood Revealed

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  “Before the Blood Stone was formed and the three species contained within it,” Nial continued, “the Elah were the strongest of the three. They were the political leaders. It is likely they will be the quickest to learn the ways of modern humans and to take advantage of our…your weaknesses.”

  Winter caught her breath as Nial corrected himself. Had it been a deliberate slip, to remind them he was not human? Or had he momentarily lapsed into the centuries old habits of passing as a human?

  * * * * *

  “We have saved the worst for last,” Roman said and waited for the reaction to die down. “The last of the species are the Summanus. They are the least human-like in appearance. There is very little about them that you could relate to, yet despite that, they are intelligent, self-aware and utterly ruthless. Before they were bound into the Blood Stone, they had carved their way to victory over all other species by enslaving humans and using them as the shock troops in their war against the Ĉiela and the Elah. They use humans for food.” He waited out the collective in-drawn breath of his audience. “They see humans as food,” he finished.

  This time, the outrage drowned him out.

  * * * * *

  Blythe was barely aware of the grip Simone had on her fingers. Eloise had her phone out and was texting someone, while Jake stared at the laptop screen with a fierce focus, his shaggy hair flopping over his forehead, just like Blythe’s tended to when she wasn’t strictly controlling it.

  “This is beyond major,” he breathed.

  “Mom, you should write about this, about the three enemies, on your blog,” Simone said.

  “We don’t even know if this is for real yet,” Blythe pointed out.

  “But it makes sense!” Jake shot out, tearing his gaze away from the screen. “Look at all the weird shit that has been happening. Raining frogs, floods across deserts, entire forests up and dying, trees bleeding, whole flocks of birds dropping dead.”

  Blythe blinked at his fierceness and his detailed knowledge of the phenomena that had been plaguing the world lately. “That might just be a coincidence,” she pointed out.

  “It’s not.” He sounded completely certain and confident and turned back to look at the screen once more.

  Eloise went over to the coffee table, picked up the remote and turned on the big screen TV. CNN came on, as that had been the last channel they had been running. The same Los Angeles conference was showing that Jake had on the computer.

  Eloise clicked through the channels, giving each one a few seconds on the screen. Every single one of the major networks was running the conference live. “Donna Blatson says that every channel is showing this or some other version,” Eloise said. “There are simultaneous press conferences around the world.”

  KILM was showing a different scene. Eloise paused long enough for Blythe to absorb the differences. There were three people in front of the cameras, two of them dark skinned coastal Indians. One was speaking slowly and seriously, in what she suspected was Hindi.

  “India,” Simone murmured.

  “Try BBC US,” Jake said.

  Eloise clicked again.

  The man standing in front of the cameras had the same serious expression as the others. He was very tall and slender and spoke with an educated British accent. Blythe found herself staring at his eyes. They were mesmerizing. Very pale, almost colorless. There was a dark-haired woman next to him who looked glamorous in the way most European women seemed to be able to pull off without effort.

  An older man stepped up beside the two of them and spoke into the microphones. “We’ll take questions now.” He pointed. “Yes, Barney?”

  “Go back to CNN,” Blythe said. “Then come and eat, Eloise. Everyone, let’s just listen and eat. We can talk afterward.”

  Jake spun the laptop around to face him. “I’m going to take some notes for you, Mom.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Blythe said, a small tendril of alarm touching the center of her chest and making her stomach clamp. She reached for the salad bowl to disguise her reaction. “The blog is about personal security. This…whatever this is…it isn’t about personal security. It’s a much bigger scale than that.”

  All three of her kids looked at her, with various expressions of surprise.

  “Of course this is about personal security,” Jake said flatly, sounding far older than his fifteen years and far too much like his father. He pointed at the TV. “The Summa-whatever they are think of humans as food. You think they’re going to try to take out a whole city with their version of an A-bomb? They’re going to hunt us, Mom. They’re going to pick us off one at a time. What’s not personal about that?”

  Blythe ladled far too much salad onto her plate, a rare confusion destroying her attention. She made herself nod. “You’re right,” she said. “I hadn’t thought it through.”

  Jake grinned. “You’re still fogged about Patrick Sauvage being a vampire, is all.”

  Blythe picked up her fork and shook her head. “That sounds so strange, when you say it out loud like that.” She nodded toward the TV. “Let’s just listen,” she said firmly. “Maybe I’ll be more inclined to believe this once they get through questions.”

  She took a bite of salad, trying to lead by good example and grimaced. The lettuce was soggy.

  * * * * *

  About halfway through the question period, when she had reached the point where she couldn’t eat one more bite and had settled back to listen to the rest of the broadcast from her dining chair, Blythe realized that no one at the conference—the media as well as the interview subjects—had spoken the word that exploded in her brain with the shocking heaviness of truth.

  No one had spoken of war.

  Yet from past experience, Blythe knew in her bones that what was coming was nothing less than war. If these people, these vampires were right, then war would cover the globe. Not a single corner of the world would be spared.

  War was coming to Los Angeles, to her neighborhood and perhaps right into her own home, where her kids lived.

  It was hard to concentrate on the questions and answers, after that. She did it because she didn’t want them to see her fear.

  Chapter Three

  Nial and the leaders of the Pro Libertatus had been very specific about the question period that each conference would end with. Dominic had been part of the crew to pass the directions on to the other groups around the world.

  “You let it run as long as they have questions to ask,” one of the Libertatus PR people had explained. “You don’t refuse to answer any question and you keep answering until they give up and go home. We avoid any implication that we have something to hide. We’ve been hiding forever. To overcome that we must be open and fulsome. It will take a long time.”

  Nial had explained it better. “This is the first time they will have heard any of this. We all had years and sometimes centuries to wrap our heads around it. We have to give them space and time to do the same.”

  Dominic was glad he had found an empty chair, because forty minutes after Senator Corcoran had opened the room to questions, the media were still shouting each other down, trying to wedge in their query just ahead of each other. The louder they spoke, the greater the chance they would be heard and answered.

  Dominic was aware of the noise only because it was registering on a lot of minds as uncomfortably loud, making thinking difficult. He didn’t hear it himself, of course, but he could “hear” it through everyone else who registered it consciously.

  The media were old hands at this sort of jostling for attention and most of them only considered the high ambient noise levels in a subconscious way and adjusted their microphone levels and recording equipment settings to suit the conditions.

  Dominic was also able to measure how the steady, calm and factual responses Kate, Roman, Garrett and Patrick were giving were being received. It was interesting to see the four of them through the eyes and perceptions of the journalists, who were cynical by nature.

&n
bsp; Although they were being given absolute and unglamorous truth, most of the media in the room were using journalistic standards to assess the information. They were patiently waiting for proof, rapidly considering alternative sources that could verify the fantastic story they were being fed. Many of them, having grown up in Tinseltown, wanted to see the vampires perform. They wanted fangs. Blood.

  There was very little empathy for the four people being so thoroughly grilled and exposed there in front of them.

  Dominic shifted on the chair. The matter of proof had been discussed thoroughly. He had been surprised to learn there was no easy way for a vampire to demonstrate he was what he was.

  “We’ve spent our entire existence hiding who we are,” Nial had explained. “We don’t have the equivalent of a human’s business card to announce ourselves.”

  Sebastian had been even more frank, speaking quietly as he bent over a circuit board, peering at the pathways, when Dominic had asked him about it. “Sure, we could show our fangs, even though it feels to us like exposing your genitals would to you.” And the hot, writhing discomfort the notion gave Sebastian did more to convince Dominic of that truth than any of the words he had used.

  “If it helped, sure, we would do it,” Sebastian added. “It won’t help. Just like feeding in front of the cameras won’t help. None of what makes vampires different from humans will help convince humans we really are vampires, because most of it is negative. We don’t sleep. We don’t age. We drink blood using fangs to tear open human skin.”

  The litany made Dominic grimace. “It won’t look good on camera,” he surmised.

  “Besides, this generation of humans has grown up watching movies with special effects that are indistinguishable from the real thing. If they see a man with fangs on their television screen, they’re going to figure he’s got a really good set of prosthetics, or it was digitally added to the footage.” Sebastian shook his head. “We can’t prove we’re vampire in any way that humans are going to believe. They’ve become so sophisticated, they’re outsmarting themselves.”

  “Then how…?”

  Sebastian shrugged. “Time. Time will prove everything for us. The media are going to dig into our lives, turn them inside out and report on everything they discover, including the serial identities we’ve all used. And sooner or later, the Others will show themselves and do the work for us.”

  Dominic recalled Sebastian’s prediction as the question period moved into the second hour. The rate and intensity of the questions did not seem to slow at all and despite the sometimes sharply personal aspect of them, the four people behind the microphones answered all of them.

  From where he was sitting, Dominic could see the screen of the laptop sitting on the table in front of them and it seemed that the other conferences around the world were continuing for just as long as this one. No one had moved from behind the microphones. All of them were still busy speaking and taking questions.

  Dominic wondered how the general public was reacting to this. Were the networks still airing the conferences? Or were they just recording for later? Either way, it would help spread the facts, as the footage would be analyzed and discussed on late night shows, daily shows and news channels everywhere, as well as filtering out onto the social networks on-line, where they would be even more thoroughly filleted, shared and liked…or not liked.

  Then Patrick Sauvage stepped up to the microphone as one of the reporters shouted at him.

  The question sounded aggressive even to Dominic.

  “Patrick! We want to hear it from you. Tell us. What’s it like being a vampire?”

  Dominic found himself dipping into the actor’s mind, even though he didn’t want to. In a big room like this, with nearly five hundred people reacting to bad news, it was difficult to focus on just one person and sample their thoughts. Patrick seemed different. His thoughts were clearer than anyone else’s. Maybe, because he had been rehearsed to death, he was thinking in a well-worn channel that made his thoughts uncluttered as a result.

  Dominic could feel the man’s fear blooming underneath the almost meditative calm of his superficial thoughts. Patrick had been dreading having to answer truthfully about his private life and thoughts. He had been hiding the truth about himself for decades, just like the vampires had been. Now he had to come clean and it was terrifying.

  None of his fear showed on his face. He gave the reporter a grim smile. “It’s a relief in many ways. I haven’t had to stave off cravings for a drink for months, just to start.”

  There was something like a soft breezy wash of laughter from around the room. Tension was still too high for everyone to have a good belly laugh, though.

  “Is that why you asked to be made a vampire?” Howard demanded and the room fell completely silent, except for electronic cameras humming. “So you would stop drinking?”

  Patrick didn’t blink. His pleasant expression didn’t change. “Among other things, yes, that was one of the reasons.”

  And Dominic could almost feel the man’s fear rise up like mercury in a thermometer, almost overwhelming him. Yet he didn’t move or flinch as the babble of reaction exploded over the room like fireworks.

  And even though the man had a baby grand piano sitting gathering dust in a forgotten corner of his house, Dominic felt a keen moment of empathy for him and a grudging respect for his courage.

  * * * * *

  Simone wandered into the kitchen, her bunny slippers slapping the tiles softly. She yawned as she opened the fridge and looked inside. Then she glanced at Blythe where she still sat with Jake, watching the TV from the table. “It’s still going?” she asked.

  Jake was still taking notes, typing furiously. It had only occurred to Blythe about an hour ago to wonder when he had learned how to type with ten fingers. It was an oblique reminder that her kids were growing up way too fast for her to keep up with. They were having experiences and learning life lessons that she could not be a part of. That would happen more and more often as they got older.

  “Only CNN are running it now,” Jake said. “And we have to keep jumping to affiliate stations to get the full coverage.”

  “How many questions can they have?” Simone asked, picking up the milk carton and shaking it, as if that would help her make up her mind.

  “They haven’t asked half the stuff I want to know,” Blythe said.

  “I don’t think military strategists are common among journalists, Mom,” Jake pointed out.

  “You’ll just have to ask them yourself,” Simone said and let the fridge door shut solidly, cutting off the light.

  Jake snorted.

  Blythe had to smile, too. “I’m just a hotel receptionist now,” she reminded them both. “The chances of me ever getting to ask a direct question or two are so remote, I would have more chance of dating Chris Hemsworth than sitting down with vampires and studying their military strengths and weaknesses.”

  “Then you believe this stuff?” Simone asked, surprised.

  “I’d rather have proof,” Blythe said honestly. “Although, if you listen to it long enough, it starts to make a strange sort of sense.”

  “Besides, isn’t Chris Hemsworth married?” Jake asked.

  “And younger than you,” Simone said pertly.

  Then Jake pointed at the TV. “Isn’t this conference happening in your hotel? That’s the logo, behind them on the wall, isn’t it?”

  Blythe had noticed the logo a long time ago and didn’t look. “It’s a huge hotel. There’s a whole office full of people who take care of the events in the convention wing. Garrett and the others don’t stay in the hotel. I’ve never met any of them. I’ve never even seen them except on TV.”

  Simone rubbed the apple she had selected against her pajama pants. “Maybe you’ll get lucky,” she said. “Just think, you could be one of the first people to meet a real, live vampire.”

  “They’re not alive,” Blythe pointed out.

  “Anyway,” Jake shot back, “who says we haven
’t all met a vampire before now? They’ve been passing as human. We could have had neighbors and teachers who were vampires. The mailman could be one. There’s no way to tell if they don’t want you to know.”

  The silence in the room was broken only by the soft tones of Kate Lindenstream answering a question that Blythe had missed and none of the director’s words registered, because Blythe was too busy dealing with Jake’s startling observation. Her chest squeezed. Jake had put his finger on a complication she hadn’t considered until now. How did they tell vampires apart?

  “That’s…creepy,” Simone said.

  “It is,” Blythe agreed softly as Simone shuffled back toward her bedroom.

  Blythe got to her feet and picked up her coffee mug, intending to rinse it out. “We’ll just have to find out as much as we can about vampires and about the other races they were talking about.” She ran the faucet, holding her hand under the water stream to test the temperature.

  “Know thy enemy?” Jake asked.

  “I don’t think the vampires are an enemy,” Blythe replied, placing the mug upside down on the drainer.

  “Just because they say they’re not?” Jake asked. His tone was curious, rather than confrontational.

  Blythe frowned as she sat back down at the table, thinking it through. “No one does anything without a reason,” she said slowly. “If this isn’t some huge hoax, then because we have no corroboration or proof, for now we have to take everything the vampires have said at face value. With me, so far?”

  Jake nodded. His clear blue eyes, so much like his father’s, were steady and filled with sharp interest.