Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel

by Brennan, M. L.

  “I’m not sure,” I hedged. Honestly I didn’t want to see.

  “Madeline never explained it to us, of course. Why she chose us. At first I thought it was just a bit of snobbery—prominent families, good looks, that kind of thing. But Grace never agreed. She said that it had to be something more—all the fuss that Madeline had to go through to acquire us, particularly given the likelihood that either of us would die at some point in the process. Grace thought it was something in our temperaments that Madeline wanted. That she was hoping for something.”

  I shook my head. “Rebelliousness? That doesn’t seem very likely.” My mother had been experimenting with me—she’d admitted as much to my face. But this was just patently unrealistic.

  Henry laughed again, from his belly. “You disagree now, but think it over. You don’t get as old as Madeline did without being twice as crafty as a fisher cat.” His laughter disappeared, and he was gravely serious. “You’ll have time to think about it, of course. Centuries upon centuries. It does cheer me a bit, you know, my boy. When I’m dust and not one human even remembers I existed, there will still be that little scrap of me, that vestigial tail of humanity, walking around in you. Or flying. Do you think they’ll have flying cars? I’m sure they will. You’ll see them.” A faraway look passed over his face, and a smile tugged at his mouth, one that had just a hint of his usual mania. “Or not. If they blow up the world, of course, even the vampires will die.” Then, like a light being flipped, he was back to lucid and serious, the switch so seamless that it was downright eerie. “I know why you’re here, son. Grace gave you the first half of it, and now I need to finish the job. By finishing me.” A brief giggle, almost a titter, the kind you more usually hear when someone is half a dozen martinis to the wind, then painfully sane again. “You should do it now,” he said, the tapping of his fingers stopping as he curled them into fists. “That blood is dead inside me—it’s just sludge. I don’t like it—too quiet. Go on, then.” He frowned, irritated at me, snappish and upset.

  I hesitated for just a second, then reached into the bag and took the needle out. He flicked a look over it, then back to me, that irritation remaining. I took a step toward his IV, then stopped. “I’m sorry, Henry,” I said, feeling the uselessness of the words even as they left my mouth. What did you say to a person before you put him down like a senile ferret that was peeing all over the house? I couldn’t even offer him a last meal, like a death row convict, since the only thing he’d been consuming for months was a protein-rich slurry being shunted in through his feeding tube.

  The irritation melted from his face, and Henry smiled at me, sudden charisma and charm glowing off him like the sun for the briefest of moments before fading away, a small echo of the person he might’ve once been. “And what have you to be sorry about, son? Being born? I do appreciate you doing it yourself, though. Like Old Yeller, I guess.” He snickered, then pitched his voice high, imitating a young boy. “Yes, Mama, but he was my dog. I’ll do it.”

  Anger flashed through me. “You’re not a dog, Henry,” I said sharply.

  “No, I’m not,” he agreed, with the utmost gentleness. “A dog is a loyal, loving thing. Maybe I used to be that, but I’m not anymore.” He nodded at his IV stand. “Better go ahead and put that in, son. Sometimes I bite, you know. You saw, of course.” Slow pleasure filled his eyes, a fondness as he lazed over old memories, and there was the quick flash of his pale pink tongue dragging unconsciously over his dry lips. “Saw me bite old Arnold. What a pleasure that was. I was sorry when you made me stop.” His smile now was awful, nothing but teeth. “Is that what you need, son?” he asked conversationally. “To be reminded? Yes, I would kill him again if he was before me. And Conrad. And Maire. I would kill the whole world if I could—just bite and tear until it was nothing but an ocean of blood for me to wade through.” His fingers started tapping again, much faster, and I turned away from him and walked quickly around the table until I was at the saline bag hanging on the IV stand. Then, not letting myself hesitate for a second, lest Henry continue talking, I pushed the needle into the bag above the saline line and pushed the plunger hard, injecting all the morphine to mix with the saline. There was no change of Henry’s expression as he watched me, but he wrinkled his chin thoughtfully, and said, “Yes,” and his voice was once again so calm and tranquil. “That was what you needed.”

  I watched the individual droplets of the liquid enter into the drip chamber, then into the IV line that led into Henry’s arm. “Good-bye, Henry.”

  He watched me, thoughtfully, silently, for a long moment. Then his eyes relaxed, and the lids began to drift shut.

  I relaxed then. Just a little, not even something that I even realized that I was doing at the moment that I actually did it, though of course that was too late by then. Because the moment my muscles made that infinitesimal movement, that my lizard brain decided that Henry was no longer a threat, that was the moment that he moved.

  His left arm came up with a speed that wasn’t human, and with a strength that he owed to alien blood, and the restraint on his wrist tore. How long he’d been working away at it, subtly and carefully, in those moments when Conrad wasn’t watching, who knew? Who can say the patience that he must have exhibited, how much control he’d needed to restrain himself from attacking Maire or Conrad when they were in range, to wait until that moment he wanted, when I was near him, and my guard was down?

  He’d surprised me, and I couldn’t move back fast enough. His hand grabbed the front of my shirt, with enough force and strength that I could feel his nails rip at my skin, and he hauled me down, down onto the bed, so that I fell across his chest, face-to-face with him, unable to do anything but stare at his open mouth, at those teeth that I knew could rip muscle from bone. Time stretched—somewhere in the distance I could hear a door slam open, and I knew that Conrad was running out of the observation room, coming with his stun gun to protect me, but he might as well have been in another state for all the good he could do me in this moment, when I felt Henry’s mouth against my cheek, could feel the heat of his breath in my ear, the power of the hand at my chest. I started to bring my own hands up, but I knew it would be too late, and I braced myself for the pain.

  “I don’t want you to feel badly about it, you know,” Henry whispered in my ear, and I realized that the pain wasn’t going to come. I froze, listening to Henry’s voice. “I truly died when I was twenty-one, when Madeline changed me. This is just finalizing things, really.” He lifted his hand out from between us, then reached up and, with exquisite gentleness, ran it over my hair. I felt him breathe in deeply. “They never let Grace touch you, you know. I think that’s why she killed those doctors after they cut you out of her, handed you off to be carried away to Madeline. But I’m glad I got to do this, even if it’s just now.” His hand moved down, gave me a soft, affectionate pat on my cheek. “But do try to remember me sometimes, son. Just a little. Every now and again over the next half millennia. To a human, you know, that’s practically eternity.”

  Henry’s breathing slowed, and his hand slid limply off my cheek, onto my shoulder. Slowly, cautiously, I moved my hands up, pushed myself off him, and looked down. His breath was slowing, until I saw his chest stop moving entirely.

  I looked left. Conrad was standing in the doorway of the prison cube, the stun gun in his right hand, and a Beretta sidearm in his left. He was staring at me, chest heaving as if he’d just run a marathon, a mixture of horror and wonder in his expression.

  “I thought you were a dead man, Fort,” he said, never taking his eyes away from my face, at the miracle of my unravaged skin. “Or that at least you would never be as pretty as that again.” Conrad shook his head. “Anyone else in the world in that position, and Henry would never have let them come up again.”

  “I know.” I swallowed hard. “Hand me the saw, Conrad. It’s time to finish this.”

  * * *

  I felt it the mom
ent that Henry truly died—after I’d removed his brain, and the moment that I pulled his still heart out from its place within his chest. When Grace died, it had been like a snapping inside me, and I’d tasted blood in my mouth. This time, though, it was like a lock was turned in me, and every muscle in my body tightened into a rictus that left me crashing to the floor. My vision blacked out, my hearing was gone, and that was when the seizures started. Then there was a white nothingness, and my brain shut off, and the transition was finished.

  Chapter Seven

  A week and a half after Henry’s death, I arrived home to my apartment after yet another meeting with my siblings in Newport. I took extra time when unlocking the front door—cautiously putting incrementally more pressure on the key until I felt the lock disengage, then turned the knob with the kind of caution that I would normally reserve for handling fine china. I’d snapped my key off in the door lock twice, and ripped the knob off the door once in the time that had passed since my transition. I was slowly figuring out how to handle the increase in physical power that had suddenly been present when I woke up from my transition, but it was a strange process. After Grace’s death it had mostly been my reflexes that were initially heightened, with the increases in my physical strength trickling in slowly enough that I’d been able to adjust my day-to-day routine without really even being aware of it. This, however, had forced me to pay attention to all sorts of things that I hadn’t had to consciously think about before—closing car doors, turning keys, unzipping zippers, breaking eggs without smashing the insides everywhere. So far Dan had been remarkably patient with my sudden morph in a Hulk-like creature of destruction in our apartment, but I was really hoping that this part of the process would pass soon—particularly after the previous night, where I’d broken the ON button on the remote by hitting it with apparently way too much force.

  The most frustrating part, of course, was that it was the oldest skills that were most affected, the ones that I did largely on autopilot. Whenever I worked out or sparred with Chivalry or Suzume, I had no problems, because those skills were new enough that I was always consciously thinking about how much force to put into a punch or a block. Meanwhile, I’d broken half a dozen pairs of shoelaces, and managed to destroy one of the grommets on my favorite pair of sneakers.

  Once the door was safely open, I trudged inside. I was absolutely exhausted, but there was nothing physical about it—it was the mental exhaustion of too many meetings that had gone absolutely nowhere, and left me feeling that I could’ve spent the entire day sleeping in bed and accomplished the same amount. The staircase decision remained the high-water mark of cooperation between me, Chivalry, and Prudence. When it came to actually dealing with the decisions of running our territory, we consistently deadlocked on everything. It was that meeting chaired by Madeline all over again—unable to agree on how to thoroughly address any issue, our days were actually spent on determining stopgap compromise measures that just kept everything in stasis on the assumption that more time would allow us to actually figure out a real way of dealing with the issue—something that seemed, day by day, more and more like a complete fantasy.

  It was as if, terrifying as the thought was, my siblings and I were a microcosm of Congress.

  The attaché request from Gil Kivela had been put off by an agreement to ask him to put it in a formal written petition, in triplicate, as a way to buy more time for us to continue arguing in circles, given that it didn’t seem likely that Prudence would ever agree to it. The succubi issue continued to stagnate—I continued making regular phone calls to them, and there had been some bright news lately from Saskia when she’d reported that Nicholas had picked up some under-the-table work washing dishes at a local restaurant, and that she’d been putting up signs around town for housekeeping services at a cut-rate price. I’d told Saskia that it was still my goal to get them to the casino towns of Connecticut, but I knew that they’d started to give up hope of that when she told me, in a purposefully bright tone, that if they were still in the town in the spring, they’d figured that they could get some jobs doing basic yard work. Meanwhile, the adults were taking turns driving to the Newark Airport to hunt—which was something that no amount of forced optimism could make sound anything other than truly grim.

  My mind was briefly pulled from the depressing state of affairs as I put the portable picnic cooler I was carrying on the kitchen countertop. The completion of my transition had altered my digestive system, meaning that I could now process human blood successfully—and was, in fact, now reliant on it for my continued health. I hadn’t drunk directly from a person’s vein yet—though I knew that it wouldn’t be much longer before I had to, as adult vampires had to do that every fifteen days or so or risk dangerous effects—but I had been drinking human blood. Every other day I had carefully poured out an eight-ounce cup in the morning, then another in the evening, and drunk it down like a particularly disgusting medicine. I’d tried waiting three days between servings, which was the schedule that my brother was on, but quickly discovered that that wasn’t going to work—I became absolutely ravenous, with a hunger that regular food just couldn’t touch. Just as my sister had promised, blood was not something that benefited from sitting in a fridge—after just a few hours in the fridge the blood developed a distinctly unpleasant edge. After one day it was awful. And after two I would just spoon half the sugar bowl in it and try to just down it like cheap beer at a frat party. I’d attempted to freeze it to thaw later, hoping that would make the process easier, but that had tasted just like frozen and thawed milk—utterly foul.

  The only silver lining to the whole scenario was that I hadn’t had to try to find a human to provide the blood for me—my siblings were working overtime to keep me stocked up with the vampire version of take-home casseroles. I didn’t want to think about how many people they were pressing into service to donate a pint here and there for me, which my siblings were then obligated to carefully agitate to remove the clotting factors in order to allow the blood to sit in my fridge without becoming a partially solid mass—right now I was just more than willing to accept the help, rather than attempt the process myself. They’d been slipping me their efforts separately—just today, for example, Chivalry had pressed the little picnic cooler into my hand as he was walking me to my car—inside had been one of those expensive double-wall stainless steel thermoses, with a sheet of reheating instructions carefully written out in Chivalry’s beautiful copperplate and taped to the top. When I’d actually gotten into the Scirocco, I found Prudence’s contribution on the passenger seat—a Chinese takeout soup container filled with blood, with DRINK ME written on the top in black Sharpie.

  I unloaded the thermos and the take-out container. Out of necessity, I’d had to try to figure out a system to deal with my new nutritional requirements, and that had involved buying three plastic water pitchers from Walmart—one was blue, one was red, and the third was Hello Kitty (I’d run up against a selection issue). For today, I took the Hello Kitty pitcher off our drying rack from where I’d put it yesterday after I washed it. I popped off the top, then poured in the blood from the thermos and the take-out containers, putting those in the sink to wash and return to my siblings. Then I replaced the Hello Kitty lid, and put the pitcher into the fridge, behind the blue thermos, which had tomorrow’s blood ration in it—the red pitcher was at the front of the row, closest to the door, and I knew that it had just a few sips’ worth of blood left it in, just on the edge of being completely undrinkable, but enough to offer a quick supplement for what would otherwise have been my bloodless day.

  It was definitely a very weird new normal. Though if I could’ve stuck with this level forever, I would’ve taken it. At least the minutiae of managing my blood, and figuring out how not to rip the tabs off my zippers, had some kind of frame of reference. But I knew that all too soon I was going to have to take that last step and feed directly from a human. It was my own personal Rubicon, which once I crossed I
could never come back from. Both Chivalry and Prudence had offered to help me—Chivalry with all the delicacy and tenderness one could ask for, Prudence with all the blunt eagerness for expedience to ensure a truly scarring experience.

  I’d turned them both down. I would handle it myself, I’d told them. In my own way.

  I just didn’t know exactly what that way was, or when I would be ready for it.

  I started washing out the containers (for a guy who ate human organ meat, Dan had been pretty unrelenting in his proposal of a new apartment rule about the immediate cleaning of any containers that had previously held blood), then stopped and mentally kicked myself. I pulled open one of the drawers and withdrew a stack of Post-it notes, all of which had the following message prewritten on them:

  FORT’S PROTEIN SHAKE—PLEASE DON’T DRINK.

  I pulled one off the stack and slapped it on the side of the Hello Kitty pitcher.

  Between my blood pitchers and Dan’s human organ meat, our fridge situation had become a little stressful given Jaison’s regular time in the apartment. Dan had never been overly worried about Jaison delving into the fridge drawer that contained his organ meats—all carefully wrapped in butcher paper and looking completely innocuous from the outside—but the leftover situation had been a concern. The ghoul’s approach had been impressively straightforward—he’d labeled any leftovers with human contents as “property of Fortitude Scott” and had told Jaison that I was freaky when it came to personal food properties, and relied on good manners to do the rest. My one request in that situation had been for Dan to use only opaque Tupperware containers to store those items—both for my own comfort (I admitted to being more than a little squeamish about shepherd’s pie that contained human liver), and to avoid the embarrassment of Jaison thinking that I was a backsliding vegetarian.