~*~
Rebuffed by Dell, Ryan stopped a girl named Lori and asked her out for Saturday night. He picked her at random, liking the way she looked. Although she was not as pretty as Dell, she was no dog. She accepted, but suggested he might like to accompany her tonight to a party with her friends. "Loden's friends," she amended.
"Who's Loden?"
"You'll see." She smiled. "You'll like our friends." There was an intriguing twinkle in her eye. The rest of the day Ryan wondered if he would.
Like Loden's friends, that is. Lori's friends. He knew who they were. The kids who were into heavy metal, gothic literature, body piercing, and thumbing their noses at society. But Lori herself was pretty cute. She was as perky as a cheerleader in Halloween drag. She was no Dell, that was true. But Dell had made it obvious she wasn't interested. It had cut him deeper than he thought it might. Damnit.
Well, Lori was going to show him a good time, introduce him to some people. She'd help occupy his time, help him fit into the new school, at least with the cult. He wasn't a jock, he had no aspirations as an academic, where else was he to fit anyway? He was really sort of a country boy, a ranch hand, used to hauling hay and cleaning horse stalls on his grandfather's land. The ranch boys didn't have a group, though, so that left him on his own.
It worried him that he might not fit in with Lori's group either. What did he know about Dracula and body-piercing and tattoos and drinking blood? Nothing, nada. Maybe Lori would instruct him. He really was looking for something besides a girlfriend, and why not what a cult had to offer? At least he'd check it out; no harm in that. No harm at all.
That night at the party he had a chance to reassess his own idea of "harm." First, he wasn't exactly accepted on sight. The other people in the house, which was apparently given over for the night to the younger generation with no parent present, rigorously ignored him. Lori said, noticing his discomfort, "Don't worry about it. They'll come around."
"Which one's Loden?"
"Oh, he's not here yet. He doesn't own a watch, doesn't go by time. No telling when he might show up. If he does." She shrugged.
Maybe the others would come around. Maybe he should have made a concerted effort to dress in black clothes and move his body as if it were mired in molasses. It seemed the people in the house were drugged on something that slowed them to a crawl. Quaaludes, pot, something. Their eyes were dull and their gestures small. They seemed unsteady, but mannered in the way people were when having to be careful where they put their feet in case they might stumble. At one point he was offered a hit off a monster joint and declined. Another faux pas, evidently, because after that no one made the slightest attempt to engage him in conversation.
Lori sat beside him on the sofa. He tried to ask her about the scene they were stuck in, but she evaded him. Instead, she talked about school, her plans to go to Europe and stay in hostels after graduation, and how cool it was not to have to "perform" at a party like this, how it was just enough to "be."
He had to admit he just didn't get it. He really didn't get it when the first bloodletting began. Lori touched him on the arm to direct his attention. He'd been daydreaming, idly munching potato chips from a bowl in his lap, wondering if there was anything good on TV. He'd seen one in the family room. When he turned at Lori's touch, he saw a skinny young man slip his black turtleneck over his head. He brought a pocketknife from his pocket and opened the blade. Ryan saw lamplight shine off the blade and it made him shiver deep inside. Oh, man. Oh, man.
A girl, his girl, Ryan guessed, was kneeling at the boy's feet. Without preamble, and before the crowd gathered so that Ryan could not see what was happening, the knife was making five quick slits in the boy's upper arm. They weren't deep, but blood welled immediately. As soon as he'd cut himself, he wiped the blade on his jeans, folded it shut, and slipped it into his pocket. Then he bent over the girl on the floor, thrusting out his arm to her. She bowed her head and began to lick at the blood, a look of ecstasy on her face.
"Oh, Christ," Ryan said, grimacing.
"He's been tested," Lori said, thinking his disgust might be at the thought of the girl getting AIDS.
"You do that sort of thing, too?"
"Sure." She glanced meaningfully at his arm. "When I feel like it," she added.
Ryan watched the couple giving and receiving blood and felt a catch at the back of his throat. He had seen a lot of things; it wasn't as if he was so straight he was a Republican or something. But licking and sucking at bloody wounds was way beyond anything he'd witnessed before. No wonder they were all so lethargic, he thought. Maybe they weren't drugged out of their skulls, after all. Maybe they were depressed and weak from giving blood. Never mind AIDS—not that testing protected them, since the tests didn't always detect HIV in the early stages. But hadn't they ever heard of anemia? And whatever godawful thing might be in someone else's blood?
He laughed to himself, and Lori looked at him with dark eyes outlined in black eyeliner pencil.
"Most people who see this for the first time have a squeamish reaction," she said, as if to forgive him.
"But what's the philosophy behind the ritual? I mean, I know they're not doing it because they're . . . well, hungry."
She smiled and shook her head. "No, they're not hungry in the way you mean. There's no, uh, philosophy. It's like a way of life. A lifestyle. We're intimate when we share blood. We're brothers and sisters. It's a way to distinguish us from the rest, the normals. And, believe it or not, it's an incredible turn-on."
"Oh, it is, is it?"
Lori and Ryan turned at the interruption and saw Dell standing nearby, hands on her hips. She was scowling.
"Hey, Dell. What's up?" Lori said.
Ryan noticed Lori hadn't missed a beat.
"I know I shouldn't be here," Dell said to Ryan, ignoring Lori's greeting. "I wasn't invited." This she directed at Lori. "But I heard there was a party, Loden was throwing a party." She looked around and saw couples beginning to get into the bloodletting business. Ryan saw her look quickly away again.
He started to stand up to offer his seat to Dell. "Want to sit down?"
"Not on your life," she said, anger in her voice spiraling close to the surface. She faced Lori. "What made you bring him here?"
"Hey, he wanted to come." She tugged on Ryan's hand and made him sit down again.
"What's the point of all this crap?" Dell asked, angrier now.
"Call it crap if you want, but maybe you ought to wait until you're invited somewhere before you begin calling names." Lori was blowing her cool. Ryan didn't know what to say. He was really surprised to see Dell and more surprised to see her so angry. He saw some couples close to them move away and some people were beginning, to leave. Others, couples involved too deeply in their blood rituals, hadn't yet noticed Dell on the scene.
"You think this makes you a vampire?" Dell asked. "Why do any of you think you know what the hell you're doing?"
"You don't know what we know," Lori said.
"I know this. I know this kind of thing is crazy as hell. This no more makes you a vampire than wearing a jeweled crown makes Miss America the Queen of England." Dell turned to Ryan, her cheeks flushed. He saw the pupils of her eyes were dilated so that her eyes were extremely dark and intense. "Is this really what you want?"
Ryan realized suddenly why she was so angry. She liked him. Liked him enough to show up at Loden's party and make a scene on his behalf. He said, "I'm not sure what I want, Dell."
She threw her head back in exasperation. "Well, you'd better make up your mind."
"Who says it's up to you?" Lori asked.
Again Dell ignored her. She said to Ryan, "About Saturday night. . ."
He nodded, almost afraid to breathe until she finished.
"We'll go somewhere together, like you said. Somewhere there's no blood dripping all over the place." With that she turned and left the room.
"Whoa, boy," Lori said, shaking her head. "A little overwhelming, isn't she
?"
Although Lori was right in a way, Ryan didn't like to hear criticism of Dell. "She's just worried, I guess."
"None of her business. As far as I can tell, you're a big boy."
Maybe so, Ryan thought, but he was glad Dell had let him know how much she cared. If she hadn't cared, she wouldn't have walked into the middle of a cult party and said the things she'd said. He thought her brave, and the logic she'd employed was impeccable.
As the night wore on, the thought of cutting himself and watching Lori drink from him was more distasteful in his mind than some little kid playing in his own excrement. Not only was it unsanitary, but it was such a taboo, almost as bad as cannibalism. It certainly wouldn't turn him on. He had to be missing something integral to the notion.
He kept silent and didn't share his doubts. He continued watching the couple and then other couples as they followed suit with blades and bloodletting. Soon, half the people at the party were down on their knees taking blood and the other half stood, giving blood.
"I think I'm going to have to leave," he whispered to Lori. She hadn't moved in long minutes, frozen in place by what was going on.
"Okay," she said, reacting slowly as if waking from a trance. "You'll get used to this later. Forget what Dell said. Most of the time we don't bring first dates to this kind of party, but I knew you'd be cool."
He was cool, all right. He was cold as a corpse. All he wanted to do was get the scent of blood out of his nostrils. He thought he was going to gag and that wouldn't make his date happy. He stood and Lori with him. She said good-bye to a few people and they left the house. Outside, in the fresh air, Ryan took a deep cleansing breath. "Maybe we should have worked our way up to this," he said.
"It's what Dell said, isn't it?"
"Not really."
She linked her arm in his as they walked to the car. "I hope I didn't scare you away. Not everyone does this. It's not like you have to or anything. It's more like you want to once you realize how close it can bring two people. Or a group of people. We're like family. We'd do anything for one another."
Ryan thought they already did anything for one another. He'd be damned if he'd take a knife to his arm, or any other part of his anatomy, and watch someone drink from him. As for being the drinkee, well, that was totally out of the question. Ugh.
He drove Lori home through the night, but all he could think about was Dell showing up at the party. He thought of her long red hair spilling around her shoulders in spirals. He thought of how her eyes had looked, deep and dark and amazingly impenetrable.
He tried to listen to Lori while she made her case for what he'd seen. He wanted to understand. He wanted to make sense of it. Finally he gave up trying and decided it was just the shock that he was working through. She'd said they all got over the initial disgust eventually. She suggested he read Bram Stoker's Dracula, and he said he would. He would, really. Read it slow, she said. Read it like you've never seen a book before and this is the first one you've ever read. I'll try, he told her, honest, I will.
"And after that," she said, "I have a whole list of new books for you to read. People are publishing books every day just for us."
"For you?"
"For the real believers."
"You don't really think you can be a vampire, do you? Dell asked that, I know. But you don't, do you?"
"Oh, of course not! But we can get close to it if we really try. We become one of the underground the books are really written for. It's a society, Ryan. If people really knew what we thought, they'd have to get a little scared. Not because we're going to turn into bats and bite their necks, but because we don't think at all about things the way they do."
He didn't think it made much sense to want to be so different you created a whole myth around yourself and you made rituals up out of the whole cloth. He didn't say it to Lori, but as far as he could determine, the kids at the party weren't a danger except maybe to themselves. He wasn't afraid of them. He wasn't lured.
He would, however, read Dracula. He'd always meant to anyway. He'd just read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein last year and that had been an eye opener. The monster was nothing like he was portrayed in the movies. He expected Stoker's monster would be more interesting, too. But nothing was going to make him want to partake of blood. He was about as far from that as he was from the moon in the sky. Dell really hadn't had much faith in him if she'd thought otherwise.
When he went to kiss Lori good night before she left the car, meaning to give her a friendly little peck on the lips, she grabbed him around the neck and kissed him back so hard he found himself trying to pull away. Breathless once loose, his mouth still filled with the taste of her, he said, "That was . . . intense."
She grinned at him and said, "Yeah, wasn't it?"
He watched her enter the house before driving away. He was too stunned to leave earlier. He had really liked what she'd done. He thought he could go for an aggressive woman.
Then he thought of Dell and knew the truth. He would go out with her exclusively, if she'd let him. He had no interest in blood drinkers and cults and warped philosophies. Lori was a sweet thing and a terrific kisser, but Dell was someone he couldn't stop thinking about. He was happy she'd changed her mind about going out with him. All he needed was a chance.
~*~
Mentor took a direct route to Bette's house when he returned. She knew he was coming back. This time he would make her let him inside. He walked down the long street fronting her house, noting the small children playing in the street after dark. If only they knew what kind of creature he was, the mothers would never let their children be alone outdoors again.
Teen boys, all wearing black baseball caps with some kind of red insignia, congregated on a corner across the street. They watched him quietly, but did not move to intercept him. He projected an aura of danger their way. They might be tough little hooligans, but in each of their brains an alarm sounded that caused them to hesitate. Dallas had its share of minority gangs, and this one dominated the neighborhood.
A white man in his forties sat on a house stoop near the sidewalk. Mentor touched his thoughts and found his mind scrambled by heroin. His personality was near disintegration, and it made him angry and dangerous. As he lifted his head when Mentor neared, Mentor sent a message telepathically. Don't come near me, he told the man. You'll be sorry if you do.
Finally, Mentor was in front of Bette's walkway. He looked up to the front door and the windows. Lights glowed lemon yellow through lace-covered windows. Her car was in the drive. He telepathically searched the house and found no one there but the woman. Now he would make her invite him in, and he would finish the job he'd begun the day before.
When she answered his knock, he hit her with his strongest suggestion. Ask me in, he said to her mind. You know me as an old friend. He watched her expression change from horror to recognition and, finally, to happiness. She reached out for his hand and tugged him into the house. "I haven't seen you in so long," she said.
"And I bet you missed me, didn't you?" Mentor stepped through the doorway and closed the door behind him. He should have done it this way the first time instead of letting her see him as he really was, allowing her to understand his real intentions. He didn't like to trick them so easily, though, and unless he had to, he usually let a human face him on his own terms. But he hadn't any more time to waste on the woman.
Once they were in her small living room, he entered her mind fully. This caused her to stiffen and become as still as a statue. His own frail body also froze, waiting for his mind to return to it.
Inside Bette's skull he rifled through the area that held her lifetime of memories, shunting aside those that were too personal, those that concerned her childhood or her parents or her friends and relatives. He searched diligently for the memories that had to do with her work. She was a bright woman; he admired her and would not touch anything in her mind that would change her too much if he could help it. Of course there was always the chance of an acci
dent when doing such delicate operations, but Mentor took special care because of the goodness he found in the woman.
It took several long minutes before he located her work memories, and then he went through them gently, stirring them this way and that until he found the exact ones he needed. She had memories from textbooks and classes taken at a university. These memories were tangled up with flashes of meetings with the man who had been in her house the night before, when he was much younger. When they both were much younger.
She had volumes of information stored about hematology and her lab work involving blood. If he ruined too many of these memories, she would never be useful as a scientist again. He meant to be careful, realizing he was trampling among stored data that she needed in order to fulfill her life's training.
And then he found what he needed to expunge. He moved through a memory of lifting a long computer printout close to her face and noticing the shipments from Strand-Catel. There was confusion surrounding these memories, like clouds shrouding a summer moon. She was not sure what the data meant and it left her befuddled. He took these memories and folded them the way one folds a newspaper, then he stuffed them behind a set of memories that dealt with other blood banks. For her to recall them again, she would have to have a traumatic brain injury that might possibly jiggle them loose, but even then it was an improbability. In other words, short of near fatal injury to her brain, she would never remember them again.
He lifted every memory he could discover that had to do with Strand-Catel and folded and stuffed until the whole inquiry she had started had been swept clean and put away in very deep storage within her brain.
On his way out of her mind, he almost tiptoed over to the area of memory that held personal data. He was tempted to look in on the love she had devoted to the man who had spent the night with her. But he knew that was snooping. It was an urge he should not indulge. What he might find there would no doubt throw him into a conflict about his own lack of a love life. It would depress him. Better to stay out of this woman's love affairs and leave before he caused some kind of accidental and irreparable damage.
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