“That wasn’t actually the most important part of what I said.”
Blake leans back in his chair, giving Alexander a smile and shaking his head. There’s a smudge of neon-pink highlighter just above one of his eyebrows, which ruins his otherwise impeccable demeanour somewhat. Alexander decides not to tell him about it.
“If I tried to pass this on to any of the others, downstairs, they’d have us looking to control the entirely of Illinois, and before you know it we’d have maverick cops and do-gooder vigilantes trying to break our ties to lobby groups and the black market. Not to mention that we’d have to police the comings and goings of every ragtag little group of vampires who wanted to hunt in ‘our’ territory. Power for power’s sake is so boorish. Only megalomaniacs and politicians want it. All I want is for those in my care to have all that they need to be happy and comfortable and free. If the area we controlled grew too large, I’d end up with a headache to match—with more power comes more responsibilities.”
“You’re the anti-Spider-Man, “ Alexander offers sarcastically. “But I take your point… about this particular instance. The general truth of what I was saying remains. You need to delegate.”
Once upon a time, Alex might have followed a statement like that with a joke about how, if Blake doesn’t give more of his tasks to others, it’ll leave them in a dire predicament if he ever goes and gets himself killed. But Alexander doesn’t make jokes like that, not anymore. Not since Tim got hurt. Now they know all too well how easily the joke might become horribly unfunny and prescient.
To cover the silence of the unsaid words they can both hear, Alexander clears his throat. “I’m going to go visit Lily and Will. Bette’s becoming— ”
“Reckless, yes, I know.” Blake concludes the thought. “And you think there might be some half-finished formula in one of Will’s old chemistry experiments which can catch her interest and occupy her time.”
They don’t need to sense one another’s minds to know what the other is thinking; decades of friendship does the same trick that vampiric telepathy would. Alexander smiles and nods. “That’s the general plan, yes. I thought I should let you know, since they’re your special pet project. I doubt they’ll resist the chance to give education to the heathens, even if they do hate me.”
“Yes, we are rather unpopular,” Blake agrees with a smirk. “Except for Timothy. I think they’re just puzzled by him.”
Alexander just shrugs, not offering a reply to that. He knows that the good-cop act of Timothy’s which earned Will’s tentative trust is just that, an act. Tim hates the hypocritical way the hunters choose to live even more than Alexander does. But Alexander has never been very good at pretending niceties he doesn’t feel—there’d seemed little point in developing a knack for social graces in the face of unpleasantness, not when his childhood surroundings had been the brittle, bigoted streets of a gold rush boom town.
Timothy, on the other hand, is as smooth and guileless as one born to lying, the result of a human life spent in a tiny close-knit village, and a fanged, cold-skinned lover he’d had to keep secret from everyone around him for the last few months before his death.
Timothy’s human recollections are a shadowed, half-known thing for Alexander. Once upon a time, before Timothy was hurt and they were forced to begin again, they’d shared little histories of themselves. Now, Tim never speaks of it, as if voicing it aloud will take those memories from his grasp as well.
Still, Alexander knows the bones of it: the snow, the routines, the monotony. The stubborn flock of sheep and the wolves that preyed upon it. Tim’s little sister, the light of his darkening world, whose name had been Ledishka and who’d gone off into the world before he’d had a chance to come back to the village, to creep to her window at night and wake her, to tell her that he was all right. And perhaps that, too, would have been a lie anyway. Vampires can feel happy. They can feel powerful. But they never feel all right. There’s too much a sense inside them that there is something missing, an empty space where the vitality of life once sat.
And Timothy, for his part, knew most of Alexander’s story before Alex had even finished the living of it. Growing up in a place which boasted of being a new world, a fresh start for everyone, but which seemed be a harder world for some than it was for others. How he’d lost his father, and then his mother, before he was old enough to thrive alone, and how the Chinese community of the city had done the best they could by him but hadn’t really had a role or place where a hard, angry little boy who was fast growing into a young man could fit.
He’d made his way from one odd job to another, fighting and stealing and working in a ferocious, furious bid to stay alive as long as he could. Eventually, after many of the kind of adventures and escapades such a life is bound to be riddled with, Alexander ended up working in a rail yard owned by a strange, shadowy kind of boss. But what did Alex care if Timothy drank blood? The world was cruel and selfish, so it stood to reason that the people in it should also be those things. And Alexander had known more than his fair share of ordinary humans who fed on and exploited those whom they had power over. Vampirism, if anything, was just a more honest example of the machinery of all life.
That fearlessness when faced with a fairytale monster may have been what first stood Alexander apart from the other workers: exasperated with the superstition and timidity of those around him, Alex often volunteered to take messages to their employer himself, just so it would get done faster.
Impudence— refusal to let anyone have power over him, which meant that he gave nobody the right to frighten him—got Alexander to Timothy’s door, but it was Alexander’s curiosity which made them friends. Curiosity was a liability, and so Alexander rarely indulged his natural inclinations in that direction. Disinterest gave you power, power to freeze pastors with a glare before they tried to save your soul.
~
When Alexander gets the door to Will and Lily’s warehouse unlocked and opened, the first thing to catch his eye amongst the disarray is the ancient television set, currently broadcasting equally antique cartoons. The opera episode of Bugs Bunny, disguises and camp and high drama, is ending. A roadrunner cartoon begins and the coyote lays the first of his ill-fated traps.
“I always felt sorry for him, you know,” Alexander remarks to Cora and Will, as the short serrated dagger in Cora’s hand presses hard against Will’s throat, the blade flashing silver-white in the dimness. The razor edge has already done its work on the wrist of her other arm, slicing a good two inches of the vein open lengthways. She has the wound pressed against Will’s struggling mouth.
“Go away,” Cora snaps at Alexander, pressing the knife in more firmly against Will’s neck and turning her full attention back to him. “Come on, open up, you know you’ll do it, stop—there you go, drink up.”
Will swallows, eyes screwed shut.
“The coyote, I mean,” Alexander goes on, walking over to the tableau he’s gatecrashed. “The poor bastard’s just trying to get himself some dinner, isn’t he? He can’t help being a predator. It’s just his nature. But the roadrunner isn’t content with getting away. He has to be an asshole about it and make the poor chump suffer.”
“Your talent for showing up when you’re not wanted is remarkable,” Cora growls, glaring at him as she takes in the subtle but insistent fighting stance Alexander has slipped into. She steps back from Will, who drops to his knees and retches. “Oh, there’s gratitude for you.”
“Run along,” Alexander orders her coldly. “You can bully the smaller children in the playground some other time.”
With a final contemptuous glance down at Will, Cora stalks away and out of the still-open door of the warehouse. Her high, high shoes make a sharp clicking sound with every step, the rapid meter fading into the distance as she leaves.
“Are you able to stand up on your own?” Alexander asks Will, not bothering to offer a helping hand. He sits down on the arm of an extremely threadbare old armchair, watching as Will manages
to stumble over to the table in the kitchenette area and slump into one of the chairs there.
“Why would she do something like that?” Will asks.
Alexander inspects the fingernails of one of his own hands and sighs.
“Because she hates you. Because she wanted to make you want something that you don’t let yourself want. She wants to plant a seed of obscenity in the heart of all you hold dear. Hmm.” Alexander cocks his head to one side, thinking. “Maybe Blake has a point when he says that she and I are alike. I quite enjoyed watching her make you choke and gulp like that.”
“You can fuck off any time you like, by the way,” Will mutters, scrubbing the back of his hand over his mouth, as if he can scrub away the memory of Cora’s blood.
“I could, yes,” Alexander agrees, standing up and walking over to where a plastic kettle with a crack in the handle is plugged into the wall. “I imagine you want some sort of horrible herbal tea now, to flagellate away any enjoyment you had from her game?”
Will sighs, clearly resigning himself to Alexander’s continued company. “Yes. That would be nice.”
It takes a massive act of willpower to keep Alexander from rolling his eyes. Of course Will uses words like ‘nice’. Of course he does.
“It seems weird to me that she’d come here, when she’s got that whole house of horrors at her disposal in Colorado.” Will scratches at his head absently, at the point on the crown where he was worst burned when Cora held him captive under sunlight. His hair is shot through with white all over, but the pale streaks are thickest there. It makes him look older than his young, smooth face would otherwise suggest.
“Cora has always been the worst of her own weapons,” Alexander answers. It’s simple but it’s true—no number of glass-walled rooms or underling thugs would ever be as dangerous as Cora’s unique ingenuity.
The tea is ready. Alexander hands Will a cup, who sips at it with a look of resigned distaste. “Thank you,” Will says. “It’s very good.”
That makes Alexander burst out laughing. “You look as if I’ve made you drink piss!”
That response startles Will out of his forced politeness, a surprised grin twitching on his pale face.
“You can say it’s bad,” Alexander goes on. “I won’t be offended. My sense of self-worth is not contingent on whether or not I make a tolerable cup of tea.”
Will shakes his head. “No, it really is very good. It’s just… tea is sometimes hard to drink. When I’ve been hurt, or I’m really hungry.”
Alexander has to pause before he answers, silently reminding himself that Blake will be very cross if Alexander beats Will to death with a tea kettle. “I would have offered you my blood instead, but suspected that you’d be offended. But now your stupidity is offending me, which seems like a poor reward for good intentions.”
Will, ignoring Alexander’s remarks, takes another swallow of tea, then gingerly removes his other hand from where it’s pressed against his neck. Cora’s knife has left a long, ragged-edged slice “I think this has stopped bleeding now. Will you help me stitch it?”
Alexander blinks at him, confused. “Stitch it? Even allowing for the fact that you clearly suffered some sort of severe acquired brain injury during your life, you’ve surely noticed by now that vampires have preternatural healing. I was there in Colorado. I know you’ve done it.”
Will rolls his eyes. “I haven’t had any blood this time, genius. I don’t heal all that much faster than a human if I haven’t had blood. I only swallowed a mouthful or so of Cora’s.”
Alexander sighs in despair, only just barely restraining himself from putting his palms over his face. “You’re an irritating little punk asshole from the Midwest who plays the drums and hunts vampires. How the hell did you end up with such a ridiculous sense of your own martyrdom? Do you wear a hair shirt under those pitiful excuses for outfits, too? You annoy me so very, very much, I want you to know that.
“Even if you insist on abstaining from human blood, out of some misplaced concept of chivalry, why don’t you drink from the vampires you and Lily continue to hunt so ruthlessly? Granted, vampire blood won’t keep you fed and satisfied on its own, but I imagine it’s considerably more nourishing than a cup of tea and those gruesome smoothies you concoct.”
Will doesn’t answer right away when Alexander stops speaking. Eventually he shrugs, looking down at his cup, and his voice is soft as he replies. “It’s just easier this way. Drinking any kind of blood, it… it’s… it just feels easier this way, that’s all.”
“You mean it’s easier for you to pretend that you don’t want it,” Alexander snaps, his amusement wearing thin and his irritation gaining ground. “The sad thing is that you could be so clever if you stopped being so stupid, William. Vampire science is woefully unexplored. Biology, chemistry, physics. Why our eyes turn red—Bette says it’s to do with iron levels and deposits, but Bette’s curiosity is as charmingly insouciant as the rest of her. A truly dedicated, methodical scientist… you would have state-of-the-art equipment at your fingertips, all the research that’s ever been published, a thousand years to run all the tests you wanted. What if you spent some of your time and some of our resources curing human diseases, creating new vaccines? Think of how much grander and more useful the good you could do would be, if you just stopped playing at this wretched charade of goodness.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Will insists quietly. “It can’t. No end can justify—”
“Oh, wake the fuck up! The human race is a vicious, cruel, hideous thing that shits where it eats and devours its young and inbreeds all its most vile and cultish notions deeper into the bloodline with every generation. There’s no sanctity in human life, no grace in depriving yourself so that they can survive a little longer in their nasty little lives,” Alexander sneers. “Blood is blood and it’s what we eat. It isn’t mystical, it isn’t a metaphor for the divine, it isn’t anything except blood, and the only reason you and Lily are being so obstinate is because you’re too proud to admit that we were right all along, that hunting us was a fucking mug’s game, that Blake may have forced you into this but you’re not sure if you’re still angry at him about that.
“You’re not sure if you really hate it all that much. Somewhere deep down you’re grateful to be strange, and every ugly, petty, conservative little atom in your stupid body hates itself for that. That’s your problem: you like it, and you hunt us and kill us because that way you can pretend you’re not exactly the fucking same underneath.”
Will’s chair scrapes back with a squeak against the linoleum as he stands, jaw clenched angrily, cheeks pale and fists balled at his side in fury.
“Oh, sit down,” Alexander snaps, acid in his tone. “You’re too much of a pragmatist to actually get offended by what I’m saying, and we both know it. I hate the martyr act and can do without the righteous indignation you try to dredge up as part of it. You and Lily can play at being good little Samaritans in your own time.”
Will scowls down at Alexander for a few long seconds, while Alexander glares back in his own cool contempt. When the moment breaks it’s Will who looks away, who gives a dry and weary laugh and sits down again, his throat still bleeding weakly onto the collar of his t-shirt.
“It’s… man, I was gonna say ‘it’s funny’, but I really shouldn’t think it’s funny. It shouldn’t be funny,” he says. “Kids like Rose and Tommy, and even my sister, they call us ‘good vampires’. Me and Lily, I mean. And when they say that, what they really mean is that we don’t drink blood when we’re hungry, and you do, and that makes us better than you.
“That’s so fucked up for so many reasons, but the one that bugs me most when they say it they assume that I must be this really good, sweet person inside and that’s why I don’t kill people. I wish I was as good as they think I am, but it’s not so simple. I don’t kill people because… because now this is the kind of vampire I know how to be. And because of Lily. Loyalty to her.
“When I wa
s away from her, when I went out on my own, after I was turned… before that I was an atheist, but not a pessimistic one or anything. It was just how I saw the world. But by the time I came back, I’d shifted a bit. I think I’m more of an existentialist now. And I know I’m more cynical than I used to be. Hanging out with Sofie would turn anybody into a cynic.” Will pauses, and smiles slightly to himself. “Well, anyone but my sister, maybe.
“So this is how it is for me, the cynical existentialist: I hunt vampires because I like how it makes me feel to hunt vampires. I don’t hunt humans because it would complicate things, and it would make Lily upset, and I don’t want to upset Lily.
“And here’s something else I’ve worked out: it’s almost impossible for vampires to feel empathy towards most humans. That’s a survival instinct, I think, the same as how humans don’t imagine what it’s like to be a cow destined to become a burger. The food chain isn’t big on compassion of the lower links. That’s not how nature works.
“I tried being a vegetarian a bunch of times when I was alive. A lot of people in the scene I was hanging around with, the music scene, the social scene, whatever, were really into straight-edge stuff. You know, no alcohol, veganism, no drugs.
“I kept trying it, but it never stuck that well, and it’s not sticking any better now. I try to remember what it was like to be human, to be alive, but every time it’s just that little bit harder to conjure up the memories. So my reasons for not biting people are a lot more complicated and a lot less noble than ‘it’s wrong to bite them’. I don’t believe in right or wrong, not in the way a statement like that would require.
“Lily’s close to what the kids mean when they say ‘good vampire’, though. Lily’s never lost that connection to people, not like I have. Maybe that’s because she always had it for more than just her own species. She was always great with animals. She had total empathy for them. And now she’s got empathy for people.” Will shakes his head and gives a bleak laugh. “I don’t think the kids would like it if I told them that their relationship with Lily is like the relationship she used to have with her mom’s dog.”
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