V Is for Vampire

by Eris Adderly

  Now he was awake. Desperate.

  Leo had her wrist in a pull that made her think she’d get back a withered husk. His hands came up to clutch at her arm, to hold her in place. His knees were bending, feet looking for purchase on the floor of the van. Her marks on his neck were already closing, and November worked her free hand to rip his uniform aside, to shove the undershirt up and out of the way before the fabric healed right into the grotesque knitting flesh of his chest.

  She had to wrest her arm away and open the bite a final time for the new V-positive. It would be months until his new cuspids began to grow in and push his neg set out of the way. When she gave him back the wrist, he was just cresting the peak between frantic and delirious. Just present enough to find her eyes.

  “November.”

  His breath was heavy, and she fought the lump in her throat. Saved and damned, both at once.

  He took her forearm in both hands and drank with hungry abandon, now. November knew the quiet grunts and moans. The taste for it that bloomed as 22v entered his system and began to make him like her. Like Rado.

  What kind of a life was she about to stumble into? She’d have to bring Leo underground with her now. Have to teach him how to take care of his body’s new needs. How to control the fucking pheromones that would come. An undocumented goddamn vampire she’d have to shepherd around, and Radoslav had already wiped her from the system, as well. Where would they even live?

  Blood was trickling from the corners of Leo’s mouth. The noises he made now were the lazy kind; he reveled in the drink in a near-stupor, and November wouldn’t have been surprised to find a growing ridge in his pants. She tugged her wrist out of his grip, and he was too drunk to fight for his meal. It had been plenty, and the last thing she needed was to pass out with him.

  “It’s … it’s done,” she said to Rado. “He’s … one of us.”

  Leo’s eyes drifted closed, and she knew he’d be lost to sleep within seconds. She shook her head and glanced down to watch the bite at her wrist closing again.

  “You did what you had to,” said Rado. His grim tone made her wonder what his turning had been like. How it had come to pass.

  She sniffled. Wiped at her face, probably making a bigger mess than what was already there, and looked down at her sated and sleeping partner. “He’s going to be useless right now.” And he would not feel good when he woke up. The conversion sickness would have him hating the first few hours of his new life, at least.

  “Then we need to get you both underground,” Rado said. “Before sunrise happens and we have real problems.”

  He brought the van to halt, and November sat up straighter.

  “We have to walk from here,” he said, twisting his neck around to face her. “I’ll help you carry him.”

  * * *

  November knew the levels and corridors of U-Seattle like the back of her hand, but here she was all turned around.

  Radoslav wove them through alleys and jogged them along the least well-lit streets, reasoning well in place that their carrying an unconscious man at three in the morning might not go ignored on the more trafficked, more direct routes.

  He moved with a clear destination, only pausing to watch for other people before leading them this way or that. November had less focus and had already tripped three times—once on her own boot, and twice on curbs—as she kept splitting her attention between following Rado and staring up at the night sky every chance she got. Even the buildings, and the way they extruded from the ground up here, rather than expanding to take up space within it, as she’d known them all her life, were an oddity and constant distraction. The free moving air, for fuck’s sake! The way sound traveled, all of it an overload on her senses.

  “Here,” Rado said, as they neared the end of an alley between two brick buildings. “We’re going to have to wake him.”

  November lowered Leo’s ankles so his boots touched the ground. Rado had been keeping a grip under her partner’s arms, and it would probably be best not to bring up to Leo later that he’d spent a portion of his time slung between them like a hammock with the back of his head resting just above his roommate’s ass.

  Rado moved until he had Leo in a sitting position on the ground, but the moment he let go his hold so he could turn around, the newest vampire went slumping sideways. November ducked in to shore him up, and Rado followed, squatting on his heels to prop his shoulders.

  “Leo,” she said, running careful knuckles along the side of his face, “you gotta wake up.”

  He remained inert, and she took hold of his chin in her fingers and waggled it back and forth. “Leo! Come on!”

  Radoslav grumbled a curse and brought one of his wrists to his mouth. He bit and pulled off, two dark glossy beads welling up before he thrust the wound right under Leo’s nose.

  Her gate partner sucked in a breath. His eyelids fluttered and his dangling hands flew to the forearm in front of his face. There was a jumble of motion as one vampire tried to latch on and drink, while the other wrested his arm away, its purpose fulfilled.

  “Nngh! Fuck you!” Leo was wide awake now, blood smeared back to his ear which he tried to wipe away with the heel of a palm. He was already moving to round on Rado when the first of the cramps hit him. His body tried to double, and he rolled onto a hip, back hunching as he heaved.

  November had never been present at a turning. Never seen conversion sickness in person. Even as a bloodline vampire, to go through the marrowing—that time like a second puberty in their late teens or early twenties, where they began growing fangs and every other damn thing began to change—was a process that happened over months, if not more than a year. There was plenty of time to adjust while the body moved through its throes. But not for converts. Not for Leo.

  Everything but the teeth he’d get nearly all at once, and the system did not like it. The way he was groaning and retching at the moment made her a hair more grateful to have been born V-positive.

  “Just breathe,” Rado was saying as he scrubbed a palm in rough circles over Leo’s rounded back. “Breathe, man. It’s no good. Nothing’s going to come up.”

  She’d heard of this. The urge to vomit, but the body’s refusal to let any of it go.

  “Leo, you made it,” she said. Her partner was trying to control his breathing, as Rado coached him. She reached to trace fingers down his nearest supporting forearm. “You’re alive.”

  Her last word did something to him. His hacking subsided to a degree, and he twisted his head to look up at her. November wanted to apologize, even though he’d agreed. He’d asked her to bite him.

  Leo sat back on his ass again and raked his eyes down the damp, dark front of his shirt. He brought a hand up to the hole in the fabric where the bullet had passed. There was no longer a matching wound in his chest or back.

  “Alive,” he repeated, voice a breath. The one word teemed with consequences.

  “That’s right,” said Rado, standing up. “You’d be dead if it wasn’t for Kitamura. You can have your first existential crisis underground, but I guarantee a second team is on the way. We need to move.”

  She had no idea what her partner could be going through, to pass out after nearly dying and wake up a vampire, but Rado was right. November held out a hand to Leo. He eyed it for a moment before taking his grip, and she helped him get to his feet.

  “Can you walk?” she said.

  He took a tentative step and his knee buckled. November and Rado swooped in to keep him upright, and she pulled his arm over her shoulder, bolstering at his side.

  “So a ‘not really,’ then,” she said as Rado backed away. “Come on. Just lean on me if you have to.”

  “How long”—Leo coughed—“how long is this going to last?”

  “A few hours,” said Rado, ducking his head out of the mouth of the alley again. “Maybe a day. Let’s go.”

  He slipped out into the street, leaving November no choice but to follow, Leo lumbering along at her side, all his effort
s on staying vertical and in motion.

  Rado hadn’t gone twenty steps before he stopped at a rectangular metal cover set into the sidewalk. He went to a knee near a corner of the thing and began feeling along its edge with his fingertips. Whatever he was searching for, he found, because his hand twisted, and then he was lifting and sliding the metal panel out of the way. There was an opening below. Concrete stairs descending to blackness. He looked back at her and Leo.

  “Go,” he said. “I’ll close it after us.”

  She gave him a hard look.

  You better be on our side.

  “Alright, Leo,” she said. “One step at a time. Be careful. Just because you’ll heal doesn’t mean it won’t still hurt if you fall and break your ass.” November risked a moment to let go Leo’s arm where it draped over her shoulder, to turn on the light on her id bracelet. The cool white glow would be all they had going down into that mess. She grabbed his wrist again.

  They took the first stair.

  The way down was barely wide enough for them both to go side by side. They had to cram all four of their feet onto each step, Leo groaning and swearing the whole way over his aches and unsteady legs. Metal slid on concrete above, and even the dim light from the street winked away overhead. More footsteps were behind them, Rado following, until they all made it past the end of the ancient stair and onto a narrow walkway.

  The light from her bracelet didn’t go far, but there were glimpses of a surrounding structure here. A hint of brick at the edge of the light’s reach. A wooden support beam. The smell of wet stone and not a lick of human use in centuries surrounded them. When the shuffling of their bootsoles went quiet, she could hear an occasional drop of water somewhere in the dark.

  “Is this the gate?” she whispered. It might have been paranoia, but she imagined walls crumbling around them if she used her normal voice.

  “No,” Rado replied with more than her whisper, but less than his usual gruff volume. “It’s further back. There’s a walkway. Watch your feet.”

  He’d lit up his own bracelet and was squeezing past them. Stepping further into the dank space to where he now illuminated another doorway at the opposite end of … of …

  “What is this place?” said Leo, echoing her thoughts.

  “It’s part of the original underground,” Rado told them over his shoulder. “Almost four hundred years old.”

  She and Leo followed him, picking their way over dislodged stones in the floor and the broken remnants of what might once have been an entirely wooden walkway surface.

  “Why is it just sitting here like this?” she asked. “No guards?”

  “It’s condemned,” he said, waiting for her at the stone doorway. “Since before we even migrated underground.” And by ‘we,’ he meant everyone in the room. Leo was a vampire now.

  They made it to where Rado stood and filed behind him through an archway so ancient it felt like the stones exhaled damp breath on the backs of their necks. Leo grunted when he checked his shoulder on the way past.

  The space beyond felt less narrow than the first room and, within the radius of light, November could see more ruined wood at odd angles to the walls and floor. Stringy roots from plants dangled in from the ceiling.

  From the way they’d come, a metallic sound rasped in her ears, and November’s head whipped around.

  “Rado,” she hissed.

  “Just go,” he said. “Go.” His pace increased, and she hustled Leo along after, senses jarring at the portent of dull thuds at their backs.

  Too far. We’re too far to fuck this up now!

  “Mister Niculescu.”

  A voice rolled out of the darkness ahead of them, and November almost choked on her heartbeat. She felt Leo’s head snap up from watching his feet, and Rado held out a hand to his side to stop them all in the walkway.

  “Reverend,” said Rado.

  Hairs stood up on the back of November’s neck. She knew that voice. Had heard it only one time.

  Reverend …

  Out of the black, a figure emerged, uncanny in movement and appearance to make her insides scream. His suit was immaculate white. His skin a deep brown.

  Leonide Croix. Just like …

  In his hand, he carried a cane.

  No.

  The bald man from her Vision had turned his gaze over Rado’s shoulder to rest it on Leo, who was trying to untangle himself from November and stand upright on his own two feet.

  “Reverend, I am so sorry,” said Rado, turning his head to take in the new vampire in his torn and bloody guard uniform. “We didn’t have time. There was no other wa—”

  “Down here! They’re down here!”

  November whirled on the sound of trooping boots. Aged wood splintering and the brightest of lights bouncing through the archway toward them. There was too much noise in the silent, damp space, and her first instinct was to duck, and to drag Leo with her. Too many voices shouting, but she never got the chance.

  “Stop.”

  Two men in GateSec surface uniforms who’d come through the doorway with guns halted in place like someone had paused a recording. The command had come from behind her, and November turned her face, some horror banding her chest, to watch the man in white cock his head, eyes narrowing at the two armed men. His stance had not changed. He stood there, casual as a speaker who’d had his presentation interrupted.

  The uniformed pair turned, as if on hinges, to face each other. Discharged their weapons in the small space with such a sudden, violent bang that November yelped, and she heard Leo swear. The two men collapsed to the ground, and two more came behind them, guns still strapped to their backs, eyes trained on the bald man at the back of the room. The man who had them all in the clutch of hypnotics the likes of which November had never seen.

  “Your friends have been injured,” said the man in white with an accent she couldn’t quite place. “You should get them to a hospital.”

  His tone was somewhere between command and suggestion, and November could see a hint of fang as he spoke. The second pair didn’t hesitate. They shouldered their way forward and, one at a time, hefted one of the injured—possibly dying—guards under the arms and began dragging them backward out through the first room. Up the concrete stairs, from the sound of things, until November heard the metal plate sliding back into place in the distance.

  Four negs at once. At once!

  She had never seen a vampire maintain hypnotics on that many at one time. And without words! Those two guards had just turned and murdered each other. The man in white hadn’t even blinked. Hadn’t looked worried that his suggestion might fail. How old did a vampire have to be …

  Leo was staring at the older man, brow knotted, jaw slack. November’s guts were curling in on themselves.

  “You were right, Mister Niculescu,” the man said to Rado as if there had been no disruption. “There was no other way. It is as I expected.” He turned dark eyes on November, and they caught the blue-white light from the id bracelets lit in the room. “And you, Miss Kitamura. I thank you for saving my son.”

  “Your what?”

  It was Leo who erupted, while November stood agape and Rado looked grim. Radoslav Niculescu, apparently. That name was old blood. Very old, but there were bigger questions looming now.

  “Leonide, I have been waiting a long time,” said the man in spotless white. “I am sorry it had to happen like this.”

  The elder vampire merged so completely with the man from her Vision that November couldn’t stand it. “Who are you?” Rude words spiraled out of her mouth, unstoppable.

  Patient eyes moved to her. Nothing appeared to upset him.

  “My name is Zenith Croix,” he said. “Leonide is my son.”

  Zenith …

  November stared. Leo had to be doing the same, because she heard nothing from over her shoulder.

  The Reverend Zenith Croix?

  The Reverend was a vampire myth. An old one. The man in white with his snake and his cane.
Seek him by moonlight, children, and he will hide you in shadows from the day. Her mother had repeated the tales from her grandmother and back. The man standing in front of them, pale suit nearly glowing in the surrounding black, would have to be older than the ruins they stood in now, if the name he claimed was not just a conceit.

  But to hypnotize all those people …

  “This is bullshit, Rado.” Leo turned on his roommate, hands balling into fists. “Bullshit! Who is this guy?”

  Radoslav lowered his eyes. Made his mouth into a flat line, the first sign of contrition November had ever seen in the man. “He is who he says, Croix.”

  It was enough for the bald vampire to expect her to believe he was the actual Zenith Croix. The Reverend in real life. She had no idea how much Leo had to be breaking down on the further assertion that this man might be the father he’d never known. But there were certain things about the way his mouth moved when he spoke. The shape of his eyes that nagged at November in a familiar way.

  Her thoughts flitted to her parents in Tokyo. Her American mother, immortal, forever engaged in her research. Her Japanese father, aging and content to live out his days as a neg. Who would she be if either one of them had been just … missing from her life? Where would she be?

  But you’re here. Now. And you’ve seen the Moon and stars. You’ve turned a man, and there is no going back.

  “I was not the father I should have been,” the senior Croix said, “but I am proud of the man your mother raised. You risked your life to save Miss Kitamura, for no other reason than it was right, and you were able.” There was an edge of warmth to the man’s speech now, as though he worked to conceal some level of emotion.

  “This is who sent you to keep an eye on Leo?” she asked Rado.

  The dark-haired vampire nodded.

  “Why?” Leo said. “If any of this is true, why weren’t you there?”