Blood Claim

by Laura Baumbach, Angela Fiddler, Jet Mykles

  "I'm not hiding out,” Cory snapped, then covered his mouth. “I'm sorry. I just—"

  Luke stopped already forming his next insult in his head. Cory had never ever, not once, ever apologized or stopped his too-quick tongue from cutting. “I didn't come here to fight."

  "I'm not trying to—” Luke didn't finish, either. He was never going to change Cory into a perfect companion, but that didn't change the desire. “You seem to think there is more to this life. But there isn't. We exist. We feed. But greater purpose? There isn't one."

  "I don't choose to believe that,” Cory said, and then for the first time in their relationship—such as it was—they actually arrived peacefully at an impasse. Cory shivered and wrapped his arms around himself. His gloves shone in the moonlight. “Can you at least drive me home?"

  The change in him touched on some protective spot inside Luke that he'd thought was long dead. “You know I will. But why aren't you going to fly?"

  Cory looked up at him and let the exhaustion show on his face. He'd slept well the night before, but Luke saw it was the first time in a long time. “There's a bad wind blowing,” he said simply. “And I don't want to be in it. If it's too much work, I can always take the C-Train."

  Luke didn't point out that this comfortable life that disgusted Cory so much almost always included a car of some sort. Nor did he want Cory in the wind. In fact, as he stood there, the wind touched him for the first time. It stole the steam from his coffee, touched his hair, and tried to wrap itself around his neck. It wasn't looking for him, but for Cory. “Stay,” he said, not meaning to say anything.

  "What?"

  "Stay here, with me. At least for the next little bit. There's something going on here. I promise you there won't be any strings."

  The pond's heater kicked in, and they both jumped at the knocking sound. It seemed to wake Cory up. He eyed Luke warily. “Do you have any blood packs?"

  "A couple."

  Cory nodded and looked back up again. The stars were too bright. The cold night turned the air into a huge crystal, and if they weren't careful, they'd be caught up in it. “Dibs on your O negative."

  Luke would have given up a lot more than his O negative stash if it meant them going inside again. “Agreed."

  * * * *

  Lathe didn't have to search very long to find the city Corbin had ended up in. The moment he reached Calgary's city limits and crossed over the first river, the water had whispered Corbin's location to him. It had woken Brutus, and Brutus never forgot a scent. Years ago Lathe had promised his wolf what remained of Cory after he used the young man to open the vortex and release the energy stored inside it. Cory's escape had cheated them both.

  It had taken him longer to find Calgary's source of power. Unlike most major cities, especially cities that had bodies of water and a location so close to the mountains, the land here was empty and dead. There were hardly any vampires; two, in fact, if he counted Cory. It didn't surprise him to find that Cory had got himself turned; he just wondered at the unfortunate bastard who'd turned him, or how long it had taken Cory to convince the other to take him. But if Cory thought that was enough to protect him, he was only delaying the fate Lathe had in mind for him, not circumventing it at all.

  He'd used Cory to harness a small vortex in a northern town in British Columbia. It had been a school they'd used as quarantine during a tuberculosis outbreak, and the deaths there created a block in the power lines the river brought into the town. Most of the cities had already been claimed by established vampire clans; Lathe didn't want to share. Cory had been so close, and when he'd left, Lathe had tried to open it himself. But like a tick with its head buried in its victim, lopping off the body only poisoned the lines. He needed Cory, damn it. He needed to be able to transfer the vortex from feeding on the lines to feeding off the host that Cory would become, and then Lathe would kill the vortex and Cory at the same time.

  And the fact that Calgary should have been rich with power lines running under the city told him there was another sort of drain on the lines. Another vortex. He'd been expecting something big, but nothing prepared him for how strong it actually was. They were so close to the bedrock here. The ground beneath his feet remembered what it was like to form mountains. And the people ... Lathe took his pleasure from power more than anything, but his cock stirred at the thought of the slaves he would harvest. All that hot blood and willing lust would be welcome after his long search.

  The restaurant was in the middle of two rivers converging, and it seemed smaller than its dimensions. It hadn't taken him much to set the fire inside the kitchen—nothing major, mind, only enough to gut the kitchen itself—and it took very little to convince the proprietors to just wait on the restoration work. There had been a large squawk about it, but eventually it died down, and the restaurant was his. From there, it was just a matter for the weather to take a colder turn, which would set Brutus free.

  A banging came from upstairs. It wasn't Brutus, who was waiting patiently for true dark by the door and unable to take physical form quite yet. Lathe stood up, climbing the staircase to the main level. The building had been a restaurant for so long, it reeked of humans and their filthy habits, but it hadn't always had such an innocuous existence. People had died here, and died violently. Lathe knew of a suicide on the third floor, a murder/suicide on the second, and an older convalescing patient who had been tossed down the stairs. When that hadn't finished the job, a stout branch had. They were all still there, and the other—Luke, Lathe had learned—would be able to pick up more from them than he could.

  They were all effects, however, and not the cause. Lathe took the stairs up to the second floor. No tables were set up here, no banquet space despite the view of the river from the windows. The only thing in the room was a huge bookcase against the near wall, with a dollhouse-size model of the house. He stepped onto the second-floor landing. He had to go past the public washrooms that had been converted from other rooms. A woman wept eternally to herself in the women's toilet. He ignored her.

  The window was no longer visible. A blue light came from just before it and obliterated it completely. It was a sickly blue, almost purple, like the color of a freshly bloomed bruise, and it swirled maliciously in its place.

  "Hello,” Lathe said. The angry blue light reached for him and tried to pull energy from him, but it was weak, and made weaker by its lack of victims. The restaurant owners must have recognized it, if not understood it, for what it was; the restaurant closed at three p.m. and didn't open until ten the next morning. The vortex worked best at night when it could insinuate itself into dreams.

  The light slid off Lathe harmlessly. There was nothing left inside him to corrupt. The circle pulsed once, sullenly, and then withdrew from him.

  The power lines to the city, the ones that were designed for Lathe and Lathe's kind, were being consumed by this thing, like a leech swollen with the blood of its host. It was a good thing Cory had made himself stronger; he would need that extra bit of strength to contain it all. “Soon,” Lathe told the vortex. He'd have to encourage it to enter the new host, but that was easily enough done, and it would know mortal death.

  The vortex pulsed again, furious, but it had no voice to protest with. There was no malicious thought behind it. It just was. And like all thoughtless beasts, it would serve Lathe in whatever way he demanded, resentful or otherwise.

  True darkness finally arrived. Lathe was safe in the twilight once the sun set, but Brutus needed the absolute dark to become physically present. Lathe went downstairs to free the beast.

  Brutus scrambled across the wooden patio, his claws leaving half-inch scratches through the paint and into the treated wood beneath. He was still mostly smoke and shadow, but his claws and teeth were fully formed.

  Lathe let him play, if that was the word for it, for a moment. When Brutus pounced on a moth he'd been stalking, the grass beneath his paws withered and died as he sapped the meager life from the insect.

  "Bru
tus,” Lathe said. The great beast stopped and looked at him, ears pricked. He was now whole, but his black eyes were so dark they reflected nothing. “Find him,” Lathe continued. The words had to be said out loud to bind Brutus to them.

  Brutus sat up and howled at the moon. In the distance, a barking dog yelped like a trapped puppy and was silent. The entire neighborhood held its breath, Lathe felt, and then Brutus turned. He sniffed the air, cocked his head, and was off, leaping from pooled shadow to pooled shadow, appearing fully formed from each new jump.

  Lathe followed. Corbin had nested close to the vortex, knowingly or otherwise, just on the other side of the second river and up the hill. Twice he had to call Brutus back. The cold snap hadn't been long enough to drive the homeless into shelters, and Brutus had to cross downtown to get to Corbin. The homeless, those too far gone in their own personal hell to ever come back, recognized Brutus for what he was. As Brutus passed their hovels and cardboard castles, Lathe heard the ones still awake draw back in terror and the sleeping ones cry out for their mothers or their bottles, whichever they held dearer.

  But Brutus was on a mission and wouldn't be distracted from it. He leapt ahead, taking massive bounds, and when he had to wait for Lathe, his entire body shook with resentment.

  They had to cross another river. This one was older and deeper than the one by the vortex. It brought with it the scrapings from the mountains. Soon, Lathe would be in control of the potential energy, and he found himself quivering as well. Soon.

  Brutus led him down a new street, then another and another. Each one was less lit than the last, until it was dark enough that Brutus could heel beside him, and the touch of his breath, the ender of life, was welcomed on the back of Lathe's thigh.

  The garage behind the steepled white and green house was not used forvehicles, as did the rest of the freestanding structures in the alley. The owner of the garage had tried to keep the unwanted visitors away, from an angry yellow “no trespassing” sign to the hundreds of nails holding two-by-fours in place over the door and windows. The nails currently in use still hardware store shiny, but Cory had obviously burrowed down and under. Lathe would be damned more than he already was if he did the same thing.

  Instead, he put his hand up, pressing it against the wood. It didn't take much to force the decay already in the wood to swell and reject the new steel. One by one, the wood pushed out the nails with a sickening squelch.

  "Hey!” Lathe heard behind him. He turned as the sound of the metal hinges of the gate reached him. It was the owner of the house. He was taller than most humans, and the hair on his head was crazy around his face. “You can't just—"

  Brutus, lolling by Lathe's feet, perked up. He didn't growl, not in the presence of prey, but Lathe felt the hunger from him.

  Whether the human saw the great beast by Lathe's feet was irrelevant. Some did; some didn't. It was better if they did see; at least then they understood their role in the universe. Lathe looked at the human, wanting to see the dawn of comprehension on his doomed face. “Um, never mind,” the human said, reaching behind him for the gate. This one was smarter than most of his ilk. “Please."

  "We do mind,” Lathe said and then nodded. “Take him.” Brutus was up in the next second. The human had been standing in the shadow of an old, dead tree, and that was where Brutus erupted from, fully formed. There was no blood, not even as Brutus's jaws clamped down. Brutus wasn't actually biting. Everything from the human's silent scream to his desperate attempt to protect his vulnerable throat was absorbed through Brutus's cold touch.

  The grass in the alley was already shocked from the cold, but as Brutus fed he bled out the last bit of stored color in it. The brown shadow spread through the fence to the bushes that still held the ghost of blooming flowers. Brutus poisoned the roots. The already hibernating wood died and crumbled. It even stretched to the climbing ivy running up the walls of the house. The vines dropped free from their hooks and roots and fell to the ground in a brown shower of leaves.

  There was nothing left of the human by the time Brutus stepped free from the newly scorched earth. He licked his lips and whined up at Lathe. Lathe scratched the back of the beast's ears, feeling the ice-cold skin, and then kicked the door to the garage the rest of the way open.

  Cory wasn't inside. Lathe didn't know why that was such a disappointment. The interior wasn't sun proof, but Corbin had solved that problem by burrowing under the abandoned car and letting the iron underside protect him from the sun. It wouldn't have been a perfect nest; he would have had restless, painful dreams, but he was still young. Long black feathers lined the pit, with the plume end smelling of Cory's blood, and Lathe saw Cory pull out his own pin feathers in order to make the nest homier and to protect himself from the worst of the dreams. He knew Cory wasn't beyond a little pain to solve his problems.

  "Where did you go, my little bird?” Lathe asked. The silent garage failed to answer him.

  But Brutus would. “Go. Find him."

  Brutus howled again and was gone. Lathe couldn't keep up, not in the time he had left of the night, but Brutus would lie low in a cold, dark place and let him know the next evening where he was. He returned to the restaurant to sleep.

  * * * **

  Cory found more than blood in the fridge. He pulled out two beers, opened them over the sink, and poured them into glasses. The downstairs rec room actually had a wood-burning fireplace, as opposed to the hermetically sealed gas fireplace upstairs, and they sat on the floor in front of it. Luke took the warmed blood pack first. Cory had already fed; that was obvious from the flushed cheeks.

  The plastic gave way to Luke's fangs reluctantly, and once he breeched the seal, it didn't hold tension like human skin. But the harmless chemicals suspending the blood kept it alive for them to feed from. He drained it, feeling his body assimilate the blood. He opened his eyes, for that second hyper alert to everything around him. If this has been the bad old days, he would have pinned Cory to the table and fucked him until neither one of them could move, but that item was off the menu. Cory smiled ruefully, obviously thinking the same thing, so Luke raised the glass of beer instead. “It wasn't all that bad,” he said.

  "It wasn't,” Cory agreed. “But it wasn't all my fault, either."

  "No, it wasn't.” Luke took another drink, then held the glass between his fingertips. “Did you find it?"

  "Find what?” Cory was curious, not defensive, and it wasn't a tone Luke was much used to.

  "Your greater purpose. The thing you left me for."

  "I didn't leave you,” Cory said. “You'd all but packed up my things and threw them out on your sun-drenched lawn."

  "You killed someone, Cory."

  "I killed a human,” Cory said, voice dark. “And he needed killing."

  "It doesn't work that way. Dead humans bring police officers—"

  "Not that one,” Cory said. He'd been a worker in a shelter, a volunteer who brought juice jugs around to all the tables and brought the younger, prettier men to the storage room. It had come out in the investigation, and with so many potential motives for the crime, it stalled out. But it meant that they probably had Cory's fingerprints on record now.

  "We can't afford the attention."

  "And I couldn't let him keep doing it."

  "Have you done it since?"

  Cory's eyes were blank for half a dozen seconds. Then he shook his head. “No,” he said finally. “It's not safe. So if you're asking me if I thought my grander purpose was to become some sort of winged crusader, the answer's no."

  He dared Luke to say anything along the lines of I told you so, so Luke didn't. Cory waited, tense on the edge of his chair, his body preparing for another argument. Luke put down the glass and stood up. Cory watched him approach with narrowed eyes. Luke pushed his shoulders against the chair, and although Cory's entire body was tense, he didn't fight. Luke pulled Cory's hips to the edge of the recliner.

  Cory's mouth tightenedas Luke knelt down in front of him. “Wha
t are you—” he began, but then Luke undid his jeans, and Cory didn't finish the rest of the now redundant question.

  Luke looked up, meeting Cory's gaze. Cory was motionless, just for a second, and then relaxed. “Yes, please,” he said finally.

  He was half hard already; he always was when they fought. Luke pulled the jeans further down Cory's thighs, thought about keeping them high enough to trap his legs, but knew that Cory would hate it, so he took the time to take them all the way off. Cory spread his legs and touched Luke's shoulder lightly with the tips of two fingers. There was a thank you in the touch, but it didn't need to be said.

  Luke debated not kissing the insides of Cory's thigh. It seemed, for the moment, too forward, too familiar, but then Cory took his head, pushing him not toward his cock, but further down, to the start of his inner thigh. Luke smiled and pressed his tongue against the white skin. He found the femoral buried deep, and kissed where it branched off. Cory's sigh caught in his vocal cords in that second, and what came out was half a strangled groan. Luke tried it again, moving up a quarter inch and kissing that spot as well, but raked his nails across the same spot on the other leg. The scratch remained white for less than a second, then erupted scarlet against the skin, and Cory's hands tightened in Luke's hair.

  Interesting. He slapped the inside of Cory's upper thigh, and his hand print came to the surface as well, hot and pink. Cory shuddered, his hands pulling Luke's head up, but Luke fought the grip, and eventually Cory stopped trying to force it. Luke slapped the other side, harder, then back to the first side again, and if he had electrocuted Cory, he didn't think the response could have been more dramatic. Cory's eyelashes were damp, but his lips were parted, and as soon as Luke finished, Cory thrust his hips up and off the chair.

  "Again?” Luke asked.

  Cory nodded. His shoulders were the only thing that touched the chair now, the rest of his body stretched like a bowstring.

  "Would you prefer the paddle?” Luke asked, keeping his voice neutral.