Blood Reaction Saga (Book 2): Blood Distraction

by Atha, DL

  “I need to know how it happened.” “Why? You barely knew him?”

  His hand paused in his writing. “I think your generation calls it closure.”

  I was hesitant to give him any details, not knowing what would put him on the killing spree again, but for once, Levi’s emotions were blatant in his expression. He’d loved, in some way, this brother he knew nothing about.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.

  I hoped to God he wasn’t lying. “Fine. What do you want to know?”

  “How did it happen?”

  “I’ve told you already. I staked him.”

  “I know that. But after … the stake … that. How long did he last? Did he give you no advice? Point you in my direction? He had to have said something.”

  “He really wasn’t in the mood for giving advice, Levi.”

  “Tell me something!” The stick he’d been writing in the dirt with splintered in his hand. I waited while he took a deep breath. “Anything that will help me to know him.”

  “There was no knowing him. What do you not get about that? Asa was broken.”

  “There had to be something. Some kind of indication that he had…”

  He stopped there. I think he didn’t know what to say, but I knew what he wanted. “You want some kind of indication that he had something good left in him, Levi. But what if there wasn’t anything?”

  “Please just tell me what happened.”

  “And if I say the wrong thing and you lose it? When it comes to him, you don’t think clearly.”

  “I give you my word that when it comes to Asa, you have nothing left to fear from me.”

  So he might kill me for something else. Great. Well, here goes nothing, I thought. I took a steadying breath and let it all pour out. “I’ve already told you how it happened. He had no idea I was turning. I don’t think he realized it could be a slow process. The only experience he had at all was his own turning, which was a quick, fast‐forwarded approach. He didn’t see it coming, and I had no specific plan. I figured I’d know when the time was right. And I did. But after that, I didn’t know what to do or what to expect. He didn’t die quickly, and I had time to take the blood I needed to complete the conversion from him. He still wasn’t gone by that time, and I pulled the stake out. And I would have left him like that and let him live probably if he hadn’t laughed and said he hadn’t meant any of his threats. He said he’d have let me go if I’d simply escaped. I staked him again when he told me I was a killer and said he wished he could be there when I killed my daughter. He offered me no advice. He didn’t ask anything of me. Not once in that entire time did he ask a thing of me. He didn’t mention his maker, and he didn’t mention you.”

  Levi sat quietly absorbing what I’d just said. I knew he was trying to find something to hope for when it came to Asa, but there was nothing there. “So no resolution with himself or anyone else when the end came,” Levi whispered. He was still drawing in the dirt, small strokes that mirrored his agitation.

  Levi looked so pitiful that I almost felt bad for him. Almost.

  “I think your maker is fully to blame. He made Asa, killed his family and then cast him out. You should take it up with that worthless piece of skin,” I said as I picked up my own stick. I carved my name deeply into the ground like thousands of humans before me.

  “My creator is a good man,” Levi answered.

  “Whatever. Tell that to the thousands of Asa’s victims.”

  “I’ll take you to meet him someday. You’ll see for yourself,” Levi answered. He spoke with conviction.

  I’ll hang him in the sun, I thought but kept the sentiment to myself. “I doubt that,” I said instead.

  “I’d hoped Asa would find peace with himself, with our father. I’d always hoped for a reunion. Now there’s no chance of that. You ended any possibility. I don’t mean that it was your fault, but you must understand how I feel.”

  “Not really. It’s like hoping for redemption for the devil,” I answered.

  “Is there no redemption for a sinner?” The stick snapped in his fingers. He cast the pieces aside again and picked up another.

  “For the principal sinner?” I questioned.

  “Why not?” Levi looked at me wistfully. “Why not even for the biggest sinner of all? Surely there is a god who can forgive even the principal sinner. Isn’t that the point of a god? What good are they otherwise?”

  “You have to at least want to be redeemed, I think.”

  He tossed his writing stick aside and got to his feet with the speed of a tired human. The bounce and cockiness was gone from his step. “Then I suppose there really was no hope for him. In this life or the next,” Levi said.

  More and more sympathy was creeping into me. I couldn’t seem to stop it. “Look, he did have this one moment at the very end that was surprising.” Levi turned towards me, hope scrawled across his face. “Right before he died, he said ‘Thank you’. I think those were the most genuine words he ever said to me. He must have hated himself and wished for death every day, and I think he was glad to finally see it come. So maybe in his last moment he did find some peace. Some form of it anyways.”

  Levi faced the forest. His shoulders were back, his body rigid. “Did you leave him for the sun?” It was as though he couldn’t look at me if my answer was the wrong one.

  “I buried him.”

  Visibly relieved, he exhaled sharply. “He deserved no such quarter. Especially from you.” “I didn’t do it for him.”

  “Then who?” Levi half turned in my direction but didn’t look at me.

  “His mother.”

  “Why?”

  “I called him a son of a bitch. It was the only time he showed any emotion. True emotion, anyways. He defended her memory.” I drew more furiously in the dirt, carving out a picture of my own mother, her short hair brushed to the side. “He thought I was insulting her.”

  “Semantics have changed,” Levi added.

  “Yes, I know. Asa explained that. But the point is that he loved her.”

  Levi nodded and left without another word. I guess he needed time to grieve for the brother that he never had. I didn’t bother to follow him. When it came to Asa, I had no grief to spare.

  Chapter 22

  The next four nights were hell on earth. Before Levi’s entrance, I’d been able to visit my own house, pretend I was human. I’d been surrounded by my things, my pictures, and mementos of my family. Human things that Levi said gave me a false sense of who I was. Now I was living in a basement in a forgotten camp. But it accomplished what Levi wanted. It clarified my self-image. I was an outcast.

  I wanted my family, to hold my daughter in my arms and do simple things like bake cookies and pick out tomorrow’s school clothes for her. It was all I thought about. And I missed being a doctor and the human interactions that came with saving lives, or just simply being there when someone needed you the most.

  But Levi had warned me in no uncertain terms that I was not to attempt to return to my house or to Ellie even though the local television studios had never featured my photo on the nightly news. My name wasn’t being broadcast on APB’s or run into the dirt on the local radio stations. Despite my missing from the news stories, the apartment complex where Ellie lived with Mom was being monitored twenty‐four seven, and Detective Rumsfield remained in critical condition. The authorities were interested in me but not enough to make it public.

  And their silence was the biggest mystery to me; I worried over it and fretted each evening when Levi brought back copies of the state’s two largest newspapers. I studied them in detail, along with Facebook stalking a few of my former colleagues via Levi’s account. I could find nothing about myself at all except a few questions as to why I wasn’t working any more. No one mentioned me being a fugitive, no one saying, “I knew there was something off about that woman.”

  Was the lack of media exposure a trap to lure me out? I didn’t know, and Levi didn’t care at all abo
ut the reasoning behind the silence. The only thing he was interested in was putting as much distance between us and Detective Michael Rumsfield as possible. Actually, he recommended killing him in his hospital bed, but I’d refused. I begged him not to kill him either, which made him shake his head in disgust and stomp away. Why should I care to save him? He asked. Honestly, I didn’t know either except that killing is wrong. I’d been trained on every level not to just think that but to believe it. Besides, I wouldn’t leave Ellie, and murdering Rumsfield wouldn’t help that cause. And so the sentence laid down by Levi for my stubbornness was solitary confinement at the CCC camp. It was utterly miserable.

  He’d left the evening of my so‐called trial and had come back only long enough to feed and check on me. And issue commands about not leaving or venturing away. It had been awkward at first. I hadn’t fully gotten over his willingness to hang me in the sun, and his affection towards the animal that had ruined my life rubbed me the wrong way. Levi’s sentiment toward Asa was beyond my comprehension, and maybe it always would be. But his interest in my care appeared genuine, and he was willing to let me stay in the same county as my daughter, so I was content to agree to disagree. In the end, Asa was still dead, and I was here living some variation on life with the possibility of returning to my family. If Levi wanted to love Asa from the beyond, well then let him.

  Our conversation that first evening was uncomfortable and luckily didn’t last long. He’d returned, nearly brimming with blood it seemed, fed me quickly through a self‐inflicted bite, and then left. The second night he fed me again through another self‐ inflicted injury, but he’d hung around longer. We’d managed some small talk that by the end of the hour had trailed into more meaningful conversation. By the third night, we were able to move on to deeper subjects such as why Asa had chosen me, the details of how I’d managed to outwit him, and a brief outline of my three decades on this earth.

  Levi was much older than me but not quite as old as Asa, and where Asa had dropped into the absolute anonymity of a serial killer, Levi had embraced the world and became its student. There were few places on the globe he hadn’t been to and nothing much he hadn’t been willing to try. At least, anything that could be accomplished in the dark of night. The result was an interesting man and a great conversationalist. He enjoyed listening as much as he enjoyed talking, and despite my original anger at how he’d treated me, I couldn’t keep myself from opening up to him. He had everything Asa had lacked. Empathy, compassion and a sense of humor. He was a man who was sure of himself, and if he’d been human, he’d have been the boy next door that you fell in love with at first sight. I couldn’t have stayed angry with him if I’d tried.

  Whatever demons Levi had about Asa, he’d apparently laid them to rest when he returned the fifth night. Dawn was still an hour away, and I’d found some moldy, but mostly readable, newspaper clippings under one of the rusting bed frames. The mattress was the old spring type, musty, but not wet, and I’d carried it back to the cabin the night before last. Sleeping on most anything beats a wooden bunk I’d discovered.

  It turned out that Levi was right; the camp was a remnant of the CCC and from the date fading away on the newspaper, the camp had probably shut down around 1940. For a few years, the Boy Scouts had used it, but the last time a human had legally slept in one of the bunks, it was probably about 1965. Since then, it had hunkered down against time and the elements and was simply wasting away.

  I heard Levi enter the remains of the clearing and listened as he headed in the direction of the main house. He stopped midway and turned towards the first barrack I’d entered in my snooping. I knocked lightly on one wall and went back to my newspapers so he didn’t waste time sniffing out my trail from each barrack to the next. He was with me in seconds.

  “What are you reading about?” he asked as he stretched out on one of the bunks across from me. It sagged dangerously under his weight.

  “You were right. This was a CCC camp,” I said, pointing towards one of the yellowed clippings lying beside me on the uneven plank floor.

  “Yeah, I figured. I saw a few of them being built back in the day.” He plucked the newspaper off the floor and flipped over on his back. The bunk bounced but somehow held together.

  I looked up at him curiously. “When were you turned exactly?” He’d never told me the year.

  “1898. Long before President Roosevelt formed the CCC. Mainly, I saw the buildings through their construction stages. I, of course, was dead to the world while the men worked. I snuck into them at night.”

  “Into the men or the camp?” I asked. He slanted an eyebrow in my direction.

  “Good hunting place, I guess,” I said. “Group of men working by themselves in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Actually, I preferred the taste of women. Still do. Something Asa and I had in common.”

  I glared at him and he laughed under the anger in my expression. “I’m just teasing. Loosen up.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’re not the one who ended up undead at Asa’s hands.”

  “You’re right. That was callous. But in his defense, I would have likely done the same thing if I’d come across you. At least when I was first changed.”

  More glaring from me. “So is that normal vampire behavior? Take humans hostage, toy with them for a week, and then kill them.”

  Levi shrugged and picked up another of the newspapers. “It happens. We get bored or lonely. More likely both. We’re not a large population, so it’s hard to find a vampire that you connect with on a personal level. We seek out human companionship even if we have to force it. If we’re strong enough, and they are too, sometimes we turn them.”

  “If you’re strong enough?” I questioned. I laid the newspaper I was reading aside and picked up another. Out of habit, I turned towards the candle.

  Levi handed me the newspaper he was holding and gestured for another. “Most of the time, we end up killing the human in question. Not killing them takes commitment; the restraint is enormous, and humans aren’t that durable. All good magic takes time.”

  I changed my voice to match that of the average street corner fortuneteller. “The sacred bond between maker and child. Magic.” I pretended to rub a crystal ball. “You don’t seriously believe that? I thought you were more educated.”

  “Education can’t teach you what to believe.”

  “Well, this is certainly not magic,” I said, sweeping my hand between the two of us.

  “Cheating death and living forever, eternally young. This is not magic? What is it then?”

  “I can’t know for sure. I’m a doctor, not a molecular biologist.

  But I’m pretty sure it’s a virus and probably a retrovirus,” I said. “But it’s certainly not mumbo‐jumbo. You tricked me with the penicillin comment. Maybe you have more in common with Asa than I thought.”

  “I know you’re insulting me if you’re comparing me to Asa.”

  “Well, if the fang fits.” I picked up another newspaper clipping, one corner disintegrating in my hands.

  “Humans live on one plane, we on another. They need science, but you and I don’t. We subsist on a magic that transcends the human laws of mortality. Our blood is sacred. It is beyond science.”

  My eye roll was involuntary. “We subsist on the retrovirus’s ability to remodel DNA into what it needs. It is not sacred. There is no other plane of existence for us.”

  Levi turned over onto his stomach and placed his hand in the candle flame. His skin seared and popped in the heat. The sizzling sound was like fingernails on a chalkboard. I shoved his hand away; burning flesh never had a nice smell. He held the palm of his hand up to me. “This wound will be healed within an hour because I converted someone’s life force into my own.”

  I shook my head and moved the candle out of his easy reach. “It will heal because the virus has the ability to repair tissue at amazing rates. It uses the proteins and amino acids in the human bloodstream to do so.”

 
“And there is no magic in that?” he asked.

  “No more magic than is in a mosquito or a bat.” “Mosquitoes and bats die every day,” he answered. “Ours is a very effective virus.”

  “Why do we die and regain life with the setting and rising of the sun? Why can a stake through the heart not be repaired while everything else can?”

  He waited for answers that I didn’t have. I turned back to my newspapers.

  “Because it’s magic. There are no answers.” He held his hand up again. The subcutaneous layer was already repairing itself.

  “Haven’t you ever been told that all magic is just misunderstood science?” I asked.

  “Don’t fool yourself, Annalice. That’s just human talk.”

  Levi followed me out of the barracks and into the first floor of the cottage. He hesitated there while I walked the steps down to the basement. I could hear him pacing as I lay down on the bed. Some of the springs were sharp, but I reached down under the blanket and bent them down, pulling the blankets back into place. At least I felt more human sleeping in a bed. Albeit, an old, outdated one that didn’t even belong to me.

  Levi kept pacing, and I kept getting more nervous. Was he reconsidering his decision to not kill me? Maybe getting past Asa’s final death was just too much to ask and I’d been lulled into a false sense of security during our easy conversations over the previous evenings. First light would be here soon. He was usually gone to wherever he’d been hiding out by this time. Clearly, he was planning on staying, but for what, and why the change?

  “I’m afraid you’re going to wear the floor out above my head!” I yelled up at him. He stopped, and I listened for his next moves.

  If I had a beating heart, it would have been pounding out of my chest as the steps creaked with his weight. I sat up in the bed preparing to bolt. I might not get far, but I’d sure try. I worked to calm my breathing as he walked to the bed, but I couldn’t find the mental resolve and his expression did nothing to calm my fears. I’d seen the same determined look on his face the night he considered killing me. As his hand slid across the foot of the bed, I surged around the other side.