by P. Mattern
The meeting had taken an ugly turn when he’d mentioned his upcoming marriage to Ruthie Lilly.
“I’m about to tie the proverbial knot boys.” He’d told the V-net Officials. Brian Longhorn was the senior member of the V-net Committee, Peter Kranze and Howard ”Hoop” Wallard were the other two gentlemen.
By then the men had been celebrating the success of the Cavedweller negotiations with a round of double malt scotch.
“Congratulations!” Peter said, followed by the other men.”And who might the lucky lady be? Let’s toast to her good fortune!” he joked.
As all four men held out their shot glasses, Ian said jovially, ”To my bride-to-be Ruthie Lilly! May our marriage be as pleasant as our lying down!”
Ian was surprised that he had remembered the traditional Welsh toast, and somewhat pleased with himself. But as he pushed his glass forward to complete the toast he was startled to see ashen looks on the faces of the other three men.
“What’s the matter gentlemen?” he asked, a slight frown creasing his brow, the hand that was still holding the shot glass frozen in midair.
Brian was the first to recover his voice. After clearing his voice he spoke.
“Ian, the V-net Committee has had to invoke some rather harsh regulatory statutes because of the most recent, ah ,unfortunate occurrences in Fort Hunt. One of these has been the decision to forbid interphylum marriage . V-net vampires have been targeted by the government now, and we can’t risk infiltration by spies…”
Brian broke off speaking for a moment as he observed Ian’s face beginning to turn angry colors, then continued.
“Ruthie Lilly is currently under suspicion herself, being a half-Fay. For all we know she aided your escape so that the government could track you, or the government had her aid in your escape so that they could spy on you. I mean, how well can you really know her? It can’t have been more than a matter of weeks since you encountered each other. “
Ian’s inner fury was well reflected in his face but he held his voice steady as he replied.
“I would stake my immortal LIFE on her loyalty, not only to the V-net but to me as well. She risked HER immortal life to save me from the facility. Her assistance marked her as a traitor and a fugitive, Brian!”
Peter intervened at that point.
“Ian, man, you have to ask yourself why she would risk all that for a ‘marked’ vampire. I don’t think you are familiar with her background, or history working with the government. Let me get the dossier.”
Turning around he pressed a button on an interoffice phone and Ian heard him request a dossier on Ruthie Lilly, then turn around again.
There was an awkward silence among the men while they waited for the dossier. Ian’s face was still mottled and the veins in his neck seemed to be bulging.
Finally after a tap on the closed door a vampiress hurried in and presented a thick file to Peter.
Looking unflinchingly at Ian, he motioned to the conference table.
“I think you’d better sit down, Ian,” he said, with a note of apology and regret in his voice, ”This may take awhile.”
Mitzi tool a seat on the concrete bench opposite Sam’s gravestone at Pleasantview Cemetery, smoothing her long black skirt around her. Some twenty yards behind her, at a respectful distance, was Cass. The heightened security at the Farm now that the Citizen’s Protection Corps was making regular forays into the city to ‘chip’ the population meant that the vamps traveled in pairs, and the female vampires visited the city proper with a male escort.
Although Cass kept up a visual sweep of the graveyard, he purposely tried now to focus on Mitzi as she sat before her husband’s grave. Mitzi’s devotion to those she loved was one of her many qualities that Cass admired, and he understood that the loss of her first husband had cut deeply into her soul. Grieving places were actually a part of V-net culture. He felt that she should be able to pay homage to Sam.
He also felt that she was entitled to her privacy while there, and tried not to listen as she spoke aloud to her departed husband. Cass, like all vampires, had access to an auditory enhancement feature that kicked in if they were concentrating on picking up sound. Cass was keeping his heightened auditory abilities turned down. He had no desire to hear Mitzi tell Sam of her eternal love for him, though he was grateful to this man he’d never met for being a great husband to her and a great father to Charley all those years before Cass had met her.
Instead he was concentrating on their surroundings, straining to hear the approach of any other entities, human or non.
Turning to check in on Mitzi, he could hear her soft sobs drifting back to him. He suspected more of her grief had to do with Buttercup’s death and Cory’s recent departure than the loss of Sam, but he was glad that she had a place to release her innermost sadness in privacy.
Looking down, he kicked at a small pile of shriveled fall leaves by his left boot. It was late into fall now, and, like it or not, it seemed that the vampires’ exodus would be taking place during winter. His attention to the season wasn’t out of concern for the vampires themselves, who were able to withstand severe drops in temperature even bare-chested. But he had a feeling that the way things were unfolding they would be taking some humans with them as well, the humans that were determined not to accept the RFID device implants.
There would be hundreds of thousands of them.
To shelter humans, make sure they had access to food and medicine and to keep them healthy without directly impacting their culture would be a tall task, but in Cass’s mind the vampires had no choice. He couldn’t begin to fathom the political and ideological insanity that had brought mankind to this point. It seemed as though a macabre eugenics program had been implemented.
Cass was sure that the civilized vampires could not exist in the long term without human blood. Doing without it would surely cause further genetic mutations in their phylum—and he didn’t want to hazard a guess as to what those could consist of. Not only was it their choice to come to the aid of humans, but their continued existence depended on it.
Cass heard the crunching of leaves and turned to see Mitzi’s tear-streaked and still lovely face as she stood behind him. He quickly went to her, and she looked up at him and beamed.
“I am still grateful for all the love I am surrounded with,” she told him, her eyes shining.
“Especially your love, Castor. And Absolam is growing up so fast and is such a wonder! And I was just thinking, well, life goes on, and maybe Cory was not mine to raise after all. But I was also wondering…”
“Say no more.” Cass told her, as he gathered her up into his arms.
“Let’s go make babies Mrs. Noble!”
Especially after the departure of Cory, Absolam and Jaxon had become fast friends. They were similar in age and both strikingly handsome young men. Jaxon had piercingly blue eyes and honey colored hair. Ab’s hair was silver blonde, and he had his father’s warm, golden brown eyes. They were waiting on the grownups to take them to the home of a friend, one of the young female vampires that they socialized with. Her name was Rosalie, and she and her younger sister Natalie were , as far as the boys were concerned, the hottest ‘babes’ in Fort Hunt.
The young men were both too old for the grownups to refer to it as a ‘play date’ any longer, although from time to time Mitzi forgot and called it that before she caught herself. They had taken pains in getting ready for the social event, grooming themselves and choosing their attire carefully.
They stood in front of the huge decorative mirror in the room they now shared at the farm. It was situated on the far wall of the boy’s room , an antique find by Mitzi and Cass that was eight feet tall and twelve feet long and had been at one time part of the ornate décor of a Victorian mansion in Fort Hunt that had belonged to a wealthy banking family. The huge mirror was set in an ornately carved mahogany frame, with a nature theme, carvings of calla lilies and flying birds, fruit and vines covering it and culminating in a pinnacle at the top that was a represent
ation of the moon and stars.
The boys were looking at themselves and each other in the mirror. Jaxon went into a rapper impersonation, and then moonwalked. Ab, laughing at him, did a pantomime of walking up an unseen set of stairs using his innate hovering mechanism. They were both dressed in tees and cargo shorts. Ab’s tee shirt was black with gold lettering that said “IMMORTALS DO IT FOREVER”. Jaxon’s tee shirt depicted the Portal of Bones from the WORLD OF AZGLEN game.
Mitzi , passing through the hallway in her usual hurry glanced in at them through the open door and said “Jaxon I’m sure your Aunt Fressenda would not appreciate the crotch grabbing and ABSOLAM how many times do I have to tell you that there is NO FLYING IN THE HOUSE!”
Absolam muttered “sorry” along with Jaxon and after Mitzi disappeared around the corner they both cracked up. They were used to getting into trouble together, and it bonded them as though they were brothers.
“So.” Ab said conversationally, “Are you making out with Rosie tonight?”
“Hopefully.” Jaxon answered. “We’ll have to sneak though. It’s their parent’s house and her mom is always peeking in.”
“It’s not their real mom you know it’s their step mom.” Ab said,” Their real mom was killed by a werewolf I think I heard.”
Jaxon snorted.
“That’s ridiculous! Avinash is dating a were! It’s not like they’re our enemies or anything.”
Ab nodded,”True but I don’t know how far they go back. You and I have grown up in a baby’s dream, Jaxon my friend! There were times in the past of war between the phylums”
“No shit,” Jaxon replied.“I know history BETTER than you do. For that to be true our hotties would have to go clear back to the Dark Ages.”
The boys looked at each other, contemplating this possibility.
“Soooooooo…” Ab said,”We’re dating ‘cougars’ essentially?”
“One way of looking at it. Doesn’t matter though, they were fanged at the ‘peak of freshness’ and that alone makes them age appropriate!”
Both the young men chortled at Jaxon’s quip. Jaxon suddenly got a serious look on his face.
“What’s it like for you now, Ab? Seriously. With Cory running away to Faquier Hall?”
For a minute Ab seemed at a loss.
“You don’t have to talk about it man,” Jaxon said gruffly, “I was just wondering.”
Ab looked down and shuffled his feet.
“It was bad at first. Really bad. My mom was torn up. You know she never knew or cared about our parentage because we BOTH were a part of her. I really think that if someone else, like Auntie Celeste for instance, had offered to tell her she would have chosen NOT to know. But that’s mom for you!
Cory’s leaving to join Adrastos was a shock. And I know that she was grateful to me for stopping him from taking HER as well…but in a strange way, I think it was a kind of comfort to her that he WANTED to take her with him, that he attempted to, even though it was a completely selfish act on his part. To her it meant that he loved her.
“I envy you, you know.” Ab continued looking Jaxon in the eye but seeming to look right through him at the same time.”You had a human childhood, at least part of it was. Growing up the child of vampires mine has been accelerated, like childhood on meth or something! I understand why my mom, having been human for so long, struggles to accept that I am almost grown now. At least according to V-net culture. That has to be so weird.
“I sort of feel like the Buddha, when he saw the ragged man in the city streets and was pulled out of his illusion that life was completely wonderful for everyone, and that pain and suffering existed in the world. All this time I thought the world was wonderful, just like my life growing up here on the farm. Everyone so supportive, everything I could ever want, well almost everything, handed to Cory and I on a silver platter. But now everything is changing. My dad tells me that we will have to move at some point , and live differently than vamps have been living for the last half a century. My uncle Lux says we have to adopt a Zen attitude.”
“So you’re a Buddhist now?” Jaxon teased, looking around to make sure that no one was watching and then replicating Ab’s hovering pantomime of walking into the air up a flight of unseen stairs before floating down again.
“Well I guess I’m agnostic-a truth seeker. Uncle Lux said that there is truth in all religions, and that the greatest truths, the ones that he calls the ‘Profound Truths’ in the Reverendum, are repeated over and over and found in all religions. So I think it’s best to reverence all religions and believe in the Profound Truths.”
“Interesting theory,” Jaxon commented thoughtfully. “Do you believe in God?”
“Yes because I think a universal consciousness believes in ME…and you know in homeschooling we studied all the known religions, even the arcane ones. Even if it’s somewhat old fashioned and indulgent I like my mom’s concept of God…it’s comforting to her. There’s a lot to be said for faith- based panacea. When I get a girlfriend I won’t care what religion she is because I see the truth in all of them.”
Jaxon snorted.
“I know Lux and Pierre are into Zen Buddhism but it’s not actually a religion is it? More of a life philosophy wouldn’t you say?”
“Yeah,” Ab agreed. In his mind he had left the conversation and was starting to feel nervous about going to Rosalie and Natalie’s house. He really wanted to kiss Natalie, the blonde sister, a lot, and hoped he would have the opportunity. “Although Natalie told me her mom was Catholic when she was turned and kind of practices it still. It’s good to believe in something. What do you believe in, Jaxon?”
Jaxon looked at Ab evenly. Ab suspected that Jaxon was thinking of his own mother . Jaxon’s mother had allowed him to be bitten by her vampire boyfriend and then eventually had given Jaxon to Fress to raise when she abandoned the V-net and chose to live a nomadic life with her rogue vampire lover.
“Loyalty.” Jaxon answered, without hesitation.”Loyalty , and being willing to fight for and even DIE for those in your tribe ,above all else.”
With vamp quickness Jaxon scooted to the apparel shelves against one wall of the room . He reached for something high on a shelf and when he turned around he was wearing a stylish men’s fedora hat in light grey suede with a black leather band around the crown.
“NOW I’m ready to party!” he cried with glee,” All pimped out. Tell your mom to get a move on!”
Cary was squeezing his head between his hands and staring at Avi ,incredulous at what he’d just been told.
“WHAAAAT? You’re girlfriend is with child? OH MY GOD I’ve stumbled onto the set of a vampire soap opera! Somebody help me!”
Kimbra tapped the back of Cary’s head, none too gently. She simultaneously reached out to hug Avinash.
“We’re here for you! It will be okay, don’t freak out. Remember to breathe.” she told him.”Cary doesn’t mean to be an ass…he just falls into it naturally out of force of habit. But you do know that we support you and you’re not alone, right?”
Avinash seemed as though he’d calmed down somewhat but still had a deer in the headlights look to him.
“I guess that I need to tell Fressenda first. I just left my girlfriends place. She said her parents won’t kill me or anything. And I found out something I didn’t know-there’s only a 50% chance that the kid will be lupine.”
“Maybe the kid will be a were AND a shapeshifter.” Cary said unhelpfully.”And why are we talking in singles here? Don’t weres have multiples?”
Kimbra threw Cary a malignant look and stepped on his Chuck Taylor clad foot on purpose. She was about to say something else when Fress appeared at the entrance to the ¾ season room.
“Sorry to interrupt.” she said, “But Avi your girlfriend’s parents called and they wanted to talk to you.” Fress waited , looking at Avi for a response and then said, ”Avinash? Do you know what this is about? Care to clue me in?”
“Fress!” Avinash replied, as though he’
d just noticed that she was there.
“Yeah, uh, there was something …I was just telling Kimbra and Cary that there was something I wanted to tell you about. “ Avi shot a worried look toward the front of the cottage.”It’s about Neerja. We think…we’re pretty sure that she’s pregnant Fress, actually.” He finished in a breathy tone, as if his short speech had somehow sucked all the air out of his lungs.
Fressenda held out her small white hand.
“Well come with me, then, you can talk to them, and we’ll set up a meeting and face the music together, Avi. It will be fine, don’t worry!”
As Fress pulled him forward, Avi shot a relieved look back over his shoulder at Cary and Kimbra, and smiled as if to say, ”Isn’t Fress great?”
Cary rubbed one hand over his mouth to hide a smile. He considered Avi’s predicament highly entertaining and couldn’t wait to see how it all panned out.
“Okay look at this Cass!” Lux said, his long fingers traveling over the keyboard of his laptop as he, Cass, Daniel and Pierre sat having coffee at the kitchen table on the Farm. Lux turned the screen so that Cass could see it, as Daniel and Pierre hopped up out of their seats to stand behind the other men and peer at the computer screen.
Lux had pulled up Craig’s List. The travel section in which unused plane tickets were advertised at a discount or persons seeking a ride to a certain destination and willing to share expenses sought a match.
“So?” Cass said sourly, scanning the ads as Lux scrolled through them, then, a few seconds later he exclaimed ”Hey wait! Back up! I think I see what you were talking about!”
Some of the ads were worded oddly, as if they were written in some sort of code. All included private box numbers to reply to. Pierre, looking over Lux’s shoulder, began to read one out loud.
“Seeking ride West with Dark brother offer mutually satisfying terms.I am AB, seeking to leave ASAP.” Pierre read aloud, then began to read another below it.
“Going West will trade A- for transport and security.” It read.