by Arthur Slade
His nap was about to become endless. I cut the wires to the camera—there were likely others stationed about the room. And who knew what security tricks he had up his sleeve? I took thirty seconds to scout the room. I had four and a half minutes before his guard would return.
I hated being late for a meal. And I hated rushing to finish it.
I dropped down to the floor, landing quietly. So far, so good. No alarms had gone off. No infrared beams cut across the room; I would have seen them. Maybe he was more into brute force. The guard at the door was enough to ward away most would-be enemies. And really, who’d be able to climb to these heights other than me? I stretched, and one of my vertebrae cracked, but Mr. Joseph did not slide open a curious eye. I took in a Zen breath.
He let out the slightest snore. He was a well-muscled specimen. He hadn’t put on any fat since the photographs had been taken. He had laid out his suit jacket on the chair and there were underarm sweat stains on his shirt. A Luger sat on his bed table; no surprise since he was likely a collector, and I fully expected the thing to be in perfect firing shape. Maybe he had a thing for Nazis too.
Well, this was it. It did take a bit of time to suck out the blood. And I’d be sluggish afterward. I wasn’t looking forward to dragging my heavy body back through the vent system. Seven to eight percent of body weight is blood. And judging by Gabriel’s size, I’d be putting on about twelve pounds—tough on a girl’s figure. That was why I owned stretch pants.
I crawled across the bed, paused a microsecond to admire a gold skull button protector on his top button, then dipped down to sink my teeth into his jugular.
The moment my teeth touched his neck, a shock shot through me, strong enough to throw me from the bed. I rolled across the floor. My lips were actually burning. I wiped them with a jittery hand.
The skull button had been a personal electroshock device with some kind of sensor inside it.
Gabriel opened his eyes. There was a trickle of blood on his neck. He sat up and reached for his Luger. I knocked it from the bedside table—well, I knocked over the table too. Bad aim. I still couldn’t quite stand. My muscles were jerking.
“Well,” he said. “I guess the conducted electrical button works. One can never be too cautious.”
Electricity was not my friend. But I got my wits back much faster than most.
“Obviously,” I said. Which was the cleverest thing I could come up with. Again, I was in the odious position of having to talk to my food. It was just so wrong and depressing. All I wanted was a quiet meal and a glass of wine.
“May I ask who you are?” he said.
“There isn’t a lot of time,” I answered. “I have to kill you then go shopping.”
“I assume you’re not the bed turning service.” He eyed the open vent. “Ah, I see. A spider.”
I leapt, but he was off the bed before I could get to him. This was the second human who could move faster than should be possible.
“We aren’t done talking,” he said. “I want to know who you are before I cut off your pretty little head.”
“I’m your fairy godmother.” I really had to work on my repartee. But, as I said before, I usually didn’t talk before I ate. And my nerves were still buzzing with electricity. Fifty thousand volts took several seconds to shake off.
He lifted a yellow Taser gun from his opposite bedside table. “These seem to work on you.” He fired it.
I couldn’t dodge a bullet most of the time, but the Taser fired electrode projectiles that weren’t quite as speedy. I dodged the bolts, hearing them hiss as they shot by. The wires that followed to deliver the shock landed uselessly on the floor. “Oh, you’re quick,” he said. “Impressive.”
His confidence was a little unnerving. But I must admit, my ire was up. And the taste of his blood tingled on my lips. I needed more. More! I made a feint one way and smashed a left hook into his jaw. That knocked a bit of the confidence out of him, but he’d moved fast enough to make it a glancing blow.
He jumped back off the bed and was now framed against the window, the whole big city of Dubai behind him. “Who sent you?” he asked.
“The ghosts of all those people you killed,” I said. Okay, I admit that was a little too melodramatic.
The door opened behind me and his guard walked in. “Boss?” he said. I delivered a back kick that connected with the guard’s temple, and he crumpled to the floor. One of my expensive Edwardian Hamburgers flew off. I nearly screamed in rage. The shoes had two belts and a zipper so that should never have happened, but it was proof of how hard I kicked the man. The heels were a good inch long. Which made me lopsided. I sliced my nails through the straps and kicked off the second shoe. I’d be charging that to the Dermotters. I fought better on my bare feet anyway.
“Well, that’s also impressive,” Mr. Gabriel said. I’m not certain whether or not he was referring to the shoes or my quick strike on his bodyguard.
He pulled a wicked-looking knife from his belt. But that gave me heart. He was down to the most basic of weapons. “I wonder how much you cost?” he asked. And yes, he did stroke the knife blade and leer as he asked. A walking, meat-eating cliché.
“I can be bought for a meal.”
He touched his neck. “Hmmm,” he said. “I thought you were trying to cut my throat. But now that I think of it, I don’t see a knife. And there’s blood on your lips. My blood.”
He was putting far too much together, far too quickly. I guess you didn’t get to the top of the weapons heap by being dull-witted.
I took a step toward him. He assumed a fighting stance.
“I did try to hire one of you only a short while ago,” he said.
“One of me?” I said.
“Yes. A homo sapiens vampiris.”
“We are not on your family tree!”
“One does not argue with science. But I’ll stick with vampire. A blood-sucking fiend.”
“Fiend? How crass.”
As I said before, I found his calmness unnerving. I wasn’t used to humans knowing that I, or my kind, really existed. In fact, I preferred we be left off the species chart altogether. “And where did you come up with this mad idea?”
He flashed the knife. “I know a lot about your kind now, actually. You need to feed once a month. You go mad when you don’t, especially when you’re chained. Your reflexes are faster than humans by about twenty-five percent.”
“I assume you didn’t learn this in grade school.”
“No, a complicated series of tests. A shame our subject died.”
I couldn’t help it. I pictured my mother shackled to a chair in some desert bunker. Going mad from the lack of blood.
“Who did you experiment on?”
“Oh, he didn’t have a name. Not one that we could trust anyway.”
He? I didn’t know any he vampires. Well, there was that shadowy, nameless figure known as my father. The fact Gabriel had captured one of my kind was not good news.
I’d discerned how fast he really was from how quickly he’d escaped from the bed and nearly avoided my blow. The knife likely wouldn’t kill me. But I didn’t want a hole in my nice shirt. Or my ribcage.
“How do you know that my kind haven’t sent me as revenge?” I said.
“Ha. They’re disorganized. Scattered across the world. Most of you don’t even do much more than scramble from meal to meal. Not the smartest of species.”
We were the top of the food chain. We didn’t scramble.
So I decided to end it. “You’re so nine hundred,” I said.
This confused him. And well it should have—it’s an old librarian joke. You see, nine hundred is where we file the history books under the Dewey Decimal System. So I was saying, “You’re history.” It kills at librarian parties.
Not so much in this situation.
Anyway, he continued to look a little confused. So I charged him. Skinny and svelte ol’ me against a two hundred fifty-pound barbarian blood-pumping machine.
He
was going to taste oh so good.
10
TURNS OUT, I BLEED
I’d like to tell you it was easy. That with a flick of my wrist, I knocked him out and sucked all the blood from his body. But the bastard could move.
He darted out of the way, flashed in with the knife, and sliced my shirt and my shoulder. The cut was deep enough to make a rivulet of red run down my arm. Now I knew why the ninjas wore black—to hide their wounds. The sight of blood brought a leer to his face.
“And yes, I know you bleed too,” he said. “We experimented with that. Though we didn’t wait to see if your kind could bleed to death.”
Oh, how I wanted to take his head off his shoulders. He’d tortured one of my brethren. And he didn’t feel any remorse for that. The reasons to kill him were piling up.
“You move quickly,” I said. It was as close to a compliment as I’d give him.
“I may have been augmented.” He flexed his arm muscles and made his chest muscles dance like some beach bum weightlifter. “We studied your kind. Very closely. We were able to do a gene subtraction here, a gene injection there. It does come in rather handy. Makes the teeth whiter too.”
He flicked the knife again and caught my left arm. This time there was an actual gash. It hurt, and not just my pride. My arm was burning, and I was very aware of how quickly the blood was coming out of me. I’ll be honest. I was not used to being cut. Or taunted. I preferred the takedown to be over in a few seconds. But my heart was beating faster, my breathing was shallower, and panic was flapping its wings at the edge of my thoughts. All the signs that I’d become the prey.
“You men,” I said, forcing myself not to look at the wound. “You always feel the need to get things augmented. Never take the time to work on your personalities.”
I thought it was clever. He laughed. Well, growled was more like it.
“I’ll enjoy doing experiments on you,” he said. Yes, he actually said that.
He was growing more confident with each second. And well he should have, since I was the only one doing any heavy bleeding. But maybe he was overconfident. He slashed out, and I raked my claws across his chest, four marks that spouted blood. Enough to make his white shirt red and dull the egotistical sheen in his eyes.
“I prefer my food not to get overly excited before a meal,” I said.
Then I dodged another blow and stepped up to him, nails aiming for his throat. But he was a street fighter and smashed his forehead into mine. I caught his arm and, with a move Mom taught me, used his momentum to launch him against one of the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Now, normally it would take a tank to drive through the glass on these modern buildings. But with his weight and my speed and the thickness of his head—well, he actually made a satisfying spider web of cracks. So I slammed him up against it again and again. Adrenaline was overriding the logic center of my brain. Smack! Smack! Smack! Then the window broke behind him. It was not the type of glass that would shatter, but it did come loose from the windowsill and fall backward. I failed to notice this, and the last slam of his head met with open air. He slipped out of my grip. I grabbed his shoulder, slowing his fall enough that he was able to catch the edge with his fingertips.
I hefted him partway up. “You won’t let me fall,” he said. “You want to know what I know.” It was windy, and I could easily be pulled down with him. And I wouldn’t turn into a bat on the way down. So I dug the nails of my right hand into the plush carpet. Dug my feet in too and lifted him up about eight more inches, grunting in an unladylike fashion.
“It may be that the female of the vampire species is faster and stronger than the male,” I said. “Maybe you didn’t get to test that.”
Then I began to feed.
“Wait!” he shouted. “Waaaiiit!” He struggled for a moment, but the paralytic agent in my fangs made him sluggish, and he began his second nap of the day. He was dead a minute later.
“That’s for wrecking my shoes.”
I dropped him. His body did a couple of twists and turns and a pirouette through the air. He hit terminal velocity and would soon hit something else. No sense watching the messy part.
I wiped my mouth and straightened my clothing. I took a moment to glance in his mirror. I looked like hell heated up in a microwave. And I had gained several pounds.
I squished my bloated body through the vent, closed it quietly, and crawled back the way I’d come. A few floors below, I lowered myself into the bathroom of an empty apartment. My wounds were already closing. Another nice trick of my body—I healed fast. They itched with pain, and I did still feel tight in the chest as if I might never catch my breath. But I was alive. And he was dead. His blood gurgled in my belly. I opened the front door and went to the elevator.
I left Burj Khalifa in bare feet.
11
ROSES HAVE THORNS
I slept very deeply. The next morning, my skin was so dry it was flaking. The same grumpy driver took me back to the airport. There always was the chance that some camera had caught the feeding. So as I waited in the airport, I kept one eye on a flat-screen TV. There were Al Jazeera reports about a man who, through a freak accident, had fallen to his death from Burj Khalifa. The theory was that a drone had flown into the window, weakening it, and he had leaned on the glass. Al Jazeera played a short and not very illuminating bio of Gabriel. He was labeled as an investment manager in the military industry.
There obviously wasn’t any cameras that recorded the battle, or I would’ve been caught. Or else the cameras belonged to Gabriel.
It dawned on me that I hadn’t bought a keepsake, so I went to one of those keepsake stands and picked out a ring in the shape of a snake. Its eyes were jade, and it fit perfectly on my little finger. My one memento.
I slept most of the way home, despite being so close to so many humans. A full stomach did that. I struggled to open my eyes once we’d landed in New York, then I stumbled to my flight to Montréal. A few hours later, I blink-walked my way to a cab and was soon back in my apartment. Dubai was far, far behind me. Though I still had sand in my eyes.
By Monday afternoon, I was sitting in my History of Books and Printing class and learning about the history of the printing press. Over the next week, my life returned to normal. While Dubai had been exotic and exciting, I didn’t want to become an adrenaline junkie. That’d be the end of me. Mom had warned me about that.
I did wonder if I’d dined on Gabriel a little too soon. I could have learned more about my species. But when you had to fight your food, you tended to want to eat it quickly. I had learned there were others like me. This, of course, I already knew or had at least been told by my mother and DBI (Dermot’s Bureau of Intelligence). But Gabriel had been based in Panama, and there’d been a vampire there.
There couldn’t be too many of us around. If thirty were in the United States, that might not get noticed. Only an extra three hundred sixty deaths a year didn’t make a dent in the statistics, as long as we covered our tracks. Severely exsanguinated corpses would become a story at coroners’ conventions. But three hundred vampires feeding twelve times a year? That’s three thousand six hundred corpses. We were getting into rather large numbers that authorities might notice. No, it was obvious that we were a very small nation. Or we spent a lot of time in those backward countries.
But we existed. I was proof. So was my mother. And now there was Gabriel’s tale of experimenting on a vampire. I was not enthused about the idea that we were being examined by such unscrupulous characters and that those experiments had resulted in augmented—What? Muscles? Reflexes?—so that Gabriel could almost match my speed.
I wasn’t certain I wanted another assignment like that.
Anyway, at about 3:00 p.m. on the Thursday after my return, there was a knock knock knock at my door.
I was a naturally paranoid individual. It was a survival mechanism that Mom instilled in me since birth. Never trust anyone but me. It did tend to stick. I doubted I could be traced to Ga
briel’s death, but he obviously came from a large network, and they may have had methods I couldn’t imagine. I didn’t want to end up in one of their chimpanzee cages.
Anyway, I couldn’t sit there until I got all moldy. But I didn’t want to look through the peephole. It was a good way to get shot. So I went out onto my balcony and crawled about three feet across the old stucco siding, digging my nails in far enough to leave indentations. Stucco was falling to the ground as I peeked through the hallway window. Dermot was standing at my door, rubbing his chin with one hand and holding flowers wrapped in brown paper in the other. Of all the things in the world, I did not expect flowers. My heart fluttered momentarily until I stomped those feelings to pieces. Had I read “Cinderella” too many times?
I jumped down onto my balcony, hopped to my door, opened it, grabbed the flowers, and, just as he was opening his lips to say something, slammed the door. Capricious, that was my middle name. I enjoyed his shocked expression. Well, what I saw of it.
I went into my mini-kitchen and began digging through the cupboard for a vase. He opened the door a moment later. “Oh do come in,” I said as I slit the waxy paper open with my fingernail. Twelve perfectly formed roses. “Very kind of you to bring these for little ol’ me. Does everyone get them after a mission?”
“Only the good agents,” he said without any hint of sarcasm. “I would’ve brought champagne. But I know you don’t drink alcohol.”
“I do when I’m in the mood for it,” I said. I sliced off the stems with my fingernails and a few seconds later had them in a vase with water. I took a deep breath through my nostrils. Having heightened senses meant that smells were amplified, and the roses gave off a scent that was heavenly and calming.
I was touched. Perhaps I did have an iota of romance in my heart. No one had brought me roses before. No one had dared. It was kind of hard to date when your mom was always hovering over your shoulder shouting, Eat the boys, don’t date them!