The World on Blood

by Jonathan Nasaw

  She felt a surge of empathy. "What am I supposed to do, Nick? I know your letting me read this was a gamble. I appreciate the trust and the confidence, and I feel tremendous compassion for all of you, really I do. But I have a responsibility as a pastor to maintain my church as a sanctuary in every possible sense of the word, and it's not fair to ask me to let the problems of one fellowship jeopardize—"

  "I'm not asking you to—"

  "—all the other fellowships—"

  "—jeopardize anything."

  "—not to mention my home—"

  "Oh bullshit."

  She looked up at him angrily. "What do you mean, bullshit?"

  "I mean bullshit bullshit. It doesn't take a degree in counseling to figure out what's got you more upset than any threat to your church, and that's something personal, something between you and me. I lied to you, not V.A., and I gave you my sperm under false pretenses, and it was wrong, and if you want to hate me, hate me, and if you want to take it out on me, take it out on me, and not on V.A."

  "They lied, too."

  "They lied because they had to. You know they had to. But what I did, I did out of pure selfishness. I was in the position you might have found yourself in after a few more years—I'd given up. I'd already accepted the fact that I was not ever going to enjoy the blessings of parenthood, which despite the legends is as close as even a vampire can get to immortality. Then you asked me to father your child—quick, you wanted it done quickly—and I gave in to the temptation."

  Betty rose, heading for the door. He reached out and grabbed her by the elbow; she shook him off. "Get your hands off me, Nick. Don't you ever put your hands on me again. And don't try to turn this thing around so it's my fault somehow, either, and most of all, don't you ever try to tell me not to take a threat to my church personally."

  Angrily, she plucked at the sleeve of her sweatshirt, as if his touch had disarranged it. "Everything about my church is personal. I've put every cent I ever saved into that church, I've lived like a miser for five years. You say you can't survive without V.A.? Well I can't survive without my church, and whether it's your fault or not, your fellowship has put it in jeopardy."

  "But I've already told you, it wasn't one of us in the first place."

  "No, it was a witch who's looking for revenge any way she can get it."

  "We can protect you against Selene."

  "I can protect myself against Selene. And here's how I'm going to do it." She folded her arms over her chest. "First of all, Vampires Anonymous—" She emphasized the word deliberately; she wanted Nick to know that she wasn't going to be shy about saying it aloud, now or ever. "—has had its last meeting at the Church of the Higher Power."

  He nodded.

  "Second, I don't want any of you coming to any other meetings at my church, either. I think I know what some of you look like by now, and I don't ever want to see any of you setting foot in my church for any reason."

  "But the only other Friday M.A. meeting is out in Concord—some of us need M.A. too."

  "Then drive to Concord," she said coldly. "Thirdly, if I am pregnant with your child, and if I decide to keep it—"

  He started to say something; she silenced him with a look. "You don't have any say in the matter, not anymore, so just listen carefully: in the event I choose to bear this child, you are to keep as far away from us as possible. I don't want to see you, I don't want my child approached, I don't want our child to even know her father exists. In fact, if it ever reaches my ears that you've so much as told anyone that you're the father, I'll sue your ass from here to East Jabbip. Now what have you done with my coat?"

  He retrieved her blue down jacket from the downstairs hall closet, and showed her out. Neither of them spoke. Nick found himself watching numbly from the doorway as she marched down the steep flagstone walk, then heard the roar of the Oldsmobile's engine from the bottom of the driveway and saw the red glow of the tail lights receding around the bend in the road.

  He locked the door behind him and wandered back up to his bedroom. A peculiar numbness had overtaken him, as if he'd actually lost a child, albeit one he'd never known. He threw himself face down across the bed and tried to grieve, to let it out, to feel his feelings like a good twelve-stepper, but all he felt was self-conscious. He'd never ever been able to cry for Leon—how could he weep for a child he'd never see?

  Then the phone rang. He glanced at the bedside clock—4:00 A.M.—and decided to let his machine take the call. He didn't even bother monitoring it, but a few minutes later curiosity got the better of him—it was practically the only emotion he hadn't worn out in the course of the harrowing night. He padded across the hall to his office and punched the playback button.

  Hello? Hello, Nick. You there Nick? Please pick up the phone Nick. A woman's voice, not immediately recognizable. Please, this is January, if you're there Nick pick up the phone. Pitch rising desperately. It's January. You gotta pick up the phone, Nick. I don't know if he's alive or dead. I think maybe I killed him…

  "Where are you? Are you home?" He found himself crouching down, fists clenched, nose to the speaker of the answering machine. "Goddammit, tell me where you are."

  Nick? Are you there Nick? Nick, please pick up the phone…

  BOOK

  TWO

  At Feasts

  Full Warm of Blood

  Chapter 1

  « ^ »

  ONE

  "Does it look anything like the Philippines?" asked Whistler.

  Lourdes laughed. Her first glimpse of Santa Luz through the salt-rimed oval window of the Blue Goose, a twelve-seater seaplane from St. Thomas, was of a wild black tangle of rainforest crowning the central hump of the island. "Yes and no, honey—there's seven thousand islands in the Philippines."

  Then they were skimming low along a notched coast of small coves and inlets rimmed with pale curves of narrow crescent beaches, until finally the lights of the Old Town appeared directly ahead of them. The Goose touched down, bouncing like a skipping stone past the bare masts of moored sailboats towards the maze of wooden docks.

  The seaplane terminal, a lighted shack at the edge of the Old Town docks, was deserted except for an agent in a white short-sleeved shirt with epaulets, and a cabdriver in a leather-billed cap, whose '50s vintage Checker was parked next to the shack.

  "Mister Whistler, nice to see you again, sah." The Goose rocked gently on its pontoons while the cabdriver helped Lourdes up onto the dock, glancing appreciatively down the front of the scoop-neck silk blouse she'd bought in Miami. He still had hold of her hand when Whistler whispered something in his ear. Clearly flustered, the man dropped her hand and hurriedly turned back to help the agent with their luggage.

  "What did you tell him?" whispered Lourdes as they climbed into the back of the taxi.

  "That you were a Drinker, not a Drink—he'd mistaken you for a fellow slave."

  "That's not very flattering. And how did he know to meet us in the first place?" They had been planning a full day's layover in St. Thomas, but when the flight from Miami had arrived in time for them to connect with the last Goose to Santa Luz, they'd decided on the spur of the moment to make the hop that same night.

  "Francis! Miss Lourdes wants to know how you happen to be here to met us." Whistler relayed the question down to the cabbie, who had started up to the parking lot with a suitcase in each hand, and one under each arm.

  "Been meetin' de last Goose every night since Mister Whistler called Mister Prescott last week, Miss."

  "Oh," said Lourdes, surprised. "That was… thoughtful of you."

  "Nanny Eames'd have my balls for breakfas' if I didn't," was the reply. It was Lourdes's first encounter with a Luzan accent—balls rhymed with pals, and for a minute there she thought she'd heard him say Nanny Eames would have his bowels for breakfast. For all she knew, it was a local delicacy—Whistler hadn't told her much about the island during their three-stage journey, and she hadn't asked, not because she wasn't curious, but because
she despised the role of Orphan. Tell me, oh learned Master, of the lore of vampires; teach me to suck wisely, oh great Whistler. Plus Whistler had a didactic streak as wide as the continent they'd just crossed.

  The road that climbed up through the rainforest was what the Luzans called dundo track—no sky. All Lourdes could make out through the windshield was a tunnel carved through the blackness by the narrow beam from the Checker's single headlight: a wall of jungle suddenly appearing in that spotlight would signal a turn in the road; the tree trunks at each of these curves were blazed with livid bumper-high scars.

  Suddenly the cab stopped in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere—no driveway, no visible structures, just a row of ghostly-white limbless trees that turned out to be the thick-walled arches of a portico that surrounded the Greathouse compound. A little spooked now, Lourdes followed Whistler into a danker, closer, stony-smelling darkness. They emerged into a courtyard enclosed on three sides by the porticoed stone wall and on the fourth by the front wall of the Greathouse, which was so obscured by vines and branches that a yellow light in an upstairs window seemed to be glowing in the depths of the forest.

  With the sky shut out overhead, it felt to Lourdes as if they were under a great black dome, courtyard, mansion and all. Her feeling of uneasiness grew when she noticed that she and Whistler were now alone in the courtyard: Francis had disappeared suddenly, the way people disappear in dreams. Their footsteps crunched on gravel as they approached the Greathouse; a parrot screamed somewhere in the surrounding forest. They climbed wide cracked stone steps; Whistler pushed open a great mahogany door, and Lourdes followed him inside.

  There was a torch burning in a sconce in the wall next to the door, but the smoky light it cast barely reached the far wall of the entranceway. Lourdes had a sense of a staircase rising somewhere to the left, of an open balcony over their heads, of a wide corridor stretching into the darkness ahead of them, and of an open space, wide as a ballroom, to their right. The mansion was a vast and stony darkness surrounding her: if ever in her life Lourdes had felt as though she were in a fairy tale—perhaps in the castle of the Beast—it was now.

  Withdrawing an extinguished taper from a cement urn full of sand that stood against the wall, Whistler lit it from the torch, then led the way up the wide curving stone staircase. Lourdes followed close behind, as the darkness hurried after her trailing shadow, reclaiming the staircase step by step.

  The second-floor balcony had only a low stone balustrade on the right; the door at the far end was open. Voices spilled out, and smoky light, and quadrille music, and then the black figure of a crone appeared in the doorway, illuminated from behind, light streaming out around her as if she were appearing at the end of a tunnel in a barely-remembered dream. Her skin was a dusty, faded shade of black that never saw the sun, her dress a black bombazine so old it had a verdigris patina in the flickering light of Whistler's taper.

  "Look a' you, you're gettin' old, me son," she said, in a voice like the dry whisper of stone crumbling to powder.

  "I do seem to be catching up to you, Nanny Eames." Whistler dunked the taper into another cement urn. "This is Lourdes, that I told Prescott about."

  "De Drinker dot ain' been initiated?" She closed the door behind her.

  "That's the one."

  "An' why not?" The ruffles and furbelows along the old woman's dress front rustled as she folded her arms across her bony chest. "De Drinkers ain' have no customs on dot island?"

  "California is an island without customs, Nanny Eames."

  The old woman turned to Lourdes and addressed her directly for the first time. "How often do you drink blood, gyirl?" She had great full bags under her eyes, and the whites were so bloodshot they seemed nearly black in the dim balcony light.

  "Every night—since I met Whistler, anyway."

  "Drink tonight yet?"

  "On St. Thomas, before we left. But I sure could use a little boost right about—What? Did I say something wrong?" For Nanny had turned her glare upon Whistler.

  "No, gyirl." Nanny's voice had softened with pity. "But your mon here should have told you—you cyan' drink on dis island until after you been initiated." She reached behind her and opened the door a crack, but without taking those baleful old eyes off Whistler. "Prescott!" she called.

  "Yes, Mama?" A deep rumbling voice from behind the door.

  "Get some clothes on, an' show Miss Lourdes to de tower." She turned to Lourdes. "Me an' Whistler must have a tack, gyirl. I'll send him up to you soon." Her smile was so ancient that the lips no longer moved, and the isolated narrowing of the wrinkled old eyes was more disconcerting than reassuring.

  Nor was Lourdes exactly crazy about that "take her to the tower" stuff, but she decided to play along—she knew perfectly well that Whistler still had a flask of blood in one of the many pockets of his Banana Republic safari jacket.

  Prescott proved to be a handsome ebony-skinned man with contrasting gray hair of so tight a curl that it reminded Lourdes of an old Persian-lamb coat her mother had once owned; his shoulders were broad under a blue and gold dashiki. She followed him up a narrow circular stone staircase, neither of them speaking, and he showed her into a stucco-walled chamber in what seemed to be some sort of turret with a curved outer wall, where he left her.

  The room was furnished with a queen-size foam pad under a mosquito net suspended from a hook in the stucco ceiling, a dozen fat homemade candles, and not much more—but at least their luggage had been piled against the near wall. She made up a makeshift bed by unrolling Whistler's new sleeping bag across the foam pad and spreading her own matching bag over it, then crossed to the deep-silled window in the curving outer wall and pushed open the green-painted shutters. And now that she thought about it, yes, the smell of the forest out there did indeed remind her of the mahogany forests of the Philippines.

  She was still at the window with her back to the door when Whistler arrived a few minutes later. She would not turn to him, or even greet him, but waited until he had crossed the room and was at her side before turning to face him—and then it was only to pat his pockets for the flask of blood. "C'mon, let's have it."

  He drew away. "Sorry, m'dear. I had to turn it over to Nanny. Island custom—Eldest Drinker controls the stash." He started to put his arms around her; she twisted away to face the window again. "Like it or not, Lourdes, we are on an island with a traditional vampire culture—"

  "Great. Here comes another lecture." She'd addressed the forest.

  "There are advantages—no one calls us addicts, or forces us to attend meetings or talk about our feelings. And we don't have to waste any time agonizing over our vampire natures: we know precisely what we are, and where we fit, and where our next blood is coming from, and when." Whistler stopped—he could not tell from the back of her head or the quality of the silence whether Lourdes was listening or not. But then, it was never truly silent in the rainforest.

  "But there is a price," he went on. "There are rules that we must live by. Because if we don't—" He stopped again. "How shall I put this? In that room behind Nanny Eames there were a dozen vampires, and at least two dozen slaves and donors and families—the categories tend to overlap—and if she ever took it into her head that you or I were a threat to the established order of things, there's not a one of them, not even that handsome Prescott or that helpful Francis, who wouldn't slit your throat and catch the blood in his hat if she ordered it."

  "Why didn't you tell me all this before we came?"

  "Quite frankly, m'dear, I'd forgotten that particular rule—that one doesn't Drink on Santa Luz until one has been initiated. My fault entirely. I should have remembered—when I was here in '73 a vampire from the mainland kidnapped a local girl. The Drinkers rescued her and explained the customs to him, but it was another two weeks until the full moon—apparently he wasn't willing to wait, or leave."

  "What happened to him?"

  "He was eaten by tourists."

  "What?"

  "W
ell, indirectly. First they chummed him, then they trolled him, then they sold the shark they caught with him to one of the resorts. Consequently: eaten by tourists. But you won't have to wait two weeks—the full moon happens to be tomorrow night."

  "And how the hell do we make it until then?"

  What do you mean we, Whistler started to say, then thought better of it. If she fell asleep, he might join the others downstairs; if not, he decided, he'd stay with her. Greater love hath no vampire, etc. With an apologetic grin, he extracted a bag of rock cocaine from a zippered front pocket, handed it to her, then reached under the mosquito net for the bottle of Jack Daniel's they'd purchased at the duty-free shop on St. Thomas.

  "Crack 'n' Jack, m'dear," he replied. "A combination that has seen many a stranded vampire through many a bloodless night."

  "You can stick that up your own crack, Jack." She turned on him furiously, jaw pushed forward, almond eyes flashing. "Me, I'm going downstairs to have a little talk with Nanny Eames myself. Woman to woman, and you ain't invited."

  Her courage almost failed her at Nanny Eames's door. She extinguished her taper in the sand bucket, took a deep breath, let it out, and rapped on the door rather more loudly than she'd intended.

  "Yes?"

  Prescott's voice. She remembered Whistler's words: He'll slit your throat and catch your blood in his hat. "It's Miss Lourdes," she called boldly. "I have to speak with Nanny Eames."

  Lourdes had just a moment to regret her rashness before the door opened and Nanny emerged. This time the high neck of her black bombazine dress was askew, and for some reason she was wearing a stiff black bonnet fastened to her head with a wicked-looking hatpin. "Yes, chyile?"

  Lourdes plunged right in. "I'm sorry to bother you again, Nanny Eames, but I had to tell you I'm just not gonna be able to make it through a whole night without blood. If you want me to leave the island, I'll leave, and if you want to feed me to the tourists, then go ahead and feed me to the tourists, but I've got to have some blood."