The World on Blood

by Jonathan Nasaw

  Nanny Eames nodded to her, and Lourdes understood that she was to place her hands on the little old vampire's throat and breast in the same manner. Then Nanny whispered for her to stare into the man's left eye, and when the baby-blood began to take effect, she felt an arc of energy building between her partner and herself as they stared into each other's left eyes.

  By the time he spoke the ritual sentence—"Blood make us one"—Lourdes was higher than she'd ever been before, so high that high was scarcely a suitable word: it seemed as if she and her partner were on one level, while the rest of the world had been lowered beneath them like an old-fashioned orchestra pit.

  She could feel the great artery pulsing under one palm, feel his heart against the other, and she knew what to do, then. "Blood make us one." She returned the phrase in a husky whisper, and he repeated it back to her.

  "Blood make us one." The words were becoming reality: she and the old vampire were indeed as close to being one as if they were a single soul in two bodies. It was the eternal truth, the goal of meditation, an acidlike ego-melt that lasted until their eyes unlocked, leaving Lourdes with a soul-deep love for a wrinkled old vampire sporting a shirt-stretching erection that must surely have placed a strain on his elderly heart, a yearning feeling in her own youthful heart, and a savage need calling from her womb.

  Blood make us one. A dozen times the ritual was repeated. Whistler drank next to last, then held the gourd for Nanny Eames. One by one the torches had burned down, until the courtyard was as black as it had been the previous night—the full moon that had signaled the feast was no more than a rumor, somewhere high above the forest canopy.

  Blood make us one. In the dark the circle of Drinkers shuffled around Lourdes. She kissed each of them—and they kissed back. Deep, open-mouthed kisses. And such was the spell of the ceremony, of the heart-touching and the left-eye-staring and the baby-blood, that no one kiss, no one kisser, no one body, was any more or less arousing than any other, and there was not one of them she would not have opened her legs to, from Nanny Eames right on down to the chubby lad who held her breast as he kissed her, cupping it, weighing it in his palm as reverently as if it were soft gold and he were Scrooge McDuck.

  Blood make us one. The orgy that followed, back inside the Greathouse, though circumspect enough by Whistler's mainland standards, was generally agreed upon afterwards by the Luzan vampires to have been the finest in years, owing largely to the energy and visual contrast provided by the two whites. Whistler was particularly proud of Lourdes, who evinced neither jealousy nor reticence, actively seeking out new partners and combinations and variations, and adding an unaccustomed vocal note to the carryings-on.

  Eventually even the shyest of the slaves, a young girl named Josephina, had taken to vocalizing—she developed a distinctive, aspirated high-pitched rhythmic squeal of her own under Whistler's insistent pounding, and as she began to come, the skin between her budding breasts darkening to an eggplant purple, Whistler found himself howling with her, and his first orgasm of the night was so strong it felt as if his balls were being turned inside out.

  Lourdes heard him from the depths of her own impending orgasm; in response she placed her hands on the back of a woolly ancient head between her thighs—whether it was the old man or Nanny Eames she could not have said at the moment—and pulled it snugly against her; when she finally started coming it was in a series of short, sharp, nearly unbearable spasms. At first she feared she'd never stop coming; after a few minutes the fear turned to hope.

  FOUR

  Whistler had never taken Selene along with him to Santa Luz. "That island's no place for a Drink," he informed her, and from what he had told her of the local customs, she was inclined to believe him. But she thought of him when she saw the full moon rising over the snow-capped mountains to the east of Lake Tahoe that night, and then of Lourdes, wondering how the baby-blood was treating her. Personally, Selene had no doubts whatsoever that the woman who could snare Jamey Whistler would take to the stuff like mother's milk.

  Not that she couldn't have had him herself, back in the sixties, Selene mused, standing at the window of her room at Whistler Manor, looking out over the grove of Jeffrey pines that shielded the manor from the highway. They'd even gone so far as to plan out one of those hippie-dippie Haight-Ashbury weddings in Golden Gate Park, with Steve Gaskin or Sufi Sam Lewis presiding.

  But that would have meant giving up her witchly ambitions: her Coven followed the tradition of Dianic cults—no men allowed, and no married woman could serve as First Among Equals.

  There was no rule against living with somebody, though, so when the High Priestess died and Selene succeeded to her place in the Cyrkle, she'd taken advantage of the technicality to remain Whistler's lover, and used her position to strengthen the bonds between the Coven and the Penang.

  Which is why, after the disaster with Nick, there were others—not in her Coven, true, but priestesses in other covens—who blamed her for her own and Mandy's misfortune. Selene had gotten much too cozy with the vampires, they whispered, and allowed her coven to grow far too dependent upon them. Selene should have known better than to mix sex and recreational drugs with witchcraft, they also whispered—after all, that had been the downfall of Magister Cochrane for sure, and possibly Aleister Crowley as well.

  And during the months of silence while her throat wounds healed, Selene began to think that perhaps they were right, at least about sex and drugs at her level of practice.

  So she had refused Whistler's offer of plastic surgery for her disfigurement, and at Midsummer—the summer solstice—had taken a five-year vow of abstinence and celibacy. For the first year or so, every time she felt sexual stirrings all she had to do was run her fingers over the livid scars, and the feelings would pass. And then after a few years she found herself barely noticing the stirrings; her scars, though, had become old friends; she used them as allies, for strength.

  A gust of wind shivered a high snow-laden bough and sent a curtain of shimmering powder cascading past her window in the moonlight. Selene started; instinctively her fingers went to her throat. In six months, she reminded herself, the five years of her vow would be up; she decided to use that as her timetable.

  "By the summer solstice, then," she vowed to the full moon. "It will be done by Midsummer."

  Nearly midnight: time to throw the runes again. She closed the window and retrieved her goat-bladder rune bag and the vampires' green notebook from her altar. Back in bed—an early American four-poster—she spread her feet wide under the covers, smoothed the quilt flat, then spilled the ivory tiles out across the blue-and-white-checked counterpane valley between her legs.

  The bones had nothing to say to her on the first throw. Selene sighed and pulled her nightgown over her head, scooped the tiles up and warmed them between her palms before pouring them back into the sack; then she threw them again, naked as the bones themselves this time.

  That did the trick. The tiles clacked and rolled and came to rest. She read them, gathered them, rolled them again. The message was clear enough: she thanked the runes, gathered up the bones, and poured them back into the goat bladder, tying up the neck of the bag with a thong made from the vocal cords of the same goat.

  Selene's altar was set up in the northeast corner of the room—it was a wicker cabinet from Pier 1, draped with black damask, that held her paraphernalia, her hand-copied Book of Shadows, and her spells, which she'd copied onto index cards like recipes.

  Squatting naked before it, Selene replaced the bag of rune stones, retrieved her athame (the ritual Wiccan dagger), lit the black candle on a saucer atop the altar, and with the athame carved four pentacles into the air around her, one for each of the four directions, to begin the process known as Drawing Down the Moon. This would invoke in her the qualities of the Goddess—only in Her aspect could the High Priestess convene a full meeting of the Coven.

  Chapter 2

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  ONE

  Sherman ended the
meeting of Vampires Anonymous the next Saturday by reminding them all that it was the night of the winter solstice, and warning them about what the psychologists were just beginning to refer to as S.A.D.—Seasonal Affective Disorder. "So if you find yourself feeling a little more down than usual, try turning on some bright lights, sunlamps, get some UV rays."

  "Or P.V. Rays," suggested Henderson, the lanky musician.

  "What's that?"

  "Puerto Vallarta. That's where I'll be spending next week."

  "That'll work too. Now is there any other business to take care of before the closing prayer? Nick?"

  "Just a change for the phone tree. January's going to be staying with me for a while, so you can reach either of us at my number."

  After the closing prayer, the others crowded around Nick and January at the coffee urn in the back of the room. "And will congratulations be in order?" asked Toshi.

  "How about catering?" was Cheese Louise's question.

  "Come on you guys," January protested, flattered at the attention. "I told you in my share I lost my job." Despite the fact that there was nothing romantic going on between them—or at least nothing sexual—January found herself blushing anyway. "And it's just, I mean, I can live on the streets, I done it before, but not without using. And nights are still real hard for me, you know?"

  "No, no, congratulations are in order, I believe," Sherman interrupted her. "Unless you slipped again during the week, tonight's your one-week anniversary."

  January seemed pleased. "I didn't think about it like that."

  "Not only that, almost anybody who's ever slipped will tell you that in some ways, the second first week is even harder than the first first week, so you should be doubly congratulated." He then led the informal gathering in a round of applause, after which Nick invited everybody over to Fat Apple's for a celebration.

  Sherman had to beg off, though, reminding Nick that Catherine was expecting him at home. This had come as something of a surprise, he'd explained during his share: she'd gone up to Tahoe on Friday night to spend Yule with the Coven, so he hadn't expected her back until late Sunday at the earliest. But then she'd called him a little after seven to say that she needed to talk to him, and that she was on her way home and would be arriving around eleven, traffic and weather permitting.

  He had been obsessing about it ever since, he'd reported, and was dealing with it pretty well on a cognitive level: he'd performed a regression on himself during the drive over from Mill Valley, and traced the fear as far back as his mother telling a naughty three-year-old Sherman that she had called his father at the office to tell him about the crayoning of the walls of the dining room, and that said father would be having a "talk" with him that night.

  He could have traced the fear back further—to the womb, no doubt, if the drive from Marin to the East Bay had taken a little longer—but it didn't matter, he'd explained to the meeting: the purpose of the regression had been to remind himself that fears of the future were almost always rooted in the past.

  All of which self-knowledge was worth absolutely diddly—by the time he was halfway home he'd pretty much convinced himself that this was it: Catherine was going to tell him that it was all over, that she was leaving him now. Maybe that's what she'd been building up to all these months, maybe the other witches had finally talked her into it…

  Didn't matter. What got him through the rest of the drive was the understanding that if this was the kiss-off, he was going to have to talk about it in his men's group next week: he wanted to be able to tell them that he hadn't wussed out, that he'd marched up to the scaffold with his head high and at the very end had refused the blindfold.

  But maybe a last cigarette if there's time, he told himself. Only there wasn't time:

  Catherine's car was in the driveway. She'd beaten him home and was waiting for him in the living room, and the only difference he could see in her, apart from the stubborn set of her jaw, was the color of her hair.

  For Catherine Roark Bailey, Registered Dietician for the City of Berkeley, chartered Witch, recovering Sex-and-Love addict, and black-belt Codependent, had been born the only brunette in a family of third-generation Mission Irish redheads. But when her hair had gone white in her early twenties, she'd turned to the bottle for the color that should have been hers by birthright, and over the years Sherman had seen her in every shade of red from Burgundy to Mahogany to Manic Panic.

  When she'd left for the mountains yesterday she'd been Paprika, with a little Cinnamon thrown in for highlights. But all the spices of the Orient could not have produced the hue that adorned the curls of her new perm tonight. "Do you like it?" she asked him.

  "I Love Lucy?" he said carefully.

  "You've got an eye, Sherm, I'll give you that." It was genuine Egyptian henna, she explained. "I've been trying for this shade for years, but they stopped exporting it in the sixties, except for Lucy, because Nasser was a fan. Selene got me a bag through an herbalist she works with—we did it this morning."

  "And then you rushed right back here to show me?" said Sherman hopefully.

  "Fat chance, Bailey. Why don't you start a fire, and I'll go make us some tea, and then we'll have our little talk."

  "I don't think I could stand—" he began.

  She cut him off. "Fire, tea, talk."

  A box of foot-long matches stood propped against the Amish hearth broom; from a wrought-iron rack hung a gleaming brass-tipped set of tongs and shovel and pokers—gleaming because they'd never been used. Sherman lit the Duraflame log and watched the paper cover flare up, gas blue at first, then a comfortable yellow. "There," he said, rubbing his hands together like Bob Cratchit, though in fact it was only a mild fifty degrees or so on the other side of the floor-to-ceiling picture window.

  Sherman sat down on the white sectional, looking past their white-flocked dwarf Christmas tree to the heavily wooded hillside to the east. When Catherine returned with the tea tray he cleared a place on the glass-topped coffee table, and she sat down next to him. "Thank you for the fire," she said.

  "Thank you for the tea," he replied.

  "Thank You Falettin Me…"

  "… Be Mice Elf Again. Sly and the Family Stone, 1970."

  "Very good. Now can we get on with it, please?"

  "Hey, you're the one who started the rock trivia."

  "I'm sorry, Sherman. I guess I'm a little nervous too. But let's not fight. Tonight of all nights, let's not fight."

  "But I don't even know what it's all about—and don't say Alfie."

  "All right, I won't. It's about us, Sherman."

  And there it was. He took a sip of tea—Earl Gray—she'd fixed it with cream and honey, just the way he liked it. "I thought it might be."

  "Good. I was hoping you'd be thinking about it—that's why I called you first. I wanted you thinking about it good and hard, because I have a question for you, and I want you to give me the right answer the first time. Ready?"

  " 'Ready when you are, C.B.' " he said bravely, thinking of his men's group again—boy, were they going to be proud of him.

  She smiled in spite of herself. "Which do you love more, me or your sobriety?"

  Sherman was pretty good at contacting his inner child—at moments like this it seemed to take over his face. His chubby cheeks plumped out like they'd just been slapped, and his walrus mustache quivered as if pasted on. "Jesus, baby, that's cold. How can you even—"

  She stopped him with a gently upraised palm. "Is that your answer? Remember, I want the right answer the first time."

  "Do you want the truth?"

  "No," she replied, to his astonishment—and relief. "You don't even know the truth. What I want is the right answer."

  "But—"

  She interrupted him again. "I know what you're about to say, and I know all about situational ethics—I haven't been married to a shrink for twenty years for nothing. But just think hard: we're not in a meeting, so we don't need the right answer for a meeting. It's just you and your wife, an
d the right answer is the one that won't send me walking out that door. Now which is it, me or your sobriety?"

  He stood up from the couch. "You don't have to leave, Catherine. Just let me pack up a few things. I guess I can stay with—"

  He found himself yanked back down to the couch. "Shut up and sit down, you asshole. I was only bluffing."

  "Fine," he replied. And it was fine: that one moment on his feet had made all the difference. Whatever was coming now, Sherman was ready for it.

  "I can see I'm going to have to do this the hard way." She took both his hands in hers. "Do you know what tonight is?"

  He made a puzzled face. "Sure. It's the winter solstice—Yule, you call it."

  "Okay, rock trivia: what's the opening line of Sergeant Pepper?"

  " 'It was twenty—' " His eyes widened behind the thick lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses. "Oh Cathy, it was twenty years ago today."

  Catherine didn't bother to rub it in—her slow sad nod, her raised eyebrows and tolerant smile said it all: Yes, darling, that's the sort of anniversary a man will seldom remember, and a woman will never forget. "The night of my second initiation into Wicca—the Quest Perilous. Before then I'd been in the Outer Court, but I'd never been at a Yule with the vampires."

  "It was down in Santa Cruz, right?"

  "Close. Now hush, I'm going to tell you a story. But yes, this was before Whistler bought the Tahoe place—the house in Bolinas wasn't big enough for the Coven and the Penang both, so he rented two big old side-by-side houses. Only it wasn't Santa Cruz, it was Capitola. Or maybe Soquel. Anyway, the witches' house had about a dozen rooms and a trellised-in back porch, and to get to the beach you just walked out the back door and down the steps."

  Catherine let herself slump down on the couch. When she was satisfactorily settled on the small of her back, she closed her eyes, and as she began to talk about the ceremony—a first, an astonishing first: never before had she so much as hinted at what took place in a Wicca ritual—Sherman noticed the hair on his forearms crackling to attention. An old bartender had told him about the phenomenon years before: Sometimes people tell you the good stuff, and sometimes they tell you the true stuff, hut rarely is the good stuff true, or the true stuff good: when it's both, the hair on your arms stands up.