The World on Blood

by Jonathan Nasaw

  Still confused, Hedley checked his hand to be sure the bleeding had stopped, then stood up and pulled off his cutoffs. His penis was darker than the rest of him, almost black, and he did not have an erection. "At de Greathouse, sah, de Drinkers fuck everybody, and nobody cyare if de Drink is happy."

  I care if you're happy, thought Nick, reaching around the boy, clasping a buttock in each hand, and pulling the boy's crotch against his face. But I'll settle for hard.

  On the way back inside Nick noticed his boots on the front step, and Selene's empty chalice beside them. (Hedley, who'd been hard, and was now happy, was still resting on the chaise—Nick, having nothing else to give him, had told him to take the morning off.)

  The boots he left inside the door; the chalice he took with him as he climbed the stairway that led up to the south wing. He had no idea which was Selene's room (last time he'd been in Whistler Manor, it had been divided into the Coven wing to the north, and the Penang to the south); he wandered down the hallway until he smelled incense coming from under the last door, and set the empty chalice down in front of it.

  "Come in, Nick," called Selene, though he had neither knocked nor spoken.

  He opened the door and saw her seated before her altar, dressed in her hooded green robe. "Sit down on the bed, I'll be right with you."

  He climbed onto the four-poster while with a pentacular wave of her athame she sealed the gate to whichever region she'd been visiting, then blew out her black candle, replaced her Book of Shadows inside the altar, closed the wicker doors, and dropped the black damask altar cloth over the front as if she were putting a hamster to bed for the night.

  "Thanks for not cutting my throat last night," he said when she turned around at last. "I brought your chalice back."

  "Thank you. But it wasn't personal, Nick. And it wasn't about blood, either—it was about submission."

  "In that case, I'm glad I didn't struggle."

  "Be glad," she said, lowering her pointy little chin and regarded him from under dark bushy brows. "Be very, very glad."

  "But it's behind us now. Bygones be bygones, you said?"

  She raised his chin to examine her handiwork. "It's in the past, Nick. Insofar as there is a past, present, or future, it's in the past."

  "And what's in the future? January says baby-blood is on the menu for tonight."

  She looked surprised. "Planning to join us?"

  He shook his head. "Not me, thanks much. I'm just hoping nobody gives any to January."

  "Not my call, Nick. And she's no longer your responsibility, either."

  "I'm not talking about that, Selene. I know when I'm beat: I'll be lucky not to be prowling People's Park myself in a few weeks—I'm not about to start preaching to anybody else. All I'm saying, as a friend, as somebody who knows her pretty well—from both sides now, if you'll pardon the expression—is that she's got a lot of heart, but I don't think she can handle baby-blood right now, any more than I could."

  "The problem is, you've never seen what the problem is, have you, Nick?" She silenced him with a finger in the air. "Just listen to yourself—Nick Santos, St. Nick, out to save the world single-handed. Have you forgotten, dearie—Whistler never wanted to give you baby-blood in the first place. You're the one who insisted, and it cost him one of his dearest friends in the world." She touched her throat. "Nearly two."

  To Nick's surprise—and it was as much of a surprise to him that he had any capacity for that emotion left—he felt the tears rolling down his cheeks.

  "Don't worry, dearie," she went on smoothly, while he had his private epiphany. "Whistler hasn't the slightest intention of letting January drink baby-blood—we'll drop some Ecstasy in a bowl of my blood, and pull the old switcheroo… There, there." For Nick had buried his face in his hands, and begun sobbing.

  She patted his heaving shoulders and waited for him to sob it out.

  It took a few minutes. When he looked up only her crinkled elfin eyes were visible above the covers. "I feel years younger," he remarked.

  "You look years younger." She winked. "Quite a monkey to carry around on your back all these years, eh Nick? The responsibility for the addictions of humanity? Quite a monkey."

  "I'm sure it'll come back when I'm straight," he replied. "At the moment, I don't care one way or the other."

  "If it does come back, kindly take it on down the line, will you, dearie? Now take off those nasty clothes and climb in here. You're about to get the benefit of five years' enforced celibacy."

  He put his hand to his bare chest. "I'm flattered, Selene, but—"

  "Don't be." She sat up and stripped off her gown, then reached out a bare arm and zipped Nick's windbreaker the rest of the way down. "That ritual I just finished?" she said, caressing the fine brown hairs of his chest. "That was the completion of my vow—I have to fuck the first person I see afterwards." She lowered her hand to the crotch of his black jeans. "Guess who, dearie?"

  "Selene, I've been fucking all night and half the morning, I was out of training to start with, and I've finally remembered, if I could ever have truly forgotten, that I am, to the heart and to the bone, queer as a three-dollar bill."

  Selene's reply was to reach up and unsnap the waistband and crotch of Nick's 501's. "You can ask me if I give a shit after you drink my blood and fuck me," she said sweetly. "Otherwise, you're messing with the Great Horned God. Now say the words I long to hear."

  Nick skinned his jeans down, grinning as his reddened, battered, but still game and semi-erect penis popped into view. "You mean, 'Roll over, baby, I think I love you'?"

  Selene giggled. "Close enough."

  FOUR

  By 8:30 P.M. on Sunday the sun had sunk low enough behind the western mountains to allow the vampires to enjoy some unaccustomed, unfiltered daylight out on the lawn. Under his white panama hat, August Fetterman wore an ivory-colored linen suit and an open-necked shirt the color of a Palm Beach tan; little Sandy wore exquisitely faded jeans and a soft blue oxford-cloth shirt; and when a barefooted Whistler emerged from the lodge in a blousy black silk Armani sport jacket and slacks, Nick felt positively grungy in his Levi's and Jimmy Dean windbreaker.

  He'd been awake a good thirty-six hours—Selene had had an awful lot of catching up to do, and fed him as much of her blood as was required to get it done, and then when she finally let him loose around one or two in the afternoon, he'd inadvertently awakened January crawling back into bed.

  She'd been cross, to say the least, and had dispatched him to the cellar with her empty thermos, after which they'd played at their naughty retro sex for hours—it had occurred to Nick that if he didn't find himself a man again soon, the authorities might strip him of his homo card.

  Then January had drifted off into what looked like a delicious Quaalude doze, while Nick had prowled the Manor looking for company; he'd stumbled across Sandy on a similar errand and renewed his card; the two of them had met Augie out on the lawn just after the sun dropped behind the mountains.

  "Gentlemen!" called Whistler as he crossed the lawn.

  "Squire." Augie tipped his panama, his billowing ivory suit invested with a faint lavender tinge in the fading sunset light; Sandy touched his forelock, which was that colorless shade of brown that redheads fade to after forty.

  "Hello, Jamey," said Nick warily—it occurred to him that the two of them hadn't actually talked face to face since his expulsion from V.A. "Congratulations."

  "On my marriage? Thank you," replied Whistler, thereby artfully reminding everyone that there was something else Nick might have been congratulating him on, without being so crass as to actually mention it.

  Nick would have been happy enough to let it go at that, but Augie, standing facing the water with his legs spread wide and his arms behind his back, snickered under his hat. "Something funny, Fets?" An old, detested nickname.

  "Get off your fucking high horse, Nick," said Augie without heat. "So we got you. So what? Before you got got, every one of us got got just as good, by e
verybody who'd gotten got before them. You want to hear the story of my fall from grace?"

  The other three were all laughing by the time Augie had finished the tale of the teenage twins. "Yeah, laugh," he said, pretending to be offended as he took out his silver flask for a nip of Josephina-blood. "Me, I'm left with a broken heart."

  They passed the flask once around, then Augie pocketed it again. "By the way, Nick, how did you and your partner hit it off last night?"

  "I like January," he replied, somewhat defensively. "I've always liked her. She's got a lot of heart."

  Augie snickered again. "Yeah, in jars in her refrigerator, probably—like that whatsisname, that Dahmer in Milwaukee."

  "She'll be fine—as long as she stays away from baby-blood."

  "Which reminds me…" Whistler glanced down at his Patek Philippe. "Gentlemen, we're due in the keeping room at ten o'clock. Nick, I understand you're going to pass?"

  "I don't even trust myself in the same room with the stuff," Nick replied.

  "Why don't you join us after midnight, then? And in the meantime—" Whistler patted the thin fabric of his Armani, then found his own silver flask in the hip pocket of his trousers, and held it out to Nick. "Here, take this—it's full."

  "Thanks." Nick slipped the flask into the back pocket of his jeans.

  "Don't mention it. Oh, and Nick? It's going to be good having you back."

  The others seconded the motion, clapped him on the shoulders, and wandered back towards the manor, leaving Nick alone on the lawn still trying to think of an appropriate reply. He stooped to pluck a few errant blades of grass that were sticking up higher than the others, then tossed the offenders into the air like a golfer testing the wind.

  But there was no wind: the air was violet and still, the lake as deep a purple as the cheapest properties on the Monopoly board. Nick could feel Whistler's flask rubbing against his hip as he rose; it occurred to him that he could leave now, and use the flask to detox. It was still his choice.

  But then, it would still be his choice tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. One day at a time, it seemed to Nick as he reached for the flask, was as good a motto for a user as it was for a twelve-stepper.

  Besides, he realized later, strolling through the quiet woods where he'd met the owl five years before, if he ever wanted to come back, he knew that twelve-step rooms were the only places left in America that fit Frost's definition of home: the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

  An hour or so later Nick found himself sitting cross-legged at the end of the dock, trying not to pay attention to the voice in his head that told him he'd be a fool ever to leave this place. He tried an old meditator's trick Leon had taught him—listening for the farthest sound. It was the only thing that worked, sometimes, when you felt you couldn't listen to that little voice a minute longer, and it was unusually rewarding on blood—at the moment, for instance, Nick was largely convinced that he could hear fish feeding below the surface of the lake.

  But his tranquility ended suddenly when all the other sounds he'd been picking up, the music floating in from along the shore, the softest ripples of wavelets against the pilings, the snap-crackle-pop of his neck when he rolled his head, were overwhelmed by a muffled screaming coming from somewhere inside Whistler Manor.

  He turned in time to see the front door of the lodge burst open, throwing a trapezoid of light over the threshold and onto the lawn, and was on his feet as January came backing through the door hauling a struggling body in a cross-chest carry. She turned sideways to stumble down the brick steps to the lawn. Nick saw Josephina, now gone limp in January's grasp, no longer screaming. There was a knife at her throat.

  The vampires began crowding through the doorway. The light spilling through the open door was oddly angled—to Nick's stoned eyes it was like a painting, Hopper on blood: Whistler's hair a paintbrush dipped in yellow; Augie and Louise in their dark crimson robes crowding through the door at the same frozen moment, an unwieldy grace to their movements, as if they were going to take each other by the waist and waltz down the steps and across the sloping lawn. The lawn itself was billiard green where the light spilled across it, otherwise dusty black velvet, and the dancing angular shadows cast by the vampires on the porch were black as well, but with luminous, amethyst auras.

  By the time Nick reached the beach, January was halfway down the lawn, her back to Nick, one arm across Josephina's chest, the other holding the knife to the girl's throat; the vampires had arrayed themselves in the doorway, on the porch, and along the two narrow steps, as if posing for a class photograph.

  They saw him coming up behind her; she did not. Sherman was speaking in his most tranquilizing therapist's tones: "We're just having a little difference of opinion here, January… let's not give up, let's keep working with it… you want us to give you baby-blood, we want you to show us that you're ready for it… don't you think that putting down that knife might be a good way to start…" He was trying to keep her attention as Nick crept towards her in a crouch, placing one bare foot carefully before the other, so high he could feel the blades of grass bending under his soles with each step.

  It was already evident to Nick that January hadn't drunk any baby-blood yet—if she had, he knew, recalling his own brief experience, there was no way he'd be able to get this close without her noticing.

  He was only a few feet behind her when he felt, with a telepathic jolt, that she had sensed his presence. Her right arm—the knife arm—tensed; he leapt the gap between them and the three of them tumbled forward onto the lawn, Nick grabbing for January's right wrist with both hands as they fell, forcing it down and away as Josephina scrambled toward the manor on her hands and knees.

  Nick could feel the pounding of footsteps across the lawn, then a picket fence of legs surrounded them. Someone reached down and took the knife; he smelled ether as he rolled off January and lay on his back on the soft damp grass.

  "Don't hurt her," he said. The only other sounds were scuffling, and hard breathing, until Josephina began to wail. That was a good sound, Nick thought: it meant her throat hadn't been cut.

  After the commotion died down (apparently Whistler's sleight of hand had not been quite as sleight as he'd hoped: January had seen him switch bowls when it was her turn to sip from the gourd), Nick volunteered to drive January back to Berkeley. Part of him wanted to stay, but he'd been getting the feeling, out there at the end of the dock, that if he didn't leave tonight he might never leave. Besides, he didn't think he'd be able to enjoy the orgy much anyway, if they'd had to lock January in the blood cellar.

  As for January, for the first hour she was still drowsy from the ether, and by the time that had worn off, the Ecstasy with which they'd dosed her had begun coming on. They'd also spiked her refilled thermos with it—Nick took a hit at the top of the pass leading out of the Tahoe basin, and by the time they'd reached the flat street-light grid of the Sacramento valley they were both loopy and mellow. January didn't appear to know that it was Nick who'd jumped her—or if she did, she'd decided to ignore it, in the flush of Ecstasy empathy.

  Nick encouraged her by pretending that they'd barred him from the ceremony, and refused him baby-blood as well; he really started getting into it under the influence of the Ecstasy-laced blood in the Star Trek thermos. "Who the fuck do they think they are?"

  "Telling us what not to do. Nobody tells us what not to do." January's face had taken on a haggard beauty in the reflected glow of the dashboard lights. "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke. Next time we'll bring our own goddamn baby."

  "Although if I may make a suggestion?" offered Nick. "There are lots of ways to get blood other than by killing people."

  "Yeah, but why?"

  "For one thing, if you kill them, you never get to use them again. For another—I know this is hard to believe—but you'll feel better about yourself."

  "Okay, well—and I'm not even saying you're right—but what's some ways? I mean,
I never had anybody to teach me."

  "Non-lethal ways to get blood. All right. Give me a minute here." Nick drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. "In general, for a woman of course, there's sex—men will do all sorts of goofy things if it gets them laid. Or you don't even have to screw them—you can always maneuver them in a position where you can accuse them of rape—you know, blackmail.

  "Or, for a big strong girl like you, there are non-lethal blows—the Glasgow Kiss is a good one. Then there's the sob story—you tell them you're dying of a fatal disease and only blood keeps you alive. Hospitals are good—there must be a dozen ways to hunt blood in hospitals. Or did you ever hear about the Oops Ring? One of my personal favorites…"

  Nick warmed to his subject as they drove through the warm Sacramento night. The sky was high and starry—a top-down convertible sky; in the distance they could make out the lights of a Denny's twinkling through the heat haze rising from the cooling highway.

  It was not until they were nearing Vacaville that it occurred to Nick to ask himself just what the hell he was trying to accomplish here. Something about the situation had finally struck him as odd: he'd long since passed his original intention of saving the lives of January's potential donors—by now he was just junkie-rapping.

  Having noticed that, he should have felt guilty—or at least uncomfortable. Instead there was another sensation, one that it took him to the county line to put a name to.

  Ah, Anomie, my old friend. Hop in, make yourself at home. I can use a fellow like you—things are getting too godawful strange around here to have to deal with concepts like right and wrong.

  Chapter 6

  « ^ »

  ONE

  January was still sleeping soundly beside him when Nick heard the phone ringing in his office across the hall. He threw on the Percy Dove-tonsils dressing gown he found at the foot of the bed (from the back of what closet had that emerged, he wondered), and balancing his aching head carefully atop his neck, he went into the office to monitor the call.