Bloodshift

by Garfield Reeves-Stevens

  “The turn off’s coming up in the next few miles,” Adrienne said, breaking his silent considerations.

  “What does it say: ‘This way to the vampires’?”

  Adrienne smiled. She had never felt as relaxed around a human. Helman had accepted her as what she had said she was, a person like any other, but with a disease. If the Father would give them sanctuary, then she and Helman would have the time she felt they needed. She would be yber no more. She would be human.

  “It says Nacimiento Reservoir. The town doesn’t even have a city limits sign.”

  Helman stared past the forward illumination of the car’s highbeams. The coastal highway was empty of other traffic but he kept on the alert for darkened vehicles at the side of the road which might suddenly spring into pursuit.

  “A lot might have changed since you were here last,” he said.

  “The last trip with Diego’s entourage was only five years ago. These small towns don’t change that quickly. When the Father’s familiars told Diego that the Father had refused to see him again, Diego considered burning the whole town to the ground. But he said it would be ten years before anybody knew it was gone.”

  “Diego sounds charming.”

  Adrienne became deadly serious.

  “You mustn’t underestimate him, Granger. He was the one who arranged for the evidence of the Delvecchio—” she faltered for a moment, unsure. Then she used his word for it. “The evidence of the Delvecchio murder to be used against you. Both King and Rice would be in constant touch with him. He was responsible for Jeffery’s horrible death and I’m certain that his position in the Conclave rests on his disposal of me as well. Remember, he was the one who encouraged my work in the beginning. If either of us ever meet him face to face, we will not survive.”

  The turn-off sign came up suddenly and Helman braked in the darkness.

  “Since the Father has refused to have any dealings at all with any of the yber for the past two centuries, why do you think he’ll grant us sanctuary?”

  “When the Conclave was formed and the Ways set out as our sacred teachings, the Father refused to take part. Even then he was too powerful, and too revered, for the Conclave to destroy. He is mentor to hundreds of yber around the world. Since then he has had a reputation for taking in those yber who have fallen from the Ways. Most who approach him to serve as his emissaries are rejected. A very few are accepted. No one knows what the conditions of his acceptance are. But at least you and I will have a chance.”

  “Will you introduce me as your familiar?”

  “You aren’t my familiar, Granger. I won’t lie to the Father. You will be introduced as my friend. Helping me in my work.”

  A memory came back to Helman as he drove slowly through the narrow twisted road leading through the coastal hills.

  “Back in Toronto,” he said. “When Rice was giving me information about you, I asked him if you and Chris Leung were lovers.”

  Adrienne was impassive. She thought she knew where the question might lead.

  “What did Rice tell you?” she asked.

  “He said it was impossible. He seemed disgusted.”

  “To Rice, any such relationship between yber and human, unless it were part of Communion, would be like coupling with animals. Humans are quite beneath the yber in the yber view of things.”

  “Then, it’s not impossible?”

  “No, Granger, not impossible.”

  He asked no more questions about the past. Except for Adrienne’s instructions, they drove the rest of the way in silence, both lost within their thoughts. Thinking of time uninterrupted.

  The Father’s familiars had told them that they were expected. Adrienne and Helman sat waiting in an enormous lounge off the spectacular four-story high entrance hall. Helman was sure that the Father was expecting them because the Father was now somehow linked to the Conclave. He felt he and Adrienne were sitting waiting for the trap to be sprung.

  Helman had asked the familiar how the Father had known to expect them. The familiar had said that the Father had had a dream. He had said it reverentially, as though it were a rare and strange occurrence. Adrienne told him that it was.

  “Yber don’t dream, Granger.”

  “Never?”

  “None ever remembered a dream. Jeffery and I attached ourselves to electroencephalographs for months without ever finding a dream trace among all the brain wave readings made while we slept.”

  “Why would that be?”

  “Efficiency, I think. Just as our bodies become incredibly efficient, so do our minds. Our memories are virtually unimpeded. Our senses magnified. We concluded that yber don’t dream because there is no need to. Our minds process all the information that comes to us in the course of a night instantly. There is no backlog of shuffling and filing that has to go on while we are in an unconscious state. That’s generally thought to be the reason humans dream.”

  “Then why would the Father suddenly start dreaming after nine hundred years?”

  Adrienne shrugged. “The first changes from human to yber occur within twenty-four hours. The old incisors fell out and new fangs erupt. Within six months the organs fuse. Within a year yber are able to detect each other at great distances with a type of sense we were never able to identify, probably telepathic in nature. Our bodies continue to change for centuries as our strength and abilities increase. Diego’s body is quite different from one who has been yber for only a few years. The Father must be even more altered. Perhaps after a millennia we regain the ability to dream. Perhaps we might even be able to see into the future.”

  Helman felt that this was going beyond the realm of science. “Or maybe even turn into bats or clouds of dust?” he asked sarcastically. He had accepted the yber as a natural phenomenon. There was no room left in him to accept things even more fantastic.

  But Adrienne’s expression stayed serious.

  “Though I know of none personally, the legends of shape-changers still live within the Ways. Who knows what further powers there are still to experience?”

  Helman took Adrienne’s hand. “You seem very human to me,” he said.

  She squeezed back. “I feel very human with you.”

  The doors from the entranceway swung open. A familiar, an older woman of about fifty wearing a simple white smock, with a high, tightly fitting collar, smiled at them. Behind her stood two other familiars, similarly clothed. Behind them was a tall, white figure that Helman’s eyes refused to focus on.

  “The Father will see you now,” the familiar said.

  The Father must be even more altered, Adrienne had said. And she had been right. Both of them had been totally unprepared for the sight of him as he entered the room, Adrienne adjusted to him first. Helman took far longer.

  The Father was grotesque. Not that he was misshapen or twisted in bizarre and unimaginable forms, rather, there were so many small deviations from the ordinary that the overall impression was that of a figure seen in the darkness of a still room. From the corners of the eyes, the figure was acceptable. But if you dared look for detail, horror began.

  The Father was well over six feet tall. He wore a simple white kaftan, similar to the robes his familiars wore. The three of them in the room gazed upon the Father with adulation.

  His feet and ankles were bare and visible beneath the hem of the kaftan, as were his hands and forearms in the loose sleeves. No musculature seemed to exist upon his body. Thin, dull, white skin clung to his bones like vacuum-wrapped plastic. Each joint and rigid tendon was clearly visible. In less than bright light, the Father might appear transparent, or melted.

  His face was the same.

  No muscles seemed to fill up the deep hollows where the skin sucked in closely to the skull. He had no lips. His teeth, all of them stark white serrated fangs, emerged abruptly from the slug-white gums visible directly below the one nostril. The Father’s nose had long since been absorbed back into his body and a single gaping hole burrowed deep within his death’s-head
face. Something else that was also black flicked within his mouth.

  His ears were little more than small bumps that partially hid the network of tendons, veins and nerves that were visible at the hinge of his jaw.

  He was completely hairless. Completely shrunken. And his eyes made him completely inhuman.

  They were flat black. No iris, no pupil, no moisture. Just black like dry, dead stones. They could look directly at Helman and Adrienne and all the others in the room without moving. They saw everything at once. They saw many things that no one else could see.

  Helman was drawn hopelessly into them, totally repulsed at the incomplete monster before him.

  The Father held his gaze as he walked effortlessly to a chair in the middle of the room across from his two visitors. Helman had the impression that gravity was not working on the nine-hundred-year-old creature. He might have walked through a pile of crisp autumn leaves and not crushed one of them.

  The Father smiled at Helman by turning two tiny corners of flesh at the edges of his mouth upright. His tongue emerged from between his fangs, flicking like a lizard’s. It was shrivelled and tubular and ended in what looked to be a conical scab that resembled a bee’s stinger.

  “You are new to such as ourselves,” the Father said.

  It took a moment for Helman to realise he had spoken. No lips were there to move. The voice had sounded dry and whispery like soft winds through deserts. A voice that whispered your name in the night when you knew there was no one else there.

  Helman could not reply.

  The Father turned to Adrienne. In his movement, the front of his kaftan spread open. Helman stared in shock. The Father was wearing a string of rosary beads that ended in a silver crucifix.

  “You seek sanctuary here,” the Father whispered to Adrienne.

  “From the Conclave,” she said. “I would like a chance to explain why.”

  The Father shook his head once. Slowly and ponderously as if some sudden movement might snap it free and it would float away.

  “There is no need,” the delicate, breathless whisper said. “Sanctuary is granted.”

  Adrienne could not keep the look of surprise from her face.

  “I have known you were coming,” he explained gently. “I was given a sign. From God.”

  “From God?” Adrienne repeated doubtfully. She had had her suspicions that Diego might not have entirely believed in the Devil worship of the Ways, but she had never heard of an yber turning to the religion of the Kingdom of Light.

  The Father tilted his head upward. Helman saw that he had no eyelids. He never blinked.

  “Our sweet Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, has come to me in my dreams and shown me that the end of my punishment is at hand. Praise God.”

  “What punishment is that, Father?” Adrienne felt a tiny tremor of panic grow in her. Had the Jesuits contacted, converted, the Father?

  “For seven centuries I swept the earth as an agent of death.” The familiars closed their eyes and nodded, as though listening to a sermon they had heard countless times before. “Thousands of innocents were consumed by my bloodthirst. Millions suffered because of me. I served the demons of the Pit. But the Lord came to me and directed me and I turned away from the evil of those I had gathered to me. They formed their unholy Conclave. I undertook the life of a pilgrim, to repent, though I knew I would never meet my Lord.”

  The Jesuits could be in the hallways even now. Cross-bows cocked. What unfathomable senility had struck at what was once the greatest of yber?

  “Why is that, Father?” Adrienne asked. She calculated the movements she would have to make to drop the three familiars in the room with them. Mentally she measured the distance she would have to cover to get back to the car. Undoubtedly there would be pursuit. It would be fester if she carried Helman. She shifted her position, preparing herself for the flight.

  “All of us,” the Father whispered, sweeping his ivory-chiselled hand and claws across the room. “All of us must serve God in whatever way we can. Then, when we die, we may be transfigured and ascend to Heaven. But our kind, Adrienne St. Clair, can never die. Were we to stand before the rising sun or refuse to partake of the living blood, we would be killing ourselves by our own hands and we would once again belong to the Pit. It is our punishment for our curse.”

  Adrienne leaned forward, one eye on the door to the entrance hall. Who knew how many scholastics were waiting there?

  “Is that what the Jesuits told you?” she asked. His answer would determine her actions. She could see Helman bracing himself. He had put it together too.

  “The Church is in the grip of Satan Himself,” said the Father. “Please sit back. You are safe here. I am content to let each of you come to the Lord in your own time. What is of first importance is that you have rejected the Ways. You search for better methods for our kind.”

  “Your dreams told you that?” Adrienne settled back into the chair. Perhaps they would be safe after all.

  “No, Adrienne St. Clair. You have come to this place before in the presence of a Lord of the Conclave. Familiars will talk. I will listen. I know many things without having to have learned them in dreams. But now you must teach me of your work. And your human companion will have to leave.”

  Adrienne reacted immediately. “He can’t go. He’s in as great a danger as I. He must have sanctuary too.”

  The father rose, ending the discussion.

  “He is not yber. He is not familiar. He does not belong here. It is necessary that he go.”

  “But he’s risked so much to get me here.”

  “He has risked nothing. Since the first I have known he was coming. And now it is necessary for him to go. There is only risk when the outcome is uncertain. The outcome of what we face is already decided.” The Father turned to Helman. “Leave us now, human. You know to whom you must go. There is no uncertainty. No risk.”

  Helman stood. He didn’t understand what the Father was talking about.

  “I have no one to go to,” he said.

  “Then they shall go to you. You may return when night falls again if that is what you wish to hear. Now go.”

  Two familiars, muscular beneath their kaftans, gripped Helman by his arms and led him out of the room. He and Adrienne could only look apprehensively into each other’s eyes for a moment before he was removed from her presence. The familiars kept their grip upon him until he had reached the car outside the gates.

  Sunrise was less than an hour away. Helman drove toward the town centre of Nacimiento to call Weston. He had to be somewhere in the area. Helman would be safe with the Nevada Project team during the day. He would also find out about his sister. Weston’s ambiguous message that all was as they had anticipated still angered him.

  By now the Conclave would have realised that he had not returned to West Heparton. He would not be surprised if the Conclave could manage to trace him and Adrienne to Nacimiento in a matter of days. Or nights as they thought of it. He would have to force a definite commitment out of Weston about just what it was Nevada wanted from Adrienne.

  A car pulled out from some bushes behind Helman. The sudden flash of the other vehicle’s headlights in the rearview mirror startled him. Out over the hills to the east, the sky was beginning to lighten. The headlights blinked at him, signalling to him.

  Helman pulled over to the side of the narrow road. Finally Weston had come to him.

  The other car pulled up beside him. The power window hummed down. The figure inside was in shadows.

  “It’s about time,” said Helman. “She’s been given sanctuary, what do we—”

  The figure turned out of the shadows.

  It had fangs.

  “You have betrayed us,” the vampire spat.

  Helman jumped back.

  “So nervous, are you, human? I don’t think your nephews would be very impressed if they saw the way you looked now. But then, I’m sure you would be quite impressed by the way they look now.” The creature laughed hideously.
Helman was frozen in helpless anger.

  “Lord Diego will meet with you all tonight, human. For the last time.”

  The car squealed away in a spray of gravel, The chilling laughter still echoed in Helman’s ears.

  He realised that the Conclave must have always known where he and Adrienne would head. This last vampire had followed him only to make sure that Adrienne hadn’t left the Father’s sanctuary with him. They knew where she was. They knew where he was. And it seemed to be too late for his sister and her children.

  The sun was coming up. Its light was the only thing that had prevented them from killing him here on the road. It would protect him for only twelve hours more. Tears of frustration grew in his eyes.

  He screamed out Weston’s name to the empty hills.

  Weston was going to tell him everything about what was going on or Weston wasn’t going to be alive to see Helman’s last sunset.

  The twelve final hours would not be wasted.

  Chapter Ten

  THE TWO MEN accompanying Weston had made the mistake of treating Helman as an ally. Both were now unconscious. Helman pressed his forearm against Weston’s larynx. Part of him hoped that Weston would say nothing so that he could have the excuse to crush the man’s neck and leave him there to suffocate. But Weston had information. Weston had power. Helman wanted both.

  He didn’t care that he would never make it out of the front door of the Santa Barbara motel room without Weston. He was facing certain death by sunset anyway. He wouldn’t let the loss of a few hours interfere with what small revenge he could get.

  Santa Barbara, January 20

  Weston began choking and gasping for breath. Helman slapped his free hand over Weston’s mouth.

  “The Conclave know where she is. They know where I am. We haven’t been dodging them at all. You and they all knew we’d end up at the Father’s. I want the truth. I don’t want any bullshit or stories about the end of the world. All I want is a way out of this alive. With St. Clair. And with Miriam and the kids. Nod once if you understand.”