by Sara Beaman
“Really.”
I was you.
“Interesting.”
Are you going to kill me?
“Of course not.”
But you drink people’s blood.
“Mostly you’ve been drinking my blood. Or hadn’t you noticed?”
I bring a hand to the scar on my chest.
“Without it you’d be dead. Of course it’s the least I can do, after shooting you...”
Why do you care?
“What do you mean? I shot you. I couldn’t leave you there to die.“
But you’re a vampire! You must kill people all the time!
“I’ve never killed anyone,” he says flatly, like it wouldn’t matter either way.
I stand up and start walking towards the bedroom. I don’t believe him, and I can’t stand him reading my thoughts. I want to be alone.
“I’m sorry,” he says, standing, “but the last time I left you alone you ran. I can’t let you do that again.”
Don’t touch me! I think at him, commanding him like I commanded the deer. Don’t put me back to sleep!
“Calm down. I won’t touch you. But Mirabel may have conditioned you with a compulsion to return to Atlanta. And if you don’t stay here with us, you will die. The wound will re-open and you will die.”
I hesitate. Why?
“After I shot you... you were bleeding out fast. You had minutes left at best. You wouldn’t have made it to the hospital.”
So?
“So I did what I had to do to save you—I gave you the blood. And I’ll keep giving it to you—as much as you need. I’m not going to let you die.”
So if I don’t keep drinking your blood, the wound will open up?
“Exactly.”
But after the wound heals completely—
“You don’t understand. It never will.”
What are you saying?
He takes a deep breath. “At first, while you’re still healing, you’ll need a lot of blood. Revenant blood, like mine. And then, well, you’ll need small increments, every day... for the rest of your natural life.”
The rest of my life?
I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it. I won’t even think about it.
“I’m sorry for putting you in this situation,” Adam says.
I give him a burning glare for just a moment, and then I start crying. He takes a step forward, holding out a hand.
Leave me alone, I think at him. For the love of God.
He retreats into the kitchen.
I curl into a corner, covering my face and crying silently. I try to pretend I’m alone, but I know he’s still there. I can only hope that he can’t read my thoughts from those five yards away.
I don’t believe that he wants to help me for my sake. He wants me with him for a reason. Maybe he shot me by accident; maybe he even feels remorse for it. But he wants me with him for a reason.
He’s wrong about me, in any case. I don’t want to go back to Atlanta.
I just want to be alone.
After just a few minutes car doors slam outside, one-two. I look out into the main room. Haruko bursts through the front door, her face stony. “We’ve been followed.”
“What?” Adam says. “How? We got rid of all of her things—“
“How the hell should I know?” she spits. “Get your gun. They’re coming.”
“They must have put a tracker in her clothing somewhere...”
“Or in her somewhere,” Haruko says. “We never should have taken her with us.”
Adam looks at me. “Go to the bedroom and take off your clothes. Underwear too.”
My eyes widen.
“I’ll bring you some of Haruko’s,” he says. “We don’t have time to argue, all right?”
I shake my head no, but I turn and walk towards the bedroom anyway. I’m scared to find out what will happen if I don’t cooperate. I close the door behind me and start stripping off my ruined clothing, my hands shaking. I can hear the three of them rush up and down a set of stairs on the other side of the hallway, to and from a basement as I stand waiting, naked, shivering.
Then the house goes quiet. I put my ear to the surface of the door.
“Adam,” I hear Haruko say in a low voice, “she’s a liability.”
“Haruko...”
“I don’t like it any more than you do, but we can’t take her with us, and we sure as hell can’t leave her here.”
Oh God. They’re going to kill me.
I stumble away from the door. I’m only on the first floor—maybe I can jump out the window. And then what? What the hell am I going to do with myself, naked and alone in the woods?
The door swings open.
Haruko throws a wad of clothing at me. “Get dressed,” she says. She slams the door behind her.
What do I do?
I start pulling on Haruko’s clothes: underwear, sports bra, jeans, socks, and T-shirt. It’s all black, and it’s all too tight. I go over to the window and try to pull it open, but I can’t; it’s bolted shut. I go into the bathroom, hoping there will be something else, some other exit, but there’s nothing.
I’ll have to go back out into the hallway.
I open the door. Adam is waiting for me, crouching by the corner to the living room. He has a pistol in one hand and the handle of the black lockbox in the other.
“They’ll be here any minute,” he says in a low voice.
Who is ‘they’? I ask.
“Mirabel’s people.”
Are they looking for me?
He shakes his head. “No. They’re looking for this.” He lifts the box.
The bedroom window shatters. Adam grabs my arm and pulls me into the living room. I hurry into the kitchen, where Haruko is waiting, knife in hand, hidden behind the archway. Adam ducks behind the armchair. Aya is nowhere to be seen.
Three armed men dressed in black rush from the hallway into the living room. Aya emerges from thin air behind them. They turn, firing at her. Adam comes out of his crouch and shoots at one of the men; Haruko rushes out into the living room and stabs another in the back. He screams.
Aya falls. So does the man with the knife in his back. Adam gets back behind the chair. “Get down!” he hisses at me.
I hide behind the refrigerator, shaking. More gunshots. I can’t see what’s happening. I don’t care. I don’t even know what I’m hoping will happen. I just don’t want to get shot again.
The front door swings open. Mirabel walks into the kitchen. I know it’s her—she has my face, my hair, my body.
“There you are,” she says. She smiles crookedly and reaches into her purse. She takes out a small handgun and shoots me in the arm.
A dart. It stings like hell. I want to pull it out, but my hand won’t move.
The room blurs, then goes dark and silent.
6
A Dream of Blood
{Adam}
I followed Aya through a series of labyrinthine halls lined with oil paintings and electric lamps made to look like gaslights. As we walked I heard footsteps in the distance, smelled the faintest body odor. The sensation in my chest became a pulsing, almost as if my heart had started beating once more, beating so forcefully it seemed on the verge of failure.
Human blood.
A small group of somberly-dressed men and women rounded a corner in front of us and walked in our direction. At the sight of them, their scent and the warmth of their bodies and breath, my gums began to tighten against my teeth, which sharpened into points. My muscles hummed with tension. My mind began to race. The weakest one would be the smaller of the two women—thin arms, not muscular enough to put up a fight. She’d be easy to pin against the wall—the jugular easy to find under her pale skin—
I stopped in my tracks and turned toward the wall. I closed my eyes, pressed my fingertips against my eyelids. I could hear them retreating down the corridor. It was all I could do not to run after them, to seize one of them from behind, to—
“Dr.
Fletcher?”
I opened my eyes, looked both ways down the hall. Aya and I were alone again, alone with the portraits.
“Are you all right?”
I stared at the painting in front of me without really seeing it. “Sorry. Yes. I’m fine.”
“It’s not a problem. As long as you’re okay.”
She followed my eyes to the painting. It was a portrait of a thin, tall man just shy of middle age, dressed in what I supposed was Victorian or Edwardian clothing, all black and white. His face, shown in profile, was pale and somewhat severe. His dark hair was pulled back in a short ponytail at the nape of his neck.
“That’s a portrait of Master Radcliffe’s late brother,” Aya said. “You look a little like him.”
I shrugged.
“Shall we continue?”
I nodded and fell into step behind her.
Soon she stopped in front of a set of double doors. “This is Master Radcliffe’s office,” she said. “I’ll wait for you outside.” She opened the left-hand door and flattened her back against it to let me pass through.
The room was cold and very dimly-lit. Books, papers, and unidentifiable paraphernalia overflowed from every crevice and collected in every corner. Bookcases cut the room into haphazard zones. Some kind of modern, dissonant orchestral music played through unseen speakers.
I took a few steps forward, trying not to crush anything underfoot. As Aya closed the door behind me, Julian’s disembodied voice came from somewhere in the stacks.
“Good afternoon, Dr. Fletcher.”
He emerged from behind a bookcase. He was shorter than I’d imagined, and slighter. He looked less imposing than he sounded. His face was young—he looked at least ten years younger than me—except for his eyes, which were green and sharp as daggers. He was carrying a thin, leather-bound book in his left hand.
“Good afternoon,” I replied after too long a pause.
“Come with me,” he said, turning to walk further into the stacks. I followed him to a sitting area in front of an unlit fireplace furnished with three long couches, each half-full of detritus. “Please, have a seat.”
I moved some papers from a cushion and sat down. He sat across from me, shoving yellowing newspapers aside without caution, and stared at me for several long seconds without speaking. His thin lips curled into a smile. He reminded me of a co-worker of mine, someone I didn’t particularly like. They had the same ash-brown hair pulled back in a short ponytail, the same too-large nose, the same slight underbite. The same affected, pretentious aura.
“You wanted to talk to me?”
“Yes. Of course.” He laughed. “You’ll have to excuse me. Aya tells me you’ve already demonstrated telepathic capacities, you see, and...” He trailed off.
Telepathic capacities? “Yeah. That’s—“
“Impossible?”
I forced myself not to roll my eyes.
“I imagine this will all take some getting used to,” Julian said.
“Why am I here?” The words came out in a petulant tone I didn’t like. “What the hell did you do to me?”
“Let me begin with your second question, Dr. Fletcher—or, may I call you Adam?”
“I don’t care.”
“Well, Adam, you were declared dead a little over forty-two hours ago, back in Baltimore. With the help of a friend, I had you flown here to Georgia. When you arrived, shortly after nightfall, I revived you.”
“How?”
“Using the blood,” he said. “Three drops is sufficient—“
“You can’t bring someone back to life by feeding them blood. That’s absurd.”
“Of course not. Not normal blood, anyhow. But the blood of an immortal, of a revenant—“
“You mean a vampire?”
He laughed. “We don’t usually refer to ourselves as such, but, if you like... yes. Three drops of vampire blood is sufficient to revive a corpse.”
I shook my head. I didn’t believe what he was saying, but there was no sense in arguing with him. “Right, but, aren’t corpses easy to find? Local ones, I mean?”
“You want to know why I chose you.”
“You don’t even know me.”
“I know of you. I’ve been following your work for years now, reading the journals and such.”
“You have an interest in brain injuries?”
“I have an interest in retrograde amnesia.”
“Wait. So you stole my corpse and brought me back from the dead so you could ask me questions about amnesia?”
“Among other reasons. Yes.”
My mouth opened and closed several times as I tried to form a response.
“You could have at least picked someone with tenure,” I eventually stammered.
“You’re being modest. In any case, that’s not how it works. We have a code of ethics, you see—“
“The undead have a code of ethics?”
“We do, and it’s rather strictly enforced,” he said. “As an upstanding proponent of the Sanguine Consensus, I can’t just go select a living heir and off them myself. That’s murder. We select our initiates from the ranks of the newly dead, you see, in order to avoid tampering with human life.”
He stood up, brushed some dust off the front of his pants. He brought the thin book he carried over to the mantle above the fireplace, the lone bastion of organization in the entire library. It held maybe fifty other black leather books, each the exact shape and size, in a neat row unblemished by dust. He placed the book on the left side of the mantle next to a bookend.
“Revival doesn’t heal the body,” he continued, “so it’s less ideal to attempt the process on anyone who’s died of, say... old age. Cancer. Massive physical trauma.”
“I thought I was in a car accident.”
“You died of asphyxiation. It won’t prove to be a problem. Honestly, you are an ideal modern candidate. We rarely see better.”
I didn’t know how to reply.
“Did Aya get a chance to talk to you about anything else?” he asked.
Human blood.
“Sort of,” I said.
“I see.” His tone was suddenly sober. “Perhaps she didn’t need to say much of anything.”
I shrank against the back of the couch.
“I’m terribly sorry about your fiancée, Adam.”
“Yeah. So am I.”
“I can imagine this is all rather surreal for you right now.”
I nodded, troubled by what Aya had said, unable to focus on much else.
He’ll have something ready for you.
Something—someone—to eat?
The crushing sensation in my chest still hadn’t gone away. In fact, ever since I’d seen the people in the hallway, it’d gotten markedly worse. I ran a finger across my front teeth. Did they still feel sharper than normal?
“I... well, I understand what it’s like to lose someone important.”
I ignored his attempt at sympathy. The impulses I’d had back in the hallway were those of a murderer, and they had nearly overwhelmed me. If I had someone waiting in the wings for me to drink, I didn’t think I’d be able to help but kill them.
“I apologize,” Julian said, chagrined. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. I’m sure you’d prefer to be alone. I can have Aya bring you back to your quarters in just a moment.”
I nodded.
“First, though, you should eat something.”
“I’m not hungry,” I lied.
“I understand your reticence. The concept is gruesome,” he said. “Come. I’m not going to ask you to assault anyone.”
“You’re not?”
“No, of course not. Come with me.”
I followed Julian past several rows of bookcases to a study, far less congested and much brighter than the main library. The room was outfitted with a large drafting table with a black amphora at its center. Amber-colored stained glass panels lined the ceiling, filtering in what seemed like sunlight through elaborate iron filigrees.
/> “We must consume blood almost daily if we wish to function normally,” Julian said, propping the door to the study open. “That being said, we can choose to drink from either a still or a living vessel.”
He pulled a chair out from the table and gestured for me to sit.
I stood in the doorway, repulsed by the idea despite the compression and pain overtaking my chest. “What if I refuse?”
“That’d be unwise.” He walked over to a cabinet against the back wall and pulled out a single glass, crystal clear and shaped like a teardrop. “Hunger manifests differently in each of us, but it’s never pleasant.”
I swallowed hard, thinking back to my reaction in the hallway.
He leaned across the table to fill the glass with blood from the amphora. “In the case of our family, the House of Mnemosyne, hunger results in the temporary inability to form short-term memories. Acute anterograde amnesia, in other words.”
He walked across the study and handed me the glass. The liquid inside was room temperature, neither cold nor hot. I forced myself to imagine it was red wine.
He smiled. “If you won’t sit, you must at least drink.”
I shook my head no. I thought of throwing the glass against the far wall, letting the blood splatter all over the books and papers.
The humor drained from Julian’s face and voice as he closed in on me. “You will drink on your own or I will force you to drink.” He placed his hand on my right shoulder. “The choice is yours.”
I suddenly felt it wasn’t a choice at all.
Refusing to look at him, I brought the glass to my mouth. I refused to inhale as I closed my eyes and poured the first few drops past my lips. I tried to refuse to taste anything as it slid across my tongue; but as soon as the first drop entered my throat I was already knocking the rest of the glass back as if I couldn’t possibly drink it quickly enough. For a moment, my mind felt perfectly clear; my body felt buoyant. The blood was all I could imagine wanting. It was both longing and release.
Julian released his hold on my shoulder. He took the glass from me, refilled it from the amphora, and handed it back to me with a satisfied smile.
“This is your blood,” I remarked as I came to the realization, after the last sip of the last glass.
Julian raised an eyebrow. “How could you tell?”