Bloodlands

by Christine Cody

  Gabriel must’ve realized that I wasn’t here to talk about the oldster, because he rolled to his back, onto the blankets I’d brought down here from above. They were bunched round us, where we lay at the foot of the stairs. Those bandages were still on his head, but I doubted he needed them. Probably had never needed them much at all.

  I was on my side, cradling my hands against my chest now. He ran his gaze over the nightclothes I’d changed, seeing as he’d mauled the ones I’d worn last night. And I’d sure enough allowed him to do so.

  As my skin went flush, my mom’s voice tried to make its way out from under the remaining peace and to the top of my thoughts.

  Your body is a temple, said the echo of her.

  I didn’t want to hear it, so my next words rushed out of me. “Would it be possible for you to . . . ?”

  His body clutched as he sensed my excitement at asking for more of his vampire hypnosis.

  I saw a flare of red in his eyes, as if he were remembering what’d transpired between us upstairs. “I shouldn’t have done it the first time.”

  “I was already pretty certain you were a vampire, so you didn’t give anything away on that account.”

  “That’s not exactly it. If I oblige you, I just might take more blood this time. It’s hard to stop the inner greed for it. I tried to stay away from you—that’s why I came down here—because I didn’t know if I could handle a second time.”

  Little by little, the peace was leaving me, and I almost wanted to cry. I already missed it. “I don’t feel sick from the lack of blood. I’m fine. You shouldn’t worry about that.”

  “I’m not. But when would the whole community find out? And how far of a head start would I need to get?”

  “I’ll make sure they don’t know.” I think what was left of the peace gave me more courage than I would’ve normally possessed. “I don’t believe you’re here to harm us, Gabriel. If you wanted to, you would’ve tried already. That’s why I did what I did when I saw your eyes in the shadows ny room . . . that night.”

  Again, something in his eyes flashed in the dimness, a turn of thought, as if he were imagining me taking off my clothing. His eyes began to glow a hotter red.

  The color made my belly tighten. I wanted to bring him to the point where he couldn’t say no to me. I wanted more. “I haven’t told anyone about you.”

  “Your dog already knows.”

  In my pool of serenity, the news didn’t come as any shock. Chaplin had said he had a handle on Gabriel, and I’d put my faith in him, because he often knew more than I did.

  So what was my dog up to? I’d have to have a real sit-down with him.

  “Did you tell Chaplin to stay quiet about you?” I asked.

  “I insinuated that I wasn’t a threat, and I needed him to help me out by keeping mum. I didn’t want to alarm you or the community.”

  Right. He’d wanted to search for Abby, and being identified as a monster would’ve gotten him run out. But I didn’t want to have Abby interfere with what was between me and Gabriel now.

  “If I haven’t revealed anything about you to the rest of the community by now,” I said, “you can rest assured that I won’t be doing it anytime soon.”

  I hesitantly touched his arm, and his muscles clenched.

  “When you came into me,” I said, “you gave me something I thought I’d never find. You made me forget about . . . outside.”

  “And you want to keep forgetting.”

  My escalating desires were eating away at me, and I pressed a hand to my stomach, as if that could control them.

  He seemed to know how much I craved his aid, and he rested a hand on my forehead, as if he were feeling guilty about withholding from me. As if he were reminding himself that he could ease me, even temporarily. He could make the nightmares go away. And wasn’t that better than not helping me at all?

  Gabriel stroked my temple with his thumb. My skin burned, and he looked into me, as if wanting so badly to cool me down.

  I let him mentally enter me, let him go to the only place inside myself that I kept undefended. Right away, my breathing smoothed out. I smiled, relief bubbling through me in a small laugh as he offered magic, soothing images, like how people used to climb trees with leaves.

  By his coming into me, I could intuit his musings, too. He was thinking that good thoughts came so very easy with me. The positive notes of the past, the decency of what we all used to be. I could also sense that he was clinging to this peace just as much as I was. He couldn’t let go, because doing so would plunge him into bloodlust.

  And he didn’t like the bloodlust. He despised that about himself, mostly because of . . .

  Abby?

  The name was like smoke in the wind, and I couldn’t hold to it as it floated off. But that was fine, because Gabriel was now riding the peace with me. The vibrations distracted him from jabs of appetite, sending us into a hushed place. A limbo, electric and welcome.

  I took enough of him to last me, then closed my eyes, laughing until the happiness almost turned to crying again. Besides the peace, something else from him stayed with me—a yearning. A plea for humanitmaris profound longing for it choked me up.

  “What?” he asked, as if unable to comprehend what was happening with me.

  I guess not even a vampire could go deep enough into me to see everything.

  “It’s only that . . .” I couldn’t draw any words from my confusion. So I settled for something safer to say. “You just bring out the wicked in me. But you bring out some good, too.”

  I opened my eyes, and he tilted his head at the sight of them. I’m sure fever was burning in my gaze, just like earlier, during the first time we’d been together. I didn’t want him to see it.

  “I need the good so badly,” I said.

  “Don’t need it too much.” He was still staring at my eyes, and I breathed and breathed, calming myself until I felt better. “This can’t become a pattern, Mariah. I won’t facilitate it.”

  “An . . . addiction?”

  In my floating state, the idea almost sounded ridiculous. His tone told me it wasn’t.

  “I should know addictions, because I used to depend on booze. Then I graduated to blood.”

  And then finding Abby?

  I stroked his face, over all the scars that had basically healed since that first night. His eyes went redder, and I could’ve sworn he peered past the fever in my eyes and deeper for an instant—one in which I could see how he’d taken lovers during his human days and they’d laid hands on him just as I was doing. But there hadn’t been many instances of tenderness after he’d turned vampire, because the worse the world had gotten, the more interested he’d been in fast and easy than slow and meaningful.

  I scooted nearer to him, gently pushing until he lay on his back as I balanced myself on an elbow, then bent down to impetuously brush my lips over his. He shivered at the softness, the care of my actions, clearly not knowing how to react.

  I kissed him again, experimenting in how far I might go without causing him to rage for another bite. I also wanted to know how things worked between a man and woman, and the peace made it seem okay to find out.

  He was looking into me again, and my surface thoughts seemed to meld with his. He was picturing a man and a woman, too, but not in a regular way. Sex without a bite, he was thinking. He hadn’t experienced it in a long time, not since he was human. Nowadays, he didn’t get his pleasure like they did, although he was capable of bringing it to a human he was biting.

  Was a bite his means to satiation?

  “Mariah—you know what you’re asking for. These aren’t garden-variety . . . relations . . . you’re inviting.”

  “I’ve read my dad’s medical books. I know the difference.”

  As I hovered over him, I could feel the moistness of my breath bathing his mouth.

  “I dipped into your blood last night,” he said, almost as if talking to himself, “and it should’ve been enough to keep me.”
/>   “Maybe you want something more.”

  And then I saw it in his eyes: how devastating it’d been to lose any semblance he’d created of his humanity out here.

  Emboldened, I kissed him again, lingering this time, spreading warmth through his coolness. I touched hicheek, his chin, his neck—a vein that was bulging because of the push of blood.

  I asked a question against his lips. “How old are you?”

  “Not very.”

  I skimmed my fingers over his collarbones, and he jerked.

  “What you do to me . . .” he said, then laughed a little, just as I had after receiving the peace. “My skin isn’t sensitive like a human’s, but . . .”

  I waited him out, not sure what else to do as my body pounded. It felt like my heartbeat had been pushed under the water, muffled, taking up every inch of space round me.

  He sighed, bringing my hand to where his heart should’ve been beating, had he been truly alive. “Your touch brings these rays of energy. Like . . . like a living imprint.”

  He didn’t have to say that he’d never experienced this before with a blood victim. I got a perverse thrill out of knowing he hadn’t felt it with Abby.

  “How old are you?” I repeated, wanting to figure out how many bites there’d been before me.

  “Mariah—”

  “A century?”

  He gave in. “Only just over a couple years in vampire terms.”

  I was unbuttoning his shirt now, rather proud of myself to be doing so. I finally had courage. I could finally forget.

  “Mariah . . . ?”

  I parted his shirt so I could trace his pale skin, and when I did, my hand seemed to warm on him, the rays he’d talked about apparently spreading as he jolted again.

  It must’ve been the shock of it that sent him into action, and he lifted me, setting me on top of him. I gasped, his sex against mine. What was left of my sanity peeked through the fog in my head. No more, it said. Stop now.

  But under his thrall, it didn’t seem so dangerous to continue, and I rested my palms against his chest. This time, I could feel a thrust of pressure molding the shape of my hands.

  Imprint?

  “I can feel it in you,” I said. “The blood. Or maybe that’s just my own pulse in my hands.”

  “It is you. Your pulse is mine.”

  Something—happiness, the ecstasy of finally knowing someone—washed over me. He hesitated, as if hardly grasping that he had the power to cause such a shift of intimate emotion in anyone.

  He’s feeling even closer to human, I thought. And I made it happen.

  He latched his fingers to the hem of my top, then undid the tiny buttons. Heat licked over my face when he eased the material off my shoulders, down my arms. And when he palmed my breasts, his thumbs circling my nipples, I lowered my head.

  But it wasn’t because of any chiding mother voices in me. My pulse was flailing, springing and taking off, and I was trying to get it back.

  He slid a finger under my chin, tilted my head up, caught my gaze and opened himself, offering the peace I’d come here for. I breathed easier, although my heartbeat still rammed the blood through me. Through us. I could feel it in him.

  I guided him to the ground, leaning forward, my bare breasts against his chest now. What a feeling . . . What I’ missed out on all these years . . .

  The fringes of his irises were ringed with a famished red, his fangs edging past his lips, but he didn’t seem feral. Maybe he was still feeling the peace, too.

  I coasted upward, my nipples combing over him. My short, chopped hair wisped against his throat as I turned my face so that my lips were against the underside of his jaw.

  “You’re so cold, Gabriel. Hard underneath the skin.”

  “That’s what you get.”

  “I know what comes with you. At least, I think I know.”

  “If you’re asking if I react like a human guy during all this, then the answer’s yes. And no.”

  What did he mean by that?

  “The only way I can have children,” he said, “is through a blood exchange. I can’t impregnate because vampires are sterile that way.”

  “But you can . . . do other things.”

  In answer, he took my hand and rested it over his sex, where the blood rushed, making it harder.

  I sucked in a breath, taking my hand away. I’d imagined what it might feel like, but . . .

  Then a rush of his vampire sway overcame me again, and I put my hand on his belly.

  Relaxed again. I was fine.

  “I was raised by my mom to think that you shouldn’t share yourself freely,” I said. “Not with all the STDs and the movement to purify young women round the country.”

  Cults had sprung up—“purity enforcers.” They were as crazy as the people who’d made a religion of worshipping pop stars.

  “But you’re not like others,” I said.

  I skimmed down, over his stiffness, wanting to undo his pants. But he took care of that for me, his expression showing that he was curious about how far I’d go.

  When he was bared to me, I hesitated. He looked different from the sketches I’d seen in the mild erotica that had flashed at Dallas intersections via the TV-channel collages that drive-by artists showed in their transport windows.

  This was flesh, swollen to hardness. I took him in my hand, my temperature rising even higher.

  He groaned, closing his eyes, his fangs needling his gums. But then he seemed to recover, quickly helping me out of my pants, settling me to my back. Then he lay against me, my entire body imprinting him, seething energy buzzing back into me, too.

  I was wet, and when he slipped inside me, I wiggled my hips to get him past my tightness. I held to him, one of my legs wrapping round the back of his. It was uncomfortable at first, because he filled me all the way. But his body felt like it was my own.

  I could sense his appetite climbing, up, up as he drove into me. Harder, faster, I moved with him, my fingers clawed against his back, my nails biting into him again as I heated up, my blood simmering, my bones going to a melt, tempered only by the peace he gave me as he looked into my eyes, balancing everything.

  For what seemed like endless hours, I saw in him the red of blood cells scrambling round. Felt it, too, as crimson blinded me, banged at me, stretched me and fought the peace until it expanded, bubble-like, warped, pushing, near to breaking—

  I tensed round him, my muscles convulsing. His body rhythms copied mine as we strained, my nails ripping into his skin, while a low, warped cry shuddered out of me.

  There was no bite, no blood, but he took something from me as I came—a blast of fluid heat, running inside us, coating us.

  Afterward, we didn’t move for a minute, but it seemed like forever as we panted, coming down into that body of water that held me up in my floating place of peace. But then I glanced at my fingers, and I saw his blood on them.

  I was too mellow and content to scream as I would have any other time.

  He took my hands in one of his, then folded his fingers over mine, shielding me from the red as he sank down to the blankets, bringing me on my side to face him. Without thinking, I cozied my leg between both of his while he kept soothing me with more of his gaze.

  Soon, I was under that imagined water, looking at the wavering surface until everything went as blank as slumber.

  Next thing I knew, there was barking, and I bolted up at the same time Gabriel did.

  Chaplin?

  Had he realized that Gabriel was in here with me?

  Then my dog barked again and I heard his true message.

  “No,” I said.

  “What?” Gabriel asked.

  I was already putting on my nightclothes. “Chaplin’s saying that Stamp’s on my main outside visz screen.” My voice was unsteady, but it would’ve been worse without Gabriel’s remaining sway. “Stamp’s telling us that all’s forgiven, and he’d like to explain just why that is if we’ll all gather up top, outside, in twenty
minutes.”

  He started to get dressed, too. “I want to be the one to go out there and have a word with him.”

  I stopped cold.

  “Are you all right, Mariah?” he asked.

  I still had some peace in me, but now that Stamp was here, I didn’t know if I’d be able to get through it. Not unless . . .

  Would Gabriel give me more of his vampire tranquility? Or would I be a coward forever without it?

  He seemed to turn the decision over in his mind for only an instant—one in which I supposed he felt torn between the vampire he’d been trying to leave behind and the man he’d just been.

  Still, he came to me, cupping my face and looking into my eyes, offering the only peace I knew.

  19

  Gabriel

  After Gabriel finished soothing Mariah, he wrapped her in one of the blankets she’d brought downstairs. She was in her nightclothes, and even if matters were hectic, Chaplin, who was still barking, would surely notice her state, then come after Gabriel. The dog had told him to stay outside, and the vampire hadn’t obeyed.

  Besides, what had gone on between Gabriel and Mariah was just . . . private. None of anyone else’s business. Not even Chaplin’s.

  As Gabriel finished tucking Mariah up, then grabbing the lantern she’d brought with her, he found her peering up at him. Becaus there and the peace that still filtered through her gaze, there was something in her eyes that he could almost identify. Even when he’d been all the way inside her, she’d never truly let him in.

  “Thank you, Gabriel,” she said, and the emotion behind her words spoke to him more than the actual syllables did.

  She reached up to take the bandages from his head, slowly unwinding them, unveiling what he knew to be all the healed injuries from when Stamp’s men had roughed him up outside several nights ago.

  When Mariah finished, she dropped the bandages to the ground, then pulled the blanket around her so that it swallowed her from neck to ankle. Then, with a small smile—the last one he thought he might see for a while—she took the stairway.

  Gabriel didn’t follow at first. He just loitered under what might turn out to be the final moments of a good thing.