Bloodlands
Page 27
Sammy said, “I’d left the hubs as a human, thinking I could make a go of it out here. A survivalist, they called me. But on the wall border one night, I came across a Gila—half-man, half-creature. It bit me and that’s the last I ever saw of him. I continued on here, thank-all. I’m not sure I would’ve known what to do without the clan.”
What he said was true for me, too. The community had helped. But help in and of itself hadn’t been enough.
Hana said, “We were not open to accepting new members when you came.”
“Probably a good thing, seeing as I don’t quite fit the mold,” Gabriel said lifelessly.
“Maybe not, but the Badlands actually treats us in particular better than most places,” the oldster added. “In were-form, our bodies acquire, conserve, then recycle water, just like all good desert animals. Actually, every were adapts out here.”
“And what about you, Mariah?” Gabriel asked.
I startled. He was talking to me in a civil manner.
“Are you a born were-creature or are you bitten?” he asked, but there was a coolness in his eyes.
“Bitten.” I locked gazes with Chaplin, letting him know that I wasn’t hiding behind half-truths this time. “When those men attacked my family in Dallas . . .”
I hadn’t told Gabriel everything before because it would’ve exposed me.
The oldster took pity on me, just as he usually did. “Those bad guys had a chained werewolf with them. They thought it’d be funny to threaten people with it. That was their big weapon of the night.”
“The werewolf is what got to Mom and Serg,” I said, the lining of my stomach starting to quiver. “After my dad got me to the panic room, he grabbed a silver letter opener from his desk. It was the only silver we had, but it took care of that wolf when he stabbed it and it went back to human form. Still, he . . .” I grabbed a fistful of my shirt. “My dad didn’t see what happened to me before he took me out of Dallas, out here.”
“The story you told was a lie, then,” Gabriel said. “You didn’t mention a wolf.”
“Again, Gabriel, you were going to leave. We didn’t want you to carry the knowledge of what we are with you.”
Hana spoke. “Mariah . . .”
No more lies. “Things are different now, so I’ll say it truthfully. Before the bad men brought the creature to Mom and Serg, half of them cornered my mother and brother with more conventional weapons while they let the werewolf loose to stalk me. The other half laughed and laughed as that . . . thing . . . bared its teeth, nudged my legs with its snout, nipped at my nightgown, tore at it. They taunted me while I tried not to scream. I . . . I couldn’t move, not even when it brought my gown up. They laughed and laughed more, goading it, and it nicked me on the thigh with what I thought was its claw. I had my eyes closed. I didn’t know. Then my dad came in with his guns, but he didn’t see what came before.”
I hunched into myself even more. “Dad killed some bad guys in my room, and the rest were wounded as they escaped, but not the werewolf, because he didn’t have any silver in him yet. So the thing ran to where my mom and Serg were. My dad got me to the panic room, and while he was fighting everyone off, I cleaned my wound, thinking that would be enough. Just a scratch, I kept thinking. That’s all it was. Chaplin was passed out, so he couldn’t do anything. My dad thought the wound wasn’t a real bite, either—nothing like what my mom and Serg had, and that’s why I think they probably begged him to end their lives, because they knew. They were torn up from the bites and their self-healing abilities hadn’t kicked in yet, but they still knew. Then, a couple weeks after we’d left Dallas, the first night of the full moon came.”
The room was quiet.
The oldster said, “By then it was too late. Dmitri wouldn’t kill her. He told me once it was because guilt was eating him about being unable to save his wife and son, and he was going to make it up to them by seeing that Mariah got better. He wasn’t going to give up on her. He tried to invent a bunch of were-creature cures, but none of them worked.”
I could testify to that, because I’d tried all of them—wolfsbane potion, feyweed smokes. “The thing is,” I said softly, “I didn’t want to die. Dad kept telling me we could overcome what I’d been infected with, and I thought our prospects were looking up when we found the New Badlands, with the others here. He even did his best to chain me and then fortify himself in his room during a full moon phase or trouble.”
“But,” the oldster said, “it was all too much for Dmitri.”
Everyone seemed to be waiting for me to tell Gabriel just why that was, but I wasn’t going to do it in a room full of onlookers.
“All your vital signs,” Gabriel said, oblivious to my dilemma. “I should’ve realized right off that you were different from humans. Especially . . .”
He glanced at me.
“Especially my signs?” I asked. “Do I sound different to you?”
He looked so bruised that I could barely stand it.
“Yeah, you do,” he said. “It’s almost . . . a calling.” His light gray eyes cut through the swollen tissue round his eyes, which had been healing even since he’d gotten back here. But there were still the fading marks of the cross on his skin. “I have to wonder if I hear you that way because I’m connected to canines as a vampire. That’s why I was able to have Chaplin as a close familiar, not just an animal to summon. Not that it did me much good.”
The dog twitched, but there’d been no bitterness in Gabriel’s tone.
The oldster reached out to take Gabriel’s hand. “You did good, and we thank you for that. A million times, thank you.”
The others joined in, and even though it sounded as if that was that, I knew the night was far from over.
“I’d like to speak to him alone,” I said.
Hana offered me a sympathetic glance. But then again, when Pucci wasn’t round, she’d been one of the most relatively tolerant of my issues, besides Zel and the oldster. Hana had been like that with Annie, too, always going behind closed doors to talk with her, never telling anyone else a word of what was said.
As everyone but Hana and Pucci moved toward my door, I didn’t tell them to stay out of my domain. The viszes were the most varied there, and I suspected that Sammy and the oldster would want to listen in on the common-area link besides scanning the outdoors for any signs of Stamp’s premature return.
Pucci and Hana went to their own domain, where there would also be a common-area visz, but Chaplin went into my place, too. I watched him go, wishing things were better between us. Wishing I hadn’t hurt him in so many ways.
After they were all gone, I sat on a crate near Gabriel, sucking in a breath at my soreness. If only I could get nearer to him. But even though he seemed to accept what we were as a community, there was still an invisible wall between us.
A lack of trust. And I’d built it.
“They’ve put up with me for a long time,” I finally said. “I suppose it’s because of my dad and how much he did for the community before he poisoned himself with some calantria from outside. But before that, he made them all promise to protect me—just as Chaplin did—and teach me to forget all the anger and how to survive in calm like they have. And as much as I’ll always be grateful to them for doing that, sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t have left months ago.”
Gabriel didn’t say a word, and it wasn’t because he was too tired. He looked better now that the silver had been chased away. It was just that he had nothing more to say to me.
I tried not to let that stop me from the inevitable. “Once, you told us that the passage of time wasn’t going to erase our problems, and it disturbed me more than you’ll ever understand, because, without you knowing it, I was the cause of those troubles.”
I allowed that to sink in for him. But his only reaction was the tensing of his jaw under those bruises.
“Maybe,” I added, “I even made matters worse by not telling you exactly how I work—how I’m like a spring that’s always
being pressed down until it shoots up when the controlling force can’t hold anymore.”
“What’re you trying to tell me?”
I blew out the breath I’d been holding for . . . how long now? It felt like years.
“Just as I said,” I whispered. “I’m the cause of everything. It wasn’t a demon that was killing Stamp’s men, Gabriel.”
He sat up, and the horror on his features made me feel like I was a monster through and through, even in human form.
God-all, I couldn’t look at him, see that reflection glaring back at me—the self-hatred he’d carried along with him through all his travels. It was mine now, and I wished I could go back to a time when no one outside the community knew just what I was.
Then he lowered his head, pressed his hands over it. Was he thinking that he’d touched and been inside this brutal, bloodthirsty it? That he’d taken some of such a creature—my blood—inside him?
But wasn’t he a monster, too? Hadn’t he wanted to bite me?
“At first,” he said, “I thought I was the one killing those men.”
It was another stone on my chest, making it harder to breathe. “I’m sorry. You don’t know how sorry I am for everything.”
He struggled to his feet, and I stood, too, afraid he was going to leave. Explanations wouldn’t condone my actions, but maybe it would . . .
What? Pave the way for my rehabilitation?
Even though I doubted that, I said, “We don’t have heightened powers in our human forms—only when we’re changing. That naturally happens every twenty-eight days, when there’s a full moon phase, sometimes for three nights in a row as it waxes, gets to its peak, then wanes. When the night’s at its darkest, that’s when the full moon is at its worst for us, and we’re compelled to go out and hunt for whatever we need to soothe the wild were-creature side of us.”
Gabriel stalked away from me, but didn’t leave.
“We can’t stop ourselves from changing during a full moon,” I said, “although the more mature we get, the more control we have on other nights. We can also force a change to happen, just like some of the others did tonight when we needed to fight. But there’s a price for that, because it’s not organic.” If I’d forced a change during a less emotional time, my very bones would be groaning, my skin burning—although both elements had become more elastic since I’d been bitten. “It’s not a natural change, like when the moon calls or when we’re so angry or passionate that we have to battle for control. I’m a newer were, and I don’t have the restraint of the others in the community.”
“Anger,” Gabriel said, as if fitting everything together. “Passion?”
I could see that he was remembering all the times I’d been close to changing in front of him. “Like the night when Chaplin was captured . . .” I said, urging him along. “Or when we were . . . together.”
When he’d bitten me and entered me in a way that had made me think that I’d been missing so much by staying inside, secure, untouched.
“I had no idea how passion affected me until you got here,” I said. “Your peace was the only saving grace for me.”
He seemed beyond that right now, and it broke me.
“Your voice,” he said. “It would get rough. And your eyes . . .”
The fever. Unless I could summon every ounce of restraint, my disturbed state went livid in my eyes. “When you gave me the peace,” I said again, “it helped. Helped so much. That’s why I asked for more of it. To calm me, to keep me inside.”
He laughed without humor. “So your fear of venturing too far from your home—”
“Truly is about what’s out there—the bad guys like Stamp and the ones who attacked my family.” I held out my hands in an appeal. “I was honest about that. But staying inside is also about keeping myself together. Every time I’ve strayed too far from the domain, I’ve been a monster who’s brought pain to the community. Forcing myself to stay in kept me away from trouble. I hate what I do when I wander too far, and I’ve never been able to accept that about myself, mostly because it makes me a bad guy, too.”
I was getting worked up now, upset, and it made my blood simmer, my bones begin the first melt of a slide into my bad, were-creature form. My mother would have screamed, had she seen what I’d become. My dad would have killed himself all over again, just as he’d done when he’d realized there was no hope of conquering my bloodlust.
Chaplin had told me that fear destroyed control, so I shouldn’t fear. But I feared what my body did, feared the anger and passion that sometimes made me that way. And when I feared, I gave into all of it.
Fear had been our downfall out here in the New Badlands.
“Some scars never heal,” I said, “even though were-creatures mend just as fast as any vampire when we’re in preter form.”
“All this time,” Gabriel said, “I thought you were such a coward for not going outside.”
“I am.”
He looked at the ground, as if there were answers there. “Once Zel told me that I had no idea about the damage that was going on. I guess I brought on that anger . . . passion . . . in you.”
Although I didn’t want him to suffer any blame, I was going to be genuine. “You had an effect. But, as I said, you also found a way to balance me.”
“Balance.” He didn’t seem to believe in it. “So when Chaplin forced you outside, to face that fear of yours . . .”
I nodded, knowing where he was going.
“He said that having me with you would do a world of good. That was because it was a test—having me near you when you were at your most vulnerable, outside where you wanted to run free.”
“He wanted to prove two points. That I needed to toughen up, and that I could be strong in your presence, too.” I glanced at the visz, where the others were most likely listening in. “They all have tried to teach me. Only I’m a hopeless student.”
“Don’t say that.” Gabriel seemed as if something inside him still wanted to protect me, even from myself. “Nobody’s beyond learning.”
Our shared gaze was so intense that the heat rose in me to an even higher degree. But as I’d done so many times before, I pressed it down, priming that spring inside me to let loose. I didn’t know another way of handling myself other than blocking the emotions. Shielding from the truths that could break me for good.
He continued. “There was also a time when Chaplin told me that, normally, he would’ve been the first to order me to get myself out of here, away from the community. He wasn’t talking about how he couldn’t overcome my sway to do what he wanted me to. He was saying that if he hadn’t had that grand plan to match me up with Stamp so my sacrifice would protect your true identities, he would’ve kicked me out because of how I affected you. Because of what damage I was doing.”
“I suppose it took the dog a little time to control the sway you had over him. So he was slow in recognizing your effect on me until I killed the man in the whale-hide hat. . . .”
Gabriel wandered toward the wall. “Maybe you’d better tell me all of it, Mariah. Every kill. I’m still trying to get it all straight in my mind. You’d think as a fellow preter, it’d be easier for me to acceeverything.”
Yeah, one would think that. But I didn’t say that maybe I was a worse kind of monster than he was.
“What happened with the first death?” he asked. I could only see his wounded profile. “I know it occurred just before I got here. Stamp’s men thrashed me, and then I came to your place.”
“Do you remember how the moon looked the night before?”
He hesitated, then nodded, shaking his head. “Full.”
“The last night of the full moon phase.” I felt as if I were sliding down a slippery slope, no way back up. “All of us were outside that night, running free. Before that, for almost a year, I’d been doing much better at controlling myself, so no one was worried very much about me. Not yet.”
Of course, the others had avoided me that night, as usual, because of
what I’d done to earn their worry. The terrible, terrible truth I’d also been lying to Gabriel about.
But I’d get to that soon enough.
“Stamp’s men had just started coming round,” I added, “harassing us via the visz lenses, so the thug who’d appeared on my screen was fresh on my mind. But all of us promised each other we’d leave them alone. I really did mean to do just that, and I even had the others bind me with cable and chain that night so I could prove my good intentions.” I exhaled. “I don’t clearly remember how it all happened, though—things are always a blur except for bits and pieces—yet I recall the fear that Stamp’s man would find my home. Then I remember breaking out of the bindings while the others gave in to their full moon changes. Then I was trying to catch that thug’s scent round my visz lens, tracking him, waiting near Stamp’s place to see if any of his crew would be out. And there he was. He’d wandered off with some drinking buddies, then branched off by himself. . . .”
Now that I was allowing myself to, I remembered the aftermath of blood, the taste of him in my mouth, the buzz of fulfillment. Regret.
“Afterward,” I said, a catch in my throat, “I came home, cleaned myself off, healed. There was so much blood—more than my usual meals produced. Then, even though I rarely even visited the common area, I found Zel and Sammy there, chatting after their own hunts. I told them what I’d done. They didn’t want me outside from that point on, so that only encouraged me to stay inside my home—I guess it even enabled me. But then you came, and what I felt for you only built on the fear I hadn’t quite let go of yet with Stamp moving in nearby.”
I lowered my voice so the others wouldn’t hear on the visz. Even now, he was stirring the appetite in me.
“You made me hunger in a way I’d never done before, and it got worse and worse until I couldn’t stand it.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.