I had met with other vampires in the past, and debated the theories. One of them, Adam Pawloski, had said he was fine with the idea that his soul was gone forever.
“Why doesn’t that bother you?” I’d asked.
“Why?” He laughed as though it were a ridiculous question. “My friend, I am who I am. Maybe that’s based on someone else, but then, isn’t that like reincarnation? Did you know that the elves of Tír na nÓg have this religious belief that they are all reincarnated after every death, and therefore, truly immortal? Is their previous life invalidated because they have a new one now? Is the current one guilty of taking something from the old one? Doesn’t really change things for me, either way. Maybe I am who I was before, but I’m comfortable thinking I was born the night I was changed. I am who, and what, I am right now, no matter what I think about it.”
I didn’t think I could agree with him, though I knew it would be a comforting thought. Another vampire I ran with for a while, Tali, had gone the other route.
“Red, after getting infected, I spent ten years doing some serious soul-searching. That right there should tell you something. If it’s an infection smart enough to completely optimize you for the purposes of hunting, only keeping enough humanity to help you blend in, then it would discard those kinds of doubts and fears that get in the way. Ten years. That’s a long time, and I spent it coming to terms. That’s who I am, and who I was. I remember everything. I still make choices just like before. It’s just a change. You think orks and trolls didn’t ask all those questions when goblinization happened? I’ll bet they wondered if they were still who they were. But we know they’re still the same people. Same thing for the ghouls who keep all their marbles after changing. We’ve all got different needs, now, but the bottom line is that we’re still people.”
I liked her theory well enough, and it even made sense, but on some level, it still gnawed at the edges of my mind.
A knock sounded on the other side of my shower booth. “Clementine’s Nighttime Apparel!”
I cracked the door open and held out the credstick with a hundred nuyen on it. He slid a new pair of jeans, a burgundy tee, and a clean synth-suede jacket through. The deliveryman took the stick and looked at it. I could hear it being loaded into his commlink as I put the pressed laundry into a dry alcove.
“Nah, keep the change, man.”
“Hey, thanks, chummer! Mind if I ask what happened?”
“I was dating a werewolf and she shit on all my clothes before throwing me out.”
He laughed and wished me a good night.
Midnight came as the night crawled on. Still warm from the shower and enjoying the feeling of truly clean clothes that fit well, I was reluctant to surrender the feeling of normalcy by returning home just yet.
I was wondering what I should do with my newfound petty cash when my commlink signaled an incoming message. I flipped my display shades on and approved the transmission. Slim’s Matrix persona appeared before me, looking remarkably like he might have if he wasn’t a ghoul, but in noir black and white tones. Even the filter had bits of old-film scrambles to it. Pretty flash.
“Hey, Red, it’s me, Slim.”
“I see you. What’s up?”
“Needles wanted me to call you. Pretty left earlier to meet up with Edgar to fence some of the drek we can’t use from those Star slags. She was supposed to check in an hour ago, and she never misses those calls. Could you see if she’s okay while you’re out there?”
I sighed. I had a feeling Pretty was just being rebellious. “She probably just got distracted.”
“No, no. Pretty is really good about calling up. She knows Needles’ll get pissed if she doesn’t, and then she won’t get new clothes and drek. And, you know, she really is loyal.”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine. Where is she?”
In the parking garage underneath an apartment building on Halsted, I listened intently to the silence. I couldn’t hear anyone or anything but the slow drip of coolant from an old Yamaha Rapier that had seen better days. The three layers of garage seemed to go on and on, without a trace of life to them.
I finally noticed the faint scent of burnt rubber, and saw tire tracks from a parking space near a storage room door. I knelt down, slipping into the astral, fighting through the distant echoes of horror the city’s spirit has yet to forget, tasting the air for traces of recent strong emotions.
—Anticipation. Excitement. Fear.
Confusion. Pain.
Pain. Elation. Pain.
Urgency.—
I was confused by the combination, but it filled me with dread. I could feel the trail lead to the door from the spot where the van had been parked. I quietly ran to it, listening through it. Nothing. Even with elven ears and vampiric fine-tuning, it was too thick.
I steadied myself and yanked the door open. Blood. It’s always the first thing I notice.
The racks of cleaning supplies were knocked over, chemicals and buckets and the like strewn over the two figures within.
Edgar was slumped against the wall, his gray suit a mess from the bullet that had exploded through him, spraying the back wall with his innards.
Pretty lay beside him, her black blazer and skirt soaked with blood. On the floor, some of it was the blackish color of a ghoul’s, mingling with Edgar’s. I might have thought she was dead, but I could see the faint traces of life in the astral, hear the tiny, shallow breaths she unconsciously sipped. She was out cold, but alive.
I ran to her, ripping her blazer open. I didn’t register the blood, or the smooth perfection of her soft skin. All I saw was the ragged bullet wound in her chest, the darkness of outer burn marks. It was just above her right breast, hopefully not piercing the lung. I didn’t know enough about medicine to tell.
She stopped breathing.
I figured she was in shock, and shouted her name, slapping her lightly across the face. If I couldn’t wake her up, it was hopeless.
“Pretty. Pretty! Don’t do this… don’t do this, Pretty! Pretty!”
I looked about, found a faucet for filling buckets and cupped my hands to splash her face. I laid her on her back and began pushing on her chest with the most basic understanding of CPR, counting as I did it to keep my cool. I held her nose and breathed for her. A coughing gasp after a moment of this brought her around, moaning in pain. I held her face close to mine.
“Pretty… Pretty, look at me…”
Her eyes looked into mine as I softly chanted the words to Influence her. “Stay calm and relax. Do not worry, I will help you. Just trust me and let me help you.”
The moaning stopped and she calmed, her eyes gaining their shy, fearful look again. I was confused for a moment before I realized this was her relaxed expression. She was totally at ease. She was herself.
I dragged my gaze away from her wide, vulnerable stare and concentrated my will, fighting the chaos of the astral and drawing forth the energy, giving it the shape of a healing spell. The soft turquoise glow was like a balm on my hands, and I spread it on her wounds, gently pushing it into the bullet holes. I can never quite see into the area being healed, so I don’t know if it kickstarted her regenerative system, or simply replaced flesh that had been lost, but it worked. The small slug was pushed out, landing with a tink on the concrete floor. Her breathing became stronger even as she stared at me, and the bleeding from the remainder of the wound, nothing but a bloody gash now, oozed slowly, controllably. I tore a sleeve from her blazer and used it for an amateur bandage. It would have to be enough until we got back.
Picking her up, I took her out of the closet. Setting her down gently outside the door, I went back in and used the rags and cleaning materials to clean any trace of her or me from the spot. No fingerprints, and the spilled blood was doused liberally with sterilizing solutions to corrupt them. I dumped out almost every labeled bottle in the room, heedless of toxic fumes. When I was sure the metroplex guard would only find Edgar’s dead body and a great, big stew of cleaning supplies,
I picked up Pretty and carried her out of the garage.
She moaned softly whenever I jostled her, keeping a brisk step and trying to look as casual as one can while carrying a wounded, semi-conscious woman. I had put my jacket around her shoulders to conceal any bloodstains, and whispered soothing words whenever she winced from the pain. “We’re almost there,” I told her, “we’ll be home soon.”
I got her as far as the derelict control room before I could go no further. Despite my healing, I was still out of shape, and puffing from both that exertion and my earlier violence when I set her down. The decades-unused, padded couch in the room was covered in dust, but I didn’t have the patience to clean it before I laid her out on it. I locked the door and braced a chair against it. Somehow I got the feeling that leaving Pretty here as I went back for help would be a bad idea, but I didn’t see how I could get around it. If only I still had—
I smiled and started to call her name before I hesitated. It was still a good plan, but I didn’t like the kink of Menerytheira’s jealousy toward Pretty. I remembered the old tales of genies who granted wishes too literally when they were displeased with their master. And really, I was no longer her master. She had no obligation to me. I’d just have to hope I still had enough influence to get the job done.
I spoke her true name and felt a tickle at a corner of my mind. It was her way of responding positively to my summons. In an instant she had flowed from under the door’s cracks, starting with a smile like a Cheshire Cat and filling out from there. She started to speak before she noticed Pretty lying on the couch, and those fluid eyes narrowed.
“What is she doing here?”
“She needs help. I don’t think I can leave her here alone.”
“Why not?”
“She’s hurt!”
“She got here okay.”
I rolled my eyes and tried to keep my patience. It never fails to amaze how a being of seemingly infinite insight can be so childish, sometimes.
“I had to carry her here. It exhausted me. Now, I can carry her the rest of the way and cause myself a great deal of undue pain, or you can help me out and go and get some help to carry her.”
“Why should I?”
I drew her gaze and held it for a moment. “Because I’m asking you to help me.”
It was like something in her was melting, but she still looked angry. Then again, it might have been tears, but she flew through the wall and was gone. I only hoped it was for help.
After a half-hour, I was worried that she hadn’t delivered the message. My Influence was still planted in Pretty, as she kept staring at me, quiet, peaceful. She looked like a deer near a trusted human, a creature normally ready to bolt at the slightest movement, but still and calm for certain exceptional individuals. I felt guilty that this particular suggestion was something that could have far-reaching effects. That’s the risk of a Suggestion: for short-term goals, they wear off after the compulsion is accomplished. For long-term ones…the effects might be permanent. Oh, I could reverse them with a counter-Suggestion, but I was exhausted from the night (Was it only two in the morning?), and didn’t have the focus necessary to whip up another mind-bender.
I was about to get up from the rickety plastic chair and start off to the warren myself when I heard a rustling in the ducts. I pulled one of the pistols, the Fichetti, and aimed it toward the duct as I assensed for any bug spirits.
It was a welcome surprise when Needles climbed out and headed to Pretty with a medkit. I lowered the pistol and made way for the other two ghouls who had come with Needles. He turned his gaze to me, smiling.
“Good job, Red. Looks like you did all right with her wounds, too. A little food, medicine, and time, and this won’t even scar.”
He seemed to look closer at me, and his smile faded a bit. I wanted to ask what was wrong, but he motioned for his men to take Pretty back to the warren. He regarded me for a moment as I put the pistol back in my jeans. “Dined out tonight?”
My brow furrowed, and I wondered how he had known. “You’re blushing, Red. You can’t do that on bug blood.”
I closed my eyes and slumped into the desk chair with a sigh. He walked over, looking down at me.
“Wanna tell me what happened?”
“With Pretty or with my fight?”
“Both.”
So I laid out my whole evening. The meet, the mugging, my temporary loss of sanity, and finding Pretty in the closet with the dead Mr. Edgar.
“Edgar’s dead, huh? Probably someone wanted what we were fencing. I imagine he was cleaned out?”
“His pockets were torn open. There wasn’t anything left to find. I’ll bet Pretty might have gotten a look at their license plate before they got out of there, but unless she has a photographic memory, I’m not holding my breath.”
“Close, actually. She’s got cameras in her cybereyes. It’s where Slim gets the graphics for people she meets for those files of his. If she saw it, we can retrieve it.”
“Well, that’s something, isn’t it?” I rose from the chair, pulling out the pistols and other gear I’d taken. “Here. You can use these more than I can.”
Needles eyed the bags of novacoke with disdain, but pocketed them all the same. In the warrens, you used everything of value, and threw nothing away. He rose up from his haunches and eyed me.
“So, how’d it feel?”
I paused, unable to look at him. All my high ideals and righteous speak about sparing people, and look what I’d done. I was nothing but a hypocrite. Worse, I was nothing but a host.
“…Ask me after I try to sleep, today.”
Turn after turn down the repurposed CTA tunnels, I found a stretch that was unoccupied. Alone, finally, I slumped against the wall and hugged my legs to my chest. Still feeling short of breath, I breathed slowly in and out. I didn’t want to meditate. I didn’t want to have to work for peace of mind. I didn’t want to have to shut my eyes for it, but the dark didn’t mean anything to me any more. I only wanted peace, with the same ease as anyone. Unfocused, my eyes stared at nothing, the pulse of blood and the echo of a soul not mine striking lightning in my eyes.
This feels good.
I squeezed them shut.
This feels natural.
Bit my lip.
This feels right.
The taste of my own stolen blood on my tongue only made me want more. Even now.
Even with a whole life in me, I still wanted more. And deeper, the implacable, unquenchable lust. Feeding was good and right and proper and what I had to do, and it felt more than right. It felt like vindication, or reason. It felt like the whole purpose of existing. And yet, the possibility of propagating, of infecting someone, drinking them in until nothing was left but the tatters of their soul for the virus to overtake, assimilate, rebuild, and reanimate into a perfect predator, it stirred me. Visions of a pack at my command, of companionship, sharing the kill and reveling in the hunt.
The ghouls were kindred spirits, but they didn’t know how far a vampire’s thirst reached. They absorbed some trace elements of metahuman spirit when they consumed their flesh, but they could find what they needed in morgues and chopshops. Surgery happens every day. People die every day. There would never, ever be a shortage.
Sharpening knives in charnel houses. Lesser beings. They don’t know this pleasure. They don’t know this pleasure.
They knew hunger, but they didn’t know thirst. They didn’t know what it felt like to take something irreplaceable, satisfy the debt inside that is the only real barrier to immortality, like filling an hourglass with more sand. Every turn of the moon, every shift of the blood, you could feel the difference, the move away from eternity. And somehow, infection made whatever an afterlife must be feel like a very cold, very dark proposition. There is so much more to lose when death is not an inevitability. Living forever, constantly dying...
There is only life. And there is only the taking of it.
And for all the power the virus offered, all the promise
of eternity, it was...fear.
I unclenched my jaw. Felt the wound heal almost instantly as my fangs retracted, leaving only the memory of a sharp, coppery taste as any proof.
For a mage of my tradition, fear is the last sensation before oblivion. And the last thing I would ever be is a slave. Not to fear, not to hunger, and not to the parasite in what little was left of me.
Chapter 8
Wine, Music, and Wonderful Roses
The next few days passed quietly. I kept my face out of things as much as I could, meditating and taking long walks by the waterfront. The nigh-ancient ruins of Navy Pier were aglow with stolen electricity, the old pumps of the Union purifying water for the people of the Corridor under the watchful eyes of well-armed guards. I stalked about its edge, using an old pair of binoculars to spy on the gang that had taken it over. I wondered if it was a temporary arrangement: as soon as Lone Star felt they were too much of a hassle, would they send some boats over to clean house? Hell, I thought, if they fixed it, it’d make a great staging point for them. By tomorrow, another attempt at a public contract might take root there, or it might be shelled by a rival gang, or the bugs might start a hive there. The map of uncontrolled Chicago territory changed on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis.
I learned I could still astrally project, but it was harder than before. Maybe it was from so much time spent locked in my flesh beneath the river, or just the corrupted influence of the astral in Chicago’s city core. Without any resources beyond the Matrix (and research into circumstances as unlikely as mine was next to impossible, even when the spotty connections were strong enough for a search), I could only wonder if I was permanently damaged in the astral. All that time beneath the water had eroded my body and my magic, and there was no telling if I would be able to get it back to where it had been more than a decade ago. I toyed with those spells I still remembered clearly, stretching my abilities in the hostile energy of the city. There were times I could almost feel the fingers of ghosts clawing desperately at the weave of spells, maddened forever and crying out for help or in blind pain. The Shattergraves were my crucible once again, and time had only made them all the more dangerous. I cast my telekinetic nets and manabolts and felt my tenuous link to the other planes grow, feeling something familiar and yet different, learning to walk the path of magic all over again.
Shadowrun: Crimson Page 11