by Angela Allen
Adina walked slowly through the crowded streets, the rushing of blood singing to her like the river of her home village hundreds of years ago. Occasionally when a man or woman glanced at her, blushed or took a deep breath as they passed by, their heartbeat quickened. They couldn’t always know why they reacted to her, unconnected to their animal spirits. Although their minds didn’t know they were prey, their bodies did.
Adina closed her eyes for a moment and continued walking. Even with no sight she could sense them like the warmth of bright lights. Easy to avoid, blood running in their bodies like electricity. She licked her lips, sucked in air for a deep breath—their scent spread on the Earth like an infection. Food, gasoline, cologne, garbage, leather, cotton and the rubber of their clothes and shoes were thick in the air. It was disgusting.
She fingered the gold figure on the chain around her neck, the symbol of Mercury, fire, like her, the great destroyer, cleanser of the Earth. The heels of her boots clicked against the concrete sidewalk, but underneath the Earth waited. She could feel it, her oldest companion, next to the Whisper in her dreams. She sighed. Whether they were a blessing or a curse didn’t matter. She could no more control the Whisper than she could the Earth or her blood hunger.
Adina felt someone watching from a distance, probably the creature from the alley. She had the same tingling in her neck and spine. It wasn’t a First, but there was something about how sensitized she felt to its presence that was similar to being in the vicinity of another First.
She stopped in front of a clothing store and looked at the people passing by reflected in the window. She saw nothing unusual about anyone. Whoever it was could be across the street or blocks away. How was she being blocked from targeting its position?
In the past she had been followed by a Remade, who had been studying her, hoping to find some way to live the extended, virtually immortal lives of a First, wanting desperately to link into the Whisper. Adina killed her when the Remade wouldn’t leave her territory.
This thing watching her now was different. There was impressive power in it. Nothing had challenged her in hundreds of years. This could be interesting.
Taking her time pretending to window-shop, Adina walked down Eighth Street toward the West Side. The side streets were quieter. People were home in the apartments over the closed shops, and all the sidewalk action was along the main avenues and streets, where the restaurants and clubs were located.
There was a deep growl from an alley between two buildings on a side street. Normal humans couldn’t hear the sound over the city noise, but it vibrated clearly in Adina’s ears. Curious, Adina turned into the small empty street and followed the growl down the alley. She crept up on a tall African American man with thick, long dreadlocks holding a knife to the throat of a short, older Hispanic man with his hands bound behind his back. The bound man’s sharp features were contorted in pain.
A quick rush of adrenaline made her tremble slightly, her reaction to being near a Remade. The older man was a vampire, his growl a call for help. His acrid scent permeated the alley with fear and disorder. This level of chaos usually came from a vampire who’s less than a year old and had had little guidance from his Maker. No wonder he had been captured.
“Tell me where, now,” the younger man said, letting the knife draw more blood. The dark blood of the Remade surged out of the neck wound like thick gravy, joining the puddle of blood on the ground. Judging from the thick consistency of his blood, Adina guessed he hadn’t fed in a while. The young man was bleeding out the vampire.
Adina frowned. The blood of Remade was bitter. She had tasted one once, before killing her.
The older man wavered and looked in her direction, his dark, deep-set eyes locking onto hers, pleading for help. The knife holder glanced quickly in the same direction but returned his attention to the vampire. Adina was in the shadows of a building and knew he couldn’t see her. This wasn’t the person who had been watching her earlier; he was a normal human being with no apparent special abilities other than being cunning enough to capture an incompetent Remade.
She shook her head and growled so low the human couldn’t hear her, but loud enough for the vampire to get the message. He slumped to his knees. It was clear he understood Adina wouldn’t help him.
Adina slipped away. Whatever the young man’s mission, let him kill the vampire. She didn’t want the competition in her territory anyway. Hopefully he wasn’t stupid enough to cross paths with her. But if he did, she’d consider adding him to the collection she kept in her basement. She smiled. Of all humans, vampire hunters were her favorite to play with.
Chun Zhang kept his distance, even though he suspected Adina sensed him watching. He wasn’t prepared to face her yet. Firsts were acutely aware of their surroundings. He needed to have a good sense of her movement around the city. Her feeding ritual was the same as the few other Firsts he had observed. He wanted to check out her house. This would be harder now that she knew he was trailing her, but not impossible.
When she ducked into the alleyway he considered following, but didn’t believe she was going to feed twice in one night. Even from two blocks away, he could feel she was sated. Instead, Chun maintained his distance, retained the hot tendril of psychic energy he picked up from Adina and made sure he didn’t project his exact location. Chun was very good at finding lost people, and even better at tracking Firsts once he had a taste of their energy. Usually he needed to be in physical contact with something of the person, but the psychic energy of Firsts when feeding was so strong he could shadow them without ever touching anything they owned.
He felt guilty, as always, at having seen her kill. That never changed. But he couldn’t have saved the young man. No point in thinking about that. He had to keep his mind on the mission: destroying her. This was a first-generation vampire, rare and powerful. He needed to capture the ritual words she gave her dying victims before finishing her. The more words he collected, the closer Chun got to being able to use that power against them and perhaps even become fully human again.
He fought the dread that crept into his gut when he thought of using the words. But the fourth Noble Truth of Buddhism gave him reason to hope: to end suffering he must change the way he thinks and perceives. He had to believe learning how to use these words would end much suffering. There was little else to hope.
He couldn’t get close enough to hear what she whispered tonight, even with his enhanced hearing, but Chun could tell it wasn’t English. Probably her native African language. Following her from a distance for a few weeks, he watched her shop for clothes and jewelry, uptown and down. She called herself Adina, which meant “She Has Saved” in Amharic. A fitting irony.
It made him sick to see men and women alike attracted to her, when at any moment they could become her next meal. Not that she wasn’t attractive, with her long, muscular limbs, wide hips and skin the color of coffee beans, her almond-shaped brown eyes and full mouth that were on the verge of smiling all the time. She walked with a roll of her hips that often drew attention. Like a ship cutting through ice floes, people noticed her when she passed. Although she could have been hundreds of years old, she looked barely twenty. After feeding, she shone with life, the life of her latest victim.
Whether he liked it or not, the cost of destroying a First was to watch a few fellow humans die. Nisi, his teacher and his love, had made that clear. She’d called a few days ago to say she would be in town this week. He needed to see her. Nisi made him feel human. Their love, even with the distance their work required, gave him reason to continue. Although he was stronger and faster than a normal human, Chun suspected he might need Nisi’s help with this First.
In the long run, destroying one First saved many humans and broke another link in the making of other vampires, since they were the only ones who could remake humans into vampires. This was what he had to keep in mind. Humans had a better chance of surviving the vampire plague if the First could be eradicated.
A shudder
went through him; a sharp pain throbbed in his forehead. One of his debilitating headaches erupted. Time to go home. Once the headache started, there was a good chance the rest of the seizure would come and he didn’t want to be on the street when that happened. He hailed a taxi.
Home was a small, two-story building tucked in the downtown meatpacking district. The building was perfect, with its old-fashioned coal furnace and thick brick walls. Blocks away from the residential area, it was full of activity during the day and deserted at night. The perfect place for him to live, far enough away from vampire hunting grounds, especially those of a cocky First. They rarely felt the need to hide in the dark corners where humans didn’t go. They enjoyed flaunting their virtual immortality, sometimes even becoming part of social circles that made them visible to anyone looking for them. Adina owned a small house off a private courtyard in an upscale part of the city. She practically glowed with overconfidence.
Chun stumbled into the kitchen through the side entrance of his house, locking the inner and outer doors. Ping, his dog, a large white-and-gray German shepherd–wolf mix, padded down the hall to meet him. Chun reset the perimeter alarms before going down the stairway in the kitchen, to the basement to collapse on a small bed. Ping whimpered, sensing the attack and nudged him gently with her nose.
“Good girl,” he slurred through the pain, patting her head.
Chun pulled open the drawer of the small table next to the bed and took a capsule out of a jar. He popped the pill into his mouth, took a gulp of water from a water bottle, shoved his plastic mouthpiece in and curled up on the bed. Ping lay down on the floor, next to the bed, waiting for the attack to end.
He wasn’t sure the ground herbs in the capsules helped, but Lucky Falcon, the Navajo doctor who’d given the pills to him, had promised they wouldn’t make him feel worse and they could assist the recovery process, so Chun promised to take them.
He couldn’t go to regular doctors and tell them that the blood of a vampire, mixed in with his own, periodically became dominant, and as this blood entered his brain Chun had seizures. On the other hand, it was also the same infection that gave him the abilities to be an efficient hunter of their kind. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
The storm exploded in his body. The seizures began as the vampire blood fought to take over his body. Kidneys, liver, heart, lungs, every major organ resisted the blood that now flowed through them. His mind floated into a dreamlike state, away from the gripping headache and spasms. His thoughts drifted from words to images and memories, swinging back and forth in time as the attack blossomed full force.
…Chun as a child, in China, riding high on his grandfather’s shoulders, his grandmother scolding them to be careful, looking up at clouds shaped like dinosaurs…
…In their first home in California, aluminum siding and clean cement sidewalks, a mountain of leaves in their backyard in the fall…
…Chun in college, his heart skipping a beat when he first saw Tina…sitting on the bed on their wedding night, the room filled with candlelight and the scent of fresh roses, Tina so beautiful he had tears in his eyes…walking on the beach with his wife at night…his mother cooking meat dumplings…blood…everywhere…blood…a man knocking him out with one hand while sucking the life out of his wife…someone singing “Happy Birthday” in a dark room…coming to lying next to his wife’s body, her blood soaking into his clothes, a pale man kneeling over Chun drawing on his chest with her blood…cutting into a rare steak, the blood seeping onto the plate in the shape of a leaf…the sharp pain of a bite through his skin, his scream…Tina throwing her wedding bouquet, the white roses arcing in the air…“She died too soon. You must listen, I have something to tell you,” the man said to Chun and then whispered in Chun’s ear in French, “Avec envie, légèrement”…blood…the vampire’s face covered in his wife’s blood, shuddering with pleasure as he caressed Chun’s neck, baring his teeth for the last bite…red, white and green balloons in a bright blue sky…a glint of metal, the vampire’s head falling from its body…his wife’s laughter…blood…a large brown-skinned woman standing over Chun with a sword…blood…
Ping licked his hand, recognizing the end of the attack. Chun slowly sat up and took a couple of sips from the water bottle. He knew better than to stand up immediately. It usually took him about twenty minutes to recover fully. He put his head down and breathed slowly, waiting for his body to readjust as the vampire blood became passive again.
Nisi was his savior. She had destroyed the First that had killed his wife and had almost killed him. Unfortunately, her blow had spilled the vampire’s blood into Chun’s open wounds, infecting him. It wasn’t her fault; she’d thought him dead. He would have died, but the First’s blood brought him back to life.
Nisi had easily carried him to her car that night, and to her home. She was strong enough to cut off the head of a vampire, and yet gentle with him. Realizing that regular doctors wouldn’t know how to treat his wounds, Nisi called a neighborhood doctor, Lucky Falcon, to guide him back to life. Falcon was a Navajo healer, well versed in the traditional and untraditional methods of curing people.
Within a few days Chun had miraculously recovered from most of the wounds. Nisi told him what she knew about vampires. Chun would have thought her mad if he hadn’t been through the hell of the past few days. He couldn’t deny the violent memory of the attack, or the way he had changed. Everything was different.
Lying in her bed, Chun knew where Nisi was in the house, and when she left. Wrapped in her sheets, he could feel her move through the city, as if a string were attached between them. The ability to sense these things was one of the many things that had changed since the vampire attack.
Nightmares filled his dreams when he slept, images of faceless, maimed bodies, their screams and moans often forcing him to wake in a sweat. Once awake, voices filled his head, as if the walls had disappeared and he was hearing conversations from the houses in the neighborhood. If he woke in the middle of the night, he could walk through the house in the dark and see everything clearly. One day he tripped on the way down the stairs and grabbed the wood railing, pulverizing the wood. There were times he had felt as if he was losing his mind; the experiences he had couldn’t be real.
Falcon stopped by almost every day, checking Chun’s wounds and talking to Nisi. Chun could hear them clearly, even when they were on another floor. When Nisi began telling him what she knew about vampires and hunting, he told her about the new sensations.
“I knew you were changed by the blood,” Nisi had said, as they sat on her couch. “No one heals as fast as you did, except—”
“One of them?” Chun said. “I’ve heard every word you and Falcon have said. I know you’re afraid I’ll change into one of them.”
Nisi caressed his arm. “In the beginning, but now we know you’re still human.”
“But I’m different.”
“Yes, stronger, your hearing, sight, all more like them, but no blood hunger.” Sunlight streamed from the window over them. “You can still walk in the daylight.”
“So far,” he said.
She shook her head. “I don’t think it’ll happen and Falcon agrees with me. He needs better equipment to test your blood, but he’s convinced the fact that the vampire was killed as the blood entered you prevented the complete transformation from happening. It may also be something special about your blood, he’s not sure. But he’s pretty certain you aren’t going to change into a Remade vampire.”
“If I do become one of them, you have to destroy me. I couldn’t stand living like the monster who killed my wife.”
Nisi nodded. They held each other. The scent of lavender water she wore surrounded him like a warm blanket.
The three of them spent the next few weeks discovering how the mix in his blood had altered Chun. He was stronger, faster and could heal more quickly than regular humans. All of his senses were heightened. If he was physically in contact with someone’s belongings, he could
track them.
“You’re almost a superman,” Nisi told him a couple of weeks later. They laughed together. It was not long after that Chun asked her to teach him about killing vampires.
When he told Falcon the words the vampire whispered, he had his first seizure.
He came out of it with Falcon and Nisi sitting by his bedside.
Falcon shook his head and said in Navajo, “Ant iihnii.” Witch people.
“The Firsts each have a spell that keeps them strong and young,” Falcon said. “Sounds have power. The power speaks to the blood, the blood to the body. This is how the Firsts live forever. You have that blood in you now. This curse saved you. Everything has light and dark to it. Perhaps you can use this to find the weakness to their strength, a way for us to destroy them.”
“Falcon, you know I don’t believe in the idea of magic words,” Nisi said, helping Chun drink water. “I believe in the sword that spills their blood. This whispering ritual is just something they do.”
“It doesn’t matter what you and I believe. There was a time when you didn’t believe in vampires. Chun’s new abilities may be the way to another weapon.”
He turned to Chun. “You know the truth in your blood, in the words you spoke, yes?”
Chun nodded slowly.
“But I’d like to learn the sword in the meantime,” Chun said, smiling at Nisi.
Nisi taught him how to handle a sword, and what she knew about first-generation vampires and the Remade. This woman from a farm in North Carolina didn’t look anything like the cliché of a vampire hunter from the movies. Just a little taller than he, she was stocky, wide with muscle, with strong, large hands gentle as butterfly wings over his body and capable of swinging a steel sword with the accuracy of a samurai. Her short brown dreadlocks made her look fierce as they practiced the fighting forms.
In those weeks of training she also healed his heart. Somehow, in facing the desperate future they would live as hunters, they found a place in each other’s souls. Her eyes reflected a deep loss. She hadn’t talked about it, and he didn’t need her to, unless it would ease her pain.