Bite Me: A Vampire Anthology

by Cain, Addison

  Well. She could try to talk to her gate partner. But Leonide Croix already sounded like a bundle of nerves. November was in no mood to butter on reassurances just to get some small talk out of the man. And she didn’t want to hover over the control panel.

  As usual, she took a middle ground between laxity and rigid alertness, only using the available stool and kiosk to one side of the corridor gate to sit for about half the time, while reading through some more of Bardot’s A History of Municipal Electricity on the HUD projection from her ID bracelet. Her ‘community service’ as a guard would be over in three more years; there was no sense in drifting out of touch with her actual profession, to which she intended to return. If anyone would hire her.

  Somewhere deep in a dry examination of the Grid Revolt of the early twenty-third century, November heard a soft click. Her eyes left the text hovering above her wrist and swept the corridor down to where it intersected with the first cross-passage. There were low rumbles off to the left. Voices. Cargo vehicles made way more noise than that.

  She flipped off the HUD and stepped in front of the gate.

  Four stepped around the corner, two women and two men, clothing motley, neither GateSec uniforms nor drivers. Conspicuous red splotched the approaching group in the form of coats, shoes, or garishly-dyed hair.

  Goodnighters.

  Fuck’s sake.

  The ragtag bunch of conspiracy nuts trooped closer, and November brought her weapon around from its shoulder strap to lay in her hands. It would be enough to look threatening. These loonies were irritating, but about as much of a threat as a rubber switchblade.

  “Uh oh!” One of the men crowed as the Goodnighters came forward. A skinny punk with a red fauxhawk. “Did HateSec leave their little traitor gate pig all alone?”

  November rolled her eyes but gripped the UV-80. Quietly thumbed the safety pad off. “Go find someone else to annoy, asshole,” she said, letting her voice carry. “You have no reason to be in this corridor. My boss won’t even write me up if I decide to boil the skin off your faces.” She let them hear the beam weapon prime and switched it to ray cone instead of bolt. They’d all dance for her, if they got stupid.

  One of the women, extremely pale in a long red coat, bared fangs, closing the distance. “All you HateSec cunts are in on it!” The vamp had something in or around her fist. Like brass knuckles, or a cat’s claw. “You and the fucking Athanati. Just taking their money. Looking the other way.”

  The Athanati. Next they’d be on to lizard people. Quantum alchemy.

  November stopped playing and pointed the weapon.

  “I said ‘fuck off.’ Any closer and everyone gets a sunburn.”

  She’d only had to do this once, and it had been disgusting. There had been a smell.

  All four were grinning now, fangs out as though she were some quivering neg cornered in an alley. The second man cracked his knuckles from within fingerless gloves in a comical display of thuggery. They came on, and November tightened her jaw.

  Fine. Fuck ‘em.

  She pulled the trigger.

  Flame-blue pinpricks of laser UV spangled the ‘nighters from hair to waist, and the gate guard braced for the screams when the light hit vampire faces.

  Fauxhawk laughed.

  The shit is this?

  November juiced the trigger, as though it mattered. Nothing was happening. No burns. No reaction. They kept coming.

  The silent woman chucked something palm-sized and metallic at the floor. It spun. Little feet tinked out to make it stop at an angle.

  No!

  She lunged forward to boot it, but not soon enough. A fan of fluid sprayed up out from the tiny cylinder, splattering her hands, Her face.

  Fire.

  November shouted.

  My eyes!

  Her burning hands flew to scrub at her face, instinct overriding a clear mistake. Vision blurred. Her corneas screamed. Then a boot crunched into her knee.

  UV inexplicably useless, she lashed out with the gun to bludgeon against a sea of red and gray and jeers. Something blunt landed on the back of her neck and her center of gravity lurched.

  November fell, skin sizzling. It was in her mouth, that metallic taste of cooking meat she’d only known once before. Enflaming. Eroding. Liquid sunshine—but she was the traitor? Where had these nutjobs even come by the stuff?

  A new blow punched into her gut. Another to a kidney while November curled on her side, rasping breath against the gold solution coating her face, sinking into her tongue, her gums. Primal drives made her protect vital organs, even when logic told her vampire genes would heal.

  A wild stab of pain sheared between her shoulder and spine, and November shrieked, only to inhale more sunshine and knot up into a choking ball. The cat claw had torn into muscle, and not in a tidy fashion.

  She choked on the floor outside Gate 0433, blind and writhing under blows. The ‘nighters poured venom into her ears, which still worked all too well.

  “Traitor!”

  “Your own kind!”

  “Fucking keep us down here!”

  “We know the truth!”

  The claw hit her again, raking the side of her thigh. November could only croak.

  Fifty-one was young for a vampire. These idiots were going to kill her. She’d suffocate from the gold allergy out here in the far branches of U-Seattle while these four beat her to jelly. She hadn’t even finished her time. Hadn’t been to see her mother.

  A heavy metallic thud vibrated the floor. November sputtered, limp, waiting for the end of it.

  Hydraulics lumped in the wall. Metal slid on metal.

  “Kitamura! Stay down!” Her gate partner’s voice boomed through the static of blood in her ears, in person and not through a mic. She wanted to shout at him that UV weapons wouldn’t work, but garbled tones were all the wreck of her throat could produce.

  Then something clacked above her, a quick, flat staccato. There was a shriek, and not from Croix.

  They don’t need UV on the surface.

  And a gross amount of voltage, it turned out, would light up anyone.

  “Fuck outta here!”

  Croix roared. Boots danced around her, but the blows had stopped.

  “Wanna be breakfast, neg?” A taunt from one of the vamps.

  Another electric sizzle, another scream. Croix unloaded conductive rounds, one after another, all business. November tried to push herself up on her palms, but the skin felt like it would slough from her bones. Something thumped the wall overhead and the gate alarm began to shrill.

  Fingers yanked the back of her vest. She went with the tug like a doll, limp and drowning in sunshine while her vision ebbed from blurry to black in wild throbs with the beat of her heart.

  “Go! Go!” One of the women was shouting. “Leave him! The alarm!”

  Boots chirped quick on glossy concrete, receding. Her gate partner was dragging her backwards, limbs slack from her body, everything searing, wailing.

  “Come on, Kitamura.” Her head lolled, hearing fuzzing out. She couldn’t breathe. “Hang on, I got you!”

  This was no way to fucking die.

  Chapter 2

  When her eyes came open, November gave up a bleat of pain. Consciousness seared her back to the light, and rough hands were hauling her upright on a padded surface. Her vision still blurred. She wanted to claw at her face.

  “Come on. Keep ‘em open.” Male hands batted her arms away, tilted her head straight up. Fingers pried an eyelid wide. “We gotta flush that sunshine.”

  Water came trickling down the bridge of her nose, and November’s spine jerked when it coated her naked eyeball. She tried to swear and got half a sopping washrag in her mouth before the memory of the attack snapped back into place.

  Goodnighters. Liquid sunshine.

  “Croix?”

  His name came out more of a hack than a word, but the gate guard palmed the top of her skull. “Hold still.”

  He peeled back her other eyelid an
d November heard the juicy squeeze of cloth. Another rivulet came and she tried to let it, small muscles twitching to blink the whole time. Muddy shapes of light and dark moved overhead.

  “Alright.” Her gate partner let go her face. Stuffed the rag into her right hand. “Here.”

  Bootsteps retreated and the vampire dabbed at her eyes with shaky hands. Wrung more water over the sting so each movement of her eyelids didn’t feel like they were lined with powdered glass.

  “Where”—she coughed, and her throat burned—“where are we?”

  She was sitting upright now on what felt like either a sofa or large chair in a dim space, though a light was on several meters to her left. More water, more dabbing.

  “My apartment.”

  His what?

  The sound of boots returned and something hollow and plastic thunked between her knees. “Can you make yourself vomit?”

  “What?” November blinked at the blurry guard.

  “I have no idea how much gold is in your system,” he said. “You need to do it.”

  She sat there just breathing. Tear ducts welling like mad. Her throat was raw, and she hated everything.

  “Come on.” He gave the hollow thing a tap with his boot. A trash bin, probably. She didn’t want him to be right, but those fucking whackjobs …

  November dropped the rag at her side and leaned forward, elbows on knees. She stuffed a pair of fingers into her mouth, deep, to that place she couldn’t tolerate. Heaved.

  She tried not to howl as her stomach came up. Liquid sunshine—gold dissolved in a saline solution—scalded at the back of her throat, in her already-seared nasal passages. Tears streamed from her ducts now, flushing her eyes with hot salt instead of cool water. Fluids splattered the bottom of the trash can.

  November folded over herself, lungs trying to go inside out, gut twitching. She sat there, trying to be still. Trying for everything to quit feeling like she’d spent the last two days inside a sandblast booth.

  “You done?”

  She gave him a weak bob of her head.

  “Here. Have some water.”

  He’d be holding out a container. She blinked and her vision cleared just enough to look up and find a cloudy hand hovering. Croix let her fumble to find the glass.

  Cold liquid poured into her mouth. Swirled under her tongue and down her throat, purifying angry tissue. She swished and spit. Drank more and swallowed. It wasn’t blood, but it was something. Something that wasn’t goddamn gold.

  November hunched there on the sofa, or whatever it was, more wrung out than the rag he’d handed over. The pain and urgency had simmered after the water. Even her hands and face didn’t sting as much—had he wiped down her skin before she’d come to?

  In his apartment.

  Her head snapped up, the space around her sharpening with every blink as her body tried to heal.

  “Wait,” she said, “are we on the fucking surface?”

  “I’m sorry.” Take-charge Croix was gone. This one was all nerves again, standing a few paces away, making a helpless gesture with his hands. “I had to get you out of there. Away from all those—fuck, who were those people?”

  “They were Goodnighters,” she said, shoving the foul bin away from between her knees with a foot. “And you should’ve just left me. The fuck am I gonna do up here?” November gave a questioning flip of her wrist, only to note for the first time her bare arms. She was out of her vest and uniform shirt, down to only the tank she wore beneath. There was a blood-soaked rent in the fabric where that cunt had gotten her with the claw.

  “They were going to kill you,” he said, growing some spine again, taking a step closer.

  November downed another swig of the water. It tasted too sweet after forcing up all that shit from her stomach, but the worst of the sunshine’s effects were fading. “You have to take me back.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “That’s the problem. By now, GateSec knows you’re missing. If they figure out I smuggled a vamp to the surface? Fuckin’ criminal charges. Prison time, probably.”

  She laced her fingers together, elbows on her knees, and cocked her head at the man. “You didn’t really think this one out, did you, Croix?”

  “Just ‘Leo,’ ” he said. “And there wasn’t exactly time for me to sit down and run this thing past a committee. I was too busy saving your ass.”

  Well, well.

  The gate guard had a pair in front of her, after all. A compact living area was coming into focus, one blink at a time. It was dark where she sat, but light from a tiny adjacent kitchen painted the side of the neg’s face.

  “Well, ‘Leo the Hero,’ ” she said, “it was still a dumbass move.”

  He folded his arms over his chest. His uniform shirt was intact, if unbuttoned. Blood speckled his undershirt. Hers, no doubt. “A simple ‘thanks’ would suffice. Vampire Who is Still Alive Right Now.”

  Cheeky.

  “You can’t keep me in your apartment like a pet,” she said. “On the goddamn surface.” Shit, out of the frying pan, into the fire. Might as well turn her UV-80 on herself. The thought made her squint around for windows in the room, but she couldn’t find any. Maybe it was a basement apartment, but still.

  “I’m well aware of that.” He hooked a foot under a chair and drew it out from the small kitchen table behind him. Turned the thing backwards and sat, spraddled, arms folding across the back of the chair. Not an ugly picture at all. If November didn’t want to beat his ass, she’d probably have any number of workplace-inappropriate comments ready.

  “Well, you need to figure this shit out, Leo. I can’t stay up here.”

  “I will,” he said. “But first I need to figure out how I’m gonna explain why I set my gate to auto-lockdown at the same time an alarm went off underground, and now my partner’s missing. Better hope no one at the main office is paying attention too close, because they’re never gonna believe I left for two hours to take a piss.” He held eye contact now, and November gave him a sliver of credit. This was a legitimate first fire to put out. Not that she absolved him from setting it in the first place.

  “Do you want anything?” he asked after the silence spread.

  She exhaled. Her ribs hurt and November took another look at her side. Blood everywhere. Sticky. She made a face. “You got a shower?”

  “Right through there.” Leo pointed over her shoulder, and she twisted her neck to see an even darker rectangle in the space—an open door.

  “Okay.” She sighed. Pushed herself to her feet and then took a moment, swaying in place, deciding whether her bruised limbs had strength. When everything steadied out, November made a small ‘stay put’ gesture with splayed palms, as though that would be what kept her standing, and moved around the furniture toward the bathroom door.

  She got there and fumbled for a light panel. Found one. The mirrored wall behind the sink told her no lies. November’s face looked like she’d plowed head-first along a hallway of industrial carpet. Her tank top and pants like she’d fought a roll of concertina wire and lost.

  “You care about this towel in here?”

  “I don’t care about towels,” came his voice from the other room, sounding tired. “Use whatever you need.”

  November did just that. She shut the door and shucked off the rest of her ruined uniform. Figured out the spray system in his tub-shower and stepped inside, pulling the rediglass closed behind her.

  Lukewarm water was enough—her still-tender skin wasn’t ready for the kind of scalding heat she normally liked. She stuck her head under the spray and tried to melt past the tension in her limbs. Watery red streamers spiraled down to the drain.

  The surface. When was the last time anyone V-positive had tried to stay up here? The early twenty-second century? The UV was out of control. Even at night. The fuck had this kid been thinking, bringing her up here?

  He’s twenty-seven. Hardly a kid.

  But compared to her …

  The sting at her ribs and thi
gh was not going away, and the vampire brought her attention back to eyeball what was left of the wounds. She made a face and nudged at the ragged laceration on her side with careful fingertips. It wasn’t actively bleeding now, but neither had the flesh knit closed, like it should’ve. She’d coughed up all the gold—what was the problem?

  As if in response, her stomach made a noise.

  Your broke ass hasn’t had anything to eat in a week.

  And by ‘anything to eat,’ she meant blood. Regular food was all well and good for a while. But just like the ancient sailors coming down with scurvy until they figured out it was a good idea to keep a fucking lemon or two on board, if anyone V-positive went without refreshing their bloodstream for too long … well, it wasn’t pretty.

  She already wasn’t healing properly.

  Goddamn this idiot.

  November gave a low growl and finished scrubbing crusted blood from her skin, avoiding the two open wounds. She cut the spray off and stepped out into the humid little room. Swiped the hanging towel and patted rather than wiped herself dry. No sense in agitating things.

  Her clothes were on the floor in a bloody heap, and November curled a lip. Nope. This neg was gonna lend her a shirt or something. She wrapped the towel under her armpits, instead.

  “Hey,” she said, stepping out into the cooler living area, “you have got to take me back.”

  Leo was in the kitchen now, and he turned at the sound of her voice. His mouth came open and stayed that way a full beat before words came out, while hazel eyes took in legs and female shoulders and wet hair. “We just went over this,” he said after he got done realizing she was a woman. “You know I can’t do that right this instant.”

  “I need to eat.” She held his eyes, pointed.

  “I’m making us food right now,” he said, gesturing behind him at some package on the counter.

  “No,” she said, “my wounds aren’t healing. I need to eat.”

  His brows went up as her meaning took hold, but then shoulders sagged in defeat. The gate guard sighed. “Still,” he said, “I can’t take you. What do you want me to do?”

  “Go fetch me bloodmeal, then.” November crossed her arms over her chest and looked him up and down, weight on one leg. From the looks of his apartment, GateSec didn’t pay any better on the surface than it did underground, but the powdered concentrate was as cheap as it was going to get. She knew; it was what she bought every payday.