He blinked at me. “I want to believe you, Blossom. I thought I loved you once.”
“You loved me once. There is no way I should be able to disarm you, unless you wanted me to,” I said, confidently.
He blinked again. He sighed. “I can’t promise anything. You don’t know what I’ve done, the things I’ve said and contrived and—”
“You don’t have to promise,” I said. “You just have to try. It’s all humans do. All the rest is left for a greater power.”
On the way out of the infirmary and just in case, I stopped before the statue of St. Lucia in its niche in the hallway. She smiled serenely, the veil covering her head and caught in her hands, wide open. There was a crown of stars on her head, made of something that sparkled in the darkness. And the inside of her mantle was deep blue spangled with white stars.
I looked up at her face, sculpted from holos taken while she was alive. Such regular features, so perfect. In someone living, I’d know that face belonged to an artifact. But it couldn’t be. In her day, centuries ago, artifacts would never be allowed even the benefit of the doubt.
And yet, I had a feeling she understood as I whispered a prayer that Joe’s heart and soul might be healed, as well as his body. I’d come home and found my family. My love for him was now more memory and a warm sense of solidarity. But I wanted him to find what I had found. I wanted him to discover his mission in life and to be happy.
I had the impression the saint smiled at my back as I turned and went to serve breakfast to our charity cases. There would be cakes and cinnamon toast because it was Christmas. I couldn’t wait to see how the crèche children reacted to the treats.
Blood Ransom
They stood at my door, in the last light of the dying day, side by side, looking like they would like to be invited in, but I wasn’t that stupid. One of them was taller than the other by a good two inches, but other than that, they might have been twins: identical dark hair — cut very short — identical broad shoulders and a suggestion of muscles beneath the identical black suits, identical mirrored sun glasses.
They also both smelled like Immortals: the suggestion of corruption beneath a floral scent and what – even if one knew they’d never been near a funeral parlor – one couldn’t help thinking of as embalmer’s fluid.
I saw myself in their sunglasses: a faded middle-aged woman with indifferently brown hair, indifferently brown eyes and a multitude of freckles, wearing my gardening jeans and t-shirt. I wiped dirt from my hands to the legs of the jeans and said, “How may I help you, gentlemen?”
It took them a moment to respond. Perhaps they’d gotten used to deference in that new world I’d left behind as surely as if I’d been a nun.
“Ms. Bretenes?” the tall one asked.
“Yes.” Surely it couldn’t be that hard to find me. There wasn’t a farm or even another house for two miles around. And suddenly that thought turned around on me. There were two immortals at my door, and there wasn’t a farm or a house for miles around. No human who would come to my aid.
My hands felt clammy with sweat and the pulse on the side of my neck beat frantically. All of which was stupid of me. After all, the immortals were now civilized, part of the established order. They would no more want more humans turned than any rational being wants his food supply diminished or turned into competitors. It hadn’t been just political correctness renaming them from vampires to immortals. They had become citizens and been, in a way, defanged.
“We...” The short one said and hesitated. “That is, may we come in?”
“No.”
They inclined their heads in unison. When the tall one looked up, he said, “We have come to ask your help.”
“My help?” I echoed, sounding half witted, which was a compromise. I held back the words Do you know who I am and how many of you I killed? Which would have made me sound either arrogant or threatening. Besides, in my early forties, I was a middle aged woman who planted a garden and raised chickens, not the sniper who’d made her name in the definitely uncivil war between vampires and humans.
“You... We have a situation we can’t handle,” the short one said.
I didn’t answer because answering would mean releasing the bubble of bitter laugh trapped at the back of my throat together with an offer to put them all beyond mortal cares.
And then the tall one said the only words that would cause me to react in any way, other than trying to get them out of my doorstep as soon as possible. He said the name I’d never again expected to hear. “Captain Heron says you are the woman for the job.”
My breath caught in my throat and made a sort of loop-de-loop, robbing me of the capacity for speech, which was just as well because I had nothing to say. When I’d last seen Joseph Heron, he’d been not a Captain but a lieutenant, the leader of the Black Sheep, a man that the army both needed and refused to acknowledge, the man writing the book on urban warfare and with his fifty subordinates doing more than the people who, with their divisions, tanks, bombers, didn’t seem to manage more than turning good cities into radioactive waste lands where the only things surviving were vampires, cockroaches and rats.
When I’d last seen Joseph Heron, he’d been human.
The shorter vampire – I mean, immortal – pulled is sunglasses off and looked at me with eyes that seemed human and concerned. “It’s his brother.”
***
There are some impulses it is better not to examine, some reactions I’d prefer not to analyze. As I filled the dispenser food dish for the two cats – Dawn and Sunset – fed the chickens and set up the feeder to dispense more food to them for the next three days, should I be gone that long, and gave my garden a last spray of the hose, hoping my absence wouldn’t do too much damage, I told myself this was crazy.
And it was.
I was no longer a wide-eyed seventeen year old, recruited fresh from the Colorado farm, impressed by the suntanned man of the world who knew all about rifles and what scope to use to pick out what vampire when he first rose from his day sleep and emerged from a building two miles away.
My military service hadn’t, at all, turned out as I expected. My older brothers had been recruited and gone off to serve in other countries, where vampire armies attacked the sleepers at night and turned them, and where the US army stood as it had so often between tugs and their victims.
But I, after some very basic psychological tests and some more basic training, had been sent off to Lieutenant Heron’s black sheep, and told I could dispense with uniform and with military life altogether save for this: my loyalty would be absolute to my superior and my fellow black sheep. We would live together – or at least in various small groups – we would obey the lieutenant. And we would hunt together every night.
But that, I thought as I locked my door and carefully hung the cross over the threshold, had been when Joseph Heron was human.
I changed my clothes into the black pants and black turtleneck I’d mostly worn – at least in Fall – in my hunting days. The black turtleneck was snug around my mid riff. Either gardening didn’t have the kind of trimming power of military exercises or middle age was unbeatable. I threw a hodgepodge of black pants, turtlenecks and t-shirts into an overnight sack and then my toothpaste tube and my toothbrush and then as an afterthought the weaponry, some of which went in holsters and holders hidden on various parts of my body.
Outside my visitors waited in the now purple shadows of growing night, side by side. If this had been another time, I’d have been either a snack or already turned. Instead, they waited. Their car, sleek and black had been parked on the gravel beside my driveway, next to the fake wishing well and the amusing little gnomes left behind by the previous owner.
The thought of spending the drive back to Denver behind them, smelling them, feeling their glamour, was more than I could bear. “I’ll take my car,” I said. “I’ll follow you.”
Tall one looked hesitant. He cleared his throat. “It’s just...”
“We
’re heading into a situation,” short one said.
Weren’t we always? “I’ll take my car,” I said. “I’ll follow you.”
“But we need to brief you on the situation,” Tall protested.
Short elbowed him in the midriff, making them look, momentarily, like school kids. “We can call her,” he said. “On her cell.”
It seemed his desire to be stuck in a car with me all the way to Denver just about matched mine.
***
Rain in Colorado is like hurricanes in some other states. You know it will come sometime, but it is infrequent enough to never be planned or accounted for. An example of such lack of planning was this gravel road between the outlying farms and the highway access. It was not just gravel, but just about wide enough for two cars to pass by each other, if both cars had a button that squeezed in their sides.
One edge of the road climbed up a craggy cliff with a sign saying “beware rock slides” and a net haphazardly strung across it. The other side plunged down into an indistinct abyss made more indistinct and darker by the sudden downpour that came pelting down on us a mile from my house.
I kept thinking of stories of a couple who had driven off the road and got hung up atop pine trees for three days, with nothing but a chocolate bar and a pack of chewing gum for sustenance, and I squinted at the rain, thinking that at least I wouldn’t die of thirst.
The cell phone I’d set on speaker and tossed haphazardly on the passenger seat crackled and one of the immortals said, “Are you alright?”
I squinted at the rain pelting my windshield and coming down in torrents, amid which their back light glow was barely visible. “Fine. Just fine,” I said, and pressed the defrost heat button to dispel the fine misty haze on the inside of the car windshield. “You were saying Lieut– Cap– Joseph Heron’s brother had killed three immortals?”
“Yes,” the immortal answered, his voice hollow and lost, the sort of tone one expects when discussing heinous crimes. Which I supposed to them it was.
“I’ve killed...” I tried to count but my five years of fighting all ran together in my mind and I was sure I could never tell all my kills apart from each other. “Many immortals,” I said. “More than two hundred,” I said.
“Captain Heron said five hundred and thirty two,” he answered, his voice crackling with more than the static inherent in cell phone conversation. Overhead, a boom of thunder echoed and for a moment the landscape was made stark and unbelievable in the white glare of a thunderbolt. “Which makes you one of the top ten snipers, from the war.”
I didn’t say anything. Joseph Heron would have kept count, of course. Perhaps it was his job.
“But that is different,” the voice said, turned dismissive. “That was war. This is... There are laws.”
“And what would those laws be?” I asked, only half mocking. There was a reason I’d taken myself off to the country, to leave in isolation. I’d heard that some Native American tribes took their warriors returned from battle and made them live in isolation for some time – months or years – until they were thought fit for human company again. What I’d done on my own might partake that a little. But it was more than that. At heart, I could never be sure that the peace was a good, or even a bearable thing.
We’d never been sure where the first vampires had come from. Sometimes I thought they’d emerged from all the fluffy-headed romantic literature that my mother’s generation had admired, turning man-killing monsters into objects of desire. But even I recognized that was unlikely. No matter how many angsty teen girls dreamed and sighed over vampires that sparkled in the sun, it was unlikely to cause said vampires to spring into malevolent existence in the real world.
The outbreak had started in the middle east, and some said it was the result of opening an ancient tomb in Iran, which had once been the fabled Persia.
Whatever had caused it, it was suddenly everywhere at once, a plague that turned normal humans into ravening monsters craving blood and willing to kill other men and women to get it.
The United States – and the western countries in general – had faced many wars and defeated many foes. But this was different. This was a foe that could at any minute recruit your closest friend, your nearest relative, your most staunch ally. It was a foe that was made of ourselves.
It was a foe we couldn’t seem to defeat. But I didn’t think that meant we should have declared a truce, either. I didn’t think there could be a truce with a group of intelligent beings for whom we were food. Could a lion enact a truce with a gazelle? Only the better to devour it. Woe to the herd who agreed to the pact.
“We...” For some reason I had the impression that the Immortal on the other side was licking his lips nervously. I thought I made him nervous, though I couldn’t say why. Perhaps it was those five hundred and some kills. “That is, the law is clear on the relations between humans and immortals,” he said, sounding ever so slightly shrill. “It was part of the peace treaty.”
“I’d packed my bags and left civilization behind before the peace treaty,” I said. Exactly three months before. The day Joseph Heron had been turned. “I saw it announced on the windows of the newspaper vending machines. I didn’t buy a newspaper.”
“The terms were announced on radio and TV and the internet,” he said. “You can’t help knowing them.”
“I can help having a radio or a TV,” I said. “I do help it. The only radio I’ve heard in the last ten years were military marches played by the Denver symphony and transmitted by the feedstore when I go in to buy chicken feed. And I don’t have internet access. I don’t own a computer.”
I had the impression the immortal had sighed exasperatedly, though the sound didn’t transmit to me. “No human is to kill an immortal. It is a capital crime and the execution is left to the immortals to pursue.”
“How nice for vampires,” I said.
“And no immortal is to turn a human. Surely you’ve heard that.” His tone was accusatory, perhaps because I hadn’t shown fear of being turned. “And we’re to be called immortals, not vampires,” his voice had turned sullen. I wondered how young he’d been when he was turned. He looked like a full grown man, but there were flashes of teenager beneath. “It’s derogatory.”
“I’d heard,” I said. “People talk. People are no longer afraid... Not too afraid of walking at night. You’re not to turn us and you’re not to drain us. Though there are still vampires who do drain humans.” In the papers I didn’t buy, I did periodically read headlines. The newspaper on the counter of the feedstore, the newspaper flung in the back booth of the diner where I ate when I absolutely had to go to Denver. Headlines over the years came back to me: couple found drained in the woods; child drained of all blood found in city park; vagrants dying of exsanguination, Immortals suspected.
“There are always criminals,” the immortal said. “Which is why there is an immortal police force, to deal with our criminals.”
I bit my tongue, because otherwise I’d have repeated how nice for you.
“We use the latest scientific methods,” he said, defensively, as though I’d spoken. “We do whatever we can to make sure we’re not accusing a human wrong. And Michael Heron has ... He’s been shooting immortals. We have traced three to him, but there might be more. Some bodies might not have been discovered yet. Our kind is not... gregarious.”
Lions rarely were. When lions got gregarious the game in the area went extinct.
“Captain Heron has done what he could, tried to persuade him to deliver himself to justice. We don’t know what caused Michael Heron to decide to kill these immortals. There is no motive. And Captain Heron thought that perhaps you could negotiate with Michael. Perhaps you could make him listen to reason.”
“Ah,” I said. “I’m to be the bait.”
It made sense too, and if I’d been Joseph Heron I’d done exactly the same. I’d never known if he knew I’d been in love with him. It was something that must never be spoken of. He was almost thirty and marri
ed, his wife, Ria, one of us. He was suave and sophisticated and a man of the world. And I was a twenty year old raw recruit fresh from the farm, who’d only seen three vampires in my life before being recruited – one of which had already been dead.
I had known, though that Michael was in love with me. Impossible not to. Like Joseph he was tall and blond and at some other time, in some happier decade, he’d have been the quarterback of the high school football team or the class president of the Freshman class in college. He was my age. Square jaw and sun bleached very short hair and not a bad shot. But his features lacked the subtle creases in Joseph’s sun tanned face, his eyes lacked the look of having seen it all and done most of it.
He didn’t stand a chance, and had settled for platonic adoration and for competing with me on kills. I didn’t know what they’d done since the war, nor why he had now become a one man truce-breaking army. But I knew that I’d work at bait. Unless Michael had lost all memory.
The storm had become more intense and it required all my concentration to drive in the downpour. Drops of water obstructed my vision. I reached over and turned off the phone, and then I concentrated on driving.
***
I didn’t need my guides to tell me, as we drove into Denver’s riverside district, that we were entering vampire territory. Even during the war it had been the vampires’ practice to take over the wealthier districts and commandeer the high priced condos. The ones they’d taken over here edgy constructions of concrete, once the residence of the glitteratty and fashionable. Those and anyone with power and influence were always the ones the vampires recruited first. This was probably still the residence of the gliteratty and fashionable, save that the hours had changed.
In the old days, this late at night, the cafes and restaurants would be closing. Now, they were in full swing. I noted lights and music and asked myself what vampires ate and drank at restaurants and cafes, then decided I didn’t want to know. Would Monsieur care for some blood of virgins, just arrived fresh from Paris?
Here Be Dragons: A collection of short stories Page 11