Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  Silence stretched for a long time. The only sound was the wind crying through the branches of the naked trees. Somewhere above, a crow cawed after something.

  How could I lie to her?

  “I’ve killed two people.”

  She stared into my eyes, and I saw in there a glowing warmth. It was both like and unlike the fire I had seen in Sebastian’s eyes. The light in her eyes had the heat and intensity of Sebastian’s, but not the fearful violence. Instead of a barrier, it was a welcome.

  “Were they innocent?” she asked me.

  “What?” I was drawn back by the question, enough that my hand pulled free of her grip. “What kind of question is that?”

  “You killed two people because you were a vampire?” Gail asked, looking at me with a warmth that seemed to melt down her face with her tears.

  I nodded, two deaths that should have never happened.

  “Were they innocent?”

  I stood aghast at the question. What the hell did it matter? I had two people’s deaths on my hands. “My God, Gail, they didn’t deserve to die. You can’t play God with human lives.”

  She grabbed me, “Damn it, Dad! You’re not an evil person. I know you. Who were these people? What were they doing? Why did you ... ?”

  I looked into her eyes. Had I turned into a monster or not? I had made the difficult admission already, hadn’t I? “I—”

  “Who, Dad? How did it happen?”

  “Tony,” I finally said. “The man’s name was Tony. I broke into his girlfriend’s apartment. He was....”

  “He was what?”

  I shook my head. “You can’t justify this.”

  “He was what?”

  “Beating her, okay? That’s not the point.”

  “Damn it, it is! If you were still a cop, could you have shot him?”

  “Maybe, I don’t know ... just drive to Sam’s, would you? Use the cellular to call ahead and give him some warning.”

  Gail backed up and wiped her eyes. “Okay. What should I tell Sam?”

  “As little as possible.”

  She opened the door to the Chevette. “You’re not going to be at Mom’s funeral, are you?”

  I shook my head. “Not unless they have it after sundown.”

  She took my hand again. “I forgive you.”

  “Thanks.” I started to walk back to the house, but she kept hold of my hand.

  “For everything,” she said.

  I took my hand back and said, “I love you, Gail.”

  “I love you, still,” she said.

  I began walking back to the house. Behind me I heard the Chevette start up. Over the engine I heard Gail shout at me, “I still loved you, even when you shot back.” Then the engine revved and started to fade in the distance.

  I rubbed the spot where the bullet had emerged from my lung, back when I was still a cop. I stood in front of the door for a long time before I could wipe my eyes and enter.

  I took refuge in Ryan’s den, trying not to think about Gail, and Kate, and trying to keep from going into an emotional tailspin, I stood in front of the French doors, staring at the snow beyond. My own gaunt face stared back at me out of the glass. Shadows made my eyes invisible, a pair of black holes in my face that caused me no pain.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” came an English-accented voice from behind me. I turned around to see Leia, Ryan’s granddaughter. I didn’t hear any irony in her voice.

  I shook my head, suppressing an internal shudder. Ryan had told me that the drain my injury caused to my body’s resources would require me to feed pretty soon. Ryan had said I could eat and drink normal foods. However, I couldn’t digest them, since acid production in my stomach was now about nil. My stomach lining would become more and more sensitive the longer between real feedings.

  However, I didn’t want to think about blood, or real feedings, not with my last two victims fresh in my mind.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “Your name’s Leia, right?”

  She nodded and I caught the scent of a strong perfume. The perfume was the only thing about her that was overstated. “Yes.” she said. “Did—” there was a slight pause as she bit her lip. “Did Grandfather help you?”

  “Very much,” I said. I flexed my intact left hand, still skeletal and trembling. “He saved me from a rather stupid accident.”

  “Good. I’m glad he could help you.” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. Something deep in there told me that she was very unnerved by my presence. I’d be unnerved, too, considering her grandfather’s clientele.

  “You don’t need to be afraid of me.” Fear didn’t seem the right word, but whatever empathy I had wasn’t providing me with convenient labels. I sensed confusion, wariness, caution, expectation—some or all of which may have been me rather than her.

  “I’m not afraid.” Her smile faded with a sharp feeling of a nerve being brushed. My comment had struck a chord, what one I didn’t know. Almost as if she’d seen me notice, she resurrected her smile and said, “What’s there to be afraid of?”

  I nodded. “Indeed. What?” I turned my gaze back out the French doors. She had caught me within my own fears.

  “‘For, alas, alas! with me,’ ” I whispered, not really aware that I was quoting aloud, “‘The Light of Life is o’er.’”

  “What’s that from?” Leia asked.

  I cleared my throat, embarrassed at having quoted the verse aloud. “Edgar Allan Poe, a poem. It’s about death.” I lowered my head. “Everything he wrote was about death.”

  I heard her moving around behind me. “You don’t seem the type to spontaneously quote poetry.”

  I turned around to face her; she had taken a seat in a recliner facing the hearth. She sat, legs crossed, looking at me intently. The low fire brought out livid copper highlights in her red hair.

  “I read a lot of Poe in high school. It comes back to me every once in a while.” Once in a bad while. Ever since my father died. Poe came back when death was near.

  “How does it go?” she asked.

  “Hm?”

  “The poem, how does it go?” There was something in her eyes that drew the poem to the surface.

  “It’s called, ‘To One in Paradise,”’ I said. “Thou wast that all to me, love, / For which my soul did pine—/ A green isle in the sea love, / A fountain and a shrine, / All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers, / And all the flowers were mine.’”

  I paced as I recited the poem from memory. I had to stop and catch my breath, because my throat was tightening up.

  “‘Ah, dream too bright to last! / Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise / But be overcast!’ ”

  I turned away from Leia to face the French doors again.

  “‘A voice from out the Future cries, / ”On! On!“—but o’er the Past / (Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies / Mute, motionless, aghast!

  “‘For alas! alas! with me / The light of Life is o’er! / No more—no more—no more—

  “‘(Such language holds the solemn sea / To the sands upon the shore) / Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree, / Or the stricken eagle soar!’ ”

  I leaned on the windowsill and whispered the final stanza.

  “‘And all my days are trances, / And all my nightly dreams / Are where thy gray eye glances, / And where thy footstep gleams—/ In what ethereal dances, / By what eternal streams.’ ”

  I ended with my forehead touching the glass and the sensation that everything behind my chest had fallen away.

  A long silence followed before Leia said, “I’m sorry.”

  I collected my thoughts enough to say, “What for?” “That poem’s difficult for you, isn’t it?”

  I tried to dry my eyes as subtly as possible as I turned around. “It’s not the poem.”

  She stared at me, and I got the feeling she was seeing into an uncomfortable depth. “No,” she agreed. “It’s not.”

  “So you live here,” I said to change the subject. “With your grandfather?”
<
br />   She nodded.

  “What about your parents?”

  “They died, a long time ago.”

  “Sorry.”

  She shrugged.

  “Are you friends with Bowie?” She looked to be about Bowie’s age.

  She laughed. “Hardly what you’d call our relationship. Let’s just say I associate with him. Are you friends with him?”

  “I don’t know. Where is he? There are a few questions I have to ask him.”

  Leia shrugged. “Bowie has gone, to do the things that Bowie does. Are you sure about me getting you something?”

  I felt an unnatural clarity in the air, as if every sense had been honed to a scalpel edge and was cutting into my brain. Brushfire emotion had consumed everything inside me, and sensory input rushed in to fill the void. The light burned my eyes, Leia’s perfume stung my nose, and the ebb and flow of my own blood was a hammer in my ear.

  Hunger was suddenly a deep ache inside me. Leia stared at me knowingly and said, “Are you sure?”

  The offer violated me, as if a stranger were viewing my own private perversion. She looked at me and I felt the thirst swell inside me—

  I felt a wary sense of self-preservation. I did not fully trust this place, and Gabriel had impressed upon me that everything freely offered carried a price along with it. I shook my head. “No. Thanks.”

  She frowned briefly, as if something was wrong. I didn’t know what. I was able to push the sudden wave of hunger away. The need wasn’t yet strong enough to make me lose control. From talking to Ryan, who opined much more freely than Gabriel, after two victims I should have at least a week—if it hadn’t been for the drain because of my injury. As it was, I could go one or two days before I reached the state where I became uncontrollable.

  I pushed the urge away, but the taste lingered in my mouth and the light was still bothersome. I walked over and dimmed the lamps to a tolerable level, where they barely competed with the glow from the fireplace.

  I looked at Leia, seated in the recliner, looking at me with a faintly curious expression. Who was she? Why had she been seated with Bowie the first time I’d seen her?

  Like Bowie, she was young enough to be recruited by Childe’s cult....

  “Do you happen to know anything about a man calling himself Childe?” I asked.

  Her face darkened, but she showed no surprise at the question. “He is not a man.”

  “You know him, then.”

  She stood. “Evil. Pure distilled evil. Everything he touches turns to rot sooner or later.” She walked until she was nearly touching me. The smell of her perfume was overpowering. She ran a finger under the collar of her turtleneck as she spoke. “You should leave Childe be while you still own yourself.”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t back away now, even if I wanted to, even though the farther along I came, the less certain I was of what was happening.

  She stepped back. “Don’t think your losses make you special, my poetic friend. Revenge is not a happy pursuit.” Leia stepped around me and out the door. “The guest room is upstairs and to the right.”

  I stood in the doorway and watched her ascend the stairs, a spectral figure. The black sweater and pants soaked up the darkness, with only her flowing red hair to mark her humanity.

  Revenge is not a happy pursuit.

  That woman had been hurt by Childe. I wondered how her parents had died, and how her grandfather had gotten into the business of treating the undead.

  23

  I didn’t go to the guest room. I didn’t think I could sleep normally now if I tried, despite feeling the burden from Ryan’s ministrations. My hand had drained me, and dark thoughts had drained me even more. More than my hand, the events of the past three days wearied me. I had been pulled along this path nonstop, and more than my body, my mind was tired.

  I needed to relax, if only for a few hours. So, after Leia’s departure, I rummaged through Doctor Ryan’s bookshelves. Ryan’s library was a much lesser and more pedestrian affair than Childe’s, but in it I found something familiar: a small cloth-bound volume entitled simply, Tales and Poems. Under the title was the name, “Poe.”

  The memories it sparked were melancholy, but so were the tales, so were the poems. Right now I needed the familiarity, the feeling that something of myself was still mine, unchanged. As always with Poe, I needed the feeling that I had company in the darkness.

  I pulled a drape across the French doors, shutting out the rest of the world, and settled in the recliner, which still held a whisper of Leia’s perfume. I opened the book at random. The first line my eyes fell upon were within the opening paragraph of “The Masque of the Red Death.”

  “No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood.”

  It was as if the two decades since my father’s death had never happened, and Poe’s words were still talking directly to me. I let myself be taken to Poe’s realm because, somehow, it vindicated my own....

  In a few hours I had passed from the Prospero of the Masque to the Fortunate of the Cask—from Doom to Revenge. I had passed into a blackness now wholly literary, and therefore a little lighter.

  The first tier of masonry had but been laid within the text when a noise drew me out of the story. I looked up, not sure what I had heard. The winter night was deathly silent, a blanket of snow soaking up stray sounds.

  I convinced myself that it had been the house creaking, or something popping within the hearth—a few shadowy embers still glowed there, the last ghost of a fire.

  Just when I returned to reading, I heard the noise repeating. I heard it, again—a very distinct knocking coming from in front of me. Something about the rapping frightened me.

  Lightly tapping, the noise repeated itself.

  I told myself it was nothing, the wind ... But there wasn’t any wind.

  I slowly placed the book on an end table. A Raven, embossed in gold leaf, looked up from the cover.

  I stood up and walked toward the heavy purple curtains I’d drawn across the French doors. It was those doors from which the sound came. Someone gently rapping on the panes to gain admittance.

  “Bowie?” I asked, even though I knew it wasn’t him. Bowie would not cause me such dread.

  The rapping continued. I felt certain that whatever was outside those doors represented death. The sense was so strong that, as I reached for the curtain, I felt as if it could be Kate beyond, risen from the stainless steel cart from which I’d last seen her.

  I flung open the curtain.

  The feeling of fear and present death did not cease when I saw the man who had been knocking at the door. If anything, my feelings deepened.

  The man did not have the appearance to inspire terror. He was, in fact, attractive in an androgynous fashion. He was dark-skinned, but any attempt to put his face in a set racial category was doomed to failure. His nose was European, his eyes could be Asian, his hair was Indian, his skin African—but none of the terms fit him. He was not a marriage of separate races. He was of a race of himself.

  “Come with me,” he said. His voice did not fog the air. I doubt it was even audible inside the house, beyond the glass, so softly was it spoken. I heard it nonetheless, and I found myself unable to refuse.

  I opened the door with the feeling that this was a particularly vivid dream. The cold and my feet sinking into the snow only slightly dispelled the illusion.

  I never felt so much power tied into a single entity. Standing next to him was like standing next to volcano that was about to erupt. There was nothing about his appearance, absolutely nothing, that gave that impression. Physically he was less imposing than I was.

  “You will walk with me,” he said.

  I didn’t have much choice. Even if I had felt able to refuse, this man’s bearing and his sudden appearance would have demanded some sort of attention in spite of the intimidating presence around him.

  I followed him away from Doctor Ryan
’s house, and into the night-emptied streets of Shaker Heights. Once out of sight of the house, he addressed me again, “Ask your questions.”

  “Who are you?”

  He glanced at the sky and said, “Another spirit bound in chains of flesh. No names for me, Mr. Tyler, I am not here.”

  The denial of one in power. I could feel the tug of secrecy behind this visit.

  “You know me,” I said, half-question, half-statement.

  “I have an interest in what you are involved in.” We stopped and he gave me a searing look. “You are an outsider.”

  “I know. Why are you here?”

  “You question my presence?” His stare became a holocaust, I could feel his gaze stripping layers from inside me. I knew now what Gabriel had told me about power, and status. I was standing in front of a vampire as far beyond Gabriel as Gabriel was above a Thrall.

  Still, under that invisible assault, I managed to whisper, “Yes, I am.”

  The first trace of expression crossed his face, a slight upturn at the corners of the mouth. “Strength,” he said to himself. He turned and continued walking along the sidewalk.

  “Perhaps I’m here to offer you Indenture.”

  “Indenture?”

  He turned around and extended his right arm beyond the sleeve of his jacket. It extended for an unnatural length. “You feel the hunger upon you, don’t you?”

  In response, I felt the ache begin in my stomach, in my brain. The raw need consumed every vein in my body. A death chill frosted every nerve. The night focused into razor clarity, every angle slicing into my brain. Every sense amplified a dozen times, including the ethereal sense that told me of the power this creature before me held.

  This creature, now, burned like a pillar of divine fire. I saw within him a heat, a power to take away the hunger, the need, the pain. More than enough. More than I could take in a dozen lifetimes. His life burned infinitely brighter than that of the human souls I had seen.

  And before me was his extended arm, the life within nearly too bright for me to look at, the heat within burning the frozen skin of my face. The skin of his arm was bare before my face, and as I watched, the skin laid itself open to me. A slit appeared between the bones of the wrist, above the vein, traveling up the arm and pulling apart.