Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  “Put down the gun,” she repeated. I felt her will, like a mental undertow on my arm. I resisted it, despite the weight my arm felt. My hand shook, and fear from the doctor washed away any emotion I might have felt from her.

  “You?” I felt the anger again, the stress. I felt bones dislocating, muscle tearing and reknitting, skin splitting and flowing back together.

  So obvious, so damn obvious. I suddenly knew what was wrong with the pictures on the wall of Ryan’s office. There hadn’t been a single picture of Ryan’s wife. There’d been him in England, him and his granddaughter Leia, but none of a wife. What had really sparked his interest in vampires?

  What if Leia wasn’t his granddaughter?

  “Yes, me. I’ve waited half a century for Childe’s humiliation. You aren’t going to stop it.”

  “My daughter or he’s dead!” came a half-animal yell. I glimpsed a shadow of myself on the wall, and saw a hunching back, lengthened arms, and a distorted skull evolving a muzzle. I could feel myself willing the changes now. Everything was tinted with blood-red anger. I snarled.

  “No,” she shook her head. “And you harm him, and you’ll watch me tear out your daughter’s heart.”

  I was fighting an internal urge to drop the gun and rip out the doctor’s throat. My body was burning itself with the effort of the change, and it sensed the heat within the doctor’s flesh. It wanted that flesh.

  Leia kept staring at me, and it was becoming difficult for me to concentrate. The gun shook in a clawed, leathery hand. The world seemed to be twisting away from me, as if the scent of the doctor’s blood, even through the skin, were making me high.

  “Childe is evil; he has to be punished. Punished, then killed.” Leia took a step down the riser.

  I tried to say, “Gail.” But all I produced was a breathy growl. My clothes split and shredded.

  “You weaken yourself with your anger,” she said, and I found my neck turning so I could stare into her eyes. She was halfway down the stairs now, her cloying perfume in advance of her. Now, however, my sense of smell had become infinitely more acute, and I could smell the corruption that perfume cloaked.

  She kept descending until near the end, where her eyes were even with mine.

  “Look at what Childe did to me,” she said. She grabbed the collar of her turtleneck and yanked it down. The fabric tore as she uncovered her left shoulder, neck, and breast—

  A gaping, festering wound sank into her flesh. I saw the outline of a collarbone, glistening red.

  I felt something stab into my side, opposite the doctor. I turned to see Bowie plunging the contents of a hypodermic into my side. I yanked myself away, breaking the needle, but I was too late. The hypo was empty. I readied to lunge at Bowie, the doctor all but forgotten—

  “Look at me,” she said.

  I could not avoid looking.

  “That blood’s just to soften your will.” I was locked in place, unable to draw my attention away from her. Heat rippled out from where the needle had pierced my skin, and my body sucked in the heat, along with something else.

  “Fetch his daughter,” she said to Bowie. He ran up the stairs. She turned back to face me. “You will be harder than a thrall. You have to accept my blood willingly.”

  She took another step down the stairs. “You ask me why? Childe took my blood and left me with this—” her hand went to the wound that ate into her shoulder and chest “—he seduced me, used me, and then left me to die from a long, suppurating infection. I lived for a month.”

  I remembered Ryan’s words: “In most humans this entity can’t survive the first twenty-four hours in a living host. Though, if another infection weakens the immune system, the entity can survive much longer.”

  The warmth in my side had spread to every part of my body. I shook with a feverish heat, sweating, dizzy, my body beginning to tear itself back into a human form. I, tried to recapture the emotions I had been feeling, but they slipped through my mental fingers like so much air.

  My back collapsed against the wall, and the gun tumbled from my fingers. Everything seemed very far away, even the pain of my bones reshaping themselves.

  “Death wasn’t the end,” a far away voice was saying, “I was left cursed with this unhealable wound. Every night for fifty years I’ve woken up to this pain. Every night for fifty years I’ve been tied by this political contrivance they call a Covenant. Every night for fifty years I’ve been waiting for Childe to slip, to give an opening for those who hate him. Even his own race wish him gone, and will happily destroy him for a misstep. You know what Childe is, you know he had to be stopped. Punished. Crushed.”

  I shook; my body was fighting off an alien infection.

  The master-slave relationship, and the control it created, flowed from the blood, blood linked to a specific mind. The blood in my veins, the vampiric infection throughout my body, gave me control to the point where I could heal gunshots and restructure my entire body. Allowing another vampire’s blood into my body, allowing another infection, could give that “other” similar control, both body and mind.

  That was how she had taken control of Childe’s people.

  That was happening to me now. With that flash of realization, I tried to push back the encroaching apathy and disorientation that blazed across the surface of my fever.

  “Cross,” I muttered through a mouth that was still animalistic.

  Somewhere, far away, I saw her nod. “My maiden name. My brother, the chief inspector, was responsible for those police files your detective friend ordered from England. Detective Weinbaum is almost as useful against Childe as Sebastian is. Now either they will kill him, or Childe will kill them, bringing all the force of the Convenant down upon his own head.”

  I barely heard her as I tried to concentrate, tried to gather together the tatters of my will against the fever. My body stopped changing back.

  “With my brother’s death, I knew Childe would never stumble on his own. I had to take his thralls.”

  I felt her breath against my sweaty cheek. My half-human body was vibrating with fever, drenched in sweat. Inside myself, I fought to retain my own identity, my own perception of reality, against the force this woman was exerting.

  The pressure of the fever, the blood, and her will, was becoming impossible to fight. Her mind was as strong as my own, maybe stronger, and she was aided by the traitor infection that Bowie had injected.

  I saw Bowie descending the stairs, bringing Gail with him. Gail stared blankly, going where Bowie led her.

  “You have a choice,” Leia’s face was within an inch of my own. I felt her words brush my ear, burning it. “Take my blood. Become one with my blood as your daughter has. Or your daughter dies. The Covenant protects no thralls.”

  GaiL She showed no reaction upon seeing me, as if she were in a trance.

  Leia had taken her. She had forced my own daughter to become one of them. A sound, somewhere between a cry and a howl, emerged from my throat. A spark of rage ignited, my own fire, and I concentrated on it.

  Her arm extended in front of me, the vein opening for me as Jaguar’s had. There was a flood of fire, a pressure willing me to taste, to drink. I wanted the blood, and I knew that it was the desire that was the key. The second I stopped resisting the desire, the burning hunger that she was pulling out of me, I would be lost.

  She had taken Gail.

  I felt the knot of anger harden.

  I was not a thrall. I was not a human any more. I was a vampire whose chosen name was Raven. I was this woman’s peer. She had had half a century to focus her will, but my own wounds were fresh.

  I felt myself bend over her arm, felt the bones begin again to rewrite the structure of my jaw. I could smell her blood, and it was the sweetest thing I had ever smelled. Below me it leaked from her arm, a warm ruby glow, radiating with life.

  Under it all I could still smell the taint of corruption. She had taken Gail.

  The world stopped spinning around me, and my sense re
gained a sharper focus.

  “Take of me, Mr. Tyler. Your daughter has an eternity before her, don’t let it end.”

  She had taken Gail.

  Focusing on Gail allowed me to retain myself. Doctor Ryan had found a weapon for her, but the weapon wasn’t absolute. The tainted blood increased her power over me, but it did not make me her slave. I was the master of my blood, not a thrall who carried another’s blood in his veins already.

  I held her arm with both hands. My nails were talons in leathery skin, my jaw a savage muzzle, my nose wrinkling at the sweet smell of blood. I knew, instinctively, that to give up control, even for a moment, would make me her slave.

  “Drink, Kane—”

  Raven, it is Raven now.

  “—you should not be fighting me—”

  My name is Raven and I am master of my own blood.

  A voice came from out of the darkness within me. I heard myself whisper.

  “From childhood’s hour I have not been / As others were—”

  I raised my eyes to meet hers. Leia stopped talking. I slammed the tatters of my will against her own.

  “I have not seen,” I whispered, “As others saw—”

  I dropped her arm. I could feel her try to turn away, but I held her gaze with my own.

  “I could not bring / My passions from a common spring—” I could feel the fever burning itself out within me. “From the same source I have not taken / My sorrow—” The blood inside me burned like a magnesium flare, brief, intense, leaving nothing but ash in its wake.

  “I could not awaken / My heart to joy at the same tone—/ And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone...”

  I was still me. My mind felt tempered, all the impurities burned away. I felt all the anger, the fury, the endless rage and fear burning through my skull. All of it focused on Leia in front of me.

  Leia began to scream.

  Bowie began moving toward Gail, who still stared into space.

  “No!” I growled. My hand slashed in front of me, at Leia. Every last trace of emotion within me powered that swing. My hand was not a hand anymore, it was a weapon.

  My talons sank into Leia’s neck, tearing across her throat. Her scream gurgled to a halt. She slammed into the wall next to me.

  Bowie had grabbed Gail, and she seemed to wake up from her trance. Gail yelled, and I leaped at him. His hands were on her throat as he looked up at me.

  I saw fear in his face.

  He raised his arms too late to defend himself, and I sank my teeth into his throat. I tasted blood, but I didn’t drink. I tore at him, shredding flesh, tearing at him tooth and claw, driving him away from my child. Gail scrambled, panicked, up the stairway.

  Bowie pounded at me, and I felt his bones shift under my assault. His spine separated under my teeth before he could transform into anything threatening. I threw Bowie’s corpse into the den to shatter through the French doors. His head stayed in the doorway.

  I heard a renewed scream behind me. I turned around in time for Leia to grab me with a pair of clawed hands. Where I had turned into something wolflike, she had turned demonic. She threw me high against the wall. My back cratered the plaster, and a picture shattered underneath me. I slid to the ground, Ryan diving out of my way.

  Leia dove upon me and slashed with obscenely elongated hands. Her nails were a foot long and tapered like swords. I raised an arm to defend myself and I felt the claws sever the muscles down to the bone.

  I grabbed her wounded neck with my other hand, holding her at bay. It didn’t work as well as I intended. My gut exploded in pain as her other hand slashed into my abdomen, burying itself in my stomach.

  I roared, and Leia hissed at me in a way that was too reminiscent of the way Childe had sounded in his box.

  She pushed away my other arm, its muscles severed and immobile, and began slashing at my face and neck. I saw my own blood spray across the hallway, splashed by her blows. As I weakened, I felt my body rebel against the alien shape.

  Each slash knocked more of the beast out of me, and more leaked out of the fiery hole in my gut. My hand on her throat did more to pin me than it did her. As I began regaining a human form, she started laughing at me.

  Then the world exploded as someone fired my Desert Eagle. Leia’s face exploded across me. She stopped laughing. However, her hand kept slashing at me, as if by reflex.

  The gun fired again, numbing my ears. Leia’s head caved in with the impact. Her arm still moved.

  Again it fired.

  Leia’s arm dangled by her side.

  I was frozen in that tableau for nearly a minute, as my body shifted, sucking all its resources to return me to my human form. Above me, Leia’s head was nothing more than a chunk of rotten meat above her lower jaw, good as decapitated. As I watched, her oozing blood faded from livid red to a sick, dead, black.

  I let go of her neck, and her body tumbled to the ground.

  Gail stood there, in the center of the hall, holding my Desert Eagle in both hands.

  31

  Gail held the gun, trembling, tears streaming down her face. “Dad?” she whispered.

  I slowly pushed my back up the wall. I looked down the hall to where Ryan stood, shaking, staring at Leia’s corpse with wide eyes. He didn’t move.

  I looked back at my daughter and said, “It’s all right, it’s over.”

  “Over?” she repeated.

  I walked up and took the gun from her hands.

  She buried her face in my shredded shirt and cried. “I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t want to lie, but they made me.”

  “You’re free now,” I said. I looked down on Leia’s body. All her blood was now the black of death. Ryan had knelt down next to the corpse and was whispering. “Come on, honey,” he mumbled at her, “wake up, wake up—”

  I looked at Gail.

  “You are master of your own blood now,” I said to her. “Let’s leave this place.”

  I walked her out the front door, out into the snow, toward the Chevette on the lawn. I was limping, feeling as if most of my flesh had been torn from the bone. For my injuries I must have looked almost as bad as Joey had.

  Gail was shaking her head, and I thought of all she had to go through. For what?

  “So pointless ...” I whispered to the night.

  “Things usually are,” replied a cultured voice with an English accent.

  I turned to face the Ryan house, and leaning up against an ivy-covered wall was a well-groomed gentleman who appeared to be in his fifties. He had a slight touch of gray at the temples of his shoulder-length hair, and his chin sported a Van Dyke.

  “Childe?” I said.

  The man made a slight bow. “My reputation precedes me.”

  I glanced back up at the house. Gail turned to me and whispered, “Oh, God.”

  Childe shook his head. “He has little to do with it. No, we’re discussing Jaguar, actually.” He smiled grimly and followed my glance up at the house. I saw erratic shadows cross the windows, semi-human in form. Nearly a dozen of them. No sound came from the house.

  “Jaguar?” I said.

  “The English of an otherwise unpronounceable Mayan name. I would think you’d remember meeting him.”

  Jaguar, my raceless visitor. I nodded as the lights went out in the house. “He told me Doctor Ryan was buried in the flesh.”

  “Some of us more so than others.” Childe held out his hand. “Perhaps you two should come with me.”

  “What is he doing in there?” I asked.

  “Fixing things.”

  I stared at Childe and after a moment said, “That was you, in that box.”

  He started walking away from the house said, “I have made better impressions.”

  “I should have killed you.”

  He paused for a moment and looked back over his shoulder. “Yes, by your lights, perhaps you should have. But come.”

  He waved us after him.

  “I could have,” I whispered.

  He kept nodding. I
t was difficult to picture this man as the thing within the box. But I’d had that glimpse of him in the window, and he was unquestionably the same being. The same person whose picture was faxed from England.

  How many of Sebastian’s men had it taken to bring him back?

  “For God’s sake, why?” Gail said.

  He turned around, and I noticed that the suit he wore had to cost close to a grand. The scarf and gloves he wore spoke of the same expensive taste. “Why ask for nepenthe of some strange black bird crossing my threshold? Is there balm in Gilead?”

  Childe addressed me, giving me an odd grin. “I know something of you now, and you shan’t offer such balm.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t make the mistake Leia did. She was one of us, but she wasn’t of us. Applying a human morality to us is akin to applying that bird’s morality to a human.”

  He turned around and resumed walking. “What souls we have, what minds, are chained within this flesh. All resides close to the surface. We become what we are. Our thoughts mold ourselves, our flesh, our reality. Our choices bind us—”

  I nodded, not understanding all I wished to. Though I began to see how vampiric psychology could affect the flesh; from Joey’s zombie-rot to Leia’s wound, self-image molded the body.

  “What she did,” Childe continued, “forcing herself on the bodies of my thralls, with her blood, that was a worse act than killing me would have been.” He shook his head and wiped snow out of his hair.

  “All of them chose to be yours?”

  The corner of Childe’s mouth twitched upward. “I do not force the worm within my breast upon anyone. They each had time to decide.”

  We turned a corner and approached a black car. “What happened with her?” Gail asked.

  “At the end of the war, I offered something to a woman. She gave freely, but when it came time for her to take, she refused to deal any more with me. I am always clear about what a relationship with me costs.”

  We stopped at the car, a Rolls Royce, one of the earlier models, before they started looking like Lincolns. Childe shrugged. “Her husband was a doctor, but she hid the marks too long. They became septic. She died. She lived. Her mind kept the scar alive, and she blamed me.” He shook his head. “She existed for half a century, and all must have seen that wound in her heart. None sponsored her, took her into the community, or gave her a name.” He gave me a meaningful look. “You’re very lucky. Rogues come to bad ends.”