Bleeding Hearts: Book One of the Demimonde

by Ash Krafton

  "Yes."

  "Legends say Horus had several children. Burial practices describe the 'Four Sons of Horus' as gods who protected canopic jars. Not all of Horus' children were benevolent, however.

  "Our legends focus on the eldest two, born as twins yet as different as night and day. One son was vampire. The other, you can now guess, was Were. Horus' line combined the humanity he obtained from his mother, Isis, with the supernatural gifts of being god-begotten and magically conceived from the dead."

  Marek's voice took on the cadence of chanted prayer. "Horus, our falcon-headed forefather, is a pillar of strength, a storm of revenge. His eyes are the sun and the moon, and his eyes follow his children everywhere.

  "Horus bequest great gifts to his children but never intended for them to become stronger than he. The sun controls the vampire, driving him into unconsciousness, destroying him should he grow defiant and challenge its power. The moon controls the Were, giving him power only at her command and whim. The gods may be forgotten in these times but Horus lives on. His eyes are watching and controlling his children's children. Although legend may have spawned it, for us it is no myth."

  "So. The Werekind are your cousins?"

  Marek's upper lip curled, as if he was repulsed by the suggestion. "Maybe centuries ago, when our lines were young. Certainly not now."

  I leaned over and poked him. "You can't pick your family."

  "No, but I can pick my next meal." His threat was disarmed as the corners of his mouth tugged upward in a grin. I laughed and looked out the window.

  See how much my world had changed? Crap like that wasn't usually funny.

  A sharp ring cut short our respite. Pulling his arm away, he flipped open his cell phone.

  "Yeah. News?" He listened, then lowered the phone momentarily, as if he'd throw it. A long pause as he listened and his face grew dead calm once more. "Yeah. Fine. We'll talk then."

  He flipped shut the phone with an angry snap and dropped it onto the seat. Gripping the wheel, his hands tense, his knuckles white. The air grew heavy with tension. I held my breath.

  A long moment passed. Eventually, he stretched his fingers, consciously relaxing them. With one hand, he touched his hair, raking it back from his temples. "The mutt is dead. We got nothing."

  "Dead? What happened?"

  "He pulled a suicide. Apparently he smuggled a silver bullet."

  I had to be missing something. "Don't you need a gun in order to use a bullet?"

  Marek slowed with traffic as we approached a red light. "It's not a real bullet. A silver bullet is a glass capsule filled with silver nitrate. If a Were eats one, it's fatal. They chew the glass and swallow it. The shards cut their mouth and throat, which allows the silver to come into direct contact with their bloodstream. The anaphylaxis is nearly instantaneous."

  "What kind of animal eats glass?" This was the guy who'd rubbed up against me? God, I couldn't imagine it.

  "Now you see one of my many points." The light turned green and he hit the gas. I sank back into the leather seat as we shot forward.

  Wanting to change the subject, I remembered what we'd been talking about when the phone rang. "So, apart from all that, why are there No-Were rules?"

  "Ah. I never finished. See, because of our origins, it is forbidden our bloods should be combined. If one fed upon the other, legend says it would manifest a phenomenon known as Horus United—both of his bloods co-mingled in a single vessel. The person would shape-shift, irreversibly but not into wolf. There's only one animal that person could become. Falcon."

  "Like Horus."

  Marek nodded, keeping his eyes on the road. "No one wants to volunteer for testing. Can you blame them? Who'd want to live as a bird? Tiny brain, weak, helpless..."

  "Able to fly, living simply as nature intended, free from humanity and the pettiness and the ugliness."

  He shrugged. "Still. No volunteers. Accidental transformation has never been formally documented. The rules are as old as tradition, and tradition is as old as our existence. Weres and DV do not share blood. Period."

  "So that's it?"

  "Pretty much. We cooperate but, for all intents and purposes, our societies don't mix. No-Were zones aren't hallowed grounds so Weres may enter, but they are searched and monitored and expected to be on good behavior. They have enough good people that we can't ban them." He added the last part grudgingly.

  Too bad. Folletti's did a hell of a job making sure Tanner behaved himself. "I think it's weird the DV haven't pursued it. You guys are the smartest of the smart, aren't you? No one's ever looked into it? No research?"

  "On the contrary. We have people doing in vitro research, but it's not showing any conclusive results. Millions are spent each year in joint ventures. Were relations are getting strained because of it but that's another story. Still, fact remains. When the bloods are combined, nothing happens. Something is missing."

  Grateful for something else to think about, something clinical and impersonal and easier to deal with, I turned back to the window. As light streamed past, it colored my memories from my countless hours in the museums. I pondered the first time I met Marek, wondering if he had given me any clues that day about these truths of his.

  He'd gazed at Isis' image with such tenderness. It really was love, I supposed now, if she was, after all, his mythological grandmother. Isis, with her wings, her disk and horns, her empty throne. Isis, with the ankh in her hands. The ankh...

  "Life." I spoke out loud as my gut-instinct tugged at me to follow the thought.

  "What was that?" He, too, had been deep in thought.

  "Life." I repeated. "Life is missing. That's the difference between in vitro and in vivo, isn't it?" Scooting to a more comfortable position, I rested my head against the seat. "Horus is a God of the living, not of the dead. Horus's existence reaffirms life beyond the point of hope. Osiris was already dead when Horus was conceived."

  The thought fed itself and gut-sense nudged it along. Maybe I'd hate myself in the morning for ruining perfectly good mythology but tonight I needed to sort this puzzle out, to be distracted by something that wasn't an immediate and personal threat.

  "Instead of studying blood samples combined after they are taken from people, why not study blood samples of falcons? You might come across one of your, I don't know, hybrids. You can work backwards from what you find."

  I glanced down at the pendant I wore. Marek had given it to me only hours before, and yet it seemed so long ago. Time flies when you're having "fun." I separated a lock of hair and twisted it around my fingers. "The merging must happen in a living vessel. Horus' miracle can't be worked in a test tube."

  Marek pulled the car over to the curb and shifted it into park, and we rocked to a stop. He stared at me with a penetrating glint in his eyes. "How do you do that?"

  Startled, I ceased playing with my hair and dropped my hands. "Do what?"

  "That thing you do. You take a foreign idea and open it up. Unfold it. Clarify it, as if you'd been thinking about it all your life."

  "Oh. I thought you were going to say something about tying knots in my hair."

  Leaning over, he wrapped a hand around the back of my head, pulling me onto his mouth with a kiss that made me see stars. I obliged by kissing back. It was either that or suffocate.

  Releasing me the smallest bit so he could speak, he whispered in a husky voice. "I am going to find out who you are, Sophia Galen. I swear to it." He inhaled my breath from my lips, and it seemed he drew me in, ever so slightly. Marek redefined the word intimate.

  Marek tasted my lips, teasing me into kissing back. Eventually we were interrupted by a group of laughing kids who tapped on the window as they passed, braying with laughter and cat-calls. Marek pulled from me with a tiny smirk and swung the car back onto the road.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him adjust himself covertly. I pretended not to notice but, pleased with my own ability to tease, I chuckled all the way home.

  As I'd suspecte
d, sleep didn't want to be in the same room as me.

  Marek wanted to spend the night, insisting I shouldn't be alone. I had to practically shove him out the door with two hands and a cattle prod. He made no effort to conceal his disapproval. On and off until dawn I caught touches of his power, as if he lurked close by, keeping a watchful "eye" on me through the night.

  I'd jumped in the shower as soon as he left, desperate to wash away the oily stain that still seemed to cling to me. I knew it was all in my head. It was the memory of the Were's hands on me and not real dirt. Nonetheless, I applied the bath poof with such force my skin tingled.

  I didn't fall asleep as much as eventually lost consciousness. Even unconsciousness didn't linger once the sun came up, despite the exhausting emotional ride I'd been on. Euphrates, who curled up along the other pillow, woke when I finally gave up pretending to sleep. He leveled a disgusted glare at me as I rolled out of bed.

  Stroking away the disapproval in his yellow eyes, I scratched behind his ears. "Relax, Fraidy," I told him. "I ruined your sleep for one morning. I think someone ruined my sleep for a good while to come."

  He seemed to accept that I'd be sufficiently punished and graced me with his presence while I went out to the kitchen to get coffee started. What a sport.

  After the first cup had time to sink in, giving me that false yet lovely sense of being awake, I lamented over the terrible waste of a Saturday morning for sleeping late. Accepting the cruel fact my Saturday would be several hours longer than usual, I wondered what to do with the extra time.

  Picking a yoga outfit to match my blue trainers, I went for a walk to clear my head. My feet picked out their own path, my brain still preoccupied with the events from the night before.

  That little bit of restless almost-sleep had mercifully put some distance between me and my interlude with Tanner. At least I could evaluate the existence of shape-shifters without only reliving the part when one almost chewed on me.

  I stopped at a donut shop for a bagel and a brew, chewing automatically as I walked. Too many brain cells were consumed with churning thoughts.

  Why was it when something bad happened, I later found out about a whole new species pretending to be people? What was next? If I tripped on this sidewalk and fell flat on my face into the bushes, would I discover a race of tiny beings, ready with ropes, a la Gulliver's Travels?

  More disconcertingly, why was I taking all this in stride? I must be some kind of freak if I could walk around town at an ungodly hour sorting out what I learned the night before when I had been accosted by a werewolf.

  As I tossed the empty bagel wrapper into a trash bin, I realized I hadn't tasted a single bite. Thinking too much again. Brushing my hands together, I saw St. Joseph's down the block. I guessed when I put my feet on auto-pilot, they picked the destination that would bring me the most peace. Huh. Good to know my subconscious mind looked out for my best interests.

  Rounding the corner and crossing the street, I peered through the fence to see my madrigal hard at work once more in the church gardens. As I steered myself up the main walk, he spotted me. "Hope you brought your work gloves today."

  I glanced behind me at no one before giving him a who, me? kind of look.

  Brushing his hands together, he laughed and shook his head. "Come on and sit a while with me, Sophie. Sister Johanna is working me to an early grave with these seedlings. You must be exhausted yourself, keeping your eyes open at this hour on a Saturday."

  I smirked. "Isn't sarcasm a sin, Father?"

  "Not if it's not sarcasm."

  The sun was already warm, though it was well before ten in the morning, and the weather promised another bright June day. He indicated a shady spot, away from the sister who planted petunias around a statue of St. Joseph and the Infant.

  St. Joseph, foster father of the child Jesus, held the boy carefully, protectively, yet each face wore a serene expression that implied the child somehow took care of the parent. The statue represented an invitation to have faith, to believe we are cared for in a way our modern mentality found difficult to accept. After all, wasn't that what faith was about?

  "Oh..." I reached down to brush my fingers against a shrub gracing the corner of the path. "A bleeding heart . Think Mother Nature Superior over there will yell if I pick some?"

  "No," Jared said. "I'm sure she won't." He reached down and carefully snapped off a strand of flowers for me.

  We sat down on a wide stone bench under one of the red maple trees, and I pulled off one of the blossoms. "I haven't seen these in years," I said. "Let's see if I still remember how to do this."

  I peeled the delicate pink petals apart and began to separate the pieces of the flower. I'd learned the game as a child and had taught it to Jared the summer I'd met him. If disassembled carefully, the flower could be reduced to a bunch of parts that resembled miniature toys. Jared watched with a bemused expression.

  Rabbits, slippers, baseball bat... drat. What's that last pair called?

  I grinned as I lined up the pieces on my pant leg. These tiny visits to more innocent times delighted me. "Remember when we used to do this? There was a bush in the old cemetery we hung out in. We'd set up little bunny armies on the blanket..."

  Whoops. Probably not the best memory to relive now that half the memory was a priest. My face burned, probably as pink as the blossoms in my lap. "Sorry."

  "Sophie, it's okay." He glanced over his shoulder at the nun who was hopefully out of earshot. "Memories aren't sins."

  "Even if what you're remembering was a sin?"

  "Sophie, we were just teens. What we shared were important moments, because they made me who I am today. It couldn't have been evil."

  I fidgeted with the tiny baseball bat and clucked my tongue as I swung it. "Even the home base part?"

  "The whole game," he said firmly. His eyes crinkled with a suppressed grin. "Don't worry. When I do my youth ministries, I only preach against about a third of what we did together that summer."

  I applied myself vigorously to the rest of the blossoms. "Only a third, huh? So odds are my bleeding hearts and I won't go to Hell?"

  He laughed, eyes twinkling. Sister looked up from her flowerbed with a shrewd expression. She'd soil herself if she knew her pastor was discussing his past sex life with an ex-girlfriend.

  "I should hardly think so. I mean, that's what confession is for, right?" He picked up the filament whose name I'd forgotten. "Ice skates," he said. "I can never get these things out without ripping them. They're too delicate."

  Jared turned it over in his palm to admire its slender curve. "You know, I never cease to be amazed by this little blossom. Such a tiny heart, yet when you open it and examine its contents, you finally see how much that heart can hold. Never underestimate the depths of a heart, Sophie. It's a miracle in and of itself."

  "That's eloquent."

  "It was part of my first sermon when I was ordained," he added shyly.

  "Oh. I wish I'd been there."

  "I'm rather glad you weren't," he admitted. "Seeing you would have been too much a test of my faith."

  "Why? Would you have changed your mind?"

  "I didn't join the Church because you or someone else wasn't there. I was meant for this. Father Mac let me help with his Youth Group back home and I felt like I'd found my place. He directed me, gave me focus, a goal. One person, if he's very special, has the power to reshape the person you become. One relationship can affect how you approach every relationship thereafter. I wish you could have met him."

  I remembered him at age seventeen. I remembered how lost he'd been, like a dry leaf in an autumn wind. The kid had been shipped back and forth between his parents and each time it ended up worse than the last. He liked cutting school and ditching the cops and I'd caught him with dope more than once.

  Anyone Jared admired deserved my respect, because I knew the list of people who could claim that honor was short.

  "So, no," he said. "I don't think I would have ripped off
my vestments and raced out the back door with you. I accomplished something on my own, you know? If you'd have walked in, I might've turned to you for help the way I always did, instead of standing on the Altar and letting people look to me for help instead."

  My affection for him was a warm glow, a swell of nameless emotion, a pulse of soft comfort that came from being with someone who meant the world to me. Once, there'd been no barriers between us; we needed few words.

  Now, I wasn't sure if we had the same connection. My relationship with Marek seemed so much more intimate, so effortless. The contrast made me feel as if I'd suddenly become a stranger to my best friend. "I'm proud of you."

  "Well..." He stood, reminding me he'd grown up after all. "That was long ago. That kid is just a memory. Who we are now and what we've become is what's important today."

  My smile wavered. It wasn't that I didn't agree with him but... I wasn't sure what I'd become since I'd met Marek. I'd discovered things about myself I never knew were there or at least significant enough to notice. The previous night just made it even more obvious.

  "What's wrong?" Jared used his pastor's voice, the one that coaxed out the most resistant of confidences. I'd always caved when he invoked the voice of God's mediator.

  "Eh," I said. "Nothing that wouldn't sound like a confession. God knows you hear enough of those."

  "Yeah, but if you ever want to talk about something..."

  I chewed my lip. This was my chance to be honest. Once upon a time I told Jared everything. I wasn't sure I ought to be sharing those secrets, even with someone who could never and would never tell. Even with someone who knew me better than anybody. I had to keep the Demivamps a secret.

  Giving him a false smile to encourage the belief I had nothing to share, I blew off my chance to confide in him. "I know. Thanks. And anyways, Sister Johanna looks like she's getting a hernia. You better help her with that wheelbarrow."

  I scooped up the flower petals and stood, tossing them into the bushes. With a small wave good-bye, I started down the path. "See you later, Farmer Jared."