Laws of the Blood 1: The Hunt

by Susan Sizemore

  It went on for several more pages, ending just as Selim stuffed Jager’s body in the trunk of her car. While she hadn’t witnessed Larry Jager’s demise, she was certain every detail was absolutely correct, that it had happened just as the spare words of the script laid it out. She didn’t know how this could have happened. She didn’t know what to do about it.

  She looked unhappily at Joseph. “I wish to God I’d never started this.”

  His confusion was a palpable throb against her senses. “You admitting to writing that—heresy?”

  “Break the First Law? Are you crazy? Of course I didn’t write it! I mean I wish I hadn’t told Selim about this script just because I thought it might distract him. I didn’t dream it would really be about our community. I just thought—”

  “Doesn’t matter what you thought. Reality matters. What the Strigoi Council does about it matters.”

  Siri held up a warning hand. “Never mind the Council. It’s Selim we have to worry about.”

  “Selim’s going to be in trouble over this. What if the script mentions Miriam? How can I protect her?”

  “You can’t, companion.”

  “We’re all dead.” Joe paled. “We’re not supposed to be in movies!”

  “We aren’t,” she pointed out. “Not yet. This film hasn’t been made yet.”

  “But it’s been green lighted. It’s going to get made.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nobody Buffalo sixty-sixes an Arc Light production.”

  Siri grabbed Joe by the front of his shirt and shook him like a terrier. “Speak English! What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Power,” he responded, with a calm succinctness that was terrifying. “Money. Influence. Clout. Knowing where the bodies are buried,” Joe added with a twisted grin. She let him go and stepped back as he went on. “Most importantly, the people at Arc Light have a moneymaking track record with the studios. They get what they want.”

  “Money talks.” Siri breathed a despondent sigh. Joe nodded. She wanted to pound her head against the wall. She wanted to pack up all her belongings, stuff Selim’s unconscious body in the trunk of her car, and get the hell out of town. Possibly off the planet. Everything was bleak and hopeless and confused—and there was something inside her she couldn’t reach that was very, very important. It hurt to even try to think about it. She gave a hollow, aching laugh. “Yesterday I was only worried about all of East L.A. going up in flames. Now I have to deal with the whole town exploding.” Her temples throbbed with the mother of all headaches. “What the hell am I going to do?”

  Joe put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re not going to do anything, companion.”

  He was right. She was going to have to take this to Selim. It was for him to deal with. Officially. Oh, God.

  Siri swallowed hard and looked out the window at the late-afternoon light outside. It wasn’t that long until sunset. She just didn’t know whether to welcome or dread the coming of night.

  Chapter 18

  “YOU SEEM TO be taking this remarkably calmly.”

  “Do I?”

  Selim stood in the center of his living room and looked at the smashed chaos around him. He didn’t quite remember the last several minutes, but the evidence of how he’d spent the time was abundantly clear. He tried to smile at Siri. She was wide-eyed with terror, her back pressed into the corner farthest away from where he stood. He would like to tell her that it was the sound of her voice, calmly sarcastic with an underpinning of terror, that brought him back from the edge of madness. He would like to reassure her.

  He said, “We’re dead.”

  This wasn’t what she expected to hear. “Selim!”

  He picked up a sheet of paper that had come to rest on some ripped-out stuffing from the couch. The broken glass of a framed picture crunched under his shoe soles as he approached his companion. Selim waved the paper under her nose. “How do I fight this? How do I save the world from the truth?”

  Siri’s hands balled into fists. “Think of something!” she spat the words at him.

  The last thing she’d expected from Selim was this fit of temper. It had been impressive to watch as he first read the script pages, then tossed them in the air and set about ripping, rending, and tearing apart everything he could get his hands on. Hands, not claws or fangs. That he reacted with a human fit of temper surprised her, and the sickening waves of hopeless futility that mixed with his fury sickened her. She felt small, fragile, and afraid, witnessing the swift destruction of so many old, treasured possessions, but somehow she actually felt better when he was finished.

  “You’ve been needing to redecorate, anyway,” she said as he continued to stare at her from inches away.

  Selim’s mouth opened and closed several times, like a landed fish.

  Selim let the page fall to the floor between them. It landed on the torn sepia-tinted photograph of an old girlfriend. A really old girlfriend. They’d met in 1880. Maybe he tried to remember the past too much.

  “Sometimes I think you have more souvenirs and relics than the old lady in Titanic,” Siri said, picking up his thought.

  “Don’t,” he told her grimly, “talk to me about movies.”

  Siri couldn’t bear to look into the cold fire in his eyes. She was looking at the floor when she spoke again. “What are you going to do about If Truth Be Told? You have to do something!” she added loudly, after he was silent for a long time.

  He put his hands on her shoulders and drew her away from her safe corner. “I know.” He sounded remarkably reassuring for a person who was utterly clueless. “I’ll think of something.”

  “What?”

  Selim was momentarily blinded by an image of himself—only taller—all right, himself as played by, say Keanu, struggling back and forth across an underlit billboard catwalk with an absurdly muscular, tattooed, and pierced Larry Jager. He couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it all. Other images played through his mind, and he just kept on laughing. Better to laugh than cry over a mindrape he couldn’t and didn’t want to remember. He’d already had his tantrum over that.

  When he stopped laughing, he was sitting atop a layer of debris on the living room floor. Siri was seated in front of him, legs crossed, her expression a cross between worry and exasperation. “Sorry,” he told her. “It’s just—” He chuckled. “I rented Blade once. It was the funniest movie I ever saw.”

  “It wasn’t a comedy.”

  “You aren’t a vampire.” He chuckled. “You remember the opening scene? Where the hero kills off more movie vampires than there are real ones on the whole West Coast in the first five minutes? With garlic? And silver bullets? Vampires aren’t allergic to silver, that’s werewolves.”

  “I don’t believe this. You said not to talk to you about movies.”

  “I did, didn’t I? Guess there’s no escaping pop culture.”

  “Vampires don’t go to vampire movies.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “You did.”

  “I lied. We don’t sleep in coffins, either. Actually, some do, but that’s just youthful pretension.”

  She crossed her arms. He thought it was to keep from throwing something at him. “You frequently lie to me.” He watched her force the urge to sling recriminations aside. Her tone was bracing and abrasive. “Stop talking so much, Selim. Verbal hysteria isn’t going to save our asses. Let’s deal with one problem at a time, shall we?”

  “I love you.” They looked at each other for a few moments. He was ebullient, feeling light as a feather. Happy to have let himself say those words, even if he was babbling about everything else. He supposed this mood, this love they shared while they gazed into each other’s eyes, was also mostly hysteria, born of crisis. So what? It was still the truth. “Because I love you,” Selim went on, and a laugh bubbled out of him again, “I am going to tell you a true thing.” It was not a big thing. Not the names of the members of the Council or the way to destroy a six-hundred-y
ear-old vampire or how even a mortal could easily kill a fledgling or that wooden stakes through the heart hurt like hell. It was simply, “Enforcers love vampire movies. Always have.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Selim shook his head. “It’s just that we always identify with the Van Helsing character.” He picked up and read one of the script pages again. “But those movies aren’t real. They have nothing to do with our banal, middle-class existence.” A flash of hope from Siri speared through him. It felt pleasant, but he rejected it in an instant. “This is real.”

  “But—it’ll just be another movie. It won’t seem any more real than any other horror film to the people in the theaters. Will it?”

  “Won’t it? What if somebody is outing us, Siri? Using the media to break open thousands of years of silence? A vampire is deliberately breaking the first and most important Law of our kind and using the entertainment industry to do it. This script is probably only the first blow.”

  “A vampire?”

  “Has to be. A strig? Or maybe a very, very powerful human psychic. I’d prefer if it was human.”

  “Why would a vampire break the First Law? Even strigs aren’t that suicidal, are they?”

  “I don’t know. Every vampire knows that human awareness of our existence will end in our extinction. Every time its happened in the past—” A stab of fear went through him, though the memories that played in his mind were not his own. His kind had their own mental film archive, he supposed, passing warning images on to the fledglings. “Humans don’t allow any predators to be equal to them on the food chain. Lions and tigers and bears haven’t fared very well, have they, against those damn, smart apes? A creature that feeds on those apes doesn’t stand a chance if they find out about it. Us,” he amended. “Or it could be a power play of some kind. The Council won’t stand for it, of course. No mortal will know of our existence. Everyone who has come into contact with this script will die to cover our existence, and that includes all of us characters in this little drama.”

  She nodded miserably. “That’s what I thought would happen. But there has to be a way out. We have to think of something. Maybe something else is going on, and all we have to do is . . .” Her gaze was on him, but she sighed as her sight went inward, and outward, leaving the room and him behind.

  Selim waited a few moments before quietly asking, “What do you see?”

  “I’m not seeing anything.”

  He scuttled across the floor to put his arms around her. She was stiff in his embrace as he drew her onto his lap. Selim tapped Siri’s temple with his forefinger. “There’s something going on there.”

  “Hearing something,” she mumbled.

  He softly kissed the spot he’d touched. “What do you hear, sweetheart?” His voice was an insistent, compelling whisper.

  “Music.” Confusion radiated from her. And faint indignation that brought an affectionate smile to Selim’s lips.

  “What kind of music?”

  “An oldies radio station?”

  He didn’t blame her for being indignant. This was hardly the time for her psychic talent to switch into some kind of radio receiver. He couldn’t bring her out of her vision state, no matter how trivial the experience, no matter how much time it took away from their life-and-death crisis. All he could do was be patient and help her through it. “What song’s playing on the radio, Siri?” he coaxed gently.

  “Jefferson Starship—no, Airplane.”

  Meant nothing to him, but there was a sixties sound to the band’s name. He’d bypassed that era and gone from Tommy Dorsey to Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in his musical tastes. “Oh?” he said, more to make reassuring noise than anything else.

  “Something else before that. Something about sultans.” Now, here was something interesting, but before he could make delicate inquiries, Siri stiffened and pushed away from him. “It’s gone now. And I have a headache,” she added as he helped her to her feet.

  She didn’t normally suffer side effects from the gift any more than she normally heard rather than saw. He didn’t like her reactions, but he didn’t have time to explore them. “Stress?” he suggested.

  “Sure.” She shrugged. “Why not? Plenty to be stressed over.” She turned a bleak gaze on him once more, breaking his heart. “Selim, what are we going to do about If Truth Be Told?”

  “I’ll think of something,” he promised, just to be saying something. He had no ideas. He noticed the photo on the floor once more. It reminded him that there was somewhere he had to be, an appointment to keep. Business as usual. Might as well pretend everything was normal for the moment. He took Siri’s hand. “Give me a ride, please? I have to see Alice.”

  Siri would wait in the car when he went anywhere else, but never on the rare occasions when she drove him to this large colonial-style house on a quiet, well-groomed street in Burbank. She claimed that the neighborhood made her nervous. Truth was, she was jealous. Although tonight she made a point of reminding Selim that a human murderer could well be lurking in the bushes.

  “Not around this house,” he answered.

  “Yeah, maybe,” she grudgingly agreed, but she came in with him anyway.

  He shouldn’t have brought her with him in the first place, but it was good to have her company, even though they hadn’t spoken much during the drive. Rene looked delighted to see them when he opened the door. Kind and courteous, this particular one of Alice’s several companions was a world-famous French chef. He invited Siri into his kitchen after telling Selim that Madam was waiting for him upstairs. There was no irony in Rene’s use of the word. Selim noticed Siri’s faint, nasty smile behind Rene’s back, though he knew she would never actually make a rude comment about Alice Fraser. “Alice,” he had once told his companion, “was a successful madam when I met her. Why should she change a profession she’s good at just because she became a vampire?” Siri had just sniffed disdainfully. He didn’t think it was at Alice’s business, but because he was responsible for the madam becoming a vampire.

  Alice opened her office door before he could knock. She gave him a quick hug as she drew him inside. The office was decorated in dark wood and antiques, yet the computer on the rolltop desk didn’t look out of place. The room smelled of roses and fresh coffee. Selim took a seat in a wing chair. The fragrant roses, a mix of red and yellow blossoms, were in a cut-crystal vase on a small table beside his chair.

  “There’s darkness downstairs,” Alice greeted him. She poured coffee from a tall carafe on a sideboard and handed a cup to him. “Somebody’s in great pain. Siri, I think.” He nodded but didn’t try to explain. She went on, “Rene’s doing something with a dessert. Maybe crême brûlée will help cheer her up. You don’t look very good yourself, darling.” She took a seat on the footstool in front of his chair and looked up at him through her long eyelashes. Her voice was rich and husky. “Tell me all about it.”

  There was always something persuasive about Alice, in her tone, her manner. It was the vibe she naturally put off, gentle, caring, comforting, and insistent, even when she wasn’t trying.

  “Actually,” she said before he could tell her anything, “it’s going to take more than a crême brûlée to cheer me up.” She drained the hot coffee and set the cup on the floor. “I hate feeling like this, Selim.”

  “It’ll be over soon. That’s what we need to discuss.” He reached out and touched her cheek. “You’re the calmest vampire in town,” he told her. “I appreciate that.”

  He wanted very much to tell her about his recent encounter with Kamaraju, to explain that even Don Tomas was edgy and reckless. He wanted to tell her a lot of things, but one simply didn’t. Couldn’t. The nests already knew more about each other than they should, communicated with each other more than the Council liked. It was hard enough to keep secrets in their very psychic little world. He also blamed himself for letting Siri establish so many friendships, no matter how useful he found the information she brought him. Even a week ago, all th
e community’s communications links had seemed harmless, very modern. Now he thought that the Council was right, vampires belonged firmly entrenched in the fourteenth century. They should keep their mouths shut and their nests secret from each other if they wanted to survive.

  Alice brought him out of his reverie as she held out a hand that shook faintly. “If this is calm—” She touched her canines. “Fangs are so unattractive, Selim.”

  “Not on you, Alice.”

  “I very nearly bit a customer last night,” she complained. “I don’t even normally take customers. For some reason I thought sex with a stranger might be interesting, fun. It wasn’t a distraction; I need the cure.”

  “Can you hold out a couple more nights?” She gave a reluctant nod. “Good. I have someone in mind for you.”

  He was lying, trying to act like he was in control. When he’d woken up this evening, his plan had been to inquire of Alice who she’d like to hunt. He was going through the motions, acting normal to keep anyone from getting suspicious that the city’s Enforcer had totally screwed up and been screwed over, and that they were all going to die because he wasn’t strong enough to keep his mind from being invaded. He couldn’t afford their finding out his weaknesses, his inexperience, his age, and turning on him.

  Her demeanor brightened considerably. “Anyone I know?”

  He forced a laugh. “I doubt it, nest leader.”

  “You’re mad about our hit list, aren’t you, babe? That was Mike and Kama,” Alice assured him, and smiled at his sardonic lift of an eyebrow. “Mostly. They knew that Miriam wouldn’t mix business with Hunting. They did call me. Tom knew about it because I called him, but he kept out of it. I thought he’d tell you.” Selim shook his head. “Foolish of him. Man isn’t guarding his back as well as he thinks he is. Kama and Mike would gang up on Don Tomas if they thought they could get away with it, you know.”

  “I know. They’re scared of rumors and shadows. They talk too much, think they can make alliances.”