by J. R. Rain
Jake looks up from the fireplace when I walk in. Shock lasts only a second or two before he grins. “So, umm, how does this work?”
“First time?” I sashay closer.
“Being dinner, yes.”
“We should do that part first.”
“Not during?”
“No. It’s not like the movies. There’s nothing at all sexy about biting a hole in someone’s neck or arm and slurping up blood. It doesn’t set off some like ridiculous supernatural orgasm to feed while screwing—just makes a giant bloody mess.”
He laughs. “Okay, so what should I do?”
“For the feeding part? Just stand there. After that”—I wink—“I’m sure you know.”
Jake smiles. “All right.”
I lean into an embrace, and he smoothly wraps his around me in return. Surprisingly, there’s nothing awkward about the contact. Hell, it even felt right. What’s happening to me? I’m about to bury my face into his neck when I pull back. “You sure you’re okay with this?”
“Aren’t you like a higher order predator or something? Do you really need to ask? Don’t you just, you know, take?”
“Technically, yes. But I like you.”
His warm hands slide down to the small of my back. “I think I’m a bit overdressed for this restaurant.”
I grin and lean back. “Technically, it’s fast food. But all right.”
He removes his shirt and tosses it aside. Oh, yeah. Sparks are flying… except feeding is totally unsexy. Best to get that part over with as fast as possible. I give him a small mental poke so he doesn’t feel pain, extend my fangs, and attach myself to his neck. A quality of our bite—and the jury is still out between biochemical or psychic—renders a victim dazed. Even if we don’t consciously go in and erase the memory of feeding, most humans struggle to remember exactly what happened. Probably for the best.
Once I’ve consumed about a pint, I extract my fangs and keep licking at the holes until they close. No sense wasting blood. Jake stands there with a stupefied expression, which will last another few minutes. I take the liberty of peeling him out of his pants, easing him over backward onto the bed, and removing his shoes.
I lay beside him, my head propped up on one hand, teasing a finger around his chest until the fog wears off from his mind. Need to make sure he’s a fully willing participant for the fun part. He blinks rapidly and turns his head toward me.
“What happened?”
“Nothing yet. Thank you for letting me feed.”
“Am I dreaming?”
I shake my head. “Nope. You really are in bed naked with a hopelessly average vampire.”
He leans in for a brief kiss. “Mina, you are about as far from average as it gets.”
“You’re too kind.”
“Vampire, CIA agent, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen…”
“Oh, stop.” I grin.
“Seriously.” Jake pulls me on top of him. “How many other vampires work for the CIA?”
“Just me.”
“See? You’re one of a kind.”
“Jake Bishop, you talk entirely too much.” I go in for a long kiss.
We’ve had a rough day, but something tells me the night is going to be fun. And maybe a little rough, too.
Chapter Eight
In The Dark
The fire—among other activities—has made the little house toasty warm.
I sit on the end of the bed stitching the bullet holes in my bodysuit. Jake’s in the kitchen, heating some chicken we picked up on the way here. It takes me longer to repack my stuff into the suit’s pockets than fix the damage. That done, I grab his shirt off the floor and put it on. I’ve only got one set of clean clothes in my backpack and the suit’s still a bit damp. As long as I don’t do aerobics or climb trees, his shirt covers all the critical points. Good enough for the house.
Speaking of the house, I make my way around searching for the electronics I’m sure have to be here somewhere. There’s a fair amount of dust everywhere, so it doesn’t appear that the Agency has someone stopping by every month to clean… maybe once every six. Upon entering a small den/office room in the back of the house, I notice a soft humming, barely audible even to me, coming from a bookshelf.
The titles are all old classics like Moby Dick, The Iliad, and such. I study the row at eye level, then crouch a bit to peer at the one below it. A wire catches my eye at the back of the shelf behind the books, a spot too dark for a human to see without a flashlight. I pull a handful of books out of the way, revealing a grey wire running along the backing. It disappears into a pea-sized hole at the edge of an eight-inch-square panel.
I set the books on the desk and pick at the hole. The panel pops off, exposing a secure phone. At least, I’m assuming it’s a secure phone… probably connected to that little dish on the roof. I pull it out of the cubby and dial the number I use to check in with Andrew while on assignment.
“Giuseppe’s Pizza,” chirps a young-sounding woman.
“Hi. Can I get a medium pie with double anchovies? And do you guys deliver?”
“I’ll have to check on that. Did you want to add an appetizer?”
I think back to the challenge-response matrix for the right answer. Today’s Tuesday; the eleventh is an odd number… “Garlic knots.”
“All right. Who’s this going to?”
“Mina Barrett. My apartment’s in a gated community. Guest code for the gate is C1579-W.”
A pronounced click comes over the line.
The woman, dropping the overly-friendly retail voice, asks, “Hello, Agent Barrett. Checking in?”
“Something like that. Is Carson available?”
“Let me check.”
Twenty seconds of dead air pass.
“Mina,” says Carson by way of greeting. “What’s going on over there?”
“Need an alternate way out. Dominion is all over us. The whole thing was a setup to lure me here.”
Andrew hums. “You’re sure about that?”
“Got it from the head of a night walker sent to grab me.” I tap my foot. “It’s possible he could have been primed with misleading information and sent after me in hopes that I’d extract it from him, but that seems a bit too much effort. Unless, of course, the data Jake found is really earth-shattering and the Dominion want us to think it’s useless.”
“Any idea what he found?”
Spatula scrapes come from the kitchen.
“Or was given.” I frown. “Not yet. He says it’s on a memory stick that shouldn’t exist yet. Technology too advanced for the here and now. Either time travel or extraterrestrial tech.”
“Er, right…”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“Well, if the operation was a setup… that means the Dominion regards you as a threat. Take it as a compliment.”
“Oh, I do. I’m also completely thrilled to have an entire underground organization interested in eliminating me. Fortunately, I’m difficult to kill.”
“That’s the spirit,” says Andrew, a smile in his voice. “Give me a little while to make some arrangements and contact you back on this line as soon as I can. If you don’t answer, I’ll assume something went wrong and you’ve had to relocate.”
“That’s putting it nicely. And thanks.”
“Mina, why would the Dominion give away this information, if it’s as strange as you say it?”
“Maybe they didn’t know what they had until later.”
“Maybe.”
I hang up and head to the kitchen. Jake’s set out a plate for me with two chicken thighs and he’s already working on his portion. The only light in the room comes from an old oil lamp in the middle of the table. Holy crap we’ve gone rustic.
“Gets pretty dark out here at night,” he says between bites. “Haven’t seen dark like this since I was a kid.”
“Bet your farm at least had electricity. It’s not that dark to me.” I tear off some skin from the thigh and toss it in my mouth
.
“I bet. That’s gotta come in handy.”
“You have no idea. So, this thing you found…”
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small silver device two inches long, half an inch wide, and a quarter inch thick with an oval cross-section like a tiny muffler. A trapezoidal connector on the facing end has a ‘tongue’ inside covered top and bottom in hair-thin wires. I take it from him and look it over.
“Hmm. Except for the shape of the plug, it looks like a USB drive. Feels like plastic. Hey, at least I bet whoever made that thing doesn’t have to try plugging it in three times before it works.”
“Say again?”
“You know, USB? Doesn’t fit, flip it over, still doesn’t fit… flip it over again—goes in.”
He laughs. “True. I tinkered with it at my apartment. Connected a few bare wires. If you look closely at the connector, you’ll notice two thicker contacts on the bottom. They’re the power and ground. The voltage is identical to USB, which is part of the reason I was thinking time travel. This device is basically a few iterations forward from where we are now. Except for the trapezoidal shape. That’s where the alien thing came from.”
“Parallel design? Two disparate societies developing comparable technology without any contact.”
“Yeah.” He smiles. “Something like that. Or… maybe it’s Origin technology.”
I roll my eyes. “Vampire technology? You seriously believe that?”
“Let’s say I don’t not believe it. I’ve seen some things. I’m surprised you think it’s untrue.”
“The whole ‘vampires are from another planet, made the pyramids, came here to create humans as an ideal food source thing’ is just a little far-fetched. You’ve been reading too many tinfoil hat websites. Next thing I know, you’ll be telling me Bigfoot exists.”
He tilts his head. “Except there’s quite a few people out there—vampires included—who regard it as their actual history.”
“I’m only 125. I couldn’t care less about where we came from. I care about the here and now.”
Jake holds up the fob with the bizarre connector. “Explain this then, Ms. Here and Now. Did this thing come from the future, from some other alien race, or from vampires? Besides, if vampires are aliens, don’t you think it’s a little strange how similar we look? I mean... what are the odds of aliens looking like us... minus the fangs and weird eyes.”
“My eyes aren’t weird.”
“Sorry. Got caught up in the moment. They’re quite beautiful actually.”
“Thanks.” I eat another hunk of chicken. “This is surprisingly good for being so basic.”
“I did what I could. The safehouse pantry was a bit… sparse.” He hurries a few bites, then continues talking while chewing. “Also, vampires don’t merely look like us. The biological similarities between our species are shocking.”
“Fine. I get it. The odds that another species evolved out there in space so close to humans is astronomical. That’s why I think the alien bit is total bullshit. It’s too unfathomable to consider life starting on some other planet that’s almost a mirror of the life that started here.”
“What if the life that started here is because you guys came here and started it?”
“Ugh. Now you sound like my mother. I just don’t buy the alien angle.”
Jake holds up the fob with the bizarre connector. “Explain this then. Did it come from the future, from some other alien race, or from your home planet?”
“I have no idea. Maybe what’s in it will have those answers.” I sigh, then take another bite of chicken.
“If it’s not alien porn.”
He grins.
Once I’m done nearly choking on my laughter, I shake my head. “If we nearly died over intergalactic smut, I’m going to be pissed.”
Chapter Nine
Of Humans and Vampires
I finish off the rest of my chicken while staring at the damn unexplainable piece of technology sitting on the table between us.
Stories about my kind coming from another planet aren’t new. They’ve been going around as long as I can remember. Some of us believe that vampires arrived on Earth thousands of years ago, beyond the earliest records of any human existence. I’ve heard everything from an ‘exploration team’ to a ‘lifeboat’ fleeing a dying world. All the various versions of the story have a common thread: vampires somehow created humans as a perfect food source, engineering them to be close enough to us that they provided what we needed, but not so close as to be a threat. But I just can’t believe that. If we made humans, why did we spend thousands of years hiding among them?
If any of that had been true… the world would be a much different place, more along the lines of what the Dominion wants. I’m sure they believe that story, thinking that they deserve to rule over humans the way humans treat farm animals. That concept would be more palatable if humans weren’t so intelligent. They don’t have a problem treating monkeys like animals, but the intelligence gap between vampires and humans is so small as to be negligible. Making any kind of argument that they’re inferior to us from a pure sentience standpoint is ridiculous.
When I was a little kid, I believed those stories might be real, but as I grew up, they sounded sillier and sillier. If vampires originated on a different planet, why would we bother traveling however many millions of miles it would take to reach Earth only to use humans for a food source? And I just can’t get past how similar humans and vampires are. Maybe some other progenitor type civilization made us both, which explains the similarities. Or maybe vampires and humans branched off from each other thousands of years ago from a common ancestor, like Neanderthals and humans. For whatever reason, the idea that we made humans bothers me.
The body hair thing comes to mind again. Ancient humans had been a lot furrier than modern humans, which I am fairly sure is an evolutionary process resulting from their no longer being cave-dwelling nomadic hunters wearing animal hide garments. However long ago in the past, vampires could’ve taken a leap forward. We might be basically ‘advanced’ humans. I can’t explain how or why we diverged. But that thought feels more believable than space vampires.
Pretty sure you could add ‘space’ to anything and make it sound silly.
Space dog. See?
Anyway, if we had come from another world, where did the spacecraft go? Why don’t we have technology like laser pistols or teleportation? I lived through the 1900s. There’s no explanation for how a society like vampires could go from having the technology to travel across the galaxy to being stuck using horse-drawn carriages. Though, sometimes that Area 51 stuff does make me wonder. That whole ‘grey alien’ thing could be a disinformation campaign meant to keep humans thinking of aliens as ridiculous and impossible. Like, why would some advanced civilization pile into a starship and fly millions of miles just to poke some country bumpkin in the rear end with a metal wand?
“So what’s the plan?” asks Jake later in the evening.
“Get out of Germany as fast and quiet as possible, preferably without the Dominion noticing.”
He opens his mouth to say something, but the doorbell rings, so he reaches for his gun instead.
“It’s the phone,” I say. “No one’s at the door.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I didn’t hear anyone outside, and secret phones hidden in the backs of bookcases don’t usually ring like normal telephones.”
“And you know this how?” He eyes the back door.
“Call it a hunch.” I jump up and jog to the den. Sure enough, the phone’s light is flashing.
“It’s been more than half an hour. My pizza’s supposed to be free,” I say.
“Ha. Ha.” Andrew chuckles. “I’ve got something better. Go to Berlin, specifically, Schöneberg. Find a club called Nachtengeln. A man named Ernst Friedrich is on the payroll. He manages the place. Ernst will get the two of you set up with some new credentials and a quiet ride to the airport.”
“It’s been there since before you guys came out of the woodwork.”
I stare down at my toes, shaking my head. “That doesn’t prove it’s not a vampire club. It’s not like we spontaneously came into existence twenty years ago. We just didn’t tell the world we existed.”
“If it is a vampire club,” says Andrew, “they’ve done a helluva job keeping it secret.”
“Munich to Berlin… that’s roughly seven hours by car.”
“Yeah. I expected you’d spend the night at the safe house and head over there in the morning. If you left now, the place would be closed by the time you arrived. Friedrich is expecting you tomorrow evening. It’ll take him at least that long to get all the documents in order.”
“Got it. Thanks. Anything going on I should be aware of?”
“Things are fairly quiet at the moment from a Dominion perspective.”
“All right. I’ll be in contact soon.”
“Get back safe.”
“That’s the plan.”
After I hang up, I stash the phone in its cubby and put the books back on the shelf. To avoid the off chance that the marks I made in the dust clue someone in on the phone’s location, I kill the next half hour dusting the entire room.
“Do you always do housework when you crash somewhere?” asks Jake from behind me. He’s leaning against the doorjamb with his arms folded, a rogue’s grin on his face.
“What can I say? I’m OCD.” I’m sure he knows exactly why I’m dusting. Munich might be his first assignment, but he’s not that clueless. “I’ll sleep first, then keep watch the rest of the night. We leave for Berlin in the morning.”
“You sure you want to sleep first?” He wags his eyebrows.
“Tempting, but yes. Sleep.”
“Worth a shot. How long before I wake you?”
“Four hours if I don’t get up before that.”
He nods.
We both go into mission mode, eschewing the small talk for the sake of not being caught off guard. I hit the bedroom while he returns to the kitchen, presumably to clean up after our meal. Within a moment of me lying down and focusing my thoughts on rest, I’m awake again. Since Jake didn’t do it, I assume less than four hours have passed—or something bad has occurred. It’s still dark out, which feels normal to me. Most of the time, I tend to crash around midnight or one in the morning and wake up before sunrise. If I have something to do, I’ll occasionally stay up later, but those times are rare enough that the idea of waking up to daylight feels unusual.