Brightblade

by C. T. Phipps

  “You’re a flaming sword wielding dhampyr monster hunter. Maybe you should be afraid of yourself. Maybe people should be in general.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Meeting the In-Laws

  “You’re still standing away from me,” Arthur said, sadly.

  “Yes,” I said. “As long as you’re smoking that, I’ll be a few feet away.”

  “I thought you didn’t mind?”

  “I mind it less than cigarettes. People with empathic powers do not need secondhand highs. Next thing you know, the entire room has the munchies and none of us are focused on stopping evil wizard vampire minions.”

  “Clearly, a dangerous potentiality,” Arthur said.

  “You never know. I’ll let you finish it,” I said as I turned around to walk back inside.

  “Nah, it’s cool. I do need to go back inside, though.” Arthur finished and stamped it out against the side of the wall. “I’ve found that a lot more vampires could use a long drag. It’s why I encourage my followers to feed on stoners. They’re a lot more mellow that way.”

  “I think the munchies with vampires could backfire horribly,” I said, dryly. “Before you go, I would like to ask a few more questions if you’re no longer smelling like your room back home. Like, what do you know about Samvrutha Mitra anyway?”

  “Back to the mission, eh?” Arthur asked.

  “The job,” I corrected. “The mission is what I’d say if I was a secret agent. Secret agents don’t have bills to pay, which I’m already screwing up because I was supposed to pick up a werebear on the way back. Instead of, you know, doing this for free.”

  “You volunteered,” Arthur replied.

  “Yeah, I’m stupid that way,” I said. “However, I’m not sure there’s much more to say here.”

  “You still can’t accept why I became undead?” Arthur asked.

  “Accepting is different from understanding,” I said, looking back at the bar. “I’ve been half-undead for about an hour and I already can’t imagine living this way fully.”

  “Life is wasted on the living, while undeath is a Dead Man’s Party,” Arthur said, before starting to hum some Oingo Boingo.

  “But you know her, right?” I asked, desperate to get back to professional talk. There was just too much emotion here.

  “You should probably ask Alex,” Arthur said.

  “I’m asking you. Call it brother-sister spy mission profiling time. You said you knew her.”

  “I only know her professionally.”

  “She’s a hooker? Err, stripper?” I asked.

  “Neither,” Arthur said. “She’s a witch.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Like I said, she used to serve Thoth and was changed by Peter,” Arthur said. “It was an emergency transformation like mine but even more severe. Sam, which is what her friends call her, has a very complicated history with the undead in this city.”

  “I’d make a joke about lazy American tongues, but I’d be very hypocritical,” I said. “Also, who doesn’t have a complicated history in this town? Ours needs a flow chart.”

  Arthur chuckled then frowned. “A couple of years ago, her husband and she were just mages-for-hire. They’d been low level House assets that had never really gone through the same process you, I, or Alex went through. They were left alone despite Sam’s mother being a powerful agent and demon slayer. Sam was just a low-level herbalist and witch by comparison.”

  Her mother never wanted that life for her child, Zadkiel replied. But the blood of heroes runs in Samvrutha’s veins.

  “I think she may have faked her power levels being lower than they were,” Arthur replied. His voice lowered and his look became disgusted. “Either way, her husband ended up getting himself turned for the same reason Minji did: cancer. Maybe it was a plan by the Barons, maybe not, as it happens to other people who can’t afford regular health care. They had some dhampyr children and the Change destroyed him. He became debt-ridden and tried to eat their children—because dhampyr are yummy.”

  I stared at Arthur in horror. “And she willingly went along with that?”

  “No,” Arthur said. “She didn’t. Sam ended up owing all her husband’s debts to Thoth. He took her on as a Blood Servant and offered his protection to her children. Like many Blood Servants, she ended up critically injured on the job and changed against her will by the bellidix.”

  Peter, what have you done? I asked myself. “Against her will?”

  “She was out cold when it happened,” Arthur said. “Or newly dead. Either way she couldn’t give her consent.”

  “She didn’t have a living will?” I asked.

  “Do you?” Arthur asked.

  “Now I do. How did she take the change?” I asked. Suddenly, I felt a lot of, well, resonance with her.

  “She didn’t commit suicide,” Arthur said, pausing. “Or try to. So, she took it pretty well. Sunlight walks and self-inflicted immolation are still the common ways for newborns to die among our kind.”

  “That’s what passes for taking it well?” I asked.

  Arthur shrugged. “Sam and I used to be fairly close since Thoth was once Ashura’s co-ruler or at least Chancellor. We haven’t spoken since she became one of our kind. Mostly, she’s done her best to stay removed from vampire society in general and has renewed her ties with the wand community. The Star Chamber doesn’t normally accept vampires as members, but they made an exception for her.”

  “The Star Chamber,” I said, wracking my brain for the name. There were so many damned cults, sects, and secret societies these days. You couldn’t throw a rock with your TK without hitting two or three of them. This one was unfamiliar, though. “Never heard of it.”

  “They’re the House-Lite,” Arthur said. “They’re mages who try to influence the government rather than control it outright. The Men in Black are their allies and Alex is technically a member of both. I wouldn’t call them friends of the Vampire Nation but they seem to know we’ll both go on the witch burning pyre if the government decides to call for a new Burning Times.”

  “Were any of those real witches?” I asked.

  “I asked Ashura and apparently some of the judges were vampires having a laugh,” Arthur said. “You know, I sometimes think that I may not be on the side of the good guys.”

  “Just remember, humans as a category have done plenty of horrible things on their own,” I said. “Nobody’s a good guy or bad guy because of what they are.”

  Arthur raised an eyebrow at me. “Really.”

  “Yeah, I said that. Shut up or I’ll remember you just told me about a vampire trying to eat his children and change my mind.”

  Arthur stared at her. “The Need is something that is overwhelming, and every day we struggle with it. You can live off animal blood if you really try; you’ll need to supplement it with a little human blood on occasion, but it’s possible. You don’t have to kill, not if you take a little at a time while someone makes sure you don’t go overboard. A spotter is what I call him, others call them watchers or lifeguards. However, if you don’t have blood then the animal inside will take over. If you lose control, even for a minute, you can do something uncontrollable because nature—divinely driven or not—has made vampires predators. Our instincts are to feed. It is our conscience that makes us want not to. Guess how often humans defy their darker nature?”

  “Well, I’d be out of a job if they were any good at that, but most don’t even think about eating their kids.”

  “Most don’t even among vampires. However, the Change can bring the worst out of people who otherwise have their darker side under control. People who might kill or molest their children if they weren’t watched,” Arthur said. “I try to make my prey those people. You know, when I need to be in top shape. It’s amazing how few people care when they vanish.”

  Not often did you hear your brother confess to casual murder. He walked past me to the bar.

  “Great, now I have to go around to avoid ruining his d
ramatic exit,” I muttered.

  “We should talk,” Ashura said, appearing behind me again.

  I practically jumped. I was getting sick of her doing that. Usually, my TK sense and Empathy powers clued me in when someone was behind me but she just sort of popped in and out. “Sure, talk, fine. What should we talk about?”

  “I wish to make peace with you given we are family,” Ashura said, looking slightly irritated about it. “Given you might become one of us, I can’t go with my original plan of waiting for you to die.”

  “Oh, I’m sure if I become undead, I’ll soon be corrupted into thinking it’s all just fine!” I wondered if she’d noticed the sarcasm.

  Ashura frowned and her fangs were visible. “I am no longer able to read human emotions the way I used to, but I’m fairly sure that’s sarcasm.”

  She rubbed her temples and looked like she was getting a migraine headache. Did vampires get migraine headaches? I wouldn’t have thought so, but it looked like we did.

  You’re not a vampire yet, Zadkiel said.

  Yet, I replied.

  I took the time to read Ashura’s emotions for the first time and it was a painful cacophony of conflicting feelings, emotions, memories, and desires all bouncing around in her head at once. It was pretty much the opposite of what she felt from Arthur even as Ashura struggled to push it all down. It was like someone had walked up to the walls that normal people kept in their brain and took a sledgehammer to it.

  “It was half-sarcasm,” I said. “Half-fatalism. It’s my standard defense against feeling vulnerable since I gave up drinking.”

  Ashura nodded. “Are you worried that with Arthur removing Sophia’s tampering with your mind that you will return to being a drunk?”

  I blinked. “I hadn’t been until you mentioned it.”

  Ashura sucked in her breath.

  “I would offer to fix the barriers in your mind, but I doubt you want me poking around in your consciousness. I am going to also say I am not as powerful as I used to be, but six-hundred-years is still six hundred years.”

  “I don’t want anyone screwing with my head,” I said. “But…let’s say I hold out the option if I screw sobriety up. Those weren’t good weeks for me, or anyone.”

  Ashura looked down with her wild eyes. “I know something about addiction and the struggle with it but I suppose all vampires do. It is long a debate whether one should ever change those who suffer addictions. The similarity to the Need is so much that some believe those who have control issues should never be made while others believe only, they understand what it is like to cope.”

  Okay, this conversation had gone in a weird direction. “I’m…sorry?”

  “I do not wish you to hate me, Ashley. You are important to Arthur and Arthur is important to me. I wish for him to be happy, but it has been a long time since I have associated with vampires as young as him. He is so…human.”

  “That’s not a bad thing,” I said.

  Ashura cocked her head to one side. “Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Ashura said. “I remember my last pleasant memories of humanity were living in a village in Wallachia,” Ashura said. “I was called Illinca then and while I was a peasant, it was not an unpleasant life. I thought my parents loved me.”

  “Wallachia? Like Dracula’s Wallachia?” I asked. “Really?”

  “A great hero,” Ashura said. “I lost my virginity when the Janissaries came to our village to kidnap young boys to turn into members of their own kind while taking young women like me as plunder. From there, I was educated as a bed slave and joined the ranks of the Sultan’s brother’s harem. They lied about my virginity of course. Unfortunately, the brother was the Bloodslave of Marduk and I soon became part of his harem as well. Well, perhaps not so unfortunate. Marduk was enlightened for an Ancient and did not think women were purely decorative. It took about four years to persuade him to change me and after that, I spent decades killing slavers.”

  “And yet you keep slaves yourself now,” I said, judging her more harshly than I might have.

  “Time wears us all down,” Ashura said. “Slavery is the most awful thing a person can be afflicted with, yet many people still gave up their children to save them when famine loomed. Or maybe I’ve just turned myself into a hypocrite. I have not held onto my humanity as well as some Old Ones.”

  Was every vampire’s story horrific? “We’re all people. Being turned into a different type of person shouldn’t deprive you of your basic humanity.”

  “You think I find vampires to be worse than humans,” Ashura said, smiling. “No, I think your race is much worse.”

  I blinked as I realized Ashura completely believed that. Indeed, the very act of saying that calmed her fractured mind. “What?”

  “Humans are monsters,” Ashura said. “I fear for Arthur whenever he indulges his human side because I worry I will lose him to the terrible thing that I brought him out of.”

  “You’ll have to work at it to sell me on that one. Sure, some humans are bastards, but we don’t have a single sin that vampires don’t have or make worse.”

  Ashura said, “You are very confidant for a woman who did not live through slavery, colonialism, two World Wars, and the slow end of the environment.”

  It wasn’t quite, “You are a wise man, Professor, for someone who has not yet lived even a single lifetime.” It was close, though.

  “Vampires kill for food,” Ashura replied. “We are, however, the defenders of the world from the Elder Gods and demonkind. Art, culture, science, and matters of faith are ones that we are able to study for centuries. The deadening of our emotions means that while passion is something we feel keenly, it is something that we must work to maintain and cultivate. My master freed me from the shackles of slavery and among vampires I was an equal despite both my race as well as sex. The undead know no nationality, race, or creed but our own. You see us as degenerate and brutal, but it is not being a vampire that made Sophia what she is, it is her refusal to rise above what she was raised to be.”

  “Oh, so Sophia is no true Scotsman, I mean vampire. Sure, vampires are better, as long as I ignore the vampires that aren’t, who are clearly too human and not vampire enough, if I define vampire as meaning the good traits you suggest. Vampires kill for food? You were about to kill Minji not ten minutes ago. Because you were hungry? I don’t recall that being mentioned once. You all kill for the same reasons humans do: power, convenience, and just have one other reason tacked on.”

  Ashura said, “Why don’t you ask your angel?”

  “Are you confidant of its answer?” I asked. “Because I know mine.”

  “I know that I am willing to look after those I love and don’t care about anyone else,” Ashura said. “A vampire will preserve its territory, its harem, its companions, and it’s consorts. I saw many humans who would not. I have been betrayed and assaulted by many of my kind over the years, but Arthur is the only one I love. I just fear that you will poison his mind against me. Then I will be alone.”

  It was kind of strange how her flimsy argument resonated. “Sounds pretty human to me. You say vampires want to preserve the environment, but some don’t. I’d say most don’t. Just like a lot of humans do. You’re not painting as much of a difference as you think. Which means, ironically, you’re doing a better job of defending Arthur’s position to me than he was. We all have our hungers, our desires. We all sacrifice things to gain them, and then find out we sacrificed more than we expected.”

  “Enlightened misanthropy is a skill of Arthur’s,” Ashura said, dryly. “He is more vampire than most vampires, trying to embrace our ancient religion and ways. I would say he has a convert’s zeal but most newborns these days just go back to their normal lives and act like being a vampire is merely a change in diet as well as schedule. Our culture is being diluted among that of normal humans. For better or worse.”

  “People change,” I said. “Doesn’t everyone worry about their culture being diluted wh
en the traditions they were born to fade before the tide of history?”

  “It’s a bit different when you have the possibility of living forever,” Ashura said. “When a vampire reaches Old One status, it becomes impossible for anything other than a vampire or angel to slay them. Vampires were present in Japan when the napalm and atomics fell yet returned after decades of regeneration. For the oldest of our kind, the end of all life on Earth by an asteroid would just mean we were trapped here alone. Why I helped fund that Musk man’s space travel in hopes of spreading humanity to the stars before this world is spent. He will make a good vampire in a few more years.”

  “He’s misfocused,” I said. “Making another planet livable for humans is, by definition, harder than keeping one already livable.”

  “I wonder what could possibly be holding us back from doing that?” Ashura asked, coyly.

  “Your point is taken. Doesn’t change that I bet most vampires are not recycling.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Ashura said, sounding sad. “Humans taste differently now than they did a century ago and I can remember sights you would not imagine just looking up to the sky in cities. The air is different and so much else is gone that once was. Wonderful things no one will ever experience again.”

  “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain,” I quoted Blade Runner.

  “Arthur made me watch that movie,” Ashura said. “I sympathized more with the Replicants than the humans.”

  “I think that was the point,” I said. “New Detroit exists to show humans and supernaturals can live together in harmony. Maybe I need to start believing in that dream too if we’re going to be a family.”

  Ugh. I felt unclean for saying that.

  “I heard that,” Ashura said.

  “Sorry,” I muttered.

  “If it doesn’t work, we’re all screwed,” Ashura said, puffing her chest. “So, let’s fight to keep it going.”

  “Agreed.”

  It was as close to a statement of truce with the brother-stealing Old One as I was going to get. Then Ashura had to ruin it.