They gave him a bath that night, let the grime and blood soak off in rivulets, exposing all his wounds—healed and unhealed alike—to their careless exploration. Cija ran some sort of hotel shampoo-packet through his hair that smelled of sage and lemon, and exclaimed in surprise at the result: “Ve-ry pret-ty,” she said, her “outside voice” (as he’d come to call it in his own mind, to distinguish it from either the half-glimpsed roil of thought or that off-putting subvocal communication they used amongst themselves) just a bit too rough, too slow, still tinged with whatever original accent she’d had, even after being run through their million-year proto-tongue Creole as a filter.
Combing her claws carelessly outward from the roots of his overgrown mop, bangs drooping almost to his lower lip now, and scoring away a bit of beard as she did; he damn well knew he’d looked a whole lot pret-ti-er a half-year back, ‘round when he’d first started his tour through the circuit—before he’d stopped bathing, or shaving, or talking to anybody he could tell had a pulse. And complaining, as she did: “You smell like us, but you taste like them. It’s very confusing.”
Goran shrugged, licking his fingers clean. “Smells like us, specific, ‘cause we just got done rubbing ourselves all over him. He’s not a toy, Cija,” he warned.
“But he could be.”
And: Yes, he wanted to say, yeah, I could. I can be anything you want. Let me, please. Let me.
Please.
But it hurt too much, and he didn’t know who he was anymore, and then he was gone for a while—extinguished, snuffed out, like a black wax Sabbat candle. He’d been up for what seemed like months, always in transit, passed like a party favour from pride to pride; his fever for assimilation through emulation had spiked at last, and he slept well, dreamlessly. Cradled between corpses.
—
That first bunch of ‘em he’d met in an all-night highway strip-mall drugstore, somewhere considerably closer to home. He’d seen them coming from a literal mile away, knowing in his gut how they could see him, too: not just background noise, potential prey.
That he stood out to them in some way which intrigued, itched at them the way scar tissue did—some frequency they were all tuned to, him and them alike, though he only got the fuzz and the beat, most times. Static and hiss, lost between stations.
“You smell like us,” the first one to look directly at him said, words echoing magnified through his skull’s orbit, in-mouth/in-mind. And: “I dreamed of you,” he replied, eagerly. “Knew you was gonna be here.”
“Of vampires? Not so special. Many do.”
“No, I dreamed you: Saoirse, Owain, Chuyia. Y’all met near the Black Sea, on a pilgrimage to Chorazin, right? ‘There to salute the Prince of the Air.’”
The first one (Owain) simply kept on looking at him, blinkless eyes almost all-white between slitted white lashes, with a faint black ring ‘round each iris and pupils like chips of ice. While the second girl, Chuyia—chai-scented hair in a braid to her waist, one gold strand fringed with small coins linking nostril to earlobe on the left-hand side—cast her red-tinged gaze down at her bare, clawed feet, and murmured:
“…perhaps worth examining at…closer quarters…”
Saoirse tittered and stroked his cheek, her own eyes eight-ball haemorrhage black, each twisted nail frosted a different, inappropriately candy-bright colour. “He’s certainly warm enough to seem edible, at least. Whatever else he might turn out to be.”
Owain shrugged the idea away, like someone ugly-drunk was trying to feel him up. Said: “Just another bug-eater, another would-be tool. There’s a new one every mile in this damn country.”
“No, I ain’t like nothin’ you seen before—nothin’ like them, anyhow. Never have been. But I am like you. I mean…” Adding, desperate, as they just kept on staring, fixedly: “Why would I dream you, your names and lives and all, if I wasn’t?”
“Why indeed?” Chuyia murmured, as Owain hissed, dismissively. But there was just enough room for one more in the van, as it happened—and after all, they were already hungry.
Their nightside existence turned out to be built far less on glamour and magick than on endless boredom, constant flight. Enabling it was steady yet stultifying work, almost as brain-dead as any other crap job he’d ever had—all but the blood part, coming hand-in-whatever as it did with sex parts of every possible combination. Though even that wasn’t exactly the way the books and movies had warned it might be: They needed far less than anyone seemed to think in order to keep going, far more often. Five small meals a cycle, just like that Caveman Diet the girls’ magazines kept talking up.
So he settled into the routine, head-first. Drove during the day, when they were asleep; booked the rooms, rented storage spaces, made sure the windows were well-taped over by the time they woke and the evenings well-stocked with a steady stream of treats—hookers fresh enough not to be too diseased, experimenting students, runaway junkie-wannabes who hadn’t quite connected with the habit that’d kill ‘em yet. And now, never would.
He healed fast, thought on his feet, made a nice chew-toy—and he could at least pass for human still, which none of them could. once they’d all done him enough in enough different ways, though, that really was it; they were done with him, and made it more than plain, no matter how he pleaded. The most (and least) they could do before leaving was throw him to a new pride, so he could at least try getting what he wanted out of them awhile.
But the next bunch didn’t come across either, in the end—nor the next, nor the next after that. And slowly, he came to recognize that whatever mild affection any of ‘em might eventually develop for him was entirely predicated on points of difference rather than shared similarities, equally disturbing as they were on both their parts…that what had driven him towards them, in the first place, was exactly what inevitably drove them away in the opposite direction. That they liked him as he was, all (comparatively) weak, confused and buzzing with random pain—strong enough to take their abuse and live, to heal, but not scar-free. And never quite strong enough to stop them doing any damn thing they wanted with him, even if he’d thought to try.
Oh, they could enthrall, all right; he’d seen it done, on more occasions than he could count. But he was not in thrall to them, and never had been. What he did, he did with a clear mind and an even clearer conscience, willingly, in sure and certain hope of due recompense to come. of the Resurrection, and the Life.
What remained to be seen, however, was how many times a man could be lied to, and still keep on believing; much like any other faith in that way, he guessed, which he had to admit wasn’t really enough to keep him from being at least a little resentful.
Backsliding, his Momma used to call it, way back when—you know how to do right, just don’t wanna, do you, boy? ‘Cause there’s something in you that don’t fit with this world, something mean and dead and rotten to the core…and I’m gonna have to beat it from you like a damn rat-killing dog, ain’t I, so’s you’ll get at least a little better. Or so’s you won’t get no worse, anyhow…
Ignorant swamp-French bitch.
Momma kept Daddy in the old fall-out shelter under her own Daddy’s house, locked down fast, while her and him slept in a trailer in the front yard. At first, growing up, he’d thought it was some game they played between the two of ‘em, like other people’s parents did—but it went on far too long, never stopped. And one time she’d dragged him down there by the hair, twisting and kicking, with a cat she’d found him playing with hanging slack from her other hand: Let’s make this Daddy’s supper! Threw it in, then, and slammed the door again real quick. Made him watch what happened, after.
Holding him still all the while, his eyes peeled open with a thumb jammed in either corner ‘til stars bloomed at the limits of his vision, and whispered: This is why. Why you are the way you are. Why I gotta d
o like I do. ‘Cause you don’t wanna end up like that, do you, boy?