The Superiors (12 page)

“You’re not going to do it with me?”

“I might just taste her again.”

Cali watched this exchange with a placid look on her face. She had been drawn from many times a night for years. Surely she wouldn’t think it strange if he shared her. And she didn’t appear scared by his offer to the neighbor. She had barely been touched since he brought her back to his apartment. He didn’t know how long it took saps to heal, but he recalled it being a slow process. Still, perhaps the day and night of sleep had given her strength.

“Cali. I have not hurt you and this woman won’t either. You can trust me. Don’t be scared. We’re not going to hurt you,” Draven said as he approached. She seemed reasonable, but sometimes saps were unpredictable, like when she’d pulled his hair. That had hurt, too. He could heal a wound with his tongue, but he couldn’t keep his hair from hurting when pulled. It didn’t seem very evolved.

“She worked in a restaurant. She’s quite calm,” he told Lira. “Do not take from this arm. Her vein is collapsing. Here, on this one.” They knelt on the floor beside the bed to draw from Cali.

He put his lips around Cali’s wrist and pierced her vein carefully at the same time as Lira. He let the small trickle of warmth flow slowly along his tongue and down his throat. The rapid pulse of her heartbeat fluttered against his lips. Lira’s cheek was almost touching his, and her fingers massaged up and down his thigh. He pulled away from Cali after only a minute, distracted by Lira’s caresses. After another minute he nudged her. “Come, it is time to go to bed.”

Lira stopped, closed the marks efficiently and turned to Draven. She smiled, delighted in her small act of lawlessness. Her teeth were outlined in red. Draven grabbed her with a suddenness that was almost violent and brought his mouth to hers, sucking at the taste of Cali in her mouth. Lira responded to his unusually passionate advance. But he pulled away after a minute. He had Cali’s hand gripped in his and she was squeezing back. “Get out,” he said, pointing to the door. “We will sleep. I will take you back later.”

“I don’t—,” Cali began, but he cut her off.

“Go. Do whatever you want, just stay inside.”

She looked down at him with her caramel eyes and then stood and walked out. He closed the door and turned back to Lira with singular intention. She had barely gotten to her feet from where they had knelt beside the bed when he fell on her, knocking her backwards onto the bed in his haste.

Chapter Sixteen

Cali stood in the living area of the Man with Soft Hair and looked around for a few minutes. He had been gone the night before, but she had slept off her weakness most of the time, too tired and sick for curiosity.

She used the facilities and went back to the kitchen. She could remember being in a Superior’s house, once, a very long time ago. She had been bought and sold that same night. She shuddered at the memory of going to the blood bank right after. This house was very different from the one she vaguely remembered. That one had been big and open and had lots of windows, and she had gone there in a car that wound around a hill many times before reaching the top. This man’s home was small and many others lived close to him in other rooms, under and above and beside him. He was surrounded by Superiors. That meant she was surrounded by Superiors, too.

She glanced at the door. Would more come? Would he let them suck on her arms until she passed out again? Yesterday she had felt awfully calm and peaceful in the dark space of his bedroom. Today she didn’t feel as secure.

His home was poorly lit, with only one window in the side of the kitchen that looked out on the side of the next building, identical to this one. Like most Superiors, the man who lived here slept during the daytime and fed at night. He had left for most of the night, and she guessed he was working at whatever he did. She didn’t know his name. It wasn’t important.

When she had first worked at the restaurants, she had tried to learn the names of the Superiors who came in. She had even thought at first she could remember everyone who bit her. But that proved impossible. After a few months in the restaurants she’d heard too many names to count. So she remembered only her regulars, and since they didn’t introduce themselves anyway, she gave them names based on identifying traits. That worked out pretty well, although she had to amend the names sometimes when they got too long. She used to call the Man with Soft Hair something else, the way she remembered him—The Snarky Man Who Bit Her For the First Time. But that was too long to say every time. At least all he wanted was to bite her.

Sometimes Superiors liked her for whatever reason they preferred any human. She had been lucky that no Superior had found her to their liking for any reason besides nourishment. She knew it happened, especially in the restaurants. And now with the one she worked at, it was only a matter of time. She had thought when she woke that this Superior had bought her, and she distrusted his reasons as much as any of them. It would be nice to find a home with one of them, but once one bought her, he could do whatever he wanted with her. Most humans were happy to take that chance, since many got treated good and had their own space and, eventually, a family in the new home. But not all humans got so lucky.

Cali was wary of being bought, although she didn’t think it could be much worse than the restaurant that now owned her. The Confinement was safer. If only she could find a way to get back there.

She shook herself from her musings and turned away from the window. She glanced around, looking for the bag of food the Superior had brought her. It wasn’t anywhere in sight, so she went back to his living area. She sat down, tired from just a few minutes of walking around. She knew she had to go back tonight, and she might die before too long. Gathering any strength she could before she went back seemed like a good idea.

If only she could stay here, even. Her captor hadn’t fed too much, although she didn’t know if it was just because he didn’t want her to die on his hands. He had obviously never owned a human. She didn’t know exactly what he wanted from her. For all she knew he had some horrible things planned before he took her back. But she somewhat doubted it. He looked pretty harmless with his soft hair and warm eyes. Like most Superiors, he didn’t seem all that superior to her. He only thought he was, like all Superiors, with his snarky smiles and talking to her like she couldn’t understand the most basic things.

The best, most superior thing about his home was the small bookcase with three shelves filled with books. She ran her hands over the spines of them, some shiny and smooth, some creased and broken in multiple sections, some rough and textured. One of them had ridges on the thick spine, along with intricate gold patterns. She marveled at it. She had never seen anything so incredible.

She glanced at the bedroom door, but her captor hadn’t come out yet. He was probably sleeping, anyway. Cali turned back to the books. She took a deep breath, wiped her hands on her shift, glanced back at the bedroom door, then poked a finger into the small space above the book, hooked it in the soft leather binding, and pulled. The book slid out and the one next to it relaxed into the empty space.

She stood holding the wonderful thing, just looking at it and feeling the weight of it, the thickness and density of it, the feel of the leather in her hands, the thrill of it. She opened the book and touched the heavy pages, filled with the tiniest lines of symbols in rows and columns on every page. Well, not every page. A few at the beginning had little or nothing at all on them—a shocking wastefulness. Paper. She wanted to say the wondrous word aloud. She’d heard of it, but she had never touched it, or even seen it.

She’d never even seen a real-life book, but she’d heard stories. Probably only legends, but that didn’t make her awe any less when she found the thing she’d heard of—the thing that could teach a human how to live without Superiors. Now she held one of the sacred things in her hands. She looked at the print, wondered how long it took to learn this, to learn the millions and millions of symbols covering the pages. She wondered what on earth could be said that required so much paper and so many symbols. Was it really so hard to live out there? But then, a Superior wouldn’t have a book on human survival. What could they want to know? They already knew everything.

She wondered how it was possible to know so much. She thought everything she knew in the whole world would fit in less than one page of symbols. She wondered if all Superiors had read this, if all of them were really this smart. Maybe they were Superior after all, and she just didn’t usually see the ways that they were.

She was about to close the book when a page rose up by itself. Something stiff had pushed it open. She flipped the page and took out the little square of hard white paper. When she turned it over, she found a picture. She’d seen lots of pictures, of course, on the sides of buildings and on all the cars. But why would anyone need a picture on paper, especially one inside a book where no one could see it? It didn’t even have the little symbols to read on the side without a picture—just a blank white paper. What was the purpose? It was about the length of her finger in each direction, and on the front, the Man with Soft Hair and someone who looked almost the same as him had their faces side by side. They both had sad, serious eyes. The man she didn’t know didn’t have good hair, though.

Cali didn’t understand what the picture meant, what it was for. It wasn’t a picture of anything someone could buy. Just two faces. She held it for a minute, then glanced at the bedroom door. She had this crazy impulse to take it. Maybe she could show it to someone at the restaurant and ask. Some of those girls knew a lot, had gone home with Superiors before. Cali paused another moment, then lifted her shift and pushed the picture down the front of her underpants. She checked the Superior’s bedroom door again. Her heart was beating so hard.

She pushed the book back into the space on the shelf. Her hands shook from having done something, touched something, taken something she shouldn’t. She wiped her hands again. If he found out what she had done, he might be awfully angry. Maybe he’d hurt her a lot. She’d stolen from a Superior. She had touched his things, and not just to clean. She had touched his personal, private thing.

She hurried into the kitchen and found a ragged cloth, wet it in the sink, and began cleaning the surfaces in the kitchen. Most of them were clean enough, but everything had collected a thin layer of dust, so Cali cleaned that first. When she had finished, Lady Who Visits came out of the bedroom and cast a hungry look in Cali’s direction before turning back to Man with Soft Hair, who stood in the bedroom doorway. They both squinted in the bright morning light that streamed through the kitchen window.

Cali’s heart started racing. She was sure they knew she’d stolen. But how could they tell?

“Do you need shades?” Man with Soft Hair asked, retreating into his room and emerging with a pair of sunglasses. He handed them to the Lady Who Visits and she smiled and thanked him and put the glasses on.

“I’ll bring them back tonight,” she said, and Cali wondered at what she had missed, because it seemed the woman meant more than she said.

“I’ll be gone tonight,” the man answered. “I have plans. If you would like to return them tomorrow morning, you may.”

“I might just do that.”

“If you’d rather leave them outside my door while I’m gone, that would be fine, too. I have to return the sapien and I have a long night after that, so I need some sleep now.”

“Oh, yeah, of course.”

The man walked the woman to the door and opened it and they brushed their cheeks together before parting. He turned back to Cali and she had the instinctive urge to step backwards away from him, no matter how harmless he looked. She knew he was not.

“As you heard, I must sleep. Have you everything you need?”

“Maybe some food,” she said.

“Yes, of course.” He came to her then, and she did step back. She stepped back until she bumped against the window and she had to stop. The man took a bag from a cabinet and put it on the counter. He turned to Cali, and she noticed again how strange it was to see a Superior in only shorts. She had never seen one without clothes before this one. He looked just about like all the men she’d seen in the Confinement—on the small side, and more tightly packaged, but otherwise normal. There was nothing Superior about his looks at all—he looked just like a human with great hair and awfully sharp teeth. She thought if he’d been human, he would have been an awfully nice-looking man. But he wasn’t human.

She kept waiting for him to bite her again, or sneak up behind her and rip out her throat, or force himself upon her. But he only opened a jar of food and told her again to stay inside, and then he went back to bed. She sat at the small table eating the strange food he had brought her—a can of oranges, a can of tomatoes. He had also brought a box of crackers, a can of corn, and a package of cornbread. These were less exotic and more common to her.

After she finished eating, she rinsed the cans, put them in a small plastic basket on his counter, and cleaned the table. She washed the cans from the night before and put them with the other things he could return to the store for reuse, threw away the cornbread wrapper, and then began cleaning the rest of the house. She had nothing else to do while her captor slept. She liked it more than cleaning the new sap bar where she worked. Cleaning there was much worse than at Estrella’s. The sap bar was disgusting and dirty and it always would be, no matter how much the weakened humans cleaned. Too many years of too-tired humans doing a minimal cleaning job had left the bar permanently grimy.

So Cali cleaned, and when she got tired she slept in a soft chair Man with Soft Hair had in his living area, and no one made her get up or do a certain amount of tasks. No one came to bite her, no one had told her a list of things she needed to do and told her she would be punished if she didn’t finish them or if she forgot one. She hardly knew what to do with herself. So after she slept more, she cleaned more, ate more, and then she slept some more. When she woke, the bloodsucker was licking her wrist hungrily.