All That Bleeds (22 page)

“I know what happens if I’m caught.”

“Listen, it’s all right to admit this was a mistake. You made your decision to come too quickly, without knowing what would be involved,” she said, striding toward the door. “I can arrange for someone to drive you into the Sliver. You’ll be able to get home from there.”

“Alissa,” he said softly.

She paused. “What?”

“Relax. Wearing sunglasses isn’t unique to ventala. Light burns my eyes and makes me feel sluggish, but even in bright sunlight, I’m faster than a human being will ever be. When the sun rises, I do have to sleep at least a couple hours. Are they going to expect you to work at sunrise?”

She shook her head.

“Then it’s not a problem. And don’t worry about the way I’ll come across. Mills is a former Navy SEAL who works for an elite private security firm. I promise you that high-profile clients want their bodyguards to be seen, not heard. ES will expect him to be watchful, not chatty, while on duty.”

He was right, of course. “I’m nervous,” she said. “Your frequent sphinxlike silences are unnerving.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“I don’t actually want to get used to it. I want you to talk to me, like you did last night.”

“Last night I had an incentive.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I shouldn’t need to bribe you to talk to me. What do you have against conversation?”

He shrugged.

“Like now. I’d really like you to tell me what you’re thinking.”

He pinned her with a look. Even with someone else’s face, there was something dangerous in his eyes. “I’m thinking,” he said, lowering his voice to a whisper—a very intimate whisper, “that we have unfinished business from last night.”

Her heart thudded behind her ribs. He licked his lips and glanced at her throat, where she was sure he could see her pulse thrumming beneath her skin. She blushed.

“I’m thinking,” he said, and paused deliberately, leaning close, “that if there were a lock on the dining room door, we could take up where we left off.”

Her jaw dipped open, and she drew in an unsteady breath. The idea had its allure, but they really couldn’t. A lot of staff milled about on the ground floor during the day. Anyone could come in or notice the drawn drapes. Her eyes darted between the floor and the door, then back to him.

The way he watched her made her body temperature rise another degree. She swallowed.

“I could move the dining room table to block the door.” He lifted a corner of the long, heavy table experimentally. “I could barricade us in—”

“Point taken.” She shook her head with a small smile. “You can stop talking.”

Merrick said he wanted to see the area she’d walked through on her way home from the Xenakis party, so she led him out the back door to the lakeside path.

“Tell me what it’s like to wield the muse magic.”

“You expect me to answer questions when you don’t?” she asked.

He shrugged, the hint of a smile playing at his lips.

“That hardly seems fair.”

“If life were fair, we would’ve been lovers the first weekend we met,” he said.

She slid a glance at him and raised her brows. If he thought he could continue to throw her off balance by flirting, he was mistaken. She was, after all, an experienced public figure, and she was certainly used to being propositioned by men. The only reason he’d flustered her at all was because she was attracted to him, too. But she realized there was an advantage to his being different. With a lot of men, she had to walk a tightrope by flirting in a way that made them feel good without promising too much. Yet Merrick flaunted his unflappable control, making her trust it. Also, being outside, bathed in the afternoon light, their walk was very public.

She smiled at him and widened her eyes with mock innocence. “From the very first weekend?” The back of her hand brushed his arm in a light caress. “And, if it had started then, would we still be lovers after all these years? If life were fair?”

“What do you think?”

She paused thoughtfully, then shook her head. “I doubt it. By nature, muses flit. Lots of passionate love affairs. Men, though not always prone to monogamy themselves, don’t like to share. Long relationships are hard to sustain. Before my parents’ generation, muses either didn’t marry or they married
a lot
.”

He smirked.

“Ventala aren’t known for their long attachments either,” she said. “Our correspondence probably lasted much longer than a full-blown affair would have. Maybe we’re lucky there was a wall,” she said. “What do you think?”

“Anticipation can eclipse actual events, and I do like my letters. The way the ink soaks into the heavy bond paper. The sexy sweep of the letters.” He licked his lips. “You’ll have to work pretty hard to be better in the flesh.”

She laughed. “A challenge. I do like challenges.” She glanced at the lake, a glacial blue stretching to the far shore and a thick forest of evergreens. “You asked what it’s like to wield muse magic. The magic can be used in a couple different ways. The side effect of having it is being able to infuse my voice with persuasive power to influence people, but I don’t use that much because it borrows power that should be used for greater things. Using power for persuasion is also against Etherlin rules, but you may have noticed that I occasionally break Etherlin rules,” she said, shrugging her brows.

“Using it for inspiration with aspirants, that begins like a dance, an exchange of energy and ideas. I can almost share their thoughts and follow them forward. I start talking, filling the empty spaces. Encouragement washes over them like rain, enlivening them to the possibilities. Hunger follows, a need to reach a conclusion, to see what hasn’t been seen before. Anticipation builds, and the power ignites in a frenzy of thoughts and impulses. The few spoken words mean infinitely more than what’s actually said. It ebbs and flows, until there’s a rush, like being intoxicated, and then there’s a crescendo. It’s orgasmic, I suppose, but more intense. Afterward, the buzz continues for hours and there’s a sense of satisfaction and bliss, a knowing that something has been created that
will ripple through the world and touch people’s hearts and minds, possibly shape their lives. The aspirants are giddy and manic and grateful, while I feel connected to all mankind. In those hours, I’m powerful and humble at the same time. And there is complete clarity. No matter what else I waver about in life, there is one thing I know with absolute certainty. I was born to be a muse. Setting that blaze of inspiration makes me truly happy.”

“There wasn’t always an Etherlin,” he said. “Why did the muses create it?”

“People think it was created to separate us from the world, but quite the opposite is true. Or was true initially. The muses noticed that their powers had faded over the generations, but the magic was strengthened when they were in close proximity to each other. They met several times a year to cultivate that enhanced strength. During World War Two, many of them came to the United States before it entered the conflict. We always try to avoid choosing sides during wartime; no one wants to inspire a weapon that results in human casualties. When the U.S. entered the war, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin was ready to be exploited and the muses used their influence to inspire mass production, which, of course, continued long after the war and saved millions of lives.

“The muses of that generation, my grandmother’s, were all very close friends. They decided to live in the same city. One of them was involved with a real estate developer, and they bought the property for the Etherlin and developed it.

“When the first casualties of the Vampire Rising were discovered, everyone thought it was a plague with bats as the vector. The combined power of the muses helped scientists to realize they were mistaken. Seven million deaths could’ve been twenty or forty.” She brushed a strand of hair behind her ear.

“Why the wall? Ventala weren’t always here.”

She frowned. “Don’t you know?”

He shook his head.

“It’s not a nice story,” she said, wanting to give him a chance to avoid hearing it, the way he’d given her one before talking about his childhood.

“They never are,” he said, shrugging, then nodded for her to go on.

“Some of the un-mutated vampires moved to Colorado. They were searching for ways to save themselves and hoped to graft inspiration from the muses. Unfortunately they found themselves desperately drawn to muse blood. More and more of them arrived, and their behavior became erratic, swarming around a muse whenever they encountered one, trying to cajole or intimidate her and her security detail. Finally, they killed a pair of ES officers who were guarding a muse. They dragged her into the shadows and raped her while they drained her dry. It was kept relatively quiet because there had been talk of having the Secret Service take over the duties of ES, and the council and the muses thought the incident would force changes the muses didn’t want. We never want to be beholden to a specific government—for protection or anything else. And so, a wall.”

“Did the muses lend their influence to the Human Preservation Act?”

“I’m not sure. It was before my time, of course. Americans had just suffered through World War Two and were plunged into the Cold War. Paranoia and McCarthyism were prevalent, and then the Bat Plague killed off several million more people. Even when the mutated vampires were defeated, people couldn’t relax. They carried around that primal fear that’s etched into the souls of all human beings—the fear that the human race will be wiped out. The muses might have supported the HPA, but I don’t think they inspired that legislation. It was the inevitable result of all that post-traumatic stress and lingering fear.”

“No one tested the DNA.”

“What DNA? The mutated vampire DNA?”

He nodded. “Scientists didn’t have the technology at the time. The idea that the Rising came from a deadly evolution of the vampire species was a theory.”

“What are you suggesting? That something other than a mutation caused those vampires to turn—for the lack of a better term—rabid?”

He shrugged.

She slowed and looked at him. “What are you saying? You can’t just make a statement like that and stop talking. The Rising was a devastating moment in human history. No one thought vampires existed anymore, and then they mutated and came out and swept across the land like locusts. And the un-mutated ones seized the opportunity and came out to hunt, too. Men, already weary from war, had to organize themselves for a different kind of battle, one against nature, on a scale which they’d never before fought. It changed the face of the world. If you know something—if you have some secret knowledge of those events—you’re obligated to disclose it.”

He raised an eyebrow and she fumed.

“There’s no law saying that you must, but it’s a moral obligation!”

“An obligation to the people who stripped away my basic rights?”

“Your basic right to hunt and kill, you mean?”

He shook his head. “To feed from a person who’s consented.”

Her heart thumped a horrified rhythm. “Why would you want to do that? Blood is processed perfectly now. I know early on it caused salt and mineral imbalances that made the ventala sick, but it’s been perfected.”

“So they say.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning they don’t have to drink it.”

“So tell me. Does it make you sick? Does it make your muscles cramp?”

“No, but it doesn’t fully satisfy the thirst.”

“It’s whole blood. They’re able to preserve ninety-four percent of what’s in human blood. The proteins and cells and fluid. It’s an almost perfect match.”

“Our bodies know the difference and crave the real thing.”

“You know where that leads. Vampires and ventala lose control during direct consumption, and human lives are lost. Packaged blood outside the donors is the only safe alternative.”

“So they say.”

“Do you know differently? Do you have some personal experience to share?”

He shook his head, but she couldn’t be sure whether he was denying the experiences or just denying the inclination to talk about them.

“Let’s defer the discussion on the blood-drinking issue and return to what you said about genetic mutation not being the cause of the Rising. Explain that.”

“I’m not a geneticist.”

“But you do know something. What?”

“Lysander said it wasn’t a mutation.”

“What…what did he say it was?”

“He didn’t.”

“Maybe that was just conjecture on his part.”

“Maybe, but when Lysander mentioned it, I remembered that once my father had said the same thing.”

She rounded a curve in the path and stopped walking. “This is huge. Do you realize what you’re saying? It’s like saying that the world isn’t round. We—everyone—believes the mutation theory to be true.”

“What does it matter? All the shapeshifting vampires who caused the plague were wiped out. Their bodies were burned to ash. Next, you had the Human Preservation Act, where all the other vampires were killed and their bodies burned to ash.”

She tipped her head back, staring at the sky. “You’re saying people made a mistake? That killing them all means the truth will never be known?”

He shrugged.

“I understand why you’re angry at people for killing the vampires. That’s your heritage.”

“I’m not angry about that. They were right to do it.”

“But you resent the current restrictions on you?”

He flashed a smile. “Of course. What’s good for the world isn’t necessarily what’s good for me personally. Take the wall. It couldn’t prevent me from hunting muses and feeding off them. It just keeps me away from the woman I’m interested in. On the other hand, it does prevent others of my kind from coming across a muse and being overcome by an impulse to
bite her. Not all ventala have enough control. So the wall makes sense for your community, even if it’s inconvenient for me personally.”

“What makes you different from the others?”

“My will.”

She studied his profile. “And why do you think that’s so different than theirs?”

“Because my father said I would be like him. The hunger and the rage would eventually consume me. In the end, I would let them because it would be too exhausting to fight my own nature.”