Blood Rites (3 page)

The Austras mourned Charles, and though he had died five days ago while giving her life, she felt nothing for him. What had been there—fear, horror, fascination—all of it had vanished with his death. Now she only sensed the perfect order of her existence. She had become the creature she always should have been. She wanted to run, to laugh, to shriek her pleasure to the starry sky, not stand here and pretend that there was anything left of Charles Austra to mourn. She had never believed less in God than at this moment . . . or in heaven, or in hell.

Though she had glimpsed all three at the moment of her rebirth, now only the fire seemed real.

Pale fingers circled her wrist and pulled her hand away from the grate, turning it over, looking down at the blisters forming on her palm. “I have never known the feelings I sense in you now,” Elizabeth Austra said, “but I can share them and try to help you understand.”

Elizabeth bowed her head and kissed Helen’s palm, holding her lips there only an instant. She raised Helen’s open hand between them. “Watch,” she told Helen and they looked together as the blisters shrank taking the pain with them.

And still gripping Helen’s wrist, Elizabeth walked with her through the quiet gathering, up the stairs, and into the night.

“Shouldn’t you be with them?” Helen protested.

Elizabeth led her up the mountain path, away from the glass house, and into the thick trees. “I am where I want to be, welcoming my new cousin to our home in Chaves.” Her lips brushed Helen’s cheek and Helen noticed, not for the first time, the Austras’ need to touch one another, as if their mental intimacy was not enough.

Perhaps it wasn’t. She felt Elizabeth in the brush of that kiss. Her sorrow. Her joy. Her ageless sympathy.

“There will be a blood sharing later,” Elizabeth said, repeating what Helen already knew. “It will welcome you into the family. In the meantime, are you hungry?”

Helen moved back a step, not certain what Elizabeth meant. “Yes . . . I don’t know,” she admitted. “If this is hunger, then I have never been hungry before.”

—You’ve changed—Elizabeth accentuated her mental message with a fleeting smile, exposing her long rear teeth. “And if you’re hungry,” she added vocally, “that’s good. Tonight your joining with us will be all the more powerful.”

“I’ve already shared Stephen’s blood. And . . . his brother’s.”

“And what am I thinking now?”

Helen looked at the woman for a moment. She sensed nothing. She shook her head. “I don’t understand,” Helen said.

—You sensed nothing when I spoke to you as I do to the rest of the family. I speak my thoughts to you now as I would to a human. I receive as I would from a human. Let me show you the difference. Tell me about Stephen? What is he doing and feeling now?—

Stephen was beside the furnace in the glass house preparing to grind his brother’s ashes, mix a portion of them with the melted white sand and lead, and stir them together into glass. Helen sensed his sorrow, his denial, his anxiousness. She asked, “Will I feel you all the way I feel him now?”

“Yes.”

Farther up the mountain a deer ran across the path. Helen heard its hoofs click on the stones. In the woods to her right, a fox watched her with cautious curiosity. How could she be anything more than she had already become? Another change frightened her.

“You feel no more fear than Stephen,
oui
?”

“Fear?”

Elizabeth laughed, a sound of seductive sympathy. “He is afraid that you have been pushed into our world too fast and in that he is probably right. He is worried that his brother’s death will somehow taint you and for that he is very foolish,
oui
? And above all, he knows that there will be a half dozen of his cousins vying for your attention tonight. He is jealous and that is an uncomfortably human emotion. You should be pleased that you unsettle him. Few things can.”

Elizabeth laughed again and started up the mountain. Helen followed until the glass house was only a small piece of the landscape. She smelled the leaves, the needles of the few pines, and the herbs the family had planted as they broke beneath her feet; all blending into the scent of late summer. They climbed until they reached Stephen’s house and stood on its catwalk waiting for the others to come. Though they did not speak, did not share thoughts with each other, Helen sensed Elizabeth’s calming touch, her quiet support as they waited side by side for the sad work in the glass house to end.

When the doors to the glass house opened and the family began the climb up the mountainside, Elizabeth moved closer to Helen. —After tonight you will never know loneliness— she said mind to mind. In response Helen reached for Elizabeth’s hand, not surprised to find her own was shaking.

II

For the first time in nearly two thousand years, the Austras welcomed someone half human into the family. Though the words of the ancient ritual were known by all, only Denys was old enough to recall them firsthand. Though he had long ago passed his leadership role to his half brother, Stephen, he led the family’s circle now.

They built a bonfire and Helen stood with her back to the heat of it, facing Denys. He held a crystal goblet in his hands and sang the inflected words of family sharing in a low solemn tone, “
Ge cres nas gevornes. Cres Aughkstra
!” From blood we are born, blood of life eternal. He passed the goblet to her.

Helen repeated, her inflection altering the alien words to that of one joining the whole, the words of a child at its ten-year ritual, “
Ge cres nas gevornes. Cres Aughkstra
!”

The crystal rested heavy in her left hand. She raised her right, palm up, and winced as Denys bit deeply into her wrist. The circle began to rotate, each member of the family standing briefly before her, taking one deep swallow from the wound on her wrist, letting the blood from their own similar wounds drip into the goblet that seemed to grow heavier with each small addition.

When the circle had been completed and Denys again stood before her, when all had shared in her life, she raised the goblet and turned to face the fire. She felt so much a stranger as she stared through the flames at each of them. Her straight blond hair seemed such a contrast to their uniform dark curls, her deep blue eyes so pale when compared to their colorless black ones. But she was family—one of these eternal, perfect predators. Long before she had changed, her soul had guessed the truth. Tilting her head back, she drank, consuming them all.

She felt the marrying of cells into one perfect union. She sensed the thoughts of the family around her, not just the words of welcome on the surface of their minds but the emotions layered beneath them—deep, deeper. And she felt the hole, the piece Charles had occupied in their collective thoughts, and at last understood their rage at the terrible loss that would never dull with time.

But his death, like so many others, brought new life. Their acceptance of her—human and family—was perfection in itself. At the time of her birth into immortality, Charles Austra had shown her the horror of his family’s past. Now she shared the bonds of ecstasy. She contemplated each of their lives as she stared into the flames. When they dwindled into coals, she looked past them at the ring of pale faces surrounding the fire. Slowly, she moved around the circle, hugging her new brethren, sharing separately the thoughts of each as she faced them.

In each, she sensed hope, but felt it strongest in the women. A terrible burden had been lifted from them. Their lives would not be needed to save their race. Helen, with her unique human power, could bear children and live.

Forever.

The thought dizzied her. She took an unsteady step forward and gripped Rachel, who was nearest her, for support, then moved from her to Denys.

He raised his hands and stretched between them she saw a gold chain. A crystal teardrop, black as the eyes of her new family, dangled from it. She bowed her head and he placed the chain around her neck. The crystal still held the warmth of the fire that had forged it and, more, a steadying power she would only understand with time.

“
Nas gevornes
!” We are born! Denys chanted, then whispered to her, “Welcome.”

Did she sense an invitation beneath the simplicity of that word? Perhaps someday, she thought. After all, their affection had forever in which to grow.

The circle broke into groups of two and three. Helen saw Stephen standing in the shadows at the edge of the trees. She walked to him and he took her hand and led her away from the fire, down a winding footpath. As they moved, their speed increased until she was running, running swiftly behind him toward his home.

—Our home.—

Though he hadn’t asked a question, she could refuse. Helen didn’t think to be coy or to tease the uncertainty Stephen tried to hide. She wanted him more than she ever had before. She merged passion and assent into one quick thought and was pleased to see Stephen stumble and whirl, ready to catch her. She hit him without stopping and they fell together onto the twisted thyme lawn that surrounded the house.

“Here,” she whispered and lay on her back, staring up at the scattering of stars.

Since the night she first exchanged blood with Stephen, they had shared a mental bond. She would feel his need before they touched; he would sense her demands even when she did not speak of them. But tonight’s family bonding let her sense more than Stephen. As Stephen unbuttoned the front of her green cotton blouse, she felt Rachel’s quiet passion as she lay on top of Denys, her long dark hair tickling his chest. She became Denys, feeling him harden, his lips brushing the tips of Rachel’s breasts.

She merged with Ann and James and Sebastian gliding four-footed up the hill, bringing down a deer in some forest clearing, feeding briefly on its blood and terror, then letting it go. Only life tonight.

She felt the silent laughter as Marilyn ran, pursued by her evening’s suitors, laughing still when she let them catch her and pull her down.

She shared the human rapture as, in an empty clearing, Elizabeth lay beside her human lover. Through her mind, Paul Stoddard became part of the sharing, through his blood in her, he became part of them all, and he lay open to the rapture as Elizabeth’s face hovered above him, a dark shadow against the stars.

She sensed them all, a dozen minds around her.

And in the distance, too far for even her ears to hear, Laurence played a flute. It flowed through her mind like the family’s thoughts.

Lost in them, she felt Stephen undressing her as if she were one of the others and he someone else, felt his hands pushing apart her legs as if they were Rachel’s hands pulling Denys deeper into her or Laurence’s fingers fluttering quickly over the pipes.

His need, hers, theirs, so perfectly one.

She heard Stephen’s laughter, coming it seemed from a great distance. She felt his brief stab of pain as he bit his lip and then he was kissing her, feeding her his blood, forcing her back to him. He hadn’t touched her since her changing but it made no difference. He knew her body as perfectly as if it were his own.

She screamed his name as he entered her, mentally kept on screaming it as he kissed her, biting her tongue, their blood mingling as their bodies twined.

She whispered it as, near dawn, they walked into the shelter of their house.

Sunrise was striking the bedroom windows coloring the raised bed crimson and violet, when Helen stretched and ran one delicate hand down Stephen’s pale, long-limbed body. ‘ ’I love you,“ she said.

Stephen didn’t reply. Helen had expressed a human emotion. What he felt was different, less detached. She had become family. He loved her now as he did himself. He conveyed this not with words but with an opening of his mind, a sharing of what he felt.

“I understand,” she said, then repeated, “I love you,” and kissed him one final time before the warmth of the sun, colored and softened by the ruby window, touched her body. With it came the dawn lethargy, the call to sleep that could be resisted only with effort. She took Stephen’s hand. They slept.

Helen woke late in the day, long after Stephen had left for AustraGlass to resume his duties as director of the ancient family firm. Helen’s clothes hadn’t been delivered yet so she put on one of Stephen’s robes and walked through her house.

The sunlight struck the tall colored glass windows, filling the rooms with soothing prisms of light. Helen, aware of the touch of each tiny rainbow on her bare arms and feet and irritated by the brush of the soft fabric on her skin, dropped the robe over a chair. Clothing wasn’t necessary here. This was her home. She could do exactly as she liked.

She went into the unused kitchen for a glass of Tarda water, the special mineral blend bottled in their homeland to diminish the Austra need for blood, then wandered into Stephen’s workroom on the north side of the house.

The huge room was the only one in the house with clear glass in the windows. These stretched the entire length of the space. In the windows closest to the door, squares of glass were hung from wires, over a thousand tiny samples of color, the range of her lover’s creative art. These, the glass-doored case containing unlabeled jars of powder and sand, and a small gas-fired furnace were the only objects apparently in use. The potter’s wheel, the loom and the tapestry on it, a few box cameras on a shelf, and an oven whose purpose Helen did not understand were all abandoned and dusty. Stephen hadn’t used the room in years, Helen knew, but the time would come when he’d return to these crafts again. Such was the cycle of Austra life.

In the far corner of the room, where a pair of tall windows shed a strong northern light, she found a number of newly stretched canvases of different sizes and boxes of brushes, paints, charcoal, and chalk. A vase of flowers sat on the table beside the easel, a smock was draped across the back of the chair facing it. Helen put on the smock. Its soft cotton felt right on her, perhaps because the clothing had a function beyond modesty. She closed her eyes and drew Stephen into her mind, sending her thanks, receiving his quick response, his pleasure at how easily her mind reached him.