By Blood We Live (18 page)

I left him sleeping in the vault, got dressed and went upstairs. The house knew I’d changed. The floor and the walls and the furniture. They were in on it.

There was something else. A faint throbbing I hadn’t felt last night. I stood still. It was a good, warm feeling now but I knew it wouldn’t feel good later, in a few days if I didn’t … if I didn’t …

Drink.

The thirst. For years the thirst meant him. Now it meant me. My skin prickled. I thought of the blood bags in the fridge—but that wouldn’t work yet. He’d told me it took years to make the shift. And even the thought of MREs sort of annoyed the thirst, put an edge on it like the
smell of electrical burning. I tried to remember drinking
his
blood, but I couldn’t, even though my body knew it had happened. Instead of a memory of it there was just a massive red blackness. Just nothing.

For a while I stood in the kitchen doorway thinking about what I was, now. The reality of it.
A vampire feeds on the blood of humans. Drinks it. Swallows it down.
In the world I grew up in blood was something to be scared of. Hepatitis. HIV. (Stonk had shaken his head when I asked him. No, sweetpea, we don’t get diseases. Diseases can’t live in us.) In the world I grew up in blood was practically the dirtiest thing around.

I thought I’d got used to the idea.
Drinking blood.
But when I thought of myself doing it it made me dizzy and hot. Disgusted, too, a little. I told myself not to be shocked. It was stupid to be shocked. I’d known this was what it was, what it would be. I’d always known.

The study still smelled of bleach but there were no other signs of what had happened, what we’d done. I turned the desk lamp on and woke my laptop.

Finder.

Documents.

Files.

Encryption.

Enter password.

My hands didn’t move. The book title I’d noticed yesterday came back to me:
You Can’t Go Home Again.
It meant something different now. It made me doubt myself. I saw what Fluff had meant, that you couldn’t trust it, the feeling of things seeming to mean things. Or what he’d actually said was you had to trust it and mistrust it, to keep bouncing between the two.
Be the loving servant of two masters
, was the phrase he used.

Yeah, well, physician heal thy fucking self.

I entered the password.

The faces came up, the information.

WHOEVER LOVED THAT
loved not at first sight?

I loved Vali. But you’ll have worked that out by now.

All of it, once I was in it, felt as if it had happened before.

Naturally. Love being indefinite déjà vu.

The humans, in lousy furs, rattling with trinkets of teeth and bone, had been following the retreating ice north, and I’d been following the humans. Not just me. Fellow vampires Amlek, Mim, Una and Gabil were travelling more or less with me, though they were elsewhere that night. We were governed by an irregular familial gravity. We gathered for a while, lived and hunted as a group, separated, came together again. No obligations, no see you Friday or I’ll be back around seven. I’d made Amlek. Amlek had made Mim. Una and Gabil, two and three hundred years old respectively, had their own makers, but they’d have to trace back to me in the end. (The first question I asked any vampire I met was: How old are you? So far no one counted as many winters as I did.) But that particular night I’d felt like being alone, and I’d been around long enough to know when to follow my inclinations.

As I entered the clearing a gang of
Homo sapiens
were just about to hack the werewolf’s head off. She was impaled on a low tree branch, stuck with at least a dozen spears, one through the throat. (Not looking where I was going, she fessed-up afterwards. My own stupid fault. If I hadn’t stuck myself on that tree they’d never have got the spears into me.) Her hands, huge and elegantly clawed, had been cut off and lay among the frozen leaves on the ground.

Two humans with flint hatchets had climbed up (had been
ordered
to climb up, their wobbling faces said) into the tree above her and now stood,
or rather crouched, ostensibly ready to deliver the decapitative
coup de grâce
, in fact wishing they were far away. The remaining fifteen ringed her, the boldest darting close—grinning and screeching and tongue-flapping and mooning—to add wounds with knives and darts, with which latter her torso was already liberally quilled. The full moon—the heavenly one—lit the forest’s slivers and gashes of stubborn snow. Lit too Vali’s wet snout and bloodied fangs, her glistening pelt, her hard bare breasts and flat, deep-naveled belly …

I can tell you what I did next. I can tell you exactly what I did next. But I can’t tell you why. Divine whim? A determined universe? Aesthetic indignation? Desperate boredom? Sheer randomness? Take your pick. These days my preference is for Mysterious Moments of Pure Being, wherein perhaps all the above meet in paradoxical simultaneity and you find yourself doing something with both a deep sense of inevitability and absolutely no clue why you’re doing it.

The two shivering ninnies in the tree first. She wouldn’t die from her wounds, but she would certainly die from having her head cut—or, as it would have been with these halfwits, bludgeoned—off. (These were pre-silver days, or at least, pre-
worked
silver; a handful of smarter-than-average primitives had found certain rocks gave the creatures trouble—argentine and chlorargyrite we now know, though at the time your grandsires simply called them “wolf rocks” or “monster rocks”—but bullets and blades were millennia away.) The forest was cold and crisp and full of dark consciousness. It had been a long time since I’d seen this sort of action, but there were my energies like loyal horses, rearing and snorting and pounding the earth. I held them for a moment (a long time since I’d felt this sort of physical self-delight, too, outside feeding) then released them, with a thirty-foot leap into the tree, where a nifty spring and flip had me hanging like a bat in front of human Tweedles Dum and Dee. There was of course the stretched moment of stunned introduction. Their faces, swiped with paint, achieved a lovely nude look of surprise that had the briefest moment to switch to one of terror and certainty of death before I despatched them with a pair of tracheal slashes. A moment later my lady’s would-be decapitators went sailing over their companions’ heads and disappeared into the darkness on the other side of the clearing.

High human spirits dropped a little. Dropped further when the assailants found four more of their number dead, suddenly, throats ripped out or bellies opened, when they hadn’t actually seen how that was possible, when they were forced to concede that they hadn’t, actually,
seen that happen.

Mooning and tongue-flapping ceased. Celebratory gibbering petered out. One of your lot, wearing feathers in his hair and a necklace of small bird skulls, flung his spear at me. I caught it, cheerleader twirled it, then sent it back at him with such force that it went straight through
his
skull, splitting his forehead and cleaving his affronted brain, nicely, en route. Group shock. Perhaps because the feathers testified to chieftainship the bisection of this particular noggin produced a pivotal dip in morale. The remaining humans fled, some blubbering, some screaming, some in bug-eyed silence.

I turned to see the werewolf forcing herself backwards off the snapped tree limb that had pierced her just beneath the ribs and come through slightly to the right of her spine. With a moan, she collapsed on her back then rolled onto her side, gasping. I went to her as if in fluid obedience to an inevitable choreography. With, I imagine, an inane or beatific smile on my face. I felt—in those rare split seconds when I wasn’t wholly dissolved into the experience—full of uncomplicated warm innocence.

“It’s okay,” I said to her in my own language, despite knowing she wouldn’t understand me, while the ghostly collective of my vampire peers went:
What the fuck are you doing?
“The humans have gone. Let me help you.”

(We didn’t stink to each other in those days. That came later, when the species war was already a thousand years old and the vampire ruler Hin Kahur implemented howler aversion therapy: Newly turned vampires were tortured for weeks and months; each time something excruciating was done to them they were gagged and hooded with
gammou-jhi
hide, saturated and coated with the creature’s urine, faeces and the fluids from the sex organs and scent glands. Within a hundred years the therapy was no longer necessary. Even brand-new vampires found the smell of a werewolf unbearable. Conditioned response morphed into sensory hardwiring—go figure. There’s plenty of
post hoc
vamp science that
attempts to explain it—my friend Olek, the oldest vampire egghead, has a theory that it’s like the experiential formation of neural pathways in the brains of newborn human infants—but whatever the explanation, there the phenomenon unequivocally is: to vampires, werewolves absolutely fucking stink. And though the blood-drinkers’
gammou-jhi
stereotype is a moron, it didn’t take his species long to copy the aversion method, rendering the olfactory feelings mutual. However, when I met Vali all that was still in the future. Our races didn’t socialise with each other, and there was natural competition for prey, but we managed as best we could simply to keep out of each other’s way.)

“I know you can’t talk,” I said. “And I know your wounds will heal. But we should move in case they come back in greater numbers. Can you walk?”

She couldn’t. She’d lost a lot of blood through the big wound, and by the time I was done pulling out the spears and darts she’d lost more—along with consciousness. I wondered what language she spoke in her human form, what tribe she was from, how long she’d had the Curse. I wondered—astonished at myself, since it was risibly irrelevant—what she’d look like when the moon set. What she’d look like as a woman.

I tore a leg off one of the humans, plucked a couple of hearts and tongues and stuffed them into one of their furs. I debated taking her own severed hands, but closer examination revealed they were decomposing already, and besides, it was common knowledge that
gammou-jhi
, like vampires, could regrow anything (apart, obviously, from a head) overnight. So I left the forlorn things where they were. (Later she said to me: I think there must be a place all the parts go, all the hands and feet and hearts and eyes. They’re put together to make whole creatures, who carry the confused memories of all their original owners …)

The sky said seven hours till sunrise. Two hours less to the setting of the moon. There would be a second and possibly more awkward introduction.

I picked her up, slung her over my shoulders and set off.

M
Y NEAREST EARTH
was four miles away in a cave in the hills. Unburdened and going at a sprint (we’ll have to talk about flight later, though I already know I’m going to make a devil’s arse of explaining it, and in any case these were the days before I could do it) a journey of a few minutes. Going carefully with a nine-foot
gammou-jhi
across my shoulders it seemed to take forever. I wasn’t tired when we got there, but small muscles I’d forgotten about had woken up and were stretching and blinking, astonished they’d slept so long. When I laid her down on her side her eyes opened. They were dark, their lights still a little adrift. I knelt beside her.

“You’re in a cave in the hills on the side of the river where the sun goes down,” I told her, this time in the tongue of the tribe who’d been chasing her. “You’ve been hurt, but as you know, you’ll live. I brought meat. It’s here if you need it.”

The cave was dry, and smelled of icy stone and the wild sage that grew over the entrance. Now of her, too, a complicated odour: her bitter canine blood, yes, but also something that just when you thought it was sly and fruit-sour hit you with a dash of brine—then astonished the back of your throat with maddening sweetness, like too much honey, so that you could hardly breathe. I’d never smelled anything like it. It sensitised my face. My idiot face. My tranced, beguiled, undone face.

Nonetheless the long moment of pure being was passing and the strangeness of what I was doing was beginning to assert itself. I’d never been this close to one of her kind before. The big totemic head looked bizarre lying still, blinking, jaws open. I looked down to where her hands had been lopped from her wrists. Two new nubs were sprouting already. Even with my hearing I’m sure I only
imagined
catching the whisper of furious cellular repair. I’d lost a hand more than once down the centuries (although never both together) and supposed regeneration to be the same
for her as it was for me, a sensation as of millions of tiny insects hurrying to form a very specific complex cluster …

“I can’t explain this,” I said to her. I felt hyperreal and precarious, repeatedly close to laughter. I’d been picturing myself trying to explain it to Amlek and the others.
I don’t know what made me help her. I just found myself helping her.