Generation V (2 page)

By now Chivalry was at the counter and placing an order for a hazelnut cappuccino. He was smiling politely at Tamara and looking completely unaffected by her borderline toplessness, much to her apparent frustration as she managed to lean over even farther, with the result that two men seated at tables behind Chivalry but with good eye-lines to the counter choked on their drinks, and one unlucky guy spilled coffee all over himself. Chivalry didn’t so much as glance below her collarbone. I felt a little bad for Tamara, despite her tendency to leave me stuck with all the cleanup work. The elegant but extremely expensive wedding ring on Chivalry’s left hand meant that Tamara could strip down right in front of him, beg him to take her, and Chivalry probably wouldn’t even blink as he strolled away.

Now Chivalry was smiling at Jeanine and politely greeting her. “What a great little coffee place,” he said, prompting preening. “I just stopped by to say hello to my younger brother.”

Now everyone was staring at me—my coworkers with
shock that I could be related to this god among men, and my brother with that calm steadiness that made me squirm inside at the memory of the sixteen calls of Chivalry’s that I’d dodged over the last month and a half. Nothing in Chivalry’s face suggested that he was pissed off at having to trot his thousand-dollar shoes into one of the mangier areas of Providence and over what was certainly one of its most disgusting floors to track down a brother who was avoiding him. I felt that very familiar sensation of gut-wrenching guilt and embarrassment that was my almost constant companion when I was with my brother.

“Hi, Chiv,” I said lamely.

“Hello, Fortitude,” Chivalry said, his voice grave and calm. “Would it be possible to have a word with you before you return to your”—and just the slightest flick of a glance to the collection of coffee bags, filters, and paper cups that lined the soiled workstation—“endeavors?”

I felt color creeping up my neck. The madder Chivalry was, the more he tended to show his age. Chivalry might look like he was in his early thirties, but he’d been born just as the Civil War was winding down. When he forgot himself, Chivalry sounded like a soldier’s letter home read in a Ken Burns special. At twenty-six, I’m not an infant compared to him—I’m a fetus.

“Fort, you bad boy,” Jeanine cooed, giving me a swat that might’ve looked playful but still packed some punch. “Why haven’t you ever mentioned that you have an older brother?” The unspoken
stud muffin
part of her statement hung in the air. “And”—here she turned to Chivalry, giving him a full-on eyelash batting—“of
course
Fort can take a break and talk to you. The little darling has been on his feet all day.”

That was laying it on a bit thick, I thought, but I wasn’t going to turn down a break, especially since Jeanine was usually of the thankless-taskmaster school of management. While I walked around the counter, ignoring Tamara’s glare of death, I watched while Jeanine leaned even farther toward Chivalry on the pretext of giving him a little pat on the chest. She failed to notice when Chivalry’s expression went from glacially polite to frigidly homicidal. Of course, she wasn’t the one who was going to have to deal with it—I was.

I picked a table as far away from the register as possible, and even as I waited for the ass-ripping to follow as Chivalry settled himself in front of me, I couldn’t resist giving a little grunt of pleasure at the sensation of sitting. Jeanine didn’t allow stools behind the counter, even during slow days, and my sneakers were so worn down that I could actually feel the curling edges of linoleum through my soles.

Chivalry glowered. Sometimes I wondered if that was his default expression or if I just brought it out in him. “That woman,” he pronounced, “is a whore.” He dropped a crumpled piece of paper onto the table and gave it a glare that should’ve ignited it.

“That’s harsh,” I said. “You’re acting like no one ever slipped you their phone number before.” He chose to ignore that, giving only a very regal sniff of distaste, and cautiously sipped the sludge in his paper cup. Nothing in his face gave any outward indication about his feelings, but then again, he came from a more mannered time. Anyone born in this century would’ve given a spit-take. Rinsing out the machines between batches was Tamara’s job, and it hadn’t been done since she was hired.

Chivalry set his cup down with exquisite care, another reminder that the places he preferred to eat at would’ve served it to him in a nice mug rather than a partially recycled paper cup. A small part of me felt hurt at how disgusted he was by where I was working. Not that I didn’t spend half of my own time being disgusted by it, but that wasn’t exactly the point.

“I am concerned,” Chivalry said.

“Don’t be,” I snapped.

“Mother is also concerned,” Chivalry continued as if I hadn’t said anything. To him I probably hadn’t. “You haven’t come home to feed in over five months.”

“I don’t need to. Not yet.”

“At your age, you should be feeding every month, if not more often.”

“I’m fine,” I insisted. I hated visiting my mother’s house to feed, and I always put it off as long as possible. I hated what it involved, and what it meant to me. I hated the way it made me feel. The longer I could go between feedings, the weaker I became, but I preferred it that way. It made me feel human. If I tried very hard, I could even pretend that vampires were all make-believe, and that I wasn’t turning into one.

Chivalry made a low grumbling sound and pushed his cup away from him. “If you wait too long, your instincts will take over. Even as young as you are, you will become a risk to all around you.”

“You don’t care about the people around me. You wouldn’t care if I snapped and went on a murder spree.”

Chivalry’s mouth thinned. “A murder spree would be most inconvenient. Our mother has better things to spend money on than covering up your foibles.”

“But that’s all you care about, isn’t it? People’s lives don’t matter at all to you.”

One second Chivalry was tapping the table in irritation, and the next second his hand was around my jaw. He’d moved too fast for my eyes, or any of the humans around us, to follow. The palm of his hand was against my chin, and his fingers were wrapped almost gently around my face. I waited, not moving—one squeeze and I’d be sucking Ensure out of a straw for the next twelve weeks.

Not that he’d do it. My sister, Prudence, fantasized about breaking all of my bones to kindling (as detailed to me last year at Christmas), but Chivalry wouldn’t. He was just giving me a reminder of what I wasn’t. He was a full vampire, and could break a person’s neck before the person even realized he was moving. I was still mostly human, and sucked at sports.

“You wouldn’t even care if I killed everyone in this building. Lives don’t matter, just your convenience.” Talking was difficult, but I managed. Another reason to avoid my family was that I almost routinely manage to piss them off. He didn’t move his hand, just looked at me. “Chiv,” I nudged, “this is getting weird and you have an audience.” Already people from other tables were sneaking glances.

Chivalry didn’t bother to look around, but released my jaw slowly, leaving me with a pat on the cheek that managed to convey both fondness and a warning.

“You’re right, baby brother,” he said softly, his voice cold enough to put my freezer to shame. “I wouldn’t care. Not really, or at least not for long. But you would.”

He stood up, and made a show of smoothing the
wrinkles out of his jacket. His dark eyes gleamed like ocean water under a full moon, and the cold part of me that is entirely vampire seemed to sit up in response. I could hear the heartbeats of all the humans around me, smell the blood running through their veins. I pushed that part of me back down hard, until the people were only people again, and I could fool myself that I was one of them. Not feeding does sometimes have its drawbacks, especially when I pushed it to the edge.

Chivalry gave a soft snort, unimpressed. “Mother has asked me to invite you to dinner tomorrow. It’s not a command…yet.” He turned and walked out the door, not having to push through the crowd, since everyone took a few steps back when they saw him coming, unintentionally creating a path. They probably didn’t realize they were doing it, or if they did, they thought it was because he was good looking. They didn’t realize that it was because he was a predator, and that lizard part of their brain that was in charge of keeping them alive knew enough to get out of his way.

I finished the rest of my shift, ignoring Jeanine’s not-so-subtle questions about my older brother and refusing to let it rile me when Tamara left ten minutes early, making me stay twenty minutes late to do both of our cleanup work. The sun was just starting to set when I finally left Busy Beans, and I gratefully inhaled a few breaths of air that weren’t permeated with the smell of coffee grounds. As I waited at the bus stop, I looked over the tops of the buildings and enjoyed the last few sunbeams.

True vampires prefer overcast days, but I can lounge on the beach all day and the only price I’ll pay might be
a slightly worse sunburn than the human next to me. Time leeches away at our more human traits. At his age, Chivalry will avoid the afternoon sun, and he spends a lot of time complaining about how hats have gone out of style. My sister, Prudence, was a little girl when the British blockaded American ports during the Revolution. She sticks to the shade as much as possible, and carries both an old-fashioned parasol and a ready set of excuses about a family history of skin cancer.

Our mother lives behind blackout curtains and can’t go outside until hours after the sun sets.

The bus arrived, and I climbed up. I found a seat in the back and tried to keep my mind on good, human things. The vegetarian wrap that I’d pick up at the deli a block from my apartment for dinner. The Humphrey Bogart marathon that started tonight. The twelve hours between now and the next time I had to put on my green apron. But seeing Chivalry was tugging my mind back to all the things I spent so much of my time trying to avoid.

Unlike with Prudence and Chivalry, Madeline had decided that I would be raised among humans. Why she’d changed her parenting approach after two successful runs already remained a mystery that she’d flatly refused to explain to me, despite the many times I’d asked. My foster parents were named Jill and Brian Mason. Jill was a dental hygienist, and Brian was a cop. They were nice, normal people. Not much money, but a lot of love, and despite years of trying, no baby. They’d tried looking into adoption, but a misspent youth with a militant wing of the Sierra Club and a stack of arrests from chaining herself to redwood trees in the Pacific Northwest had left Jill with a record that Brian’s decorated public service just couldn’t
offset. No one cared that Jill had never hurt a single person—forty-three arrests were enough to make sure that no adoption agency, public or private, was going to touch them. Then one day Brian and Jill got a call from a lawyer asking if they’d be interested in a special kind of foster care.

I don’t think they listened to anything past the part where they’d be given a healthy infant. I was three months old, and the family that was giving me up wanted to retain a connection with me that required one dinner a month, unsupervised. But this was their only chance to be parents, and they thought that anything was worth getting me.

It was a long time before they learned how wrong they were.

But they took me into their little house in Cranston, and I had the kind of childhood everyone should have. Cub Scouts, Little League, dog in the backyard, and cookies in the oven—we were a Norman Rockwell painting. And when a black Mercedes pulled up in front of the house once a month and I was taken away from them, I was always back four hours later, no worse for wear.

Maybe if Brian hadn’t been a cop, everything would’ve been okay. Maybe it would’ve ended in blood no matter what. But as I got older, I started whining about going to my relatives’ house for dinner. For a while they were able to dismiss it, but when I was nine, my whining was getting worse, and one day I made a mistake. I told Brian that I didn’t like the way my blood mother touched me. That it made me uncomfortable. He asked for details, which at first I was smart enough not to give.
But he reassured me, told me that he could protect me, and I was dumb enough to believe him, so I told him what I had to do at those monthly dinners.

Brian was on the phone with my mother’s lawyer within half an hour. The lawyer was expensive, and the first thing he started doing was threatening to take me away from them. Brian and Jill didn’t have much money—that’s why they’d been chosen to take care of me, just in case this happened. They didn’t have enough money to fight for me, and maybe another couple would’ve backed down, would’ve believed what the lawyer was saying—that nine was a difficult age, I was an imaginative child, and that everything was just fine. Don’t rock the boat.

Brian went to work and started looking into my mysterious relatives. He hadn’t done that before—maybe he knew on some level that he wouldn’t like what he’d find. He’d made a total of three phone calls before he got one of his own, from the chief of police. The message was simple—if you want to keep your job, stop looking into Madeline Scott.

At home, Jill got a call as well, from Prudence. She wanted to come over, to talk to them, to clear up any confusion that might’ve arisen because of my “story.”

Maybe if she hadn’t said it that way, it would’ve been fine and she could’ve smoothed things over. Maybe if Madeline had told Chivalry to handle it, everyone would’ve been okay. But maybe Madeline already knew what direction this was heading, because she gave it to Prudence.

Jill called Brian. He pulled all the money they had out of the bank, and Jill started packing.

I didn’t really understand what we were back then. Maybe if Madeline and Chivalry hadn’t shielded me so much, I would’ve known enough to try to talk Jill and Brian out of it, to calm them down, to lie. To save their lives.

Prudence arrived before Brian came home. I knew she was at the door and I begged Jill not to open it. She loved me enough to believe me, and she didn’t open it, but it didn’t matter. It’s only in stories that vampires need an invitation.