Shield of Innocence (Alternate Places Book 4) (31 page)

"So, we can go try the
others? I don't know if that will end the argument, but it's a nice enough
present, if we're going to just abandon them all here."

That got him to stand, and Eve to
do the same, going with him. For some reason the rest of them wanted to hang
out in the front, where there was less upset sounding bickering. He just
walked, smiling at them all.

Then, like Bey had earlier, he
clapped his hands several times and smiled politely.

"All right, would..."
he looked at the beasts arrayed around him, and understood the rough power
structure there almost instantly. Lenore and Sims were about the same age, or
at least in the same rough power class, and were a lot smaller as far as inner
shadow beasts, than Marissa, who was in turn about half the size of Bey.
Inside.

"Actually, Eve, would you do
up Lenore and Chief Sims first? You'll have to go larger than you did with
Ginger." He did it himself, knowing that her inner being would follow that
part now, and understand what he meant. It would be hard to sneak up on the
girl that way again. That basically meant that no vampire was really going to
be able to dominate her mind very easily ever again.

It was work for her to grow that
large, but took a lot longer to get the women up to speed. Part of that was due
to age, and how old and dusty their memories of pleasure were, but the rest was
just that being
bigger
like they were made a vast difference.

He did the other two himself, at
the same time. It was no harder that way, and while Bey was truly difficult to
remind about sex, Marissa was nearly there on her own. Even not getting
anything from the act for over a thousand years, she still enjoyed being close
to people. Now she smiled, moved in, and put a hand on his arm.

"This is
amazing
.
Perhaps I was wrong about you, and yours?" She practically purred, since
she was getting a bit horny, the new sensations hitting her firmly already.

He just smiled, and started
working everyone that was going with him through the node. They were probably
late already. Hopefully no one would be too mad at him over that part of
things.

The front sitting room was filled
with people from two worlds, which was kind of incredible, Zack had to allow.
It would have been easy to take it for granted, in a lot of ways, since many of
the people were so familiar, but the differences, the tiny ones, were kind of
wild to see.

For instance, Lenore was at least
an inch taller than Claire was. Otherwise they could have walked out into
public and pretended to be identical twins and no one would have ever called
them on the idea. The bigger change ups were interesting too, like Chris and
Ginger.

No one else was getting it, since
they didn't look all that similar. Not on the outside. The feeling coming off
of their internal shadows was so similar that it was nearly glaring to him. To
Merry, too, though she wasn't speaking of it. Libby however was getting along
pretty famously with Calley Hale, however.

They both looked at each other
before anyone else said much of anything, and smiled, identically.

Then, as one spoke.

"
Threesome
!" It
got a laugh, and both of the girls to hug, almost instantly. From across the
room, Chris raised his hand. Volunteering. It was cute, when he did it. Like
the excited kid in the back of the class who
really
wanted to give the
answer.

Zack shook his head.

"No can do, since you're up
to learn the new trick for the day. Don, too. I... Don't really know if Kaitlyn
can manage it or not."

That one turned out to be his own
mistake, doubting her like that, since she easily did Luthor, the vampire
leader, who was ancient, powerful, and purring at her like a kitten after about
half a minute. She didn't even have to get more than a hint about how Zack did
it, either. Her ability to communicate on that level was limited, and it didn't
matter for once in the slightest.

Sex was her thing, and what she
was good at.

Don was the one that had trouble
with the whole thing, though in the end, he got it too. Then Merry scurried out
of the room, to make food for the others. Without saying anything Eve went with
her, which didn't make a lot of sense, until they were all settled at the main
dining table, and some containers of blood where brought out. Their vampires
didn't seem to think it would come to much, but enjoyed it after a few
movements.

Luthor actually smiled.

"It
lives
? The force
of life still flows through each sip, but it is in a cup? How is that possible?"
The man was ancient, and held a slightly lizard like aspect to his bearing. His
eyes however locked with Eve, guessing who was responsible for it.

She smiled and nodded. There was
a strange bit of connection underneath the surface level, but it wasn't exactly
clear what was going on.

"We have a system in place,
and a good anticoagulant that doesn't taste too horrible. This is human blood,
but we also have a much less expensive version that's made of cow. That gets
sold in stores in different places. Publically? In the meat department, normally
so as to not squick out the normies. People use it to drink, but
also
for blood pudding, if you can believe that. Which makes no sense, given they
have to force coagulation then, but hey, it works, so, why not?"

Zack looked down the table and
caught Luthor's eye. There was a quiet excitement there, as well as a slight
wariness.

He spoke to the ancient being
directly, staring a bit.

"They're all public there.
Vampires, shape shifters, and pretty much everything else?"

The ancient being turned, this
time toward Lenore, who was the oldest of the visitors there. That was his
rationale at any rate. It poured off of him, in wonder.

"You aren't hunted down in
the daylight? Or condemned as unholy by the religious?"

"Oh,
some
of that has
gone on. Not so much on the hunting side, to be honest, but the condemnation is
there. It's amazing how easy it is to refute when you're actually invited on
the television talk shows to do so. Rebekah here, she's a Manthori, which I
haven't seen here? She's done some of that for our people. Before we were put
forward, which wasn't our choice, she and some of her friends had a musical
band. The All Vampire Band. It was thought a harmless ploy to gain listeners by
the humans, which it was, but when we were made public, she was available as a
familiar face to deal with the public. It worked remarkably well."

That started a conversation about
things, but Luthor wasn't planning to jump in immediately on coming out in
their
world. That was both a shame, and understandable in a lot of ways. The leader
of the vampires was so old that changing anything would be seen as a threat to
his mind, more likely than not. On the other hand, it would be nice to not have
to try and hide the strange things of the world all the time.

In that other place, Lenore explained,
a politician who for some reason had been able to run for office as a vampire
and won, had put them out to the world.

Eve giggled at that.

"Richard ran as a
Republican, too. The incumbent was
so
corrupt and horrible that people
just assumed Swerlin was crazy, and still better than what they had. The big
problem there was that a greater demon or two got involved and put him up to
coming out for real. Medical tests, showing off how strong he was for the
camera, and that kind of thing. Then others did, so... We came out. People
there have a real issue though, in that they forget anything too strange, until
it becomes familiar to them. So, we exist now, but a lot of the other groups
still don't, to the minds of most. You don't have that here, do you? It's
really strange."

Luthor regarded her with a
stillness that sent a chill into the room. It wasn't a physical thing, but Zack
noticed it, like the heat was being stolen from reality around them.

It was, interestingly, Tyler, who
spoke then. He moved to touch Ginger's hand, since she was right next to him,
politely sipping at the blood of the cows in her vessel. Eve had that too, but
the others were all given human. Normally that would have been a problem for
Zack, but they, the donors, were all alive, and if he'd been told correctly, treated
well. There was no fear, or desperation coming from the cups at any rate.
That
was strange. Every plate of steak he'd ever seen had held terror and pain.
These containers of blood had none of that.

The dead man that wasn't a
vampire looked over at Eve, and shrugged in a way that reminded Zack of a
puppet being manipulated. Like there were invisible strings making it happen.

"I wonder if the angels did
it? The part where it's hard for people to keep things in mind? Gregor
mentioned something once that..." Then suddenly, the topic was dropped.

Zack had to wonder however, since
he'd never met any angels that he knew of. Then, he might have, and simply
missed the whole thing, taking them for something else.

On the nice side they only stayed
at the table for about two hours, and the conversation mainly stuck to how
different, and similar things were. Luthor really wanted to see about buying,
or trading, for the blood production information, but didn't know if
asking
was allowed. It could be considered improper, after all. This was a meeting of
the line walkers, and no one had told him all their possible rules yet.

Eve however was
looking
to
set up operations in this new world, even if she didn't make any money from it,
and so was Rebekah. They just didn't know how to go about doing that, exactly.
Zack however, had loads of gold and cash around, that wasn't doing anything at
all, which would work well enough to get things going that way. Shrugging he
smiled and looked at the bone white woman and Eve, who was pale, but just at
the lower edge of normal for a white woman.

"We should get that blood
stuff going here, too. You two can run it, if I provide the money? Or, I mean,
get others to do the work, but you know roughly what to do." He didn't
really need to make anything off of it all, so didn't think to suggest that,
which set the tone pretty well.

Eve smiled at him, and winked.

"Cow blood first? The human
production is more expensive, since we need to pay the donors for it. One of
the big mistakes we made back home was putting out the expensive stuff first.
Then we were, the vampires, kind of told by the council that we had to either
eat animals or pay a hundred bucks a pop for a four ounce bottle of human. That
caused problems that you don't need, if you can avoid them."

Luthor stood, bowed, and gestured
to the side room.

"Would it be allowed to
speak about this? In private, or at least at a remove where our boring and
tedious words of business won't disrupt the pleasant evening of these
others?"

That got the whole thing to break
up into groups, with Claire floating over toward the other room, to act as the
mouthpiece for his money, since it was a vampire matter, and her literal job.
That meant that a certain line walker wasn't going to be needed. It also let
the vampires he didn't know, who had remained very silent the whole evening, to
escape. They had their prizes, and probably were glad to have made the contacts
with the strangers, but that didn't mean they weren't cautious.

Zack hadn't seen them leave, but
Libby and Calley were both gone. Chris was there however, and moved over to
speak to Ginger, who was next to Tyler. On the interesting side, the dead man
wasn't acting like Chris was coming to poach his girlfriend. There was no
posturing or acting like the boy wasn't a real danger that way. It was
interesting to see, since it appeared that Ty just didn't care that much about
that kind of thing. As in, if his girlfriends wanted to have sex with other
people, that was up to them.

Ginger didn't seem all that
concerned with Chris however, since he was just a skinny looking kid to her
eyes. A
human
one, and since he wasn't food, that meant she wasn't all
that impressed, personally. Even though he could teach vampires how to enjoy
sex. She'd
noticed
that, but didn't get the whole picture yet.

Not until Lenore moved over to
the group, and gestured for Zack to come along as well.

"This has been an
interesting evening! Christopher, you're working with Eve aren't you? Helping
to set up the new line walking concern in our world? I know that Zack,
our
Zack, is very excited about it. He mentions you often."

That got a nod, and a grin.

"Not that I'm really needed
in there, but it's something to do when I'm not in school. Your Kaitlyn and Eve
have the line walking portion down well enough, along with other Zack. They
think we should keep things separate though, so that people will be more
comfortable about it all? Not run by demons? Even Zack said something like
that. He seems nice enough to me, but I guess a lot of people there are afraid
of him?"

Ginger looked at him closely, and
had to fight off rolling her eyes, working out that the skinny, kind of average
looking high school boy was important. A part of her wanted to kick herself,
but she hadn't really been openly rude yet, just a bit less interested than was
probably polite.

Smiling, Zack waved from Ginger
to Chris, and tilted his head.

"You two should be pen pals
or something. I mean, you're the same person from different worlds, and that's
kind of interesting, right?"

The reactions of the group were
different then, Lenore being mildly interested that two very different looking
people would be the same person, for instance. Ginger was slightly taken aback,
and Chris was suddenly resigned to simply never getting a date with the
vampire.

Tyler just wanted to have sex
with them.
All
of them, which included Claire, Lenore, and him. Not that
he had a need too, or that it was an obsessive level thing, but it sounded
interesting to him, and since they clearly weren't all going to fight, that was
the other main option. To his mind anyway.

For Zack's part, he just nodded,
and smiled at them all.

"We should get you all back
pretty soon. It's getting late and I want to get to my vacation home in the
morning. I'm going to the beach. It's a pretty big deal for me, since I haven't
taken any time off for a while."

Not for a
long
time,
actually. He'd been fifteen on his last real vacation. That had been to
Disneyland, and his grandparents had worried about him the whole time, since
he'd acted afraid of the people in the costumes. It was, he knew now, simply
that he didn't understand the difference between their outer forms, and their
shadow selves. That had been hard for his brain to figure out at the time.
Plus, some of them were kind of creepy looking.

The blonde vampire girl, Ginger, smiled
at him then. It was real looking, which was kind of hard for her kind to do
when they were young.

"That sounds fun. Next time
you should come to
our
world for it, and we can all go? I'll have to get
a place for us all, or rent a hotel room. We can go to a science fiction
convention, and dress up like humans!" That seemed to be an inside joke,
which only Tyler laughed at.