Generation V (5 page)

Despite the two centuries that Chivalry waited to become an older brother, his instincts are unmistakably well honed. There were few things I hated doing more than sitting and making pleasant chitchat with Bhumika when she was looking this fragile, but making a visit to my host parents was definitely high up on that list.

“Gosh, Chiv, what a great idea,” I said, making sure that my voice was as chirpy as possible.

“Hurry back,” Bhumika said. “I want to hear all about what you’ve been up to.” Her honest interest and the unappealing prospect of trying to find upbeat anecdotes to tell about my current living situation were even worse than anything Chivalry could’ve thought up to punish me, and I hurried out of the room with a mumbled reply.

Grace and Henry are the nasty secrets of the house, and they are very fittingly kept down in the basement. Madeline might keep kindly Wilson in the driveway to divert the curious, and visitors are encouraged to roam around the house to their hearts’ content, since she knows that there’s nothing on the main two floors that is going to scream
vampire
to them, given the modern person’s willingness to rationalize anything before reverting to superstition, but the door to the basement is kept secure. Madeline had a butler’s pantry built around it, where a member of her staff is located at all times, day and night, ostensibly polishing up the silver. In reality, they are there to unlock the door for anyone who needs to go down there. Well, the first door. After that there’s a short staircase, then a very high-tech door that requires an authorized thumbprint to open, then an even longer staircase.

It isn’t a dank basement with drips and weird rock outcroppings. It used to be, but Madeline brought in contractors about ten years ago, and now it just looks like you’re in Area 51. Discreetly placed surveillance cameras lend it that homey feel as you head down.

I reached Mr. Albert’s room. He’s the caretaker. I
probably should be comfortable just calling him Albert, but I’ve never been able to get that out of my mouth. At six and a half feet tall, he’s a former wrestler, with his graying hair trimmed ruthlessly into a jarhead’s buzz, a nose that has been broken on more than one occasion, three long, curving scars that rake down his forehead, and the precise manner of the butler in a British period film. Simply put—he’s intimidating. I knocked, heard his “come in,” and went inside.

It’s a small sitting area, just some tables and chairs, with stuffed bookshelves from floor to ceiling along every wall except the one between his room and the holding area, which is made of one-way glass so that he can keep an eye on Henry and Grace at all times. Mr. Albert’s Taser hangs next to the door, easy to grab if he has to run into the enclosures suddenly.

Mr. Albert stood up when I walked in. I wished he wouldn’t do that. Having him tower over me makes me feel like a child again. “Good morning, Mr. Scott,” he said.

“Hi, Mr. Albert. How are they doing today?”

“Just fine. They’ve been looking forward to your visit.”

Guilt trip. What a bliss.

Mr. Albert unlocked the door for me and took a seat in front of the glass. He has observed every interaction I’ve ever had with my host parents.

I walked slowly into the room, closing the door behind me. The walls and floor are laboratory white, and the overhead fluorescent lights never go out, so I always spend the first few minutes of my visit squinting. Henry and Grace live in side-by-side plastic cubes, ten feet by ten feet. There’s a slot for each of them, like at a bank or
a prison, that their food trays pass through, along with the door that Mr. Albert uses when he needs to interact with them—I’ve never been through it. In each cubicle is a chair, a single bed, a table, and a toilet. Everything is metal, and everything is bolted to the floor. They’re allowed one book at a time each. If they want to watch television, they can ask Mr. Albert and he’ll turn one on that is mounted across the room from them. There’s a bright red line painted five feet in front of their enclosures, and a small chair placed just behind the line. That’s as close as I’m allowed to go.

It’s very Hannibal Lector chic. The only thing breaking the monotony of the white walls are a few framed pictures. There’s one rainbow, two birds, a beach, and a turkey. They are all terrible, since I made them with finger paints when I was five. Each one is dedicated to Henry and Grace, even though I remember how Mr. Albert had to guide my hand through the letters.

Henry and Grace sat in their respective cubes. Both in their fifties, with graying hair and increasing crow’s-feet around their eyes, and dressed in white hospital scrubs, they should’ve look harmless. They were trying very hard to look harmless, in fact, each seated with folded hands and crossed feet, attentively looking toward me as if it was parent-teacher night in the Arkham Asylum.

They couldn’t manage it. Their eyes never stopped darting over me. Even as we exchanged pleasantries and started a completely banal conversation about the weather (they hadn’t been outside in over thirty years, and their skin was albino pale, but they did like to watch the Weather Channel), Henry’s fingers started tapping
frantically, and Grace got out of her chair to come closer to the edge of her cage. She wasn’t touching it yet, but I knew that she would soon. They always tried their best to show interest in my life, but it was an uphill battle, always doomed to fail.

We managed a full ten minutes before they were both out of their chairs and pacing. It was like seeing tigers at the zoo as they walked back and forth. Having both of them so focused on me was always nerve-racking, and even though I tried my best to stay calm, my body started showing the physiological signs of stress. My breath began coming a little bit faster, my heart sped up, and I could feel the start of sweat at my temples and under my arms. The more my body reacted, the faster they paced, the more stressed I got, and soon enough Grace snapped and started slamming her fists against the wall between us. It would’ve been easier if she was screaming, but she wasn’t. Instead she had dropped all pretence of our earlier conversation, and was now whispering to me, very softly and sweetly.

“Come to your mommy, darling, come here. Let me hold you, sweetheart. Come to Mommy.”

Then Henry started. “Come here, son. Come to your father. I’ve missed you so much.”

Suddenly Mr. Albert was at my shoulder. The Taser was in his hands, and he’d hung the cattle prod on his belt. Henry and Grace lost all restraint at the sight of him—they began throwing themselves at the walls and started screaming obscenities. They were both foaming at the mouth, and Henry’s hands were already bleeding.

I hurried out of the room, not looking back as their voices rose and there was the brief whiff of burned flesh
and urine. The walls of their cages could be electrified. Then I was back in Mr. Albert’s sitting room, and I didn’t slow down. My visits were always enough to ensure that his hands would be too full to say good-bye.

Between them, Grace and Henry have killed five people. For hosts, I’m told, that is a very low number. Famous hosts have included Jack the Ripper, whose career total was much higher than historians assume. One of the last people Grace killed was right after she gave birth to me. Not that she actually went through labor. A week before her due date she was put under and I was delivered via caesarian and whisked upstairs by Madeline. Not a moment too soon either, because as Grace was being stitched up, she came out of the anesthesia, grabbed a scalpel, and things ended very badly for one member of the surgical team. The rest got away with moderate scarring.

Vampires don’t fall in love with other vampires, throw on a little mood music, and have babies. Both genders of adults have functioning sex organs, but that’s not how they procreate. Adult vampires usually don’t live together—most branch off, claim territory, and then begin the task of nesting. If they are successful in procreating, then they live with their offspring until they also begin to feel the ticking of that biological clock, and the system continues.

But to get that little future vampiric bun in the oven going, they need humans to do the dirty work for them. Hosts are created when a vampire drains a human right down to the point where the fuel meter is pointing to empty, then fills her back up with the vampire’s own blood. I’m told that this process used to be messier before IV drips.

Small blood exchanges are no big deal for adult vampires. After snacking on her politicians, Madeline always has them take a sip from her. Chivalry does the same with his wife. Prudence doesn’t even like sharing an order of Chinese food, so I doubt that she does this. But both Madeline and Chivalry claim that there are no negative long-term effects to humans drinking small amounts of their blood, just a slightly increased feeling of loyalty and devotion from the human. I’d call that a sizable negative side effect, but neither of them listens to me. Whatever the arguable emotional impact, though, a human can walk away with a bit of vampire blood and be physiologically unchanged.

It’s when the blood exchange gets a lot bigger that other things start happening. A little psychosis here, increased strength there, and at two pints and up humans tend to start dying on the spot. Whole blood transfer survival rates are extremely low, and those hosts then get to undergo a few months of prolonged changes as the vampire blood starts tinkering around with their fundamental makeup. It starts with big things, like bone density and organ resilience, but then it goes small. By the time Henry and Grace were at the end of the process, their reproductive systems had been altered on critical levels, so that any child created with Henry’s semen or Grace’s eggs was going to be a vampire. From what Chivalry has told me, on the basic DNA level, I actually have more in common with Madeline than either of my host parents.

Vampires gain in strength as they get older, and reach the point where they might be able to create a host around the two-century mark. There’s an emphasis on the “might” there—Chivalry
had told me that there were vampires who spent their entire lives trying to create a host and were never able to achieve it. When we celebrated Madeline’s birthday, the cake had six candles on it—one for each full century she’d lived, but even for her it was apparently a very arduous undertaking to make a single host. With the fun addition of homicidal psychosis, actually keeping hosts intact long enough to breed is also a challenge for any vampire in the mood for a baby shower. The vampire blood running around in their systems isn’t natural, so whenever Henry or Grace get a cut, no matter how minor, their bodies can’t produce more blood. It’s up to Madeline to come replenish it from her own supply, another process that I’m told is (ha-ha) draining.

So vampires have a bit of built-in population control.

In vampire parlance, Madeline is my blood mother, the real parent. Henry and Grace are the host parents. All I know about them are their first names. I don’t know who they were, where they came from, or even why Madeline chose them. If they had any idea at all what was going to happen to them, or if they’d been completely misled. If somewhere in that madness they were fond of each other. If they were actually fond of me, as they suggested, or if it was just another attempt to escape.

Visits home are always full of these kinds of wonderful experiences. As I came out of the basement, the pantry maid stepped aside from her pile of already gleaming silver spoons.

“Mrs. Scott would like to see you before dinner,” she said. There wasn’t any curiosity in her limpid blue eyes.
Madeline liked her staff friendly, pretty, and dim. There were benefits to falling into those categories. Literally. Madeline provided full health and dental packages, plus the promise of almost lifetime employment. The only other place that could offer that kind of provision was Disney World. I thanked the maid, who turned back to her Sisyphean polishing.

Madeline has a suite of rooms on the second floor. There are also suites for all of her children, even though Chivalry is the only one who lives in the mansion. Prudence has a very modern town house one town over, and I’ve lived on my own ever since I left for college. Madeline’s rule is very simple—if we live with her, she’ll cover all our bills. If we live elsewhere, we have to support ourselves. Whether that is an attempt to keep us close, or to push us out of the nest, I have no idea. Whatever her intention, it would suggest that she has had mixed results.

I tapped lightly on Madeline’s door, heard her response, and walked in.

Madeline was the first vampire to arrive in the New World, and so she had her pick of territory. Hemmed in by Puritan-run Massachusetts and Connecticut, Rhode Island was the most inclusive of the new colonies. The oldest Jewish cemetery in America is located in Newport, and periodically people accused of witchcraft in other states would pack up their belongings and run to Rhode Island, which had a strong tradition of choosing
not
to burn people at the stake. People were a bit more alert to differences in their neighbors back then, and most vampires preferred to hunker down in Europe, where money and ancient family prestige could cover up all sorts of eccentricities and atrocities.

Her territory is all of New England, plus New York state, a sizable chunk of Canada, and northern New Jersey. I learned this when I was applying to colleges and Chivalry handed me a map of what areas I was allowed to go into. When I protested this, still entertaining the dream of leaving all of them in my dust and going out to UC Berkeley, I was told that I was still too young to go unescorted out of our home territory. So if I planned to attend Berkeley, Chivalry would be going with me. The thought of living with my brother was enough to kill all desire to go to Berkeley. I asked at the time what I was supposed to do if I met up with a vampire I didn’t know in
our
territory. Chivalry just smiled and said that that wouldn’t happen, because no vampire would dare come into Madeline’s territory without an invitation.

Vampires aren’t the only things that stay hidden from humans, and the other kinds of supernatural creatures usually have to negotiate with Madeline before they can settle anywhere within her borders. Sometimes that’s just a courtesy call, and other times there’s a full exchange of emissaries and forging of alliances. Not that I know much about it—the closest I want to come to the supernatural is summer blockbuster movies. When I was still living with Brian and Jill, the only people other than my family who I saw during my visits were a few politicians. After their deaths, when I’d lost the last of my illusions that all those things that my friends and I dressed up as on Halloween were just make-believe, I made a very conscious decision that I didn’t want to know anything about it. There wasn’t any hiding from vampires, of course, but I managed to give the rest a very wide berth.