In Blood We Trust (3 page)

My body rhythms were shredding me, my breath like icicles puncturing my lungs as heat wrestled with the coolness of my will to stay strong.

Stay human.

He spit out my blood, gulped from his flask, spitting that out, too, then drinking more. His back was to me, and I hunched down, shamed. A power within me was pressing outward, as if my monster didn't want to stay in. My gaze was still violet, beating and fuzzy.

No,
I thought again, but this time it was to myself.
Just stop . . .

He finished draining the flask, then slowly looked over his shoulder at me, his gaze a little less crimson, but not all the way back to its humanlike appearance. His short hair was tousled, his face a wounded scape boasting a nose that had been broken and hadn't healed correctly back when he'd been human. All in all, he was a bruised, haunted revelation of all the remorse he could muster.

But there was a terrible slant to his mouth that negated that.

“The way you taste . . .” he said.

He ran a bewildered gaze over me, and for a moment, I thought that maybe I had started to turn without having realized it. But with one scan of my body, I saw that I was still as human as I could be, considering the circumstances.

As I calmed my pulse—
don't think of the blood, think of breathing, just breathing
—I watched as Gabriel tossed the flask away.

“I can still feel your blood on my tongue,” he said. “It . . . numbs me.”

I still didn't get it. Not until I thought about the word
numb
.

“Like a poison?” I asked. My muscles ached a little, and not only because I'd tempted my body to change. It was because I wanted him back inside me.

“Like a poison,” Gabriel repeated.

I didn't think I'd heard him right, and I retreated to the wall, near my pillow. Before I'd turned into this new creature, he'd taken my were-blood. It had bolstered him, and I'd even thought . . .

Well, I'd thought that maybe I might be the only being in this world who could make him feel that way. But that was before I knew better.

Before I'd exchanged with 562 and become real poison.

My mind spun as he wiped the back of his hand over his mouth.

God-all,
poison
. Were-creatures worked that way with one another. We didn't yearn for each other's blood, because it pained us to taste and digest it. That was a good thing, too, because it kept the more powerful creatures, like the wolf I'd been, from attacking the weaker ones, such as the were-elk, were–mule deer, and were-scorpion who'd been a part of my Badlands community.

Had 562's blood changed the composition of mine to the point where Gabriel couldn't stomach it now?

I wasn't sure how I'd even been able to digest 562's blood in the first place, but maybe it had something to do with the way 562, my origin, had quickly and deceitfully taken my blood before I'd taken it from her/him.

Gabriel stayed on the other side of the bed, having turned away from me again. I wanted to reach out, run my palm over the lean muscles of his back.

“I don't get it,” I said. “The night of 562's rampage, she/ he kept mentally appealing to you with the notion of feeding you with blood. Why would 562 have done that if it would've poisoned you?”

“Maybe its blood just tastes bad enough so that none of us would try to drink from it. 562 offered it out of love. That's what it kept thinking to me, anyway.”

I'd always thought of 562 as more were-creature than vampire, with its snout and fur, its copse of long teeth, and its response to a full moon. Maybe that was why it had chosen me to be the drinker—because for the rest of the Reds, mother's milk wasn't healthy.

Besides, now that I thought about it, I
had
gotten sick on 562's blood, just as if it were a poison. But I'd swallowed it. I'd taken it right in, unlike Gabriel.

“Why did you take it from me?” I asked. “You knew that my blood could be dangerous in other ways.”

His shoulders slumped, and the sight of such a strong man weighed down did the same to me.

“Whenever I'm with you,” he said, “I tell myself I won't give in. But I did this time.”

“Maybe we should . . .” What? I was out of ideas, and I couldn't stand the thought of never feeling Gabriel again.

“Tonight,” he said, “it was a prick on your neck from my fangs. Next time . . .”

Next time he might get even more violent, and I could see . . .
feel
. . . that the part of him still clinging to humanity might survive only if he was miles away from me.

My blood gave one last desperate stretch in my core, then began to cool. My vision went from violet to blue as it turned back to normal.

When he stood, I looked away from him, hardly able to afford for my body to heat up again. I couldn't stand to see how beautiful Gabriel was, pale and streamlined, his belly flat, his legs long. And his skin . . .

I liked the coolness and hardness of it. I'd grown so used to it.

He gathered his dust-worn clothes—the beaten white shirt, the jeans, the boots that had always reminded me of a lost cowboy from the movies of yore. He put the articles on, one by one, seeming so far away already.

“I need to go to the cells,” he said, as if we'd only been in the middle of some discussion and were just now taking it right back up again. “I've got to talk to Stamp.”

“Now?”

“Me and the other vampires have to keep at it. We've got to chip away at him until he brings down his mind blocks to let us know if there're other security threats outside the hub, just biding their time to come in and attack. And Stamp
will
break. The old ones tell me that all humans do it at some point.”

Johnson Stamp, the Shredder who'd tried to kill us more than once. He'd even chased our group out here to the hubs, although he'd gotten his due in the end.

When I didn't say anything else to Gabriel—what could I possibly utter?—he turned round, all dressed now.

I held a sheet in front of my body. I don't know why when he'd seen it all more than once.

When he came over to me, it seemed as if he were going to bend down, kiss me softly. But all he did was touch my neck, healing my faint wound just before he headed back to the door, walking right out of it.

I should've told myself that it wouldn't be the last time he would need to leave me hanging, either. Not if we wanted to keep ourselves—and probably every one round us—safe. I was so easily riled, and I had caused enough trouble in the Badlands to know better than to cross lines now.

Reassuring myself with that mantra, I set about getting ready for the night, aimless, restless, and even now under the thumb of a hunger that Gabriel had brought out in me but hadn't assuaged.

I
had to get out of the asylum, so I headed toward the gated doorway, onto the walkway along the top of a high brick wall that surrounded the massive stucco building that loomed over GBVille.

I'd decided that some fresh air would do me good, but there was another reason I wanted to take a stroll. I was actually going to a place that had offered me alone time more frequently these nights.

As I traveled over the walkway, I heard a measured pounding sound from the middle of the asylum—an outside area that acted as a sort of covered courtyard a few hundred feet away. It sounded as if someone was playing drums.

It almost even reminded me of the so-called music that the lowlords in the hub had been playing before we'd shut down GBVille, but this was more . . .

Primal?

Intricate?

Maybe I'd see what the others were up to later. But for now, I approached the main gate of the asylum's walls, where a couple of Civil guards were on duty. The ogre and a displaced Yeren man-monkey stood a little straighter when they saw me.

The ogre grunted something that sounded like my name, as good a greeting as I'd ever get from a gray-skinned, towering mammothite like him, while the Yeren merely looked at me with wide, dark eyes.

Thing was, that ogre had said my name as if he were investing some kind of heavy meaning into it—a definition that I was just coming to terms with. There was a gratefulness for how I'd beaten 562 in our head-to-head confrontation, when my origin had been snacking on monsters as she/ he had rampaged through the asylum on the night of the most recent full moon.

But there was also a clear wariness, as if me and my new state of being were the second coming of 562, and all the Civils were just waiting for me to munch on every one of them.

Had
the Civils caught on to the fact that 562 had been eating up only their kind that night, and not the Reds? Had they heard any rumors about how 562, the mother and father of all the Reds I knew, had possessed such love for her/his monster progeny that she/he had been willing to attack the Civils in order to put the Reds on the highest rung on the ladder of existence?

Had they worked out the notion that 562 even
preferred
to drink Civil blood?

I told the guards that I was only going out for a walk, and they apparently thought that I wanted to grab a wildlife meal somewhere just inside hub boundaries. And maybe that would've been a good idea, based on what my latest romp with Gabriel had brought out in me.

Changing to my nonlunar form and loading up on blood might just calm me down all the way. But I didn't wish to become that way tonight. I didn't even like to change randomly, since I didn't know what kind of tricks 562's blood might have in store for me, like new hungers in the pit of my belly that I'd need to address.

Then again, part of me wondered what I was capable of now...

As I walked quickly away from the guards, toward the fringes of GBVille, I still couldn't shake the odd feeling that had been pumping through me while I'd been with Gabriel—the cruelty, the thoughts that were simmering to my surface and solidifying into stronger ideas only now.

Memories of my were-birth.

The anger I still felt, even today, pushed me forward. It
always
rode just below everything else in me, but I'd been feeling it more and more lately. I just hoped my bloodlust wouldn't ever explode into its fullest measure, as I'd seen it do in 562 during the full moon.

I was even afraid that I might find an appetite for the Civil monsters, just like the one my origin had revealed that night.

It was only recently that my Badlands group had discovered that there were more monsters in existence than merely blood drinkers, who were the children of 562. There were a lot of others who'd obviously ventured into the open after the world had changed; the government had caught some of these Civils, too, keeping them in asylums for research along with a lot of Reds. Word even had it that the government had been preparing to sell monster blood to elite customers who could afford to purchase longer life and immunity to disease. But from the reports we'd just found in the asylum labs, it looked as if our illustrious, shut-away leaders hadn't gotten to the point where they had packaged that corporatized dream just yet, thank-all.

With every step, I walked a little looser, closer to where I wanted to go. Behind me, under the murky moon, GBVille was dark. Not a lit window to be seen anywhere—not even in General Benefactors Corporation buildings that the hub had been named for. There weren't even any flashing reflections from the now-deadened carnerotica public screens, and surely no neon glares from the ads that had decorated transports before our group had used a power blaster to blow out everything.

Truthfully, it might as well have been the Stone Age, but I didn't think that the distractoids in the hub cared that much. The citizens were still running round in herds, high on adrenaline. Some had taken the “biological scare” pills ordered by the government for emergencies since we'd started a rumor about a rogue mosquito, just like the bug that had started the massive epidemic all those years ago during the Before era, when the world had changed altogether. GBVille had been barricaded because of those reports, and the populace was clueless as to the monster takeover because we'd been so secretive about it, with vampires imitating the voices of office-bound politicians and leaders, and other humanlike monsters masquerading as the powers that usually ran things. We'd also sent humanlike monsters as messengers to other fringe hubs already, just to get word out about the rogue mosquito. None of them had returned yet, but that was because they were searching out other monsters, gathering them, to begin rebellions in other places.

Even now, word hadn't gotten out about who was really in charge of GBVille—as well as an increasing number of other hubs as more monster communities followed our example here.

And it was about time we were at the top of society, too.

For a long while, what humans called “monsters” had been at the bottom of the totem pole, especially after the world had altered so much, what with melting polar ice caps changing the weather and the face of geography, and things like terrorists using stolen warheads to blow off a lot of the West Coast. Then the mosquito epidemic had hit, and it'd destroyed much of the world's population. But even then, our country wasn't the same as it'd been before—not with how places like India had leveled sanctions on us, messing up our economy until some mercenary private investors had started putting capital back into our interests. Me and my dad—rest his soul—had been sort of glad for the weakening of government, though, because it'd allowed us to move out to the New Badlands unnoticed by the bigwigs who'd cut back on some of their domestic surveillance programs. We'd even had a pretty good life in our were-community until Johnson Stamp had come along with his nosy employees.