Nightlord: Orb (50 page)

“Yes,” I agreed.  “Angels of Death?” I asked.

“That’s what the word on the street is.  People disappearing in alleys causes talk.  Seeing a shadowy figure kneel by a bum and walk away from a corpse does that, too.”

I glanced at Mary.

“We really need to work on our sneaking,” I told her.

“One of us does,” she agreed, dryly.

“Hello?” Wallace asked.  “I’m still talking.”

“Sorry.  What can we do for you?”

“You’re the guy Tony wants to eviscerate, right?”

“I think he’s more interested in exsanguination,” I admitted.  “He’s not interested in my guts, necessarily.”

“I think that would be a shame and a waste.”

“Oh, here we go.”

“What?” he asked.  “I’m not doing anything.  I’m just talking.  No harm in talking, is there?”

“That depends.  Are you talking to keep us here, make a proposal, or waste our time?”

“Suspicious, aren’t you?”

“Tony wants to exsanguinate me,” I pointed out.  Wallace laughed aloud.

“Good point.  But it’s okay; I don’t want you bled dry.  Neither do Teeth or Knuckles.”

“Teeth?  Knuckles?”

“My progeny.”  He nodded at the other end of the alley.  Two large figures slipped around the corners and started walking our way. Mary stepped behind me, back to back, to face them.

“Then what
do
you want?” I asked.

“Only a little of your blood.  A tiny bit.  Nothing you’d miss—I’m not greedy.  Enough to give me a leg up is all.”

“This is hardly the best way to ask.”

“It’s not like I could write you a letter.  Everyone knows Constantines don’t know how to write,” he added, mockingly.

“I don’t know it.  And you could have simply asked right here instead of calling your buddies to cut us off.”

“Could be you have a point.”  He nodded past us, at his friends.  “Hey.  Scram.  The man doesn’t like being crowded.”  Teeth and Knuckles shrugged and went back the way they came.

“See?” Wallace continued.  “I don’t have to go with the heavy-handed shit.  I can be as refined and diplomatic as the next guy.”

“Apparently so,” I agreed, straight-faced.  “All right.  You want blood, in the commodities sense rather than in the vengeful one.  What do you offer?”

“Offer?  Are we negotiating?”

“Well, you can try to take it, which has its own special problems.  You could ask for charity—a gift.  Or you could offer something in exchange.  If you’ve got another way this could go, I’m listening.”

“Huh.  Okay.  Would you please give me a gift of some of your blood?”

“No.”

“Had to try it,” he said, shrugging.  “I didn’t expect it would work, but, hey, you never know.  So, we’re negotiating.  What do you want?”

That was an excellent question.  What did I want?

“Do you think you can fix it with the Elders so they’ll leave me alone?”

“Can you?”

“Not yet.”

“Me either,” he agreed.  “I can throw money at you, if that’ll influence your thinking.”

“I’m good, but thanks.  What else have you got?”

“I’m a Constantine.  We have a reputation for being brutal and being good at it.  Got someone in your way who deserves a chunky salsa award?”

“I can usually handle that, but I’ll keep it in mind.  Look, before we get too far into this, let me point out we still haven’t established what happens to someone when they get a dose of my blood.”

Wallace nodded at Mary.

“She looks okay.”

“I’m awfully hungry, though,” she grumbled, looking at him with narrowed eyes.  She couldn’t have been more threatening if she’d drawn and cocked a pistol.  He took a step back.

“Now, now.  No one wants this to get messy.”

“My point,” I interjected, “is we haven’t established the side effects.  She might be hungry for days, even weeks.  Or it might be permanent.  How would you like to have to feed every night?”

“That’s on the table?”

“Could happen.  We don’t know, yet.  If you’re really interested, though, I have an idea.”

“I’m listening.”

“You could help me with my research.  One of the things I’m looking into is the effects of my blood on existing vampires.  Another thing I’m looking into is curing vampirism in people who don’t want it.”

“Whoa, hold on,” he protested, taking another step back and holding up his hands.  “How do you ‘cure’ that sort of thing?”

“Magic.  I haven’t worked out the details, yet.  I need volunteers for that—people who don’t want to be vampires.  It’s probably going to be a complicated and unpleasant process, on par with going into the hospital for major surgery.  It might be about as painful, too.  So I need volunteers who
really
want to be human again.”

Wallace rubbed his jaw and considered it.

“Say I can find someone.  That gets me a dose of blood?”

“If you insist, yes.  I’d rather say it gets you credit toward it.  I don’t really want to pump you full of my blood and discover you explode from the overdose or turn into a ravening hunger-monster that goes on a flesh-ripping rampage.”

“Huh.  Is that on the table, too?”

“I don’t know.  That’s why I got a volunteer to try it in small doses, first.  We’re starting to see side effects and I’d like to know how bad they get.  I imagine you would, too.”

“Ahem,” Mary cleared her throat.  I gave her my attention. “I meant it about being hungry,” she pointed out.  “Really hungry.”  I nodded.  She went back to watching behind me.

“Tell you what,” I said to Wallace.  “Think about it.  You seem reasonable; I try to be.  I’m not against what you want.  On the other hand, I want to know what I’m going to be responsible for starting.  Is that too much to expect?”

“No, I guess not,” he admitted.  “Okay.  You let me know when you’ve got your experiment done.  How long do you think it’ll take?”

“I wouldn’t think it’ll be more than a month, the way things are going.  I’m guessing it’s best to do this as a slow, gradual process—the hunger is new, and may be from trying to do too much at once.”

“Like blow, back in the day.  You snort a line, it’s cool, but do too many and it blows your brains out.”

“I would imagine so.  That’s why we’re going to try and handle this hungry problem and see if it settles down before we try any more dosage.”

“Right.”  He made a show of carefully reaching into a cargo pocket on his leg.  He pulled out an old business card and scribbled on the back.  “Here’s a contact.  Let him know you want to talk to me; he’ll pick a time and place.”  I took the card—“The Pizza Wedge”—and glanced at the phone number on the back.  It was legible, so I put it in a pocket.  I wondered why he didn’t just transfer information to my skinphone.  At least, I wondered until I realized preventing or confusing digital traces must be second nature to surviving vampires.

“I’ll get back to you,” I assured him.

“Until then, we were never here and we never had this conversation, okay?”

“Who are you?”

“Good answer.”  He strolled past us and down toward his friends.  We walked the other way out of the alley and caught a bus.

Mary fidgeted on the bus.  She held my hand in a grip of steel.  She kept looking at the other passengers and licking her lips.  I squeezed her hand in return; it seemed to help.

We got off the bus, switched to another.  I was afraid to go through too much of that. Mary was obviously pushing her limits.  I turned my skinphone on, did some fact cybering, and we immediately got a cab.

Oklahoma City has meat packing plants.  It’s not human blood, but blood of any sort is acceptable to a vampire about to completely lose her cool.  If hers was anything like my hunger rages, it would be tough to cover up the property damage, to say nothing of the fatalities involved.  She could go through dozens of people and then start on the responding law enforcement, paramedic, and rescue workers.

We broke into the meat packing plant as quietly as we could.  It helps that we can simply hurdle a ten-foot fence.  The place wasn’t exactly crawling with security, either.  Who breaks into a factory to steal spare ribs?  I suppose we did, technically, but all we wanted was stuff they were throwing away anyhow.

I followed Mary.  Her nose led us through the place and down to one of several drains.  I can smell blood more effectively than a shark, but hunger does strange things to our senses.  Mary led the way.

I’m going to draw a kindly curtain over the proceedings.  It wasn’t pure blood; there were other fluids involved as well as bits floating in the mess.  I gave her my shirt as a strainer, then backed off so she could drink.  When I stood near to the flow it tended to lean in my direction.  She drank everything until her vampiric digestion couldn’t stand the foreign material.  The blood went into her system, the rest came back up.

After a couple of hours, Mary finally gave me back my shirt.  The bloodstains came right out of it; the rest was going to be difficult.

“Feel better?” I asked.

“Full.  And sick,” she added.  She turned away and vomited again.  I almost knew how she felt. I once tried to eat real food at night and had a similar, though lesser, result.  What she threw up wasn’t even what humans would call food, and there was a disturbing amount of it.  It was a nasty, unpleasant process.  If you ever run into a similar difficulty, consider meat-packing plants as a last resort.

Which makes me wonder.  What happens to non-blood things we ingest during the day?  If I eat a big meal in the afternoon, it’s still there when I have my transformation, isn’t it?  Why doesn’t it come back up?  What happens to it?  Does it digest super-fast during the transformation?  Or does it become part of me on some mystical level?  Or does my nighttime deadishness detect it during the dying process and treat it as though it belongs there?  Does food sit in my stomach until morning, when my normal digestion kicks on again?

I don’t know and I don’t know how I’d go about finding out.  It’s going to bug me; I know it is.

Mary turned back toward me, wiping her mouth.  She was a filthy mess.

“I don’t want to
ever
do this again.”

I stroked my hand along her face, cupped her cheek, ran fingers through her hair.  The bloodstains vanished into my skin, but the other stains remained.  I exerted myself for a cleaning spell, a real one.  We were alone and had time.  There was also no shortage of fluids to paint with.  Ironic, considering.  It took about half an hour, but it worked; we were pristine.

“There you go.  All better,” I told her.  She sat down and leaned against a heavy pipe.

“I still feel sick.  Do you know what’s mixed in with that blood?”

“No, and I cherish my ignorance.”  I sat down next to her and held her hand.  “We’ll stop feeding you my blood and see if your hunger levels off.  I agree we shouldn’t do this again.  This may be a convenient way to get blood, but it’s obviously hard on you.”

“Okay.”  She shuddered.  “Can we buy a meat processing plant like this?”

“Why?  So you can tear it down?”

“So we can alter how it disposes of waste.  I want a pipe for blood and only blood.  We can have it drain into a vat and swim in it.”

“Seems like a good idea to me.  If things settle down enough, I’ll look into it.  Think you can make it home?”

“Give me a minute to make sure I’m done throwing up.  I still feel sick.”

We left the plant by much the same methods we used to get in.  Mary didn’t argue when we bus and cab-hopped for a while.  She leaned against me, the poor, miserable dear.  I wondered if her condition was from the waste byproducts or from the changes going on in her system.  Maybe it was a combination of both.

We made it home and she went straight to the basement to lie down in the power circle.  I went with her, settled her in, asked if she needed anything.

“Tomorrow,” she noted.  “Human.  We’ll find someone desperate to die and oblige him.  And then we’ll do it again and again until we can’t find anyone else.  I have got to get this
taste
out of my mouth!”

“No problem,” I agreed.  She made a terrible sound and spat.

“Not for you,” she replied, miserably, and stood up again.  “I’m going to brush my teeth.”

I didn’t tell her it was probably more psychological than physical.  Maybe brushing her teeth for half an hour would actually make her feel better.  I tried to stay with her for moral support but she shooed me away.  She doesn’t like me to see her when she’s not at her best.  I guess it’s a woman thing.  She shooed; I went.

Friday, November 20
th

During the last week, the Four haven’t had time to play checkers.  I’ve cut more plastic pipe for them and they’ve painted most of it, but they spend the majority of their time over at Mark’s.  I can’t say I blame them.  Gary needs the help.  I’m actually rather proud of them.

I visited, shook hands with Mark, and told him not to worry about the yard equipment.  If I’d been smart, I’d have insured it—the loss was all mine; don’t worry about it, blah, blah, blah.  Mark isn’t good with acts of generosity, but he’s learning.

While I was there, I set off a prepared spell; this one was specifically for his nervous system.  His therapy sessions should see real improvement this week.  I also went over the settings on the dishwasher and the clothes washer with Gary.  He was using dish soap in the dishwasher—logical, but the wrong kind.  He was also using far too much detergent in the clothes washer by filling up the detergent compartment—also logical, but not a good idea.

Someone had already shown him which clothes to hang up and which clothes to fold.  I suspected one of the local mothers, but it might have been Patricia.

Come to think about it, Mark had nothing to complain about.  His place was cleaner than mine.

Speaking of my house, my gem farms were doing well, my power stalls were charging well, and I’ve got my Christmas decorations up.  Blinking lights on the porch roof in front spell out “SANTA LAND HERE.”

I don’t think Myrna approves.  The Four do.  I’m okay with that.

Larry has finished cleaning out his gutters and has returned my ladder, much to my surprise.  I’d written it off.

My symbol library has grown; Diogenes has a pretty good feel for how to edit a scanned-in ideogram.  We’ve started printing them out by the gross.  One of the spare bedrooms is now lined with large pigeonholes so I can keep them all sorted and organized.

Sebastian has phoned a couple of times.  He wants to know more about how my experiments with vampire-curing are going.  I think I’ve convinced him it’s a project, not an experiment, and will take time.  He also wants to know if I’m still interested in building power circles for other magi.  I’ve told him they can blame the Fries and Mendoza families for my lack of enthusiasm.

Several nights of hunting have fixed Mary’s flavor problem.  She reports feeling wonderful, stronger than ever, and says she can reach much farther than before with that feathery tendril of hers—twenty, thirty yards or thereabouts, even without seeing where she’s reaching.  She also says her feathery tendril is stronger, physically.  Working tumblers in a lock was no problem before.  Working the whole lock and opening a door is now within her capabilities.

All in all, I’d say it’s been a good week.  Things are looking up.  Time to start worrying about how it’s all going to go horribly, horribly wrong.

The sunset did its thing and I stepped into the shower.  A little later, Mary came in.  I peeked out; she sat on the toilet seat and looked at me oddly

“Something the matter?” I asked, going back to rinsing.

“I woke up early,” she told me.

“You do that.”

“No, you don’t get it.  I woke up about twenty minutes ago.”

“That’s impossible.  Sunset hadn’t even started.”

“And it sucked.”

“How do you mean?”

“I woke up in pain.  Everything hurt—all my joints were stiff, my head hurt, and it felt as though I’d drunk a gallon of old blood.  My stomach hurt and twisted.  I actually thought I was going to throw up again.”

“I’ve never seen a vampire throw up anything but food,” I mused. 

“What I threw up in the packing plant wasn’t food.”

“You know what I mean.  Besides, what could you throw up?  You haven’t eaten anything.”

“It can be done.  It’s not pretty.”

“You’ve seen a vampire throw up without eating anything?”

“Yes.  You don’t want to.  Black bile.  Foul.”

“Noted.  Go on about your waking up,” I told her.  She thought about it, trying to describe it.

“Well, I woke up feeling sick,” she began.  “Then I started to burn.  Well, not really burn, but it was as though someone started sticking pins in me.  Hot needles everywhere.  It was like the tingling, sort of, but more intense, even painful.  And then I started to sweat—I never sweat.  I felt like I was dying, right there, from some terrible sickness.  It gradually faded away, and then I was fine.”

Sunset finished running its course.  I turned off the water and started to towel off.  Yes, I could smell her and wished I couldn’t.  It seemed impolite to say so.

“Congratulations,” I told her.  “It sounds like my version of undeadness is taking over your version.”

“What does that mean?”

“Take your shower; you’ve got ick to clean off.  I’ll keep talking.”  She stripped and climbed into the shower while I explained.

“I experimented with creating vampires and seeing how the transformation process occurred.  Normally, when my kind dies—I mean, when one gets killed during the day—the soul goes on to wherever it goes and leaves behind a mechanistic imprint—a soulless copy of the intellect—on the undead corpse.  This undead corpse behaves more like your vampire species does; it lies down during the day, gets up only at night, that sort of thing.

“But your species dies during the creation process, apparently in a way that doesn’t sever the connection between the body and the soul.  You’re still inside that body.  As a result, I think my blood is trying to jump-start it.  It’s perfectly intact and theoretically functional, especially since it regenerates.  It’s even got a soul in it.  There’s no reason I can think of why it can’t be kicked-started into life.”

“You mean I might wake up during the day?”

“It’s possible.  Given your experience during the sunset—which is, by the way, fairly typical—you might be on the verge of living by day and dying by night.”

“I’m not sure I like your species,” she remarked.  “That sunset thing was awful.  Do you feel nauseated every time?”

“No.  I think you’ll get over that part.”

“But the icky sweats?  The painful prickling?”

“It has its drawbacks,” I admitted.

She muttered something about side effects.  Then she stuck her head around the shower curtain.

“Is this part of your research into a cure?  Or was that a lie to get the magi off our backs?”

“It’s a lie.  But it does interest me.  As soon as I have my test gate operational, I can spare some attention for that.”

Mary finished her rinse cycle and climbed out of the shower. I held a towel for her.

“Will you go back to Karvalen when you’ve got it working?”

“Not for long.  I may have to talk to Amber about something Sparky said.  I tried to talk to her about it a few times, but our relationship wasn’t the best back then.  I think she might talk to me about it, now.  I also have to find out what Tort did to rescue me.  It’s possible she’s in trouble because of it, in which case I have to rescue her.”

I didn’t add that if Tort was dead because of that rescue attempt… Well, I don’t know.  I don’t like to think about it.

“She’s the little girl who grew up to be a magician, right?”

“That’s her.”

“And Amber is your daughter, the one you turned into a fire thing?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

She toweled her hair while looking in the mirror.

“You know,” she observed, conversationally, “I think I know what your problem is.”

“Really!  It’s not families of magi, tribes of vampires, interfering goddesses, demon adversaries, vindictive religions, and lousy cosmogation?”

“Cosmogation?”

“Navigation on the sea, astrogation between stars, cosmogation from one cosmos to another.”

“Cosmogation.  Okay.  All those are problems, too, but they come from one basic problem,” she went on.  I dropped my light tone as I recognized she was serious.

“What is it?”

“Power.”

“Power solves problems,” I pointed out.

“It can, yes.”  She wrapped her hair in the towel.  “Give me a minute.  I’m trying to think of how to phrase something I’m not sure I understand.  It’s only a thought.  I haven’t really nailed it down, yet.”

“I’ll go finish dressing.”

“Okay.”

She still wasn’t ready to talk about it when she finished dressing.  I sorted more ideograms in the pigeonhole room while she talked with Firebrand.  A little later, I knew she was talking with Bronze—well, trying to communicate with her.  Firebrand is telepathic in the sense it can send what seem to be words.  Bronze is more empathic in the sense she can communicate a meaning without words.  I didn’t know she could do it with anyone else, though.  Maybe Mary’s extrasensory abilities make it possible.  I should probably ask.

Much later, close to midnight, Mary came into the glyph room.  I had the vocabulary for a gate already printed out; I was getting the pile of ideograms ready for assembly.

“I think I’ve got it,” she told me, hesitantly.

“Shoot.”

“You said power solves problems, right?”

“Yes.  At least, whenever I’ve had a problem, it was useful to have the power to do something about it.”

“But power causes problems, too.”

“Only if you use it irresponsibly,” I argued, and gestured for her to precede me.  We left the glyph room and went to the empty bedroom where I kept my worktable.  I started laying out glyphs on the table so I wouldn’t have to rummage around in a box for them, like dumping jigsaw puzzle pieces out before assembly.

“That can happen, yes,” she admitted.  “Simply
having
power can be the problem.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Look at it this way,” she went on.  “You’re the equivalent of an Atlantean vampire.  You’re not one, I know, but everyone else thinks you are and you give a bowel-loosening good impression of it.  This means you have immense power—power the Elders fear and the younglings want.  Potentially, power to upset the entirety of the culture of the undead.

“As far as the wackos in the magi are concerned, you’re the lion to be hunted, also because of that power.

“The rest of the magi apparently don’t have your spells for gathering magic, and those spells represent power—power they want.

“You may have the ability—as far as they know—to find a cure for vampirism.  That’s power, too, and it affects both the vampires and the magi.  It draws their attention and makes them think about you, how you affect them, and how they can use you.

“Having so much power is what causes your problems,” she finished.

“I still don’t see it,” I admitted, putting down the box of symbols.

“Grr.”  She spread a hand across her forehead and squeezed her temples.  Finally, she dropped her hand and regarded me.  “I keep forgetting you’re an alien; you don’t see things like I do.  How about this… If you were Joe Average, living in your farmhouse and playing with concrete checkerboards, would you be having these problems?”

“Hmm.”

“Here’s another one.  Would any of these idiots come knocking at your door for your legendary skills with carpentry?  Or would you be relentlessly hunted because of your inhuman talent with pastries?  Would they be trying to capture and torture you for your secret recipe for the World’s Greatest Lemonade?”

“I’m starting to see it now,” I admitted.

“Power causes problems,” she said, simply.

“Then why do people keep chasing after it?  Politicians, businessmen—wealth is a form of power—all the way down to kids on the playground.”

“I don’t know.  Maybe it’s a desire to feel more secure.  I think, though, as we get more power, we get more problems.  Ever hear about the frog in the kettle?”

“It rings a bell, but no, I don’t remember it,” I admitted.

“There’s a special way to cook a frog and it seems relevant.  The frog is dumped into a pot of warm water.  He’s a frog; he’s okay with that.  He sits there, fat and happy, while the cook gradually turns up the heat.  The frog still doesn’t mind; he’s warm and the slow rise in heat feels good.  He adapts to it as quickly as it rises.  Then, once it reaches a certain point, the cook suddenly turns up the heat to full power and brings the water to a sudden boil, killing and cooking the frog.”

“So, power is like that?” I asked.  “People gradually get more power and more problems, but they don’t notice because their problems are growing with their power.  Then they run into a problem that’s attracted to their power and they get eaten?”

“Not always; some people go their whole lives without the cook turning up the heat.  Of course, you’re immortal, so, statistically, it’s only a matter of time.”

“I get it.  Now, how does this explain my present situation?”

“You didn’t grow up here; you’re an alien.  You dropped out of the sky with a nuke in your pocket and parked your spaceship in the back yard.  If you’d bought parts and built the thing over the course of years, no one would have noticed.  As it is, the rocket exhaust caught their attention.”