The Immortal Rules (8 page)

I nodded. Kanin smiled bitterly.

“You cannot,” he said in a flat voice, and my heart sank. “Let me give you your first and most important lesson, Allison Sekemoto—you are a monster. A demon who feeds on human beings to survive. The vampires at the center of the city may look and act and pretend to be civilized, but do not let that fool you. We are monsters, and nothing will change that. And do not think that you can cling to your humanity by drinking the blood of dogs or rats or sheep. It is junk food—garbage. It will fill you for a time, but it will never sate the Hunger. And you will soon crave the blood of humans so badly that the mere sight of one will send you into a frenzy, and that human will die, because you will be unable to stop yourself from draining them completely. That is the single most important thing you must understand, before we go any further. You are no longer human. You are a predator, and the sooner you accept that, the easier this life, this existence, will become.”

My heart sank even lower. It seemed everything I’d thought about vampires was proving to be right. But I still said, “I’m not going to kill humans to feed on them, I can tell you that now.”

“It always starts out that way,” Kanin said, and his voice was distant, as if remembering. “Noble intentions, honor among new vampires. Vows to not harm humans, to take only what is needed, to not hunt them like sheep through the night.” He smiled faintly. “But it becomes harder and harder to remain on their level, to hold on to your humanity, when all you can see them as is food.”

“I don’t care.” I thought of Stick, of Lucas and even Rat. They had been friends. People. Not walking blood bags. “I’ll be different. I’m sure as hell going to try.”

Kanin didn’t argue. Rising, he stepped around the desk and beckoned with a large pale hand. “Come here.”

Wary, I stood, edging toward him. “Why? What are we doing?”

“I said I would teach you how to survive as a vampire.” He took a single step forward, and I now stood a foot or two away from him, gazing up at his chin. Geez, he was big. His presence was overwhelming. “To live, you must understand the vampire body, how it works, how it endures. Take off your coat.”

I did, dropping it on the chair behind me, wondering what he was getting at. In one blindingly quick motion, he grabbed my wrist, yanked my arm up, and slashed it open with that long, bright dagger he carried. Blood welled and streamed from the wound, a second before the pain hit like a hammer.

“
Ow!
What the hell are you
doing?
” I tried yanking back, but it was like pulling on a tree. Kanin didn’t even twitch. “Let go, you psychopath! What kind of sick game are you playing?”

“Wait,” Kanin ordered, giving my arm a little shake. I gritted my teeth as the vampire held up my wrist. “Look.”

My arm was a mess, blood everywhere, oozing down my elbow. I could see the wound, the deep, straight gash that probably went to the bone.
Psychotic vampire.
But as I watched, panting, the wound started to heal, the gaping flesh drawing together, turning from red to pink to white until only a faint, pale scar remained. And then nothing at all.

I gaped as Kanin released my arm. “We are very difficult to kill,” he explained to my shocked expression. “Stronger than humans, faster than humans, and we heal from most anything. This is why we are the perfect predator, but be warned, we are not invincible. Fire harms us, as does any massive trauma. The strongest vampire will not walk away from a bomb going off under his feet. But bullets, knives, clubs, swords—it will hurt, being struck by one, but it will not usually kill us. Although…” He touched my chest. “A wooden stake driven through the heart will not instantly kill us, but it will paralyze and usually send us into hibernation. That is our body’s last-ditch effort to survive—it shuts down completely and we are forced into sleep, sometimes for decades, until we can rejoin the living world again.” He withdrew his hand. “But to completely destroy a vampire, beheading it or burning it to ash is the only sure way. Are you getting this?”

“Kill a vampire, aim for its head,” I muttered. “Got it.” The pain was gone now, and there was a gnawing ache in my gut, though I still wanted to learn more. “But why am I bleeding at all?” I wondered, looking up at him. “Do I even have a heartbeat? I thought…I thought I was dead.”

“You
are
dead.”

I scowled. “I suppose this is a case of death taking a while to kick in, then.”

Kanin’s expression didn’t change. “You are still thinking like a human,” he said. “Listen to me, Allison, and keep your mind open. Mortals view death in terms of black and white—you are either alive, or you are not. But between them—between life and death and eternity—there is a small gray area, one that the humans have no knowledge of. That is where we reside, vampires and rabids and a few of the older, inexplicable creatures that still exist in this world. The humans cannot understand us, because we live by a different set of rules.”

“I’m still not sure I understand.”

“We have no heartbeat,” my mentor continued, lightly touching his own chest. “You wonder how the blood can pump through your veins, right? It doesn’t. You have no blood. None that is your own, anyway. Think of it as our food and drink—it is absorbed into the body the same way. Blood is the core of our power. It is how we live, it is how we heal. The longer we go without, the farther we slip from humanity, until we resemble the cold, empty, living corpses the humans think us to be.”

I stared at Kanin, looking for any sign that he wasn’t human. His skin was pale, and his eyes were hollow, but he wasn’t corpselike. Unless you looked really hard, you wouldn’t know he was a vampire at all.

“What happens if we don’t…uh…drink blood?” I asked, feeling a pang in my stomach. “Can we starve to death?”

“We’re already dead,” Kanin replied in that same infuriatingly cool tone. “So, no. But go long enough without human blood, and you will start to go mad. Your body will shrivel, until you are nothing but an empty husk wandering around, very much like the rabids. And you will attack any living creature you come across, because the Hunger will take over. Also, because your body has no reserves to draw upon, any damage that doesn’t kill you could drive you into hibernation for an indefinite amount of time.”

“You couldn’t have told me all this without slicing my arm open?”

“I could have.” Kanin shrugged unrepentantly. “But I had another lesson in mind. How do you feel?”

“Starving.” The ache in my gut had grown more painful; my body was crying out for food. I thought longingly of the once-full blood bag, lying empty on the floor. I wondered if there was anything left that I could suck out, before I caught myself in horror.

Kanin nodded. “And that is the price of such power. Your body will heal itself from most anything, but it will draw upon its own reserves to do so. Look at your arm.”

I did and gasped. My skin, especially the area where Kanin had cut me, was chalk-white, definitely paler than before, and cold. Dead flesh. Bloodless flesh. I shuddered and tore my gaze away, and felt the vampire’s smile.

“If you do not feed soon afterward, you will fall into a blood frenzy, and someone will die,” he announced. “The greater the wound, the more blood you need to replenish it. Go too long without feeding, and the result will be the same. And this is why vampires do not become attached to humans, or anyone. Sometime in your life, Allison Sekemoto, you will kill a human being. Accidentally or as a conscious, deliberate act. It is unavoidable. The question is not
if
it will happen, but
when.
Do you understand?”

“Yeah,” I muttered. “I got it.”

He watched me with depthless black eyes. “Be sure that you do,” he said quietly. “Now, from here, you must learn the most important part of being one of us—how to feed.”

I swallowed. “Don’t you have any more of those bags?”

He chuckled. “I procured that from one of the guards at this week’s bloodletting. It’s not something I’d normally do, but you needed food immediately upon waking. But you and I are not like the vampires in the city, with their slaves and pets and cellars of ‘wine.’ If you want to feed, you must do it the old-fashioned way. I’ll show you what I mean. Come, follow me.”

“Where are we going?” I asked as he opened the door, and we stepped out into a long, narrow hallway. Once-white paint was peeling from the walls, and glass crunched under my feet as we walked. Every few yards, a doorway opened into another room, the remains of beds and chairs and odd machines I didn’t recognize scattered about and broken. A strange chair with wheels lay on its side in one doorway, covered in dust and cobwebs. I realized I could see perfectly in the dark corridor, though there was no light, and it should’ve been pitch-black down here. Kanin looked back at me and smiled.

“We’re going hunting.”

* * *

W
E
TURNED
A
CORNER
, and the hallway opened into what looked like an old reception area with another big wooden desk in the middle of the room. Above the desk, tarnished gold letters hung on the wall, most of them skewed or broken, so it was impossible to make out what it had once said. There were a lot of smaller signs, too, on walls and at the entrances to hallways, all difficult to make out. Glass, debris and sheets of paper were scattered about the cracked tile floor, rustling where we walked.

“What is this place?” I asked Kanin. My voice echoed weirdly in the open chamber, and the silence of the room seemed to press down on me. The vampire didn’t answer for a long moment.

“At one time,” he murmured, leading me across the room, “this was the sublevel of a hospital. One of the busiest and most well established in the city. They did more than treat patients—there was a team of scientists here, researchers committed to ending disease and discovering new cures. Of course, when the Red Lung virus hit, the hospital was overrun—they couldn’t keep up with the amount of patients pouring through their doors. A lot of people died here.” He gazed at the desk, his eyes hooded and far away. “But then, a lot of people died everywhere.”

“If you’re trying to creep me out, congratulations. So, how do we get out of here?”

He stopped at a large, square hole in the wall and gestured at the opening. I peered through the gap and saw a long shaft, leading up into darkness, with thick metal ropes dangling from somewhere up top.

“You’re kidding, right?” My voice echoed up the tube.

“The stairs to ground level are collapsed,” Kanin replied calmly. “There is no other way in or out. We have to use the elevator shaft.”

Elevator shaft? I frowned and looked back at him. “There’s no way I can climb that.”

“You aren’t human anymore.” He narrowed his eyes. “You’re stronger, you have unlimited endurance and you can do things humans cannot. If it puts your mind at ease, I will be right behind you.”

I looked at the elevator tube and shrugged. “All right,” I muttered, reaching out to grab the cables. “But if I fall, I expect you to catch me.”

Tightening my hold, I pulled.

To my surprise, my body rose off the ground as if I weighed nothing at all. I shimmied up the tube, going hand over hand, feeling a thrill I’d never known. My skin didn’t tear, my arms didn’t burn, and I wasn’t even breathing hard. I could’ve done this forever.

I paused, my rhythm stumbling to a halt. I wasn’t breathing. At all. My pulse didn’t race, my heart didn’t pound…because I wasn’t alive. I was dead. I would never age, never change. I was a parasitic corpse who drank the lifeblood of others to survive.

“Having problems?” Kanin’s deep, impatient voice echoed from below me.

I shook myself. Empty elevator tubes were not the best places for personal revelations. “I’m fine,” I answered and started climbing again. I would sort all this out later; right now, my dead-corpse stomach was telling me I was starving. I found it very strange that my heart and lungs and other organs didn’t work, but my stomach and brain were still functioning. Or maybe they weren’t—I had no idea. Everything about vampires, I was learning, was a complete mystery.

A cold breeze hit my face as I scrambled out of the shaft, gazing around warily.

There had been a building here once. I could see the remains of steel beams and girders surrounding us, along with maybe half a wall, falling to pieces in the long yellow grass. The plaster was blackened and scorched, and charred bits of furniture—beds, mattresses, chairs—were strewn about and half hidden in the grass spreading across the floor. The tube we’d just come through was nothing more than a dark hole in the tile, hidden among the rubble and weeds. If you weren’t standing directly above it, you might never see the gaping hole until you tumbled down the shaft and broke your spine at the bottom.

“What happened here?” I whispered, gazing around at the devastation.

“A fire,” Kanin said, starting across the empty lot. He moved quickly, and I scrambled to keep up with him. “It started on the ground floor of the hospital. It quickly grew out of control and destroyed the building and most everyone inside. Only the lower levels were…spared.”

“Were you there when it happened?”

Kanin didn’t answer. Leaving the hospital ruins, we crossed an empty lot where nature had risen up to strangle everything it could get its green-and-yellow claws around. It pushed up through the once-flat parking lots and curled around several outbuildings, choking them with vines and weeds. When we reached the edge of the lot and looked back, you could barely see the hospital remains through the vegetation.