Walk Among Us, page 13
“Yes,” said their spokesperson, the corners of her mouth raised by a fraction. Duke could decode no warmth from her countenance, no interest, nothing but clinical professionalism, the smile entirely ornamental. “We’re here to do whatever you need us to do.”
“Well, I’ve never had an orgy—”
Her expression frosted over. “We are your staff, Mr. Guillo. Not your harem.”
“In that case, you can get the hell out,” said Duke, trying and failing to find equilibrium. God only knew if he looked as much of a wreck as he felt. “I don’t need random strangers in my fucking house.”
“I’m sorry,” said the woman, in a tone that told Duke otherwise. “But that isn’t going to be possible.”
“You said you’re here to do whatever I want you to do. As far as I can tell, that’s complete bullshit. You’ve said no twice already.”
“That’s because you were not operating within the framework given, Mr. Guillo. We can do things for you if they fit the mandate we’ve been assigned.”
It then dawned with gruesome vividity what role precisely his so-called staff possessed: they were his wardens.
He raised a one-fingered salute.
“Fuck. You,” said Duke, shimmying out of the coffin and onto his feet, his usual sneakers gone, replaced by two-toned brogues that were at least a decade out of fashion.
“Come on, you gotta be kidding.” Duke fisted a hand uselessly at his side. “My— Oh, you went through everything.”
His clothes were different too. Gone was his normal wardrobe, exchanged for a three-piece suit in shades of concrete, the fabrics peculiarly uncreased. Historically, Duke was a restless sleeper, and the outfit should have been rumpled beyond salvation. But it was not. Even the tie, a plain banner of glossy black satin, lay smooth along his pearl-buttoned shirt. Duke shucked the jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves, scowling. Being manipulated was one thing, but to be subject to such gross personal revision? It wasn’t merely a violation of privacy; it was rude.
Especially given the nature of the personage who’d likely orchestrated it.
But at least the women who had likely denuded him were hot.
“That stupid—”
A monitor in the cluster atop the banquet table winked to life.
“Mr. Guillo. How are you doing?”
“You goddamned—” Duke paused, realizing halfway that he was, metaphorically speaking, reading lines off the wrong script. “Where’s the old hag?”
Mara smiled with as much width and temperature as the edge of a new pocketknife, a perfunctory flash of humanity. She wore no makeup, her hair knotted into a loose bun atop her head, an oversize hoodie half zipped; the garment slouched over a pale shoulder as Mara steepled her fingers. There was a band T-shirt of some kind underneath, but the angle of the camera made proper identification impossible.
“It’s morning here,” she said.
Right. The old woman was a vampire. As was he now.
“Where the hell am I?”
“In the house you requested.”
“Bullshit,” snapped Duke, stalking closer to the monitor. Mara’s voice rebounded through the house, projected by hidden speakers, her easy alto hollowed out by the architecture’s eccentricities. “You might have started with the blueprint, but this is clearly not my fucking—”
“Your design included too many windows,” said Mara. “We kept one out of respect for it. But even with the right technology, you’re putting yourself at risk of UV exposure and we don’t want that, Marmalade.”
“Don’t call me that. Where’s the other shit? That kitchen is just Hannibal Lecter’s fridge. There’s no TV, no other furniture, definitely no harem—”
“You have everything you need, and everything is in accordance to the specifics of your contract.”
“Bullshit—”
“You shouldn’t have skipped”—Mara spat the word, viperous—“the fine print, then. The ‘luxuries,’ as defined in Section C6, will be delivered at the end of the initial product cycle. So it was written. So it was notarized. You signed off on this, Marmalade.”
“I said don’t call me that!”
She smiled again. “You’re not my master.”
“Fuck you. Also, what is this bullshit with the fine print? Who the fuck sticks shit like this in a contract?”
“Undying predators who have lorded over the commerce of your people since time immemorial.” Mara bared a tooth. “Or businesspeople with a shred of sense. You decide what fits your personal mythos better.”
“Listen here, you—”
“Marmalade,” said Mara. “We don’t have to make this difficult. As it stands, we are both cogs—one beloved, one disproportionately useful. Both, nonetheless, expendable. It would be more expedient if we cooperated, especially given that this is a necessary orientation.”
“Then don’t fucking call me Marmalade.”
“Fine.”
“Fine,” said Duke, feeling as though he’d lost somehow, a revelation that infuriated him even more than his continued inability to piece together the last few days, the few weeks.
He groped for a new topic. “How long was I out?”
“Depends on your definition of out,” Mara said.
Throttling a juvenile impulse to withhold information, Duke said through clenched teeth, “I don’t remember anything.”
“You were very hungry.”
“I— Can you not fucking talk in riddles?” He stopped in front of the screen, hands jutted forward, palms upturned. “You’re already making this a really bad day, so just tell me: What the fuck happened? I don’t— Just— Can you help me understand?”
“You were Embraced,” said Mara, voice suffused with an abrupt, nearly carnal longing. “You were hungry. Then you were asleep. At some point, things were done to ensure that you would survive . . . and survive passage to this ridiculous house you requested.”
Duke had her, then. “You’re really just talking about all this on a public transmission? Man, that old bitch is going to take your face off.”
Something like hunger bloomed in Mara’s countenance, enveloping every feature, so naked in its intensity that Duke averted his eyes. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To have me on my knees, begging my mistress to stop hurting me, to just let me die. Well, I’m afraid this is a closed network, Mr. Guillo. And very well encrypted.”
“There are still risks, you fuckhead.”
“So you say,” said Mara, and she laughed that uneven, shrill hyena sound again.
Desperate for respite, Duke cleared his throat and blurted the first thing to arrive at his mind. “So, I’m in Iceland?”
“You are in Reykjavík, yes.” Mara ceased laughing with dizzying abruptness. “Although I’m still not sure why you asked to be relocated there, of all places.”
“The Northern Lights,” said Duke, happy to have the conversation turn recursive, to have an opportunity to blather needlessly, instead of listening to Mara and becoming disquieted by her lunatic exaltations. “I’ve always wanted to see them. But more than that, Iceland’s modern. It has good internet. It has smart people. Everyone’s literate. They publish more books here, per capita, than anywhere else in the world, you know? And when summer comes, the sun doesn’t go down. I’ve always dreamed of that. Endless golden days, with nothing to do but—”
“In case you’ve forgotten, sunlight will kill you.”
Duke hesitated. Fucked over again. The thought upset him less than he thought it would. He’d heard variations of such conversational warnings before, mostly from his doctor, who’d remind him each year that there were vanishingly few vices he could enjoy without future repercussions. Don’t smoke. Avoid liquor. Stay out of the sun or die.
Same ideas, different bodies.
“I’ll figure it out,” Duke said. “Sunblock’s a thing.”
“If only it were that easy, the world would have different masters. But it’s also a moot point.”
“What?”
“The sun isn’t merely anathema,” explained Mara with rising glee, leaning into the camera. “It puts you to sleep. You’re nothing but a corpse in the light of day, a well-preserved one so long as you don’t leave the casket open.”
“Wait. Does that mean I’m going to be unconscious for months?”
“Oh. Yes,” Mara said. “But I wouldn’t worry about that. Instead I’d focus on making the systems you promised my boss.”
The blatant instruction gored through Duke’s fugue, digging down to where an old welter of righteous fury boiled.
“Fuck. You.”
She sighed. “Not this again.”
“Fuck you and your piece-of-shit boss. Fuck this Shawshank Redemption bullshit with the wardens, and—”
On the monitor, Mara propped an elbow onto the table and laid her jaw into an open palm, a faultless impersonation of her master’s mannerisms. Nothing in her expression indicated contrition, never mind intimidation. She was amused by Duke, which, in turn, pissed him off.
“And you wonder why no one loves you, Mr. Guillo.”
“Hell is that supposed to mean? I’ve been rolling in pussy since college.”
“Have you?” said Mara. “Our records suggest different. In fact, everything we have on you indicates you had trouble socializing with your peers. The only people you got along with were your fraternity brothers. And somehow that was still an improvement over your high school life.”
“You get your rocks off on this, don’t you? This is what turns you on. You fucking leeches. You think you have the monopoly on power? Well, I’ve got news for you.” A lesson he learned early: contingency plans were important. Duke bared a mean, tight-lipped smile. “You don’t have as much of an upper hand as you think. All this bullshit? You’re going to regret it.”
“What makes you say that, Mr. Guillo?”
Her cadence, he decided, that was what irritated him most. The tempo she’d elected to use, the choices she made in regard to where to plant emphasis. It chafed at him with its nursery rhyme swing, and he couldn’t wait to throw it back in her face.
“I’ve got fail-safes planted across the internet. If I don’t check in, videos are going to be released. Your boss is going to get doxed so hard, Area 51 will know the exact chemical composition of her daily shit.” Duke folded his arms. “I’m going to tear down your precious Masquerade around your ears.”
Take that, you bitch.
And yet his threat found no purchase in Mara’s expression. Her smile incremented in width.
“Really?” She sighed again.
“Really,” Duke growled in answer, a bit less sure of himself.
“You think you’re the first person who thought they could threaten us? You sweet summer child,” she spat. “You don’t know what you’re messing with. My master—”
“Can suck my cock.”
“I thought she told you already: you’re not her type.”
“Yeah, I bet I know what kind of ass she likes,” said Duke, leering. “Got to say, she doesn’t have bad taste.”
“If I were you, Mr. Guillo,” said Mara, composure smoothing into affectlessness, “I’d think less about what my master’s preferences might be and more about the work you need to do. You have very limited supplies within your house. I’d hate to have your next shipment interrupted.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“You keep asking that. You’re very insecure, aren’t you?” said Mara, resecuring her hair as she spoke, pins sliding delicately into place along that shining dark. “Each time you think you’re being threatened, you go on the attack.”
“Answer my fucking question.”
“I wonder where it came from,” she said, decidedly not answering his question. “Were you hurt as a child, Mr. Guillo? Were you often bludgeoned? Punched? Told to lie over your mother’s knee as she pulled out the belt? What is it? What makes you so frightened of conflict?”
“You want to come over here, bitch?”
“You say it like the word should hurt. I’d rather be a bitch—teeth, talons, and only two generations down from a wolf—than something like you.” Her voice held flat as tarmac as she spoke, her face without inflection. “And besides, a threat, Mr. Guillo, is a statement of intention. It is a word that describes the possibility of danger. It isn’t a guarantee; it is just a warning of what might come. By those definitions, I am not threatening you. I am providing you a public service announcement.”
“You’re not providing me a goddamned thing. I know what you are. You’re just the help. You’re not even that. You’re furniture. You’re the crack whore at the back of a highway gas station. I know what you are. How dare you even think about talking to me like that?”
Mara sighed once more. “I hope no one misses you, Mr. Guillo. It’d be a shame if anyone was stupid enough to do so.”
The monitor went dead.
Duke stood in the cold silence, his hands fisted, proverbial cock in hand, with nowhere and no way to spend his rage. Taking out his fury on the electronics would have been too indulgently onanistic, a puerile act. Greed supplied its own reasons too. The merchandise was state-of-the-art government-grade technology. Whatever his employers’ other faults, they didn’t skimp on equipment. To someone like Duke, raised to worship at the court of cyberpunk made manifest, wrecking such gear would be like torching the Louvre.
And besides, those women were still here, still watching.
So he didn’t. Chose instead to shout fuck at oscillating volumes, until the answering percussions irritated him too much to keep going. Then Duke sat himself on the hard-backed chair he’d been given, stared quietly at the nucleus of wires and screens and gently beeping equipment, the exhaust from them cool on his fingers, and went to work.
It didn’t surprise him to find an absence of safety measures. No firewalls, no keyloggers, no sheathing of surveillance programs—not even basic heuristic software to record his streaming habits. The computers were as clean as the last bone on a convict’s plate. Good, he thought. At least they respected his skills enough to waive that formality. Still, because of the diptych of principle and paranoia, he disemboweled the systems, cleaned them out twice, and then loaded up his own suite of apps.
Closed network, his ass.
Without looking up, he said, “Hey. Can one of you girls get me a Coke?”
“No. You wouldn’t like what would happen if we did,” said the spokeswoman, a long curve of black leather and bone-pale skin at the rim of his peripheral vision. How’d she get so close without Duke noticing her approach? She wore—and Duke glanced down to be sure—boots like any good femme fatale. Four-inch heels, with a flash of steel at the base. He should have heard her coming.
You should have done lots of things, baby, crooned his dead mother’s voice. Two years dead, and still she had opinions on his life.
“Could we all stop with the cryptic weirdness for just one second?” said Duke, raw-nerved, unhappy. “What the hell is wrong with a Coke?”
“Most Kindred cannot, without effort, consume anything but blood.”
“I’m a tough guy. I’ll manage,” said Duke.
“You would not.”
“Just buy me a fucking Coke. Or hell, get me some fucking coke. At this point, I don’t care.”
The woman, her name still a blank gap in his head, did not reply, but Duke heard, to his disproportionate delight, a thin little sigh as she strode noiselessly away. Victories were victories no matter how petty, and given the situation, Duke refused to begrudge himself small pleasures. His gaze drifted. Four of the six women were in view, standing—just standing—randomly arrayed through the house in clear observance of him, their posture as rigid as ever. Their hands were positioned oddly: one held over another, fingers curled and interlocked, like choir girls onstage.
“Weirdos,” he mumbled.
With nothing else to do, his programs still installing, he stood up and went to the fridge, a reflexive action rather than anything motivated by genuine hunger. Later Duke would wonder if it was to distance himself from the boreal scrutiny of the women. For now he needed to move. Both of the refrigerator doors were swinging open before Duke could get another thought in. For his trouble, he discovered a dearth of shelving, little poles instead latticing the white plastic interior of the fridge. From those hung a crowd of medical blood bags, each of them calligraphically labeled.
Green eyes.
Mongolian ancestry.
Sarcoma patient.
Burn victim.
Child savant.
Duke leafed through the containers, condensation ribboning around him. Their epithets grew weirder: Geriatric Synesthete. Roswell Conspiratorialist. Allergic to the Color Red. Duke paused at the last.
“Allergic to a color?” he said aloud, craning his arm into the back of the fridge, fingers groping around until they closed on the hook of the blood bag farthest inside. The onslaught of choice was paralytic, especially without the context of familiar experience. A small part of Duke, which he staunchly kept sequestered away, was screaming, had been screaming since he’d woken up in a coffin, and would, Duke suspected, keep screaming until the sun imploded.
But the rest of him had no intention of humoring a breakdown.
Duke freed the bag and studied the label with an anthropologist’s detached curiosity.
Blond woman.
“Damn right that’s my type.” He glanced over his shoulder. “No offense.”
The women were missing, vanished into the quiet.
He looked back at the container and experienced a sudden wrenching aversion to its content, a horror so visceral, he nearly dropped his acquisition. The blood was an aortic tomato red, unpleasantly and improbably fresh. He wondered briefly if it had been ethically sourced and if such practices were an option; Duke could see an entire cottage industry for that.
Like Netflix for blood, he thought, and barked a laugh into the cold, unmoving quiet.
Obsessing over the minutiae of his new unlife quickly accomplished what he had hoped it would: It distracted him. The dread melted into a more nebulous malaise, a sense of ambient wrongness, disconnected from any particular source. In that state, it became a much simpler enterprise to rationalize away his initial reaction to the blood: He was nervy, a dog in a new environment. Animals loathed change.
