Walk Among Us, page 14
Emboldened, Duke returned the blood bag to the fridge and patted the pouch like it was the ass of an attractive coed, a bit of private delinquency. His mouth twitched as he shut the doors. Mutinous acts didn’t require audiences, he decided. They just needed to be. And if he could enact one, he could steer others to completion. The Camarilla had no claim over him. They were his employers. Sponsors, at best, assisting in his immigration into a new existence. He was his own man. Whether they liked it or not.
And that previous spasm of terrified repulsion?
Cortisol malapropism. That’s all.
Duke went back to the computers, already composing a checklist of things he intended to replace. The chair, first of all. It wasn’t unappealing as far as furniture went, the blackwood inlaid with pagan carvings, horned wolves and beatific dryads, and saints of the wild woods. But it was much too old-school for Duke’s tastes. And, throne-like as it was, it lacked in one critical department: ergonomics.
He hooked a leg over an ornate armrest, went to Amazon, undid his tie, placed several expedited orders at frankly criminal expense, checked on the local takeout services, sighed loudly over how paupered he was when it came to dining options, commanded the sound system to play Nine Inch Nails, before finally ringing up a few old Bay Area contacts.
The first one answered immediately.
“You are so lucky it’s the weekend, man.”
Duke grinned. “Fred, how are you doing, dude?”
“I am so goddamn high. This chemist chick at the party is apparently trying to come up with a line of, get this, healthy poppers. I don’t fucking know how it’d work, but I am so on board with the fact that she’s giving out free samples.”
Seventy-six men in their fraternity and eight had gone into law. Of the number, Fred was the only one to make judge, all despite—or because of, Duke wasn’t sure, not with everything he’d heard of the pressure cooker that was the field—his infatuation with deviant living. It helped that Fred was built big, a mammoth of a man with a boisterous laugh and a better smile, the Irish in him evidenced in the golden-red hair, the green eyes, the put-on theatrical brogue he swore was unique to the small village of his grandparents’ distal birth. Today it was out in full effect.
Fred beamed into the phone camera, neck garlanded with glow stick necklaces, pomaded hair dusted with what looked like granulated cotton candy.
“How can I help, man?”
“I need you to get in touch with Tony.”
He watched as Fred staggered around the bend of a hallway, out into the graffitied alley behind the club, exchanging quick kisses with two Slavic women before at last according Duke his full attention.
“Yeah?” Fred mopped his face, still grinning. “I thought you were going off-grid?”
Duke swallowed, flicking a look over the top of his monitor. “Where the fuck did you hear that?”
“Your Facebook? Duh? Shit, what are they dosing you with over there in Iceland? We had a whole conversation about this in the comments. You were trying to take a step back, evaluate your life, experience Iceland without thinking about how Instagrammable it was? You don’t remember?”
“It’s coming back to me,” Duke said. He saw no point in contesting the statement, especially given his suspicion on the matter. The San Francisco Camarilla wanted him cut off, an unwelcome and unfortunate development he’d nonetheless made provisions for. “But you know how it is. A few days off-grid—”
“A week,” Fred chortled.
“—and you start thinking about how much you miss the world, you know.”
The tiny screaming voice incarcerated in the back room of his head grew fractionally louder. Duke ignored it. He rode the propulsion of his own lies forward, convinced that if he kept going, he wouldn’t need to stop and confront the ever-expanding pit of panic that had moved into his stomach.
“I can see that. Social media, it’s the best drug. Hey, you on TikTok—”
Duke waited until Fred talked himself to another standstill before asking again, “Tony. We got to talk about him.”
“Tony! Yeah! Wait. Which Tony? Tax Guy Tony or Coroner Tony?”
“Neither. Streaming Services Tony. I need you to get in contact with him for me. Can you do that?”
“Does a judge shit in the woods?”
Duke considered the question. “Yes?”
Fred guffawed, a raw bray of a laugh, ecstatic, and slapped a palm against his own thigh. “I miss you, man. When are you coming back to San Francisco?”
Never, Duke thought.
“You know how it is with a new job. Can’t start thinking about vacations until you’ve put in at least a year.”
“Look, dude. I know I have no jurisdiction over anything out of the state of California, but fuck me, if they’re going to chain you to a desk for a year, I am going to move Heaven and Earth to make sure you can ride out here to San Francisco for Christmas.”
“That’d be nice.” A kind of pained tenderness bloomed in Duke as he spoke, and he was struck again by the finality of the mortal condition. In a few decades Fred would be another obituary. His accomplishments might survive him, his years in the judicial spotlight, but no one except for Duke would remember his laugh, his willingness to crusade for the rights of a frat brother he only saw annually at their reunions. “But right now I just need you to get in touch with Tony.”
“Are you in trouble, man?” Those green eyes, bright even through the shitty transmission, clarified. His voice lowered with concern. “Because if you are—”
“I’m fine,” said Duke. “I just need to make sure that I continue to have the right leverage over my piece-of-shit employers.”
“Are they underpaying you or something?”
Duke laughed. “Nah. But I promise I’ll let you know if I need you to come to my rescue, okay?”
“Promise?”
“Promise.” And feeling like he owed Fred more than a passing call, like he owed the fraternity as a whole, for their indulgence and for their affection, their stalwart presence, Duke added: “Hey. How about we do the next meetup in Iceland, huh? My place. We can take a truck out to see the Northern Lights or something. Drink beer with the puffins.”
He regretted the proposition the moment he said it, but now that he had, there was no way to recall the invitation, not without sounding like a dick. Fred pursed his mouth at the camera, and Duke, very momentarily, suffered a jolt of hope. But it died as Fred reeled out his booming brassy laughter, an earthquake sound jouncing through the long strange halls of Duke’s new habitat.
“Everyone but Louis, anyway. I don’t know if I want to see him again,” said Duke when Fred’s laughter had seeped away. “What do you have against Louis?”
“Nothing. It’s just—” He’s a monster, Duke wanted to say. A monster like he was except worse—or better, depending on the framing—because he allowed himself no pretenses on the subject, and something in Duke railed against the concept of allowing such competition in his house.
Competition?
The word had surfaced without prompting, a thought as vicious as the crack of a bullwhip, and on reflection, Duke discovered he did not like its implications. He did not like thinking about what kind of competition Louis represented, as there was only one logical answer to such meditations. As with anything that discomfited him, however, he only lingered on the disquietude for a quick count of heartbeats before sullenly, firmly, dispatching it from active contemplation.
His smile broadened.
“—Jill, you know?”
Fred rumpled his tanned brow, the skin right under the thatching of red hair the complexion of buttermilk. “Jill?”
“Yeah.”
Jill did not exist, of course. No doubt there was a Jill whom Duke and Fred must have bickered over, some fine-boned artist or long-legged accountant-in-gestation, lost now to memory. But Jill, as an impediment to hospitality, was a fabrication and a gambit besides.
“Ah,” said Fred, when it became apparent Duke wasn’t about to elaborate further. “Jill. Yeah. I remember now.”
Duke relaxed, loosed the breath he hadn’t needed but was holding out of habit. “You know what I’m talking about, then.”
“Totally. Louis has stolen a few chicks from me, too, so trust me, I can empathize.”
The rest of the call faded into a slurry of small talk. Eventually a woman—tall, with imperious cheekbones, hair a glimmering maritime curtain—came to extradite Fred from his conversation, and the off-duty judge said his goodbyes, swearing they’d talk again and with less deplorable frequency.
Then he was gone. The silence rushed eagerly back, a roaring presence, its resonance compounded by the knowledge of how it could be filled. Fred, unfiltered and uncouth and unrestrained, had made the room alive for the half hour they’d sat chatting. Duke missed it already.
He drummed a finger on the glass-encased mouse, the device as impractical as his chair: a drop of cream suspended in ice.
At least that was done.
Tony was notified and some of Duke’s unease was, if not fully mollified, partially emolliated. It was a beginning. An awkward start. But Duke would take what he was given. He sat up straight, then laced his fingers and cracked the knuckles as he raised his arms into an overhead stretch. Duke let his hands fall again, landing nimbly on the keyboard.
“It’s a start,” he said aloud, mouth fissuring involuntarily into a smile.
The quiet did not correct him.
Being a vampire was less luxury than Duke had been led to believe.
The second floor, which he’d hoped would be stocked with wonders, was barren of anything approximating furniture: a blank horizon of white tiling, unremarkable save for the gray pellucid lights indented into the ceiling.
And another yellow Post-it note.
This one said, Watch out for marmalade, Marmalade.
He had frowned quizzically at the message. The house, Duke discovered, was lousy with notes, each of them more enigmatic than the last. They were taped to the underside of tables, in slants of deep shadow. Nowhere they would be immediately visible, which puzzled Duke. If they were meant as instruction, however cryptic, the notes should have been more accessible. It stood to reason as well that the old cow could be simply fucking with him, like a cat with a broken-boned bird. Whatever the case, Duke had no plans on playing the industrious hermit. This task they’d given him was asinine, and though he recognized that compliance was a necessity, he wouldn’t start on that chore until he’d dug his roots into the city, made this place his.
What really nagged at him, no matter how hard he tried to suppress his trepidation, was the fact that he saw no accommodations for the women and, worse, no indication of how they could move so discreetly through the structure. Duke couldn’t stop picturing them in the walls, arms folded over their breasts, eyes still wide and green, luminous as stars in that claustrophobic dark.
Duke shoved the thought down, shivering.
He spotted a slim obsidian cabinet adjacent to the door leading out of the house, the wood bracketed by stainless steel and anchored to the floor by cast-iron claws. Inside, a navy-blue parka with an oversize hood, furred boots, woolen socks, several scarves, and a scatter of thermal undergarments, some of which were designed for women, not men. It made Duke wonder who’d lived here before him, if this house he’d pictured for himself wasn’t as singular as he had thought, if he himself was nowhere as exceptional as he had envisioned.
The notion depressed him. The house, with its myriad eccentricities and pointed deviancies, its lack of basic appliances, already scratched at Duke; and the introduction of the idea that it, with the insult of its many problems, wasn’t even built for him specifically made the space frightening.
We’re watching.
Duke, after pacing tense spirals through his accommodations, up and down the two floors, occasionally pausing to forage for more notes, concluded he needed to move. He needed to get out. See the city. Learn the environment. His problem, Duke told himself, was a lack of traction. He was free-falling without a harness through a new mode of existence. If he could just anchor himself, equilibrium would return, sure as the oblivion at the tail of every life.
Assuaged, Duke went to dress himself for the outside, feeling all the while as though he were ransacking a mausoleum. The thought did nothing to alleviate his mood. Squeezing a toque over his head, scarf raised to cover his mouth, Duke turned to find that woman again, six inches from his face. He hadn’t realized before, but she was taller than he was, tall enough to need to stare down the ridge of her nose for eye contact.
“What?” said Duke.
“Are you planning to explore Reykjavík?”
It felt, to Duke, like a threat, a sensation he immediately took umbrage with.
“Nah. I’m just trying to catch some waves in the sea,” he snipped.
The woman smiled tepidly. “I wouldn’t advise that.”
“Look, if I’m going to be stuck here,” said Duke, “I don’t want to be stuck here like some Podunk Amish kid with no idea of the world outside.”
“If you want, we could drive you.”
Duke raised a hand in objection. “No offense, but that’s a bit too ‘Prisoner’s Day Out’ for me.”
“Mr. Guillo,” said the woman, and there was no description for what followed, save that her smile sharpened. “You are not our prisoner. You would know if you were.”
Duke held her eyes. “Well, when that day comes, we’ll see who emerges from out of the bloodbath, huh? Now move.”
She complied, taking a side step to the left. Duke swaggered past her and into Reykjavík, excitement and a pang of fear jostling for purchase on his heart, a drip of hunger underneath it all.
The breeze wailed through the open door, stole through the small gaps he’d accidentally left in his winter armament, and burrowed deep into his marrow. Yet he did not goose-pimple from the cold. He did not shiver. His body did none of the things necessary to warm itself. Instead the frost settled in layers, sinking down, filling him, until he lost the words for warmth. Duke stood in the glacial air, flayed by the wind, part of him afraid, but the rest?
The rest of him didn’t care, transfixed by the view he’d emerged into.
He knew cities and flatlands and deserts that bled into the dusk-wounded horizon, gold along the prairie and gold along the sky, a seam of red conjoining them like a throat gashed open. Duke understood and loved the temples of San Francisco’s commerce, her maze of alleys, the variegated houses climbing the steep curves of her hills. At the right hour, it reminded him of a pop-up picture book, the lights blinking amber and holy.
But this, though, this was different.
Reykjavík, vividly roofed, its houses so relaxed, untroubled by even the prospect of needing to optimize real estate, stood ringed by basalt ridges, their summit hachured with snow. The city spilled its colors onto a polished-glass sea and Duke, hand to his mouth, was humbled. Beauty rarely gave him pause. All his prior experiences had conditioned him to covet beauty. To desire it, to compulsively scheme up tactics for owning things others found mutually beautiful. Late-stage capitalism bred its own hobbies.
The city, nominally domesticated, alien, and jeweled with ice, was a sight he could barely hold in his mind yet, let alone conjecture possessing. Not that he had any mayoral ambitions, having seen what politics could do to a man. But in terms of property, of societal place, even that seemed far-fetched. He didn’t belong here, not in this edifice of unapologetic tundra, barely altered by the centuries.
Yet all that did was make Duke love the city more.
He swallowed, a kid on his knee in front of a prom date stratospherically out of his league. Reykjavík was so beautiful. He took in the city line: Harpa at the coil of the ocean’s mouth, blue green, its body mosaicked with lights; a crenellated spire rising in the distance, a church whose name eluded Duke for the moment, and that was okay.
For that nebulous width of seconds, Duke was content, unable and unwilling to ask for more, overwhelmed, drowned by the largesse of the universe. Happy in a fashion he wasn’t sure he had ever been. Happy and whole. Then the wind picked up again, and the snow came, cauling the city, and Duke, up till that point stupefied with love for the natural world, hunched into his coat and began to walk.
Ten minutes into his exploration, a lonely one only interrupted thrice by the sight of another person, several things occurred to Duke, chiefly that he’d been remiss in deciding on an itinerary, and he had no clue where he was going, much less what he wanted to do. He had aspirations of finding sustenance, but he had only a sallow concept of what that entailed. Blood was on the menu, of course, although Duke hadn’t yet formulated an exact opinion on his recent nutritional requirements. At a remove, it had sounded romantic. Confronted with the practicalities of his new diet, Duke felt daunted.
The house was stocked with a surplus of the substance. He could ostensibly backtrack and sample what he’d been given. Begin slow. Experiment at his own pace. But could blood go stale? And if it could, wasn’t it worth canvassing Reykjavík for a farm-to-table option, so to speak? Especially for that first transcendent sip. He didn’t put it past the old woman to provide him something dismal. Just for laughs.
And how did someone actually hunt?
The more Duke brooded over his circumstances, the more questions he unearthed. Both Mara and the old woman were very forthcoming on certain things, incredibly obtuse when it came to others. The Masquerade was paramount: Maintain secrecy at all costs. Dignity, too, was essential. Comport himself with appropriate grace. There was no sin worse than vulgarity. Except for indiscretion.
No mention on whether he could eat food, drink wine, enjoy his original vices, or if blood would become his overwhelming motivation, his one pleasure.
Only way to learn.
Duke turned a street corner, only to balk as four people erupted from a bar, laughing as they went, fluting at one another in a mix of what Duke presumed to be English and Icelandic. Their accents, combined with the violence of the omnipresent wind, made them indecipherable. Their body language, nonetheless, was amiable, and one—a bottle blond, who couldn’t have been older than twenty-one, still growing into his rangy frame—even proffered Duke a gold-banded black cigarette. He demurred, unprepared to gauge the effects of nicotine on his undead body.
