Walk Among Us, page 18
In an hour, the three were soporific, drunk on whatever compound it was that now percolated through his blood. Duke, between feeding his new retainers, unsure but unrepentant, charged each of them with a responsibility: one to comb the house for hidden electronics, one to clean, one to purchase a ticket out of Iceland for Duke.
His hunger worsened, a blade ticking under the steeple of his ribs, tunneling further with each hour. It had become manageable once more, if barely, a gnawing discomfort that, for the time being, could be set aside in the face of more important concerns.
But not for long.
Duke would need to figure out his specific dietary requirements, what classification of blood would allow for untroubled consumption. The doctor had cleared it up. One flavor, one genus of individuals and no other. As his new minions busied themselves with their tasks, Duke wrestled with an unpleasant prospect: he needed to call either the old woman or Mara. The alternative was drinking a path through the refrigerator and that, to Duke’s wry surprise, was an option worse than the dissolution of his pride.
So he choked down his pride, and rummaged through the house, found a phone number among the yellow notes.
He called from the computer.
Mara picked up almost instantaneously, more polished in appearance than she had been the previous time they’d spoken: sleek blazer, starched shirt, hair immaculately bunned, a monochrome Rembrandt.
“We’re still waiting for your first commit, Mr. Guillo.”
“Oh, go fuck yourself.”
She laughed that shrill, uneven laugh of hers. “Why? Because you’d like to but you know you cannot? And now you’re hoping I’ll act as a proxy for your cock?”
Her venom, transparently lethal, stole the wind from him.
“Very catty,” said Duke.
“Glad you noticed,” said Mara. “Where’s our first commit, Mr. Guillo? We have a contract. And more than that, I thought you had a passion, a want to survive the centuries, a marrow-deep urge to see your work to its completion.”
“I do. And I will,” he lied. “But I have a problem.”
“Your lack of class?”
Duke swallowed his comeback, said in its place: “My inability to eat safely. You didn’t tell me there were restrictions.”
“You didn’t ask,” said Mara.
“Fine. I’m asking now. If you want me to do anything, I need to be able to eat. Nothing happens on an empty belly. So tell me what kind of blood I can drink.”
With oratorical gravitas, Mara made her reply.
“Nope.”
“What?”
“I have no idea.”
“Fine. Ask your damn boss.”
“There’s no need.”
“Jesus Christ, stop fucking with me, Mara. What the hell do you want me to do? Drink from every bag until I get it right?”
Her laughter ricocheted again, and the acoustics of his house limned it with metal this time, as sharp as nails on rust. “It would be the smartest idea you’ve had yet. But to answer your not-question, I’m not messing with you. I’m telling you the truth. Every Ventrue’s predilection is specific to them. No one assigns you your preference. It’s not like Hollywood, where you’re taught to believe young is beautiful, blond is good, blue eyes are better than brown.”
“You really needed to get those blows in, huh?” said Duke, teeth clenched.
“Hardly my fault that the truth hurts.”
“I . . . As much as I like arguing with you, can you just tell me what you mean? If no one ‘assigns a preference’”—Duke carved air quotes for emphasis—“to me, how the hell do I figure out what to drink? Nothing is going to happen if I drop dead.”
“Well, you wouldn’t drop dead. You’d just go catatonic.”
“Thanks. That’s a load off my shoulders. I’m so happy to know that I won’t be dead, just an invalid.” Duke balled his fists, counted to ten. “For everyone’s sake, please help me.”
The viciousness drained from her, and somehow the pity that replaced it was worse. “I wish you had better listening comprehension. I can’t. I meant what I said. It’s all specific to the individual Blue Blood. The best I can tell you is that it often seems to tie to something important to you. What matters to Duke Guillo? What do you care about most? Who do you care about most?”
“Computers? Sex? Weed?”
“Those are things. Material pleasures. You don’t connect with them; you desire them. For once in your life, think in context of other people. Who are you closest to?”
“My weed dealer?”
“If you’re not going to try, I have better things to—”
“My frat brothers?”
As soon as he spoke the words, he understood. Something clicked, turned in him like he was a lonely lock, and the horror it loosed asphyxiated him. Brotherhood. Yes. That was what he craved. It seemed so obvious in hindsight, his abject need for fraternity to matter in what he ate.
What.
Not who.
Not exactly.
Duke reeled at how easily his brain realigned around this new revelation, its casual devaluation of anything—there it went again, slicing the humanity from his choice in victuals—he could construe as food. He called up memories, happy ones, of his frat brothers over the decades, willing those luminous recollections to overcome this animal hunger, but all they did was make him hungry.
And he was so very, very hungry.
It was then Duke realized something else:
The blood he wanted was already here.
Not cocooned in plastic, not cold, not congealed to shadow, too thick to sip, but still running hot in living veins. The smell permeated everything now, a warm coppery musk, and Duke had no clue how he’d missed it before. As though leashed by a string to its source, his attention twitched across the room until his eyes rested on the blond who’d offered him a cigarette, who’d stood up for him, pushed him to chase joy, to speak to Eva.
In answer to his scrutiny, Sven looked up from his mop and his bucket, beamed, waving a still-mittened hand.
Duke stared slackly, mesmerized.
“Everyone else? Take the rest of the day. You.
“You, I need you to stay.”
When Duke was done, there was little anyone would have called a body. In a way, this proved a boon. Corpses were intrinsically difficult to hide. A hundred and seventy pounds of meat, memory, and muscle. Two hundred and six bones. Rubbery acres of gray-blue intestine. Such things were hard to grind down, especially in volume.
But for Duke, it would not be a problem.
He snapped a fluted tibia in his hands, worked a finger, and then his tongue, in the marrow, scraping the cavity for any last vestige of matter. Duke knew he should feel guilty, did so to some extent, a neglected lobe of consciousness aware that he’d not only recently murdered a man, he’d devoured him.
More or less, at any rate.
Duke hadn’t actually eaten his victim, not in the normal sense, at least. Not that he didn’t try initially, to his misfortune. He’d compromised, in the end, on emulating a spider, suckling on the meat and the muscle, wringing the arteries of their harvest, squeezing every ligament and stretch of tendon in his mouth for the last drops of blood.
Either way, for all the guilt that Duke knew he should experience, mostly, he felt full.
Duke lolled a drowsy look over the patchwork maze of bones spread over the floor, the skull in pottery shards. One death. He was owed that much, wasn’t he? In a life in which he had to prey on the living, one death seemed inevitable, a casualty of self-education. Besides, the human species itself was unapologetically omnivorous, and it rarely questioned how the steak on the supermarket shelves was produced. Cows died to feed stockbrokers.
Stockbrokers could well die to feed something else.
The ecosystem was circuitous, ouroborosian in how it tied life and death, death and life, and now, life and undeath. Convoluted as his justification was, it was enough to calm him. And the blood, too, so much of it. That helped too.
Duke exhaled.
“Mr. Guillo,” said a woman’s voice. “Would you like us to take care of this?”
He thought about it for a moment.
“Yes,” said Duke, beginning to succumb to lethargy. “Yes, please.”
It was time to sleep and after that, to leave.
Meat
Duke bulldozed into Keflavík Airport, swearing under his breath, fucks issued rapid-fire. Eva called out behind him, begging him to wait as she parked the car. Reflexively, Duke slowed, her panic too palpable to ignore, but lengthened his stride again before even his next redundant intake of air. He didn’t warrant Eva’s devotion, he reasoned, having secured it by illicit means, an accident of power. Moreover, he knew he was bad for her. Addiction, as a gestalt, provided no remuneration, and something of a hemophiliac bent was likely worse. In this respect, he was doing her a favor.
Better to vanish now.
Better to walk away, give her and her friends an opportunity to recuperate, forget, and deal with the sudden disappearance of the fourth member of their quartet.
Better to run before his wardens took notice, grateful as he was for their willingness to tidy up his mess. Better to go. Better to escape.
“Wait.”
He turned at the sound, mimed helplessness with an exaggerated shrug, said “Stay” with as much force as he could, then jabbed a thumb at the inside of the airport before falling in step with an Asian family and striding indoors. Duke made an immediate beeline to his counter, passport slid across its polished top before he was even asked to do so.
“Duke Guillo?” said the attendant: a mousy thing with watery blue eyes, blond hair in thin ringlets, like an aging starlet displaced from the Roaring Twenties. Pretty in her heyday, but otherwise unmemorable. The bone structure prohibited it. “Is that a title or your first name?”
A memory of the old woman rose up, unwanted, unbidden. God, I hope that isn’t a real name.
“First name,” said Duke. “Got a brother named King and a sister called Queenie. It was all the rage in the South.”
Lies, all of it.
“Really?” said the woman. Her tag broadcasted her name as Evelyn. It seemed fictitious, a moniker picked from a hat. “I wasn’t aware of that. Which part of the South do you come from, sir?”
“Lafayette.”
She glanced down at his passport. “It says that the passport was issued in Montgomery, Alabama.”
“Well, I spent some time there.”
Her smile declined in temperature. “Which part of the South do you come from, sir?”
“Lafayette,” said Duke again, his expression static.
“I see.”
“You know, the way I see it,” he added, regretting, for multiple reasons, his initial evaluation of her. For one, it was a miserly view. Evelyn was attractive, just older than Duke liked them, which was to say she couldn’t pass for seventeen in good light.
For another, Duke needed all the friends he could get right now.
He continued. “The South’s basically the same thing all over. It’s just a question of what kind of food you like better.”
When he wanted to, Duke could honey his voice, let the accent thicken in the vowels, and smile like he was raised Pentecostal, together with a ranch of older sisters, each of them more picky about their brother’s manners than the last. This talent had opened doors and legs for Duke, and though he wouldn’t ever admit to it, Duke saw it as his devil’s Hail Mary, his can’t-lose last-ditch solution. He winked at her and waited, prayed under his breath.
If his charm had any effect, Evelyn showed no initial evidence of it. Her front-desk smile kept its glacial shine. Yet her eyes held Duke’s just long enough to resurrect his optimism.
“If you say so, Mr. Guillo.” Her eyes dropped to the monitor. “Hm. I’m afraid there’s a problem.”
“Yeah? Don’t tell me the system has me confused with a real duke. That happens some—”
“You’re on the No Fly List, Mr. Guillo.”
“I’m sorry?” Hope rotted in his chest.
“You’re on the No Fly List, Mr. Guillo,” she said again, no change to her diction. “Sorry about that.”
“Wait. Whose No Fly List? It’s got to be a mistake. I haven’t done anything wrong. I don’t even have outstanding parking tickets—”
But he knew.
We’re watching, a little yellow note had warned Duke.
It occurred to him then that the Camarilla, so stuffy, so fanatically obsessed with appearance, were exactly the sort to be able to recriminate him like this. Duke wasn’t going to be intimidated, though. He’d said so. Plus, there were always ways to circumvent the system.
“Really,” he said again. “It’s got to be a mistake.”
“Mr. Guillo, I’m going to have to ask that you step aside so I can serve the next customer.”
He glanced behind him. There was no one there.
“Evelyn, come on.”
“Mr. Guillo, I’m going to have to ask—”
Duke flung himself on the counter, halfway to panic. “Please check again for me. I need to get back to America. My sis, she’s alone and she’s sick. When she left home, our parents told her not to come back. I’m the only one she’s got—”
“What is she sick with, Mr. Guillo?”
“Sorry?”
“Your sister,” said Evelyn. “What is she sick with?”
He hesitated.
“Mr. Guillo, I really do need you to step aside so I can serve the next customer.”
“No one else is fucking here!”
Duke hadn’t intended to shout, hadn’t wanted to draw attention, knew better than to piss off customer service—especially in an airport, with security all around—but the phantasmagoric awfulness of the last few nights had chipped away at his reserves of decorum. Worse yet was the memory of that stupid note, bolted now to the forefront of his consciousness, reminding him of his impotence.
We’re watching.
A power move, Duke knew what it was. That didn’t stop it from working.
“Look, are you just trying to shake down the tourist? Is that it? I’ll pay. You want me to give you more money for a seat? I’ll pay. Fuck, I’ll pay double.” He pawed through his wallet, credit cards raining out of their sleeves.
“Mr. Guillo, calm down.”
“Triple. I need to get out of Iceland.”
“If you do not calm down, Mr. Guillo, I’m going to have to call security,” said Evelyn, unmoved by the hysteria. Statuary might have shown more passion as she closed Duke’s passport, placed it atop the counter, and slid it an inch in his direction in emphasis. “Have a nice day.”
“I want to talk to your manager.”
“Sir.” Not even Mr. Guillo anymore, he noticed. Just sir. Tense and clipped, impersonal, deeply uninterested in him as anything but a transaction to be firmly closed out. “I need you to leave.”
Her dismissal rocked him. Duke took his passport and sleeved it in a coat pocket, stared at Evelyn for one last long wild-eyed minute. He felt hollow again, latheringly hungry. It pulsed in him, that appetite, a muscular ticktocking, as though of an atrophied heart vainly struggling to keep time. Duke knew, understood without exception, that he should back down. That this was his one chance to withdraw gracefully, and any further interaction he might initiate was an act of spite and subject to censure.
But he reached inward anyway, down into his blood.
“Come on. You can make an exception for me.”
It rose, cocksure, hipshot, every recollection he had of being enough, being powerful, being the biggest dog on the field. The power shone with a cocaine luster, which was all right by Duke. He appreciated the familiarity. It made the sensation—that ephemeral infant instinct to weaponize his confidence, turn his charm on the literal offensive—easier to direct. Duke took a breath he didn’t need and by the time he let it go, he felt messianic, high on the world singing him his hosannas.
“Evelyn, please. Come on. For me.”
Duke wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but he knew what it was not: Evelyn, smile still on parade, pointing a slim finger up at the camera above her counter, the matte-black device abscessed with red lights.
We’re watching, said the note.
“Fuck.”
He peeled from the desk, vertiginous with terror, the tiled floor seeming to carousel slowly beneath him. The light was cold and blue tinged. He hadn’t noticed it before, but the light worked like a whetstone, giving everything an edge.
“Are you one of them?”
“Sir?”
“Tell that old corpse I’m not afraid of her. I’m getting out of here and she can’t stop me.”
Her smile became dazzling. “Next, please.”
The moon, gibbous and enormous, watched as Eva and Duke drove home to Reykjavík. Despite his misery, the uncertainties frissoning through him, Duke couldn’t help but gawk at the lunar manifestation, the satellite an ominous shade of distant autumn. Like everything else, it had to do with the framing. In parallax with skyscrapers, he wouldn’t have thought twice about the sight. But here, without civilization to lend perspective, the moon loomed like a warning, and Duke could see how his ancestors, clinging to one another, afraid, so very afraid of the dark, might have believed there was something numinous about the heavenly body.
Something terrible.
The tundra stretched on.
Eva broke the silence first, reaching for the radio. She wandered between the channels until, rather inexplicably, she found a station playing country music. A man wailed about the comeuppance liars and gamblers were to expect, that God would come to cut them down.
“You were going to leave me,” said Eva as the singer’s voice gave way to his guitar. “Here. Alone. Without you.”
“Eva, I . . .” A glib answer leaped to his tongue and was dismissed. The moment seemed portentous. “I was going to come back.”
She drove another mile in white-knuckled quiet. Another voice replaced the first on the radio, singing of the divine’s country, and how the Devil came to Georgia but refused to linger.
“You weren’t,” said Eva.
