Walk Among Us, page 27
I slip into the house by the front door instead of following him in through the kitchen. I sniff the air. He’s upstairs. I can’t hear his voice or footfalls; he’s being stealthy. But I find him.
I find him in Ethan’s room.
I find him in Ethan’s arms. They’re both disrobing quickly, quietly, Ethan laughing every so often, Kasim stealing kisses and touching Ethan’s scarred, ropey body with clear affection.
I go very still, my silence caught between screaming and laughter.
Of course he isn’t here to feed.
I saw this coming. He still craves humanity, craves gentleness and life and soft caresses, and his Blood’s thin enough that he can still get it up most nights. Put him near humans, and the urges increase. I thought it would be enough, teaching him to see the community as food stock, but it wasn’t.
The worst part is Kasim seems to be as good for Ethan as Jo’s visits; he’s been doing a lot better in the last month, reporting fewer episodes to his therapist, and I guess now I know why. And I don’t want Ethan hurt.
Then again, Kasim is doing enough of that himself.
This is the last thing I need on my plate. The rollout of the catch-and-release program has hit roadblock after roadblock: finding the right people, getting the word out to the right communities, figuring out what information we can ask for without risk of blowback. We need things that are HIPAA-protected, and for people who don’t live here, the process of getting that information is a little more fraught.
And Robin still isn’t back.
And Kasim is about to get Ethan’s pants off.
They’re too wrapped up in each other to notice when I ease open the door, but they notice when I throw it the rest of the way open. Kasim’s off the bed and snarling, ready to lay down his life, but Ethan is just staring, humiliated, unsure of what to do.
“Don’t move,” I say.
Kasim breaks for the window.
Coward.
I lock eyes with Ethan. “Kasim never came by tonight,” I tell him. “You’ve lost track of the last half hour. You did not see me in your room.”
And then I close the door and give Ethan some privacy, descend the stairs as calmly as I can, then take off in search of Kasim.
To his credit, he’s not far off. He’s waiting for me, and he doesn’t look as though he’s going to attack. He’s just pacing, wildly, tearing at his hair.
I clear my throat.
“No more second story exits,” I say, when he looks up.
“Leigh—”
“We’re not having this conversation here. Follow me.”
I lead him out into the gusty rain, through the mud, past the low fields filled with die-back and cover crop. His Converses suck up the mud as he follows.
He’s been here a month and hasn’t thought to change his shoes.
At least he has the common sense to take them off on my porch. If he’s thinking about the last time we were both here, he has the decency not to mention it. Maybe he understands he’s in deep shit.
We go inside, to the parlor. I see him take in the furniture, the rugs, everything Jo ignored. Good for him.
“Sit,” I say. He obeys.
“I wasn’t feeding,” he says quickly.
“I figured that out. What made you pick the Camarilla?”
“Huh?” Any other day, that blurted answer, so humanlike, would have charmed me. Here, now, it just makes me angrier.
“You go out past Eighty-Second, that’s full Anarch territory. Infiltrates halfway here along Powell and Sandy. You had options, options that would’ve put a lot fewer restraints on you. So. Why Camarilla?”
He squirms. This clearly isn’t what he was anticipating.
Good.
“Uh. It made—it made sense.”
“Did you know whoever embraced you?” I should’ve asked this in the intake. I shouldn’t have treated him with any respect at all.
“Kind of.” He swivels his head, looking for an exit. “She didn’t stick around, though. I don’t understand what this has to do with anything. What’s going on?”
“You chose to submit to Camarilla control, but you don’t want to leave your human life behind. You tried to apply here as if you were just a normal guy. You still talk to your family.” He startles. He didn’t know that I’ve had Key look at his phone, check the numbers he texts against some records I probably shouldn’t have access to. He never says anything he shouldn’t, but he still talks to his sister nightly. “And now you’re fucking a human.”
He sits rigid in my chair.
“We don’t take well to such close relationships with the meat,” I say.
“The meat—what the fuck?”
“It risks the Masquerade. Everything you’re doing, it risks exposing us, getting us all killed, and you choose to put yourself under Camarilla law while doing it? What’s wrong with you?”
“What the fuck are you going on about? Who the fuck are you to be angry at me for getting close to a human? Everybody here, you care about them, and don’t even get me started on you and Robin—”
I lose my temper then. Just like I lost control in that field, with Robin in the greenhouse, with that tech guy at the burlesque club. This time, I’m full of rage and a perverse glee. I throw him across the room and am on him again before he can stand.
“You’re fucking psycho!” he shouts, trying to cover his head. “What is wrong with you?”
I don’t know what he sees, staring bug-eyed up at me, but I can feel the fury transforming me, combining with the thickness of my Blood to create awe. Horror. Terror. If he’d been human, he would have shit himself.
Let this be a reminder to him that he is far from human.
As it is, he cowers. He blubbers. I fight the urge to crack his ribcage in two, spatchcock him like a roasting chicken, but only because I don’t want to clean up the mess. I don’t feel a single ounce of shame at the impulse. He needs to get that I’m not playing, that I am not nice, that I am in control.
“Leigh, Leigh, I’m sorry . . . fuck.” He wheezes. “I’m sorry . . . shit.”
“Give me one good reason not to tear your throat out.” I don’t know what I sound like, if I’m roaring or hissing or speaking at a calm, even volume. It feels like all three at once to me. It feels good. I haven’t let out the anger like this since that tech guy, and even then, it wasn’t this. That was feeding, not dominance. I like that Kasim knows exactly what I am and hates me for it.
His eyes dart around the room, as if looking for relief. There will be none. I bare my fangs, already thinking about how his Blood will taste. Thin, almost powerless, but not entirely. Better than a bag. Better than a human.
“Clots!”
I stop.
“Instead of the catch and release. Or—or in addition, it doesn’t really matter, but you know, we have this portfolio, this collection of all this blood, and I’d heard—I’d heard blood can make clots. Powerful things. Right? Can’t we refine it? Make it better? Cultivate . . . cultivate it. Into something special and useful and not what you’d find on the streets. That whole bit, that you’re a farmer of man—this is like making wagyu beef, yeah? Making a quality—a quality product.”
I almost lunge again, but this time the anger is different. Because why didn’t I think of that? It’s brilliant. Clots. Old name: dyscrasia. Oldest name: animal husbandry. That’s what he’s suggesting. Not just maintaining the health of the flock and picking good additions, but also nurturing what’s already here in specific directions. It isn’t entirely dissimilar to what the thaumaturge is after, though it will be a much slower process to do it sustainably.
It runs risks, sure. Such manipulations will be more potentially noticeable, and fostering a choleric or melancholic dyscrasia could put others in danger. But if I’d stopped to think that night at Vương’s house, if I’d offered up this?
Robin would still be here.
Robin would still be here, I wouldn’t be pursuing goals that run counter to my actual ideals and desires, and we’d all be a hell of a lot safer.
It’s worth the risk, now if not before. Things can’t get much worse. (A lie, but a powerful one. Things can always get worse.) I let him go and back off, but don’t look away. He remains pinned by my gaze as I struggle to darn the thin spots in my self-control.
“All I know,” he says, breaking the silence with his nerves, “is based off thin-blood street alchemy but, like, there’s got to be something there, right?”
I nod.
He licks his lips, pulls himself shakily to his feet. “Me leaving Ethan, it’s going to destroy him. You know that, right?”
I hadn’t thought about it. But yes. I do know that, upon reflection.
I can see the next bit of logic hurts him. Good; it ought to. It might toughen him up. “With his background . . . it could do it. Couldn’t it?” he whispers. “Break him hard enough to make a clot.”
I’m already mentally going through my contacts list, looking for a customer who will appreciate being offered Ethan on a silver platter. I feel myself smiling.
“Kasim,” I purr, “there might be hope for you yet.”
Confession
Robin finally calls me.
During the day, of course, so I wake up to a voice mail. It’s awkward and uncertain. She doesn’t apologize at all, which makes me proud. Instead she says that she’s been thinking since she left, and that she wants to see me, talk it over.
I text back while walking to the office, asking if she’s free tonight. When she doesn’t respond after half an hour, my nerves get the best of me and I go back out. I check on the pregnant ewes, the quail, the chickens, and Ethan, who is, as predicted, devastated. He seethes with pain, and my attempts to help only cause more. It’s hard to watch; I never like to see an animal suffer. But the predator instinct in me stirs more and more the higher his agony goes. Tonight it’s somewhere between the smell of a barbecue and the lightning strike realization that you’ve found the weak, abandoned member of the herd, ready to be picked off at your leisure.
Jo Ladzka is going to be pissed that I’m taking away her monthly feed, but what will another drop of bad blood between us hurt? I do the math, calculating when will be a safe harvest window. Jo doesn’t drink him to the last safe point, so the three weeks since her visit have probably given him enough time to recover . . . except he hasn’t been eating well this week.
I go down to the kitchen to make him a green smoothie and text his new prospective buyer, asking him to follow up with me on the pollination contract he asked about for his fruit trees this spring. I’ve gotten Ethan to drink half his smoothie of kale, almond butter, banana, and honey when my phone—finally—buzzes.
And it’s not the buyer.
It’s Robin.
I make hurried excuses and run out of the building like a schoolgirl, answering the phone and heading for my car.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.”
“I’m free but I don’t want to stay out too late,” she says. “I’m over near Peninsula Park. Does that work for you?”
“Of course. I can be there in fifteen minutes. Meet you at the gazebo.” She hasn’t suggested a bar (our bar). No, she’s picked someplace quiet. Which means yeah, she wants to talk about things in private. Which means I’ve been right that she left not because she got bored or because an ex wanted to get back together with her, but because she got scared and bolted.
A park could also mean danger. It could mean a setup. I only realize that once I’m already in the car, but I don’t turn back.
Robin’s not like that.
The weather is miserable, hovering just above freezing, spitting rain in uncertain gusts. I can’t drive all the way to the gazebo and the walk to it through the park takes longer than I expect. I pass tents and huddled figures, worrying that our meeting spot will already be taken, covered as it is. But as I go deeper into the park, there are fewer and fewer tents, until I’m alone.
All alone. I distantly note my relief, that she’s exactly like I think she is.
I end up waiting for almost ten minutes for her to show, setting up my phone to give us some light in order to keep my hands busy. I’m just starting to wonder if she’s ghosted me when I catch her scent on the wet air. Another minute passes before she emerges out of the shadows, weighed down in a raincoat and heavy boots. As soon as she’s under the gazebo roof, she pulls back her hood, revealing dark circles beneath her eyes and chapped lips, as though she’s been chewing them. She sits down on the bench without a word and motions for me to join her.
I do. She doesn’t say hi, and I don’t either. For a long time, we just sit like that. I realize just how much I’ve gotten used to her physical presence then. Not sure why it surprises me; we’ve been working together three or four nights a week for over two months. But I can feel myself relaxing just because of the sound of her breathing, when by all rights I should be getting more and more uneasy.
“I should have told you I was leaving,” she says at last.
“Not if you didn’t feel safe doing so.”
She frowns. “Is that what you thought was . . . ?” And then she laughs. “No, I was just . . . I was embarrassed.”
I’m stunned. Embarrassed—about what? Fear would make more sense than shame.
“I just needed some space,” she says. “Needed to figure out how I felt about stuff, and I knew I couldn’t be objective near you. You’re pretty convincing, you know.”
I make myself smile. “I’ve been told as much. I’m glad you called, though. Do I get a chance to answer your questions?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I tried to put it all behind me, move on and stuff, but that whole place is pretty important to me now. It really is amazing, what you do there. You know that, right?”
“Thanks. I try. We try.”
“That’s why I was so embarrassed. How you explained everything should have made sense, but the whole blood drive thing, and the sudden push to do outreach, and the thing with Bill . . . Or I guess it did make sense, but not in a way I liked, so I wanted to get some perspective.”
“Did you get it?”
“No.” She sighs. “No, it’s all the exact same as when I left. Except . . . Except I have these memories. Foggy, like a dream, but I remember you, and I remember the greenhouse. I remember . . .” She trails off. I’ve gone still as death. Literally. I’ve been thrown enough that I’ve forgotten to breathe, and my skin has already started to cool when I regain control over myself.
But she sees it.
Or maybe she just feels as desperate as I do. Maybe she’s responding to the preternatural charm that rolls off me, whether I want it to or not. How much of those nights on Division were a result of habitual influence on my part? I don’t know.
Whatever the reason, she leans in. She reaches out and folds my cold hand in hers. She stares into my eyes.
“Why did I forget, Leigh?”
Because I made her.
“I wasn’t drunk,” she says. “Not that drunk, anyway. But I barely remember how it felt in the greenhouse, when you—”
“Stop.”
If I could’ve erased it from my own memory, I would have. It doesn’t feel so much like a warning anymore, even with Ethan’s heartbreak still shuddering through the commune, even after I just told Kasim why intoxication with mortals is expressly fucking forbidden. No, it feels like temptation.
And she isn’t stopping. She needs to stop.
“I thought it was a dream, at first, but it felt too real. And then I wondered if—if somebody had slipped something into my drink at the event. If you had, after. But that didn’t make sense, either. You’re not like that. You’re . . .”
I cling to the shreds of my self-control. I will heat back into my flesh.
She looks down at where our hands are joined. Mine are flushed now. Too hot. I’ve overshot.
“What are you?” she asks, so quietly a human would have missed it.
I force a laugh. “What am I? Like some kind of X-Man?”
If she laughs, too, I have an out. I can convince her she’s wound up. Overwrought. This is salvageable. This is—
“You’re not human, Leigh.”
Fuck.
I stare at her. I can’t laugh again, can’t crack another awkward joke. I can’t even say, Of course I am.
Maybe she’s heard something, from Key or the night of the meeting at my cottage about rolling out the new program, though I swear I would have felt her if she’d been that close to my home. Maybe Kasim had too much conscience, though if he’d told anybody our secrets, it would have been Ethan. Maybe she’s just smart.
After all, she just saw my skin lose its pallor. She’s heard me talk about blood as a renewable resource. She’s seen me with the sheep and with the humans and she must have noticed that there’s something similar there, and it doesn’t run toward granting that animals have sentience and independence and the ability to consent.
Most humans, when they get close to the truth, run screaming from it. Or simply see through it, as if it isn’t there at all. The impossibility is so strong that they can’t engage with it. That helps us. As long as we’re impossible, as long as we’re the stuff out of goth kid fantasies and penny-dreadful novels, we can get away with murder.
But she doesn’t think this is impossible.
“Leigh, talk to me,” she says.
Without knowing it, she’s backed me into a corner. I don’t know how long she’s suspected, and there’s a limit to my ability to make her forget—as my imperfect first attempt has now baldly proven. Camarilla law dictates I kill her. We dance on the edge of the Masquerade, and any farther—here or elsewhere, now or later—and she’ll step over it.
I didn’t want it to happen like this.
I stretch out my awareness as far as it will go across the darkened park. All I find are deadheaded roses and hunkering squirrels, a few skunks, and the usual scattering of sleeping birds and insects. No humans nearby and no Kindred either.
“What are you trying to say?” I ask, desperate to prolong the inevitable. To prove that I’m wrong, that she’s thinking something else entirely.
