Walk Among Us, page 28
She lets go of my hands with one of hers, begins ticking things off with her fingers. “I’ve never seen you during the day. Nobody on campus has.”
“I work night shift.”
“Not even in summer. They say you don’t help with the crops, and that’s not like you. You’d be out there in the late afternoon, at least. But you’re not.”
She’s right. She knows me too well. She knows that if I could, I’d be pulling twenty-hour shifts in the busy season.
Another tick. “You live apart from the entire complex.”
“I like my privacy.”
“You value communal living.”
“I wouldn’t be the first hypocrite.” But my hope is fading. I try to grasp for panicked rage instead, to make this easier. If I can just hate her, fear her, I can kill her. But I don’t find anything I can use.
I find only desperation. Desire.
Temptation.
Key knows what I am. Our other retainers know bits and pieces. There are steps I can take here, steps that will let her live. I can mesmerize her, enough to make her docile, enough to send her back to the commune. I can make her drink from my wrist until she has no choice but to love me. I can bind her to me forever.
But it wouldn’t be her. Not quite. It would be her plus me. Tainted. Manipulated.
More than I’ve already manipulated her?
If I were Anarch, I could just take her, here, now. Turn her, bind her that way. Consent is an illusion, I told Kasim that myself. So why am I hesitating?
Why am I so soft?
“I’ve never seen you eat,” she says. “Or drink, not even water. You didn’t even taste the soup.”
The soup. The night she first began to worry something was wrong. The night I made the choice to keep her anyway. I made soup, and I didn’t taste it because I didn’t want to spare the energy to keep from throwing up. I can cook just fine by sight and smell.
But she noticed. She’s attentive. Perceptive.
I thought because she likes me, she would fail to see my faults. Instead, she has collected them all.
“Robin,” I warn. “You need to be very careful now.”
Her jaw sets. “What did you do to me in the greenhouse?” she asks. “What are you?”
Kill her, kill her. The thought pulses through my body, along with pure need, hunger. I can smell her. I could take her. I’d lose her, yes, but it would be sweet—wouldn’t it?
I recoil from the impulse, singed, scared. Scared of myself. Scared of what would happen if I give in.
And that’s what decides it for me.
I am no monster, and Robin fits into the community. She deserves to be there. And if this experiment is going to continue, it’s going to take more than dyscrasias and larger ranges of blood types. It’s going to take an increase in carrying capacity, a decrease in suspicion.
It’s going to take societal change.
It’s going to have to go beyond blood inebriation and into real belief. Honest dedication. Key’s too addled now to ever be real proof of that, but Robin? Robin is an opportunity. If I am careful, if I cultivate her, I can turn her without spilling a drop of blood. Make her understand, the way I’ve made her understand how it can be humane to breed animals for slaughter. Nobody can know until I’ve proven out my theorem, but we’re good at lying together, aren’t we?
She has a soft heart. That’s what I count on, when I say:
“You’re right. I’m not human.”
I let my Blood still again. I let my skin grow dull and pale. She tenses, but she doesn’t scream or try to get up from the bench in the gazebo.
I watch the final pieces click into place organically, bit by bit, logical progression after logical progression. The last of her illusions fall away, the last hope she had of ever thinking she lives in a mundane world.
“How many?” she asks. “How many are like you, back home?”
Home. Exultation surges through me, and it must distort my features because she lets go of me and scoots back.
“Not many,” I say quickly.
“The blood donations?”
“A renewable resource.”
I want her to agree with me without illusions, but I can’t stop myself from influencing her. It is impossible to disentangle what I am from what I say; where my vitae stirs in my throat and gentles my words, it is just another form of oratory. Of setting the stage.
And it works, not like the bludgeon of direct control, but like the sweetness of any beguiling speech.
“You need it,” she says.
“Yes. Like you need sun and amino acids and sugars and water.”
She frowns. “The sheep?”
I shake my head. “I’ve tried.” That’s a lie, but a small one. I haven’t. But I know some who have. It’s worse than bagged blood apparently.
“And that’s why it exists? The whole community? For . . . you?”
“From one angle, yes. It allows me to take what I need without hurting anybody.” No need to tell her that, no matter where she goes, she will never be far from something like me. No need to tell her about the wheels within wheels.
This is her and me.
“Like honey,” she says. “Like milk.”
“And from another angle, it gives people a home.”
“It’s a farm,” she says.
“And you’ve seen how kindly I treat the sheep.”
She looks at me, stricken. “How can you say that’s the same?”
I swoop in to soothe her. “Many people would,” I say. “From the other direction perhaps, but much of the argument against raising animals for meat or even dairy go back to inhumane treatment. Treating animals other than we would treat people. But I don’t believe that. I never have. I think you can treat an animal with respect and comfort, and still harvest from them what you need. A bargain. An arrangement.”
“But nobody knows what they signed up for,” she says. “Nobody agreed to the bargain.”
“The sheep never agreed, either.”
All or nothing arguments are dangerous. It would be easy for Robin to simply declare both horribly wrong. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t, because she’s worked beside me, and I’ve already changed her mind about animal husbandry.
She wavers on a knife’s edge.
“What happened to Bill?”
“Processed,” I say.
“Slaughtered,” she counters. She’s gone pale. I can smell fear on her, fear and disgust, but not panic. She’s still balancing. Still waiting to be swayed. Wanting it.
That gives me the confidence to nod. “But he was an outlier. A special case. Normally, it’s just like honey. Taken without threat to she who produces it.”
She bows her head.
I wait.
“Is it better,” she says at last, “than the alternative? Or—or has this always been going on?”
“This is new,” I confide. “An experiment. What I hope is a better way.”
“And what’s the normal way?”
“To hunt. To kill.” (I don’t want to muddy the water by explaining that many Kindred don’t drain until death because society would rebel. Perhaps another night.)
“And if you don’t do this, you’ll die?”
“I would, yes. There’s no textured soy protein or tofu for what I am. Maybe one day,” I add, thinking of Jolene, of what could have been, “but not yet.”
“Honey or meat,” she says. “And you choose honey.”
“I choose honey.” I smile at her, and she smiles back. Weakly, yes, but honestly. I rise from the bench and don’t reach for her, don’t crowd her. It’s important for her to believe she has a choice in what comes next. “I’m going to head back now,” I say. “You can take as much time as you want to think it over.”
She takes my hand before I can go. It fits perfectly. It feels right. “That night, the greenhouse—why did you make me forget? Am I missing something?”
I bring back a lifelike flush to my cheeks, enough to mimic a blush in the waxing moonlight. “Embarrassment,” I say.
“Not regret?”
I don’t answer that, except to say, “Come home soon. Sylvia misses you.”
And then I disappear into the night.
February
Robin’s Return
“I hear your songbird has come back,” Lucille says by way of greeting. She is at her easel, her current work less purely representational than usual, filled with jarring colors and unsettling, half-shaped forms. It matches how I feel inside.
“Two nights ago,” I confirm.
I haven’t seen her yet. That makes me a coward of course, but I’m beginning to realize I am not as brave as I once thought, at least when it comes to her. I’ve gone over our meeting in the park a hundred different ways, and while a part of me—too loud, too childish—is delighted she knows, that she’s home, that she trusts me, the rest is certain I’ve fucked up. My goals are noble, but my methods—
The Masquerade can’t be broken. What am I thinking?
So I’ve come to Lucille, hoping that even in her abstraction, she can be useful. That she will take pity on me the way she used to. All I need to say is She knows, and Lucille will take the reins.
And I am a coward.
“Do you know why she left?” Lucille asks. She is making it easy for me by staying engaged. “Was it another altercation among the herd?”
“No,” I say. “No, she just—needed some space.”
Lucille looks at me, quirks a brow, gestures to the fields outside her window.
“Not space,” I correct. “Time. Back with other people. Sometimes it takes a few rounds for new members to really settle in, you know that.”
“I had assumed, given the job you gave her, that she was reliable.”
“She is,” I say, too quick to defend. I rub at my face. I need to just say it. Lucille will understand. She almost certainly won’t immediately go to kill her. We can reconsider the issue of enthralling Robin, and I—
She takes my chin in her hand, startling me. “Your eyes,” she says.
“My—what?”
“They’ve changed colors,” my sire says, voice blank and cold. She twists my jaw, changes the angle five times, seven, until she’s satisfied. “Yes, they’ve gone from brown to gold.”
I pull away and scramble to the nearest mirror, peering in. And yes, she’s right. My eyes blaze. They are inhuman. They are beautiful and terrible, and I don’t know what this means.
No. No, perhaps—
“Ladzka,” I hiss.
“What?”
“Foul-Blooded thaumaturge.” I storm for the door, grabbing up my coat, but I’m stopped by Lucille, who slides in front of me easily and grasps my shoulders.
“Explain,” she commands.
So I do. I tell her about the blood bag, and about Kasim finding me wandering outside, and about the strange eruptions of anger and hunger I’ve been experiencing. She listens to it all. She doesn’t berate me for making the deal without her, doesn’t laugh at my foolishness or worry over me like a mother hen.
But she also doesn’t agree with me.
“You’re wrong about when this started,” she says.
“What?” I’m sure I’m not.
“It started when you hired Robin Joy.”
No. No, that doesn’t follow, and just like that, the little shreds of courage I’d built up to ask for her advice burn up. She’s not going to consider this objectively.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, pulling away from her.
“Don’t I? You’re not the first of us to change, you know. Think back to the last dinner party with the Prince.”
The last one I went to was when she’d granted us the privilege to start our experiment. It was a strange thing, both staid and bacchanalian in equal, confusing measures. Half boardroom meeting, half rave.
I remember very few details, despite how important that night was.
“Our bodies change in response to how we use them. Just like humans develop muscle or waste away, our vitae wears channels in us where we habitually direct it.”
“And I use mine to look human,” I reply, voice strangled to a deadly calm.
“You treat them like cattle, Leigh,” Lucille sighs. “Not just like food, but like a commodity. Does it really surprise you that your body would shift in response to that? A human doesn’t think of other humans as if they are cattle. It is an unnatural thing. A dangerous thing.”
She touches my shoulder as if to soothe, and I tear away from her, snarling. “You’re wrong.” Not about seeing them as cattle—or sheep—but about what that makes me. Robin understands. Robin’s convinced by this logic, and she is a shining beacon of humanity! It’s a false comparison, this food versus livestock idea. How can I be worse, more monstrous, than somebody like Vương or Jolene who never even think of human needs and desires and comfort beyond their next meal or experiment?
And besides, there was no change when Robin arrived. I’ve been doing this for five years just the same.
“This started when I drank the leavings of blood sorcery,” I spit, “and if you cannot see that, then I worry how you will help keep this community safe. Nothing changed when Robin Joy arrived.”
“Except for an obsession.”
I can’t keep from laughing. It’s a cruel laugh. It doesn’t sound human, and I feel as far from human as I can ever remember. I feel distorted. Monstrous. Animalistic. “Obsession has nothing to do with how I treat the humans under my care.”
“Doesn’t it?” she asks. Distantly, I’m confused that there’s no rancor in her tone. No fury. She has every right to put me in my place, to tear me to pieces.
Instead, she seems only . . . tired.
The fight bleeds out of me.
She goes back to her painting then. That calm, simple rebuke cuts me deep. I watch her paint and feel shame well up in the furrows I have torn in myself, groundwater rising to the surface.
“Whatever the cause,” I say after perhaps a quarter hour has passed in her silent work and my fading rage, “I need to fix it.”
“I know of no guarantees,” she says, “and I suspect you won’t listen to me if I offer my advice.”
I bow my head. “Please. You have more experience in the world than I do. Tell me what to try, and I will try it.”
Anything except handing Robin to her. I’ll figure that part out on my own.
She looks back at me and gestures minutely with her brush, slicked with aubergine. “Be kind,” she says. “Be human. Be generous.”
“They need me to protect them now more than ever,” I respond.
“Trust in what you have built.”
And she says no more after that.
I stagger home, feeling the prickling pain of the faintest rays of light cresting the horizon, not enough to see but enough to sting. She’s wrong about the cause of this being Robin, but I am willing to try her cure. So many things have happened this winter that have left me raw and defensive. And Robin . . . Robin has, it’s true, made me more aware of what I am, not just what I serve. I’ve had to make excuses, had to bargain with myself, come face-to-face with rules I’ve rarely struggled against in the past.
I’ve broken the Masquerade.
And perhaps that was the right move, even if it arose for all the wrong reasons. Surely it doesn’t actually keep her safer, or me, or the others to struggle on the tightrope when I am far better on the ground. I am at my most bestial when I fight against what I’ve denied myself. Giving in, at least by small degrees, may help me reconcile what has come loose in me.
Afterbirth
One of the ewes goes into labor close to midnight.
It is a curious thing, their preference for evening hours. Some of it must come down to their lambing in winter and early spring, when the nights are long, but I’ve read again and again (and seen myself now) that a preponderance of births seem to happen at night, far more than random chance would allow. I am more involved with lambing and processing than any other phase of meat production, and I appreciate it. It feels right, to be slicked with blood, either from new life or fresh death.
One of the farming crew noticed the ewe’s teats swelling six days ago. It’s still a few weeks too soon for healthy lambing, so I knew this one was likely to be a problem. She’s been in the barn since, under observation, and so I’m in with her when the moment comes. I consider calling the vet, but instead text Robin. She comes to the barn immediately, willing to be another set of hands.
Why Robin and not the vet? It seems as though it will be an easy birth, no knives needed. The lamb isn’t likely to survive, either, so the expense of the vet makes no sense. There are other humans I could have roused, ones who work in the barn during the day. Except even in the drama of the birth, they might notice my eyes.
Still, I could have handled it all on my own.
I could say it just seemed right to bring her in on this process, after she’d missed the slaughter, but that would be only a half-truth. The other half is that I miss her. Lucille wouldn’t approve of the way I got here, but it’s still worth giving her idea a shot: reengage with a human on a personal level. Remember what it was to be human and try not to think of sheep when I look at them.
So I call her.
She shows up wearing old clothes and Wellingtons, expecting the muck, and I have her wash her hands in hot water and antiseptic. The ewe has already burst her second water, so it won’t be long. Together, we help deliver the little creature, slicked in mucous and blood, and watch as it twitches, as its mother tries to lick it clean.
But within minutes of tying off its umbilicus, it’s dead.
I deliver the afterbirth, the clotted, bleeding placenta warm in my hands, and take it away so the ewe won’t eat it and get sick. When I come back, Robin is stroking the dead lamb’s head.
“I missed this,” she says.
“The death?”
She laughs, then cringes, pulling away from the body. “No, I mean—being here. Working with you. I guess the death is part of that, though.”
