Walk Among Us, page 30
Her walls are decorated with the work of local artists, artists I recognize, including some who live on campus. Every flat surface is covered, too, in beautiful planters filled with succulents, in found objects, in half-read books. She has a whole shelf of battered romance novels. Half a shelf of queer theory and poetry, spanning decades. A few small books, gently used, likely from Powell’s, about sheep husbandry and gardening.
This can’t all be a performance. It can’t. I begin to second-guess myself. There’s no threat here. What if there’s no threat at all? What if Kasim misheard, misunderstood? I’ve already told Vương, he’s already penciled the feeding into his schedule, but I could still undo it.
“Hey,” Robin says. The bed bows. She’s sitting next to me. Her thigh brushing mine brings me back, and I shake my head as if to clear my eyes of tears, tears that refuse to form, to fall.
“Sorry,” I say. “Long couple of nights. The rest of the ewes are starting to lamb.” I am a good liar, even if I’m sick half to death of it.
I give myself over entirely to my joy in the sheep. That, at least, is simple.
This conversation should be stilted. She certainly knows I’m avoiding something; we’ve worked together long enough, and she knows my weaknesses well enough. But it isn’t. Words flow like milk, like honey. I tell her about a set of twins, delivered earlier that day, healthy and thriving. I tell her about a ewe who, it turns out, has a false pregnancy, no lambs at all. I tell her about everything I’ve been using to distract myself from her for the last two nights, and she drinks it all in, to all appearances ecstatic to have me back with her.
“And Sylvia?” she asks, though of course Sylvia is not pregnant, will not be for another year. Her eyes sparkle. She is engaged. She’s thinking of our favorite, our girl.
For a moment, I forget what she has done, really forget. I’m happy, I’m joyous, I’m leaning in toward her. And then I think of writing Sylvia’s number on the contract paperwork for Robin’s life, and it comes rushing back. The whiplash is agony.
“Leigh?”
It’s showing on my face, my desire to drop to my knees and beg her for the truth, to explain. I want to scream. I want to rip her head off.
“I should go,” I manage, standing up, running a hand through my shorn hair. She catches hold of the other one. I freeze. I know better. I fight it for half a second, only that, before I give in, docile, letting her tug me back onto the bed. I sit.
She climbs into my lap.
She kisses me.
It is sweet and perfect, because Robin Joy is perfect, and I have been waiting for this moment to come again ever since the night in the greenhouse. My arms wrap around her reflexively, fit her every curve, and if I needed to breathe, I would be lost. I kiss her mouth, her chin, her throat, her collarbone. I feel the pulse of her blood. I feel her hands begin to roam, over my back, along my hips.
“What took you so long?” she murmurs against my hair.
I am weak. Weak like Kasim. I want her, and I want to own her, and I can still hear Lucille’s voice in my head. Reconnect with humanity, she told me, and this seems like the solution. Don’t fuck the animals. I’ve told that to myself and others, over and over again, but if seeing humans as livestock is what’s stripping away my self-control, if this is all my fault, then this is the perfect balm.
And behind it all, my own animal need.
I can have this, at least, if I can’t have her.
It won’t undo what’s been done. I know that. I don’t care.
She wants to be the aggressor, wants to press me back to her bed, but I can’t give her that. Even in my wild abandon, I can’t trust her, not quite, and so I roll us over, straddle her, let her feel the unnatural strength in my thighs. She gasps. She tugs at my shirt. I let every mask drop as she pulls the shirt from my waistband, as she unbuttons the flannel, as she slides her fingers up beneath my undershirt. My skin is cold, my pulse still, and I don’t know if I’m showing her because I’ve spent too long pretending, or because I want her to remember what I am.
And then the world goes red.
Tragedy
I taste blood.
A body arches beneath my hands, luscious and familiar.
I know this scent.
I know this voice.
She is screaming, and the sound gives me the sweetest pleasure I have ever known. It smooths out the frantic bursting of fear, of shame, of panic, leaving in its wake only pure need. I forget to struggle. I forget to fight.
She’s half in love with me already, I hear her saying, imagine her saying, but the line between reality and fantasy is obliterated. There is only the now.
A hand curls around the wooden bedpost. I smell sawdust. I hear a crack of snapping wood. Or is that a footstep on the staircase? I rage. I fear. I react.
And in another moment, the stimulus is obliterated; all that remains is the response. I am a beast, a creature of hunger, something built by nature (or unnature) to rend and slaughter and drink deep, and it is the easiest thing in the world to do what I was made to.
The only result is blood.
The Beast is in me, rampant, rearing, and I tear at flesh. I gorge myself on blood. I roll around like a dog in filth, and I am happy, happy for the first time in months, in years. I want to howl. I want to laugh. I don’t know what sounds I’m making.
I think, This is how it all ends, this is the end of me, of everything, but then a part of me, distant, desperate, thinks that if I have the presence of mind to be poetic, I am not all lost. I must get back to the surface. I must regain control.
Because Robin.
Robin.
Sweet Robin, delicious Robin, Robin in my mouth and throat and stomach—Robin—Robin—
No.
I fight. I finally fight, really fight, but the struggle is a serpent, slippery, winding. It is hard to focus, to remember what it is I’m fighting for. Stillness, I tell myself. Stillness, control, quiet. The rustle of the wind in the grass. The beauty of the darkest night, of the bleating of lambs, of the great edifice I have built in service to the beauty of logistics. Slowly, slowly, I come back down, until it is only me, huddled beneath the porch of Hawthorn House.
There is blood in my mouth.
I spit it out. I fight my nature. I shovel dirt between my lips, chew, until I cannot taste anything else. I vomit soil, then claw my way out from beneath the porch, into the moonlight.
The fading moonlight. It is late now. The night is waning.
I stagger to my feet, taking inventory as quickly as I can. My clothes are stiff with clotting, drying blood, and it smells human. I take three lurching steps forward, away from Hawthorn House, toward home, and then I stop.
I look over my shoulder.
A light burns in Robin’s window.
I go very still, caught between the need to flee and the need to know. You know, you know, the blood on my hands whispers. But I am not ready to accept it, too ready to cling to the impossible. I fall up the porch steps, claw my way inside. The house is still. The house is empty. There is a chance, a small chance, a tiny ember that is struggling against the cold within me, and—
I reach the top of the stairs.
I smell blood, more blood. I smell the shit of the dying. I walk, as if entranced, to the door of Robin’s room, hanging open into the hall. I hung that door myself. I painted the walls inside.
I stand in the threshold and see the evidence of slaughter.
There are clumps of curled, tangled red hair, clinging to scraps of scalp. The bed is overturned, the sheets soaked through. The floorboards are fouled. Helpless, I fall to my knees and do the only thing I can; I begin to pry them up, mechanically processing the scene, falling back on a numb need to clean up the mess. To set things right, to set things back to order.
It is the only thing between silent work and useless howling.
I have less than an hour, but I am alive. I am animate in a way I haven’t been in years. I make quick work of the bedroom, bundle up all the evidence of death. I go to my cottage. I bury the evidence, because fire would be too obvious, too suspicious.
I hide myself behind false walls, false floors, a hundred locks between me and the world of humans.
Lucille was right. Vương was right. I am the wolf in the flock. I am a beast, a monster, and every defense I erected between myself and the core of me was a farce. While I played at my pastoral idyll, I was coming ever closer to his moment, this fracture, and now I can taste Robin’s blood on my lips and feel her in my veins, and I want to scream.
But there should have been a body.
What the fuck have I done with the body?
Processing
I checked the slaughter room. There’s newly made sausage. I don’t know who made it.
I hope it’s lamb.
Failure to Deliver
It’s Thursday, and I forgot to cancel the appointment.
I don’t know how I forgot. My whole existence has been reduced to Robin Robin Robin. I haven’t found her body, haven’t found any trace of her except the blood that’s already boiled from my veins. I haven’t found her burner phone, either, and it’s left me terrified. Hunted.
I should have remembered to call off Sebastian Vương, but maybe I forgot in order to protect myself. I have no good excuse for him.
But he’s here, now, and he will be angry. I race across the fields, sliding in the muck, reduced to something less than human, less than animal. I don’t know what I’m going to tell him. I don’t know if I can lie, or if I will just throw myself on his mercy. I can’t afford either, not really. Maybe I should just hide.
Or leave.
But Kasim took my shift tonight, and that means he’ll be the one to greet Vương and have no ready answer for him, and while I still hate him for breaking open this monstrousness inside of me, for proving my foolishness to me, I owe him safety.
I reach the administration building. I pelt down the halls, muddy boots sliding on the linoleum.
I’m too late.
The door to the office is wide open, and I smell blood. My head spins. My stomach aches.
Only Vương would believe so much in his own right to destruction that he’d leave evidence of his rage where humans could see it.
Luckily, the blood is contained to a small pool in the back of the room. And the blood’s owner is still alive. Kasim huddles beneath my desk, shivering, glaring up at me with pure, seething hatred. But he’s weak and biddable as I get him back to my cottage and break out some of my own blood stores, giving him enough to start his body mending.
“Fuck you,” he says when he’s drunk his fill, teeth still bloody and eyes still sunken. “Fuck you.”
I want to apologize, but don’t want to acknowledge how badly I’ve made a mess of things. I avoid eye contact and start cleaning up the mess he made. Always cleaning up messes.
“I’ll talk to him,” I say. “About appropriate behavior with staff.” If nothing else, Kasim is under my protection. The thought makes me stiffen with pain, though, because there it is: more evidence that I can’t protect what is mine.
“Doesn’t matter, I fucking quit,” he says, staggering to his feet. “I should have told Lucille about your episode the other month, and I should’ve packed up and left then, before you lost control over everything. Easy feeding isn’t worth all this shit. I’m not covering for you, not when you almost killed me for Ethan and then turned around and—”
He cuts himself off. He eyes me warily.
It’s clear from that look that he knows. He knows. I told everybody Robin left again, told him to step up security in case she brought whatever threat she was spying for to our doorstep, and I thought, of all people, he’d believe me. After all, he was the one to hear the conversation.
But he stopped trusting me the moment I punished him for loving Ethan. He might have pitied me, feared for me, after that night in the fields, but instead I mocked him. I let out the beast in me so he could see it, so I could feel strong.
He knows exactly what I’m capable of.
He walks the campus at night for security, just like I hired him to.
“Were you there?” I ask. My voice doesn’t break a whisper. “In the house that night?”
“No,” he says. “But I saw what you’ve done to her room. I know how you looked at her. I’m thin-blooded, not stupid.”
I should be ashamed, or scared, but all I feel is exhaustion. I’m tired. So tired. I sit down and put my head in my hands. What happened with Robin, it doesn’t mean the whole experiment is a failure. But it feels like the end of the world. I can’t trust myself, and without me, what’s left? Lucille doesn’t care enough. Vương would run it into the ground.
It isn’t fair, but I ask Kasim, “What do I do now?”
Kasim doesn’t answer. When I look up, he’s long gone.
I am alone.
Memory Fog
I think I see Robin.
We have been called downtown to kneel at the Prince’s feet, and we walk rain-slick streets lit by white string lights on rows of orderly trees. I don’t want to go into the building, and I turn away from the doors. Just for a moment, going into the bar across the street, I see a flash of red hair, the curve of a familiar hip as a woman opens the door, shrugs off her coat.
And then the door closes.
It isn’t her. Robin is dead.
“Come,” Lucille says, touching just one finger to the back of my hand. I master myself and enter the grand lobby.
We have not been called to Elysium; this is not a safe haven or an open call for machinations, but a closed-door meeting in a boardroom downtown in a top-floor law office. The Prince sits at the head of the long, live-edge oak table (beautiful, and laughable because there’s no way the Prince gives a single shit about its beauty or its rarity) with her retainers and advisors. Halfway down, one on each side, sit Sebastian Vương and Jolene Ladzka. Vương radiates anger. It has been two weeks since I shorted his order and I’ve already given him a replacement, a new transplant from Ohio who nobody will miss for a while. And yet still he seethes.
Jo, by contrast, looks bored.
But she shouldn’t be here at all. Her very presence puts me on high alert.
Lucille approaches first, making her obeisance properly, then sits. I stand alone, by the unused Keurig, stage-dressing to maintain an illusion of human business during the day. I’ve dressed up in my nice suit, my hair freshly washed, my nails cleaned of any dirt or sheep shit. But again, I feel like the provincial idiot.
I bow to the Prince. I move to sit.
“Stop,” the Prince says.
I obey without thought. I keep my eyes lowered. They’ve stayed their strange, glowing gold, proof of my failure.
“We have been kept apprised of your grand experiment, Leigh Konopasek, and while your aims are noble and your results generally worthy, there are many concerns about its longevity.” The Prince herself is doing all the talking.
I’m fucked.
“We appreciate the great lengths you go to in order to protect your holdings from outside influences and to avoid breaching the Masquerade, but as Vương has informed you, you do not produce enough of value to balance out the expenses and risks.”
“My liege,” I say, too quickly, “we are taking steps to correct—”
“Silence. Yes, I have been informed of your efforts at expanding a hunting portfolio. But these efforts will add to disputes about territory and hunting grounds. I have gifted land to those who serve me well, and to now have to restrict their feeding to those not marked by you is laughable. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, my liege. But we—we have added a new initiative, that of fostering specific dyscrasias.”
She does not cut me off then, and I can see Jo looking a little less bored. She stops writing on a legal pad and watches me, to all appearances without guile.
“We have already successfully created a strong melancholic dyscrasia,” I continue, breathlessly. “His recipient has reported great results, and he is returning to the ecovillage shortly. It will be some time before we can use him again, but—”
The Prince’s patience runs out. She lifts a hand. I stop.
“This is promising,” she concedes, “but does not address the issue of volume. Bagged blood is useless to me. To everybody in this room except for you, in fact. Your farm produces little of value. It toes the line—and falls short. And everything I have heard you say, and have heard from Vương, says that this will continue to be true. You are soft, Leigh. You blame human society for the constraints upon your enterprise, but we are not human. There are steps that can be taken to increase production, but you will not take them.”
“You’re stuck in your pastoral fancies,” Vương adds, echoing that night in his kitchen. “But you won’t bring your herd to slaughter like you do your sheep. It’s a farce. We are sick of it. And now we hear that for all your posturing, your conviction that you are somehow better, more humane than the rest of us, you’ve murdered one of your flock for your own desires? Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting.”
The Prince shifts her smooth glare to Vương and he shuts up. I barely notice it, because I’m trying to figure out how he knows about Robin. Kasim—he must have told him. But he didn’t tell them about the clots? No, that doesn’t make sense. And there’s something else, something at the back of my mind, in the motionless marrow of my bones, a laugh, a gap in time—
The Prince interrupts.
“We are hereby relieving you of control over the herd experiment.”
If my heart still beat, it would stop. I sink to my knees. “No, please,” I whisper. Show no weakness; that is the first rule of the Camarilla courts, but here I am, prostrate, near panic. “Please, please, I can do better—”
Ethan. Genna. My cottage and the gardens, everything coming to life in just another month, the lambs being born right this instant—it all flashes before me. And I think of Robin, helping me bag up that stillborn lamb, and the meat in the sausage grinder, and canning soup and sitting in a Southeast bar and the weight, the chaos, of the last four months crashes into me, and I nearly scream.
