Walk Among Us, page 31
But I don’t.
I simply listen as the Prince rules that Lucille has failed to keep me to heel and has ceded too much of her authority to an untrustworthy brat. A severe offense, but the punishment is, in the grand scheme of things, light; she must be off the property by the end of the week. She is allowed to take her retainers, of course, but is not to use the resources of the commune for anything else. I hear a chair scrape back, feel a soft touch on my shoulder, and then my sire is gone. All is quiet. They are waiting for me to pull myself together. They are laughing, silently, at my misery.
I lift my head. I keep my face impassive. I wait for my own sentencing, sure to be far worse.
“Leigh,” the Prince sighs at last, “I was at a loss with what to do with you. You do good work, it is undeniable. But you are not fit to rule. Luckily, Ladzka has proposed a solution. You will remain on your little farm.”
I know better than to feel hope, but I feel it anyway. It hurts. It burns. I clamp down on it, force myself to clench my jaw in preparation for the twist, the punishment.
“However,” the Prince continues, “you cannot be allowed to remain in charge. Lucille’s failure was to allow you to rule instead of serve, and yours was to think yourself capable of ruling; that is a failure easily corrected, and I am willing to give you a chance to prove yourself. You will be kept on as the groundskeeper and general livestock manager, but Ladzka will be responsible for all final decision making.”
My gaze slips from a point behind the Prince’s head to look at Jo, who looks back at me, pleased and smug. She has her chin pillowed on one curled fist.
“It won’t be so bad,” Jo says. “I like a lot of what you’re doing. But you shouldn’t be the one worrying about expansion; you’re best at being in the pens, taking temperatures, doing—whatever it is you do. I’ll continue the dyscrasia research.” She smiles, and it is gleeful. No, she didn’t know about that before now. “And the blood bag enrichment program, at least for your benefit.”
“What?” I whisper.
“Well, clearly you can’t be allowed to feed from your flock,” she says, shrugging. “And now we know you can’t control yourself when the need gets too great. But here,” she adds, and reaches behind her, into her large purse. She pulls out a small bag of blood and comes to my side. “Try this.”
I stare up into her eyes but feel no compulsion to drink, only horror. But horror at what? Lucille was right. It was Robin’s presence that destroyed me, not tainted blood. Still, anything could be in that blood. It might be fractionated, or poisoned in a hundred different ways. It can leave me writhing, incapacitated.
But at least it cannot bind me.
My servitude will be conscious, whatever good that will do me.
It’s shameful, to drink from a bag in front of everybody seated around that table. I am as old as some of the junior attendants to the Prince, but all of them, to a one, drink from live bodies. I’m the only one to debase myself like this. To eat silage instead of fresh grass, by preference instead of need. To drink from this bag is dangerous and will seal my pathetic nature in front of everybody who might one day rule me.
I have come here to be humiliated.
But what choice do I have? What right have I earned to defend myself? I drink. I drink the whole thing down, and it is sweet, and good, and glorious. It is more than bagged blood, so much more, and in it, I catch flashes of Robin, of her curling hair, of her voice soft and then booming, her presence spilling out from a stage and filling a whole theater. I shudder, bent double, draining the plastic to a vacuum, and then I look up at Jolene Ladzka, bloody-mouthed, waiting for the next blow.
The room is silent.
There is no laughter. It’s not somber, though; more bored. I stagger to my feet, knowing it’s time to go. “I accept,” I say, thickly. It is the only answer. It is the best answer for my flock. For my sheep, my humans, my crops. For me. “What sort of housing should I prepare?”
Jo shrugs. “Lucille’s house should suit,” she says.
One last slap in the face.
I leave.
Harvest
I have one last week to myself before Jolene lays claim to all that is mine.
I spend it with the animals. Community movie nights, cooking and putting up food, parties under the stars when the clouds clear. I don’t leave the grounds. I drink my bags of clotted blood, none of which fulfill me the way Robin did, or the bag Jo gave me, and I try to believe that the meeting downtown was only a nightmare.
But Lucille is gone. I clean the house myself, as dawn draws earlier and sunset later every night. I prepare it for a new host, polishing every element that Lucille wasn’t able to take with her when she left. I struggle to choose new retainers to replace the ones Lucille maintained, to fill in for Key and the others. I don’t try to replace Robin or Kasim; I’m resigned to working every night, 7:00 to 5:00, for the next year, decade, century if I’m very lucky. I’m angry often, but have nowhere to lose that anger except in the fields. I build half a dozen new stone walls.
Then, finally, I receive a text that the new management will be arriving tonight. Ethan is back from the hospital, but weak, so I can’t offer him up on a silver platter to Jolene. I’m stressed and pained enough to qualify, but though I may be too human in some ways, I am still far too monstrous in others. I pick Genna instead, who still hasn’t sorted out her feelings about Bill and Jason and worries about Bill’s disappearance while she hates herself for caring. I make sure she stays on site.
I wait in my office, wondering if it will still be mine by sunrise.
The hours creep by, uselessly empty. I’m too preoccupied to work and I’ve already moved my spinning wheel and lap loom back to my house, just in case. So I sit. I stare at the door. I try not to think about any of the last four months, and instead lose myself in memories of the early days.
Just as I’m slipping into the warmth of a late August evening, a breeze coming in off the Columbia as I and three of our earliest members build cold frames for the coming frost, I feel her.
Jolene Ladzka is the approaching storm. The thunderhead. I stand and try not to look angry.
Or afraid.
She strolls into my office dressed like a caricature of a farmer: bespoke overalls and expensive boots, hair in braided pigtails. I want to smear her with pig shit. I want to bury her in the earth.
Instead, I bow. Just a little. Just enough to signal that I’m not going to fight this.
“Welcome to the ecovillage,” I say, as if she’s a first-time buyer.
She smiles. “And here I thought you’d be off hiding in the barn,” she says, no doubt knowing I wanted to.
I smile back. It is tight. It is a threat grin.
“Is my house ready?” she asks.
I want to sneer and ask if she’ll really be giving up her house out in the West Hills, with all its hidden secrets—but I am a professional, no matter what they say. “Of course.”
“Take me to it.”
She knows where it is. She has met with Lucille before, in the early days. She is waiting for me to fight.
I refuse to give us both the satisfaction.
I lead her out through the admin building, adjusting my course when, behind me, she veers toward the parking lot. But she doesn’t want to drive, only to retrieve a satchel from the trunk of her shiny SUV. We walk along the paths, me in silence, her chattering about what the fields around her have to recommend themselves. She asks if we have trail cams set up, so that she can see the birds that come when the sun is up. I don’t answer. She continues on.
We reach the front door, and I turn to go. If she wants to see the house, let her see it, let her plan whatever changes she wants for it. Without me.
“Give me a tour, Leigh?” Jo asks to my back. She uses her sweetest, gentlest tone of voice, and I have to bite back a snarl. I make myself smile. I nod. I walk her through the halls of Lucille’s house.
I think she even halfway listens while I point out all the beautifications and amenities. She admires the murals for thirty seconds, longer than I would have expected of her. But I also keep most of my talk to practicalities. Lucille appreciated craftsmanship, no matter the era, and so the appliances in the house are as functional as they are beautiful. I’m sure Jo will find some horrible use for all of them.
“And there is a vault, I assume?”
“Of course,” I say. I show her how to get to it through a sliding bookcase in the study.
“Delightful!” she says. Her eyes unfocus a moment as she no doubt checks for wards and tricks, but the house is empty.
We are alone.
If I lunge, if I move fast enough, maybe I can incapacitate her. But she is older than me, stronger than me, and in a straight fight I have no chance at all. My only hope is that she trusts in my deference. That she doesn’t expect me to fight.
And if I lose, what then? Death, or worse. I would never be able to stay. This dream, this nightmare, would be over.
Of course she doesn’t expect me to fight. There’s nothing left to fight for.
“How long have you wanted this?” I ask.
Her eyes sparkle, but she doesn’t answer.
“When you came to ask for a life contract?”
A subtle shake of her head. She wants me to do the work. I want to rub my temples, but I can’t risk the smallest show of weakness. I think. I try to untangle the hundred threads that led to this moment from the thousand threads of screaming emotion. By the time I saw her at Vương’s—yes. Yes, she knew by then. She had planned. Why else be there? I’d assumed it was to complain about my refusal to give her body after body, that her complaints had been what enraged Vương so much, but now, now that I’m starting to think this wasn’t an accident at all, her being gifted the farm . . .
“After I refused to give you somebody else.”
“After you refused to give me Robin.”
Robin. “How—”
“I have my sources,” she says. Key? Kasim? My nails bite into my palms. “I’ll admit, it was too much to expect you to translate lurking danger to your pet, not when you were so caught up in idolatry, but I really thought you’d understand when I laid it out for you.”
“I did.” Robin had been the first to come to mind. I’d thought I was crazy. Paranoid.
I wasn’t.
“Bill’s blood.”
“Who?”
“The entitled child,” I say, dredging up her own words.
“Oh. What about it?”
“Did you drug it?”
She smiles. Smiles broadly. “What did happen when you drank it?”
I jerk half a step forward, fingers clawing toward her, my frustrated anger finally slipping its leash.
She lifts a hand. “Be still, Leigh. Remember who’s in charge here. What happened?”
It wasn’t so long ago that I nearly broke Kasim’s spine. That I ripped Robin apart. I am monstrous. I want to be monstrous. But any further and there will be nothing of me left.
I breathe like a human. It soothes me. Mollifies. I search for an answer for her, because proving my weakness to her is the lesser risk.
“I made a fool of myself.”
It’s not enough. She leans in. Presses gently on my mind, reminding me that she can take by force what I will not offer. Consent is an illusion. I told Kasim that myself. “And?”
“I wandered around the fields yelling about Caine,” I say through my gritted teeth. “I nearly broke the Masquerade. Your doing.” This time I don’t make it a question.
And this time she actually answers me. “My doing,” she confirms. “How curious. More dramatic than I would have hoped for, though. I wonder if it’s something in your own vitae that responded that way. The performer in your blood.” She considers a moment, then points to the nearby chair. “Sit.”
I feel no push along with those words, and that absence is worse than any influence could be. She doesn’t have to exert herself; I’ll do the work for her.
I sit.
Jo doesn’t. She walks behind me and I hear her rummage through the satchel she brought. I stare straight ahead, at the delicate crown molding that circles the ceiling of the parlor, using human tricks to contain my inhuman heart.
And then she’s at my side. Her hand is on my elbow, light, soothing. The touch of a nurse. “Just a little prick,” she purrs.
A needle slides into my arm. She cannot make my heart beat, and so there was no reason for a tourniquet to make my vein stand out; she used her sense of smell instead. I watch as my vitae fills vial after vial. I go numb, watching reality invert itself as I become the renewable resource.
“For research,” she says, though I haven’t asked. “We’ll have a session like this once a week, so we’ll need to keep you well-fed. We can discuss exact reapportioning of contracts tomorrow night.”
I was wrong. I’m no herding dog; I’m just the bellwether, the sheep who leads the flock.
Livestock Management
I leave Lucille’s—Jo’s—with only the most tenuous connection to my body. It feels like dying. It feels like dreaming. She has done nothing to me except take a few vials of Blood, something I have done again and again to all the humans sleeping in the buildings around me. But I feel reduced. Attenuated.
I go to the barn.
It’s something between self-loathing and desperation for what I know that takes me there. I want to find Sylvia, stroke her head, bury my face in her fleece, but that is not the work that needs doing. The ewes are in the thick of labor, and I find one of them actively birthing in the pen she’s been placed in. I get in with her to observe. Things proceed okay. It’s a good distraction. Half an hour passes, and I forget, for those few minutes, the reality around me.
Then Robin walks into the barn.
I can smell her over the stench of amniotic fluid and lanolin and shit, but it’s off somehow, wrong. She has her hair pulled back and old clothes on, and she climbs into the pen with me. She smiles at me. She helps hold the ewe while I guide out the fluid-slicked lamb, and after, while its mother licks it clean, we watch each other wordlessly.
“You’re not real,” I say, because I have to. Because I remember her beneath me, dying.
She spreads her arms. “I’m as real as you are.”
“I remember . . .” I say, then pause, frown. My head hurts. I remember killing her. I remember my mouth against her throat, her blood on my lips. I remember struggle. Pain. Losing control. I remember—
A narrative.
A narrative with elisions. With gaps. I have been so convinced it’s my hunger’s doing that I haven’t questioned all those lacunae. And I remember other things, incongruous things, flashes of laughter, not mine. Footsteps on the stairs, when I know I was there alone that night.
Think I was there alone that night.
I remember . . . Robin said that night in Peninsula Park.
I remember that night outside the greenhouse, what I told her to substitute for the memory of my lips on hers.
A narrative.
It begins to click. Jolene Ladzka. Sebastian Vương’s lingering anger. Performance, all performance, and here I am, on my knees in the muck, no longer in control, and here Robin is, with all the power.
She’d been talking to somebody on a burner cell. She’d “died” as soon as I told Vương she was going to die, though I’d never told him why. Vương didn’t kill Kasim, though it was his right to. Jolene was given the ecovillage, though she’s not one for leadership. The Camarilla court of Portland has its food source with newer, better management.
Everybody but me got what they wanted that day in my office when Robin sat down across from me, perfectly designed to strike at my weaknesses. Jo might not have set her sights on the farm until that night in her house, but without Robin, I would have been strong enough to resist.
“Shit,” I whisper.
Robin winks. She holds out her hand. It is cold when I take it and stagger to my feet.
“You?” I whisper. Robin, Jolene Ladzka’s assistant. Robin, embraced, her thirst now slaked with blood instead of palomas.
“Me,” she says. “It was always me.”
“What happened?” I ask, though I know. I can guess, at least. That night when I was lost in Robin’s arms, no longer caring about anything beyond the two of us, she hadn’t been alone. It had been planned from the moment I contacted Vương to schedule his feeding, and I was always going to end up with Robin in my arms. Or did that even happen? Because at some point that night, instead of losing control of my will, I lost control of my mind. Jolene Ladzka came and rewrote every memory, and she told me that I’d had Robin in my arms, that I had lost control, because what else would I have done, really? That I’d been a beast. And I had believed it, because it fit everything else, and somewhere in there, Robin had died and been resurrected.
But not by me. There is no bond between us beyond what existed in life, and, now, her dominance over me. Robin ascendant. New to the Blood, but powerful already, set to rule an empire of flesh.
Was it the last of her mortal blood in that bag Jo fed me? Of course it was. I was afraid of sausages when I should have feared medical grade plastic.
“What happened?” I repeat again, numb, incredulous, too stunned and grateful and horrified to be angry.
“Livestock management,” she tells me, even as she runs a hand through my hair, ruffles it lovingly. She smiles, and I see a flash of pointed teeth.
“Now back to work. The animals need you.”
Acknowledgments
Genevieve
Thanks first and foremost go to my agent, Rhea Lyons, for your confidence in me and your guidance in all things. I don’t know what I’d do without you.
