A Drop of Scarlet, page 12
part #4 of Voice of Blood Series
“It’s a pleasure,” I said, taking my hand back and smiling I am not a threat to you into those coffee-brown eyes. I had gathered reams of information from Ariane in those three kisses; clarifying the way John had been before a few nights ago, before she’d given him the miraculous anodyne, unable to keep his thoughts to himself, terrified of street signs, and sleeping in holes dug in the ground. I had heard his nightmares like a cloud of white noise in the background of my thoughts for more than ten years, but over the last week, that static of chaos had quieted, all but disappeared, replaced by this guarded coolness and logic. It all made sense. His expression softened, collapsed slightly, as he felt that I had figured him out, that I understood, but he shook his head, thinking that I could never understand.
Alexander Vassilyevich emerged from the other side of the car, bundled in his gunmetal Gaultier trench coat, which matched my buttercream one, and a green cashmere scarf around his neck. Ariane embraced him just as eagerly. “It’s good to see you, Alex,” she said.
“You are even more radiant than I remember,” he replied. “But then again, you were only human then.”
Alex, Ariane, and I engaged in some cheerful half-fake laughter, which John only acknowledged with a long-suffering sneer. Ariane’s smile could not entirely be wiped away. “Well, come in, come in . . .” Ariane glanced back at the car. “What about your driver?”
“Ah, yes . . .” Alex turned his eyes toward the driver’s seat of the town car; Varlet, his eyes barely visible underneath the brim of his cap, gave a slight nod and put the car into gear. The car backed down out of the drive and disappeared up the road, swallowed by the dark shadows of the trees. “He’s in my service,” Alex sighed. “I told him to get us some rooms at a downtown hotel, and get some sleep while he has a chance. He’ll return when I call for him. You should have a retainer, too, Ariane; it does make life a great deal easier, having someone to look after the mundane details for you.”
Ariane laughed faintly. “I kinda like the mundane details,” she shrugged, holding open the kitchen door. John nodded to me; I felt he was not so much being chivalrous as not wishing to have me at his back. Such distrust! I rolled my eyes at him and proceeded inside; Ariane followed, then Alex, and John closed and double-locked the door behind all of us.
Her kitchen was almost appallingly modest after what I had grown used to. There was dust; there were cheap, mismatched kitchen towels; there were flecks of old, dry blood worked into the white paint of the built-in cabinets. She lived like an academic, one who forgot her undoubtedly enormous wealth. I knew Daniel had left her everything, and I knew how much money Daniel had been worth. Why would she not retain someone to come in and dust the windowsills? On the other hand, I should have to get used to rough living now and again, now that Alexander Vassilyevich and I were on our adventure.
“Can I get you anything?” Ariane offered shyly.
I laughed. “You’ve never had guests here before, have you?” I surmised.
“I don’t have much company,” Ariane mumbled. “I kinda like being alone. Helps me concentrate.”
John gave her a searching look, then walked toward a doorway leading to a hall. Ariane extended her hand after him, indicating that we should follow him.
“Do you have anything to drink?” I asked in the hallway.
“Uh, like what?” Ariane meandered into the study, and busied herself lighting a second candle on the mantel above the unused fireplace. The study was much more well kept; she obviously spent a great deal of time here, reading and thinking and sometimes even sleeping. There was hardly any dust on any of the surfaces. I pictured Ariane on her hands and knees, cleaning it all herself. Monstrous. “I haven’t got much . . . ,” she mumbled.
“Uh, like vodka,” I said. “What do you think I meant? Ah.” I smiled. Her face took on a blank look of embarrassment. “You don’t entertain, so nothing to drink. Nothing except your treated blood in a bottle, am I right? Please don’t be insulted, but I think I’ll take a pass on that, if you don’t mind. Oh, poor Ariane.” I rested my palm gently against Ariane’s cheek. She was cold, barely warmer than room temperature, and I felt terrible for her, drinking that cold stuff out of plastic, never feeling the fresh living warmth surging through her. I could never be so cruel to myself. “Don’t be uptight. I’m your friend. Alex is your friend. You invited us. You haven’t got anything to be afraid of. Come on; let’s sit, and you can tell me all about your new creation.”
She and I sat in the two brown plush chairs, while John sat on the floor at Ariane’s feet and Alex perused the bookshelves, his blunt-cut claws gently clicking against the spines of bound journals, textbooks, leather-bound novels, and cheap, thumbed-over paperbacks.
“I call it Orchid,” said Ariane, “and I made it for John, but I also took it myself.” She placed her palm against mine, lacing our fingers together. Even though her flesh was chilly, her buzzing energy deeply impressed me. Despite only having been changed eleven years ago, her strength and power approached my own levels. Intriguing; a rich gift from Orfeo Ricari, and more power than she knew what to do with. Did he really see so much potential in her, or had he been swayed by lust? I hoped to meet this fool Ricari. “Allow me to show you what it’s about,” Ariane murmured to me.
Ariane mentally revisited the theory and practice of the compound, the information of her thoughts sliding into my brain like so many razors into slots. I was no scientist, but it didn’t matter; I knew it as well as she did, saw it as she did, followed every step of the process along with her nearly instantaneous memories. It almost hurt to learn so much of something so foreign so quickly, but that which did not quite hurt always gave me enormous pleasure. “Potassium cyanide,” I said to her, taking my hand back, the palm slightly dampened with sweat, and laying it against the side of my neck. “Affecting oxygen uptake. And quantum dots of potassium, at that. Incredible. It would figure that we would need something utterly unnatural to get through our blood. Yes, I never would have thought of it myself.”
“That’s the way it works, isn’t it?” John piped up from the floor. “That’s science for you. It’s the stuff we hadn’t thought of as being possible—or wouldn’t let ourselves think of as being possible—that changes things.”
“So, did you assist in the theory—” I began to ask.
John cut me off with a wave of his hand. “No. No, that’s all her. If she got help, it wasn’t from me.”
Somewhere in the back of her mind, Ariane thought of a polished sugar bowl shattering into pieces. This made no sense to me, and she hid the details, trying to keep them from John, but also shutting me out. I wondered what these two could possibly have to hide from each other.
John spoke again. “Besides, physics and bioscience only tangentially have anything to do with each other; nanotech medicine would never have been possible without Heisenberg’s equations, but—no offense, Ariane—physics is way ahead of biochem on that score.”
“Dude, don’t even start.” Ariane and John shared a grin. “Science is science.”
“Anyway, it’s all mathematics in the end,” John drawled, lacing his fingers behind his neck.
“I don’t understand,” Alex broke in, much to my relief. “You have created a therapeutic drug based on a poison?”
“Aren’t they all?” said John.
“It all makes sense on the microscopic scale. Our blood is obviously structured differently from human blood,” Ariane explained, “and the blood of those who aren’t created properly, but manage to survive the process, have yet another different structure. Something like cyanide won’t hurt us, but if the compound is unstable, it does affect the way our blood works—hence, the way our minds work. Basic neurochemistry.”
Alex sank slowly down onto an empty chair opposite Ariane and me. “I might need a drink after all,” he murmured. “I’m a soldier, not a scientist.”
I laughed. “Well, I want to try it,” I said. “You said it was fun. What’s it like? Do you have any?”
“I don’t know if I can describe what it’s like,” Ariane said, flustered. “I believe that it’s different for each person who takes it—and it might very likely be different every time. All my experiences have been . . . well, extremely pleasant . . . but it’s different every time.”
I clapped my hands and bounced in my seat, quite unable to contain myself. “That sounds great! I want to try it! Now!”
Ariane continued to drone on uncertainly. Now that she had my interest, she was going to draw it out for as long as possible. “It’s best if you do it right before bedtime, just in case you fall asleep—”
I was beginning to lose my patience. We had been driving for a night and a half, I had given August Beagle pool cleaner to stick up his nose, and I wasn’t about to take no for an answer from barely-a-vampire Ariane. “Do you have any? Please, Ariane!”
“Steady on, now, kitten,” Alexander said. “Don’t be pushy.”
“You ask me not to be pushy? I’m always pushy. It gets results.” I shrugged. “You haven’t answered my question. You do want me to try it, don’t you? You need more subjects.”
“I’ve got about . . . six more doses at what’s been demonstrated as a therapeutic amount for John. I think it’s really up to him . . . ,” Ariane evaded.
John made a scoffing noise. “You just started on a truckload more. I’ll be all right until tomorrow, you know.”
“I’ll look after her, Ariane,” Alexander offered. “I don’t want to take it. Not tonight, anyway.”
We all stared at Ariane until she dropped her eyes to the floor and mumbled, “All right, I’ll get the works. . . .”
“Hurrah!” I crowed.
“Not much to do down in L.A., is there?” John said quietly.
I gave him a carefully measured smile. He didn’t flinch. I began to like him more and more all the time. “There’s never been anything to do anywhere, but bloody murder,” I pointed out. “Till now. And I’m not about to miss it.”
“I haven’t done this in a long time,” I said as Ariane set up the works, lightly tying off my arm, unwrapping a fresh blue cap insulin syringe. The drug itself was a dark, viscous liquid in a sealed bottle. Eyeing the syringe carefully, Ariane withdrew a few ticks. This whole process, the ceremony of it, made my mouth water and my head go foggy.
“Drugs?” Ariane said mildly.
“Needles,” I clarified. The sharp prick of the tiny needle was so minimally painful that it felt good, with a promise of glories to come. Already I was speaking freely, untangling the associated memories. “There hasn’t been much need for the last ninety years. But before . . . oh, God, yes. It became a pleasure, the needle. I did a lot of morphine on our journey out of Russia, didn’t I, Sasha?”
Alex said nothing and looked away. He might have felt me slowly moving away from him as the cool stream of the drug entered my vein; the room became like a soft, enfolding brown velvet blanket. I couldn’t stop talking—my tongue had a will of its own. “I left everything I knew as it was being destroyed by people I barely knew existed. All I knew was that I was getting away from my family, from my brother, from the priests and the tax collector and the empty stone rooms . . . and going on an adventure with the one I loved.” In my view, Alexander, standing anxiously by the bookshelves, grew blurry and impressionistic. “There was a train accident on the first night.”
“There was no accident,” Alex said.
I heard him, but I was off, riding a rapidly swelling wave of heightened sensation, soft and gentle, but thrilling at the same time. I could not have told you which direction was up or down; it was all the same beautiful dimension. I closed my eyes and began to drift. “I was . . . badly injured, falling from the train. Because I could still walk, we didn’t stop to get the damage fixed. We splinted and bandaged as best we could, but I was in so much pain I kept losing consciousness. Morphine was the only thing that got us out of Russia. I needed massive quantities to sustain me. Alexander cleared out an entire Moscow pharmacist’s stock.”
“And an entire Moscow pharmacist,” Alex murmured.
“You needed his blood. There’s no sin in that. I begged him,” I said. My voice was so heavy, slow, and thick that I wondered if I could even still be heard, or if the words were just unfurling, bubbling up inside my mind. “I begged him to end the pain. I begged him to make me like him. . . .”
I was swimming in warm brandy, as far away as it was possible to get from that frozen plain, from those frigid stables, the iced-over stations that I had been trying to describe. I wanted to discuss the contrast between the two, but no sounds came out when I tried to speak.
“Is she all right?” That would be my husband.
“Yeah, yeah . . . El, you okay?”
I waved my hand to assure them and found my voice again, though when I heard it, it didn’t sound like me at all. “Better than. Please . . . silence . . . please,” I sighed. “Come here. Alex, come and hold my hand; let’s please not talk. I can see every word we say like it’s been stitched onto the world. And that’s a shame. I’ll tell you later what it’s like, the enormity of it.”
Alex settled onto the floor beside me and cradled my head in his lap, gently stroking my hair. Next to us, Ariane and John held their positions at the chair, Ariane seated on it and John at her feet. I could hear the quiet, crisp sound of his fingers stroking the fine hairs on her bare ankle. We all lapsed into a warm and quiet peace, loosed, for a change, from the strictures of time and released into an infinite now.
How could I be selfish? Under the influence of the drug, I felt all my selfishness vanish, and I wanted nothing more than to share my happiness with those who I loved best, and even those who I had not previously loved, those who I didn’t even know. Every creature deserved to experience this bliss.
After a while, I had an odd feeling; a mounting excitement, a purposeful movement in the world, toward me, toward this soft, dim room. My call of joy had been received. I decided to say something. “Do you feel them? They heard me. They’re coming.”
Ariane said, “Who?”
Her voice bothered me; it was far too hard-edged, too paranoid for how good we had all been feeling. “Can’t you feel them?” I asked. “Can’t you hear them? I hear them. You hear them, don’t you, Alexander?”
My husband gave a sigh of acknowledgment.
“Who?” Ariane demanded. “Who is coming?”
“They heard me,” I said, my voice a low subsonic throb. “And they are curious. Samuel Rifkin. And Leland! Leland Quary—I’ve not seen him for so long! Oh, I’m so glad he still thinks of me. They overheard . . .” I paused, listening to the wordless, staggered little moan of anxiety that Ariane had made. “You’ve got to understand, the way I feel . . . I felt you, too, Ariane. You were in my dreams. I felt your ecstasy without understanding it—but now I do! It’s like having a gigantic, screaming orgasm, and it’s not until later that you realize that the neighbors could hear. But in a way, you’re not sorry—”
“So they’re on their way here,” Ariane said, “and they want to take Orchid. Do I have that right?”
“Looks that way,” came John’s dry voice. “Good thing you started on another batch, pet.”
Perhaps it was wrong of me to laugh right then, but I couldn’t help it; it would be so good to see Leland again. And already, even though I hadn’t started to come down yet, I wanted to take more Orchid.
I truly had been waiting for it all my life.
IX
BOLD IN HER BREECHES
JADZIA KOPERNIK
In all this time of being alive, I hadn’t ever found much that was better than lying naked on a disarrayed bed as the sky purpled at the horizon, my naked boy splayed out next to me, his eyes squeezed shut in ecstasy as we listened to the same Diana Ross song for the tenth time in a row. I was pleased that my boy shared my appreciation for the operatic drama of that particular strain of late 1960s/early 1970s pop music; the Supremes, Ronnie Spector, Tina Turner, Donna Summer—women with voices strained to the limit with existential terror and worse, hope. He had never listened closely to that music before, and I writhed with glee watching him experience it, eyes rolling back in bliss, as helplessly transported as I had been when I first heard it, twenty or more years ago, when it was already ten years out of style. The right albums transcended fashion and would always be exactly right for someone at some time in her life. Orfeo and I gorged ourselves on it. I had been carrying my record collection around with me, and on that first night when we came together again, we bought—from a desperate, recently evicted artist on the street—a dusty, dinged-up old player that looked like it was a good sneeze away from total collapse. It still transmitted the music, though, through a filter of faint static that enfolded us in a perfect, gauzy, Never-land fantasy.
I literally worried that I might die from joy; I had never felt it so strongly before.
Truthfully, it was pure ecstasy to see Orfeo again, to spend days at a time in bed, fucking and talking to each other like we’d never get another chance, pausing only to light another candle or flip over the record so that we could hear “I Hear a Symphony” one more time. It was eerily like old times, as if no time at all had passed between 1848 and now, except that we had music in the bedroom with us, something we had always wistfully longed for in those dusty, drafty Parisian apartments. He had not changed—of course not!—except that, of course, he had. So much had happened to him since we had last been together; over one hundred fifty years that had stiffened him, hardened him, polished him to an impenetrable mirror finish, like a bit of petrified willow. So heavily armored against emotion! I took even greater delight in seeing how quickly and completely I swept aside that protective shell and began gorging myself on the soft underbelly of his subconscious. This often took the form of tickling him until he shrieked with laughter, tears pouring from his eyes onto my waiting tongue. I licked his salty emotions away and savored the sweetness underneath.
