A Drop of Scarlet, page 8
part #4 of Voice of Blood Series
And I am cursed, with 500-thread-count sheets and icy buckets of Blanc de Blancs, and no crystal flutes or silk-gauze curtains can possibly resolve my unease. I have convinced A. to leave Los Angeles. A. thinks I am simply bored, as I have been before. What of it, if I am? Fifty years in a single city is enough to bore anyone. I am young yet—young enough to tire of this isolation, of this gilded cage perched on the edge of a quivering precipice. There is no permanence, but just try convincing the wealthy of this fact. Thoughts like this cause me to commit reckless acts. The sensible thing is to pack up and find another place to explore together. A. has agreed, but only by small steps—hence this ridiculously opulent, secretive hotel, full of movie stars and boy band survivors all screwing each other and smoking crack, where even the press photographers can’t find them. I know it is time for me to leave L.A. when I start to envy the powder-nosed supermodels their foul-smelling, infernal death wish.
At least they are iconoclasts, destroying the images of themselves. What am I but an appendage?
Do you think there is room in the northwestern sewers for a foolish Russian girl? I have heard that the rains never stop in Portland, and the trees are green all year round—real trees, not these manicured absurdities planted in sand. I long to be outdoors, alive as part of Nature’s immensity, an organism, a thinker, a hunter, at one with the elements.
I await your immediate reply; we shall remain here at the Turandot for another month (as much as I hate it here, there are amenities). I look forward to hearing from you, and I hope, seeing you again, in the flesh, and not simply in my hallucinations.
Always sincerely yours
Elisabeta Hanya Revikova
P.S. Call me El. That’s how lazy we’ve gotten.
I’ve lived too long.
VI
DOSING
ARIANE DEMPSEY
The days never ended soon enough.
It wasn’t as if I needed to be particularly worried about the sunlight. A heavy, monochromatic cloud blanket had enfolded the city since an hour before the past dawn, and by the end of the day, the solar radiation wouldn’t do more than pleasantly warm my skin, like sitting under a heat lamp.
Still, I didn’t feel like getting out of bed before it got properly dark. Something about this evening reminded me of the last day I’d spent as a human, trying to enjoy mundane things like snack food and movies, all the time knowing I was going to die before the sun came up again, that I’d never be able to just stand out on the pavement and stare up into it, blinking and averting my eyes and feeling freckles spring up on my skin. I knew it was my last day, but of course I had no idea what that meant.
I missed the sun.
I had stupidly thought changing would make life easier. Orfeo and Daniel—especially Daniel—and Risa and Alex Revikoff made their vampire lives look so easy, so calm, so beautiful. Of course it looked easy to my limited human senses, to my young human’s naiveté, impressed with the healing power, the outlandish physical strength, the ability to become invisible to human eyes, and of course, the ability to read minds, to make anybody do what they wanted them to just by thinking of it.
Of course it looked beautiful, when my existence wasn’t steeped in blood and desperation and insanity.
I woke up at 4:45 P.M. and drank a pint of cold, bitter blood out of the mini-fridge in the closet; but before I’d even finished swallowing, I rushed back to bed and crawled under the covers, hiding in blanket darkness. Delaying the inevitable.
Relaxed by the drink, I lay there for hours, drifting as in half-sleep, reading my memories like a book, watching them like TV. I could turn my memories over and over like a piece of hard candy in my mouth, one which never got any smaller. It was the ultimate snooze, one that, if I wasn’t careful, could last all night.
I did have control over it. I mostly concentrated on the good memories of John before the transformations. I could relive strolls along Haight Street on rainy, frigid winter evenings, takeout and a video rental and the many sexual positions that could be accomplished on a sofa. I lingered on the first time I saw him lecture at NCIT. He’d had to borrow a T-shirt from me because I’d torn the buttons from the shirt he’d been wearing the night before, and as he moved across the podium, rapidly scribbling equations on the white-board, I caught glimpses of his deer-like figure encased in a Talking Heads T-shirt a size too small, peeking from underneath his suit jacket. I got a thrill of girlish excitement every time he had to push up his glasses, astonished at his total lack of stammering, at how he never looked at his notes because he knew all the complex gravitational equations by heart. And I thought to myself, I can’t believe I’ve had this freakishly sexy genius. I can’t believe I get to have him again. Tonight can’t happen soon enough. Stupid time! Hurry up! And, like he’d read my mind (a good two years before he actually had that ability) he looked over at me, and a sly smile bloomed on his face like the first spring flowers through snow.
My mind was snatched back to my bedroom by the blare of a car horn and a shriek of brake pads outside the house. The night now fully upon me, I was out of bed and crouching on the floor, my body coiled to strike, before the sound died away.
I opened the curtains. The car had disappeared down the hill toward the city, and a stray cat crawled deep into the underbrush. A heavy fog had rolled in, and the bedroom window showed a chilly and smudged darkness, pulsing with subsonic menace.
I slowly let out my breath. I said to myself, “Well, that’s it.”
On the bedside table, a prepared syringe of the drug lay atop a folded white face towel. We had finished the synthesis and washing of the analyte the night before. After I’d sent Margaret home, wishing her a good weekend, I spent the next several hours testing the compound’s solubility in water, ethyl alcohol, acetone, human blood plasma, and human blood serum. The analyte, a chunky, pale-lavender powder in its pure form, dissolved most readily in serum, turning the liquid a moody black-crimson that bore an uncanny resemblance to vampire blood, and remained in a liquid state, which the whole plasma refused to do. I drew five milliliters of the fluid into a bottle and brought it home, then prepped a syringe.
Then I just set it down and stared at it.
I hadn’t been able bring myself to do it the night before, so late it was early, the sky already starting to lighten. Sure, I had blackout curtains, but I was so tired (no—that was a lie—so scared) that I decided to get some sleep instead, and try it when I got up that Friday evening.
My methodology wasn’t crazy. I couldn’t administer an untested drug to John. I had no idea if the substance was poisonous, or inert, or otherwise dangerous; and there weren’t any other appropriate test subjects. I had to take it myself, with only theory to guide dosage or toxicity or administration. If my guesses were wrong . . . well, I knew what it would do to an ordinary animal—lactic acidosis, delirium, seizures, coma. But I was pretty sure my guesses were right. Pretty sure.
“I’m a scientist, goddammit,” I told myself. “I know what I’m doing.”
I had no fear of needles. Those slender, slanted, hollow silver points were just another tool to me, and I knew, better than I knew anything else in my life, the sensation of being punctured by something sharp and pointed. But as I picked up the syringe and gazed at the dark liquid inside, a cold knot of ice rested where my stomach should have been. I shrugged it off, justifying the sensation as being caused by the drink of cold blood hours ago. I glanced at the clock on the wall, and said aloud, “The time is eight twenty-two P.M. Dosage at point oh-oh-two milligrams active, serum solution.”
Just a drop of scarlet.
I lightly clenched my right fist until the blue-green vein swelled against the skin in the crook of my elbow. I’d never given myself an intravenous injection before, but I’d seen it done enough times to know how. I paused with the tip of the needle against my skin, but not penetrating it, breathing deeply and slowly, struggling to remind myself of the sensuality of it, trying to reach that mental landscape of lying with a lover, with his member poised to slide into me, but holding it there for as long as he could bear the wanting.
I got shivers.
Think like a junkie. It’ll be easier.
Not a pinch, as nurses so incorrectly describe it. Much more of a violation—the surrender of the skin to the needle’s metal fang, a slow stabbing pain that flows through one’s arm. With shaking fingers, I depressed the plunger on the tiny syringe, pulled the foreign object from the flesh already trying to heal around it, and set it down on the towel on the bedside table. I clutched the sore right arm to my breasts and sank back down onto the chilly tangle of pillows and bedspread, wishing there was a warm hollow that I could crawl into, a warm arm to enfold me, warm lips to kiss my forehead and a soft voice to whisper, There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?
And there it was.
Warmth flowed through me, not all at once, but a spreading tingle that swept through my chest, to my scalp, and then washed over me like the inexorable atomic glow from a sunrise, the swift and glorious oneness that I had once associated with orgasm, and over the last ten years, had come to associate with the nourishing rush of drinking blood.
I was floating, lighter than a wisp of milkweed, and weighted down with millstones at the bottom of a hundred fathoms of clear ocean. As if stepping into a perfumery or a bakery, my head was crowded with a sweet, intimate, comforting scent.
“Oh, vanilla!” I whispered aloud. “Orchid vanilla!”
I could see the sound of my voice. Even in the darkness behind my eyelids, I could perceive the outlines of every object in the room, as if I were a bat. “Bad ass,” I whispered again, “I’ve got sonar!” I giggled, and the sound-images grew stronger and more solid, then danced away into nothingness.
Fabulous. But still . . .
This new sense was interesting, but I waited patiently, grinning, eyes still closed, for my body to assimilate it, get used to it, make it mundane. Even through human blood, drugs never felt real like something actually happening to me. They were experienced, but at a distance, seen through another’s eyes and sensed through another’s skin. A dress worn by someone else; an accident happening to the car in front. It had never been genuine, personal, immediate before.
This was definitely personal.
The cotton sheets underneath me melted into a slippery pool, as if oiled. Startled, I swung my arms outward and heard/saw the shushing sound of skin and hair on woven cloth, and my hiss as my wrist jolted against the corner of the bedside table. It hurt so much that it almost brought me down. “Ow,” I groaned, rolling over and involuntarily opening my eyes.
The fog had crept into the room.
Everything was fuzzy and vague. I pulled myself upward, laboriously, gazing at my misty reflection in the mirror. My screwed-up hair stood out from my head in a wild, tangled mane, one lock, at my temple, apparently trying to escape the rest of it. When I blinked, my hazy vision cleared. I was sitting splay-legged on the bed in panties and a T-shirt, jaw hanging open. The fog remained outside, pressed against the window like a hungry dog, the whining grown soft, scratching forlornly at the windowsill with the tip of a wind-whipped branch. I burst out laughing, the sound of it strange, foreign, insane to me.
“Oh God,” I murmured, sliding back down until my head reached the pillows, “this is crazy. I hope this stuff isn’t lethal.”
It didn’t feel lethal. It felt wonderful. I felt no distress whatsoever. Even the bumped wrist throbbed in a friendly way, as if to remind me of my physicality. The injection site in the crook of my elbow had vanished, as was usual and good; the drug had no effect on my body’s ability to heal itself. But my blood hadn’t swept the foreign molecules away, and the drug washed through and against and over my body like an incoming tide. It was a very pleasant, though intense, sort of vertigo.
When my eyes drooped closed, I was suddenly somewhere else.
There was sunshine, brilliantly glaring down onto the ravenous green of a grassy meadow. I turned around and stared at it all, trying to adjust to the overwhelming brightness, breathless at the sight of tiny white daisies growing shyly in the midst of the infinity of verdant blades, the hot, living perfection of the deep blue sky.
I hadn’t been in the sun for ten years. I’d forgotten how enormous it was, how all-encompassing, how all life seemed to bend to it, absorb its energy, then diffuse it outward, back into the world. This was not any actual place that I had ever been, and yet I felt that I knew it, as I felt that I would know Heaven if I saw it.
I wasn’t entirely sure that this wasn’t it.
Glorious sunlight! Hot and pure on my tingling skin, in my astonished eyes. And I could stand in the warmth and the deep, satiny grass and stare right into the burning white eye of the star without pain, without blindness. I felt that nothing bad could ever happen again.
“This isn’t real. . . .” I crumpled to my knees in the soft grass and abruptly began to sob, and as suddenly, began to laugh again, like a madwoman, a tripper far out on too many doses, out of control. Tears poured over my face. “When is this gonna wear off?” I wondered aloud. My voice painted the details of the bedroom over the sight of the bright field, the edges of the standing mirror and bureau and open closet door, flickering in colorless precision, then shimmering off as the echoes decayed. Disappointment and relief battled within me. The sunlight, the green meadow, the daisies, were a hallucination, and I wasn’t in Heaven, and I hadn’t really been staring directly into the sun. I was simply under the influence of a drug so powerful that it dragged me to another plane of existence entirely, and I had to remember that, as marvelous as it would be, to forget it.
It was time to touch base with reality. I’d make it quick.
I opened my eyes and struggled to focus on the clock face. The hands now marked a quarter to nine. “Wow,” I breathed. I wished for a moment that I had thought to prepare a tape recorder, but I didn’t need it. I wouldn’t ever be able to forget this. And it wouldn’t be as if I would be able to share the results with anyone. Anyone human, anyway.
Poor, dear Margaret. Maybe she would understand this.
Maybe . . . but I won’t ever know. That’s not my world anymore.
I couldn’t hold on to such a melancholy and dangerous thought, steeped as I was in this vast cup of lazy warmth and pleasure. In fact, I couldn’t hold on to any thought at all for more than a few instants. I relaxed and let myself be pulled back into the vision. When I closed my eyes, I lay in the warm grass, contemplating the sharp, white-hot boundary of the sun. I stilled my body and turned my breath into a silent loop so that the world of the meadow attained a kind of perfection, so intense, so hyper-real, hyper-genuine.
Suddenly, the outlines of the bedroom glittered across the deep blue sky, the green periphery, the intense white sphere overhead. I wasn’t conscious of having heard anything, only “seeing” it. But there was no mistake; a tapping and rustling, very faint, painted on the mirror and the bureau.
I groaned as I opened my eyes and rolled over, annoyed at the possibility of having to sober up and deal with whoever happened to have the bad luck to invade my house. I’d neglected to lock the side door that morning before I went to sleep. I smirked at the thought that it might be a hapless transient, and wondered greedily how taking more blood would affect the course of the experience. I was shocked to see that the clock read ten minutes till midnight; no time seemed to have passed at all, or else all of it.
The smell—dirt and trash and worn, tattered cloth with no human sweat binding it together—told me definitively that my own dear John was that hapless transient. I made out the fractionated parameters of his mind, trickling into mine much more slowly than usual. He had never surprised me before; usually, I could sense his approach when he was still miles away. Relief and dismay came at once; I hadn’t felt him at all, and thank God it was he, and not someone more dangerous.
Because we could die; we could be killed. Fortunately, that wasn’t what he had in mind.
With my eyes open, I watched him creeping into my bedroom. By the time he was inside, he was already undressed, and he crawled onto the bed beside me, tossing his hair aside and laying a kiss on my bare thigh. The sudden touch of his chapped-rough lips sent heavy waves of velvety sensation over me. I moaned and pulled him up to me by his hair. His eyes were distant. Through his skin I felt flutters of worry mixed with lust, combined with the ever-present desire to be somewhere else.
I didn’t care about anything but the lust. Instead of kissing his lips, I licked them, sucked them into my mouth and stroked my tongue over them until the ragged dry edges were smoothed and healed. He bit the inside of my lower lip with a light touch of his fangs, and furled my tongue back into my mouth with his, sliding my panties down with his hands.
I pushed him slightly away, breaking the kiss, still holding onto his hair, gazing into his eyes. He grimaced, almost as if I’d hurt him. “Hi,” I murmured.
He blinked at me, unsmiling. “Are you all right? I can’t see you,” he whispered.
I realized that I didn’t perceive myself in his mind; touching him when he was beside me, looking at me, was usually almost like looking into a mirror, or more properly, seeing a hologram of myself. It had been extremely disorienting before I got used to it. In fact, I couldn’t ‘see’ into him very well at all right now; everything was muted, soft focus, indistinct, and I surmised that it might go both ways. “You can’t see into me?” I clarified.
“Right—that’s what I mean. I was scared.” He gently pulled me upright, and pulled the T-shirt over my head. “I had to touch you.” He nuzzled his stubbled face against my breasts, under my arms, and I sizzled, hissing softly through my teeth. I might not have been able to see much, but my tactile senses were in great shape. My feet wrapped around the small of his back and I curled my toes together, locking him momentarily in place. Before he could settle there, with his face against my chest, I used my heels to push down on the firm shelf of his pelvic bone.
