A la Node

7 – Blood of Innocents

Night was velvet around him, he could feel its texture in every nerve, warm soft air heavy with summer scents of cut grass and sun-baked pavement and roses. The grass across which he walked was wet from the evening sprinklers, but his feet made no impression in the soft growth or the sodden earth beneath. He was a black shape against the darkness of the lawn, hardly touched the ground as he moved towards the house, and the up through the air like dandelion fluff on an updraft. He knew from long experience that the darkness of his shape would blend with the darkness around him, he would be a shadow with no distinct shape. His faint shadow in the thin light of the new moon was indistinct.

He looked through the window at what had brought him here. A single candle burned in the room, no electric lights illuminated her face, which was a pale thing, broad of cheekbone and small of mouth. Tears streamed silently down those cheeks. She sat cross-legged on the bed, hands on knees trembling slightly, and then turned with agonizing slowness to the nightstand. He could feel her through the intervening space, she radiated despair like a furnace, he could sense the tendons in her arms tightened to the point of pain as her arms moved carefully, precisely, to open the drawer. She took out two small bottles, held them carefully against the possibility of rattling their contents. He could hear the tiny shift of little pills against each other and the walls of the small plastic bottles.
She opened the first and delicately, as if handling a viper, took a pill out. She placed it neatly on the smoothed bedsheet in front of her. She took out another and placed it next to the first.

She appeared not to notice the tears, though he could smell the sweat salty tang of them, and the scent of her moistened skin, the scent of the blood that flowed beneath. She counted out fourteen small white pills, and he could smell those as well, their chemical stew acrid and irritating. Fourteen was enough to kill her. She opened the second bottle.

He watched her count them all out of the bottle, lining them up on the bed in neat rows. She counted them again before opening the bottle of red wine that had waited unseen beside the bed. The contents of the bottle quickly overwhelmed the scent of neurological poison and tears with a rich alcohol tang.

The scent of her body and her blood and her tears had been intoxicant enough, the alcohol and pills were distractions that took the taste of her away from him. She poured a glass of the wine and sipped, then held it to her cheek to catch the flow of tears. Her tongue, small and wet, caressed the rim of the glass to taste the salt and wine, but her eyes never left the precise lines of pills.

He watched her sit, still as stone but for the slow and careful touch of wineglass to lips, for a very long time. The tension in her tendons eased, slowly, and the brutal grasp of her heartbeats slowed to an even, easy rhythm. The tears ended, her cheeks took on the faintest of colors as they dried, but the darkness around her eyes remained, the eyes within watching the neatly arranged death in front of her.

Then, slowly, glass empty and cheeks dry, something within her melted away, releasing a deep and shuddering breath as it went. The candle was consumed, a tiny guttering bit of wick floating in spent wax. As she had the last time he had been drawn through the darkness to this window, as she had the time before that, she watched the candle die before scooping the pills back into their bottles. In the darkness he watched her put them away, all but two, and then watched the businesslike control she exerted over her own emotions as she placed those two carefully on her tongue and swallowed them dry.

In the black of the room, he could see her clearly as she felt her way under the covers without undressing, and lay there staring into the darkness. She would sleep soon, he knew, and as the warmth of her body permeated the sheets and the last of the dying candle left the air, he would breath her in, listen to her heart and the rush of her blood, feel the few quiet little dreams that survived her medications stir in her mind.

Then she looked at him.

Centuries of life in the darkness gave him a keen awareness of his own invisibility, and he knew well the limits of mortal eyes, but she looked through the window into blackness and he felt her eyes seize him. No, it was chance, coincidence. He was beyond her pitiful vision, for all that the dark pits of her eyes seemed locked on his own. Disturbed, he allowed the breeze to carry him away from the window, to the suburban tree-lined street where in time he would find what he needed.

For nearly two weeks he haunted the dark warmth of the night, blending with the deep desert shadows. He fed of a drunken teen staggering her way home, and again on an elderly man whose early morning walk had become, over decades of lonely insomnia, a pre-dawn amble on a route he hardly needed to see anymore.

Both the alcoholic hormonal brew of the girl and the tired medicated blood of the old man tasted dull in his mouth, though these were better meals than he had found in some time. He told himself that they were dull because the lives ensorcelled within the hot red liquid were dull, empty, valueless. He told himself as well that he stayed in this town simply because these lives had come to him so easily, far more easily than blood had been found on the long empty stretches of highway he had followed here, where no humans walked, no vehicles stopped, and mile upon mile of aging roadway hosted only abandoned shells of tiny highway-exit towns and the painfully bright travel centers that had killed them off.

This quiet desert suburb was rest and sustenance. The girl in the dark room who counted her pills and walked the very knife-edge between life and the eternal darkness, she was incidental. A pretty bauble he would take if he had the chance, but no better than a thousand other pretty things.

The nights were warm in this rainy season, the storm-clouds that gathered overhead seemed to radiate their own oppressive heat. When he again felt the gravitational draw to the little house, he moved through the heavy blackness to the rhythm of distant thunder. The dark magic that bound him to this mortal plane made sunlight anathema, the warm electric bulbs that has taken over the world so recently were a painful irritation, and even firelight could be blinding and difficult. The lightning, though, raw elemental light, he could watch with pleasure. Its gentle far-off illumination was pleasing to him, and his route to her window was punctuated by little bursts of beauty.

Again across the drying grass, up to the second story window. Again the light of a single candle flickered dimly from the opening. The scent of her drifted from the window and he caught it as if the compulsion to come here this night had been carried to him on its subtle flavors from he start. Where the compulsion came from, he knew not. It was like many others he had experienced, the beautiful and the strong, those who had become more than sustenance to him, had become his possessions, his slaves, who had ultimately been consumed more deeply than any bloodletting could achieve. Here was another, her inconsequential life become a small obsession to him, her despair a beguiling diversion.

This night she sat on the bed unmoving, candle illuminating her pale elfin face and dark eyes fitfully. The window was screened, a barrier as effective as steel, the ancient magic restricting him with a resistance almost comforting. There were those among his kind who had been brilliant men, those who had studies nature and whose inquiry had not been stopped by death. There was scholarship, of a kind, among the vampires, but no science had done more than outline the strictures of the magic that sustained them. He could not enter without invitation, he could do no more than gaze. There was a faint scent of steel and old blood drifting though the screen.

Some minutes passed with her silent on the bed, but he heard her heart quicken and could smell a musk about her entwined with the candle’s smoke. She stood, walked slowly in front of the bed, facing the window. The gentle light struck her in profile, made her half warm flash and half blackness, the shapes and contours of her breasts and belly picked out in high relief between. She did not peer though the window as she had the night before, there was no startling sensation of being seen, but the intent of her motions and all of her attention seemed directed out into the night. Slowly, her eyes downcast, she unbuttoned the thin sheer nightgown, holding it to her body with elbows held tight to her ribs. She stood as if considering the act in excruciating detail, and then let her arms fall, let the satin slide down her naked body and pool on the floor at her feet.

The sight of her aroused passions that had grown deeper and more subtle in the centuries since he had been a man and subject to the animal compulsions of flesh. Every inch of her in the oblique candle light was a map of desires written in shadow. Her gaze still directed at the space between her feet and the wall she stood in silence, frozen in stance but alive with flowing blood, tension, the rising texture of skin drawn taught. The perfume of her body rose in the air to overwhelm all else.

The old human passions flowed thorough him, subterranean. The pleasures of he flesh were not to be denied, and he had never chosen to deny them. There were many beautiful bodies in his past, in poses of submission and passion. Many had been more beautiful than this. His body appreciated what stood before him, but his mind sought out the echos of her thoughts, the darkness he had felt there, the memory of the scent of tears flowing down her face as she counted mortality out in little rows on the bed. She moved, slowly, and opened a box on her nightstand.

Had he been human now, he would have staggered back under that onslaught. Steel was a sharp cry against the warm musk, old blood was startling and immediate. The smell of swordplay came back to him like a blow, the iron blood in communion with cutting steel, death in metallic tones, life taken in passion, given in pain. He had seen many die this way, but so long ago, the memories lept from he earth to take him, for a second, away from this window, this girl. Only a second. Her hands drew from the box a single razor blade. That hand trembled, but did not hesitate. She held the blade tight in front of her, stared at it. She swallowed, seemed caught in indecision. The blade rose to the skin of her throat, to the very place her would open her flesh, where the pulse of the carotid pushed skin against steel, where life flowed from heart to mind, vulnerable to a cut that would stop both.

She held it there, blade against skin, not cutting, not yet, but close. Familiar tears flowed down her cheeks, she seemed hardly aware of them. Her body’s arousal did brief battle with the darkness as he watched in tortured frustration. She stood before him and offered body, blood and life, and she was untouchable across the simple and impenetrable barrier of the old magic. She took a deep breath and then her eyes rose impossibly to meet his own. She took the blade from her neck, brought it instead to her chest, and slowly drew a line of welling fresh blood down between her breasts. It was black in the dim light of the candle, and where the blade stopped the blood continued to draw the line down towards her pubic hair as if she were splitting herself open in sacrifice.

Suddenly, as if caught in a shameful act, she threw the blade down and covered her breasts with one arm. The other grabbed at curtains and drew them across the open window, the candle died a second later. He fled, followed closely by the sound of thunder and the scent of candle smoke, blood, and tears.

The storm moved slowly over dark empty streets. He allowed the rain to soak through him, let it cool him, willed his arousal away. He found a small group of teenagers in a little church graveyard, their black clothing and affectation of darkness offensive and ridiculous. Abandoning caution and subtlety, he fell among them, a black man-shape falling from above, scattering them into the night. He took one plump girl and let her long faltering scream fill his ears and he lifted her by the neck and drained her young life from her in a single draught. Her life on his tongue calmed him, and when dawn began to creep slowly from beneath the clouds, he found rest in a crypt mere feet from her cooling body.

He knew it was time to leave. He had been moving from place to place for a very long time, and there was a reason for that. There were few vampires in the world, and that was a conscious decision. Bringing someone new into the dark was a rare event, but even so, it could not be ignored. Every one of them had the power, and those new to the power and the blood often sought to bring companions over. Left unchecked, there would be too many – too many seeking blood and too many clues and footprints left among the mortals.

A month was too long. So many deaths in one small town would bring attention, from mortal as well as immortal, and he was not among the unassailable ranks of vampires whose autonomy was unchallenged. A wrong step would draw the powerful down on him, and every vampire was expendable, no liabilities to the race would be tolerated. It was time, he would move north now, seek the shorter days and denser populations, hide in their numbers and dark nights.

Her window was dark. The moon, reflection of the death that awaited the careless vampire, shone across the floor, shone on rumpled bed, on small black stains where blood had fallen in heavy droplets. She slept, mind clouded with the drugs that kept despair away. Dark and pitiful dreams faded in and out, he could feel them as the slightest of sensations, hurt and loss and need and death. He watched her sleep in the darkness, then slipped away, anxious.

He did not leave that night, nor the following, but returned each night to her window, watched her sleep, smelled the blood that still flavored the air of her room, tasted the simple animal dreams that barely rippled the surface of her mind. On the third night, he found the window open as it had been before, but the screen was now removed, the opening empty of impediment. A gentle breeze blew the edge of the curtains into the room. She slept, lightly, under the covers. The room had been cleaned, bloodstains scrubbed from the floor and blankets laundered. The scent of industrial perfumes and surfactants was acrid and irritating, but on the bed, under a clean sheet and salted with he faintest sheen of sweat, she slept. He looked through the window, left open. The strictures of the dark magic were not words. Nowhere was it written that one may not enter a home unless invited. The power that sustained him required blood not for its nutrients but for the life it symbolized, required the taking of that life, even if only a portion. The vitality of the living was consumed, as the intention of the life taken was honored, in a way. He could not enter unless she wished him to, whether in good faith or bad, the open window was not invitation in itself.

The animal desires he thought of as human rose within him, and shaped his body after them. Strong fingers reached tentatively across the short space, stopped short of the plane where window screen would have stopped them. He could feel the heaviness of a body enveloping him, the scent of her blood now rich flavor in a newly formed mouth. The fingers probed forward, and met no resistance.

Before thought had fully formed around the urge, he stood at the foot of her bed. His thoughts reached out to her dreaming mind and touched. She was awake instantly, upright with fingers clenched into blankets. The sheet fell away from her bare breasts, the red line between them healing, but scabbed with blood. He could see her pupils large and her eyes wide, knew she could see him only barely in the dim light. Nevertheless she knew his presence, felt him standing there, and fear coursed through her like electricity. He felt surprise in her, but also acceptance, acknowledgment.

He stepped forward, willed his form more solid, visible. The gasp that escaped her mouth had an overtone of satisfaction. He had never heard her voice, but when it came it was familiar, carried the harmonics of submission and need.

“You came.”

In reply her took the edge of the sheet and pulled it away from her, exposing her pale skin and bringing a fresh wave of her scent to him.

“Take me.” She said it quietly, as if afraid he would refuse. The man within him thrilled to the sound and to the words. She could hardly know, but take her he would, mind, body and blood. His black clothing, fashionably cut hundreds of years ago, was an image, the reflection of a memory of mortality. He willed it away and for the fist time in many years felt his human flesh exposed.

Her eyes never left him but her body reacted eloquently, exuding the scent of lust. More than lust, something akin to desperation, desolation, fear. He touched her and reveled in the feel of flesh against flesh. One had explored her, found the expression of her desire in every inch of blood flushed skin. He was not patient, not after so long. He entered her without preamble, finding her ready, eager. The magic ached within him, he sought her neck and she did not resist.

She tasted of salt and cleanliness, spice and blood. He laid his lips over the vein, felt the blood course within, felt the needle sharp compulsion in his teeth. Slowly he pierced her skin, felt her spasm, moan, thrust herself upon teeth and manhood. It was hard, painful, to take only mouth-fulls of blood. She had a beguiling flavor, and the heat of it echoed the heat between her legs, the heat of her breath gasping across his ear. He would not consume her, would not kill this willing sacrifice. With blood came connection, a tether of will. Her blood, her willing sacrifice, would tie her to him, he would own her body and soul, taste by taste, drop by drop.

He came quickly, and felt her continue to buck against him, took his mouth from her neck and pulled away. She moaned soft disappointment. He spoke to her softly, in tones attuned to the channel of influence from her blood to his. “I will return.” It was a command and a promise, and he felt her accept both.

The aftertaste of her blood and her soul maintained him through the night, suppressed the anxiety that had been growing in him, the fear of drawing attention to himself. Too soon the night passed.

She waited, awake, for him. He was less urgent, but no less desirous, and took her proffered body more slowly. She was almost coy when she cocked her head, offering her neck to him, and he took it gently, taking a single swallow of her life, savoring it on his tongue. He felt the bond with her, let his mind flow along it, felt the outlines of her soul. There was darkness there, the darkness that counted pills, that cut flesh and let flow tears, a hole whose ragged edges she occupied wholly. He enjoyed the feeling of growing power. When he had finished, he told her to lay still, and was aroused again by her instant obedience. He commanded her to stand, and examined her body as she turned slowing in front of him.

“Tell me how you became a vampire,” she asked, quietly, carefully. Benevolent with the flavor of her blood on his lips and her mind held within his, her relaxed, told her of times he barely remembered now.

He had been a small merchant, a young man with ambition, but not a lot of it, and just enough resources to import spices. He sought out the wealthy with his wares, mindful of the profit in selling at cost to the powerful. One night, he had been summoned. The Lady was apparently quite wealthy, though no ne seemed to know who she was or from where she came. She took him, brazenly, to her bedchamber, after brushing away his commercial entreaties like so much dust from her shoulder. She was beautiful, pale of face, cheeks framed by waves of long chestnut hair. She took him without hesitation or mercy, seeming able to call forth his arousal at her whim. Exhausted, stunned by her ferocity and power, he lay naked on the bed before her. She asked him lightly of his work, his successes and failures. She asked him if he might be willing to do some work for her, and smiled pleasingly when he replied that he already had. He agreed, though, without quite knowing why. The she was on him, pinning him to the bed with preternatural strength, her face close to his, eyes blazing. He watched her bite her lip with a canine took too long and too sharp, watched the single drop of blood run slowly down her chin. Her opened his unresisting jaw with one hand and let the drop fall into his mouth.

The memory was faded, felt old and dusty, a relic of another life long since past. He had indeed worked for the Lady, and she had, in time, found him lacking, left him to his own devices without a word of farewell.

“A drop of blood was all it took?”

“A drop of vampire blood. Not many of us are made, and when one is, another one often dies. The powers that be ensure that. There are kings and queens among us, make no mistake, there are many to whom taking the blood was but one more step towards power, one more maneuver, one more coup. I was but an errand boy, given no choice.”

“Tell me, why did you come to me when you did?”

“That is enough. I will return.”

Ever mindful not to drain away the life that was rapidly coming under his control, he returned o her, again and again. She was fascinated by his nature, by death, by the dark magic that controlled him. She had so many childish questions, but he indulged her, listened with amusement to the things fiction authors had imagined about the lives of his kind. He described the toxic burning of silver, how it drain strength but would not kill. Garlic, which irritated but did not impede.

A melancholy often took him, as if the darkness in the center of her soul crept into his own mind, as he described the world of the night. He could barely remember what a sunlit day looked like, could not recall feeling its warmth on his skin. The sadness would take him, and in sympathy, she would give herself to him. Obedient, she left him when he was done, stopped asking questions when he wished her silent, and tended to desires without being told, he needed only to exert his will upon that invisible chain between them.

He told her of his journeys since those early days. Endless walking, avoiding the attentions of the Lady and others of her class. He found the words came more easily now, even her half-enslaved attention was enough to draw him out. He described to her his simple desires, the lusts she sated within him. He told her more than he felt wise, and afterwords often wondered at himself. Often there was the faintest hint of disappointment in his words, a disappointment that hardly seemed to match the words themselves, a disappointment whose origin he could not place.

He came to her on a cool night, entered her window, hardly a shadow on the wall. The smell had warned him before he crossed that boundary, he saw the wine bottle beside the bed, felt incipient the darkness he had felt that first night, watching her count the pills. She had not taken the wine, nor pills, but was on the bed, naked, waiting, as if she knew that he would come this night. Perhaps she had lain thus ever night since last he had come. When he lay atop her, when she turned her neck to his teeth, she whispered, so quietly no ears but his could have picked out the words.

“Take me there,” she rasped, “take me all the way, let me see it,” and he knew without asking the destination she desired. He drank deeply of her, but slowly, relishing the flood of life flowing into him. After so loing only sipping, it was intoxicating to drink. He pulled life from her in a torrent, felt her body beneath him slipping towards death and forced himself to end the flow. He felt her heart falter in the sudden loss of pressure, felt her mind slip down, down into that pit, watched her step towards death, embrace it, find comfort there. He watched her greet it, felt her heart struggle on, her vessels contracting to maintain pressure, her lungs gasp to fill inadequate blood with oxygen. As close to death as he could take her without her passing over, and he could feel that she would live. He left her naked on the the bed.

He did not come to her for some time. The life he had taken from her buzzed in his mind, and he could feel her as a distant presence in his mind, slowly gaining strength. He would return when she could sustain his demands.

The night came when her heart beat fast, her thoughts flitted dark and hidden, hard to read, hard to track. She was alive again, having visited death and returned. He came to her room a shadow on the breeze, let his desire grow into flesh before her eyes, reveled in the feeling of her surprise and trepidation. There was fear in her now, and exhilaration. She awaited him, naked. A thousand scents flashed through him, a thousand flavors, a thousand textures. For reasons he could not grasp, exhilaration filled him, a fission of danger flitted at his subconscious and he reveled in pushing it aside. He looked down at his slave and felt the bond between them, a tiny thread now grown into thick rope. It was a good night, this bauble had proven more diversion, more sustenance, than he could have expected. She opened for him, and he took her with passion and relish, and then felt that inkling of danger bloom into an inferno of pain.

Something racked his back with fire, pain galvanizing reactions far faster and stronger than any human, yet they failed to move him. Something grasped his mind even as the silver grasped his flesh, an iron willpower, a darkness deep and complete. He looked down into her eyes and found that willpower looking back at him. Her eyes burned into him, the silver coin in her hand held him pinned to her like an insect to a board. Her other hand came to his cheek, it held the razor in tight white fingers. His shock began to crumble under her gaze, the mind he had chained so carefully seemed to grasp those chain and pull back. A calming force came across that link and forced his panic down. The razor cut his cheek and he watched the single drop of blood roll down to her lips.