Blood Vivicanti (9781941240113) (4 page)

No, he was not a girl. But
his epidermal plates were like my skin. His pipes and wiring were
like my veins. He was propelled by steam the way blood propels
me.

Unfortunately, my image and
likeness also happened to be legless. I just hadn’t gotten around
to building the workings beneath his torso.

No naughty bits.
Sorry.

Backing up as far as I
could go, standing atop a car of the Labyrinth Fort, I got a great
view of Steam.

He might have been only a
torso, arms, and head, but he was my boy, and he looked
awesome!

His head had come together
from a mixture of railcars, mostly from observation cars, sleeping
cars, dining cars, and boxcars.

His shoulders and upper
arms had been made from an assortment of tank
locomotives.

His hands and fingers were
made from the various parts of railway snowplows, railway guns, and
cabooses.

Behind each shoulder were
massive steam stacks.

His mouth and nose was a
grill. Behind it was a great fire, burning and glowing and growing
more and more intense. His eye sockets flickered with the
flames.

He dwarfed me.

I was so proud of
him.

Back in the Black
Building…

Lowen was torturing Wyn. He
was still in Theo’s young and lean body. He had no plan of
possessing anyone else for a long time.

He had other plans for
Wyn.

They were in Lowen’s
laboratory.

He had him strapped down to
a table, the way Theo had been before Lowen’s ghost possessed his
body, with his arms stretched out like the Son of God on the
Cross.

“
You’ve surprised me,” Lowen
said to Wyn. “You’ve been a little more resilient than my current
host body.”

Wyn hadn’t had blood in
that month’s time. He was panting heavily from weariness. He looked
half-dead.

“
If I hadn’t already made
plans for your body,” Lowen went on, “I might have taken it for
myself.”

He smiled with Theo’s
roguish expression, once playful, now demented.

“
Your body is a little too
old for my tastes these days,” he hissed in Wyn’s ear.

He walked around the table,
speaking more boldly, admiring his own lean arms and
hands.

“
The body I have now looks
young and handsome for your world. Don’t you think?”

He went to a nearby control
panel and pressed a button. It emitted a powerful electric shock
that coursed through Wyn.

He arched in pain, tensing,
clenching his eyes, and gnashing his teeth as electric currents
netted his sweaty body.

Lowen stood composedly with
his fingers folded together at his middle, showing an attitude of
scientific indifference. He cleared his throat before he
spoke.

Wyn had seemed
distracted.

“
It is time for your spirit
to leave your body,” Lowen told him objectively. “The scent of it
is sweet. Can you smell it? It has a hint of cotton candy and
peppermint.”

Wyn could only smell the
odor of flesh burning at a barbecue. He assumed it was
him.

Lowen crouched low so that
Wyn could look down at him, into his eyes.

“
Don’t worry,” he said with
a surprisingly sympathetic expression. “I won’t let you die. And
you will still be a Blood Vivicanti, or at least my own version of
one. Someone else needs your body. I’d like you to meet
her.”

He gestured to someone on
the other side of the room.

The figure was shrouded in
shadows, but Wyn could tell that it was a small girl.

She limped toward
him.

The miasma issuing from her
was awful, a pungent odor of burnt hair and flesh. The girl was
badly charred. Her skin was blackened. Her hair had been almost
entirely burned away, though there were still some clumps matted
together with charred skin. It looked like black paint
peeling.

One of her arms was
missing.

But there was enough of her
for Wyn to recognize the girl who had always been by Lowen’s
side.

“
Nell,” said Wyn in a weak
voice.

“
What’s left of her,” Lowen
said. “Thanks to your Mary Paige’s handiwork.”

Wyn laid his head back. He
knew what was coming.

Lowen leaned over him. He
showed all his teeth in a broad grin.

“
I did my best to make her
into one of your Blood Vivicanti. But without your Origin Blood, my
children lack some of our abilities. Nell cannot heal as fast as
you and I can. But once she is inside your body, and you are inside
hers, you’ll learn all about that.”

Lowen’s hands started to
glow with a violet light. It rose from him like mist. It was his
ghost form. It was a new trick. His ghost was learning that he
could do all sorts of new things inside Theo’s body.

The violet light
illuminated his face. His eyes turned completely white. His grin
broadened into silent laughter.

Lowen reached one hand
toward Wyn and the other hand toward the charred remains of
Nell.

The Kharetie ghost grew
larger, emanating, smoldering out beyond Theo’s body. His ghost
expanded, surrounding Nell on one side and Wyn on the
other.

The next moment, all three
were enveloped by the violet mist of the Kharetie ghost.

A few minutes
passed.

The sound of Wyn’s screams
stopped.

The sound of Nell’s weeping
began.

Lowen left his laboratory
and walked down the hallway toward his office.

He placed one hand on his
forehead and wiped sweat from his brow. He looked more tired than
he had ever been. He stumbled a little.

The diaphanous violet mist
of his ghost was trailing behind him like smoke.

Striding beside him was a
man. His body had been tortured, but he was healing quickly. It was
Wyn’s body, but Wyn was not inside.

Everything about him looked
just like Wyn – all except the eyes. They were the eyes of a young
girl who had been badly beaten and defeated by life, one who was
kidnapped in the fifth grade, hurt, rejected, and turned into a
Sleeper Devil.

“
What will you call
me?”

It was Wyn’s voice that
spoke, yet it was not his tone. It was the tone of this wounded
girl.

“
What will you call me now
that I am in this body?”

Lowen smiled as he
strolled.

“
You can never stop being
who you are,” he said, “Nell.”

Back in the Locomotive
Deadyards…

I had crawled up to the
roof of the Labyrinth Fort and I was sitting alone, thinking about
Wyn and Theo while I tinkered with a small device that I was making
for the coming war.

I was wearing my headgear
over my eyes and I was grateful that Red had made it. The lens that
I was using gave me an ultraviolet perspective on my
device.

I was adapting the
holographic technology that I’d taken from the mansion to an
encasement that was strapped along my entire right arm.

Cool, huh?

I finished welding and I
swiveled up the ultraviolet lens. Next I held up the device and
examined all sides of it, scrutinizing my handiwork.

Then I held it against my
arm, sizing it up.

Perfect fit.

Carrying the device in one
hand, I leaped from the roof and landed on the ground. Then I
strolled through the maze of railroad cars to the Red
Man.

He was in his workspace.
Red heard me enter and glanced at me. He rarely showed facial
expressions. But when he did, it was like glimpsing the subtle
movements of a Weeping Angel.

He was unbeatable at
staring contests.

Don’t blink.

The room was dimly lit like
everywhere else, but Red and I could see well enough.

All around us were devices
that he had made out of dials and copper cogwheels, brass tubing
and wires that were dangling out every which way.

I showed him the new
holo-imaging device that I had made for my arm.

He turned toward me, took
it, and looked it over. He nodded his approval and handed it
back.

Then he turned and pointed
toward the exit, not the exit to his workplace, but the exit to the
Locomotive Deadyards.

I knew what he wanted me to
do. We had had this conversation before, inasmuch as one can have a
conversation with a genetically engineered alien called Silent from
a planet far, far away.

He wanted me to leave, not
permanently, but he didn’t want me to return until I had drunk the
blood of people with fighting skills and had eaten their Blood
Memories. He wanted me to be a better fighter. He wanted me to be
prepared for the coming war.

Red was adamant. He faced
me directly and stared impatiently at me. He pointed with greater
insistence toward the exit. I should leave and not come back until
my job was done.

“
No,” I said defiantly. “I’m
not going.”

He slammed his fist down on
the table. His tools and projects leaped up a few inches and
settled back down, rattling together.

He pointed again toward the
exit.

“
I’m not going to drink
blood,” I said. “I don’t want to. I can’t.”

He tried to make signs, to
argue with me. But I could only understand a little of what he
meant.

Go…blood…Franken-Berry?

In the end, he gave up. And
with a sudden intensity, he grabbed me by both arms, drew me close,
and pierced me.

Aggressiveness was the only
way he had learned to express himself. He was like many men on
planet Earth. He fit right in here.

He thrust his Probiscus
into my neck. I tried to resist, but in his powerful grip, I had
become just like one of my old victims. I could not get free. And
when he drank my blood and his venom filled me, I didn’t want to
get free anymore.

But he was gentler than
before, kinder too, and more thoughtful.

His venom filled me and I
stopped resisting. Soon I began to enjoy the experience, although
my last fighting thought was that I would hate him afterward for
doing this, violating me the way I had violated all my
victims.

He tried to communicate
with me his fear that Lowen was coming, and that we needed to get
ready for an oncoming war. His mind envisioned the war being he and
I alone – one Blood Vivicanti and one Kharetie engineered from
Blood Thirster DNA – versus Lowen the Kharetie ghost in a Blood
Vivicanti body and his private army of Sleeper Devils and
Devicanti.

Red tried to tell me that I
was not ready for such a fight and that I would be defeated
easily.

The venom of a Blood
Vivicanti wipes clean the memories of our victims – but that is not
the case with the Red Man. His venom enhances my memories of our
embrace. Time seems to stand still when he pierces me. Quaffing
down a draft of my blood might be only a second in reality, but in
the suspended animation of my mind, him piercing me seems to last a
whole night.

Red drank only a pint of my
blood, but that solitary pint harbored within it an ocean of my
thoughts and feelings. He swallowed down not only my blood, but
also all that I am. He devoured me entirely, mind, heart, spirit.
He grasped my thoughts.

I should not have been
surprised that an alien from another planet would be able to
empathize with my feelings perhaps better than anyone else ever
had.

And I understood him
better, too, when his venom filled me. His venom was packed with
his thoughts, his feelings, his hopes, his worries.

He was much stronger than
me. Sometimes he would lift a whole railcar for me, to help me move
it to a better place in the Locomotive Deadyards. But his venom
expressed to me his weaknesses.

I had become one of his
biggest.

He could defend us quite
well. Yet he agonized over my safety. He did not want me to get
hurt. He had grown very fond of me. And he wanted me to care for
myself, the way he did.

Yes, he actually cared for
me and my well-being, more than I ever had.

He knew that I could
permanently gain the abilities of anyone whose blood I drank and
anyone whose Blood Memories I devoured. So he wanted me to drink
the blood of capable humans, those whose skills would make me even
more powerful.