Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (26 page)

There wasn’t much left of the crows, so Cory
had little choice but to try sucking the blood off some of the
larger feathers. The blond, who referred to herself as Fancy, shook
her head and made chiding noises that sounded akin to a squirrel.
“Not much for table manners tonight, are you?”

Cory ignored her.

“We haven’t seen you around lately,” the
other one said. The first time Cory had asked her name she’d said
it was Moonbeam Honeywhistle McDancybritches, but thankfully
usually just answered to Dancer. She said she was Sri Lankan, but
given her tendency for hyperbole and sarcasm Cory could never be
sure. “Usually you stick close to the downtown area, but we’ve had
trouble finding you in the last couple weeks. Has there been a
problem?”

Cory highly doubted they’d actually been
looking for him. Nobody cared about him that much. But they were
right that he hadn’t been around his usual haunts much this winter.
“Didn’t you hear about the body found near the water tower a couple
months ago? I thought it was a good idea to find a different hiding
place for a while.”

Their silence told him that they had heard
about it. It wasn’t even the most recent dead body. That one had
been two days ago, although it had been all the way out near Forest
Mall. Both bodies had been the same as all the others, or at least
all the others that ended up in the newspapers. In addition to the
bodies there had been numerous disappearances in the last year as
well. Any time Cory found a copy of the Fond du Lac
Reporter
somewhere he could open it up to find angry articles calling for
the heads of the police that hadn’t put a stop to anything yet.

“It’s getting worse,” Dancer finally said.
“Have you been to West Division recently?”

“No,” Cory said.

“Good. Stay away,” Dancer said. “There’s a
gang forming. A gang with some interesting ideas about who’s doing
the killings.”

“Nobody really believes them yet,” Fancy
said. “Even if they’re right.”

Cory nodded. He preferred not going that way
anyway. There were others like Cory and FancyDancer who had claimed
that area as their own. He had no idea what the dynamic had been
like on the streets of Fond du Lac before a year ago, but the city
had been the closest major population center to where all the
escapees had surfaced from their many years down in those tunnels
and only a few had ever tried to go much farther than the city’s
limits in the time since. The results had been interesting, to say
the least, and while the majority of the population had no idea
what creatures were now living among them, there were plenty of
people, it seemed, with their suspicions.

“Watch for graffiti crosses,” Fancy said.
“That seems to be how they’re marking their territory.”

Cory nodded. He thought he’d actually seen
one on the Division Street bridge the other day but he hadn’t given
it much thought. Crosses were one of the pieces of lore regarding
their kind that didn’t have anything to it. Right now the only
thing a cross meant to Cory was the threat of violence, and he
intended to keep his distance.

Cory looked at FancyDancer’s clothes and
realized they were slightly less grubby than they had any right to
be. “Those new?” he asked.

“New shelter a couple blocks from the
library,” Dancer said. “They were giving out coats and blankets
just before that big snow storm two weeks ago. Keep your teeth
hidden and they might help you, too.”

He nodded again, but he didn’t think that was
likely. It took far too much effort just to approach FancyDancer,
and they were people he sort of trusted. Even if the people at this
new homeless shelter were nice he still didn’t think he could bring
himself to go anywhere near them. He still didn’t remember much
about his life before the cage, but he knew that he’d been tricked
or forced into the back of that van by someone he had briefly given
his trust. It wasn’t something he could possibly give lightly ever
again. There were just far too many people willing to abuse it.

Dancer took the last handful of guts from the
pile and mashed them up in her hands to get the maximum amount of
juice from them. “You sure you’re going to be safe out here by
yourself with the way things are going, Meateater?” She stopped
long enough to slurp the bloody mess from her fingers. “Things
really are getting worse out here with Vlad the Mystery running
around. Maybe you should finally come back with us? Just for
tonight.”

Cory didn’t say anything to that. Instead he
wordlessly backed away from the circle of light until he was almost
in the shadows again.

“Hey, no need to get squirrely,” Fancy said.
“We just worry about you sometimes. I suppose technically you’re
older than us, but sometimes it’s easy to think of you like our
little brother.”

Although he knew he should feel flattered by
that, Cory couldn’t help but be uncomfortable with that kind of
talk. Maybe he should start trusting someone. He didn’t know much
about where they went when they weren’t on the street, but he did
know they had some kind of semi-permanent place to stay. He
seriously doubted they rented an apartment like the normals, but
they didn’t always spend their days sleeping under garbage
dumpsters like he did.

He wanted to go with them. He really did. He
just wasn’t ready yet.

“Thank you for the blood,” he said
quietly.

Both of them sighed at the same time. They’d
do that sometimes, yet never seemed to realize there was anything
odd about it. “Just stay safe,” Dancer said.

“And keep on this side of the river,” Fancy
said.

Dancer smirked. “And eat your
vegetables.”

They moved so quickly that any humans
watching would have just seen them flash out of existence. Cory,
his eyes more used to tracking a vampire’s movements, instead saw
them both leap at the same time for a nearby fire escape. They went
up and vanished over the top of the building. That was usually the
direction they went whenever they left. He’d probably be able to
see the exact direction they went if he were on top of the parking
ramp, since it was a good two stories higher than most of the
buildings around it other than the hotel itself. Maybe if he
figured out their hiding place ahead of time he might not feel so
squeamish about following them in the future. They might even have
beds or other comforts wherever they went. He’d like to find out
some day.

Until then he intended to stay right around
here. It wasn’t exactly safe, but then nothing and nowhere ever
was.

As much as he felt
safe—or at least as close as possible without four walls around him
and a roof over his head—in his hidey-hole in the tunnel, Cory knew
it was about time to find somewhere else to sleep for a few days.
Staying in any one spot for an extended period of time was an
invitation for people to find him. He was okay with FancyDancer
knowing where he might be, but there were a lot more vampires out
there that he wasn’t so friendly with. The entire city was crawling
with their kind now, and had been for almost a year.

As near as he could tell, it had been a
breezy day in April when somewhere around a hundred vampires came
up from a sinkhole in the ground, screaming both at the unexpected
pain of the sunlight and in mental anguish from the years of
torture. The hole in the ground had been mostly hidden by a
collapsing ranch home. Had Cory possessed more presence of mind at
the time he might have thought to search the house for clues as to
when it had been built or had last been occupied. Instead he had
run from it as fast as he could, just like most of the others. He
found out later that FancyDancer had been two of the few people to
stay in the house at least until nightfall. Everyone else had just
wanted to get as far away as possible before the remaining three
guards realized what had happened and came after them.

The guards, apparently, never did come back
up. He got that from FancyDancer several months later, when he
finally allowed himself to come out of hiding when they tried to
approach him. They had hidden in the dark corners of the house’s
basement waiting for some sign the “combination,” the nameless
thing Pig was always claiming lay hidden behind the door at the end
of the aisle, wasn’t going to come up after everybody. All they saw
instead was the strange woman who had fought her way out of her
cage. They said she came up alone, without the Zoey person she had
apparently gone after, although she had been covered in
unidentifiable muck. FancyDancer hadn’t approached her, and no one
that Cory had bothered to talk to (not that there were many, and
most of them could barely string together a coherent sentence)
claimed to have seen her since. She was a ghost, prone to the same
kind of whispers and tall-tales that Fond du Lac’s new vampire
community gave to the combination and Vlad the Mystery.

Although Cory didn’t know the exact number of
vampires that had come up from that hole, he guessed that fifty or
so of them, at a minimum, had stayed around in Fond du Lac. He
suspected that most of them stayed for the same reason that Cory
himself did—they didn’t know where their home was supposed to be.
Cory still couldn’t remember much about his life before those
cages, and he had been relatively new, only living down there for a
year or two at the most. The ones who had been there the longest
and had almost been “ripe” had been held in cages for ten years or
more, never seeing the light, living off whatever scraggly
creatures the guards occasionally brought down from the surface,
and forced to wallow naked in their own filth while waiting for
whatever unspeakable fate eventually waited for them. The result
was that most of the vampires that came back up were damaged, some
unable to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, all of
them scared and frightened and sometimes unpredictable.

In the rare moments when Cory allowed himself
to give the situation that much thought, it was rather surprising
that there only seemed to be one Vlad the Mystery, if he or she was
indeed only one person. The rest of the survivors were too busy
trying to live with the horrors they had survived to try hurting
anybody. Not that the increasingly agitated and frightened people
of Fond du Lac would consider that if any of them had known who or
what was leaving the ripped apart bodies throughout the city. As
incoherent as most of the vampires were that Cory had run across in
the last year, most of them at least understood how much danger
they would be in if people knew they existed. Cory, therefore, was
considered sociable by the warped standards of the ones he
considered his people.

While there wasn’t a hard and fast line
separating the territories of the various vampires in the city,
Cory knew there were at least a few places that were effectively
off limits when searching for some alternative place to go to
ground for a day or two. He could go a good ways north from
downtown, but following Main Street to its end was out of the
question. That was the site of Lakeside Park, and no fewer than
four vampires had claimed that area. Cory had never tried to talk
to them, although FancyDancer had told him tales of one or two
vampires that had gone in and come out missing fingers and toes.
There was supposedly a vampire in North Fond du Lac, the closest
thing the city had to a suburb, who went by the name Clancy that
would allow other vampires to hide out for a few days in an
abandoned box car with him. But that was rather far away, and Cory
didn’t feel comfortable with someone he didn’t know no matter what
his reputation. There was also a woman not too far east from
downtown known as Pale Lorie. She didn’t have any permanent place
as far as Cory knew, but she floated around the residential
neighborhood generally acting in a creepy way that made Cory
nervous.

There was also Vlad the Mystery, but no one
knew if he or she had a pattern to where they stayed, or even if
they had a permanent spot at all. All they knew was he didn’t have
any pattern at all when it came to his hunts.

So if north and east were not the best
choices that left him with south or west, and west was out if
FancyDancer was right about the gang. So it looked like he would
have to head south for now in the direction of the Miracle Mile. He
knew the area well enough, and most of the vampires he’d seen
around there kept to themselves. It was as good a plan as any.

He couldn’t be sure of the exact time, but it
was late enough that all the bars had shut down. There were still a
few people on the street. Cory tried to keep off of Main Street as
much as possible, using alleys between and behind buildings, coming
out only when the street itself was the only direct path. Even then
he carefully moved in the shadows just outside the street lights
and hid any time he thought he heard someone nearby. If he had
wanted, he could have walked right down the street without anyone
seeing him. At his fastest speed he was just a blur that blended in
with the shadows, and he could put a glamour over himself that
would keep people from seeing him. But he never liked doing that.
He felt guilty, as though his nature was something shameful he had
done to himself. That was the way the world viewed vampires, after
all. Those rare few that actually believed vampires existed only
thought of them as monsters. With that much belief in the world, it
was hard for Cory not to believe right along with them.

He tried, sometimes, to remember who he had
been before. He knew other vampires that had the same problem. Most
of the ones who had stuck around Fond du Lac, actually. They didn’t
stay here because it was a hotbed of civic activity that could
easily hide them. They stayed because they didn’t know where else
they were supposed to go. Cory supposed that all the ones who did
remember had gone back to wherever they came from. That place under
the earth, though, seemed to have a similar enough effect on a
large enough number of people that he had to wonder if all that
memory loss could really be attributed just to trauma. Maybe it was
the process of going from human to vampire. It was possible that it
affected people’s brains.