Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (38 page)

You’re going to feel that, and you’re
going to feel it for a very long time
, Gramma’s voice spoke up
in his head.
But you’ve got to move now. Before she comes back.
She might have gone far away or she might have just gone around the
block. Either way, you can’t be here when she returns
.

The fact that her voice was still with him
was enough to get him moving, but he realized quickly why she had
been so confident leaving him alone. As soon as he so much as moved
an arm pain seared through him as though his blood was on fire.
This was not the same level of pain he’d felt while she’d been
quietly dosing him. The amount of garlic and silver she was now
slipping him had to be drastically higher. Given much more, she
could easily kill him with an overdose even by accident. For some
reason she didn’t want him dead like the other vampires—maybe to
continually harvest him for blood, although she herself would now
be a better, non-tainted source if she wanted to turn anyone
else—but she didn’t appear to care enough about keeping him alive
to be more careful.

He stopped trying to move for a moment,
hoping that would allow the pain to subside. It did, yet it didn’t
go away completely. He realized that such a small movement would be
nothing compared to what he would have to do just to leave the
bedroom, let alone escape from the building. That kind of pain
would be too much. He didn’t think he could do it.

Just concentrate on me
, Gramma’s voice
said.
Just like when you go to the woods, except keep just
enough of yourself in the real world to know what you’re doing. You
can do this. With everything else you’ve survived in your life,
even the things you can’t remember, this nutjob shouldn’t be
anything
.

Cory followed her voice partway back into his
mind, just enough that he could see a blur of green and sunlight at
the edge of his vision. Then he tried to move again, this time with
something far more ambitious. He swung his legs off the mattress
and was immediately greeted with the agony again.

Focus on the leaves
, he thought.
The babbling of the creek. The buzz of insects around my
ears
. The overall sensation was odd. He could still feel
everything, and yet it was as though his consciousness was only
loosely tethered to his body by a cord. He wasn’t sure if he could
keep this up for long, but he thought it would at least be enough
to get him out the door. He remembered the way he had felt better
the more he moved on the night he had gone back to his tunnel (and
how long ago was that even? It had to have been at least a day, but
could have also been much longer). Perhaps the simple act of moving
around had been enough to get his body working at pushing out the
poison. He didn’t want to rely on that possibility, though. Making
assumptions was part of what had gotten him to this place to begin
with.

Out in the living room he had to pause to
catch his breath. He needed to puke, he was sure, but if he stopped
to let his stomach void itself he wasn’t sure he would be able to
get back up and continue again. The room was completely dark but he
knew the layout enough that he shouldn’t have any trouble finding
the door. He almost tripped and fell though as his foot hit
something that rolled across the floor and hit the wall with a
clink. Even in his barely conscious state he realized that was
rather odd. The state of the bathroom was proof enough that Lynn
wasn’t a neat freak, but in the living room at least she had tried
to keep it free of too much clutter. He tried to follow whatever he
had kicked but his foot came down on a second one, this one
crunching under his weight sending brand new waves of pain through
him.

Focus
, he thought.
Trees. Gramma.
Safe. Safe. Safe
.

He bent down, almost falling over, and did
his best to pull the shard of a broken glass from his foot. He
could smell the blood on it, although he recognized that only a
small portion was his own. Bringing it closer to his face he gave
it a deep whiff. Richer than the blood he was used to, but just
about right to be the kind of blood Lynn had been feeding him.
Human blood.

Cory stopped moving and finally tried to see
the scene before him in the dark. The poison had to be affecting
his above-average night vision, because it shouldn’t have taken his
eyes this long to adjust, but as soon as he did he realized Lynn
hadn’t been alone here. There were multiple glasses set out around
the floor, some of them turned over, in a loose circle. In the
center of the circle someone had tried to draw something with the
blood, but as far as he could tell it was just an amorphous
scribble of gore that didn’t actually depict anything. He sniffed
the glass again, this time trying to find any trace of garlic or
silver, but if he had been able to smell them he would have
realized earlier what Lynn was doing to him.

There were multiple people here
,
Gramma’s voice said.
Recently. And you don’t remember hearing
any of them
.

That wasn’t a surprise, given how far within
himself Cory had retreated. But while Lynn had still been keeping
up her charade she hadn’t let anyone else into the apartment, so he
didn’t have the slightest clue who these people might have
been.

Think, CC
, Gramma’s voice said.
You
did actually hear them if you can bring back those
memories
.

Actually he didn’t want to remember any of
it, but he supposed any memories from when Lynn wasn’t with him
and… doing … were probably safer. He tried to force his mind back
and had a vague recollection of whispers somewhere at the edge of
his mental woods. He couldn’t quite make himself remember any
specific words, but he thought he could distinguish between voices.
Other than Lynn he thought there might be four, perhaps five. Most
of them brought back no specific memory, but two of them…

“The ones who shot me,” Cory whispered out
loud, then immediately bit his tongue, quite literally, as
protection against the possibility that someone else might still be
in the building and listening.

That confirms the theory
, Gramma said.
Lynn is working with the Dusters
.

But Cory still didn’t have any inkling as to
why. The story that was going around among the vampires was
obviously not true. The Dusters were not some group of people who
had formed a gang in a misguided attempt to protect the city from
vampires. In fact, if the leftover blood in the glasses was any
indication then they all were now vampires themselves, most likely
from whatever blood Lynn had taken from him on the first night.

They attack you to send you into Lynn’s
arms
, Gramma said,
all so they can farm out your blood and
become vampires themselves. But there are still too many things
that don’t make sense
.

While Cory knew she was right and suspected
that at some point in the near future he would need to figure all
of this out in order to survive, right now his immediate wellbeing
revolved around not lollygagging around here. He stumbled across
the living room, this time taking a lot more care not to come close
to any of the glasses, and made it to the door. He felt a momentary
triumph at that, but it was interrupted in short order as, right
after making it out the door, he fell to his knees and puked all
over himself.

Oh God
, he thought.
What do I even
think I’m doing? I’m not the kind of person who can do this. The
poison is too much. I have nowhere I can really run. I don’t even
have any fucking clothes
.

Oh knock off the pity party, CC
.
Gramma’s voice had a rare quality to it that he only remembered
hearing once or twice when he’d grown up. He couldn’t quite recall
the exact situations, but he did know that voice hadn’t been
directed at him. It was the kind of tone you never wanted to have
directed at yourself, because it was a sign that Gramma was tired
of someone’s shit.
You’ve already proven time and time again
that you’re a survivor. You can do it again
.

I’m not a survivor
, Cory thought.
All I am is a
…

A monster, right? You say that all the
time, but do you actually believe it? With all the horrible things
people have said and done in your life, do you actually think that
the monster in this situation is you
?

He’d thought of himself in those terms so
often that trying to think otherwise was difficult, but then he had
to ask himself what metric he was actually using here. What was a
monster? Someone or something who hurt people, destroyed lives,
ruined anything and everything that was good in others. Just
because he was a creature that the rest of society thought
monstrous didn’t make him a monster. He was just a man, maybe even
more of a boy, who wanted to live his own life. And if that didn’t
make him human, he didn’t know what did.

Although he swayed on his knees, his body
threatening to fall over completely and not get back up, he forced
himself back to one foot, then the other. He stood in the hall for
a few seconds to make sure he had his balance before he tried
walking again. Every movement was still torment, but he thought
perhaps it was just slightly easier than before he had vomited.

He took a few more steps, now sure that he
could make it at least as far as the stairs, although he wouldn’t
be surprised if he accidentally took the quick way down by tumbling
head first. Before he even made it that far, though, he heard a
distinctive creek from the floor below as the back door opened.

Oh God no, I can’t let them find me, I
can’t, I can’t
…

Calm down, CC. Remember that one
room
?

For a moment he didn’t remember, and he was
again struck by the absurdity of a figment of his imagination
knowing something he didn’t. It came back to him quickly, though,
mostly because the room in question was just one door down and
still ajar. That was the room where the fire had apparently
started. It took him another quick moment of thinking before he
realized why that was important—the hole burned in the floor. It
was another way down, if he could avoid anyone hearing him. Or
maybe even the boarded up windows could be kicked out and he could
jump to the street below. He’d never tried anything of that nature
before, but if FancyDancer could do it then so could he.

“Cory, is that you?” someone said up the
stairwell.

“We can smell you,” someone else said.

No
, he thought.
This has to be a
trick
. He stayed in place, instinctively going into his
crouching stance as though he intended to leap at whoever came up
those stairs. He didn’t think he’d be able to jump more than a foot
and his landing would be face first, but he was prepared to at
least try. Nothing of the sort was required, however. Two sets of
footsteps, so in sync with each other that he almost couldn’t
differentiate between them, came up the stairs moving much slower
than he knew they could just so they wouldn’t spook him.
FancyDancer finally appeared side by side at the top.

“Cory,” Dancer said, the relief palpable in
the way she said his name. He noticed that they had apparently
dropped the name Meateater.

“We’re so glad we found you,” Fancy said.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “I never told
you about this place.”

“When you went missing again we searched
everywhere,” Fancy said.

“We started with your normal haunts, hoping
you were alive.”

“Then when we started to think you were dead
we looked anywhere we thought the Dusters might have been.”

“They could have killed you,” Cory said.

“That’s why we looked during the day,” Fancy
said. “Not fun, but the Dusters wouldn’t expect it.”

Dancer pointed at Fancy. “She got a sunburn
like you wouldn’t believe.”

Fancy frowned at her with a very clear “this
is not the time” look. “Then we remembered what you said about the
pizza place and scoured the entire neighborhood around it.”

“We almost didn’t check this building,”
Dancer said. “It already smells like death. We wouldn’t have found
your scent if we didn’t accidentally get so close.”

“Thank you,” Cory said, although he didn’t
think those two simple words covered it. There was no one else who
would have kept looking for him. He felt a moment of deep shame
that he had been so paranoid about them earlier, but Gramma’s voice
in his head gently nudged him away from that. They were his
friends, his true friends, and forgiveness for these kind of things
were exactly the sort of thing he should have expected.

Fancy looked at him as though for the first
time and raised an eyebrow. It was only then that Cory remembered
he was still naked. His first inclination was to try covering
himself up before he remembered that neither of them was seeing
anything they hadn’t before. Hell, he’d seen them naked just as
much. Even with the rivulets of vomit still on his chest they had
seen him worse. At least this time none of them were covered in
their own feces.

“Who did this to you?” Dancer asked.

“Whoever it is, we’ll kick their asses,”
Fancy said.

“Actually, she means we’ll kick their
fucking
asses,” Dancer said.

“I’ve only… uh, only got a partial idea,”
Cory said. He wanted to tell them more. Part of him wanted someone
else to know what Lynn had done to him, all of it, not just the
tricking and poisoning him part. But he didn’t think he could say
everything. He didn’t want anyone to know. Cory knew that if there
was anyone he should be ashamed in front of, it was them, and yet
this was too much. He couldn’t even admit it all to himself.

“Well, for all we know whoever did this might
be coming back,” Fancy said.