Blood Harvest: Two Vampire Novels (40 page)

“We’ve brought one or two other vampires to
this apartment, you know. Jane No-Last-Name was the last one. All
of them react the same way you just did. They’re unable to wrap
their heads around the idea of vampires with their own homes and
jobs.”

“You have jobs?” Cory asked. It was an even
more foreign concept to him than a vampire living anywhere other
than on the streets.

“Of course we have jobs,” Fancy said. “How do
you think we afford to have an apartment? Nothing spectacular, of
course. It’s not like we can do anything that would require us to
be anywhere near direct sunlight. And we have to be very careful
about hiding our teeth. But we’ve found some stuff that’s good
enough for us to get by.”

Cory stared at her, trying to comprehend.
FancyDancer had always been different than any other vampires he’d
met, but this was the kind of difference he had never prepared
for.

“You know, Dancer and I have tried to do some
research into vampires, trying to understand what that thing down
in the cave made us and what it planned to do with us. We figured
somebody has to understand, right? But all we’ve ever found is
Dracula
and
Interview With the Vampire
and
Twilight
. At best we’ve found a few bits of old folklore.
But there’s nothing that we’ve seen so far that explains real
vampires. We all have to just guess based on what we’ve seen. Like,
are all vampires created the way we were? Whatever the hell was
behind that door, are there more out there? We don’t have anything
else to compare ourselves to, so it only makes sense that we’ll
look to the vampires around us and assume that’s the way it has to
be. And when all the vampires you see were abused and driven mad…”
Fancy stopped wiping him off and shrugged. “Then I guess it’s easy
to think that’s the way it is for all of us. We’ve tried to tell
this to other vampires from down in that cave, but a lot of them
are pretty far gone. They were down there longer than most of us.
They’ve forgotten how to be anything other than frightened and
scared. But Dancer and I have always thought you were different.
That’s why we’ve spent so much time trying to reach you. You don’t
have to live like you do. You can get help from others. You don’t
have to be a frightened boy in a cage for the rest of your
life.”

“I’m not…” Cory was about to protest that he
wasn’t a frightened boy, but that would have just been reflex. He
knew the truth. “Actually I think that’s what I was like before the
cave and cages. I don’t remember much, but I think there was more
before. A lot more.”

“And yet you’re still the one who has been
most open to us. So what exactly does that say about you?”

It says that you’ve got me
, Gramma
said. Cory almost asked her—out loud, even—if hearing voices was a
prerequisite for being sane, but he knew better. She meant that he
had found that safe place inside him, a part forever separate yet
forever pristine, a part where a bit of his true self would always
be no matter how many people and things on the outside tried to
strip him of his humanity.

Fancy stepped back and then turned him to see
if there was anything she had missed on his back. After another
perfunctory couple of wipes she declared him as clean as he would
get without a deep bath and then ushered him back into the living
room. Dancer was in the living room with a plastic laundry basket
full of wadded up clothes on the couch. She had a binder sitting
open next to it, but she was ignoring it for now as she rummaged
through the clothes.

“Don’t know what size he is?” Dancer
said.

“No, but he looks scrawny,” Fancy
answered.

Dancer nodded. “Really scrawny. Maybe
these?”

She pulled out a pair of blaze orange
sweatpants and held it out to him. As much as he wanted to cover
himself up he was a little leery about where such a number of
clothes had come from that obviously weren’t intended for either of
them.

“We’ve gathered them up from thrift shops and
the like,” Fancy answered to his unspoken question. “Some of the
stuff we donate to one or two of the shelters we know some of the
other vampires hide at. The rest we keep around. Remember when we
tried to offer you some new clothes at the beginning of
winter?”

The sweatpants were ugly and just a size too
big for him, but when he pulled the drawstring tight they stayed on
his hips just fine. He had worn a lot worse in his time sleeping
under dumpsters.

“This shirt should work for you, too,” Dancer
said. “We don’t have any socks or shoes in our stash, but we do
have a pair of slippers that’ll keep you at least from walking
around barefoot.”

As Cory put the proffered items on
FancyDancer sat down on the couch, so close they touched despite
plenty of room to sit apart. “Are you comfortable now?” Fancy
asked. Cory nodded.

“Good,” Dancer said. “Because now comes the
part you’re probably not going to like.”

“We need to know what happened to you,” Fancy
said.

“All of it,” Dancer said.

Cory stood staring at them. Now that he was
clothed he had the urge to run for the door. He didn’t want to talk
about any of this. He didn’t want to say how easily he had been
tricked, or how he should have known better. He most definitely
didn’t want to say anything about what had been happening to his
body while he had retreated into his mind.

But more than anything else, he didn’t want
to admit the truth: that no matter what else had happened, Lynn had
said she loved him, and a part of him still wanted to think that
was completely true no matter what she had done against his
will.

Dancer stood. “Okay, you look like you’re
ready to bolt again. Just calm down, alright?”

Fancy fidgeted in her seat as though she
wanted to continue sitting but couldn’t as long as Dancer was
standing. Finally she stood up as well. “Maybe you don’t have to
tell us everything,” she said.

“You can just tell us what you think is
important,” Dancer said.

Fancy nodded. “Nothing embarrassing or
painful, right?”

After some hesitation Cory nodded as well.
Both of them took this as a positive sign and sat back down. While
Cory could have sat in a paisley armchair across from them he
instead elected to stand as he told them only what he thought he
knew about Lynn and the Dusters. About halfway through he realized
he was pacing, and when both of them asked him to back up and
repeat a few things he understood that he was speaking at the rate
of a caffeinated chipmunk. He made a conscious effort to slow down,
but it at least felt good to speak for more than a few sentences to
someone other than a figment of his imagination.

FancyDancer listened to the entire thing,
interrupting as little as possible, but giving each other glances
now and then as though something or other he said struck a
particular cord. When he was done he finally sat in the chair,
suddenly aware of exactly how exhausted the simple act of speaking
had made him. Neither Fancy nor Dancer said anything for nearly a
minute, instead just staring at each other. They almost looked like
they were communicating telepathically, but even for vampires Cory
didn’t think that was possible. Of course, with as odd as these two
were he could have been wrong.

“The blood that was in the glasses,” Fancy
finally said as they both turned to look at him again.

“How sure are you that it was human?” Dancer
asked.

“I don’t know. Not very? It was at least the
same as the stuff she was feeding me. Maybe not poisoned, though, I
guess.”

Fancy grabbed the binder and started flipping
through it while Dancer asked another question. “Out of all the
stuff she was feeding you, if you had to guess, how many different
people did it come from?”

“I don’t… uh, how would I know? That’s not
the kind of thing I usually think about.”

“How about maybe four or five?” Fancy asked
as she stopped on one particular page. Cory craned his neck to see
what she was looking at but the type was too small to see from his
seat, and he still wasn’t comfortable getting any closer.

“Maybe? Sure. Could be. I don’t know,” Cory
said.

“Look, we’ve been trying to look into all
this stuff on Vlad the Mystery by ourselves,” Dancer said. Fancy
stood just long enough to hand Cory the binder, leaving it open to
the page she had just found. Cory glanced at it, flipping through
the rest of the binder while holding his spot with his thumb. A few
of the pages had cut out newspaper articles taped to them. Most
looked like they had been printed out from the Internet. Two or
three looked like they were official documents of some kind. When
Cory took a closer look at these last ones he realized they were
copies of police reports.

“How did you…?” Cory started to ask.

“Just because we want to be left alone
doesn’t mean we won’t occasionally use our powers on humans if we
think it’s important,” Fancy said.

“We used our glamour thing on a couple of
secretaries at the cop shop,” Dancer said.

“I think one of them had a crush on Dancer,”
Fancy said.

“Probably would have given the copies to us
without our powers,” Dancer said.

Cory barely noticed what they were saying.
There was a common thread between all the things collected in the
binder: all of it had something to do with Vlad the Mystery. The
articles from the paper and Internet were in roughly chronological
order, starting with the first murder a month or so after the
vampires had emerged from their captivity. Many of the earlier
articles described the victims’ wounds in perhaps a little too much
detail while later ones had left things out, almost as though the
reporters had started to get bored with an uncatchable serial
killer stalking their city. But here or there in the later articles
FancyDancer had highlighted a few things in blue. Cory read them
over, trying to understand why, but apparently he didn’t have the
same eye for analytical detail that they did.

“I don’t understand what any of this is,”
Cory said.

“The murders don’t always match up,” Fancy
said.

“We started to notice it a little after
Christmas,” Dancer said.

Cory took another look at some of the earlier
articles, then again at the later ones, this time reading parts of
the police reports as well. At first he thought they must have been
seeing problems where there weren’t any, but an officer in one of
the last reports specifically commented on a few things that
weren’t right. Mostly the details that didn’t line up were ones
that weren’t in the papers, things the police had kept out for
security’s sake. The throats of all the victims were ripped out,
but at some crime scenes, especially all the earlier ones, there
was very little blood anywhere. The police speculated that the
victims had been killed elsewhere and then dumped. These tended to
be the dump sites that weren’t quite as flashy as the others. Also
there was evidence in some murders that the bodies had been dropped
from a great height, since most of the bones in their bodies were
broken post-mortem. The ones that had been left in better known
sites with more blood didn’t have this detail.

Cory finally looked up. “Two different
killers.”

Both of them nodded. “One of them is Vlad the
Mystery,” Fancy said.

“The other is just a person who wishes they
were Vlad the Mystery,” Dancer said.

“Or rather people,” Fancy said.

Cory thought back to that first night when
Lynn had taken him in. She had seemed so normal to him, but then he
supposed his definition of normal was skewed. She’d appeared
honestly worried that he might die. He couldn’t imagine that same
woman going up to random people and killing them to harvest their
blood.

But then he hadn’t been able to imagine that
look in her eye on the night where he had come back to the
apartment, the crazed look like he had tried to deprive her of her
basic right to own him.

“They were stocking up,” Cory said.

“And that’s why she had so much blood ready
when she first took you,” Fancy said.

“They were planning what they did to you in
advance,” Dancer said.

“But why me? And why do all this at all?”

“You were probably just the first one they
ran into that didn’t die,” Dancer said.

“The Dusters had killed vampires before,”
Fancy said. “They must not have figured the best way to take
someone yet.”

Cory felt nauseated again, but he hadn’t had
any blood in hours so there was nothing to puke up this time. “Then
why kill all the ones after me, huh? If all they wanted was to turn
themselves into vampires, there would have been no reason to get
rid of the others. They didn’t do anything. They all just wanted to
be left alone.”

FancyDancer again exchanged a knowing look.
Cory decided he was getting a little annoyed by that and the
overly-dramatic pause they always tended to give before speaking
again.

“Cory, you said you saw Pig,” Fancy said.

“Yeah, so?”

“And he disappeared on you faster than he
should have been able to move, right?” Dancer asked.

Cory shrugged, although the uncomfortable
memories of that night felt decidedly deserving of more than a
shrug.

“Didn’t you ever wonder how?” Fancy
asked.

“I guess I didn’t really want to think of him
that much.”

“But let us guess something,” Dancer
said.

“Back when we were trapped in the cave he was
in the cage to the left of you, right?” Fancy asked.

“And you talked to him all the time?” Dancer
asked.

“More than you ever talked to anyone else in
any of the other cages around you?”

“He was basically the closest thing you had
to a friend down there?”

“Even when the things he told you were
disturbing and just made you despair even more?”