Blood Rules (18 page)

Would he have to drink from Mariah in a few days . . . ?

Out of the corner of his gaze, he could see her profile—delicate, with prim, soft lips and a gamine chin edged by that razored hair. Though a nick of desire cut him, he wouldn't bleed from it, in spite of pretending that nothing had happened between them.

It was as if she sensed his perusal, and he could see her glance at him, then back at the hub.

Gabriel leaned away from her. But even with a couple of feet separating them, he was still too close. Their impromptu liaison had only strengthened the link between them, and he could still taste her. Could still feel the fiery life she'd imprinted on him, reminding him of what he was.

“I'm ready to go when you are.” She'd made an effort to look like a hub dweller by tucking in her shirt and draping a simple old scarf around her neck, plus she'd stuffed all her weapons into her backpack, making do without the holsters at her sides. She seemed like a random hubite who'd be coming or going. More important, they'd also talked about acting a little loopy, as if they were as overstimulated as the thugs Stamp had brought with him to the Badlands.

“I'm ready,” he said. There wasn't much he could do about his own wardrobe, but he'd pass.

“First things first.” She accessed the comm unit Sammy had given to her and spoke into it. “Is anyone there?”

When there was no answer, she stowed it away again, frowning.

He said, “The homestead is probably too far for a trinket like that to work now.”

“That's what I keep telling myself. Then I start getting nervous, thinking, ‘What if they
can't
answer the comm? What if I attracted attention when I was running outside without cover?' ”

Her genuine fear pawed at him, as if stripping off his defenses bit by bit.

“Don't torture yourself with ridiculous thoughts, Mariah. You know as well as I do that it's the comm's lack of reception, not some kind of tragedy.”

She must've liked the tone of his voice, because she started to look up at him, her heartbeat quickening.

Shit, if she really focused those green eyes on him, he might do something dumb.

He just about jumped off the rock vampire-style, arcing through the air and landing in a gentle crouch on the ground, just so he could get away from her all the quicker. But he got control of himself before he did a fool maneuver like that and instead climbed down like any normal human would.

Sure, he did it a mite too fast, but it beat exposing his preter side.

Mariah followed him, and he could sense tautness in her, as if she were wondering when they'd talk about the herb house.

Never, probably. Because talking about it would've meant that it'd actually happened—that he'd crossed a personal line back into near gluttony. That he'd given in to everything that was base and unnatural.

Or
too
natural.

They took a road upslope, where zoom bikes and solar-batteried box-looking cars wound up to GBVille. Every vehicle sported digital advertisements for General Benefactors, which produced media toys as well as spiritual tools like high-fashion yoga wear and do-it-yourself altar kits. Some windows even flashed personal self-made “collages,” which featured provocative images that went by faster than the naked eye could grasp. Subliminal art from invasive artists.

Humans had more disposable income these days. It hadn't been that way since India had beaten down the United States with economic sanctions, so it was only recently that mercenary global investors had banded with the United States to buy most of its assets back. The country itself was behind on a lot of the most advanced technologies available, but it was obviously beginning to catch up again. On an individual level, its confidence also seemed to be growing back to where it used to be during the days of Before.

When Gabriel heard the gasp from a pair of FlyShoes behind them, he instinctively reached for Mariah, guiding her farther to the side of the road so the person could pass. The man's FlyShoes made him a few feet taller, the implements strapped to his legs just under the knee as he lurch-sprinted by.

In response, Gabriel kept his head low. Stamp's men had used FlyShoes.

As he bristled, he kept his senses open to detect any vampires like him, just as he'd been doing ever since leaving the Badlands. He'd found that it didn't do much good with were-creatures and demons, who were far better at masquerading.

His blood felt thinner in his veins, thanks to the altitude, and he could hear Mariah making a bigger effort to breathe, but at least the air was milder than it'd been in the desert. Maybe GBVille wouldn't be so bad after all.

But Gabriel changed his mind as they got closer, to where he felt those vibrations even deeper. They made him remember a time when he was very young and a military jet plane had roared over his home, low and fast. And that was what it felt like now—low-frequency sound waves riffling through him.

“You hear that?” he asked Mariah. “You feel it in your chest?”

“The beats?” Mariah asked.

While Gabriel nodded, he took a pair of earplugs from his bag and stuffed them in, but they didn't benefit him, so he packed them up again. The vibrations weren't just about hearing.

Soon, they found the source.

Clear booths lined the road like a stiff welcoming committee. Inside them, humans stood as if in silent ecstasy, swaying back and forth, their heads thrown back as the low-frequency vibration waves pounded out of speakers. But they weren't listening to music. Just . . . bangs.

Mariah clearly sensed Gabriel's keen vampire discomfort, because she hurried her steps uphill until they came to some platforms where guaranteed, disease-free, governments-ponsored prostitutes posed like statues. Several men stood around one altar that held a naked woman who wore nothing but a snake, and they had their hands in their pants.

The woman didn't seem to care much. She just stared over their heads, petting her own snake.

It was quieter here, so Gabriel decided it'd be okay to speak. He'd have to avoid eye contact and thought sharing with Mariah, though. He had no choice, because other outside-dwelling hubites—distractoids, they were called—didn't really look each other in the eye. He needed to imitate that. Also, in a place where Text was the norm, he'd have to make sure he looked pretty clueless about body language.

“We entered through one of the red-light districts,” he said, keeping his voice low. He couldn't speak Text with Mariah, who wasn't so fluent. “Not that there'll be a big difference when we step out of it.”

“Wow,” Mariah said, wide-eyed as they passed the platform of the last prostitute—a drag queen in red sequins and satin who fanned himself with a blaze of old peacock feathers. “Wow.”

Maybe she wouldn't have to act much like a loopy distractoid if she was so entranced by the sights. But what did he expect? She was a shut-in from Dallas, one of the last traditional holdouts in the country.

Gabriel's blood welled as he tried to reconcile that innocent side of her with the animal who'd gone at him in the herb house. But he still couldn't put the two of them together.

“Wow, what?” he asked. “The women?”

“The . . . everything.” She glanced back toward vibration row, whispering, “I've never seen those vibe stations before. And certainly not . . . those kind of women. In my part of the country, there was too much fear of purity enforcers for that to be in style.”

“You know that Dallas wasn't the same as most other hubs. As for those vibe stations, they discovered somewhere along the way that vibrations can change things like heart-rate patterns and contractions in the muscles. Just one more way to get a rush outside of drugs.”

“And I thought neuroenhancers were bad enough. When my dad was working, they tried to get him to take some, just so he'd turn in top-grade performances. That's what they said, anyway.”

Gabriel lifted an eyebrow. He and she kept mentioning a “they,” but he often wondered just who “they” were. Maybe no one really knew, aside from assigning them the term “bad guys.”

Mariah distractedly looked ahead to where the red-light district ended and the corporate buildings rose; she was doing a pretty good job of acting urban, adding a few spastic quirks here and there as she talked to him and avoided that eye contact, too.

“My dad resisted the request,” she said. “It's one reason he ended up quitting. He saw where the world was going. Actually, he thought it was already too late, and he was right.” She still hadn't slowed down. “When schools started suggesting that kids take enhancers for tests, that's when my dad began talking about leaving. Even if we hadn't been . . . attacked”—she obviously wasn't going to talk about how becoming a werewolf had driven her and her father out of society right now—“I think Dad would've taken us to the nowheres, anyway.”

Gabriel thought of the outpost camp where the psychic lived among the exodus of humans. Seemed that there were others who didn't like the direction society had taken, either, and they weren't just preters.

Now the buildings seemed to swallow the sky, hovering over them like watchers. It was almost as if he and Mariah were enclosed indoors in a way. Honestly, the place was just about as oppressive as a lane in a necropolis, but sleeker, with hints of bonfires and ragged shadows from a group of thugs lighting off one building while a whisper fountain that espoused positive thoughts burbled from a granite square across the way.

The profane blending with the sublime, Gabriel thought. Just like every hub he'd visited. But no one around them seemed to give a crap about the nonsensicalness of it all as they FlyShoed by or walked in a straight line toward their next destination. Everyone was focused on the distraction that owned them at the moment. Pleasure freakin' Island.

Sterile and empty, even with everything so polished.

The air was even devoid of the earthier smells from the outskirts. The liveliest elements seemed to be sounds, like the echoes that only Gabriel could hear from the red-light district vibe stations and the whiz of motors from vehicles and FlyShoes. Even the vital signs from these hubites was stifled because of all that processed food they ate, slowing down their blood flow with blocked arteries.

Then he felt different vibrations through the ground, like a stampede, and he gestured for Mariah to settle under a concrete canopy with him.

It was just in time, too, because while he and Mariah got out of the way, thirty or more wild-eyed people clambered past them.

Gray business suits, withered street clothes, a lot of disease masks over the lower halves of their faces . . . The running ones wore all different kinds of fashion as they barreled by.

“We had those in Dallas,” Mariah said, craning her neck to follow them.

“They're everywhere.”

Word had it that the running ones had started with a few smart-asses who'd listened to a poet prophet who'd predicted these groups. “Everything is permitted because nothing is true,” the man had also said. Gabriel, never a scholar, couldn't recall his name, but he'd remembered these words because he'd started running away, too, just not like these idiots.

To the original runners, the activity had no doubt been a joke, or maybe even an attempt to merge fantasy with reality, just as video games and old-time movies had done. But the initial groups had never disappeared after being introduced into society; they existed in perpetuity, regenerating, even after losing people to exhaustion. They were constantly replenished by one more who'd probably had enough of the vibe stations or carnerotica shows. Then another person would join as they tried to run away from whatever they needed to. Then another . . . another . . .

Everyone had gotten so used to them that all you could do was step out of the way, concentrating on your own distractions.

When this group vanished around a corner, it left a city square full of concrete under the harsh slants of shadow and gray moonlight. To the left of Gabriel and Mariah, a man sneaked up on another guy who was wearing a water necklace—a string of liquid-filled beads that flagrantly symbolized his wealth. No one intervened when the disease-masked hooligan snatched it, but a teenager did take a photo with her arm camera. The culprit left without the necklace, knowing the girl would be sending the picture to the authorities, who depended on citizen nosiness. She'd also get a touch of fame from posting the film to the Nets. The police monitored those, too.

All in all, none of the people Gabriel saw right now were interacting as much as they were merely aiming shit at each other or watching things while standing next to each other. A good example of the latter was the game therapy corners, where people let out their frustrations on virtual scenarios—jolly boxes. In them, you could die, but then you were resurrected for another go. Some distractoids spent days with this government-approved pastime, dying, living, back and forth until there was no line between the two.

Gabriel could smell every one of the distractoids as if they were his next meal.

Nearby, a zoom bike came to a stop, and it brought Gabriel back to the moment. He'd forgotten that even a vampire could get overstimulated in a hub.

He thought he detected a . . . familiar . . . smell. A scent he didn't like, but before he could get a bead on it, he and Mariah walked on, trying to stay to the shadows as they looked for a building that matched the description Taraline had given them. It'd have to be something old, with stucco that had withstood the years. Something just out of the center of the hub—inaccessible enough so the scientists could act in secrecy behind the possibly Shredder-protected brick wall while everyone else went about amusing themselves.