Suck It Up (14 page)

20

Passing the Deuce

Portia opened the camera's flip-out screen, started recording, and tried to keep it light. “Was it a dark and stormy night?”

Morning chortled and ran a hand through his hair. “No, it was last Thanksgiving. I was living at St. Giles, and there are these host families that invite orphans to come to their home for a real Thanksgiving. I got invited to a house on Staten Island. I took the ferry out there, and the husband picked me up at the ferry landing. When I got to the house and met the wife, I realized they didn't have kids. I was their kid for the day. We had a huge meal and watched a football game. The couple was about to take me back to the ferry when they noticed I'd broken out in red spots. The woman said it was chicken pox.”

“You never had chicken pox when you were little?”

“No. That's what they found out when they called Sister Flora. And because there were a dozen little kids at St. Giles who hadn't had chicken pox, Sister asked the couple if they'd keep me for a few days until I wasn't contagious. They agreed. We made turkey sandwiches for dinner, and they let me sleep in their spare bedroom. It wasn't just a bedroom. It had a crib, with a mobile over it. The walls were painted with puffy clouds and airplanes, and there was an Elmo night-light.”

“It was a nursery for a baby that wasn't coming.”

“Yeah. It even had those glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. I remember staring at the stars and thinking that if there was a God up there in the stick 'em stars, he was a weird dude. He gave me to a woman who didn't want me, but he wouldn't give a kid to someone who really wanted one.”

Portia zoomed in a little tighter. “So what happened next?”

Morning searched for the right words. “Thanksgiving isn't just a holiday for mortals. There are some vampires who like feast days, or nights, as much as anyone. Especially when their human turkeys are fat, happy, and filled to the brim.”

“You mean with blood?”

He nodded. “He fed on the couple first.”

“How do you know that?”

“When I woke up and saw him standing over my bed, his chin was covered in blood.”

Portia squinted with disgust. “What made you wake up?”

“I don't know if I imagined it or it really happened, but I think it was a burp.”

“He burped?”

“Yeah. Then everything happened superfast. I saw a flash of fangs, I felt something hit my chest, and I got yanked out of bed like a bag of cookies grabbed off the shelf.”

“You were dessert.”

“Pretty much. He struck faster than a snake. I tried to scream, but the air rushed out of me without a sound.”

“What did it feel like? I mean, having someone drink your blood.”

“I remember feeling two things. I was terrified and struggling to get away, but he was superstrong. Then there was this other part of me, the like-a-movie part of me, that was just watching it happen.”

“What did that part see?”

“It's like my whole body had turned into a punctured tire. It felt like it was caving in on itself. Even my brain felt like it was collapsing. I knew I was about to black out.”

“Did you think you were dying?”

“Yeah, and I probably was. Until the accident.”

“What accident?”

Morning frowned at the absurdity of it. “Backwash.”

“Backwash?”

“The vampire was so bloated from feeding on the couple, and on me, that he burped in the middle of feeding. Some of the blood that was in his mouth long enough to be tainted backwashed into my neck.”

Her face scrunched. “Gross. So that's why you became a vampire, backwash?”

“Yeah. When it's done intentionally, it's called passing the deuce.”

“What's the deuce?”

He touched his neck with two fingers. “The fang marks of a bite, and, if a vampire wants to make another vampire, it's passing the virus that lives in vampire blood.”

“You mean like AIDS?”

“Yeah, or like being bitten by a tick and getting Lyme disease. The vampire virus infects a mortal, makes them very sick while it spreads through their body, and creates a different creature.”

Portia was mesmerized. “Kind of like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly?”

“Yeah, but not as pretty,” he said with a twisted smile. “Especially when you're a backwash accident. There's even a word for it. SangFU.”

“What's that mean?”

“Blood flubup, if you wanna be nice about it.”

“What about the vampire who turned you? Was he around—”

“When I realized I wasn't dead? No, he'd disappeared. I never got a close look at him. I wouldn't know him if he was sitting next to me.”

“So what happened next?”

“When I finally came to, I left the bedroom and saw myself in a mirror. I looked like anyone who'd been sick for a few days. And I wrote off the vampire thing as a nightmare, or some hallucination I had from the chicken pox. But then I looked for the spots on my face. They were completely gone. The only spots I found were the two on my neck.”

“The deuce.”

“Yeah.” He smirked. “A leopard can't change its spots, but a vampire can. I traded the chicken pox for the vampire pox.”

“What about the couple?” Portia asked. “Were they vampires too?”

“No, they were dead. That's when I decided I'd rather die than do that to anyone.”

“But you were a vampire. How did you have the willpower to resist what you'd become? How could you starve yourself to death?”

“I don't know. Maybe it's because I'm a SangFU. Maybe I'm missing something.” He slid her a grin. “Maybe I'm bloodlust-challenged. Whatever, I went to the basement, found a hammer and nails, and nailed myself in the room with the ceiling stars. And I stayed there until I blacked out.”

Two questions popped into Portia's head: If Morning had been at the couple's house, why wasn't he a suspect in their double murder? When she Googled him, why didn't his name come up in the reporting about the murder? But seeing how tired he'd begun to look, she shelved her questions and kept the focus on his turning. “But you didn't die. Someone got you out of that room.” A lightbulb flared in her head; she couldn't kill her curiosity. “And someone must have eliminated the evidence of you being there! Otherwise you'd be a suspect in a double homicide!”

Morning nodded, impressed. “True.” But telling her who had scrubbed his presence from the crime scene, who had convinced Sister Flora that he'd run away before the murder, and who had bought the Sister's silence in the matter with a generous contribution to St. Giles was not something he was ready or authorized by Birnam to divulge.

“Well?” Portia exclaimed, exasperated with the long silence. “Who got you out of the room?”

He answered with a weary smile that he didn't need to fake. Telling his story of being drained and rearranged had sucked him dry. He opened his silver case on the window seat, slid out a label-free can of Blood Lite, and pulled the tab. “I promised to tell you the boring stories. Don't you think I should save some of the good stuff for Gabby Kissenkauf?”

She wanted to punch him in the shoulder. Hard. But maybe punching a thirsty vampire wasn't a good thing. She turned off her camera, even though she was still in the throes of story-lust. “You're right. I mean, we're flying on his jet and all. I guess he deserves something.”

Watching him take a long swig from the unmarked can, she had a million more questions about what he was drinking, where it came from, and on and on. But another thought cut to the front of the line. If vampires weren't dead or undead, her new title,
Out of the Casket,
had just kicked the bucket. She needed a new one.
The Accidental Vampire, An Inconvenient Tooth,
and
Thanksgiving Bites!
came quickly to mind. But they were either too retro or too flip. She needed a title that sounded good with “Oscar-winning.”

VAMPIRES VS. HUMANS

THE BIG DIFFERENCE

Our minor differences—drinking vs. eating,
immortality
vs. mortality, fangs vs. retainers—get down to one big difference. Cells. No, not cell phones.

STEM CELLS

You've heard of them. They're the supercells you begin with when you're a speck of life in your mother's womb. Your stem cells divide, differentiate, and explode into the complex human organism you become. But during your transformation from fetus to full grown, your stem cells change from miracles of morphing to monsters of monotony. If cells in a grown-up could talk they might sound like this: “You want me to divide into a brain cell? Fuhgettaboutit! I do nose hair cells, dat's it!”

But vampires never lose these miraculous morphers. We are walking pillars of stem cells. It's why we possess the ability to “differentiate” into so many forms. It's why we can regenerate ourselves for as long as we chose to live.

You are clay, molded in childhood, dried in youth, and fired in the kiln of aging. We are clay that never dries, that never solidifies.

However, this hardly makes us a superior race. It only makes us different.

21

The Night Visitor

After arriving in Los Angeles, Morning, Portia, and Penny were whisked off to the luxurious Babylon Hotel and escorted to the presidential suite, compliments of
The Night-Night Show.

The penthouse suite consisted of a palatial central sitting room flanked by two bedrooms that needed a dozen Persian carpets to cover the floors. Morning took one bedroom, while Portia and Penny shared the master bedroom.

From the moment they arrived, security was provided by the hotel's version of the Secret Service. Which was needed because word had gotten out that “the vampire kid” was staying at the Babylon. Besides the media trucks and news crews in front of the hotel, there were paparazzi and an array of vampire fans, from black-clad goths to a vampire-themed cheerleading squad called the Blood-curdling Screamers. There was also a group of protestors from End Times Community College. While half the students loudly accused Morning of being the Antichrist, the other half worked the crowd trying to sell memberships in the school's Rapture Miles Program. It promised mileage points to the chosen ones who would be shuttling back and forth between earth and heaven during the End Times.

To avoid contact with the fans and foes down on the street, Penny and Portia ordered room service for dinner while Morning downed another unlabeled Blood Lite. Between mouthfuls of filet mignon, Portia peppered him with questions about his mysterious drink of choice and the locked case he kept it in. While he dodged most of her questions, he admitted it was an “artificial blood protein drink,” and the only beverage he had ever liked as a vampire. When she asked to taste it, Penny told her to finish her steak or she wouldn't get desert.

After Penny briefed Morning on their appearance with Gabby Kissenkauf the next day, she sent Morning to his bedroom, and insisted that Portia come with her to theirs.

He welcomed the break. It had been an exhausting day that had started before dawn in New York and was ending three thousand miles away in L.A.

After stripping down to T-shirt and boxers, he slipped between the bed's cool linen sheets. The scenes of the day swirled through his head. Scaring Ally Alfamen. Meeting the old guy in the firehouse. Learning about the Maltese cross and the knights of the fire table. And there was Portia.

He was surprised how much he liked hanging out with her, tossing words back and forth. It had never been something he was very good at, but with her it came easy. He wasn't so sure about her take on him. He wondered how much she was faking the friendliness because she wanted something from him: his stories. At least she was up-front about it. He had to give her that. She wanted to make a movie about him. But he didn't like thinking of her as some story vampire. He pushed her out of his mind by going back to the best part of the day.

The firehouse. And the crazy idea he had about becoming a superhero
and
a firefighter. Then an even weirder notion drifted into his head. What if he could CD into exactly that? Like the supersuits he'd imagined earlier. He slipped into the black labyrinth of his mind, and laser-focused on the image of a firefighter's bunker gear hanging on the wall. A moment later, something knocked his shoulder and flew past him. He'd been tagged by the black and yellow armor of a fire knight. He raced after it, careening through the darkness. As he hurtled around corners and down holes, the blackness began to streak with red. He dismissed the tiny red comets as if they were nothing but neon ladybugs. As he swung around a sharp turn pursuing the fire knight, he zipped past a swarming nest of red bugs. He realized they weren't bugs; they were glowing embers. His mind-labyrinth was smoldering. As he shot up a shaft after the knight, the red-streaked blackness exploded into flames.

Morning woke with a yelping start and realized he'd fallen asleep. It was only a dream. His skin prickled with heat; he was clammy with sweat. He threw off the covers and jumped out of bed.

He opened the nearest window. A breeze pushed through it, cooling his skin. He looked down at the street and noticed that the carnival of press, fans, and protestors had vanished. Either they'd gone home or the End Times had kicked into serious gear and they were earning their first Rapture miles.

Climbing back into bed, he tried to shut down his senses. But there was a gnarl of tension in his jaw and a dull ache in his gums. It was like a sensation he used to have as a Lifer, after a night of grinding his teeth.
Great,
he thought,
after two days of hangin' with Lifers again, I go back to grinding my teeth.

He turned toward the window. The bothersome sensation went away. Just outside the window was a yellow and white awning. Beyond it the lights of the Hollywood Hills twinkled. Over the faint noise of traffic drifting up from the street, he heard a steady ding. He figured it was a piece of awning hardware being blown against the aluminum frame. It sounded like the clang of a pulley against a flag-pole. It became a percussive lullaby as he watched lights snuff out in the distant hills.

A few minutes later, the gathering darkness claimed his last flicker of thought and buried him in sleep.

         

When the window framed just a few scattered lights, an object slid into view. It jutted down like the sharp nose of a spaceship, then it lengthened into a thick cane of twisted wood. Next came the knot of rope it was secured to. It was a massive stake.

The wind thumped it against the window.

Morning rolled onto his back. His eyes fluttered open. He stared at the ceiling and listened to the gentle knocking. Dismissing it as the awning, he fell back to sleep.

A blanket of mist slid down the outside of the window, curled through the opening, and glided down the wall like a stingray. A moment later, a naked figure, facing the window, rose up. He had the wide back and narrow hips of a swimmer. He reached out the window, clutched the wooden stake, and deftly flicked away the knot of rope. Pulling the stake inside, the man turned toward the bed.

Ikor DeThanatos.

Morning groaned.

The vampire instantly crouched to the floor.

Morning resumed the rhythmic breathing of sleep.

DeThanatos rose and stepped to the bed. He looked down at the young vampire and sneered with contempt. The boy had violated immortal law. He had made sacred secrets known to mortals. He had endangered the existence of all vampires.

He clutched the stake in both hands and raised it over his head. He would plunge it through the boy's heart, impaling him on the bed like a moth with a pin. Then he would fetch the other tools from the roof and carry out the sentence the law demanded for commandment breakers: annihilation.

As the slayer gathered his strength for the impaling, something swirled in his gut. It snagged his attention, but he dismissed it. He had stopped to feed during the journey to Los Angeles; his gut was probably objecting to flying on a full stomach.

DeThanatos rebraced to plunge the stake. Pain shot through his viscera like a jagged blade of lightning. He defied it, lifting the stake higher. His face contorted. The searing pain sapped his strength, draining his resolve. DeThanatos felt like he was the one impaled. He was. On the stake of confusion.

Of all the human races, vampires possess the greatest powers of mind over matter. But in one instance, a vampire's body will trump his will every time. When a mortal is turned into a vampire, one of the biggest changes is in the gut. The gut becomes a second brain. This second brain controls two things: bloodlust and the survival instinct.

The horrendous realization of why his body was betraying him shifted DeThanatos's gut-wrenching pain to knee-buckling nausea. He brought the stake to the floor, steadying himself. He dropped to his knees and gasped for air. Clutching the top of the stake, his glazed face fell on his hands. As he caught his breath, the nausea dissipated.

DeThanatos lifted his head and glared at the sleeping boy. He wasn't any boy. He was
his
boy. A blood child he had never known.

Then the memory came. The previous Thanksgiving. The feast of two adults, and a teenage boy with red spots. He recalled the juicy gluttony. But in his ravenous rapture he couldn't remember when he had accidentally pushed blood back into the boy, spawning a blood child. A SangFU.

Only one thing was certain. His gut had stayed his hand and stopped him from breaking the fourth commandment: Thou shalt not destroy thy blood child. The punishment for doing so was swift. Instant conflagration. His second brain had saved him from the fireball of annihilation.

Staring down at his blood child did nothing to weaken DeThanatos's resolve. If anything, knowing that this vampire traitor was
his,
made it stronger. Yes, the boy had received a stay of execution. But not for long. While immortal law forbid the destruction of a blood child by the maker's hand, it said nothing about a hired hand.