The Living and the Dead (Tyler G Book 3) (29 page)

When he ate though, Calley
getting up to make the food for him, he found two things. The first was that he
could
taste the food, with a little bit of attention to it. That got a
lot of things to snap into place for him, all at once. Also, as soon as food started
going in, he could feel it turn to life energy and travel down the thread to
Lucy. Wherever she was.

Then, as he chewed carefully,
which was easier now, he felt a bit of that power coming back. Hovering outside
of himself, above his head. Waiting for him to use for magic, as long as he was
careful. So that part worked still. If he ate more, he could send power to his
mom, and she could let him use some for magic, if she wanted.

It wasn't what he desired for
himself, but he could work with it. More to the point, he was willing to bet
that, in a pinch, if she cut him off, he could eat food, and strip the life
from it inside of himself. He'd have to use the power instantly, before it
moved to her, but it might work to get things done. It was a thing to practice.
So was doing it all, magic, with as little power as possible. Not at that
moment. Focusing on keeping things going, he nodded.

It was smoother now than before,
so he shook his head, just for the practice. Then he smiled, and tried to
frown. It got Calley and Steve to stare at him. Feeling a little bit bad he
realized something.

"Where's Scotty?"

Ginger put her hand on his arm
and squeezed a little. Not too hard.

"He's off with Skalla.
Apparently her idea of a date involves killing stuff. So they're hunting
rabbits. It sounds romantic." She didn't seem to be joking about it.

"Oh, sure. I can see that.
It's pretty different, and a thing that they both might enjoy. Not very fair to
the rabbits though, is it?"

That got a laugh. It just wasn't
going to be.
Maybe
if they were going after elephants. People would get
all up at arms if they started killing the ones in the zoos, so he wasn't going
to mention that one. Because guess who would be called on to fix it if that
happened? He knew the answer there already.

Kaitlyn. After all, he wasn't
really up for much at the present. If anything came up right now, he'd have to
get Lucy to take over again. Hopefully, his doing
this
wasn't seen as an
insult to her. She seemed to be being helpful.

"I should eat more. A lot.
Like Zack does. So, I have no plans. We should have a fire in the back yard and
roast stuff. There's a metal fire pit out there. I think I have a date with Eve
later." He smiled at Ginger, who just nodded, but didn't say anything
about it. "To work on magic stuff. I bet we can get her to do something
fun first though, if we try hard enough."

Rebekah stood suddenly, and
nodded at him.

"I'll do that part. Great
idea. We need to make sure we bond more. It will be a while until the band
takes off, and I don't want to lose all that momentum. We should have Scotty in
too, but I won't begrudge him getting a little bit of love. He deserves
it."

Calley gave a head bob.

"Yeah, so does Ambassador
Skalla. I would have been doing him more, but he's actually a great-great-uncle
of mine. Not close enough to be too creepy, but it still
is
. Ginger, you
should tell him to come to bed with you soon. He can't ask you, even though I
know that he likes you. You outrank him, so he can't approach, without that
starting a fight?"

That started an interesting talk
about Vampire hierarchal dating rules.

Amazingly they didn't actually
apply to
him
all that strongly. He was important, thanks to his job, and
kind of considered one of them, as far as the Vamps went. It was the being dead
thing. Also why they hadn't offered to pay him for some of the things that had
happened. Bey had figured him as one of their people, more or less, from the
very start. That was news to him, but it meant that he needed to be more
careful, rather than feel like he could get away with doing whatever he wanted.

It was good to know he had people
however. He decided to review what he knew about Vamps, when he got a chance.

After he wrote all the new data
he was getting right then down.

In all it took him nearly three
weeks to really get back to being close to normal. Tyler started running twice
daily, toward that end. Fight practice came about that often, too. Once in the
morning with Ginger, Scotty and Rebekah, who all took turns making fun of him
by holding their arms up at shoulder height and moaning when he messed things
up by being clumsy. It was kind of funny, he knew. Still, by the end he was
winning each time, so the mocking turned back toward the Vampires. Where it
belonged, at least for that kind of thing.

The second session each day was
with Eve, and was a lot harder. The girl didn't cut him as much slack, and she,
for her part, didn't make fun of him. No, when she hit him, things broke, and
that meant making himself heal as they kept on going. She also forced him to
practice magic daily. Doing it right after meals, so that he would have to take
life energy from his food, and use that directly.

That was harder than it sounded
like it should be. He didn't have any way to really store that kind of thing,
himself, being dead like he was. Living things could, he came to understand,
use their own life force, a thing that constantly replenished, for things like
that.

He was trying to turn taco's into
fireballs, and while the food have been spicy, it wasn't
that
burning.
The thing was though, that it did work. If he managed to eat a really big meal,
and started right at the last bite of food, he could pull out tricks for about
twenty minutes. Tiny things really, but it was still magic.

"I, am not a very good
battery." It sounded funny, and a bit strained, but Eve smiled at him as
the light he was making over his right hand, a deep blue thing, flickered and died.
It hadn't taken very long at all for the food to run out in his system.

"Nope! Don't let it get to
you. We'll figure that part out. Maybe you could... I don't know, sort of
gather it from the world around you?" She said it like it was secretly
brilliant. Because of course, that hadn't been the first thing that he'd tried
for.

"It doesn't work for me. I
think it's because I'm an incarnation of death, not life. I mean, I
can
do that, but if I pull too much, or try it for too long, things around me will start
to die. In a pinch, a fight or emergency, I could. Before you ask, if I try for
a life link, or a blood link, the same thing happens. I killed a cow the other
day, doing that. Even just sipping a tiny bit of life away, less than what you
do most of the time, is too much. The death seeps into them."

It had been more than just one
cow in the line, but he'd managed to stop in time for the other four to live.
Sighing he shook his head. The Vampire girl sat across from him, under the
starry night sky, and glanced up at the clouds, the few wispy ones, that
artfully crossed in front of the Moon above.

"You can still get power
from Anne though, even if she isn't doing most of it?"

"Oh, yeah. She hasn't even
complained about it. Most of what I eat goes to her, so it's kind of fair, I
guess. I just don't want to be a burden forever. I know, I'm strange,
but-" He
wanted
to be free, but couldn't be. So Tyler was trying to
get as close to that as he could in life.

It was a thing that he wanted Eve
to understand. She wasn't like him though, and probably couldn't, in the end.
Oh, she was smart. A lot more than he was probably, and her ability to
comprehend what he was going through, to even empathize with him, wasn't in
question. There was a difference in the end however, between understanding what
another went through, and living it.

Not that he was going to knock
anyone who
tried
to get it.

Eve, for her part, nodded. It was
a gentle thing, that, if he didn't know better, he would have thought of as
caring. Like she wanted him to do well. Maybe even to be happy, in his un-life.

"No one sane and good wants
to be a burden to others. We all are, in the end, but the goal should always be
to move past that, if we can. Anyway, you have the basics of magic now. There
are some hurdles for you, and you should practice every day from now on, but
you've got this. It's kind of clear that you need to put most of your effort
into low energy applications. True, it won't make you as awesome as
me
,
but few are. You'll just have to struggle along, trying to be yourself."
Then, in a friendly way, she reached out and touched his arm.

Given the mental state he was in,
and how he had to be so very aware of things now, he could see the massive
differences between them. It was more of a knowing, but it was clear to him.
She was, after a strange fashion, alive. Life flowed to her in thin, fine, and
well organized strands.

Death rushed around them, to
collect inside of himself now. It was plenty of power, but harsh, rough and
blunt, comparatively. It didn't want to make him move, he had to
command
it to do his bidding. She was, Vampire or not, dead or not, simply far more alive
than he ever could be. Like a shining beacon, now that he knew how to see it.

Sure, he could kill her by taking
those lines away, or polluting them, but it would be a shame. Not just for her,
but to break up anything as lovely as a collection of pure life energy like
that. Steve, his human model for that kind of thing, was even worse that way.
Better. He
made
the stuff inside him, and was nearly blinding. How he
didn't understand his impact on the world, Tyler couldn't tell. The kid walked
around blasting
everything
with power and life.

Calley did too, of course. It was
interesting to see that, since with her small tendrils of the stuff leaked out,
and tried to touch everyone she met. To connect with them. Scotty did that a
bit too, though he was weaker that way. Older, and dead, so the energy he had
to use wasn't as fresh and lively.

All of them were alive. Compared
to him.

Snapping out of it, he made
himself smile, which took a lot less effort now than even a few days before. He
was, he realized, becoming himself again. Moving was nearly automatic, and he
could do complicated things without stumbling too much now. Fight, make love
and play music. Even sing. Actually, once he got used to it, he found that his
range had improved that way. No one had said anything about it, but they
weren't practicing every night.

He'd been in to the embassy a few
times, since people had managed to start nearly two wars in the last few weeks
there. On the good side, the others had worked it out for them. Only once did
it actually involve half the ambassadors actually sitting on one of their
fellows until he gave over and played ball. He hadn't been there for it, and
had been told that only five of them had
literally
done it, but Ty had a
strange feeling that the U.N. didn't work that way.

 "I need to get Kaitlyn in
for a while. So she can take a turn running things." He spoke out loud,
but Eve didn't respond to it. Actually, she just looked up again, and shook her
head, softly.

"Something is coming."
Her words were dark, but he got the idea well enough. He'd felt it too. It was
stronger now, than before. She explained anyway. "I don't mean right now,
today, or even in the next few weeks, but... It's like a darkness is closing in
over the world. I... it's hard to explain. I'm probably being stupid."

"Except that I feel it, too.
It's like something is pressing against the fabric of reality itself. We should
get with Zack on that. It seems like the kind of thing he'd be good at
understanding. I can chat up some of my, um, other sources." Ty tried to
be shifty about that, but Eve, not being a Greater or even a Lesser, Demon,
smiled.

"Angels. That sounds so
stupid. I mean, I met one, and it still seems so unreal. Like a joke or game.
Plus, God is a douche bag. That bastard let me be raped for years, you know
that? He probably got off on it. Jerking his tool to my pain, or whatever he
does." There was no bitterness to the words, on the surface, but she
didn't take them back, or make a joke out of it.

That was, Tyler knew, a real
problem. God was real, not just a fantasy that someone had made up. Oh, sure,
the Christians, the followers of Islam, all of the religions, were wrong about
the particulars, but the actual entity was there.

Except that he was different than
anyone had ever told them.

"Yep. I can't back this, but
I don't think we matter much at all, to the greater scheme of things. I mean,
we have our little parts to play, but God would no more care about you or I
than we do about a pancreatic cell. Even if we love the whole, and see the use
of each tiny bit, that doesn't really change that way. I mean, have you checked
the happiness of the cells in your kidneys lately? I haven't."

Almost as a lark he turned his
mind inward, and cast it at his lower back. There was a sense that he was
familiar with, but that was a bit dark to think about. He had cells there, but
they were all dead. Not even hunks of protein all the time. Calcified things
that were hard and stone like. Ones that moved, on command, but did nothing on
their own. They didn't live, or work. They just sat there. Being not alive.

That got him to shake his head,
though Eve smiled at him, a bit.

"No shit, right? I guess I
can't blame the guy then. Pancreatic cell Eve just doesn't rate that much
attention. Thing... I don't know if we can survive what's coming. That's weird,
right? I shouldn't feel that way. I'm pretty close to immortal. I know that I'm
not that old, but..."

"All we can do is check on
that. I'm sure that it will work out, in the end. For now, I just keep waiting
for the other shoe to drop in my own life. For The Storm to come and try to
take me again. I probably won't survive that one, myself, so the rest of this
isn't that big of a deal for me. Though, no one else has mentioned the
gathering darkness, have they?" He hadn't asked, but the Vampire girl
shrugged.

"Lyn doesn't feel it. Ben,
oddly enough, kind of
does
. He asked me about it, a little over a week
ago. Kait is acting funny. Nervous and like she keeps expecting to be eaten,
and not in a good way. I haven't checked with the other Greater Demons."

That got him to sigh and look
away. The world was lovely, like always, and the particular surroundings were
nice, but now he could feel the rest of it. The world was, in the end, made up
of a constant battle between life and death. Creation and destruction. It came
into being and out of it, without ending.

Which was a happy and dismal
thing to think about, so he plucked a bit of grass from the ground, and stole
the tiny flicker of life energy from it. Not to waste it, he sent it along to
his mother. The green strand turned first brown, then into a fine dust that
couldn't hold together.

"Well, it won't be happening
tomorrow, whatever is coming. Maybe not for a long time. Years,
if
we
aren't just being gloomy. There are always beginnings and endings to
everything. That's the way the world works. Maybe all the worlds. Which is kind
of cool. Zack can go to a lot of places. He's mentioned it a few times. We
should get him to take us to a few of them, some day." It was an idle
comment, trying to take the conversation in a different direction, since being
maudlin wasn't going to help anyone.

Eve brushed at her hair, her pale
skin shining slightly under the nearly full Moon as it popped out from behind
the clouds.

"Yeah. I'll get with him on
that. You're right. We need to go and see some things. What exactly... I don't
know. It is kind of a neat idea. A multi-verse filled with infinite versions of
me. Can you imagine that? A world where I'm a pirate, and another where I'm the
daughter of the President? Maybe even one where I'm the President myself. One
where you're the actress you secretly long to be..." She tossed a handful
of grass at him, which he didn't let hit him. Instead he stole the life from
it, until it puffed into a fog in the air.

Waste not, want not, after all.

"Oh, sure. Or the one where
Steve is a world saving superhero? Or where Ginger is Kaitlyn's mom. Everything
should exist after all. A billion, billion worlds, each stranger and more
wonderful, and awful, than the last. Well, enough for dreaming. You set that
up, and I'll take a tour with you. We can all go. I'm sure Zack won't mind.
Even if it is vast amounts of work for him."

Eve gave a tiny snort, and then
took a deep breath.

"I... Everything is about to
change, isn't it, Ty?" She didn't let him go on, her voice sounding just a
little stressed suddenly. "When I became a Vampire I felt a little like
this, but I was kind of ready for it. Everything that I'd done for years had
led to a specific end point. Now... it's like I don't have control over what's
going to happen. Like the world, like... Everything, might end."

He nodded then.

"Which probably means that a
Greater Demon is screwing with us, doesn't it? That, or some being with psychic
powers. Making us feel like that, in order to... Oh, I don't know. Maybe they
want us to do something? To steal our tasty snack cakes?"

That one earned him a grin, at
least.

"On that note, a certain
lovely Vampire needs to be off. I have a six o'clock shift at Westfield. You
should come in there soon. Just to make sure no one forgets you. During the
day. Lisa still needs to pay off on that sex with you, if nothing else."