The Rhiannon Chronicles

by Maggie Shayne

  He wandered, Killian did. Had ever since his building had been torched by vigilantes back in the wars of 2011. When humankind found out the boogiemen of Bram Stoker’s inkwell were real, they decided pretty quickly that they had to return vampires to the realm of fiction. And they’d pretty much succeeded.

  Killian had survived the fire in his home, and the extermination of his species. As far as he knew, he was the only one left. So he wandered, and he avoided humans, and he survived by drinking the blood of wildlife, rather than feeding on humans. He didn’t mind so much that animal blood left him weak. A watered down version of a vampire.

  And then one day, he’d dreamed of her.

  He’d dreamed of her.

  Everyone knows vampires don’t dream. The day sleep is death. It’s nothingness. But he’d dreamed of her. Could two years of isolation make a vampire go crazy? He didn’t know, and who the hell was he going to ask?

  She came to him in flashes. Hair as red as a new penny, lots of it, rippling down way past her shoulders. Huge blue eyes that held the world inside them. A white owl. And the feeling that she was in trouble and didn’t even know it.

  He knew two things about her right from the beginning. She was one of The Chosen. That is, she had the rare Belladonna Antigen every vampire had as a human. Only The Chosen could become vampires. They would bleed out easily if cut, and they tended to die young unless they accepted the Dark Gift. It would be almost impossible for a vampire to harm one of The Chosen. They were compelled to protect them, instead.

  Charlie O’Malley was one of The Chosen. And Killian was drawn to her like he’d never been drawn to one of them before. There was something off about that.

  The second thing he knew about her was that she was dreaming of him, too. He felt it in brief, strobe-like glimpses inside her mind.

  What is this? Who is he?

  Am I losing my mind?

  God, I wish this was real.

  He’d been trekking through the cathedral forests of northeastern Oregon when he’d started experiencing her. And he’d changed directions, because he couldn’t help himself. She exerted some kind of force on him, pulled him to her. It felt like a long rubber band had been snapped around the two of themF and stretched to its limit. When he tried to go the other way, it was like he just couldn’t stretch that band another inch.

  He had to go to her.

  And now he was as close as it was safe to get, but he knew he’d keep moving closer. He stood on a winding road, looking down on Portland, and he knew she was there. Somewhere in that mass of human beings who would kill him on sight if they found out what he was. But he didn’t care. He had to get to her. He didn’t know why, and he didn’t know what he was supposed to do once he did. But he had to get to Charlie.

  He pulled up his hoodie and headed into the forest to seek shelter. Dawn was calling. But when he woke tonight, he was going into that city. Maybe if he kept his head down and his mind open, he could get to her before the humans got to him.

  Charlotte O’Malley caught a glimpse of the morning news’s nonstop media coverage of what was being called The Bloodbath of 2014. The story even had its own graphic—the word “Bloodbath” in a scarlet font that appeared to be dripping. It had been a week since the bodies of seven people had been found in and around Portland, bloodless, with twin fang-sized holes in their necks. It was a deliciously gruesome story that was just what she needed to distract her from her...issues.

  Namely a dream lover who was...well, haunting her. Making love to a phantom all night every night wasn’t exactly restful. She was exhausted and frankly, feeling like hell lately.

  Charlie’s mother was in a state of panic about the circles under her eyes. But if it wasn’t that, it would be something else. Trish lived in a constant state of fear for her only daughter and hovered to the point of near suffocation. All of which added motivation to Charlie’s goal: get her own apartment before she turned 21 in a few weeks.

  She glanced at the clock. Still twenty minutes before she had to leave for her job at the local Rent-A-Center. Plunking her ass onto the sofa, she reached for her coffee mug and thumbed up the volume.

  “None of the seven vampires responsible for these slayings survived our tactical team’s raid,” said a man whose face was as saggy as a bulldog’s. The text at the bottom of the screen identified him as Commandant Barnaby Crowe of the DPI. He had expressive brown eyes that seemed sincere, and he sat at the news desk across from morning show anchor and American cutie pie Sherri-with-an-i Jarrard.

  “With all due respect, Commandant,” Sherri said, “authorities assured the American people three years ago that vampire-kind had been wiped out. Obviously, that was untrue.”

  “Obviously,” he replied, his eyes as steady as his voice. “If we missed even one, that was one too many. I hope the bleeding hearts bemoaning the extermination of a race we know nothing about” (in derogative falsetto) “will pay attention. They propagate like rats. But they’re predators. And humanity is their prey. This is a matter of self-preservation, Sherri. It’s us or them.”

  Sherri Jarrard kept her poker face intact, providing her eager viewers no clue where she stood on the issue. “The autopsy reports on the victims, which the government released to the press just this morning, show that every one of them shared a rare blood antigen called Belladonna.”

  Charlie sat up straighter. Wait a minute, did she just say Belladonna? Hell, I have that!

  Sherri was still talking, though. “This is the same trait shared by people who claim to have been used as bait in a black ops plot to lure vampires in for the slaughter at the conclusion of the war of twenty-eleven.”

  Commandant Crowe nodded firmly. “We had a rogue agent trying to run his own show back then. He went too far. But the truth of the matter is that if there are any surviving vampires out there, then anyone with the Belladonna Antigen is in grave danger. They are the Undead’s favorite...food.” He thinned his lips and lowered his head a little, as if his words were almost unspeakable.

  “Holy shit,” Charlie muttered. “Hey, Mom?”

  I shouldn’t tell her. She’s gonna freak.

  “What is the government doing to protect these individuals?” the anchor asked.

  Commandant Crowe lifted his head, looked her dead in the eye. “First, Sherri, know that this attack was an isolated incident. We have no evidence that there are any other vampires still in existence. Secondly, I must remind you that the United States government made a promise to the few thousand citizens with the Belladonna Antigen, that they would never again be monitored without their knowledge. We do have plans in place to protect those who ask for it, but participation is entirely voluntary. We’ve reached out to all of those that we know of to offer our assistance. And obviously, I can’t tell you what that assistance will entail. The enemy could be listening.”

  “If there are any left. Which you’ve just assured me isn’t likely.”

  “We could be wrong,” he said, leaning slightly forward. “We were before.” He took off the microphone that was clipped to his lapel as he got up, then slung it into his empty chair and walked off the set.

  They switched to a story about a monster storm about to hit the Midwest, and Charlie clicked off the TV, picked up her coffee mug, her hand shaking so hard the coffee sloshed over the rim, and headed into the kitchen. She’d deliberately stayed out of range of her mom this morning, because she’d been such a basket case about Charlie’s restless nights and sleepy days.

  Or maybe, Charlie thought, Trish had already known that the murder victims had the Belladonna Antigen, that they were just like Charlie. That would explain a lot.

  In the kitchen, her mother was holding an official looking letter and crying. That alarmed Charlie even more than the news report had. Dammit, she should’ve stayed in bed and kept having out of body sexual encounters with her imaginary friend.

  “What the hell, Mom? What’s wrong?”

  Trish O’Malley looked up quick, met Charl
ie’s eyes, and scrubbed her own with the heel of one hand. “I...we have to talk. I have something to tell you.”

  Charlie lifted her eyebrows and felt the bottom fall out of her stomach. She couldn’t remember ever seeing her mother cry. Trish tended to be kind of cold. She loved her daughter, sure, but mostly showed it through her overprotective tendencies, not by any real display of emotion or affection. It was like she was afraid to love her too much. Or something.

  “Sit down, Charlie.” Trish’s blond hair was as messy as perfectly straight hair ever got. She’d been running her hands through it.

  Charlie sat down. “You’re freaking me out, Mom. Is this about The Portland Seven being BDs like me? Because if that’s it, I already know.”

  Her mother nodded. “Yes. It’s about that.” She looked past Charlie toward the living room. “It was on the news?”

  Charlie nodded. “They said people with BD are vampires’ favorite snack foods. You never told me that.”

  “I didn’t see the need.” She kept her eyes elsewhere. But that was normal. “They were supposedly all wiped out three years ago. You were only seventeen. Why scare the hell out of a seventeen-year-old for nothing?”

  Right. Why tell me that I’m the favorite prey of a deadly predator that would like to rip out my jugular? Why not just argue with me every time I want to leave the house after dark instead?

  “There’s more to your...condition than I’ve told you, Charlie.”

  There was more? More her mother had kept from her? Charlie’s knees were shaking, and the sarcasm she tried to inject into her tone fell flat. “It’s not a condition, Mom. It doesn’t have any effect on my health other than making me more likely to bleed to death than your average bear.” Her lack of certain clotting factors were, she had always assumed, her mother’s reason for treating her like a porcelain doll. No sports. No rough housing. No roller skating or ice skating or sledding down steep hills or riding a bike. Her childhood had been miserable.

  Her mother lowered her head. “That’s not exactly true. There’s a lot more to it. There just aren’t any...symptoms until later on. And there’s no cure.”

  “Well, of course there’s no cure. It’s a blood type for crying out loud, why would anybody want to cure a blood type?” Her mother was scaring her, and she didn’t like it.

  “Don’t get upset, Charlie. Sit down, I’ll make you some tea and–”

  “Jesus, Mom, just tell me what the hell is going on, will you? You’re scaring me here.” All these years, Charlie thought, treating her like she was fragile, like there was something wrong with her. In all that time, Charlie had never once believed that actually might be the case. The problem, she’d decided long ago, was her mother. She was the one with the condition. If Charlie had to give it a name, she’d call it chronic, paranoid anxiety with overprotective tendencies.

  “What symptoms?” she asked. She was still half-convinced her mother would list something like hangnails or frequent bouts of the sniffles.

  Trish opened her mouth, then closed it again.

  “Give me that.” Charlie snatched the sheet of paper from her mother’s hand. Then she read it and felt as if her blood all rushed straight to her feet, leaving her dizzy and kind of disoriented.

  Dear Mrs. O’Malley,

  Due to the recent, tragic events in Portland, we are reaching out to all individuals with the Belladonna Antigen to offer our protection in an effort to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again. According to our records, you have a daughter, Charlotte Antoinette O’Malley, who possesses this rare antigen and who might qualify for inclusion in a special program we have implemented for people like her. Your daughter is eligible as long as she has not yet begun experiencing the onset of symptoms indicating that her inevitable and tragic premature death is near, which is, at her age, highly unlikely. (If she has begun experiencing symptoms, we still encourage you to get in touch as we have a separate program in place for such individuals.) We’ve scheduled an appointment for you to discuss her safety this Friday afternoon at 1 PM at the Federal Building in Portland. We strongly urge you to attend, if only to learn more about the programs. Participation will, of course, be entirely voluntary.

  Sincerely,

  Commandant Barnaby Crowe, DPI

  Charlie let the sheet of paper fall from her hand to the floor. It floated like a bird, landing lightly at her feet. “Premature death?”

  Her mother blinked red-rimmed, wet eyes. “I didn’t know how to tell you, Charlie.”

  “Premature fucking death?” She stood rooted to the spot, her hands shaking, her heart pounding. “I’m going to die? When, Mom? How long do I have?”

  “I don’t...know.”

  “Yes, you do. You do know. You’ve always known. How long?” Charlie wasn’t crying. Why the hell wasn’t she crying? Shock, she guessed. “The letter says symptoms are unlikely at my age. At what age do they become likely?”

  Trish lowered her head, closed her eyes. “The life expectancy of people with Belladonna is mid- to late-thirties,” she said softly. “But there are exceptions.”

  “Where? What exceptions? You just waited until I was twenty to tell me I probably won’t live much past thirty?”

  “I’m sorry. I just...I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  “God.” Charlie’s whole world had been turned upside down in a single conversation. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know what to do. My God. My God, Mom.”

  Her mother touched her shoulder, looked her in the eye for once. It was rare. Now she knew why, maybe. Maybe Trish couldn’t face her. Maybe she didn’t show affection because she didn’t want to get too attached to someone who was just going to croak in a few years anyway.

  “I’ll call work for you. You can stay home today, and we can talk about–”

  “I’m going to work. I’m going...at least out. Somewhere. I need to...I need to go. I need to just...go.”

  She turned and walked almost blindly to the door, yanked it open, and startled someone who was standing on the other side, apparently just about to knock. Through blurry vision, Charlie saw an older woman with wild red hair, a multicolored kaftan and about six too many strands of beads around her neck.

  “Excuse me,” Charlie muttered, trying to duck around her to get out of the apartment.

  But the woman put both hands on her shoulders, holding tightly, and scanning her face way too intently. “Charlotte?”

  Charlie frowned and looked up slowly. “Who wants to know?”

  “Roxanne O’Malley,” she said. “I’m your grandmother.”

  “I don’t have a grandmother.” Hell, just cue the “Twilight Zone” theme already, she thought.

  “Yes, you do. Let’s go back inside so you can pack your things while I tell your mother how this is going to go down.”

  “How what is going to go down? Hey, let go of me!”

  But the alleged grandmother had exchanged her way-too-personal shoulder squeeze for a death grip on her upper arm and was marching her right back through her apartment door, closing it behind her and turning the locks as if expecting armed hit men to show up at any moment.

  Charlie’s mom said, “Did you forget something, hon–” as she came in from the kitchen. But then she stopped and just stared at the older woman’s face with her mouth open, that letter in her hand again, and whispered, “Roxy.”

  “Wait, you know her?” Charlie asked.

  Her mother’s gaze shifted back and forth between them and she nodded. “She’s your grandmother. Your father’s mother.”

  “Told you,” Roxy said, snarky and sarcastic, but with a teasing light in her eyes. She released Charlie’s arm, held out her hand toward Trish, palm up, and snapped her fingers until Trish handed her the letter. Then she read it as Trish said, “I don’t know what to do. If she’s in danger–”

  “She’s in more danger than you know,” the redhead replied. “You have to let me take her, Trish. I can keep her safe.”

  �
�What?” Charlie took two backward steps away from her mother and the stranger. “No, now wait a minute, here. No one’s taking me anywhere.”

  “Don’t you think the government is more qualified to do that than you are, Roxy?” Trish asked.

  “You telling me you trust those morons?” Roxy shook her head. “Don’t. Not ever. Fortunately, they don’t know you have any connection to me. I’ve been dealing with these government goons for a long time. You have to let her come with me. It’s the only way to keep her safe.”

  “No.” Charlie threw up her hands and sat down hard on the sofa. “No, I’m not going with some crazy lady I never met before just because she shows up with this line of–”

  “God, you look so much like her,” her mother whispered, her eyes darting from Charlie’s face to Roxy’s over and over.

  “Pack a bag, Charlotte,” the older woman said. “We don’t have much time.”

  “I can protect her fine right here,” her mother said. “They’ll help us. The letter says–”

  “It’s what the letter doesn’t say that you should worry about. You know what their help consists of? I shudder to think.” She turned to Charlie, her bright green eyes beaming into her. “I’ve seen what they do to our kind, Charlotte. You don’t want that. Believe me.”

  “Our kind?” Charlie frowned. “What do you mean, our kind?”

  Her mom kept talking like she hadn’t even heard her. “If she just vanishes, they’ll know–”

  “Not yet they won’t. I just finished a lovely little hack job into their systems, removing your names from their watch list. I also did a global search-and-replace in all Charlotte’s health records, changing her blood type to good old ordinary A positive. Sure, they might figure it out eventually, but by the time they do, she’ll be off the grid. Like me.” She sent Charlie a conspiratorial wink. “You’re welcome.”

  “For what? Mom, what the hell?”

  “You should come with us, Trish,” Roxy said.

  Charlie’s mother looked at her sadly. Then nodded, as if she’d made a decision she had no right to make. “Go pack some things, Charlie. Anything you leave behind, I can have sent to you later.”