Ourselves

by S. G. Redling

  Vartan looked away first, closing his notebook and the meeting. Adlai held the door for him. The two women filed out behind him; one of them winked at Tomas. The two other men at the table followed. The one who had spoken earlier, Dalle, paused before Tomas. He stared for a moment and then brought his thumb up to stroke softly across the bruise on Tomas’s cheek. It looked oddly intimate to Stell but Tomas allowed it. The man started to say something but instead just chuckled and left the room.

  When the conference room door closed, Stell threw her arms around Tomas’s neck, pushing him up against the table. He struggled to keep his balance as he buried his face in the warmth of her neck. They spoke over each other.

  “I’m so sorry, Stell.”

  “I’m so happy, Tomas.”

  “I’ve been such a dick to you since we’ve been here. I’ve just pushed you away and I never even asked them to make any kind of concessions for you.” Stell tried to shush him but he continued. “All I could think about was the training, becoming one of these people that the Council fawns over and fears so much. I wanted to be like them but after this morning when I heard no one could find you I started thinking about the Family and if they had come for you and what I would do if they took you.” He pulled her tight against him.

  “Nobody’s going to take me, Tomas. I would kill them if they tried.”

  Tomas leaned back to look at her. “You’d be in the right company to do it. I hear Anton Adlai is a real badass.”

  “He’s taught me a lot.” Stell shifted under his gaze.

  “I guess you’re supposed to stick with him now?”

  Stell pulled his face back down into her neck and squeezed him tightly. “I don’t care what I’m supposed to do. Have I ever?” Tomas laughed and his breath tickled her skin. “Do we really have our own apartment?” Stell pressed her body against his, her intentions clear. He bit down on the tender skin of her throat.

  “Let’s go.”

  After two hours and a few persuasive phone calls from Fiona, Tomas and Stell had an apartment with a door that locked, utilities, and best of all, a freshly made bed. Vartan’s assistant had promised them their belongings would be moved, furnishings and groceries delivered, and she assured them with a smile that nothing would arrive for several hours.

  Those hours were spent in a succession of lovemaking, feeding, and sleeping; neither speaking any more than heated suggestions or cries of delight.

  The howling of the wind woke Tomas from a light sleep and he pulled Stell tight into his chest. She murmured, wrapping her legs around his and sliding her hand up his chest. He breathed in the smell of her.

  “Hey, you.”

  “Hey, you, too.” She kissed him, then traced the planes of his face with her fingers. He closed his eyes and tasted the tips of her fingers as they passed over his lips.

  “I’ve missed you so much, Stell. I didn’t even realize how much until I saw you this morning. This place, these Storytellers, it’s like they’re trying to tear everything about me apart to rebuild me in their image.”

  “Is it working?”

  He sighed, letting her fingers trace his eyebrows. “I don’t know. I feel different.”

  “You do feel different.” Tomas opened his eyes at the odd tone in her voice. “I mean, your body feels different. It smells different.” She pulled the covers back and let her eyes roam over his chest and stomach. “It’s like there’s this electricity that burns just on the surface of your skin, like the way the forest smells after lightning hits a tree.” Tomas waited to hear more as Stell dipped her head to run her tongue along his collarbone. “I like it.”

  He closed his eyes, relieved. He did feel different. The training, the meditations, while exhausting, had strengthened his body, although his discipline still needed some work. “I really screwed up last night when I was out with Louis and Aricelli.” He told her about his encounter with the Things. “They didn’t deserve to be treated like that. And that poor waitress, Tammi-with-an-i, she could have lost her job catering to me like that.”

  “I think you worry too much about it.” Stell dragged her fingernails down his stomach, making goose bumps rise. “It’s not like you killed them, right? That’s the big worry.”

  “It’s just that now they’re going to wonder how they wound up out there with us, if we drugged them or something. They could get nosy, start some kind of investigation. You never know with the common. They can be weirdly persistent about things.”

  “They don’t even know we exist. They think we’re vampires.”

  Tomas laughed and pinched her chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Vampires, huh? You mean you’ve never heard of the Brady Bunch but you know about vampires?”

  “I saw it in a movie. Adlai told me about it.”

  “Anton Adlai.” Tomas pushed Stell’s hair back and looked into her eyes. “It looks like the Council is going to have you two working together a lot.”

  Stell rolled her eyes. “How would I know? I just get ‘tell the girl this, tell the girl that.’ ”

  “Adlai doesn’t talk to you like that though, does he?” Stell turned her head from the question. “Tell me about him.”

  Stell sighed. “Why?”

  He didn’t know why. The last thing he wanted to think of was the burly Anton Adlai putting his hands on Stell and yet the thought wouldn’t leave him. Plus, and this had been weighing heavily on his mind of late, it seemed all the Storytellers were unpaired. They lived in their own worlds, in the midst of the Nahan and yet apart. Tomas hadn’t yet worked up the courage to ask about their personal lives. Somehow casual sex chat seemed out of place in the demanding hallways of the Council but he needed to know if his path as a Storyteller was one he would always have to walk alone.

  Stell pulled him from his reverie in his favorite way, by sliding her hands along his body. “I don’t want to think about anyone but you. I have all the days in the world to think about everybody else, but I have this night with you and you are the only one in the bed with me.” She narrowed her eyes with playful menace. “Understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Tomas let his mind and his body wander to far more pleasant lands.

  Later that evening, furniture arrived along with their luggage from the hotel and a small selection of groceries. Tomas hurried the assistants out of the apartment as quickly as possible, prompted by Stell’s giggles and sighs where she sprawled in the off-limits bedroom. At midnight he declared the apartment closed to all workers and spent the night wrapped in Stell’s arms. In less than twenty-four hours since leaving the complex he felt rejuvenated, as if he had been gone a month. Back at the complex the next morning, it took five words from Vartan to erase any trace of his well-being.

  “You’re on a funeral chain.”

  “Nervous, Desara?”

  “A little, sir.”

  “You’ll be fine.” Vartan wrote out a series of directions and handed them across the desk. Tomas didn’t move to take them. “Something wrong?”

  “It’s just that, sir, if you were called to the funeral chain, why aren’t you going? Why am I? And why are you telling me where to go?”

  Vartan cleared his throat. “You don’t need to worry about that, son.”

  “Actually, sir, I do.” Tomas looked at the paper as if it might bite him. “If there is anything inappropriate about this chain, if there is some sort of disrespect and I take part in it . . .” Vartan could hear the fear in the boy’s voice. He stepped around the desk and stood before Tomas, who stepped back sharply, making no attempt to hide his discomfort.

  “You’re right. You deserve an explanation. We are not in the habit of disrespecting the dead here. Believe it or not, we are well aware of what the abominations are. What we all have to understand is that times have changed.”

  “But the funeral chain, sir, that can’t change. It can’t . . .” Tomas clasped his hands behind him. “The dead have to be alone. Among strangers. Seven times, sir. They have to move seven times befor
e the fire. And move with strangers—”

  Vartan held out his hand to stop him. “Our population centers are too dense to ask just anyone to perform the final rites of release. I mean, it just isn’t feasible to expect people to be able to safely and legally burn a fire hot enough, especially those of us who live in the cities. So we sent out word among all the communities within a few hundred miles that, at the fifth exchange, when the fifth knot is tied, we are to be called and we will send someone out to pick up the chain. You’ll tie the sixth knot and take the box to the final location for the fire.”

  Tomas thought this over then shook his head. “But that means you know where the final fire is. You know where everyone goes. You’re not a stranger to the dead. The dead have to be with strangers. You made their plans and if I’m driving—”

  “No, Desara. Only you’ll know. It’s just as if the chain found you naturally. On this sheet of paper are four locations within one hundred miles that are capable of the fire we need. You pick one, either by location or randomly, it doesn’t matter. I’ll never know which one you picked and the chain will be intact. Nobody on the other end is expecting you.”

  “But my errand.” According to Nahan Tradition, the dead had to be seven times removed from their family. Those transporting the dead had to have an errand. It was considered vulgar, to say nothing of bad luck, to transport the dead in an idle vehicle.

  “I have four packages to be delivered, one for each town on the list. Drop one package off in person; that’s your errand. Drop the others in the mail. Nobody will know anything about their journey. Does this satisfy you?”

  Tomas wiped his damp palms on his jeans, then nodded and took the paper. Vartan clapped him on the shoulder and settled back into his desk chair. Once the door closed, he sank back into the soft leather. His hands trembled as he drummed his fingers on the desk, trying to calm his own heartbeat.

  He knew the trepidation Desara felt. No matter how many times they did this, the fear didn’t pass. He and his people had worked and reworked a plan that would keep the strict tradition of the funeral chain without alerting the common municipalities to what were blatant health and safety violations. Nobody on the Council gave half a rat’s ass about the health code, but the thought of a funeral chain being broken by some nosy county employee was too disastrous to even consider. Were the concessions enough to completely avoid any disrespect or abomination? Vartan sure as hell hoped so.

  From the farmers to the Storytellers to the coordinators of the Council, even the acul ‘ad, all of them had one thing in common. Few of them feared their own death, but all Nahan feared their dead.

  Tomas heard the TV as he unlocked the apartment door and called out for Stell. He found her propped up against the headboard, dozing upright, the bed littered with candy wrappers and soda cans. Her eyes flew open as he kneeled on the corner of the bed, leaning across to kiss her. He picked up a handful of cellophane wrappers.

  “I see my old Stell is back.”

  She scooped them up, scrambling across the bed to reach them all. “Oh, Tomas, I’m sorry. I didn’t know when you were coming home and I couldn’t sleep. I’ll throw them away.”

  He grabbed her arm and brought it to his lips, kissing skin and plastic and chocolate by turns. “Leave them. They’re the closest thing we have to leaves and pine needles. Let ’em crackle underneath us.” He pulled Stell onto his lap and she wrapped herself around him.

  “How was it?” Her eyes were serious. “I know you can’t talk about it, but how was it?”

  Tomas smiled. “Well, since I can’t talk about it, I can’t tell you that it was fine. It wasn’t nearly as scary as I thought it would be. As a matter of fact, I kind of feel like a grown-up. Now that it’s over, that is. I was freaking myself out on the drive but then once I met the fire man, it was okay.”

  “So you’re not hearing anything like a loud wind?”

  Even the True Family had their horror stories about the dead and funeral chains. “No wind at all. See?” He tugged on his ear. “Still attached, no howling, no bloody eyes.” Stell smiled and rested her head in the crook of his neck. “Your eyes are kind of red though. Why can’t you sleep?”

  “I thought of my mother,” she whispered as Tomas stroked her hair. He kissed her eyes and her cheeks. Over her shoulder, on the nightstand by the bed, he saw the battered copy of Wuthering Heights underneath a box of caramel corn. It was the only tangible reminder Stell had of her mother. She kept it hidden in her duffel; he’d never seen her pull it out.

  “Can you forgive me for being such a selfish dick?”

  Stell shook her head, wrapping her arms more tightly around Tomas’s neck. “You’re not selfish. I didn’t want to say anything because I was afraid if I started thinking about it I wouldn’t be able to stop. So I got all this stuff”—she gestured to the empty wrappers—“and kept myself awake all night waiting for you.”

  Tomas pulled a wrapper out from under his leg and examined it. “Cow Tales?”

  “Sounds gross, doesn’t it? I had to know what they were.” She reached behind them and pulled out an unopened package. She tore at the paper and pulled out the long, skinny caramel column. “They’re really good.” Tomas bit into it, made a noise of approval, and shoved the whole length of candy into his mouth.

  “Hey!” Stell pushed him down onto the bed laughing as he tried to chew the huge wad of caramel and candy cream. Trying not to choke on the sugar, he let her pin him to the bed.

  “Botcha kella oobatchee?”

  “What?”

  Tomas swallowed a mouthful of candy. “What the hell are you watching?”

  “Oh, the marathon!” Stell spun off Tomas and perched on the edge of the bed. “It’s a twenty-four-hour bloodsuckers marathon for Halloween. I’ve been watching it all night.”

  “Bloodsuckers marathon?”

  Stell nodded, drawn back to the TV. “All night they are showing this program about a vampire who fights crime. He’s a detective although he can only work at night because vampires can’t go out in the sun. And see her?” She pointed to the screen. “She’s common, of course, but I mean she’s common on the program too. They say human which is insulting. Aren’t we all human? Anyway he’s in love with her and she’s in love with him but for some reason they pretend they’re not, but she’s a cop and he helps her solve all the crimes.”

  Tomas smiled, watching Stell’s profile glow by the TV light. She pointed at the screen. “She knows he’s a vampire and in the last three episodes, the murders were all done by other vampires. And he killed them! The other vampires, I mean. He killed his own kind. Like it was okay. It doesn’t make any sense. And there’s another thing I don’t get.” She was talking very quickly, her hands fluttering before her. “She knows he’s a vampire. He knows he’s a vampire. All these other vampires keep popping up all over this city. The whole show is about vampires but nobody on the show says they believe in them. They treat her like she’s crazy and keep saying there’s no such thing as vampires but they’re on every show. It’s nothing but vampires, but everybody is like ‘I don’t believe in vampires.’ And then they get eaten.” Stell turned to him, exasperated. “What does it take to convince these people?”

  Tomas climbed back against the headboard and patted the bed, inviting Stell to join him. She did, pulling the covers over them both as she crawled. “When Louis and I were little, his mom used to let us watch all the vampire movies. We’d laugh all night, asking those same questions. They have this weird fantasy about vampires and I doubt they could even explain it to themselves. All I know is that some of them take it really seriously. Not just movies and stuff, but buy the whole enchilada. One of these nights, I promise you, we’re going to find a group of them and we’re going to have some fun.”

  Stell grinned at the lascivious tone in his voice and kissed him on the neck.

  “Now let’s watch us some bloodsuckers, huh? Got anymore Cow Tales?”

  Adlai pulled away from the curb. De
sara was back. Stell wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while. He could get some sleep and be back before they had pulled themselves from the bed. He had spent the night propped up on a bench across from the apartment building, watching the lights of the television flicker through the window he knew was Stell’s. It was still his job to watch her and Adlai never let the job slip.

  It was a better gig than most. He liked the girl. She was a real killer, better than she even knew. He had thought more than once how it would feel to take her as a lover. He imagined she’d be fierce and wondered how a kid like Desara could handle it. Then he shook his head. Desara was a Storyteller, or at least an apprentice. They were supposed to withstand an awful lot, supposed to being the operative phrase.

  Adlai opened the throttle on the bike, cutting through evening traffic. There was a reason he was still in Chicago. There was work in San Francisco and Seattle, but he’d passed on it. He had to stay in Chicago. His best friend needed him. He had let him down before but it wouldn’t happen again. The lake air was cold as it whipped over his bare face but Anton Adlai’s mind was in the hot, dry nights of his New Mexico youth.

  He had just hit his twenties and was miserable in the Reaches, outside of Santa Fe. It was 1975, the recession; they were broke and had no other Nahan to turn to for help. The closest Nahan girls were forty miles to the north and Anton had no way of getting there. It would have been a disastrous autumn if Shelan and his parents hadn’t stepped off that Greyhound bus. Anton had seen them arrive and was so shocked to see others of his kind he’d walked up to them in front of the drugstore and said “Nahan da li?” The woman had smacked him across the face.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she’d hissed to a shocked Anton. “In public?” He’d only stood there as the parents stomped past him, dragging their son, who looked over his shoulder and laughed. That look, that laugh, had told Anton everything he needed to know about Shelan.