by D. N. Hoxa
“Yeah, for two years it was right outside my window.” Technically, it wasn’t my window, because I didn’t own the building, but I didn’t go into details.
“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary? Any vampires or any words…”
“Hammer, you’re forgetting I had no idea that vampires even existed outside of books until the night I was turned.”
I flinched at the reminder of that face, those piercing eyes like gardens of green, and the sharpness of his teeth on my skin. But all of a sudden, something else came to mind. Something I had always taken to be a figment of my imagination.
“Shadows.” I tried to remember the many nights I’d spent at the top of the Howling Building. “I saw shadows, almost every night, but they disappeared too fast. I always thought it was just the fear making me see things.”
“Where? Where did you see the shadows?” Hammer asked, never turning to look at me.
“Everywhere. By the wall, I mean. I saw the shadows cast on the Wall of Protection.” Maybe it was a mistake to tell him about the shadows. What if it really had been just my imagination? “What does that mean?”
“If he was right…” he mumbled. “There’s just too much at stake…”
“Hammer?”
He didn’t acknowledge me. He continued to speak to himself without regard, looking like a man on the brink of figuring something out. His face showed excitement, as if he was afraid to let the words out for fear of a jinx or hope, only to find he’d been wrong afterwards.
I wanted to shout at him to tell me exactly what he was thinking, everything that he was thinking, but I also didn’t want to interrupt him in case my reading of his face was wrong.
“Unless they found a way…” he murmured to himself. “No, no, no, no. They wouldn’t risk it…” He turned to me, light shining in his eyes, brows raised and mouth open. “Unless they won't.”
“You have me completely lost.”
“I need to talk to Bugz,” he said and walked out of the living room. I followed him down to the basement.
“Is it a thing with you guys to have names like this? Hammer, Bat, Bugz, Tick? Who calls themselves Tick?” I asked, feeling actually quite comfortable with my name for once in my life.
“Nicknames. Hand me that remote over there?” He pointed across the room at a small, black remote control with only five buttons. He had some sort of a typing machine in front of him, only instead of letters, it had symbols carved on the plastic of the buttons. It looked old and useless, but once Hammer pressed a button on the remote, it started vibrating as if it were heating.
“What the hell is that?” It had no paper or no place that I saw for ink. It had a bronze cylinder where the paper should have been—based on what I remembered from the History books in high school—that was rolling around itself and picking up speed. It also had a cable coming out from under the old wood, connected to another plastic box with four round, iron bulges, each wrapped with a piece of wire from the machine cable.
“It’s a Communicator. We’ve used them since after the explosions,” he said.
“And who’s Bugz?”
“An old friend,” he simply said.
“Aren’t you going to tell me what the hell is going on? I’m sure you can tell that I’m starting to get pissed off.”
I pointed at my face. Apparently he didn’t get the message, because my words only put a smile on his lips. He looked up at me and shook his head, still smiling.
“Just give me a sec,” he said and started to type once he was satisfied with how fast the cylinder of the machine was spinning.
So I waited and watched as he typed symbol after symbol, counting the annoying sounds coming from the machine.
I was trying to make sense of the words he’d murmured earlier, but all I got was that he had spoken to someone, that someone wouldn’t risk it, unless they won't—whatever the hell that meant. And that Bugz was an old friend he wanted to talk to, and he was trying to get in touch with him.
“Done,” he said and pulled the cable to undo the wires from the plastic box. The cylinder of the machine started to slow down until it eventually stopped altogether.
“Hello?” I asked, but he walked ahead to the stairs.
“Let’s go get a drink.” He flew in a blur in front of me, after turning all the lights out.
I found him in the kitchen. I preferred the sofa, but I wasn’t going to complain about the place as long as he talked. He actually took two glasses out of the cupboard and filled mine with whiskey and his with vodka. He motioned for me to sit on the only chair and gave me my glass. I still couldn’t come up with a correct answer as to what he was thinking. One minute he was all excited like a little boy and the next he looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“I’m all ears,” I said. He drank half his glass before he spoke.
“Thank heavens for our poisons,” he whispered, looking at his half-filled glass. “Bugz is a good friend of mine. We met during the Spanish War of Independence in the eighteen hundreds,” he said, but to me it felt like he was telling a tale, not a real story. It was impossible for my brain to imagine someone being friends with someone for more than two hundred years. “Bugz is the best investigator there is. There is nothing going on in this world that doesn’t fall on Bugz’s ear. I just asked for some insight about what they’re saying in the streets.”
“Hammer, seriously. The being vague thing is so not your thing,” I said. He was playing with my nerves, and as much as I didn’t want him to get angry and run away to the basement again, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. Looked like my self-defense mechanism had developed more than it should have. Or maybe it was just Hammer.
“Hey, our agreement doesn’t include my obligation to tell you what I have in mind,” he insisted, but he was playing games because he was grinning.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean? We shared stories an hour ago!”
“Yeah, I told mine when you told yours.” I knew where he was going with this even when I didn’t see his sneaky smile.
“I have nothing else to share! I told you all there was to tell; there’s nothing more.” I was getting a bit tired of playing these games with him.
“There’s the story of your name,” he whispered with a raised brow, sipping slowly on his drink. I gave my longest, deepest sigh in hopes that he’d just stop and let it go. I was burning from curiosity, and my unwritten rule was to follow it.
“That’s not important.”
“It is to me,” he said with a shrug.
“Don’t play games with me, Hammer, please,” I said, but it came out more a threat than a pleading.
“I’m not. I simply want to know, just as you want to know the story about my name. Don’t tell me you don’t,” he said, giving me the all-knowing look. Of course I wanted to know the story about his name! He called himself Hammer! Anyone would want to know where it came from. God, the way he could piss me off.
“And you’ll tell what’s going on if I tell you the story of my name? I must warn you though. It’s not nearly as interesting as you think it is.”
“I will,” he said, nodding. Since there was no other way I was going to get him to talk, I spilled the short story.
“Mother wanted a baby boy when she got pregnant with me. She wanted to make him as powerful and as rich as her lovers were, and she was going to make him that through them. Only, with him being her son, she would never have to worry about being sent to hell at any second, like she did with each new lover. Instead, she got me. When she did, she figured, let’s name this one death so that the “curse” of my giving birth to girls will die with her. There. Happy now?”
The only good thing about this story was the uterine cancer she got a year after I was born. One less life for her to ruin.
After that, the whiskey in my glass was gone inside me.
“I told you it was boring,” I added since he wasn’t saying anything. I didn’t dare look up at his face
, because no matter that I knew it wasn’t my fault, I still felt guilty in a way for being born and still felt ashamed.
“It’s amazing, actually. Amazing what people will do for money and power,” he said. “This is exactly what brought the world to this day. The greed, the hunger for more of everything.”
I wasn’t going to say anything to that since I had no clue. Everything I ever thought I knew was falling down in front of my eyes, too fast, too loud. I just went and grabbed the bottle, because the glass limited the quantity I wanted to swallow. The bottle suited me much better.
“They’re planning something,” he finally said.
“Who?” I asked, though I had the impression I already knew.
“Mohg and the other Doyens. At least I think so.”
“What are they planning?” I couldn’t even make a guess.
“I don’t know. Something they don’t want me to know.” When I looked up at him and told him with my eyes to just elaborate already, he took his own bottle, dropped the glass on the sink, and a blink later, he was sitting on top of the table with his legs crossed, right in front of me.
“When I started looking for Everard, I ran into vamps and heard words. Words that meant nothing to me at the time. I heard that Everard hadn't been seen in more than a year, anywhere. That vamps were in trouble because the Doyens were meeting more often, every month. That someone screwed up big time because some sort of preparations were being made somewhere on an isolated island, and no one knew what it was. Whoever went there never came back. That Mohg was unusually restless for the past year.”
He was trying to explain, but nothing made much sense to me.
“Most interesting of all were the vampires I saw. I met four of them on my way to Boston. Another one hiding in the shadows, almost in the same place you had your first feeding.”
He just had to go there. Shivers ran through my body, but he pretended not to notice the fire I was throwing at him with my eyes.
“And Jordy and Tick,” he shouted, raising his hands up. “Jordy and Tick were supposed to be in New York! Mohg assigned them himself, and no one but him could’ve had them moving. They weren’t supposed to be there, right on their way to Boston.”
“Yeah…” I said, for a second having the illusion that I was seeing something. “… No. I got nothing.”
“Don’t you see? Arrangements are being made. There’s never that many vampires around an RO wall. The Doyens know better than to put them there. It’s too dangerous. So why were there so many vampires on their way, or already in, Boston?”
“Because they like it better than New York?” I thought I’d give it a shot. I was trying to get his words to make some kind of sense to me.
“The shadows you saw. Those shadows have to mean that there are others. Others I didn’t see.”
“I did see one. In person, I mean. That same night, and it freaked me out, so that’s how I ended up in the ROB building. I went there thinking that I was warning them.”
Instead, I ran into my Lord.
“Vampires are not supposed to stay around the walls!” he said again, this time shouting.
“So, are you saying that Mohg is putting them there intentionally?”
“Exactly. I think they’re putting them there intentionally. Mohg never interfered in my personal shit before. So why now? Why tell me to stop going after Everard? What other reason is there except that he doesn’t want me to figure something out? Something that has to do with Everard and with him?”
“Well, not necessarily. I mean, he could be a friend of my Lord or something,” I said, because it didn’t seem very reasonable to me. Hammer laughed and shook his head.
“Mohg doesn’t have friends. And he cares about absolutely nothing that doesn’t involve him personally. Hell, he’d love to take as many Doyens as he can out of the way, because they represent competition for him,” he explained.
“So Mohg and my Lord are hiding something, and they want you off it, because they don’t want you to know?”
“Yes. I think that’s it,” he said and took a long sip from his bottle.
“How can you be sure? All you heard were rumors, right?”
“I’ve been around long enough to know when things change,” Hammer said. “I didn’t say I was sure, but there’s something different, Morta. I swear to you, something’s not right.”
“But what? What do you think they’re planning? Or why the hell is that important?” I asked halfheartedly. I had a feeling I didn’t want to know.
“My best guess is, it has something to do with humans. Otherwise, why would they be around their walls?” Hammer whispered, making my heart sink. I was right, I didn’t want to know that.
“With humans? You mean like, start something with the humans?”
Hammer only nodded.
I didn’t dare imagine what it would be like if the vampires started something against humans, like a war or something. Hell, there’d be no war at all. They’d be done in less than two hours.
“But they can't,” I cried. I knew I was a monster, but damn it, I had a beating heart!
“Oh, they can,” Hammer said without a trace of humor.
“No, I mean they can't! They need humans alive. Otherwise, what would they feed on?”
It was sick for me to even think that way, but if it meant keeping the human race alive, I would take whatever I could get.
“You mean us,” he stated, reminding me again that I was the same as him. “That’s what I think. I don’t really believe that they’d risk another explosion. Vampires would survive, but I’m pretty sure humans wouldn’t. The earth would die, too,” he said and some of his words from earlier came back to me.
“You said they won't. You said before that they wouldn’t risk it and that they won't.”
“No, I said they wouldn’t risk it unless they won’t. Unless they’ve figured some way of going after humans and still surviving.”
“That’s not possible.” Please let that not be possible.
“Not that we know of, but that brings us back to the frequent meetings of the Doyens and the mysterious island with the disappearing vamps. Maybe…”
“No. No maybe. Vampires can't live without human blood.”
I might’ve come off a little loony, but I didn’t want to think of a world without humans. They’d lied and cheated, kept lying and cheating, and they’d always treated me like I was the worst kind of scum, but this place was theirs. Their home. Their home, not mine.
“Don’t you think I know that, Morta? What I’m saying is, what if they found some other way? I mean, what else are they doing? The vampire community has always been see-through clear. There’s not much to hide anyway. Whoever’s the strongest wins. We feed on humans, we have no limitations other than RO silver. We obey our Doyens, and they take care of keeping us guarded and under the radar. Where did all the mystery come from?”
He was wondering aloud, listing those things for himself more than for me.
“Sorry, but it just doesn’t seem possible.”
“Yeah, I would’ve thought that, too. In fact, I thought that, too, when I heard the rumors and saw the vampires around the walls. But then I got this,” he said and took the piece of paper that Mohg had sent him from his pocket. “I have no doubt whatsoever that they are hiding something.”
“Maybe, but humans don’t have to be involved in whatever they’re keeping secret.”
“I guess we’ll find out soon.”
“From Bugz?”
I didn’t want to have contact with any other vampire in the world. Hammer was an exception because Hammer saved my life. And Hammer was going to take it, soon.
“Yeah. Now we wait for Bugz to show up.”
XI
Two weeks later, and no sign of the Bugz guy. Nothing, not even a letter. Hammer was sure that he knew where the house was and that Bugz got the message he sent with his old machine. By the tenth day, I wasn’t sure it had worked, and I voiced my suspicion. Other
than telling me that I didn’t know what I was talking about, Hammer didn’t say anything.
During the nights, we fought, talked and even laughed at some rare occasions, but we mostly fought. He blamed it on the fact that I never had interaction with another being before. I blamed it on his charming personality.
We practiced my connection with my Lord. I spent countless hours sitting on the sofa of the living room, with my eyes closed and my mind blank, trying to put the imagination I’d formed with Hammer’s description of the feeling to action. I tried to find the connection, I tried to feel it and to get it to give me some sort of direction, but nothing worked. By the fourteenth night, I gave up completely.
I wasn’t surprised at not being able to do this. I was used to being weird. What surprised me the most, though, was the sort of connection I’d formed with Hammer. The longer I was with him, the more I could feel him, smell him, and hear him. I teased him when I told him this and said that my hair had become all white because of him. My transformation was complete, according to him.
The first time he went to feed, I heard him when he was miles away. I heard his steps, and by the time he was around the corner, I smelled the new, fresh blood inside his veins. That and the clear scent of his body.
When I was a teenager, Mother used to make apple pie all the time for a year or so. She’d mince exactly eight apples and then squeeze a whole lemon on them to keep them from going brown. That’s how Hammer smelled. Sweet and sour at the same time.
We were never in a position like that night when he accidentally happened to find himself on top of me. He joked about my lips and sometimes winked at me, but he never again tried to kiss me. The more he talked and the more he laughed, or just smiled, I found myself staring at his small mouth and full lips.
And then, before the sun claimed my consciousness, I’d think about his lips, the way their texture would feel under my fingertips. For some reason, that didn’t threaten to make me throw up like before. I guessed it was because spending so much time with him in such a small space, I got to know him a little more than just superficially.
He took care of me in a way I had never been taken care of before. He made sure to put me in my bed if I fell unconscious in the living room. He always replaced my bottle of whiskey when the one I was drinking was almost empty. He always asked me first if there was something I wanted to do, if I wanted to drink or even smoke, or go downstairs and see the cars. He had the patience to tell me everything about each one of them.
