by Skyler White
Another piece of paper defiled.
“This is the standard guarantee of disease- and drug-free blood, initial please, thank you. These are your restrictions, initial by each line please. To take no more than two quarts per fig per hunt, thank you. To leave no marks beyond a maximum of three sets of punctures, thank you. And to call the Quarry Recovery Line within an hour of first draw, thank you. Here’s a card with the Recovery Hotline phone number.” I take the card.
Modernity: Abandon all choice, ye who enter here. I push the door open and step inside.
The Quarry’s lounge is decorated like an old-world bordello, deliberately ironic but genuinely antique. Flocked crimson wallpaper and polished brass diffuse and glow in the flickering light of wall-mounted gas sconces. All the human smells are gone. Soon it will teem with the Undead, but it’s early still. I’m the only one.
Amidst the Victoriana, in the center of the lounge, lush, backless velvet sofas ring a huge, sleek, one-way glass aquarium. Behind its soundproof glass, six naked men and women await their hunters. But I see only the delectable Latina woman inches away. I push my marble fingers against the cool, slick glass. “Hola, Maria.” She can’t hear me.
I force myself to see the others in the covert. Opposite Maria, the new girl is easy to spot, rabbit soft, hair like a dying fire. She is the only one trying to conceal her body, hopelessly vulnerable. I walk around the covert to where she sits, trailing lifeless fingertips against the cold glass.
She’s terrified, but even the veterans like Maria are nervous every time. They never know who hunts them, and some of us like to play with our food, drawing out the pursuit as long as we can, or amusing ourselves with the unconscious shell, tasting the cooling body, the pliant muscles and unresisting apertures, the smells still clinging, the vigor of having fed building in us.
I ring for the quarrymaster.
“Get me Maria,” I tell him.
She is not redemption. I only drink her fear. But it is familiar, almost the same as love.
As my Maria is summoned and descends, I watch a powerfully endowed, muscular younger man leaning back in his chair with his deep-set eyes closed. A Rubenesque raven girl massages his meaty shoulders. Her full, red-tipped breasts roll rhythmically with her strokes. His hands curl loosely on his corded thighs, making no attempt to cover his long, exposed, but flaccid sex. Her fist-size nipples spiral hypnotically, and I wonder what it would take to make him hard. Maybe he would rather be hunted than massaged. Some desires require that.
The quarrymaster returns to say that Maria is dressed and ready. I follow him into the pen. Only its thin walls separate her mortal body from mine now. She waits, delicate chin resting in a cradle inches away. The bar slides back revealing only her green eyes. She does not blink. Her eyes fix deep in me, locating her within. I cannot fail to find her now. The window slides shut from the other side. Someone tells her “Go!” And she is gone.
The farther she can run before I follow, the longer the hunt will last; but I’m restless, and the quarrymaster smells of fried chicken and fear. I circle the building scenting for the exit she used. I sense her eyes again as I pick up her trail and follow it, holding myself to a walk. I am hungry.
The Quarry is on the edge of the restaurant district, and she’s gone deeper in, mingling with the club-goers and first dates, scenting sex and anxiety. She’s learning. I pass the bar where I cornered her last time. She had hidden in the back, near the kitchen, trying to mask her fear-scent in the smells of food. Tonight, she has gone toward the busier streets. But she misunderstands; it’s not an olfactory scent we take when the bar slides back between our eyes.
Hunger heightens my angelic senses, and I isolate her trail amongst the hunters who seek only a human connection, flavored with a longing she does not possess. I follow, trying to shorten my powerful stride through my growing anticipation and rage. Adam will be among these throngs tonight.
The entertainment district ends abruptly at an elevated highway, despite repeated civic attempts to reclaim the darkness on the other side. Car exhaust and dirt on the ascendancy, blood and anticipation declining. Maria, where are you? The rules require that she stay on foot. I reach out for a trace of her. I’ve overshot, and retreat.
I track her to an all-night service station. She’s gone inside and vanished? No. Here’s a trace, terror masked in gasoline, moving north. She’s taking risks. A human woman walking alone under the overpass at night tempts devils who have signed no contract. I will kill anyone I find threatening her. I almost run, but stop myself, like choking back a laugh.
She’s alone. I see her now, walking briskly north. She, too, has learned not to run. I shorten the space between us too soon, pressing down need and anger. Shall I let her hear me? No.
She turns, sensing the shadows moving. She’s wearing a mechanic’s greasy coveralls. Clever girl. But her tender heart rate is rising. Now she knows it’s me. She struggles not to run, looking hard over her shoulder. Does she hope for a different ending? Does the Quarry hint that the hour we have to hunt them is a limit on us, a chance of escape for our prey? How could she believe that? Could she try so valiantly if she did not?
Disciplining my strength into grace, I shadow her beneath the overpass. I’m almost touching her, breathing the slippery smell of her fear. But the thrumming beat of her, visible through the warm flesh of her throat, summons me. My pulseless fingers reach out for the hammering vein and feel it pound swifter against them. She makes a strange noise and runs.
I watch her strong body straining forward for as long as I can, before I slide in behind her. Magnificent, striding flight, her legs stretch, and mine shadow. I rein myself back as her endurance fails. Her blazing lungs and her tearing heart echo through me. I could so easily overtake her, drive my teeth into her now, but she will exhaust herself soon and have to stop. And then…
Then I will take her. Let her run until she no longer can.
But she’s very fit and can’t bring herself to surrender, so I touch her again, circling a fragile wrist, giving her a focus for her fear. She flails, and I step behind her, pulling her against me. She can’t breathe from running. Fear spikes, mindless struggles, held to my still body. My lips graze the place of first puncture, across the last hunt’s wounds healed to bare bruises; and I taste her with my tongue. She’s not allowed to scream, but can’t throttle the half cry. She fights to control the impulse, which would end her career with us, even as I whisper to her.
The cars fly over us rhythmically carrying their own light, but only their shadows spread beyond the highway, down the concrete, to me. I transfer Maria’s wrists to one hand and glide the other across her hip bone, pressing into the softness it encircles. Her breasts are small, tapering into her chest below a collarbone that I can’t see without wanting to snap and suck. My fingers press hard into it, not to bruise, no, I can’t leave even a finger-mark in the flesh there, the castrating bastards of the Quarry all be damned for their godless fear and mortal caution.
She’s motionless against me now, except for the ragged breathing. Dragged from collarbone to jaw, my cold fingers finally tip her chin up. She shudders, knowing. My lips open against yielding flesh. My mouth stretches even wider, and I allow my tongue to stroke her pulsing skin again. A warm release, deep in the bones of my jaw, presses the sharper teeth through, lengthening as my lips and tongue work until, at full extension and achingly hollow, my feeding teeth catch against her. I force myself through a single ragged breath, pressing my lower lip hard against her human warmth. Then I flex, pulling my mouth away. My upper lip curls, my jaws unhinge, and I strike. I pierce, and sink into her full-tooth. The blood strikes the back of my throat in spasmodic cardiac bursts until I can pull and swallow, draw her into me. Maria is rigid, locked in pain, or horror, or ecstasy. But she will soften.
Beneath the freeway, time groans and gives way. My throat is slippery with the distortion of seconds into years, and I pull myself from the rising blood dreams to turn her toward
me. Her face is extraordinary, pale stealing the flush of her running. Her swimming eyes lose focus, meet mine. I shouldn’t, but I let her look, cradling her head with my warming fingers, holding her against me. She gives the weight of her body into my hands. Below my lips, her scent is fading, heart slowing.
I strike again. My mind deepens and I drink the flood of images and moments that aren’t mine across my tongue. Her mother—black hair, outdated clothes, a lover, a wasteland, a child. The sweet blood dreams. I drink her, am her. I am open to the whole thrum of thought and life and desire, of things made and things dreamed, of each person unique, each droplet alone in its current. And none of them mine.
———
Dominic pierced the hotel’s cocoon of wealth reluctantly. Any place, temple or tearoom, where the rituals of rank and riches were strictly observed brought out an ancient, impudent impulse in him. He wanted to take off his shirt and stand on the furniture. He wanted to run. On the pillowy hotel lobby carpet, getting his bearings, Dominic stood full Bengali despite his stylish jacket.
His rogue imagination was swift to provide a rich contextual history behind physical sensations as simple as lushness underfoot, but he had learned not to challenge these unwelcome fantasies too closely. He was, in some indisputable way, tiger hunting. He shifted his laptop bag to his left shoulder and began to track silently across the luxurious rug toward the restaurant, but his elbow was immediately captured.
“Dr. O’Shaughnessy, I’m Megan, Ms. Wright’s personal secretary. Thank you for coming.”
“My pleasure, Megan. Did I speak with you on the phone?”
“No, that was Tibby.”
Brisk, blond, and competent, Megan steered Dominic away from the restaurant where he had been asked to meet Madalene Wright, and down a broad flight of marble stairs. “I’m Ms. Wright’s personal secretary. Tibby is the foundation’s. Ms. Wright heard you speak today at the conference. I believe she has some questions for you.”
Megan brought Dominic to a wary halt before an unmarked but highly polished wooden door. “Are you surprised to hear that?” she asked, and rapped at the door.
“I was surprised to hear from Ms. Wright at all. She has a reputation for being more difficult to meet with than the Wizard of Oz.” Dominic tugged the cuff of his jacket self-consciously. Megan’s slender hand had pulled it up enough to reveal the tattoo that bore an embarrassing testament to his tumultuous adolescence.
“I’ll let Ms. Wright know you’re here.” Megan turned fluidly toward the equally stunning woman who had opened the door. “Lucy, will you show Dr. O’Shaughnessy to Ms. Wright’s table?”
“With pleasure.”
Dominic’s elbow was transferred from one silky hand to another, and Lucy escorted him deeper into the belly of San Francisco’s most exclusive dining room. He felt, with every cushioned step, less like a predator and more like prey.
Dominic had been seated only moments when Ms. Wright, elegant and ageless, swept into the dining room in a crimson dress, flanked by her two vestal secretaries, and trailed by a cantankerous-looking man a few years younger than himself. Dominic rose, grateful that the fabled Ms. Wright triggered nothing in him. He grinned too broadly at the grande dame out of sheer relief.
“Dr. O’Shaughnessy, how very nice to meet you.”
“Ms. Wright, I am honored. Call me Dominic, please.”
For once, Dominic’s aberrant knowledge of historic minutia proved useful. He did not extend his hand and recognized the flicker of approval in the regal face across from him. Nor did he take his seat again until she, smiling now, invited him to.
“This is my son, Harold.” Madalene nodded toward the hulk of resentment settling itself into a chair. “Harold, unfortunately, did not hear you speak this afternoon, but I very much enjoyed your lecture.” Madalene ignored the flurry of radiating activity as secretaries and waiters, sommeliers and servants poured and fetched. She fixed her keen gaze on Dominic. “So, there’s been a changing of the guard at MIT? My old acquaintance Dysart stays home and sends forth his brave young Turks. Need I fear for his health or his dedication?”
“An old general knows the value of young blood,” Dominic replied.
Tibby’s mouth contracted as though her teeth had turned to salt. Megan transmitted a subtle frown, but Dominic caught the flicker of a smile in the glittering eyes of their mistress. “I thought I caught a whiff of something,” she said. “So tell me, Dominic, are you really as good as the journals say?”
“You read the Lancet article?”
“I have more than a passing interest in neuropsychiatry, and I try to keep abreast of developments in your field. I fund quite a lot of them.”
“I am well acquainted with your generosity.”
“You are not.”
“Then I should like to be.”
Tibby blanched.
Madalene arched a sculpted brow. “My, you are quite the young tiger, aren’t you?”
“My mother is a businesswoman, Dominic.” The lumpish son heaved himself forward to interrupt. “She invests our foundation’s money in promising enterprises that are likely to win big.”
“I was under the impression that the Wright Foundation took advantage of its unique position as a private fund to support the kind of radical research that makes corporate sponsorship gun-shy,” Dominic replied. “You have a reputation for poaching the big ideas that hover on the outskirts of mainstream science.”
“So you admit that the mainstream takes exception to Dysart’s work?” Harold smirked.
“I’ll admit it’s exceptional.”
Watching the junior Wright’s face deflate, Dominic was reminded of the antique medical notion of the four humors. Presented with such a perfect example of an excess of bile, Dominic suppressed an impulse to inquire after the younger man’s spleen.
“Are you hungry, Dominic?” Behind her elegant, erect back, Madalene’s matching secretaries discreetly shook their manicured heads no at Dominic with a fearful symmetry.
“Very.”
“Ah.” Ms. Wright paused, unperturbed. “Please order something.”
A waiter materialized from the staff orbiting Ms. Wright like bees drawn to the golden pollen of wealth. He hovered, waiting for a command he could obey, but Ms. Wright’s menu remained untouched. “At a certain age, women’s bodies lose the ability to metabolize food at all and convert it directly into thigh,” she informed Dominic. “I am too old to eat.”
“Ms. Wright, I find myself in an unenviable position,” Dominic confessed. “I’m afraid that if I don’t eat something, I shall be very poor company, too addled by hunger to think clearly or answer your questions accurately. You will be forced to form an impression of me as a well-mannered young fool. On the other hand, I’m the son of a southern lady who raised me to eat with good manners or starve—Sparta, Georgia’s ‘with your shield or upon it’—so I cannot order if you do not intend to eat.”
Madalene’s laughter surprised everyone but Harold, who clearly ate whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, metabolism be damned.
“My mother never takes dinner,” he said, enjoying Dominic’s predicament, while his mother’s attendant bevy swarmed uneasily.
“Do you take tea, Ms. Wright?”
“That sounds lovely.”
“Tea, please,” Dominic said.
“With”—Ms. Wright inclined her precision coif slightly toward the waiter’s napkined forearm—“perhaps some of those nice little quiche and a few finger sandwiches?” She smiled frankly at Dominic, the first authentic expression he had seen on her expensive face. “Mustn’t disobey Mother?”
“Never.” Dominic returned the smile and took a risk. “Tell me what kind of work you’re interested in supporting, Ms. Wright,” he asked bluntly. The doyen across from him enjoyed toying with her food, but his tea and sandwiches would be arriving soon on starched white waves, and Dominic wanted time to digest both food and information.
“My foundation supports innovation,
” Ms. Wright said. “Your lecture today suggested the possibility of a psychiatric cosmetic surgery. If I understood correctly—and you may correct me if I did not”—Dominic nodded polite assent—“you’re postulating a technology to identify the locations of specific thoughts or memories, with the ultimate goal of disrupting only those targeted neurons to functionally erase the memory.”
“We believe that memory is basically a change in synaptic strength or organization,” Dominic explained. “It’s a genetic adaptation with enormous benefits to creatures needing to recall precisely where they stumbled across a den of tigers, or a poisonous snake. But it’s a lot less helpful against contemporary dangers.”
“Hence PTSD.” Madalene nodded.
Dominic watched the tea things land with profound gratitude. “The brain can’t tell the difference between the memory of an old trauma and a fresh instance of a recurrent one,” he said. “The pathway is reinforced every time an event is relived in imagination or experience, but we’re learning to identify the memory trace—the specific grouping of neurons that represent a memory—and we’re finding these traces aren’t simply the environments in which a memory is formed, but actually hold the memory itself.”
“That’s fascinating, Dr. O’Shaughnessy.”
Madalene Wright did not look fascinated. Dominic poured himself a deliberate cup of tea, playing for time. Something she had heard in his morning lecture had intrigued her enough to summon him to a hotel they didn’t share for a meal she didn’t eat. What did she want?
“We’ve found beta-blockers which, if given within a few hours of the inciting traumatic event, can almost eliminate the risk of PTSD,” Dominic said. “I could imagine similar therapies for phobia, monomania, and OCD.” Not a flicker of interest from across the table. Ms. Wright sat, demure hands in her lap, expressionless.
“Can you foresee a benefit for delusional patients?” she asked.
Dominic’s body’s pulsed an adrenal alert. He glanced at the old lady’s son. Young Harold rolled his piggy eyes in weary disgust and tucked his chin into folds of neck. He had heard this before. Dominic relaxed and ate a finger sandwich.
