Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel

by Brennan, M. L.

  Seeing my opportunity to deliver the unanimous decision that my brother craved, regardless of his own feelings on this particular manner, I saw my opening and took it. “Listen, Chivalry, you’ve said yourself that the staircase is a work of art. Let’s give it to an institution that will really appreciate it. I’m sure that we can find a museum that would love to incorporate it, or maybe we could donate it to RISD.”

  “Christ, I’m going to have to endow a whole college to get that thing out the door,” Prudence muttered.

  I ignored her, keeping my focus on my brother as I delivered the biggest carrot I could come up with. “And then, Chivalry, we’d need a new staircase, so you could support some up-and-coming architect who would love to design a showpiece.”

  Chivalry visibly brightened. “That would be nice. Simone and I stopped by the Boston MFA on our last drive down from New Hampshire, and she really enjoyed the art deco exhibits. Maybe she’d be interested in taking an active hand in deciding on a new staircase.” The moment he mentioned his wife, I knew that I had him. Whether he was fully aware of it or not, Chivalry loved offering his wives the opportunity to put their own stamps on the mansion. Perhaps it comforted him on some level to walk past Bhumika’s elaborate rose garden, or Linda’s framed watercolors. There were hundreds of tiny little touches that everyone but him had either forgotten or never even been aware of. I remembered one moment when I was about seven, Chivalry had been hanging a swing from one of the huge, ancient, gnarled trees on the property, and he’d told me quietly that it had been one that his wife Irené had planted in 1902.

  Prudence clearly also knew victory when she saw it, because she said pointedly, “And who exactly is paying for all this new work, Fort?” Apparently art deco–inspired architectural showpieces by up-and-coming artists were unlikely to come on the cheap.

  I gave my sister my sweetest smile. “Well, I’d love to chip in, Prudence, but I apparently can’t touch the capital on my third of the inheritance until I’m fifty.”

  Her upper lip curled slightly. “Oh, how joyous, an unfunded mandate.” She reached over and poured a glass from the mimosa pitcher, which had been refreshed discreetly by one of the staff members over the course of the long morning. “Well, however it was achieved, let’s at least have a toast to our first successful and unanimous group decision.” We all poured and joined in the toast.

  I stood up and stretched, my spine giving a relieved crack. “Well, if that’s everything, then—” At the suddenly deadly serious expressions on my siblings’ faces, and a definite exchange of significant looks, I stopped. “Apparently not.” I dropped back into my chair dejectedly. “What is it?”

  Chivalry leaned over to me and said, in the gentlest possible tones, “It’s about your feeding, Fort.”

  I froze. With everything else that had been happening, I had, either consciously or unconsciously, overlooked this. “Mother’s gone, so I have no one to feed on anymore.” The words felt like a death knell. And they were, really. After a lifetime of being able to subsist on my mother, I was going to have to become what my siblings were—hunters, parasites, leeches. There was nothing benevolent about our feeding process, just corrosive and harmful to the humans involved.

  There was no gentleness in my sister, just unyielding steel. “Your transition has been delayed too long already, brother. And now we have a timeline—you’ll need to feed again in two weeks. At your point in transition, any longer than that would be asking for an accident. This needs to be completed. Now.”

  Desperation shot through me, and denial. This was what I’d feared and avoided ever since I was old enough to learn about my own biological inevitability, but if the time was now, then it was too soon. Anytime was too soon, actually, but I still struggled against it. “No, no, I don’t want it to be completed, not yet. Isn’t there some other way?” I turned to my brother, knowing that I was begging but unable to stop myself, wanting and needing him to give me a way out—an escape hatch, a magic wand, anything. “Chivalry, you’re over a hundred years older than me. Couldn’t I feed on you?”

  My brother took both of my hands in his and looked me in the eye. He was regretful, Chivalry—always so full of regrets, I realized suddenly. Regrets over every dead wife, even as he married the next. And here I was, the little brother trying to fight nature itself, and he felt regret for me. “Prudence and I asked Mother that same question three years ago,” he said. “She told us then that we’re not old enough to maintain you, and that feeding from any vampire but her, even someone as close as a sibling, just wouldn’t be safe for you, even if we had been old enough.”

  I struggled to process what he was telling me—not just that it wasn’t possible, but that he’d approached the question himself, and long before it had even occurred to me to ask. “You asked her this three years ago? So—”

  A muscle in his cheek spasmed, just once. “Fort, having you at her age, maintaining you for so long after you normally would’ve transitioned, plus keeping two hosts for so long . . . it was a lot, Fort. It put a strain on her, and it wore her down. We both wanted to help, but she wouldn’t let us—not a single drop of blood to either of the hosts, even just to maintain them. She was absolutely adamant.”

  I stared, and the room seemed to close in around me. “If it was straining her . . . I know she was old, but am I the reason she—”

  Prudence’s voice lashed like a whip. “Don’t even ask that. Only Mother knew what her reasons were, but she chose her actions very deliberately, knowing more about their repercussions than any of us could.” She shoved herself to her feet and began pacing, irritation clear in every line of her body. “But it’s time to grow up, Fortitude. You are not Peter Pan, and this is not the end of the world. This is what is normal and natural for you, and I have no idea why Mother allowed this to continue.” Her voice kept rising as she spoke; then she stopped herself, forcefully pulling herself back together. The bond between us felt too tight, and I could actually feel it as she shoved anger down and forced herself into an icy control. When she began speaking again, it was in a carefully modulated voice, her hand resting almost carelessly against the sideboard, but there was no hiding the glow of her blue eyes, or the weight of what she was saying. “If you’re unable to finish it yourself, then Chivalry or I could take care of Henry.”

  “You mean kill him.” Everything began to drain away from inside me, leaving me empty.

  Prudence met my eyes, never flinching. “Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.”

  I was the one who had to look away, from her, from my brother. I stared at the table instead—the pristine white tablecloth, the antique china that we ate off of with no regard because it had been in use in this family since it was new, the cut flower centerpiece that the staff members refreshed from our own greenhouse whenever the slightest hint of a wilt appeared. Here was all the beauty of the surface—the elegance and ease—and below us, down in the basement, was the reality, strapped to a table, fed from a tube. Henry’s life had been in my family’s hands, his death ours to deliver at a whim, since the moment that my mother decided, by whatever criteria she’d held in her mind and taken with her to the grave, that he would be her host, her Renfield, her means of creating one last child.

  Prudence would do it, and with pleasure. He’d slipped through her hands once months ago, and I knew that she longed to finish the job. Chivalry would do it, if I asked him—do it with merciful swiftness, the efficiency that comes from always doing one’s duty. If I wanted to, I could be weak, and neither of them would say a word against me. I took a deep breath and forced myself to look up at my siblings. “I’ll do it.”

  “What?” They were both clearly surprised, but it was Chivalry who spoke first. “Fort, you know that I—”

  I cut him off. “I know you would. I appreciate it. But it should be me.”

  “And when will this be?” Prudence asked, sarcasm and exasperation dripping from
her words. “This is yet another attempt to stretch this out indefinitely, and I’m sorry to tell you, we simply do not have the resources to maintain—”

  “No, Prudence.” I stood up again, feeling numb and light-headed. This would be the day, then, when I finally had to let go of my deepest dream, that somehow the transition could be put off forever, that I’d never have to let biology win and become that thing that my DNA was programmed for. “He never recovered from what you did to him, and with Mother gone, now he never can.” I forced the words out, and forced myself to accept them. “I’ll do it today.”

  * * *

  The process that transforms a human being into the particular hybrid that can create a vampire offspring is a punishing one. Over a series of weeks or months, the human’s blood is removed and replaced with vampire blood, until eventually no human blood remains. The human’s body is changed—it becomes tougher, stronger, and twisted all the way down to the DNA level, until the genes that are passed on are almost entirely those of the vampire, with only a few shreds from what used to be the human. The greatest changes, though, are in the mind. Sanity can’t survive the process—whoever my host father, Henry, had been before my mother gave him her blood, it was long gone by the time I was conceived, replaced with a mind that was broken and craved nothing but death and destruction. There were shreds of lucidity in his madness, enough to recognize me, for example, and occasionally hold a level of cocktail-party conversation. My childhood finger paintings were framed on the walls of the room that contained Henry’s cell, and, when it was on, the television was set to the weather channel. Henry seemed to enjoy seeing what the weather was doing—probably because he hadn’t experienced anything but the sterile insides of his cell for over thirty years.

  “He’s in a good mood today,” Conrad Miller, his keeper, told me. I was standing in the keeper’s main room, with one side completely made up of the one-way glass that allowed Conrad to keep a constant eye on Henry’s condition. The rest of the room was dominated by Conrad’s computer setup, and of course Conrad himself, who was built along the lines of a gladiator.

  “How can you tell?” I asked, looking through the window. Henry’s prison was a clear cube of incredibly tough plastic, reinforced on the door and wall seams with enough steel to make it resistant even to a vampire. Inside, Henry was strapped to a gurney at all points, so that he wouldn’t even be able to lift his head. His current physical condition necessitated the use of a feeding tube, and a catheter, and even occasionally some dialysis, and no one dared trust Henry around anything that could hold a sharp edge. The first time I’d seen a Hannibal Lector movie, I didn’t realize at first that it was meant to be frightening and bizarre—after all, that was the kind of setup I recognized from every visit to my host parents.

  “He was singing the Harvard fight song this morning.” Conrad checked the charge on his stun gun carefully, then gave me a shrewd-eyed assessment. He hadn’t been surprised by my announcement that I’d be going into Henry’s cell today, even though I’d never done that before in my life, and for the entire few months of Conrad’s employment, ever since he replaced the previous keeper, Mr. Alfred, the only people to enter the cell had been either himself or Maeve. But around Conrad’s hugely bulging left biceps was a neat black band, a strangely old-fashioned gesture that I’d seen all the other staff wearing this morning, a dull black against the rich natural brown of Conrad’s skin. As Conrad reached into a drawer and withdrew a small case marked with my name, I wondered how many final instructions my mother had left.

  He opened the case for me and showed me what was there. “The bone saw is electric,” he explained, “so you won’t need a cord. I checked the charge yesterday, and you’ll have everything you need. That’s for the skull, of course. And the knife is for the chest—you’ll want to start below the rib cage and go up. There are a set of tongs for removal.” Conrad paused, then withdrew a long, full needle. “This wasn’t in here originally,” he said cautiously. “I thought about it, and then I asked Maeve to put it together for me.”

  “Morphine?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Enough to drop a herd of elephants. Maeve put in triple what she usually gives Henry to knock him out when she’s doing a procedure. You don’t need to fumble around with a vein either—just use the needle to inject the whole thing into the top of his saline bag. He’ll just drift off . . . and then you can do the rest of it.”

  “You know what I’m going to do, I gather.”

  Conrad nodded again, his expression calm. “Your mother explained everything.”

  “I’m sure she did.”

  He paused. “You know, of course . . . I’ll be here watching, just in case anything goes wrong. But I don’t think anything will.”

  “Why do you say that?” I took the case, feeling its lightness. It should’ve weighed a lot more, given what I was about to do. There was a carefully folded plastic apron, with a set of hospital scrubs, the kind that can go over clothing, plus a clear face shield, all folded and sitting on top of one of the tables. They looked much too big to be for Maeve, and I knew that they were for me, if I wanted them. But taking the case was bad enough—the last thing I wanted was to look like I was wearing a Dexter Halloween costume.

  “He talks about it sometimes.”

  I looked at Conrad, surprised. He nodded. “If he’s having a good day, and he can really talk. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when your mother gave me this, told me what to expect.”

  “He isn’t scared?” I asked.

  “Ask him yourself.” Conrad opened the door and gave me an encouraging nod.

  I could feel Henry’s attention on me from the moment I walked into the room. He couldn’t turn his head—it was strapped down too tightly—but I knew that he was aware. I walked across the room, passing over the thick red line that was painted on the otherwise pristine white floor—until now, that was the closest I’d ever come to the cage. This would be the second time that I’d ever touched my host father—and the first time had been during Prudence’s murder attempt, when I was trying to haul him off Mr. Alfred while he’d been tearing at his keeper’s throat with his teeth, ripping away with a savagery that had been wholly animal.

  A harsh buzzing sound as Conrad remotely unlocked the door from his observation post, and I tugged at it. It opened easily, releasing a blast of air from the inside of the cell that was stale and reeked of rubbing alcohol and the faintest hint of feces. Three more steps, and I was over the threshold, beside the gurney, and within his eye line.

  Henry had those Boston Brahmin looks, the aristocratic features, and the artfully present touches of gray in the hair just at his temples that made him look like an ad for Touch of Gray. His face was much more heavily lined than it had been a few months ago—his injuries had clearly taken a toll. But his eyes focused on me, and a slow smile spread across his face. The fingers of his right hand began to tap against the surface of the bed—and the tapping was in the same rhythm as my heartbeat.

  “I felt her die, you know,” he said, conversationally, as if we were picking up a conversation that had briefly been interrupted. Maybe, to him, we were. Henry’s mind had always been like a nightmarish hedge maze to me. He laughed, softly, but with real amusement. “I never expected for her to die before me. It’s very strange. Very peaceful.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her blood would always whisper to me. It’s in me, of course, and it doesn’t like it. But when she died, the blood quieted. I think her blood is dying as well.” He paused, and his brow slowly furrowed as he pondered. “I wonder what Grace would’ve thought about this. She always had interesting observations. She was studying medicine, you know. Quite radical. In her family, the girls were all expected to be debutantes, marry political men. That’s why Madeline chose her, really. Chose both of us.”

  Grace had been my host mother, Henry’s counterpart. She’d died when she stabbed hers
elf to death with a homemade shiv, shredding her heart into enough pieces to kill even a host, and she’d done it for me. Somehow she’d known that, miles away in Providence, I was in a fight for my life against a vampire named Luca. Her death had begun my transition, had given me the speed and strength I’d needed to survive that encounter. I didn’t know much about the origins of my host parents, besides what I’d picked up by inference or the occasional comment. I’d never really wanted to know, because when I was young I hadn’t thought to ask, and when I was older, I’d known enough to be frightened and disturbed by them. I’d never heard either of them talk about how they’d ended up being Madeline’s choices for hosts, and I paused where I was, curiosity tugging at me. “Because you were studying medicine?” I asked. When I’d been a student at Brown, there was a regular ad in the student newspaper, offering very sizable sums of money for semen and egg donations from young premed students—it wasn’t unusual for childless couples of means to troll the student newspaper for their biological building blocks, often with a wish list of SAT scores and physical features, though it had been unusual enough to request a specific major that that ad had become the butt of a number of jokes around campus. A friend of mine, strapped for cash, had actually answered the ad, though he’d ended up being rejected for being less than their ideal height of six feet. I wondered for a moment whether Madeline had felt similar yearnings—if she had, she’d managed to conceal her disappointment extremely well when I declared my film studies major.

  Henry laughed. “Silly boy. No, I came from a whole family of doctors. My father, uncles, brothers, both grandfathers. Great contributions to the field. That’s what they expected out of me, of course. But I wanted to be a poet. Tried to change my major in college without telling them—of course the dean called my father anyway. They were old friends.” He tried to tilt his head at me, and was stopped by the heavy strap around his forehead. But the dark eyes that focused on me were suddenly far too clear. “You see, then, don’t you?”