Blood Thirst

by Lena Hillbrand

  “Holy mother,” she said, jerking back. He released her, realizing only dimly what he’d done. “Cripers, I should’ve known not to help you out.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “Don’t stop. I did not mean…I…reacted to the pain…”

  “I know, that was stupid of me. Like trying to get a dog out of a trap. Now you listen here. You get those fangs near me again and I’ll put every one of these stakes right back where they was. Got that?”

  “Yes,” Draven whispered. He didn’t know if she heard, but she continued speaking.

  “Now, you can’t scream, neither. You scream and my Pappy’ll be here in two seconds, and he ain’t gonna let me help you none. If it’s already been done, he won’t do nothing, but if he saw it, he’d make me stop.” Sally yanked out another stake. She did it fast, efficiently. Draven wondered how many Superiors had died here. How many had gone through this. How many stakes this sapien had removed.

  “You know…” She spoke casually, as if she were having a conversation with someone who hadn’t suffered such outrages at the hands of her people. “I didn’t figure that’s what a bite from one of you suckers would feel like. I figured you’d take out a whole chunk or something. Glad you didn’t bite me real good, then. Hey, that don’t mean I’m gonna turn into a bloodsucker, do it? Wait, course it don’t. Lots of people get bit and don’t turn into bloodsuckers. I can’t believe I got bit. I wish I could tell Larry. That’d beat his dumb story about you kicking him on accident.”

  “I…apologize.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know. I stuck my hand in your mouth. What was I expecting to happen?” When Draven didn’t speak, she went on. “So, if you can’t bleed to death, what would happen if we just kept sticking you until all your blood drained out?”

  “I’d be…quite…hungry.”

  Sally laughed. Well, he had to give it to her that she found humor in something so awful. But then, she’d gotten a pinprick in her finger. He had a few dozen stakes buried in his flesh.

  “So if you was real hungry, would you kill us all? Suck us all dry? That’s what Mama says.”

  “No.”

  “You really never killed nobody before?”

  “Not…a human.”

  “What, you killed one of your own kind but not one of us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well I’ll be. I don’t even know if I believe all that. Why’d you kill someone?”

  “He…tried…to kill me.”

  “I reckon you got a right to defend yourself. That’s all we’s doing, too, you know.”

  Draven found her with his one functioning eye. “This…was not…self-defense.”

  “I reckon. They get carried away is all. I mean, all I want is to live in peace. They’s the one’s all gung-ho about killing y’all. I don’t care one way or another, as long as you don’t try biting me. I ain’t never had nothing against y’all until y’all killed my sister.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Was it you killed her?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so. Well, your stakes is all out now. I don’t reckon you heal up as fast as they said you would. You’re supposed to be all superior, ain’t you?”

  “Stronger…faster…smarter.”

  “Then how come I’m in here doctoring your wounds, and you’re chained up and can’t move? Just saying.”

  “Are you…bleeding?”

  “What? I don’t think so, but I sure enough got some of yours on me.”

  “I smell…your blood.”

  “What in the dickens you talking about?”

  “Your fingers.”

  “Oh, shoot. Yeah, I done forgot all about them, really. I told you, I don’t think you really bit me. I mean, I hardly feel it.”

  “You will.”

  “I will? You mean it hurts worse later?”

  “Yes.”

  “I swear, if you weren’t gonna die in two days anyway, I’d…I don’t know what. Stake you, I guess.”

  “Let me…close it?”

  “What you talking about?”

  “Your bite,” Draven said, wondering why he wasted his strength talking to the very human who had placed him in this situation. But she had shown him a kindness, and he had bitten her in return. At least he could offer to heal it.

  “And how you planning on doing that?”

  “Put it…in my mouth.”

  Sally looked at Draven and then threw back her head and laughed. “And you think you’re smarter than me? I ain’t that dumb. You must be pretty dang stupid to think I’d fall for that one. Shoo-ey. At least now I know for sure I ain’t hypnotized.”

  “It will hurt…later.”

  “Yeah, well, I think I’ll take my chances. I ain’t about to lose two fingers on account of being stupid.”

  “I won’t. Promise.”

  “Yeah okay. I’ll believe that the day I turn into a bloodsucker myself. Now I’m just gonna get outta here before you do hypnotize me.”

  Draven watched through his half open eye as Sally approached the door and slid it open, then closed the steel bars behind her. She settled back in the chair and looked at herself.

  “I can’t believe I done ruined my clothes for you. Maybe I were hypnotized. Sheesh.”

  “Sally,” Draven said, his voice not sounding quite so wet, but still raspy.

  “What? Wait, how you know my name?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Yeah, you better thank me. I sure hope my Pappy don’t get a hair in his brain to come out here checking on you and see me all bloody. He’s like to kill you afore he even sees I’m alive. By golly, I think I am stupid sometimes…”

  Sally continued speaking, but Draven had stopped listening. He drifted up and up and up on a rising crescendo of pain that shut out everything. For a moment, he became dimly aware of her voice again, and then it was swallowed along with everything else. He knew only pain that never ended but grew outwards until he could not contain it. It stretched him further and further until he thought he would explode, and still it forced itself upon him from within, pushing outwards to more and deeper pain.

  17

  Cali and Shelly went into their master’s rooms only when he was home, and only if he needed something done. It didn’t happen often. He came two or three times a night to their room and gave them each a cup, bit them and left. He returned a few minutes later to collect his offering. Much to her amazement, Cali learned that Shelly didn’t have a single scar from an unclosed bite when they met. His previous owner had taken good care of him.

  Byron didn’t care for them that well, but he didn’t mistreat them, either. He mostly left them alone, aside from his thrice-daily feedings. The pebbles under Cali’s skin ached. Shelly rubbed at his arms from time to time, too, and she knew he was hurting. She tried to care for him as well as she could, but neither of them had the nerve to dig the little pellets from under their skin. Cali suggested they do it to each other, but Shelly couldn’t stand the thought, much less the pain of the act itself.

  They spent every minute of every day together. They bickered and irritated each other, primped each other and made each other laugh, ate together and cooked together and slept together. In a matter of weeks, Shelly was the best friend Cali had ever had. Before long, she’d grown to love him. They talked about everything they could think of, and they speculated about the future, and they washed their clothes in the shower and took turns asking their master for more soap.

  They became as two people become when they see no one else. They shared secrets. They pointed out the window bars at people on the street and made up stories about them when their own stories ran low. They looked at other saps and tried to catch glimpses of a boy they both found attractive.

  They did not try baby-making.

  Sometimes Cali made a small advance that Shelly met with indifference, but she didn’t persist. She remembered her promise about being good. But she didn’t want babies, and Shelly didn’t seem very i
nterested in them, either. Cali had grown more interested in Shelly than a baby. He was good to her, and more than anything else, he was there. But they still didn’t try to make babies.

  Cali emerged from the bathroom one day and found Shelly leaning against the counter, holding a white square of paper. She stopped, a knot of guilt forming inside her.

  “Girl, what is this?” Shelly asked, waving the paper like a tiny fan.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Uh huh. Sure you don’t. And you said you never been in love.”

  “I haven’t,” she said. She came forward and plucked the picture from his fingers. It had bent into a curved shape after a while in her underwear, and the picture had worn off the edges, leaving the corners rounded and rubbed white.

  “Who are those two adorable boys?” Shelly asked. “Don’t you hold out on me.”

  “They’re not anyone,” Cali said. She didn’t know why she didn’t want to tell him. But he kept looking at her so long that she had to. He told her everything. “They’re not anyone I know, I mean,” she said. “I stole this, see, and I didn’t have anywhere to put it, so I had to keep it…well, in my underwear.”

  “You keep a picture of two cute boys in your drawers, and you expect me to believe you’re not in love?”

  “I’m not,” she insisted. “I only put it there because I didn’t have anywhere else to keep it where someone wouldn’t find it. And as soon as I stopped keeping it on me, see what happened? You found it.”

  “Seems to me you’re doing a whole lot of not answering right now.”

  She sighed. “Okay, okay. I stole it from one of them. You know, a Superior.”

  “Wait, wait, that’s a Superior?” Shelly took the picture and looked at it. Cali had forgotten that of course he didn’t know—he’d never met the man in the picture, the Man with Soft Hair. And no one could tell a human from a Superior in a picture. Not unless they smiled, and the two Superiors in the picture looked awfully serious. When Cali looked at it, she had a hard time imagining Draven smiling, or laughing, although she’d seen him do both in real life. It seemed like such a long time ago, a different life, when she’d known him.

  “Yes,” Cali said. “I stole it from a Superior back home so I could ask someone about it. But that’s just part of everything back there, you see? All that stuff I’ll never see again, part of my old life.”

  “Looks like you brought a good piece of it with you.” Shelly looked way too interested in the picture.

  “Give me that,” Cali said, laughing in embarrassment. “It’s not like I even knew him. I just wanted to know what it was used for, so I stole it so I could ask someone, and because…I don’t know. I wanted to do something bad. I don’t even know why I kept it.” It seemed silly now, what she’d done, risking punishment for that silly paper with no purpose she could find.

  “Lordy master, if you don’t want it, I’ll keep it,” Shelly said. “I can’t decide which one of these boys is cuter.”

  “Ew,” Cali said, wrinkling her nose. “They’re bloodsuckers, they can’t be cute. Now stop looking at them like that, it’s rotty.” She made a grab for the picture, but he held it away.

  “Not until you admit they’re cute.”

  “Shelly, that’s rotty.”

  “Uh-uh, girl. If you didn’t know these two were bloodsuckers, tell me you wouldn’t think they were cute. Especially this one with the short hair.”

  “Fine,” she said. “If they were people they’d be cute. Now give me my picture.” He laughed and surrendered at last. “Besides, if one of them was cute, it would be the one with curly hair,” she muttered, flattening the picture.

  “Well, if you change your mind and don’t want it, you can give it to me,” he said. “I don’t care what it’s for. I’ll just look at it. Don’t pretend that’s not what you do with it, too. Keeping it in your drawers. My goodness, girl. You are bad.”

  “I am not,” Cali said, laughing. She opened the drawer in the counter and put the picture inside next to the two bent spoons, four thick plastic bowls, and two plates with chipping edges. “See, it’s nothing, I don’t even care,” she said. “Look at it all you want.”

  She closed the drawer. She hoped Shelly wouldn’t take the worn picture, though, or look at it too often. She didn’t want him looking at some silly picture of a Superior she’d known in her last life, the one she’d lived before she knew Shelly. He was supposed to be her mate. If he looked at anyone, it should be her, not some dumb Superior he’d never see except in a bent-up wrinkly old picture.

  18

  Draven had much time to lie on the floor, feeling himself freeze, the agonizing pain of frozen flesh adding to the pain of his injuries. He tried not to move. Only his mind moved. Terrified of moving forward, it moved backwards instead. Back over the hundred and twenty-something years he’d lived, over his human life with all its misery and determination and exhilaration and horror.

  Over his Superior life, the happy period with the woman he’d loved, the years he’d spent with his one close friend. And over his many jobs, his brief pairings with women, the meaningless nights all blending together into a dull blur. So much time wasted. So many women who meant nothing, jobs that left no mark, so many humans he’d hurt. But he hadn’t hurt them the way they now hurt him.

  His mind moved over the spooling of years, coming inevitably to the last year, the year he’d worked towards Cali. Finally he’d had something to work for, to want, to drive him. Not the approval of some woman or friend he wanted to impress. He’d come so close to getting her. Even when Byron had bought her, Draven had not given up. At last he’d refused to give up, refused to bow to the order of things, to accept his lot in life.

  When he’d left the city and gone north, he’d known a possible outcome of his journey was failure. But this wasn’t failure. This was much worse. After coming all this way, he’d come to nothing. It had taken him too long, anyhow. Byron would have settled in by now. Perhaps Cali would be happy. After so long, she might not even remember him.

  But he didn’t want to think of them now, while he tried to heal and his blood froze to the floor beneath him. He would rather think of the journey that had led him there. He’d just begun to learn about himself, to learn about nature again. He had begun making a pair of rudimentary snowshoes after having to escape a pack of wolves in the mountains. Improving upon them every morning before he settled down to sleep had occupied that restless space between waking and sleep. After a week of trial and error, he’d made a pair of functional—if unattractive—snowshoes. He wondered where they were now, if these humans would use them or had left them lying where they found him.

  Sometimes he’d woken to find his hands and feet throbbing with a terrible pain that permeated his flesh and ate at him. He’d imagined that having his frozen body gnawed away by wolves and mountain lions would hurt that way. His hands and feet had felt as if ice chewed them away little by little, and it had been all he could do not to scream in agony. Little parts of him had frozen during his journey, and now he had the same torture with the added tortures of his captors. Now nothing warmed him, and he had no relief from the agony.

  Just a few days before, he’d stood on a mountaintop and looked at the millions of stars strewn across the immensity of the sky above him. The space around him had seemed infinite. Soon enough, his universe had become quite small, and now he lay cherishing those moments, wishing he could go back to them in body as well as memory.

  One night, he’d realized that he had become accustomed to the forest, no longer frightened of the trees. But a lingering unease had stirred within, one that he’d attributed to his fear that Byron wouldn’t part with his sap. The next morning, he had come upon the house.

  19

  Byron spent days going through the files. They weren’t cross-referenced as they should be, and it took more time than he’d anticipated. He found after much searching that Milton hadn’t given him a complete assessment of the situation. Sixteen saps h
ad gone missing in the last five years. Sixteen who hadn’t been recovered.

  Saps often got it into their heads that they could escape. They ought to consider themselves lucky to have masters who took such good care of them, but of course no one could explain that in a way that a simple sapien mind could comprehend. So it never surprised Byron when a couple saps slipped away. A lot of Superiors gave their livestock far too much leniency, trusting sapiens to stay with their owners simply because they belonged to them. Saps didn’t care about things like loyalty.

  Some Superiors didn’t even punish saps who ran away. No wonder they were always making a break for it. Half the time they came back on their own once they realized they couldn’t live without their masters—and didn’t want to. Superiors provided them with an easy life, food and shelter and a warm place to stay, and the lousy saps only had to offer up a drink now and then, or maybe do a few simple chores. Their minds weren’t equipped to deal with complex issues, but they could perform simple physical tasks with some success.

  Byron scrolled through the list of runaways he had compiled. Some of the data hadn’t been entered correctly. No one had updated the older records for over a year. Some of the saps had probably not even run away, but had simply wandered off and gotten lost. Byron sighed and transferred the list to his pod before standing to leave. He’d have to make a few calls on his way home.

  He stopped off at a few places to talk to owners of runaway saps. The last place he stopped looked very similar to his own. The Superior who lived on the ground-floor apartment had lost a sapien two years before. Byron waited at the door, holding up his cards to the camera while the owner checked his identity. When the Superior opened the door, Byron found the owner wasn’t a man at all, but a boy. Byron had long ago lost the ability to determine age with any accuracy, but the boy was obviously still a child.

  “Oh, hello. Are you Meyer Kidd?”

  “Yes, Enforcer. Come in, please,” the boy said, stepping aside. He spoke in an accent, the product of some long-vanished country in Belarus.