It’s very Hannibal Lector chic. The only thing breaking the monotony of the white walls are a few framed pictures. There’s one rainbow, two birds, a beach, and a turkey. They are all terrible, since I made them with finger paints when I was five. Each one is dedicated to Henry and Grace, even though I remember how Mr. Albert had to guide my hand through the letters.
Henry and Grace sat in their respective cubes. Both in their fifties, with graying hair and increasing crow’s-feet around their eyes, and dressed in white hospital scrubs, they should’ve look harmless. They were trying very hard to look harmless, in fact, each seated with folded hands and crossed feet, attentively looking toward me as if it was parent-teacher night in the Arkham Asylum.
They couldn’t manage it. Their eyes never stopped darting over me. Even as we exchanged pleasantries and started a completely banal conversation about the weather (they hadn’t been outside in over thirty years, and their skin was albino pale, but they did like to watch the Weather Channel), Henry’s fingers started tapping frantically, and Grace got out of her chair to come closer to the edge of her cage. She wasn’t touching it yet, but I knew that she would soon. They always tried their best to show interest in my life, but it was an uphill battle, always doomed to fail.
We managed a full ten minutes before they were both out of their chairs and pacing. It was like seeing tigers at the zoo as they walked back and forth. Having both of them so focused on me was always nerve-racking, and even though I tried my best to stay calm, my body started showing the physiological signs of stress. My breath began coming a little bit faster, my heart sped up, and I could feel the start of sweat at my temples and under my arms. The more my body reacted, the faster they paced, the more stressed I got, and soon enough Grace snapped and started slamming her fists against the wall between us. It would’ve been easier if she was screaming, but she wasn’t. Instead she had dropped all pretence of our earlier conversation, and was now whispering to me, very softly and sweetly.
“Come to your mommy, darling, come here. Let me hold you, sweetheart. Come to Mommy.”
Then Henry started. “Come here, son. Come to your father. I’ve missed you so much.”
Suddenly Mr. Albert was at my shoulder. The Taser was in his hands, and he’d hung the cattle prod on his belt. Henry and Grace lost all restraint at the sight of him—they began throwing themselves at the walls and started screaming obscenities. They were both foaming at the mouth, and Henry’s hands were already bleeding.
I hurried out of the room, not looking back as their voices rose and there was the brief whiff of burned flesh and urine. The walls of their cages could be electrified. Then I was back in Mr. Albert’s sitting room, and I didn’t slow down. My visits were always enough to ensure that his hands would be too full to say good-bye.
Between them, Grace and Henry have killed five people. For hosts, I’m told, that is a very low number. Famous hosts have included Jack the Ripper, whose career total was much higher than historians assume. One of the last people Grace killed was right after she gave birth to me. Not that she actually went through labor. A week before her due date she was put under and I was delivered via caesarian and whisked upstairs by Madeline. Not a moment too soon either, because as Grace was being stitched up, she came out of the anesthesia, grabbed a scalpel, and things ended very badly for one member of the surgical team. The rest got away with moderate scarring.
Vampires don’t fall in love with other vampires, throw on a little mood music, and have babies. Both genders of adults have functioning sex organs, but that’s not how they procreate. Adult vampires usually don’t live together—most branch off, claim territory, and then begin the task of nesting. If they are successful in procreating, then they live with their offspring until they also begin to feel the ticking of that biological clock, and the system continues.
But to get that little future vampiric bun in the oven going, they need humans to do the dirty work for them. Hosts are created when a vampire drains a human right down to the point where the fuel meter is pointing to empty, then fills her back up with the vampire’s own blood. I’m told that this process used to be messier before IV drips.
Small blood exchanges are no big deal for adult vampires. After snacking on her politicians, Madeline always has them take a sip from her. Chivalry does the same with his wife. Prudence doesn’t even like sharing an order of Chinese food, so I doubt that she does this. But both Madeline and Chivalry claim that there are no negative long-term effects to humans drinking small amounts of their blood, just a slightly increased feeling of loyalty and devotion from the human. I’d call that a sizable negative side effect, but neither of them listens to me. Whatever the arguable emotional impact, though, a human can walk away with a bit of vampire blood and be physiologically unchanged.
It’s when the blood exchange gets a lot bigger that other things start happening. A little psychosis here, increased strength there, and at two pints and up humans tend to start dying on the spot. Whole blood transfer survival rates are extremely low, and those hosts then get to undergo a few months of prolonged changes as the vampire blood starts tinkering around with their fundamental makeup. It starts with big things, like bone density and organ resilience, but then it goes small. By the time Henry and Grace were at the end of the process, their reproductive systems had been altered on critical levels, so that any child created with Henry’s semen or Grace’s eggs was going to be a vampire. From what Chivalry has told me, on the basic DNA level, I actually have more in common with Madeline than either of my host parents.
Vampires gain in strength as they get older, and reach the point where they might be able to create a host around the two-century mark. There’s an emphasis on the “might” there—Chivalry had told me that there were vampires who spent their entire lives trying to create a host and were never able to achieve it. When we celebrated Madeline’s birthday, the cake had six candles on it—one for each full century she’d lived, but even for her it was apparently a very arduous undertaking to make a single host. With the fun addition of homicidal psychosis, actually keeping hosts intact long enough to breed is also a challenge for any vampire in the mood for a baby shower. The vampire blood running around in their systems isn’t natural, so whenever Henry or Grace get a cut, no matter how minor, their bodies can’t produce more blood. It’s up to Madeline to come replenish it from her own supply, another process that I’m told is (ha-ha) draining.
So vampires have a bit of built-in population control.
In vampire parlance, Madeline is my blood mother, the real parent. Henry and Grace are the host parents. All I know about them are their first names. I don’t know who they were, where they came from, or even why Madeline chose them. If they had any idea at all what was going to happen to them, or if they’d been completely misled. If somewhere in that madness they were fond of each other. If they were actually fond of me, as they suggested, or if it was just another attempt to escape.
Visits home are always full of these kinds of wonderful experiences. As I came out of the basement, the pantry maid stepped aside from her pile of already gleaming silver spoons.
“Mrs. Scott would like to see you before dinner,” she said. There wasn’t any curiosity in her limpid blue eyes. Madeline liked her staff friendly, pretty, and dim. There were benefits to falling into those categories. Literally. Madeline provided full health and dental packages, plus the promise of almost lifetime employment. The only other place that could offer that kind of provision was Disney World. I thanked the maid, who turned back to her Sisyphean polishing.
Madeline has a suite of rooms on the second floor. There are also suites for all of her children, even though Chivalry is the only one who lives in the mansion. Prudence has a very modern town house one town over, and I’ve lived on my own ever since I left for college. Madeline’s rule is very simple—if we live with her, she’ll cover all our bills. If we live elsewhere, we have to support ourselves. Whether that is an attempt to keep us close, o
r to push us out of the nest, I have no idea. Whatever her intention, it would suggest that she has had mixed results.
I tapped lightly on Madeline’s door, heard her response, and walked in.
Madeline was the first vampire to arrive in the New World, and so she had her pick of territory. Hemmed in by Puritan-run Massachusetts and Connecticut, Rhode Island was the most inclusive of the new colonies. The oldest Jewish cemetery in America is located in Newport, and periodically people accused of witchcraft in other states would pack up their belongings and run to Rhode Island, which had a strong tradition of choosing not to burn people at the stake. People were a bit more alert to differences in their neighbors back then, and most vampires preferred to hunker down in Europe, where money and ancient family prestige could cover up all sorts of eccentricities and atrocities.
Her territory is all of New England, plus New York state, a sizable chunk of Canada, and northern New Jersey. I learned this when I was applying to colleges and Chivalry handed me a map of what areas I was allowed to go into. When I protested this, still entertaining the dream of leaving all of them in my dust and going out to UC Berkeley, I was told that I was still too young to go unescorted out of our home territory. So if I planned to attend Berkeley, Chivalry would be going with me. The thought of living with my brother was enough to kill all desire to go to Berkeley. I asked at the time what I was supposed to do if I met up with a vampire I didn’t know in our territory. Chivalry just smiled and said that that wouldn’t happen, because no vampire would dare come into Madeline’s territory without an invitation.
Vampires aren’t the only things that stay hidden from humans, and the other kinds of supernatural creatures usually have to negotiate with Madeline before they can settle anywhere within her borders. Sometimes that’s just a courtesy call, and other times there’s a full exchange of emissaries and forging of alliances. Not that I know much about it—the closest I want to come to the supernatural is summer blockbuster movies. When I was still living with Brian and Jill, the only people other than my family who I saw during my visits were a few politicians. After their deaths, when I’d lost the last of my illusions that all those things that my friends and I dressed up as on Halloween were just make-believe, I made a very conscious decision that I didn’t want to know anything about it. There wasn’t any hiding from vampires, of course, but I managed to give the rest a very wide berth.
But for the woman herself who wields so much power, it’s easy to underestimate her. At first.
I opened the door and entered a room that was all things pink and frilly, with spindly-legged chairs and a preponderance of mother-of-pearl gilding any available surface. Madeline sat in the middle of it, a tiny woman with a Barbara Bush hairstyle, pink fluffy slippers and matching bathrobe over a standard little old lady dress, cornflower blue eyes, and a face so wrinkled that she made the Dalai Lama look like a third grader. It was a perfect illusion of innocence until she set down her Sèvres teacup and gave me a smile that showed off a perfect mouth of teeth—and a set of fangs that a tiger would be jealous of.
Madeline’s fangs are another sign of age. Chivalry and Prudence have fangs, but they retract so that both of them pass through the human world normally enough that they could probably sit in a dentist’s chair and just get a lecture on flossing. When they do emerge, their fangs are thin and sharp, designed to make surgically precise punctures on their victim to get the blood flowing, but not leave large marks behind. I don’t even have fangs at all, just the human incisors that are basically vampire baby teeth. But Madeline’s fangs are fixed in place like a cat’s, and are the size and sharpness for ripping and tearing.
“Darling,” Madeline said, taking off the large grandma glasses that she doesn’t need, but likes to wear for effect. “What an unexpected pleasure.” Her voice is another giveaway. It’s low and sweet, with some age showing in her pauses, but it sets every instinct in you on edge. I’ve known Madeline my entire life, yet listening to her still makes all the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and I hate turning my back on her.
The knowledge that at some point I’ll start the transition that will make me a full vampire like my siblings and Mother makes me dread every birthday and routinely check my teeth in the mirror. Because popular vampire lore is wrong in another key aspect: vampires do age, and we aren’t immortal. Each of us will eventually succumb and die of old age, a thought that is not as comforting as it should be, given that every person in my graduating high school class as well as their great-grandchildren will be dust in the ground before I’m even ready for vampire AARP, but even for us, Madeline is very old.
“It’s not a surprise if you send people to get me, Mother,” I said. Sometimes I wonder what a psychiatrist would make of my relationship with my mother. If I could go to a psychiatrist, of course, and tell him everything about my life without his immediately throwing me into an insane asylum. Or, worse, believing me.
She just gave me a grandmotherly smile, completely ruined by the fangs that rested against her bright coral lipstick. “But it is still a surprise. After all, you could’ve refused to visit. And yet here you are, my darling baby. Youngest of my little sparrows, hopping home into the nest. Isn’t that lovely?”
I hate coming home.
Before I could come up with a suitably smart-ass response, Madeline had breezed the conversation forward. There’s a great French expression that I learned during a foreign film class called l’esprit de l’escalier, which basically means “staircase wit.” It refers to when you think of a great comeback line, but it’s too late to deliver it. I experience that a lot around my mother.
Madeline’s sweet smile of fang never wavered. “We have exciting things to speak of, darling. But first, let’s get this out of the way.” And she rolled back her sleeve, exposing her pale wrist. Her wrist isn’t smooth—there are liver spots, and the skin has lost elasticity as she’s aged, leaving it to hang droopily, bumping here and there with the long veins that have darkened from the blue you’ll see in very fair-skinned people to almost a lavender. Against the sticklike skinniness of her arm, her wrist bone is a disproportionately huge bulge. In a movement too fast for me to see, she slashed her wrist with one of her nails, creating a small cut that sluggishly oozed blood. Her blood was thicker than a human’s, and darker. It didn’t move correctly either. There was no dribbling, because it was coagulating too fast.
I was so hungry.
I was crawling toward her wrist, even though I didn’t even remember dropping to my knees. There was no control anymore, no holding back, and I locked my mouth around her wrist and sucked as hard as I could. It was like trying to drink a thick milkshake, and I struggled to get the blood in my mouth. It was like fire on my tongue, and I could feel each individual drop as it went down my throat and into me. Then it was finally flowing faster, and I could hear myself making small whimpers, like a young animal nursing. I could feel her skeletal fingers running through my hair as she petted me with her free hand, encouraging me to drink more. My eyes weren’t closed, but the room seemed dark, with nothing existing except my mouth and the blood that I needed more of. I wasn’t aware of my knees against the carpet, or my hands clutching at her arm, but somewhere in the distance I could hear heartbeats that I know didn’t belong to my family—these were human heartbeats, too delicate to be ours, and I wanted to be closer to them, to feel them speed up when I got closer, and then to make them stop—
And then I was aware of myself again, of how desperately I was drinking, of how I’d pressed myself up against Madeline’s legs. Of how I must’ve looked. All I wanted was more and more of her blood, but I forced myself to swallow what was left in my mouth and pull back. The slice on her wrist began to close even as I watched, and the remaining blood didn’t stain the surface like mine would, but instead pulled back inside the closing wound, leaving her skin unmarked. I turned away from it, awkwardly pulling back from her and standing up. I caught a glimpse of myself in a large antique mirror. My hair lo
oked like I had gotten caught in a cyclone, my hazel eyes were lost in the size of my pupils, and there was still one drop of blood left on my lip. It took every piece of control I had not to lick it up. Instead I grabbed a napkin from Madeline’s table and wiped it off. I mourned its loss even as I dropped the napkin down onto Madeline’s tea tray.
Madeline laughed at me, a dry cackle that sounded like the rustling of autumn leaves.
“Foolish little darling,” she said. “What do you gain by drinking less than your fill? If you imagine that by drinking one less drop you can put off your transition, I assure you that you cannot. As for why you would want to, I cannot even imagine.”
“What’s wrong with wanting to stay the way I am? To stay human?” I was still bent over, my hands resting on the back of one of her Louis XIV chairs. I was breathing deeply, and I could feel every vein in my body shivering. I was like a parched daisy that had just been drenched in water, and I hated how happy my body was.
Madeline scoffed in disgust. “I cannot even fathom the state of your mind sufficiently to begin debating such a ridiculous concept. Besides.” And here she picked up a cream envelope from beside her tea set and shook it. “There are more important things to discuss than your infantile existential crisis.”
“Your mail is more important than my crisis?”
“Infinitely.” Her blue eyes glowed like stained glass windows on a sunny day. “I will require your presence tomorrow night.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I have a date,” I lied.
“Really, dear, this is childish.”
“I have to wash my hair.”
“You’ll be interested in this.” She wiggled the envelope invitingly.
I eyed the envelope. It was expensive, and there was a wax seal on it. I wished that I could just storm out of the house, but now I was curious. “Why would I be interested?”
Generation V Page 4
