“Yeah,” Michelle replies. “But I don’t know. It scares me. I don’t want to be—”
“Bound?” Rose finishes. Michelle nods. Rose gives a wry little laugh.
“Yeah, I know. But you know what I figure? Fuck it.”
Michelle raises her eyebrows. “That’s your deep philosophy about our love affairs with the walking dead? ‘Fuck it’?”
“Yeah. Fuck it,” Rose says again with a lopsided grin. “I’m gonna go to art school and be a fuckin’ painting superstar. You’re gonna go to college and learn how to rule the entire music industry. Maybe we love vampires while we do that shit, maybe not. I mean, I’m halfway there myself now.”
She bares her teeth. The fangs are small and sharp, strange in a living face.
“So, whatever. The complicated shit is complicated enough without giving ourselves headaches about it, too.”
Michelle rolls her eyes. “That’s great. Really deep. You’re like a zen master of relationships or something.”
“No wonder you and my brother like each other,” Rose replies. “You’re both sarcastic little assholes.”
They’re quiet for a while after that.
“Do you remember when Tommy used to collect silk worms?” Rose asks.
“Yeah, I guess,” Michelle agrees. “I think he outgrew it, though.”
“I was so grossed out when I found out that they kill the moths to get the silk.” Rose is quiet again for a few seconds. “So, this growing up shit’s pretty neat, huh? Sometimes it can be, anyway.”
“Sometimes,” Michelle echoes her. “So what’re we supposed to do now?”
“Fuck if I know,” Rose answers. “I guess first of all, we lie here and wait for the sun to go down.”
Michelle laughs quietly. “That’s kind of a while away, isn’t it? It’s still pretty early in the morning right now.”
“I know,” agrees Rose. “We’ve got practically all the time in the world.”
BONUS SHORT STORIES AND A NOVEL EXCERPT
WAKE
Priyasha has been an assistant for one year and dead for forty. She was fourteen when she died from drowning in the Kalu River, the Black River. She doesn’t think that Liam meant for her to die. He probably expected that she’d recover from his bite and go on to live an ordinary life, like her brother Jeevan did.
Liam was Liam then and is Liam now, which seems ironic considering how many new identities and lives he crafts for others. Priyasha asked him about it when she first tracked him down last October, here in his nondescript Hong Kong apartment.
“You haven’t been anybody but you for as far back as I looked. Probably longer,” she said to him. “Why?”
“I want those looking for me to be able to find me,” he answered simply, giving her one of his crooked grins. The scar on one cheek makes all his expressions lopsided, but Priyasha likes that. Most vampire faces are too beautiful to have much personality in the features.
“And anyway,” Liam added. “Just because I’m always me doesn’t mean I’m not sometimes other selves as well.”
Priyasha’s never really been anyone but herself, but suspects that it’s different for vampires who are still as young as she is. Her brother is still alive, and is only eighteen months older than the age that she’d be now if she hadn’t drowned. There is a continuity to her identity that older vampires don’t possess.
“We live on borrowed blood, after all,” she’d tried to explain to Jeevan once, on one of her increasingly rare visits home. His children think that she’s their cousin, the daughter of an aunt they haven’t met. Soon her face will start being too young for even that small lie, but at least Jeevan knows who she really is.
“Borrowed life,” Priyasha had gone on. “More than just for drinking, I think. I think… I see old vampires, and they don’t… they only seem to remember how to be a person when they love someone who’s alive. They borrow that life and share it as their own. Maybe I won’t really be a vampire until you’re gone, until I need to find somebody new to watch as they age and change and laugh and cry and live.”
There’s a saying that Priyasha heard once about how someone isn’t really dead until everybody who knew their name is dead too. Maybe that’s why Liam is always Liam; so that there’s always someone somewhere who remembers him.
Anyway, by that standard at least Priyasha is still very much alive. One of the first acts of forgery Liam put her to working on was to create an online presence for herself, for the fifty-four-year-old woman she would have been without the drowning. Doctored images and a crafted work history, all uploaded and as neatly, blandly plausible as millions upon millions of other profiles.
Through this small masquerade she’s reconnected with some of the friends she knew when she was a little girl, and chats to them about their lives and tells them stories about her brother’s children. The world at large has no reason to suspect that she’s anything but exactly what she presents herself to be.
So maybe Priyasha is close enough to alive that she can be the conduit for Liam to borrow a little life through.
He’s warmer, friendlier, more human than she remembers him being from those nights when she was fourteen, so it can’t have been very long since he last had living friends around him. He never talks about his past to her, of course, and Priyasha doesn’t push for revelations, but it seems obvious to her that Liam’s loved someone quite recently, perhaps still loves them. They might even still be alive, or barely dead, somewhere out there in the hugeness of the world.
But now he’s alone, except for her, and so she does her best to be enough.
Most of their work is run-of-the-mill criminal stuff, with the occasional special project for the vampires who need Liam’s help in building a lineage of family identities, so that they can move from being father to son to grandson in a sophisticated version of Jeevan’s “children, this is your cousin Priyasha” lie. Some vampires want that, while other vampires simply want to start again completely. Liam and Priyasha help them all, as best they can.
Tonight their work begins with the delivery of a small, handwritten note. It reads “THE QUEEN IS DEAD”, and nothing else.
“It’s always handwritten,” Liam explains. “I’ve been getting it since before telegrams or telephones or faxes or emails or texts.”
When Liam says things like that, so casually and as if they are the most natural things in the world, Priyasha feels dizzy. Someday there will have been so many changes in technology that she, too, will say things like that. She wonders how human she’ll still be by then.
“She’ll want a whole new setup. Always does,” he goes on, still holding the note. “She can pass for anything from fifteen to twenty-two, and five years above that if she’s willing to put in the effort. Call her and see how old she’ll like to be this time.” He scribbles a phone number onto the back of the note and hands it to Priyasha. She doesn’t ask him how he knows it. Liam always has his ways.
Priyasha’s about to ask how old this girl really was, when she died, but then decides it doesn’t matter. Liam has taught her that the facts of a matter are unimportant. What’s important is what’s plausible, or easiest to substantiate. And if this girl has been around long enough to have reinvented herself so many times, then it is completely irrelevant how old she was when her life ended. She is ageless.
Priyasha calls the number. It rings twice and then a clipped, vaguely accented voice says “Yes?”
Priyasha swallows. The coldness of the voice is like empty, icy places. “L-Liam wants to know how old you want to be this time?”
“I don’t care,” the voice replies, and ends the call.
Suppressing an eye roll is difficult. Vampires are extremely good at being dramatic. Sometimes it’s exhausting to witness. Mostly Priyasha doesn’t mind, though. Better to be dramatic than to let the numbness take its hold.
“She says she doesn’t care,” Priyasha reports back. Liam has an image database open on one of his computer’s numerous screens
. All the pictures are of the same girl, serious eyes and pale skin and dark hair. In some she looks like a teenager, others a young woman. There are various glasses and hairstyles and makeup looks showcased by the snaps. A hundred potential identities at the ready.
“We only do photos every fifteen years or so,” Liam explains, answering Priyasha’s unasked question. “An ID photo doesn’t show enough fashion to need more frequent updates.”
“This girl must go through a lot of different identities,” Priyasha notes.
“Yes,” Liam answers simply. “What’d she say about the age?”
He opens another file, this one full of a long list of names—Priyasha assumes that these, too, are presupplied by the girl, along with the photos. She reads a small block of the list: Stacy, Stasja, Stella, Susan, Slyvia. Liam scrolls up to ‘G’ and deletes ‘Gretchen’ from its place on the list, then starts reading through the rest, clearly trying to decide what the girl’s new name will be.
“She said she didn’t mind,” Priyasha tells him.
“Did she say she didn’t mind, or that she didn’t care?” Liam asks.
“Um. Didn’t care, I think.”
Liam sighs. “That means she’s in one of her moods. It might be months before she bothers to pick the new papers up, not to mention the delay in paying. She’s just lucky she’s got goodwill credit stored up.”
Priyasha wonders if anyone but vampires has ever experienced the peculiar kind of mourning this girl must be going through: that you’d rather be nobody at all than become someone who never knew the humans you’ve lost. Even if she knows that she’ll eventually have to discard the anonymity. Like a mourner putting away their black clothes, for now this girl doesn’t care what comes next. She doesn’t care at all.
Priyasha looks at the grid of thumbnailed photos on the screen, the same face in a dozen guises, with Priyasha’s own reflection as a ghostly overlay. Priyasha feels a shiver run her spine. Some day she’ll be this many different girls, too.
Some day. But not yet.
“I’m calling Jeevan,” she announces decisively. “It’s only just after dinner time there.”
“Give him my love,” Liam tells her absently, absorbed in the task of creating a birth certificate for a newly-imagined twenty-year-old.
Priyasha smiles. “I always do,” she answers.
PROTEGE
Long before Cora steals her, Amanda already knows what being thirsty feels like.
From an early age she’s a nervous, fretful kid. The kind who hoards the remains of her school lunches under her bed or in the back of her closet, and worries about the house accidentally being left unlocked every time she sets off in the morning.
Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night and discovers that she’s wet the bed, the sheets cold and acrid-smelling where they cling to her legs.
She does her best to hide the evidence, of course, but she’s still too young to successfully conceal a mess of soiled bedclothes. So her parents always find out, and then there are shouts and sometimes slaps, and sometimes instead of going to school Amanda has to spend the rest of the day in the closet.
By the time she’s eight years old she’s learned the trick of hiding juice boxes from her lunch in the closet, for the next time she’s put away. But the years before she learned stay etched in her memory forever. Because the dark isn’t so bad, and the cold isn’t so bad when there are warm clothes on the rail for her to put on. Even hunger isn’t so bad, once Amanda learns that it fades away if she ignores it for long enough.
But being thirsty for hours and hours is a unique and awful kind of punishment.
Sometimes, when she remembers how it felt to be so thirsty, Amanda almost doesn’t even mind that Cora killed her mother and her father.
She is ten years old when Cora steals her.
The other children who already live in her new home are stupid. Amanda realizes that as soon as she arrives. They cry or have tantrums and throw their dinners against the walls and kick their legs and scream.
The first time she sees a kid knock his glass of milk over in a tantrum, Amanda punches him as hard as she can on the bruise on his neck. He’s smaller than she is and the bruise is huge and new and purple. He starts to wail in pain, his cheeks going red and his eyes bright and bewildered as he stares at her.
“Next time you do it, I’ll steal your milk for a week,” she threatens. He doesn’t do it again. She feels a small grim satisfaction every time she sees him drink his milk after that.
He’ll hate her forever for punching him, but he might live a little longer now that he knows not to be so stupid. Amanda doesn’t care about whether she’s hated or liked by people, but she can’t stand to see people being stupid. Dying over something as ridiculous as spilled milk is the most stupid thing she can think of.
Cora is cruel, but Amanda has survived cruelty before, and she has no intention of dying now.
Cora’s bites leave Amanda so thirsty that she feels like her whole mouth is full of tiny pressing needles and her throat is lined with broken glass and like she will never, ever want anything as much as she wants warm, thick liquid in her mouth, a cloying sweet-metal taste that fills her dreams.
The taste in her dreams reminds her of when she’d lose her baby teeth, the little red holes they left in her gums, the blood welling up in her mouth and staining her lips a dark rusty red when she spat it out. Amanda remembers keeping her teeth in a pouch under her bed, because she knew there was no stupid tooth fairy to leave them for.
The bites make Amanda so, so, so thirsty. But she’s been thirsty before and survived. It’s horrible, but it doesn’t frighten her. Amanda isn’t afraid of anything. Not ever. She balls her hands into fists and grits her teeth and shakes all over and reminds herself, over and over and over. She isn’t afraid. She isn’t. Not of anything. Not ever.
The other children beg to go home but Amanda’s not stupid. She knows there’s no point in asking for that. She knows it’s impossible. And she doesn’t want to go home, even if there was still a home to go to. It was better than this, but it was still miserable. There she was still hungry and cold and frightened.
If she’s going to wish for something impossible, she might as well make it something worthwhile.
So Amanda wishes for teeth as sharp as Cora’s, for fingernails pointed into claws.
She wishes to never be thirsty again.
One day, when Cora’s finished biting her and has shoved a cup of hot chocolate into her hands so that she doesn’t faint, Amanda wraps her hands around the mug and tries to stop shivering. She gathers up her courage, and then she says “I want marshmallows. Two marshmallows.”
It’s the first time she’s addressed Cora directly in months. Cora laughs. It’s not a friendly, kind laugh; it’s a surprised laugh and there’s an edge of contempt to it. But it’s a laugh. “I’m not running a charity here,” she tells Amanda.
Amanda rolls her eyes. “I’m not asking you to send me to finishing school in Switzerland. I just want some marshmallows.”
“I don’t have any. Hurry up and finish your drink,” Cora says with a wave of her hand. For the next few minutes, she doesn’t take her eyes off Amanda.
Despite the dismissal, Amanda goes to bed that night with a smile on her face. She’s realised that Cora’s not really any different to the stupid kids downstairs. Not really any different from Amanda herself.
Maybe Cora was once locked in the dark, so thirsty that she’s remembered it forever. Maybe Amanda and the other children are Cora’s secret juice boxes. Amanda already knows how to make the other children drink their milk and stop being so stupid. Now all she has to do is make Cora see the similarity between them. Then she’ll get the claws and fangs she dreams of. It’s only a matter of time.
When her next turn upstairs comes, Amanda’s not surprised when she sees two marshmallows in her drink.
“Two, wasn’t it?” Cora says, smirking. As if she thinks it’s quaint and funny that Amand
a should ask for something like that.
“You’re the one with supernatural hearing and memory. You tell me,” Amanda shoots back, fishing one of the marshmallows out with a spoon and eating it. The sugar is thick and sweet in her mouth. It makes her smile.
Cora, caught off-guard once again by Amanda’s unexpected response, smiles back.
Amanda takes a long drink of hot chocolate, and looks forward to the day when she’ll never be thirsty again.
LONE WOLF
Katherine has never become a proper vampire, not completely. For one thing, she doesn’t like killing or hurting living people any more than she did when she was still one of them herself, and for another she’s never developed the herd instinct—
“Pack instinct, Katie. Wolves, not sheep,” Mikhail corrects her whenever he hears her say it. Even after eighty-three years he still treats her like a child in need of education. She suspects that she gets off easy with his dry tones and repeated lessons—at least she is used to people treating her that way, with her looks stuck forever at a small-featured fourteen. It’s probably even more frustrating for relatives of vampires who stay human and grow up and still get treated like children despite looking every year of their age.
Oh yes, Katherine’s always had relatives and benefactors, wealthy figures both living and dead who stay off in the periphery of her life and prefer not to get involved. But she’s never had family, just nannies when she was young and boarding school when she was older and then she got tuberculosis and died and didn’t become a proper vampire.
Proper vampires want to be part of a group, call it a pack or a herd or a family or whatever other name suits best. Not only does Kate not feel that, she doesn’t even really feel any kind of context to understand what she’s missing out on.
It’s no good for Mikhail to talk about the feeling of community, of communion, that comes with hunting together, because Katherine’s never been a part of something that she can compare to the abstract idea and go ‘oh, that’s what I don’t have’.
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