V Is for Vampire

by Eris Adderly

  He left her body to roll on his back, spent, and November couldn’t help but fall halfway onto him, the back of her left shoulder draping sweaty across his chest. Rado had a messy hand he looked like he didn’t know what to do with until he met her glassy eyes. He reached to push fingers between her fangs, and November sucked him clean, tired jaw doing the last of the work it could manage.

  She nipped at him on the way out, and the vampire gave her a sated smile. Her left hand went back to drag upside-down over Leo’s chest.

  “You have neighbors?” she asked him.

  “On one side, yeah.”

  They all sounded like they needed a drink. Probably a nap.

  Or a coma.

  “They probably think you were murdering someone in here.”

  Radoslav hummed at this. “I’d love to see you explain to them what the murder weapons were,” he said, tracing a line between her breasts.

  “Mmm, death by cock.” She closed her eyes. “Better than sunshine.”

  “Fucking vampires,” Leo said to the ceiling. “Blood everywhere.”

  “I’ll buy you new sheets, Croix.” Rado leaned on an arm. The air in the space was thick.

  “I think I need another shower,” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Leo. “We all do.”

  Even though he was the stickiest of the three, Rado insisted she and Leo go first. Too lazy to argue, they went. The washing up was quick, but they wasted another languid stretch of time on kissing and touching under the warm spray of water.

  “I’m supposed to leave after this?” she said as they were drying off.

  He made some noise of dismissal while rubbing a towel over the back of his neck. “Lots of people have up-down relationships.”

  She smirked. “Are we going to have a relationship, Leo?”

  “Well.” He gestured at nothing with the towel. “You know. I mean …”

  November had flustered the man, but on some level he was right. There were plenty of surface people involved with vampires. Just not ones who had to disappear in a couple days. The nightmare of getting visitor status was enough when all parties where officially in the system.

  “We’ll … we’ll figure it out.” She smiled at him, some weak reassurance while she toweled her hair.

  A knock came at the door. “My turn, lovebirds.”

  She could have sworn she saw Leo flush.

  They left the humid little room, and Rado sidled past them, some of the blood already cleaned from this neck, but the scent of sex still heavy as he passed. He grabbed a handful of her ass as she squeezed through the door.

  Her gate partner was ahead of her, raking fingers over the top of his head while he stared at the bed. “No shit, ‘murdering someone.’ ”

  There was a healthy pool of red spreading at the base of his pillows. Or unhealthy, depending on how a body looked at it.

  “I’ll help you,” she said, and stepped forward to start stripping sheets.

  * * *

  Radoslav looked from her to Leo, and the air felt flat and artificial in the little apartment. “I’m not joking,” he said. “Repeat it back to me.”

  They’d all been hashing out the plan for the last three nights since the big fucktangle had come and gone, but the older vampire was acting like November and her gate partner were children who needed supervision at all times.

  November made a face, but it was Leo who gave the other man what he wanted. “We go to the van. I drive. You two ride in back.”

  Rado switched his eyes to her. “And?”

  The panel lights in the living area were at full brightness and, even though they were all dressed and ready to march out the door, the oversaturation of cool, white light made November feel like they were all naked.

  “And you navigate,” she said. “We drive to the square. We park. We walk to the dead gate.”

  “And then we go underground.” Rado finished it off. “And we wait.”

  November shrugged her shoulders in the oddly-fitting surface guard uniform, and shifted her weight to the other foot. “We wait for this ‘contact’ of yours to meet us there, yeah?” she said. “What if they don’t show up?”

  Rado gave a small shake of his head. “There’s no ‘what if.’ ”

  She gave him a grim look. “Then let’s fucking do this already.” There was no point in dragging the available nighttime hours along.

  The vampire slid the apartment door open and jerked his chin at Leo. Her gate partner moved past him out into the hallway, and November followed suit, the same tightness in her gut as the day she’d stood for sentencing.

  Trading one set of problems for another, is what this shit is.

  This time, Leo’s roommate didn’t have to drag her up the flights of stairs to the parking area. The unlikely three emerged into the night air like jets of ink curling out into clear water. Rado led them toward a boxy, black surface vehicle, which he unlocked with his thumbprint before moving out of the way for Leo to step up into the driver’s seat. Her partner would be at the wheel because he was the only one of them with clearance to be going where they were headed.

  The only one with clearance to be on the surface, period.

  She and Rado climbed into the cargo area. There were no seats, aside from the driver and passenger, and neither of the vampires could risk sitting near a window and having some security camera recognize their faces. They sat on the floor, backs leaning against the interior walls, facing each other, and swayed a bit to one side as the van rolled into motion.

  Radoslav kept an eye on a little projection of a surface map hovering above his id bracelet—fascinating to November for the way it spread out in all directions like a grid, rather than hanging like an ugly chandelier of excavated levels their kind had expanded upon over the centuries—and announced occasional directions to Leo from the darkened back of the van.

  The only other thing behind the front seats with them was the duffel in which Leo had brought her the new uniform. Now it held weapons, both uv and voltage, and neither she, nor Leo, had chosen to ask Rado where a coder came by anything like that. Whenever her eyes landed on the bag, though, there was no avoiding thoughts of the serial killer sterility of the other vampire’s bedroom.

  They’d been driving for some time, and November shifted, restless, where she sat. Lights strobed past the windows at the front of the van, and she couldn’t resist crawling between the two seats and coming up on her knees to get an eyeful of what was outside.

  There were lights everywhere. On tall poles to illuminate the road surface. Signs on buildings. A few making a patchwork in windows alongside the street where negs were still awake and busy. And, if she ducked her head to get a look above the buildings, the stars again. Prickling her skin, making her dizzy in their array.

  “Get your face out of that window, Kitamura,” said Rado from behind her. She turned to give him a nasty look, but his eyes were still on the map. “I didn’t spend the last two nights scrubbing you out of GateSec’s systems for your vampire ass to get caught by some fucking beat cop.”

  She made a noise in her throat, but he was right. It was just a shame—who knew when or if she’d ever get to see all this again? Still, she dropped back to her spot against the interior panel.

  “Hey, Rado,” Leo said over his shoulder. “Behind us.”

  The vampire grunted and shifted his attention to the dark windows on the rear cargo doors. He couldn’t stand upright in the back of the van, but he did rise to a crouch and go back to narrow his eyes through the tinted glass. The man made a noise of irritation in his throat and glanced down at the projected map again.

  “Turn right at the next corner,” he said to Leo without taking his focus off the window.

  “We being followed?” asked Leo.

  “Maybe.”

  The inside of the van seemed to shrink. November stared at Rado like she might bore right into his bones with her eyes and find the future, and whether they all got killed in it or not. He co
ntinued to feed Leo terse directions, and they navigated away from their original route—or at least what she assumed was their original route: it wasn’t as though she knew the streets of S-Seattle.

  After a period of silence, Rado backed away from the window and returned to where he’d sat. “Just make a left turn at the next light,” he said, but he still leaned over and began unzipping the duffel.

  “We lost ‘em?” said Leo, easing the van around the corner.

  “I think s—”

  Bang!

  Glass exploded into the front seat.

  Leo roared and the van swerved.

  “Motherfuckers!” Rado was already jerking a voltage weapon out of the bag, and November fell on her side when the vehicle lurched to a stop.

  Bang! Bang!

  “Fuck. Fuck!”

  More shots punched into the van, and Leo swore. She could see him writhing in the front seat while she tried to shove herself upright.

  “Stay inside!” The vampire wore a fanged grimace and booted his way out through the cargo doors.

  “Leo!”

  She crawled up front to find his fingers raking at the left side of his chest. A dark stain was spreading on his uniform beneath a glitter of broken glass. His mouth opened in a rictus of pain, but only strained, choking sounds came out of it.

  More shots outside. And then a round of electric crackles.

  Screaming.

  “Leo, no. No!” November pushed his hand away and clamped her own palm over the wound. The layers of fabric already slid in a sopping, nauseating way, and blood welled between her fingers, red-black in the streetlights and not enticing at all when it rushed reckless from a body she cared about.

  A continuous flow of speech came through the busted window now. Probably Romanian, and clearly from Rado. The soles of shoes and something else she couldn’t identify shuffled on the street outside, and then eerie silence.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  But no more shouts after that. Only a series of crunching noises she refused to parse. They were not the same as the boots on glass that came next.

  The driver’s side door jerked open, and November turned wide eyes to Rado. Leo only looked at the ceiling, his focus swimming.

  “Let’s move him,” said Rado. “Now.”

  November grimaced through the whole event. There was no way to do it without jostling her partner way more than they should. They settled for lowering the seatback as flat as it would go, and dragging him to lie down in the back amid growls of pain and an alarming amount of blood.

  “Hang in there, okay?” She didn’t know what else to say as she knelt beside him and shored up the pressure of her palm.

  “I … I ca …” His words devolved into a gurgle.

  “Bullet went through,” said Rado, swiping glass bits out of the driver’s seat and prodding at the place where the projectile had punched into the cushion. He took Leo’s place at the wheel, slammed the door shut, and started the van. Wasted no time finding the accelerator. An ominous pair of thumps bounced the chassis when the tires rolled over something in the road.

  “He has to go to a hospital,” she said. “Putting pressure isn’t doing shit.” Leo’s head lolled to one side, and a dark liquid built up in the seam at the corner of his mouth.

  “We don’t have time,” Rado said from the front. “Whoever those people worked for? They’ll have another team in position in the city, at least the same size.”

  “You don’t know that!”

  “I guarantee their boss knew the minute their ids stopped recording a pulse. I don’t know if they were GateSec or Athanati, but they will have a location. We have to get underground.”

  Her partner’s chest seized as though he needed to cough, but no sound came out. She shushed him anyway and tried to meet his wandering eyes.

  “Can you hear me, Leo?”

  “Mmuh?” A grotesque bubble popped between his lips. The movement of his neck was way too sluggish.

  “Who the fuck did this?” Her voice wavered before she could control it. “Why?”

  What is he? Twenty-seven? Shit. Shit!

  “No one good,” Rado said. “Probably people who don’t want you to make it back down there. Which means we were seen. Outside that night. Nenorociții.” The last word the vampire spat she imagined was no polite greeting. Rado tapped the brakes as they rounded another corner, and Leo moaned.

  No time. How would there be time underground? They were headed to a dead fucking gate—they’d all be lucky if some rickety, ancient structure didn’t collapse under their feet. And then do what? There wouldn’t be medical help in an abandoned sector of U-Seattle.

  He saved your life, Kitamura.

  Her eyes began to sting. Leo’s entire, upper left side was a dark, soaking mess. November shook her head.

  “Rado?” Her voice had never sounded so weak to her own ears. “I don’t … I don’t think he—”

  “Do it.”

  Her muscles froze at the words. Meaning and syllables failed to connect. There was no way. No way he meant what …

  “Do it, November.”

  “Are you insane?” she wailed. “That’s about a thousand kinds of illegal!”

  And it was. She knelt over Leo, her face knotting at the sight of him. It took years of bureaucratic hoop-jumping to get approval for a turning. Only the slimmest number of applications were accepted. She was going to violate the Blood Accord in the back of a van? Turn someone without authorization? It would make that felony on her record look like light and fluffy community service. She’d never see the outside of a prison again.

  “Everything you both have done for the last few days is illegal,” he said. “You’re worried about the goddamn Accord? Worry about how dead he’s about to be. We need him.”

  Her heart sped as reckless as the van. November had known Leonide Croix all of five days. He’d dragged her away from those Goodnighters, yeah, but … a turning?

  But you saw the stars. The actual Moon. If he’d left you there …

  “Leo.”

  He didn’t respond to his name.

  November pulled her top hand off the wound and slapped him. Not even a little. “Leo!”

  “Nnh?” His eyes swam in her direction.

  “Leo, I need you to hear me,” she said. “There’s not gonna be a hospital, okay? We’re not gonna make it.” Her voice cracked on the last of it, and some thin moan escaped from his throat. November kept going.

  “We can get you healed,” she said, “if we … if I … turn you. Right now.” Never in all her years had she imagined those words would come out of her mouth.

  “Quit fucking around!” Rado barked from the front seat. “Get it done!”

  “I’m not doing it unless he says!” Birth had taken that choice from her. She would never take it from anyone else. “Leo, it’s all we’ve got. Do you hear me? Tell me, yes or no, right now!”

  The drift of his eyes caught hers and, from somewhere, her partner mustered focus. His chin moved in the barest of nods. “Buh … bite.” She could hardly hear him over the road noise inside the van. “Yesss.”

  She leaned lower, eyes burning, voice harsh. “There’s no going back, Leo. The sun. The blood. All of it. Not ever.”

  He’d tracked her as she spoke. One of his hands tried to lift, but he only managed to drag it onto his thigh. His eyes were glossy, even in the darkened interior of the van.

  “Nn … no going … back.”

  November fell on him.

  She refused to think. It was too big. She was too angry, and for what reason, she wasn’t certain. Possibly for the life he’d just given up.

  Fangs hit his throat and her jaw clamped, piercing. He didn’t make a sound, didn’t flinch, and she drew at him hard—the lack of reaction meant the seconds were flying out of their grasp. The wound in his chest was too ragged, too messy to use to drain him fast.

  The gate guard fed her the last of his life, and November consumed him. There were no Visions t
his time, just desperation to do what all of society had taught her never to do if she got the chance. She drank until his pulse was a moth on its last long night, the quietest, feeblest flutter.

  Now. Stop.

  Her guess would have to serve. There were no cardiologists here. No equipment monitoring vitals, like in an official turning. One draw too far, and he was gone. And it wasn’t like she’d had practice.

  November pulled away, chin slick, stomach sloshing. The van bumped along down smaller, darker streets now, and Leo’s eyes had gone closed.

  No going back.

  The vampire took her own wrist between her teeth and bit. Yelled into tendons and muscle against the pain. The first time would be the worst, but there would be two or three more at least. She would heal before he’d be able to finish.

  Like her kind had done in the ages before laws, November Kitamura leaned over her partner and set her oozing wrist to his mouth.

  She violated the Blood Accord.

  Involuntary, like his shadow of a heartbeat on this last, fine filament of life, Leo’s lips parted. Blood that was both hers and his at once now met his tongue, and it was as if his every cell inhaled. Some fundamental part of his being raced back toward the world and screamed, whole and alive, a babe red and wet from the womb.

  The old ones would say there was something holy in the moment. A transcendent thing, the point of turning. Something flitting and ephemeral lived between reassuring lines of genetic data, and November felt for an eyeblink her awareness grow to include continents. Oceans.

  And then, like a hallucination, it was gone.

  The taste was enough. It would be enough for the rest of his days. Leo latched on and sucked. She made a fist. His eyelids twitched. Opened.

  No longer a neg, he whined and gnawed at her skin, lost in the fugue of his first drink. November winced and pulled her hand back, and Leo’s eyes rolled wild in a panic. She pitted her fangs into the closing bite at her wrist again and wrenched this time—a rougher gouge that would heal slower—and thrust the leaking tap back over his mouth.