by Ellen Oh
“You’re obviously supersmart,” Lilah says, picking up her cue to take over the conversation. “That’s why you got into this school, but you don’t really fit in. You disappear all the time. Where do you go, Aida? Are you hiding a secret life from us?”
“I’m a private person,” I say. I’m almost not listening as I look at her leather miniskirt, the coffee spot on her suede ankle boots, and the mother-of-pearl buttons on her gauzy blouse that she actually buttoned all the way up to the collar for once.
“I just want to be one of the girls,” I add.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” she says, her superwhite teeth flashing between burgundy lips. “Why don’t you come out to the club tonight? We can get to know each other better. Maybe you won’t seem so mysterious then.”
Gemma and Marnie cringe. They definitely don’t want me to hang out with them. Why’s Lilah asking me to go out with her? Just to snoop on me? Is she trying to humiliate me? Anger surges through my blood. Why is she so interested in my life? I can sense something about her, but I can’t figure out her motivation. It has to be something more than simply wanting to get dirt on me. These girls have no idea who I really am.
Or what I can do.
They should want to pet me like a kitty instead of cattle-prodding me with their snark. They wouldn’t sass me if they knew I could deplete their blood supply. There’s surprisingly little in the human body, even if you think there are rivers of the stuff flowing inside you. I can feel blood boiling inside of me, I need to burst, to fly, to take, to squeeze, to charm.
I have to get this under control. My heart pounds in my chest. I fantasize about ripping something apart. But I can’t. I have a code to follow. I can’t alienate myself again. Whatever my fate might be, I have to stay and figure out the course of my destiny this time. I can feel in my blood that this is my last chance to find my place.
“Yeah, I’ll go,” I say. “Where should I meet you?”
I love the night. I sometimes hover above clubs and wandering teens. I usually fly in the shadows like a great horned owl, spreading my wings, breathing the mist, tasting the scents. My senses are at their best right after a feeding. The blood kicks in and I can feel the city bustling with a kaleidoscopic variety of humanity.
I’m meeting Lilah at a nightclub called The Bank, on Houston Street, where the East Village turns into the Lower East Side, so I have to walk tonight. As I approach the decrepit stone building, I watch the clubbers prowl the streets in their slinky clothes and dark makeup like night crawlers. The desperate. The strange. The weird. So many types of blood coursing through the youth of this city. Now here I am darting through the streets after a feeding, a bloodletting, and I’m furious all over again, and alone.
I shake my head as I walk toward the entrance of the club, knowing Lilah and her friends are probably in there talking about me. I try to convince myself that the night won’t be so bad. Maybe I can actually become friends with those girls. If things go poorly tonight, I can at least feed Lilah some lies about my past and throw her off my trail.
But then I look down.
There’s a streak of blood on my clothes. I curse myself because I’m always so careful. So clean in my kills. Even as I gorge, I do so delicately. But this little sow, she struggled. She had a furious life in her, and I struck an artery that shot into my mouth with the rage of survival. That’s what I love about life, about real blood-borne life, that every once in a while the fury, even from a pig, is strikingly surprising. I must not have been able to swallow fast enough.
Folding my arms in front of the bloodstain on my blouse, I walk toward the entrance. Two guys slam out of the front door onto the sidewalk and start punching each other. When the bouncer moves toward them to break up the fight, I take my chance and slip inside the club unnoticed. Trance music pulses as couples dance all around me.
As I rush through the dance floor toward the women’s bathroom to wash the fresh blood off my shirt, I spot Lilah sitting at a table in the corner of the club. She’s, strangely, not with Marnie or Gemma. Some seniors from Duchesne that I don’t know well surround the table. I don’t remember seeing Lilah hang out with them at school, but she seems pretty close to them now. They’re leaning over the table, their heads close, talking to each other. Why did she invite these people? Who are they? Is she setting me up for something terrible?
Whatever her plans are for me, I have to get this stain out of my shirt. I finally reach the bathroom and open the door. I look around, hoping I won’t have to explain myself. The coast is clear so I dart in and start washing the blood out of my blouse.
The rust-colored water is swirling down the drain when the door opens. It’s Lilah. I think about hiding in the bathroom stall, but she’s already standing next to me, and I realize there’s no way I can avoid her. “Aida,” she says. “Is that blood?”
“I cut myself,” I say lamely.
“You cut your stomach? On the way to the club?” She raises a perfectly groomed eyebrow. It’s a terrible lie, and she knows it. “Something’s wrong with you.”
“Clearly,” I say, scrubbing the stain. “You don’t need to point it out.”
“It’s so obvious,” Lilah says, goading me. “I read your diary. It confirmed what I suspected the moment you walked in the door at Duchesne. You’ve been lying about who you are ever since you moved to New York. Haven’t you?”
She must be bluffing. How could she have read my diary? No human could have possibly have broken the spell. I rear up, startled, and my eyes redden. I hate that her words have control over me, but I can’t stop myself. I feel my fangs and claws taking shape as I lunge at her.
“I’d hurt you,” I growl. “But I have a code of honor.”
As I put my lips up to her neck to scare her, Lilah throws me off with a swipe of her arm. Me. An aswang with superhuman strength. She flings me aside like a rag.
I stumble into the edge of the sink.
“A code?” Lilah laughs. Her laughter sounds like a shriek, only not one of fear. “You think you’re the only one with a code?” Is she mocking me?
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
Lilah walks toward me, her eyes flashing. “Pitiful creature.”
I step farther away. “Stay there,” I say. “You don’t want me to get angry.”
“I suppose not,” Lilah says, looking at me in the mirror. “I’ve been watching you, wondering about you. And now I know the truth.”
“What’s that?” I grab my side, groaning in pain.
“That you’re just like me,” she says, revealing sharp fangs behind her burgundy lips, her eyes red and pink. “As soon as you arrived at Duchesne, I knew. You’re one of us. A Blue Blood.”
Staring at Lilah in disbelief, I take a moment to consider what she has just revealed. I had been searching for so long, following every rumor, reading every obscure document I could find about them, not that there were many to find. Just whispers here and there. But if she is telling the truth, then I had found the Blue Bloods, the once loyal army of angels who betrayed Lucifer during his epic war with God. Was she telling the truth? But how else could she have opened my diary? Or thrown me against the sink?
She is smiling, and in that smile, I recognize myself.
This is the moment I’ve been waiting for my entire life. This is my destiny. This is why my heart was leading me to New York. I had been lost to the bloodline all these years, but now I am home. There were stories that they’d been killed off by the Croatan long ago. But no, they are still here. The famed Blue Bloods of Manhattan.
Lilah notes the blood still on my shirt. “Use cold water, otherwise it’ll stain,” she says. “You have so much to learn. Welcome to the coven.”
Aswangs
A Filipino Folktale
Growing up in the Philippines, I used to have nightmares about aswangs—scary vampire-like beings who flew around at night, their torsos separated from the rest of their bodies. They were always pictured in folktales as banshee-like beings
, with blood frothing at their mouths and wild hair and bare breasts. They were terrifying.
So when I was asked to write a story for this collection based on a myth from a diverse culture, I thought immediately of the Filipino folktales I knew, and knew I had to write about a teenage aswang and connect this folktale to a story I’ve been telling for a long time, about teenage vampires in New York City.
—Melissa de la Cruz
Bullet, Butterfly
Elsie Chapman
The latest illness and its slow recovery left them all bored and restless, and Liang ended up losing the bet.
He adjusted the cloak around his shoulders, the hooded scarf with its thick, fringed edging so that it covered more of his face. Raided from the ward’s communal lost and found, both pieces had once belonged to a girl, making them perfect for his disguise.
“If I’m caught, you’re all going down with me,” he said as he headed for the door. He hoped his walk alone did not give him away—he moved about as gracefully as the city of Shangyu’s old war tanks, the ones its army no longer used for good reason.
Propped up against pillows in his bunk across the room, Wei grinned. “You won’t be caught, not with your build. And not with your face—too pretty by a long shot, you bastard.”
Everyone they knew was thin, the product of a country at war with itself for decades, all its cities perpetually famished. But it was true that the lay of Liang’s bones gave him a look more delicate than drawn. And it was both chance and laziness that he’d let his black hair grow long enough to wind into a braid so that it draped over his shoulder. His sister, he knew, would approve—she wore hers the same way.
Tao narrowed his eyes at Liang from his bed, considered him, and finally nodded, satisfied. “You might be making history managing to sneak inside, but don’t forget to get back here in time for stats check.”
“Don’t worry,” Liang said. They all had to remotely connect with the lab through the health monitors in their room twice each day, in the morning and at night. During the hours in between, patients were expected to rest in their beds and do little else.
“Let’s just hope no one comes by to do a surprise visual check,” Chen said from his top bunk as he sorted through his daily pills.
Wei scoffed from behind the book he was reading on the bunk below. “The lab’s too busy with real patients to worry about now instead of us, considering our symptoms are hardly life threatening.”
“True enough,” Tao said. “And if someone does show—Liang, you’ll just have to conveniently be in the washroom dealing with a bad meal.”
Liang pulled open the door of their room. “Not hard to believe, considering I’m still physically recovering, right?”
“Also, we want souvenirs.” Chen’s expression was amused, but there was a challenge in his voice. “To prove you were really there.”
Liang stepped out into the hall of the recovery ward. “Okay, I’ll be back tonight—with a fresh bullet for each of you.”
Outside of the city armory, he caught up with a group of girls headed toward the entrance. The guard on duty slid his eyes over Liang—cloak and scarf, long braid, a medical mask over his mouth—saw nothing unexpected, and motioned him through the metal gates.
The moment should have been profound, should have left him blown away.
After all, no other boy had ever been inside the armory before.
Boys were kept to the open land, to its streets and fields and riversides. They were to guard the great barbed fence that marked the outermost edges of the war-riddled city, rims of territory it refused to concede to its neighbors. Shangyu’s army officials had long ago decided that boys, with their larger hands and sturdier builds, were best used for discharging weapons instead of producing them. The strongest of poisons, they said, are made only stronger with efficiency. They determined that girls—with their slimmer, more supple fingers, their slighter frames a more reasonable fit over the armory’s low-moving assembly belts—would be assigned the dull task of production until they, too, were eventually moved onward, stationed as soldiers throughout Shangyu.
But as Liang stood there and absorbed as much of the armory as he could, as fast as he could—crooked lengths of worktables, cages of black steel shelves and racks and hissing pipes; suspended loudspeakers buzzing with distorted instructions; the air, smelling of endless labor, of greased churning parts, of the dirt floor trodden into utter flatness by hundreds of feet of workers—he realized that, more than anything, he was disappointed.
This was the heart of Shangyu’s forces, where the pulse of all its weapons was first set into beating—shouldn’t the place have felt more . . . proud, somehow? Overwhelming, awe-inspiring, majestic, even? Instead there was a kind of fatigue within its walls, the place tired of its own purpose, a duty turned weary because it was sensing years of war still looming ahead. Liang wondered if Wei and Tao and Chen would even believe him when he returned with his report that night.
The commanders keep telling us we’re so close to finishing the war, he thought—more than aware that his own father was one of those commanders—that it’s almost the end—but whose end?
Just as he muffled a cough, a hand suddenly landed at his elbow, guiding him forward through the room.
“Come with me,” a girl’s voice said laughingly into his ear, “since you’re just standing here, anyway. Which means you’re new, and I’m saving you from being assigned to either the melters or the molds, where everyone’s fingers always get burned—bullet metal gets so hot it’s almost like ice, if you can believe that.”
Liang found himself at one of the worktables, watching as the teenaged girl—black hair atop her head in a thick, shiny whorl, freckled gold skin, unmasked mouth rubbed bright with crimson dye—showed him how to roll fire bombs the size of lychee nuts into bundles to be marked for distribution. Her hands in their fingerless gloves were as deft as bird wings, moving so surely that his own felt more than awkward, would feel that way even if his joints weren’t still slightly inflamed from his recent illness. Her voice was lilting and smooth and patient. Sharply tilted eyes crinkled at the corners as they roamed over his face, making it even harder for him to concentrate when his nerves were already jumping.
Focus! his group commander had bellowed in his face more than once, spittle a suspended haze between their faces. Focus marks your target! Lack of it marks you as one!
Liang already knew one thing—the girl was about a thousand times more pleasant to have standing in front of him than his commander.
“My name is Zhu,” she told him as they worked at the table, side by side.
“I’m . . . Lin,” he lied. He rolled more bombs, hiding the lingering stiffness of his fingers. Irritation flared—he didn’t miss the irony of his hands being the last to recover now that he needed them most of all.
“How long do you have left in here?” she asked. “I’m sixteen, so just one year to go. Then it’s the open land for me, or a stretch of fence, armed with bullets I likely poured for myself right here in the armory.” Zhu smiled, and Liang felt it somewhere in his chest, a drum starting to find its proper beat.
“I’m sixteen, too,” he said. “So the same. One more year.” The truth, though: he would be stationed as soon as army doctors deemed him fit to fight.
Another red-lipped grin, and the bomb in his hand nearly tipped to the ground.
“Whoops.” Zhu swiftly plucked the bomb from the edge of the table to keep it from rolling off and placed it back in his palm. She blinked her midnight eyes again and Liang cursed his pulse for skipping. Years of training, of being groomed for war, with only these final months of recovery left before they stationed him—the last thing he needed was to want to know this girl.
“If you want to see fire that badly”—she took him by the hand and led him from their table, still full of bombs—“then I was wrong to keep you away.”
Liang made his way back to the recovery ward, his braid loosened into messy waves, stolen
cloak and scarf pulled tight around him against the early spring evening wind.
The night around him was aglow with distant gunfire, swollen with the stench of smoke.
His mind was filled with Zhu.
His pocket, with death.
Their fingers were scalded red afterward, just as she’d warned. But still they caught the silver bullets as they’d tumbled out of their molds, already smelling of copper and blood.
“The armory’s newest design,” she told him. “A cocoon, a disguise. Shot deep into a soldier, the bullet then unfurls into the shape of a butterfly. Imagine it, Lin—metal wings, shredding apart a heart, or an artery, or a lung, before spinning out of the body in pieces.” Zhu’s voice lowered to a hush. “It will be beautiful, and at the same time, absolutely terrible.” Her words came simply, without feeling or opinion or judgment—war left room for none of those.
“Why a butterfly?” he asked.
“Since a butterfly is supposed to be a symbol of freedom, right?” The bullet in Zhu’s fingers glinted as she turned it slowly in the armory’s flickering light. “And a symbol of love? Young love?”
Liang’s face heated as her eyes lifted and met his. “Sure, that.”
Her expression dimmed as though she’d wanted a different answer. She shrugged, and for a second, he saw how she would look as an old woman. One weathered by time, by the fortunes and misfortunes of life.
“That’s why we chose it, I suppose,” she said. “Because what do either of those things—freedom, love—matter when it comes to this war, for us here as its soldiers? They don’t, at all.”
As he strode into their room at the recovery ward, his friends sat up in their beds, tossing books and letters and cards to the side. Immediately they began to yell at him for details.
Computers?
Robots?
Machines so sleek, there’s no way we can lose this war, just as they keep telling us?
Liang recalled the armory’s oil-soaked surfaces, the hot stink of flame. He thought of the grim and relentless turning of thousands of gears and cogs, of work-roughened fingers and thumbs.
