In the Blood (Sonja Blue)

by Nancy A. Collins

  “No. I’m not letting you out,” Sonja snarled between her gritted teeth. “Not yet. Save it for Morgan.” As she struggled to keep the Other under control, another blow fell across her shoulders, knocking her to the floor. This time she felt ribs crack and blood fill her mouth.

  “Fell, stop it! I said stop!” Anise shouted as she grappled with her mate for control of the poker.

  The male vampire was tall and thin, his features pale and finely chiseled, with hair the color of raw pine that hung past his shoulders in long, silken tresses. His ruby-red eyes were dilated, like those of a panther scenting its prey. Sonja knew that wild, cruel look all too well.

  “I told you they hated us!” he growled, raising the poker for a final, killing blow. “They’re all crazy with jealousy because Father loves us more than them!”

  “No, Fell!” Anise insisted, staying his hand. “She’s not a Renfield. Look at her. Look!”

  Fell grudgingly lowered the poker and stared at the intruder with his piercing, bright-red eyes.

  “She’s right, you know,” Sonja said, spitting out a mouthful of blood onto the carpet. “I’m not a Renfield.” Without further warning she sprang to her feet before the male vampire called Fell had a chance to react, snatching the weapon from his hand. Anise screamed as Sonja slammed the fire tool’s butt into his abdomen, knocking him to the floor, and then firmly planting her boot on his throat.

  “If you try and make a move, I’ll ram the damn thing through his brain,” she warned, reversing her grip on the poker and holding it just above his eye socket.

  “Go get Father!” Fell hissed, trying not to move. “Do what I say, Anise!”

  Anise shook her head, tears trickling down her cheeks. “No, I’m not leaving you!”

  “You can cry?” Sonja moved the poker away from Fell’s forehead, while keeping her boot firmly planted on his Adam’s apple. There was genuine awe and envy in her voice.

  “Of course I can cry!” Anise sniffled as she wiped at her tears with the flat of her hand. “Everyone can cry.”

  “No. Not everyone,” Sonja said wistfully. “Have you ever seen Morgan cry?”

  Anise stared at her as if Sonja had started speaking in tongues. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Vampires can’t shed tears. At least not ones not made of blood,” Sonja replied. “Nor can they become pregnant. I don’t know what Morgan has up his sleeve, but it looks like he’s really outdone himself.”

  “It doesn’t matter. What matters is Morgan. I want to know where the bastard is holed up.”

  “You mean our Father?” the couple replied in unison.

  “Stop calling him that!” Sonja snarled, only to have them stare at her as if she’d told them not to call the sky blue or the grass green. She cursed in disgust and removed her foot from Fell’s throat, motioning for him to get up. Fell looked toward Anise, then back at his attacker, as if expecting a trick. “Get up, damn you!” Sonja barked, kicking him in the rump.

  This time Fell did as he was told, hurrying to join Anise. He wrapped his arms protectively around his mate, glowering at Sonja with unalloyed hatred.

  “Well, this is a fine family reunion, isn’t it?” Sonja said with a humorless laugh as she twisted the poker into a pretzel and tossed it aside. “I guess Big Daddy never told you two you had an older sister. Then again, I doubt he knows I even exist.”

  “My wife needs to sit down. Is that okay with you?” Fell asked acidly.

  “Of course; there’s no need to be uncivilized,” Sonja replied. As she watched Fell help his pregnant wife into her easy chair, she realized that their auras were nearly identical to her own, although significantly weaker. She had learned a long time ago how to guess the relative ages of various vampires by the auras they radiated. Anise and Fell were still quite young, by Noble standards, although the Anise’s aura was the more robust of the two. Sonja wondered if that had something to do with the mutant life form she carried inside her. Given their apparent youth and taking her own experience into consideration, she realized that the couple was still ‘mute’—incapable of the telepathic communication.

  “I’ll give the bastard credit—he doesn’t plan small,” she muttered.

  “Don’t use that word when you talk about our Father,” Fell snapped.

  “Why don’t you shut up before I rip out your fuckin’ tongue?” she snarled in reply. “I’m trying to be nice here.”

  “Nice? You call brutalizing my wife and attacking me nice?” he spat.

  “So I’m a little lacking in the social graces,” Sonja shrugged.

  “You seem to know a lot about our—Morgan, as you call him,” Anise said, taking her husband’s hand in hers. “I have never seen a creature such as you, outside of Fell. Not even our Father, the few times He has favored us with His presence, is like us. You say you are our sister. How can that be so? We are the only ones our Father has Made.”

  “You talk about Morgan as if he’s some kind of god.”

  “He is our Maker. He is our Father.” Anise smiled up at her husband, who squeezed her hand in return. “From His essence were we conceived, and in His image were we shaped. We came into being within moments of one another and have been conscious of no other life, no other love.”

  Sonja eyed Anise speculatively. She remembered how, decades ago, she had emerged from a nine-month coma and to discover her long-term memory an utter blank. She remembered how desperate she had been for an identity—any identity—to fill the void inside her. Shortly after her resurrection she had fallen into the hands of a brutal pimp named Joe Lent, who had been more than eager to re-shape her in his image and proscribe the limits of her new world. She remembered how, at the time, she had held Lent in the same awe as Anise and Fell now viewed Morgan. And why not? Lent had given her life form and meaning when she was nothing but a blank slate. She had needed him the same way an empty pitcher needs water. But then he had to go and beat her one time too many…awakening the Other. After killing Lent and taking her first blood, the memories of whom and what she had been before Morgan raped her out of existence had come rushing back. Her life had been a living hell ever since.

  The only way to make them understand what had been done to them was to kick-start their memories and freeing their former personalities. The biggest risk with doing so, however, was that if she wasn’t careful, she might trigger defensive shock. They could very well retreat into catatonia rather than deal with their buried memories. But there was no way around it—it had to be done.

  Sonja knelt before Anise and stared into her face. Although Fell tensed, Anise did not flinch or draw away. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But it’s time for childhood to end.”

  She entered the pregnant woman’s mind as if parting a curtain. Anise convulsed if she’d just received a jolt of electricity, her eyes rolling back in their sockets. Her jaws snapped shut, causing an exposed fang to slice her lower lip.

  “What did you do to her?” Fell demanded angrily.

  Sonja was vaguely conscious of Fell’s hands on her person, but she was too busy to shrug him off. All she needed was to give a final little push...

  My name is Lakisha Washington. I grew up in East Oakland; in a part of the city so violent and hopeless the police consider it a free-fire zone. My mother is a junkie who sells herself for drugs. My father is a nameless white man who had twenty dollars and a hard-on. My mother leaves me alone in my crib, squalling in fear of the rats, while she goes to meet her dealer. The neighbors break in and rescue me after six hours of screaming. I live with my grandmother after that. My mother fades from my life. She dies from an overdose on my seventh birthday. It is meaningless to me—like the death of a casual friend of the family. Despite the odds, I thrive in an environment as hostile to innocence as the surface of Venus. I do well in school, striving to prove myself, better myself. I want to escape this place so bad I can taste it. I manage to avoid the pitfalls that trap so many of my friends and fellow classmates: drugs, teenage preg
nancy, alcoholism...

  I want more from life than drudging for minimum wage at the corner Kentucky Fried Chicken stand. My determination to succeed inspires respect and contempt among those who have fallen in the trap. I get a reputation for being a “nice” girl, one that’s going places, but too smart and self-possessed to attract the opposite sex. I graduate valedictorian and land an out-of state scholarship. For the first time in my life I escape the bone-grinding, soul-numbing poverty I was born to, but to which I never succumbed. My grandmother dies in a charity hospital during my sophomore year. Despite my grief, I’m secretly relieved. It means I’ll never have to go back to Oakland ever again.

  I work as hard in college as I did in high school, earning a Degree in Business Administration. To my delight, I’m recruited by a prestigious financial firm headquartered in San Francisco. I return to California, but this time I’m on the right side of the Bay.

  I have a nice apartment in the Twin Peaks district, overlooking the city. From my balcony I can glimpse the place of my birth in the far distance, on those rare occasions I look in its direction. It looks deceptively serene, but never inviting. I am content. Everything I’ve set out to accomplish, to prove to myself and to others, has come true. I’m respected at work, I’m making more money than most Americans my age, White or Black, man or woman, and everything is looking up. No one knows I’m the bastard daughter of a whore who died with a syringe dangling from her arm, who was found stuffed between a couple of garbage cans like a broken doll for the trash collectors to find. There’s no reason for them to know.

  Nor do they know about my dreams. The bad ones about the things in the dark with the red glowing eyes and the razor-sharp teeth that watch me as I lie helpless in my crib. The dreams get so bad they intrude on my work. So I do what any other self- respecting young urban professional would do: I get myself a shrink.

  Dr. Caron comes very highly recommended. His clients number among San Francisco’s political and financial elite. He is handsome, sympathetic, understanding; the kind of psychiatrist a young woman can open her soul to without fear. Dr. Caron tells me there is nothing wrong with turning my back on the squalor and unhappiness of my past, that I need not feel guilty because I am now a part of the system that exploits my old friends and family in my former neighborhood. I owe nothing to anyone, except myself. Soon the dreams go away. But my dependence on Dr. Caron grows. My will seems to dissolve when I’m in his presence. But this does not frighten or worry me. Instead, I feel at peace.

  Dr. Caron invites me to a weekend retreat hosted at his place in the Valley. I am one of ten patients—five women and five men— who find ourselves in Caron’s strange, rambling mansion. All of us are single and live alone. All of us are either orphaned or estranged from your parents. All of us are people no one will truly miss. But I don’t realize that until the experiments begin.

  Dr. Caron introduces us to a form of drug therapy that was created by he and a quiet, moon-faced man known as Dr. Howell. Each participant is given various dosages, injected directly to the blood stream. Dr. Caron says something about finding a “worthy vessel”. Then all hell breaks loose.

  Three of the subjects die of convulsions within minutes of taking the drug. Two others suffer massive coronaries, while another goes into liver failure. One blinds himself by plunging is thumbs into his eyes. Another patient, screaming like a wounded animal, leaps onto the back of the blinded subject and tears at him with her bare teeth. But I do none of these things. I simply go to sleep. A long, long sleep filled with dreams of half-glimpsed hypodermic syringes and intravenous drips.

  And I awake; I am no longer Lakisha Washington. I am Anise, because my Father tells me that is my name. Which is has it should be. And my Father, knowing I am lonely and need companionship, gives me a mate: Fell. He is beautiful and I love him, as your Father commands. Which is as it should be.

  “Damn you, I said get your hands off her!”

  Fell’s fist smashed into Sonja’s face, knocking her away from Anise and sending her glasses flying across the room. She lay there, dazed, on the floor, blood seeping from her broken nose, as Anise’s persona and memories receded and her own identity returned.

  “What did you do to her?” Fell thundered angrily, pointing to Anise, who was trembling like a malaria victim. She stared at her hands as if she’d never seen them before, refusing to look at Fell.

  Fell delivered a vicious kick to Sonja’s side. She took the blow without complaint. She deserved the pain.

  “Answer me! What did you do?” As he cocked his leg back for another kick, Anise abruptly got to her feet.

  “Leave her alone, Fell! She doesn’t mean us any harm!”

  “She has a funny way of showing it!”

  Anise walked over to where the mirrored sunglasses lay on the floor. She picked them up and handed them to Sonja, who sat huddled on the floor, her upper lip smeared with blood. As Sonja raised her head, Anise flinched at the sight of her blood-filled eyes and over-large pupils.

  “Get used to it, kid,” Sonja hissed, snatching the glasses from her hand. “The eyes are the first thing to mutate once you start drinking blood on a regular basis.”

  “I don’t know if I should thank you for what you did,” Anise said, her hands resting atop the swell of her stomach. “But I remember now.”

  “Self-knowledge is the hardest part,” Sonja grunted. “I know what you must be feeling... thinking…”

  Anise nodded slowly. “It wasn’t all one way. I saw your memories just as you saw mine.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Fell frowned.

  Anise leaned forward, ignoring his question. “What does he want from us?” she whispered.

  Sonja pointed at Anise’s swollen midsection. “That’s more than just a baby you’re carrying around. It’s his ticket to godhood.”

  Anise frowned. “I don’t understand-”

  “Whenever vampires attack humans, they infect them with a supernatural virus that generates drastic mutations in the human’s biochemistry, replacing half of the host’s chromosomes with the vampire’s. It’s not unlike human conception, except that the fetus is an adult corpse. Because of this here is a certain biological fealty, insuring obedience to the Maker is in the blood.”

  Anise’s face crumpled. “Then it’s hopeless to try and fight him.”

  “No, it isn’t!” Sonja replied. “How do you think Morgan came into being? He was Made, just like I described. But he had the force of will to assert his personality over that of his Maker’s. Morgan can only dominate you if you give up and refuse to fight him. You can do it, Anise. I know you have the strength. For the sake of your child, you’ve got to fight him.”

  Sonja was not a hundred percent certain what she’d just said was true, but she was unwilling to accept biochemical predestination, whether natural or supernatural.

  “It all keeps coming back to the baby. Why?”

  “Vampires like Morgan are incapable of conceiving and giving birth. It takes centuries for a vampire to become powerful as he is. Why? Because a Noble is only as powerful as his brood. Since they are born of dead meat, they are often less than perfect, when it comes to their brain power. Think what it would mean to Morgan to have a living vampire, one capable of perfectly replicating itself, without having to worry about quality control. Within a blink of an eye, as vampires judge time, he’ll have an entire army immune to silver and capable of movement during the day! And not a single one of them will possess any bothersome memories of having once been human. No wonder the Renfields hate you: you’re threatening to make them obsolete! Morgan’s out to make himself a god-emperor, Anise. And you’re providing him with his first high priest.”

  “Anise, that’s bullshit and you know it! Our Father would never do anything like that!”

  “Shut up, Fell! Just shut up!” Anise hissed, baring her fangs. Rebuffed, Fell stepped back and looked away. “What do you want me to do?”she asked.

  “Come with me.” Sonj
a was surprised to hear herself saying the words.

  “You want me to leave?”

  “Not leave: escape!”

  “Where could we go?”

  “Where couldn’t we go? There’s a whole world out there, Anise!” Sonja replied with a laugh. “It won’t be hard to find somewhere safe for you to have the baby. If not here, then in Central or South America.”

  “But Morgan...”

  “Let me worry about Morgan, okay? So, what’s the verdict? Are you with me?”

  With a grunt Anise hoisted herself out of the chair. “I’m with you.”

  “Darling, what’s gotten into you?” Fell asked in amazement. “You’ve never acted like this way before! What did that crazy woman do to you?”

  “She woke me up, Fell!” Anise replied solemnly. “I’m not sleepwalking anymore. I’m finally doing something that’s my idea, not Father’s!”

  “You can’t do this!” Fell shouted, grabbing her roughly by the arm. “I forbid it!”

  Anise jerked her arm free of her husband’s grasp. “Back off, motherfucker!” she snarled with a snap of her teeth.

  The look on Fell’s face was that of a pole-axed young animal, left alive but forever altered. For a moment it seemed as if he would stagger and fall.

  “Come on, if we’re going to leave, we better do it now,” Sonja said, motioning to the secret doorway she’d used earlier.

  “No, there’s another way out,” Anise said, with a shake of her head. “I’m not supposed to know it exists, but I overheard one of the Renfields talking about it. It leads directly to the outside.”

  “Good. If we leave now, we’ll have at least an hour or two of sunlight in our favor.” Sonja shot a sharp look at Fell. “How about you, golden boy? Are you coming with us?”

  Fell opened his mouth as if to speak, then shook his head.

  “I should kill you, you know,” she said sternly.

  Fell lifted his chin and squared his shoulders, refusing to show fear. “So why don’t you?”