by L.J. Hayward
Chapter 9
We all have moments in our lives where everything changes. Something big happens, you flap about crazily for a time, the score gets reset to zero, you find the starting post and it all begins again. Learning that Santa Clause isn’t real—or if you have a sadistic older brother like I do, you’re told that Santa is really Satan—is one of the first for most. Losing your virginity. That’s a major one. Then there’s the potentially fatal ones. Drugs. Guns. Losing your temper in the wrong place at the wrong time. Learning that vampires are real. Learning that vampires are real because the girl you lusted after for so long tries to tear your throat out.
I’ve had my fair share of those moments. More than most, less than some. Didn’t I get a break?
I apologised for the broken bottle and fled. My hands shook on the steering wheel all the way home. The mental blank I’d been trying for on the drive earlier came in full force now, just when I didn’t want it. I needed to think. I needed to collate and analyse and get it all straight. I needed to find a reason why Aurum was lying to me. Instead I have no memory of getting home, parking, going inside and taking a bag of O pos from the blood fridge.
The first clear image I had was of the cage. It was dark in the room. The light switch was on my side of the cage. Mercy had no need of it. I flicked it on. A little noise of pain rose from the bundle of material in the chair. In the corner by the door, was a medium sized case I’d stolen from my last job. Inside was all my blood collection gear. I took it into the cage with me.
When my world gets reset to zero, my starting post is blood. Specifically, the elements of it, the working compounds that make it what it is. Red cells, white cells, DNA, plasma full of proteins, enzymes, antibodies, minerals, electrolytes—all the things that when poked and prodded right tell you just about everything you want to know about a person. Fascinating stuff, and a little freaky, when you think about it. Blood was where I returned to after the accident that smashed my knee. It was where I went when I got out of prison. It was where I was when Mercy fell into my lap. Now it seemed, blood was my whole reason for being.
Mercy had recovered enough to crawl into the chair and haul a blanket over her shivering body. It was about eight hours since I’d given her the wrong blood group. She was nearing the end of the reaction. It spoke volumes about how hyped she’d been she wasn’t comatose on the floor. After Aurum’s little speech today, seeing Mercy in the chair, cognitive enough to notice the light coming on, made my guts shake.
“Matt,” she whispered as I knelt in front of the chair. “I’m sorry for trying to stun you.”
“I know. It’s okay. No damage done. Give me your arm.”
She laid it out for me, knowing what I was after. I put the tourniquet on her upper arm and took several tubes of blood, careful not to get even a small splash on my skin. The flow was weak and slow, its colour pale. Only what I’d expected. I wrapped a bandage around Mercy’s arm.
“Why are you taking my blood?” There was a touch of accusation behind the weariness.
“It’s not a lot. I just need to do some more blood work.”
“Why? You keep saying nothing changes.”
It never did change. I rolled the bag of O pos between my hands, warming it up and mixing it. “Maybe I’ve been looking for the wrong things.”
She mumbled something and snuggled under her blanket. I tucked it in around her.
“Mercy, blood.” I put the bag on the arm of the chair. “Eat up. Get strong.”
A little white hand slipped out from under the blanket and pulled the bag back under. Her head disappeared under it as well. I retreated before she began to feed.
Once dead, vampires degrade very fast. Outside of their body, their blood does the same thing. It’s very volatile, which makes it hard to do any sort of testing on it. Over the years, I’ve found ways to work around that. I immediately put the tubes in the freezer, set a timer for ten minutes and then went rummaging in my library.
I felt a little guilty passing over the texts concerning weres but one kid’s overreaction to his dog’s weird behaviour wasn’t that vital as far as I could see. It seemed far more likely there was a perfectly normal explanation. Like a bioengineered, behaviour-altering super-bacteria created in some deeply buried government lab where a disgruntled employee has shown ‘the man’ who’s the boss by stealing a vial of their top secret work and then clumsily dropping the dainty glass object when the ‘men in black’ closed in on him. Perfectly normal and therefore not within my jurisdiction.
The vampire section of my collected works far outstripped any other subject. Which means I had about a dozen useless texts written by folks who’d never even seen a vampire, let alone ever believed in them. There were three books, though, that I took as gospel. They related to everything I’d had experience with and a lot of stuff I hadn’t. From memory though, they never said anything about these so called Primal vampires. So I read them again.
It didn’t take long. They weren’t massive tomes. The best of them was about thirty pages long, the brittle, yellowed pages crowded with immaculately neat but small writing. The language was thick and grossly formal, but the information it held was gold. I stopped long enough to transfer the blood from the freezer to the fridge and search through all the kitchen cupboards again for food. I found a packet of jelly crystals—jelly crystals?—and praise be, a bag of cheese and bacon balls. Heaven.
Around one a.m. I finished ploughing through my books and had to admit they held nothing to discredit Aurum. I had, in fact, found a few hints that supported his theory of ultimate ancestors. Not really making my night.
I checked on Mercy before leaving. She was lying on her bed, on her belly, legs waving wildly while Will Smith and Martin Lawrence blew things up indiscriminately on the telly. She said the lines seconds before they did, giggling at herself. The room was completely righted. It was always the first thing she did after regaining her strength. When she came out of a hunger induced rage, her reaction to the destruction she caused was a mixture of shock, disgust and fear, as if she didn’t remember what had happened. Sometimes I believed she didn’t.
I slung on my camo jacket, reloaded the Eagle with fresh paintballs and tucked it in my pocket, then with my little Styrofoam esky banging against my leg, I got in the car and went to work. Well, it used to be work. I hadn’t worked in a ‘real’ job for two years, not since taking care of Mercy became a priority and waging war against the creatures of the Old World began to turn a tiny profit. Or that profit could have come from my lack of grocery shopping.
I parked in a dim corner of the hospital car park, away from all the other cars, which clustered around the lights of the building like children afraid of the dark. It was a bit of a hike to get to the Emergency Department, but it was either that or risk someone taking interest in my car. I hadn’t left on very good terms and there had been some mention of me never, ever coming back on pain of death, or something along those lines. So I hiked.
Redcliffe wasn’t too accident prone. The ED of the hospital wasn’t like the ones you see on TV, most nights at least, and this was one of those nights. I slipped in, trying to be unobtrusive, which is easy enough to do when you know the tricks of the trade. Basically, carry an esky. A few nurses looked me over, which probably had more to do with my stunning good looks than anything else, but they made no move to tackle me to the floor and rip my clothes off. The security guard was another matter altogether. A discreet C note passed along with a handshake solved that problem and I was on my way up to the lab.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t like breaking laws, but outsourcing blood work on a supernatural myth isn’t something you can just do. If I wanted to have any chance of helping Mercy control this condition, any chance of maybe doing something to help other people in the future, I had to do what I could.
I didn’t want to take too long, so I worked fast, spinning and separating and processing. In under an hour I had a wad of printouts and the sinking feeling th
at Mercy was right. Nothing had changed. Her chemistries were vampire normal, her red cells were brutalised little fragments, also vampire normal, and her blood group, thanks to my intentional incorrect matching, was screwy. I spent a while sitting at the microscope, staring at the disturbing picture of her blood cells, slowly coming to the realisation that this wasn’t the answer.
The physicality of Mercy’s state of being wasn’t changing. She’d survived the violent transformation, things were as stable as they were going to get. I’d worked out how she reacted to different blood groups and how to use that to get what I needed from her.
Vampires reacted to blood group incompatibility in the same way humans did. When red blood cells of a different type were introduced into a body, the native antibodies in the recipient’s plasma react hostilely to the new cells. In short, it’s one hell of a gang war, and ends with massive causalities. In a human, that’s a major bummer. It can kill. In a vampire, same mechanism, different outcome. I mean, it wouldn’t make sense if it did, would it? Unless a vampire and their victim have compared blood groups, the chances of a vampire sucking down litres of compatible blood is pretty slim. If miss-matched blood groups affected vampires the way it does humans, I’d be out of a job. All it does is take the strength from them, puts them in a coma like state. Ever wonder why, when a vampire drains a victim, they’re out the next night guzzling more? A symptom of today’s binge-drinking society? No. It’s because the stolen blood keeps getting smashed to smithereens by the vampire’s natural antibodies. Mix in several doses of all types of blood groups and it’s no wonder they’re a cranky, depressive mob.
What I’d done with Mercy, ensuring she got plenty of her own blood group, had a made difference. She could spaz out, no joke, but she wasn’t constantly bug-eyed crazy like your average vampire. It was a series of trained tricks, sure, but she could act human. That she could remember those tricks, could intuit when to use them and which ones, was a fairly good testimony to my theory. Of course, I’m working with a test group of one. That’s never going to pass muster with the scientific community, but I’m betting it could in the supernatural crowd.
And maybe that was part of why Aurum came to have his chat. I plucked the card he’d left me from a pocket and stared at it. A mobile, probably one he’d picked up in-country, to be abandoned when he went home.
And maybe that wasn’t the whole reason.
I didn’t want to admit it. I mean, what did it mean if it were true? I had some measure of control over Mercy because of the blood I fed her. Because of the choker chain I kept around her neck. Not because I was her version of the ultimate vampire.
Which brought me crashing head long into Aurum’s parting question.
What flavour was Mercy?
Whenever you get in the way of a psychic compulsion from a vampire, if you’re sensitive to such things, you get to touch their… well, I guess it would be their aura. Now, I’m getting way clued into to this psychic deal, but I don’t go around seeing auras and whatnot. I’m not about to do a laying-on of hands and heal the whole congregation. But aura is the word that best suits the whole shebang. So, you touch the aura and I don’t know how it is with other folks, but my brain relays the sensation to me as a flavour.
Some are a hot, spicy cabernet sauvignon. Some are the smooth, rich earthiness of honey. Some are tangy enough to make me pull a face. Some are like saltwater. But in all fairness to my dignity, I’m not about to go around referring to vampires as a bunch of condiments. So you call them the reds, the yellows, the oranges and the blues. Kudos to me for picking names the rest of the world uses as well.
Mercy’s flavour? Well, she didn’t have one. Not that I could detect, anyway. She was just… Mercy. Maybe I was too close to her.
The flavour doesn’t develop as soon as a person is turned. It takes a while. Same with the psychic skills. I guess it’s like the probationary period or something. Got to learn the ropes, be shown where the coffee machine is and swear to uphold the clan honour on a stack of Devil’s Dictionaries or something.
At least, that was my take on it. Aurum’s revelations added a different view.
I suppose it made sense that all members of a clan are linked together psychically. Links between parent and child, all the way back to the top of the pecking order. A demonic pyramid selling scheme.
I gathered up my stuff, made sure nothing remained that would give away my midnight presence, and left.
I couldn’t get the image out of my head. A great, sweeping pyramid of vampires, and perched at the very peak, a shadowy shape growing bigger and bigger with each poor soul added to the ever widening base. And there beside it, was me ridding piggy back on Mercy, waving a tiny flag and tinier sword. Multiply the big pyramid by six—Reds, Blues, Greens, Yellows, Oranges and let’s not forget the late comers, the Violets—and that’s just not fair to the poor guy in the middle.
Subterfuge was pretty far from my mind as I left the hospital. Everything was pretty much far from my mind except a gut numbing, scared shitlessness. It was okay when it was just me and Mercy going up against a couple of vampires. Hell, we’d redecorated Surf Wars with a dozen of them. As they say, ignorance is bliss. They also say ignorance is evil, but I was just going to ignore that.
Jogging back to my car I decided the next time I tried to be inconspicuous I would beat myself about the head and just damn well park under a spotlight. What sort of maniac goes around asking for trouble like this?
Cab sav flooded my mouth.
“The sort we like.”
I staggered to a stop. Again, pretty dumb thing to do, but it’s hard to think of alternatives when the night around you suddenly comes alive with vampires.
They emerged from dark shadows and dropped from trees with nary a noise from any of them. Well, no. They were Reds and in order to be a good little Red, you had to think that long black coats were a mandatory fashion requirement. And the bastards knew how to make it work too.
I have a black Drizabone, one that reaches my ankles. Looks way swish, especially when you stride about all important like and it flares out behind you like some over produced Western scene. But the blasted thing is too hot. And I never did work out how to fight in it. Hence the camouflage jacket. Oh, and the cargo pants. Loads of nifty pockets to put things in, like weapons.
So, fashion versus combat lesson aside, the Reds arrived in a susurrus of flaring coats. They didn’t crunch on the leaf and twig covered ground, like I did, and their big army surplus boots didn’t thump noticeably, like mine did. Very quiet indeed.
They formed up around me in a loose circle, silver eyes sparkling prettily in the faint light from the hospital windows. There were half a dozen of them.
“Night Call,” the one directly in front of me whispered.
That was pretty special. It’s not often… okay, never, that a vampire initiates a fight with idle chit chat. Don’t get me wrong. When we fight, there’s heaps of yodelling and screaming, and the vampires make some noise as well. It’s just that your average vampire isn’t a big talker. Seemed this guy was. Add that thought up with the fact he had also read my mind and it equals ‘nasty’.
He was a big bastard, too. André the Giant big. All right, no one’s that big, except André, of course. But if this guy ate his Vegemite he might get there.
I’d just had the metaphorical teeth knocked out of my head by Aurum, and here I was confronting a mob of vampires without Mercy. I could either roll up in a ball and hope they’d left their dancing shoes at home, or I could do my best.
I straightened my shoulders, dropped the esky and looked him in the eye. Heck, I was still gonna hope they kept the fangs holstered, but that was more a backup plan.
“A man is more than his job,” I snarled back. “I have a name. Learn it.”
“Your name means nothing to us. What you do does. You are the Night Caller, the death of us.”
I got a little less scared for a moment. It was pushed aside by a touch of pride. They ha
d a pretty cool name for me. Neat. Then I went back to being scared.
“Then let’s not beat about the philosophical bush. How about we see the Night Caller in action?”
“We did not come to fight.”
“Heh.” I tensed anyway. “That’s a new one. Then why are you here? Is it the laid back lifestyle? Live in the ’burbs, work in the big smoke?”
The guy doing all the talking rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck. “We are here to negotiate a deal.”
I stared at him. I stared at the other vampires standing around me. Their eyes had dulled from combat-ready to normal. When I faced the main guy again, his eyes had also lost the predator sheen.
“You’re serious.” I swallowed. “Well, fuck me.”
