by Kim Falconer
The guy flew backward, past a lamppost, between two parked cars and into the street. Damn! I didn’t recognise my own strength any more. I jumped to my feet in time to see a car screech to a halt, inches from my attacker. The next car rear-ended the first, and the next, on down the line. The fender-bending train wreck kept going. Oh hell no. Glass fell, horns honked, drivers rolled down their windows and cursed. I looked for Lee, or anybody remotely undercover cop. My attacker struggled to stand. He turned to me, his shades gone, a hand over one eye. He stumbled backward, and ran. This was definitely going to be on the five o’clock news.
A guy in a tan tee broke from the crowd and shot after him. A flash of green Hawaiian shirt followed. It was all I could make out. My tails? I shrunk back, hoping to disappear behind the gathering crowd. That’s when two guys built like tanks flanked me, one on either side. They also were dressed in jeans, tees, shades and boots. XXL.
‘The gym’s that way, boys.’ I pointed down the street. They didn’t budge, so I raised my voice. ‘Back off!’ It would have been loud enough to make heads turn, but the excitement in the street had all the onlookers’ attention. Judging by the continued screeches, cars were still piling up.
‘Don’t make a fuss, Sykes.’
Blood drained from my face at the sound of my name. My stalker had friends? I made to bolt. Faster than I expected, one grabbed my arm. I turned to throw a punch, but the other dude caught my free hand. The bastards walked me to a back street, my feet not quite touching the ground. Next thing I knew, I was pushed into a brick wall, taking it on the nose. Apparently they thought I needed tenderising like a slab of meat. Both brave assholes spun me around and pinned my back flat, free fists pounding my ribs. I didn’t hesitate to spit in their faces, but that was just a distraction. Out of my watering eyes, I spotted Lee, green Hawaiian shirt flapping in the wind, gun drawn, barrelling down on us. A squad car screeched into the alley behind him.
‘LAPD!’ he shouted, reaching me seconds later. Lee clocked one guy in the back of the head and slammed him to the ground. The other ran. While I doubled over, holding my ribs, the squad car skidded to a stop and the beat cop tore after him.
Lee patted his perp down and did a really short version of their rights. I think he stopped at silent. While he cuffed him, Lee told me to let Rourke know. I pulled out my phone and tapped his name while my attacker was put in the squad car. Blood spattered the touch screen. I pinched my nose to stem the flow.
Rourke answered fast. ‘Where are you? Jesus, Sykes, it’s a mess on Jefferson.’
I wiped my face with the hem of my shirt and looked for a street sign.
Lee shouted out, ‘1237 block Hill Street. One in custody.’ He was talking on the squad car radio, but I repeated the info to Rourke. ‘There were three guys this time. Three!’
‘You alright?’
‘Think so.’ I swallowed blood running down the back of my throat.
‘Any of these guys your stalker?’
‘Don’t think so … none of them had their faces painted. Does this mean the copycat doesn’t work alone?’
‘Maybe. They didn’t catch the one who caused the crash.’
‘Damn. What now?’
‘Tell Lee I’ll be there in five. Give him your statement then walk away. If this didn’t scare our killer off, we still have a chance at him.’
I did a three-sixty and frowned. ‘Who’s covering me now?’
‘Mark and Samuel.’
‘I can’t see them.’
‘You aren’t supposed to, Ava. Just go home.’
‘Right. Talk later.’ Sweat trickled down my face. I wiped my nose again, my hand still coming away bloody. ‘Lee? You have any tissues?’ He was sitting in the squad car, writing on a tablet.
‘Hang on.’ He handed me a wad of tissues from the glovebox.
I used the side mirror while cleaning my face. Some mirrors were worse than others, but I definitely looked like shit.
‘Sit down for a minute, Sykes. You took it hard.’ He motioned me into the passenger’s seat, but the proximity to the man in the back put me off.
‘I’m fine. Rourke’s on his way.’ I balled up the tissues and shoved them in my backpack. ‘Tag team is here.’ I nodded behind me, though I didn’t know where Mark and Samuel were. I gave him a four-sentence statement and then said, ‘Gotta go.’
I had to process what happened. It was like a puzzle where the pieces kept flying off the board. MMA had taught me to handle the adrenaline rush of fighting, then move on with the day as usual, but this was different. I’d been fighting for my life, again, and losing. Halfway down the block, a rush of energy hit like a tidal wave. I took out my phone and clutched it. There was a missed call from Rossi. Funny. He was just the man I wanted to yell at. I tapped the call back button. He answered on the first ring.
‘What the hell did you put in my drink?’ I shouted, as if no time or events had elapsed since the ‘journey to the bottom of the sea’ I took four days ago.
‘Where are you?’
‘Don’t answer a question with another freaking question. Was there blood in it, or did I hallucinate that as well?’
‘You didn’t hallucinate anything, but Ava, it’s not safe for you.’
‘You think?’ People gave me a wide berth as I hollered into the phone.
There was a momentary pause, then Rossi’s voice turned glacier cold. ‘Tell me where you are.’
I sucked in a deep breath and let it out in a rush. ‘I was heading for Techno Inc before being railroaded by two freight trains.’
‘Two?’
‘You’re right. There were three. Stop changing the damn subject.’
He hung up.
‘Hey, I’m not through with you.’ I cursed him, venting my rage, bracing my ribs where the bricks had pounded me. I wanted to hit back until something broke. It wasn’t my most Zen moment. I took ten deep breaths. Didn’t help in the slightest. Still, I had one of three options. I could curse and cry, wait around for answers, or follow through with finding a new laptop. Yup, that’s right, Sykes. Stick with the plan. I wasn’t going to calm down, but I could focus on something mundane. That’s what I told myself anyway. Ritual routine. Buy the damned laptop.
I crossed the street and ducked into Techno Inc. It was a big warehouse building, enormously high ceilings with dozens of helicopter fans suspended from the steel rafters. In spite of the breeze they created, it was muggy as hell. Not good for the electronics. I passed the ‘Rebuilt’ aisle, heart pounding, and followed giant green arrows to the section that said ‘New.’ If this was retail therapy, it wasn’t soothing me.
I sifted through a maze of laptops, pads and tablets. They came with, or without, every program imaginable, wired and wireless, cams and no cams. Because most resources — art and literary works, programs, music, films — were in Creative Commons, obtaining new software wasn’t the issue; a machine that could run high-end graphics, for my microbio-simulations and slides, was essential though. I found a nice little lappy for a good price, with a twelve-month warranty. Twelve months! By then, I’d be interning at the CDC, or dead, or in a psych ward, heavily medicated. Gee, I’m a girl with options. While making the purchase, my adrenaline reached critical mass. My heart pounded in my ears. My limbs shook and sweat ran down my back. I tore out of the building with my new buy, and bumped straight into Rossi.
‘You!’ I let out a yelp and jumped back.
‘We need to talk.’
‘Get out of my way.’ I tried to keep walking but he blocked me.
‘Ava, listen. If you’re Shen, I can’t protect you. If you’re with Teern, I can.’
‘Shen? Teern?’ I huffed out the names. ‘I have no idea what you’re saying.’
He had his hands out in that placating gesture that I hated. ‘I’m neutral, Ava, until you make a choice. That’s what I’m here for.’
Snap.‘For fuck’s sake, Rossi, stop talking garbage and tell me what the hell is going on!’ My eyes burned a
nd I’m pretty sure I spat as I spoke. ‘I’m being stalked, hearing things in my head. My father’s a rapist. My mother tried to kill me … everyone’s trying to kill me …
‘What?’
I kept ranting. ‘I’m stronger than a mountain lion and can’t control the rage, and you …’ I shifted my shopping bag and spotted the bus stop. ‘If you have anything useful to say, spit it out, otherwise get the hell out of my face!’ I felt my nosebleed return. Didn’t give a shit.
Rossi absorbed my outburst, his stance calm, non-threatening. His eyes were unusually soft. ‘Come.’ He reached out his hand and took mine. ‘Let’s go find some answers.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The afternoon light reflected on the bulkhead, rippling like water. It enchanted me and I calmed down a bit. Rossi and I were alone on his yacht, in one of the best decked out pathology labs I’d ever been in. The man obviously brought his work home with him, and why not? The panorama when he put out to sea would be spectacular. Apparently, his hematology research involved marine bioassays as well. In spite of my boiling hot confusion, and more than a little anger toward him, I felt intrigued. We sat, side by side, on high stools in front of two microscopes strapped to a desk. Like every bit of equipment on this boat, they would withstand a small cyclone. Maybe a larger one. I stopped gawking and turned to him. ‘You have me here. I’m listening.’
Rossi gave me an earful of information, no denying that. But everything he said about opening my mind and showing me my ‘history’ and accepting I was Mar had no more meaning than it did on the day of my underwater acid trip, and I told him so.
‘Ava, you think you’re a Lander because you were raised by them, but you aren’t.’
‘Define Lander.’
‘The humans.’ He said it so matter of fact, like how could I not know.
‘Living proof,’ I said. A person could graduate summa cum laude and be certifiably crackers.
‘Please. Suspend your disbelief and think of this as the truth, if not about yourself, then about me, for now. This is what I am. Mar.’
My instincts were to leave him to his mad ideas, but I’d bailed before, and was still in the dark, so I stayed, determined to extract whatever sense I could. In every fantasy resides a grain of truth. I couldn’t remember where I’d heard that, but it felt right. ‘Okay, doc. Let’s pretend for a moment there is, what? Another species?’ I could hardly say the word without fracturing into a nervous smile.
‘Mar,’ he said again.
‘And you are one?’
‘Me, you, your lawyer, Teern and myriad of us, in the sea.’
‘Anyone else?’ I did laugh this time.
‘The Poseidon crew are Mar, of a sort. Shen Mar. Very dangerous, not that any Mar isn’t. But Shen live by different rules. Driven by darker desires. Addictions. They’ve adapted to land, more or less. You must know that at least, with how much time you spend with Bane.’
‘Stop!’ Cold sweat broke out on my forehead and the tips of my fingers tingled. ‘Explain darker desires?’
‘Blood, Ava. You smell it on them?’
‘I’ve smelled it on you before too.’
He looked away. ‘Mar need blood to survive on land, only a small amount, and transfusion is more than adequate. The Shen, they take it far beyond necessity.’
‘How so?’
He thought about it for a moment. ‘Where Landers …’
‘People,’ I interrupted.
‘Where people immerse in books, film, music, art, the Shen take human blood. From the blood, they pull the memories of their victims and ride them like waves of thought.’
It took a minute to register. ‘As in, for fun?’
‘Entertainment. They’re fiercely addicted.’ He rubbed his shoulder as if it had a kink. ‘It’s not a small thing, the ecstasy of a memory experienced as if it were your own.’
If this is what happened to me, when I drank his blood, I wanted to redefine the term ecstasy.
Rossi kept talking. ‘They prefer well educated, adventurous “donors”, rich with human knowledge of arts and science, creativity and discourse, full of the lust for life, conflicts, dramas —’
‘Sex?’
‘That too.’
Coeds.
Exactly.
‘So they drink the blood of smart, sexy people to get off?’
‘It’s an oversimplification, but yes.’
‘Why not run a blood bank? They seem rich enough for it.’
‘Shen have taken over many profitable corporations, true, but a blood bank would not serve their purpose. The longer the hemoglobin has been out of the living system —’
‘The person.’
He ignored my interruption. ‘— the more the memories fade. Within a few minutes, they’re often gone.’
‘So Shen Mar like it hot from the vein?’
‘Adrenaline boosts the images, tapping more dramatic memories. Over millennia, the Shen have developed ways to excite victims for the greatest recall.’
My stomach dropped. ‘So, Poseidon’s VIP lounge isn’t a floorshow?’
‘Who told you that?’
I let it sink in. I didn’t know if I could believe Rossi or not, but if he was right? ‘You, and your Mar friends. Where do you get your kicks, if not from tasting human blood?’
‘We seek our kicks, as you call it, in the eternal memories of the sea. She holds a far greater elation for us.’
I digested these revelations. According to Rossi, Shen Mar lust for the memories of others and have no qualms about draining people to satisfy their needs. Other Mar lust for the millions of years of life memories encrypted in seawater, which is much the same constitution as blood, so that sort of made sense. Could this be true? I guessed if Rossi tossed back the same shot he’d given me the other day, then a race of sea people, at home in the depths, entranced by the fractal geometry of a coral reef, might seem like family. ‘You said you had empirical evidence.’
‘I can prove Mar exist, and you are one.’ There was no chink in his confidence. He pointed at the microscope and clipped on a glass slide. ‘This is human blood. Take a look.’
I did. There were perfectly healthy red cells, oxygen rich, and the occasional white cell, clusters of platelets. ‘So?’
‘Watch this.’ He pricked his finger, squeezed a drop on a fresh slide, covered it with a paper-thin square of glass and put it under his scope. After a little adjustment, he said, ‘Now compare my blood.’
He leaned back, but not so far I wasn’t completely aware of his every contour as I bent to the scope. The hairs on my arms stood out. ‘This can’t be right.’ I pulled my head up. ‘You’d have to be completely hypoxic. Most of these red cells are dead.’ I looked again to confirm. ‘And you should be too.’
‘But you see, I am not.’ He removed the slide and took a blood bag from the fridge. With a 1ml syringe, he withdrew a drop, putting a pinhead of blood on the slide with his own. He covered it again and handed it to me. ‘Now look.’
I clipped it onto the stage of my scope and adjusted the lens. ‘This can’t be right either.’ I moved it around, checking the entire drop. ‘Your blood is mixing with the sample from the blood bag, and … coming back to life. The red cells are plumping up, becoming nicely convex and …’ I looked up at him. ‘They’re pulling hemoglobin from fresh cells. How?’
‘I told you. Mar need human blood to survive on land. We evolved to oxygenate from seawater, not air, but fresh blood, like the sea, works as well.’
‘Huh?’
He sighed, like I was a slow learner. In the sea, we breathe water into our lungs and draw oxygen from it there, but on land, we’ve lost the ability to breathe air — no O2 exchange in the lungs. If we walk under the sun, we survive by extracting O2 from human blood, which enriches our own for hours, sometimes days.
I knew I was hearing him telepathically but it didn’t faze me at this point. ‘And you think I am one of you?’
‘If you give me a drop of your
blood, I will prove it.’
I thought about that for a moment. My desire to see him eat his words outweighed the fear of having my DNA fall into the wrong hands. I held my finger up, in a rude way, but snatched it back before he could touch it. I pricked myself, making my own smear, gently placing the cover slip of glass over the live blood. I’d done it on test subjects enough times. It wasn’t like I didn’t know how. I handed him the slide. ‘Knock yourself out.’
He took it and turned the knobs, scanning for a few moments. His forehead creased.
‘Yes?’ I didn’t repress the chuckle.
Rossi unclipped the slide, held it to the light and clipped it back to the stage. He sounded less sure as he continued. ‘When did you last take blood?’
‘You have my file at the hospital.’
‘I mean since then.’
I scrunched my face. ‘Nothing since then. It’s not like I had another hemorrhage or anything. Well, I did have a bit of a bash-up or two, but nothing major.’
‘This can’t be right.’
‘Maybe I should have asked my birth mother about my weird blood, when I had the chance.’ She seemed pretty knowledgeable about my origins.
‘What did you say?’
‘Birth mother. Didn’t I mention? She’s alive and well, living on Willoughby Avenue, East New LA.’
His eyes came off the scope and hit me like a shot. Damn, he could turn fierce without warning. I pegged him as a Scorpio rising, to go with the Capricorn sun, but it didn’t seem like the right time to ask.
I leaned back, continuing the sarcasm. It beat feeling the emotions that threatened to come up. ‘Unfortunately, I don’t have a blood sample from Mum. She was too busy running from me at the speed of light.’ And screaming into my head about my father, the rapist monster, who, by the way, I resemble more than a smidgen.
