Blood Sisters

by Paula Guran

  They drank. Above them, in the skylight, the full moon glowed. Dracula leaned back in the hot water, to discover the beautiful hands of Rosemary kneading his shoulders. He smiled at her and closed his eyes while Leary spoke of something: of what he was not sure, the religion Leary had founded or the beauty of LSD or any of a number of topics. He muscles relaxed, releasing the tension of centuries. He drank more wine, unable, as mortals were, to get drunk.

  Words in Leary’s soft voice of change and optimism for the future, and the unfolding of mankind, and the need to fly out of oneself

  and change

  and Rosemary melted the furrows out of Dracula’s brow

  and change

  and the next thing of which Dracula was aware was a sharp, deep penetration in his neck, and sucking. Slowly he opened his eyes and said, “You tricked me,” but he didn’t know how.

  Yet, as the blood seeped out of him, the room melted down itself and became a stunning, incandescent forest. Beatific women smiled down on him like the Madonnas of Russian Orthodox icons. His muscles were completely gone, his veins, his arteries, his princely blood. That was okay, that was, as they said, groovy.

  He saw the melodies of his homeland—blood red, crimson, scarlet, vermilion; he heard the colors of his life—Gothic chants and Gregorian chants, the keening of lonely wolves and the sweet, ethereal voices of his Brides. The sweeping gales of the children of the night. The laughter of the bat; the plaintive whispers of rodents.

  Beautiful, beautiful—chimes in the back of his mind, promising him midnight: one, two, three, in the depths of the black night in Carpathia. The splendor that he was—more magnificent than ever he had remembered. The miracle that he was—and the endless possibilities for expression given to him.

  “I can catch my soul,” he whispered. “It’s so beautiful.”

  Leary said, “You made it, Vladimir. You’re tripping.”

  And Dracula immediately crashed.

  No longer tripping, no longer mesmerized, no longer relaxed. His eyes flew open and he said, “Bastard. Out of my sight. Betrayer. Thief.” “But, Vlad—” Leary began.

  Dracula flung himself at him, teeth bared, preparing for the kill, when Leary flew out of reach.

  Flew.

  Rosemary looked frightened, and backed away from them both.

  “I’ve been Changed,” Leary said, settling back into the tub. He opened his mouth and showed Dracula his teeth.

  “There’s only one way to settle this,” Dracula said, rising from the water in all his majesty. He was the King of the Vampires; he would not let this usurper survive another minute.

  “Settle it?” Leary asked, perplexed.

  “Yes, you idiot.” Dracula advanced, sneering at him. The King of Peace and Love. He had no idea what violence he would commit as a vampire.

  Leary backed away, ran up against the side of the tub, and crawled out. “Wait a minute. Wait.” Perhaps he was beginning to understand he had made a terrible miscalculation.

  Then Alexsandru rushed in. “The FBI! They’re at the gates!”

  Suddenly everyone was scrambling. Into clothes and coats, stuffing passports and money into pockets, the fugitives sneaking through the dungeon to the unguarded rear of the castle. The flower children, rising to the occasion, harassing and teasing the authorities.

  The Learys took flight, and were safe.

  The FBI were too stupid to see what Dracula was, and left after stern warnings about harboring criminals.

  Dracula was alone with his motley crew, and as he looked up at the setting moon, he wept.

  Years later, after the flowers and the pharmacopoeial paraphernalia and the dog-eared copies of The Tibetan Book of the Dead were locked in attic trunks, it was said that Leary died. It was said that his head was severed from his body and frozen. It was said that he had requested this action in the hope that he could be revived in a more advanced time and brought back to life.

  When Alexsandru told Dracula of this, Captain Blood laughed. No one knew exactly why. Some claimed it was because he remembered Leary so fondly. Others, that he found Leary’s hope for a second chance as a disembodied head typically Leary, and very amusing.

  And still others, that he had ordered the beheading, because that was one way to kill a vampire.

  But everyone agreed that of a night, he took the hand of his best beloved Bride, who looked very much like Rosemary Leary, and they flew together over the rippling sidewinder desiccation, shadows like condors against the full and glowing desert moon.

  THE POWER AND THE PASSION

  Pat Cadigan

  Pat Cadigan is the author of numerous acclaimed short stories and five novels. Her first novel, Mindplayers, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award; her second and third novels—Synners and Fools—both won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her collection, Patterns, was honored with the Locus Award. Cadigan’s work has also been nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards. The author lived in Kansas City for many years, but has resided in London, England since 1996.

  “The Power and the Passion” posits that it may well take a human monster to truly know an inhuman one…

  The voice on the phone says, “We need to talk to you, Mr. Soames,” so I know to pick the place up. Company coming. I don’t like for Company to come into no pigsty, but one of the reasons the place is such a mess all the time is, it’s so small, I got nowhere to keep shit except around, you know. But I shove both the dirty laundry and the dirty dishes in the oven—my mattress is right on the floor so I can’t shove stuff under the bed, and what won’t fit in the oven I put in the tub and just before I pull the curtain, I think, well, shit, I shoulda just put it all in the tub and filled it and got it all washed at once. Or, well, just the dishes, because I can take the clothes over to the laundromat easier than washing them in the tub.

  So, hell, I just pull the shower curtain, stack the newspapers and the magazines—newspapers on top of the magazines, because most people don’t take too well to my taste in magazines, and they wouldn’t like a lot of the newspapers much either, but I got the Sunday paper to stick on top and hide it all, so it’s okay. Company’ll damned well know what’s under them Sunday funnies because they know me, but as long as they don’t have to have it staring them in the face, it’s like they can pretend it don’t exist.

  I’m still puttering and fussing around when the knock on the door comes and I’m crossing the room (the only room unless you count the bathroom, which I do when I’m in it) when it comes to me I ain’t done dick about myself. I’m still in my undershirt and shorts, for chrissakes.

  “Hold on,” I call out, “I ain’t decent, quite,” and I drag a pair of pants outa the closet. But all my shirts are either in the oven or the tub and Company’ll get fanny-antsy standing in the hall—this is not the wat-chamacallit, the place where Lennon bought it, the Dakota, yeah. Anyway, I answer the door in my one-hundred-percent cotton undershirt, but at least I got my fly zipped.

  Company’s a little different this time. The two guys as usual, but today they got a woman with them. Not a broad, not a bitch, not a bimbo. She’s standing between and a little behind them, looking at me the way women always look at me when I happen to cross their path—chin lifted up a little, one hand holding her coat together at the neck in a fist, eyes real cold, like, “Touch me and die horribly, I wish,” standing straight-fuckin-up, like they’re Superman, and the fear coming off them like heat waves from an open furnace.

  They all come in and stand around and I wish I’d straightened the sheets out on the mattress so it wouldn’t look so messy, but then they’d see the sheets ain’t clean, so six-of-one, you know. And I got nothing for anyone to sit on, except that mattress, so they just keep standing around.

  The one guy, Steener, says, “Are you feeling all right, Mr. Soames,” looking around like there’s puke and snot all over the floor. Steener don’t bother me. He’s a pretty man who probably was a pretty boy and a pretty baby before that, and thinks t
he world oughta be a pretty place. Or he wants to prove pretty guys are really tougher and better and more man than guys like me, because he’s afraid it’s vice versa, you know. Maybe even both, depending on how he got up this morning.

  The other guy, Villanueva, I could almost respect him. He didn’t put on no face to look at me, and he didn’t have no power fantasies about who he was to me or vice versa. I think Villanueva probably knows me better than anyone in the world. But then, he was the one took my statement when they caught up with me. He was a cop then. If he’d still been a cop, I’d probably respect him.

  So I look right at the woman and I say, “So, what’s this, you brought me a date?” I know this will get them because they know what I do to dates.

  “You speak when spoken to, Mr. Soames,” Steener says, kinda barking like a dog that wishes it were bigger.

  “You spoke to me,” I point out.

  Villanueva takes a few steps in the direction of the bathroom—he knows what I got in there and how I don’t want Company to see it, so this is supposed to distract me, and it does a little. The woman steps back, clutching her light coat tighter around her throat, not sure who to hide behind. Villanueva’s the better bet, but she doesn’t want to get any further into my stinky little apartment, so she edges toward Steener.

  And it comes to me in a two-second flash-movie just how to do it. Steener’d be easy to take out. He’s a rusher, doesn’t know dick about fighting. He’d just go for me and I’d just whip my hand up between his arms and crunch goes the windpipe. Villanueva’d be trouble, but I’d probably end up doing him, too. Villanueva’s smart enough to know that. First, though, I’d bop the woman, just bop her to keep her right there—punch in the stomach does it for most people, man or woman—and then I’d do Villanueva, break his neck.

  Then the woman. I’d do it all, pound one end, pound the other, switching off before either one of us got too used to one thing or the other. Most people, man or woman, blank out about then. Can’t face it, you know, so after that, it’s free-for-fuckin-all. You can do just any old thing you want to a person in shock, they just don’t believe it’s happening by then. This one I would rip up sloppy, I would send her to hell and then kill her. I can see how it would look, the way her body would be moving, how her flesh would jounce flabby—

  But I won’t. I can’t look at a woman without the flash-movie kicking in, but it’s only a movie, you know. This is Company, they got something else for me.

  “Do you feel like working?” Villanueva asks. He’s caught it just now, what I was thinking about, he knows, because I told him how it was when I gave him my statement after I got caught.

  “Sure,” I say, “what else have I got to do?”

  He nods to Steener, who passes me a little slip of paper. The name and address. “It’s nothing you haven’t done before,” he says. “There are two of them. You do as you like, but you must follow the procedure as it has been described to you—”

  I give a great big nod. “I know how to do it. I’ve studied on it, got it all right up here.” I tap my head. “Second nature to me now.”

  “I don’t want to hear the word ‘nature’ out of you,” Steener sneers. “You’ve got nothing to do with nature.”

  “That’s right,” I agree. I’m mild-mannered because it’s just come to me what is Steener’s problem here. It is that he is like me. He enjoys doing to me what he does the way I enjoy doing what I do, and the fact that he’s wearing a white hat and I’m not is just a watchamacallit, a technicality. Deep down at heart, it’s the same fuckin-feeling and he’s going between loving it and refusing to admit he’s like me, boing-boing, boing-boing. And if he ever gets stuck on the loving-it side, well, son-of-a-bitch will there be trouble.

  I look over at Villanueva and point at the woman, raising my eyebrows. I don’t know exactly what words to use for a question about her and anything I say is gonna upset everybody.

  “This person is with us as an observer,” Villanueva says quietly, which means I can just mind my own fuckin business and don’t ask questions unless it’s about the job. I look back at the woman and she looks me right in the face. The hand clenched high up on her coat relaxes just a little and I see the purple-black bruises on the side of her neck before she clutches up again real fast. She’s still holding herself the same way, but it’s like she spoke to me. The lines of communication, like the shrinks say, are open, which is not the safest thing to do with me. She’s gotta be a nurse or a teacher or a social worker, I think, because those are the ones that can’t help opening up to someone. It’s what they’re trained to do, reach out. Or hell, maybe she’s just somebody’s mother. She don’t look too motherly, but that don’t mean dick these days.

  “When?” I say to Steener.

  “As soon as you can pack your stuff and get to the airport. There’s a cab downstairs and your ticket is waiting at the airline counter, in your name.”

  “You mean the Soames name,” I say, because Soames is not my name for real.

  “Just get ready, get going, get it done, and get back here,” Steener says. “No side-trips, or it’s finished. Don’t even attempt a side-trip or it’s finished.” He starts to turn toward the door and then stops. “And you know that if you’re caught in or after the act—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m on my own and you don’t know dick about squat, and nobody ever hearda me, case closed.” I keep myself from smiling; he watched too much Mission Impossible when he was a kid. Like everyone else in his outfit. I think it’s where they got the idea, kind of, some of it anyway.

  Villanueva tosses me a fat roll of bills in a rubber band just as he’s following Steener and the woman out the door. “Expenses,” he says. “You have a rental car on the other end, which you’ll have to use cash for. Buy whatever else you need, don’t get mugged and robbed, you know the drill.”

  “Drill?” I say, acting perked-up, like I’m thinking, Wow, what a good idea.

  Villanueva refuses to turn green for me, but he shuts the door behind him a little too hard.

  I don’t waste no time; I go to the closet and pull out my traveling bag. Everything’s in it, but I always take a little inventory anyway, just to be on the safe side. Hell of a thing to come up empty-handed at the wrong moment, you know. Really, though, I just like to handle the stuff: hacksaw, mallet, boning blade, iodized salt, lighter fluid, matches, spray bottle of holy water, four pieces of wood pointed sharp on one end, half a dozen rosaries, all blessed, and two full place settings of silverware, not stainless, mind you, but real silver. And the shirts I don’t never put in the tub. What do they make of this at airport security? Not a fuckin thing. Ain’t no gun. Guns don’t work for this. Anyway, this bag’s always checked.

  The flight is fine. It’s always fine because they always put me in first class and nobody next to me if possible. On the night flights, it’s generally possible and tonight, I have the whole first class section to myself, hot and cold running stews, who are (I can tell) forcing themselves to be nice to me. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t mind it, but it makes me wonder all the same: is it a smell, or just the way my eyes look? Villanueva told me once, it was just something about me gave everyone the creeps. I lean back, watch the flash-movies, don’t bother nobody, and everybody’s happy to see me go when the plane finally lands.

  I get my car, nice midsize job with a phone, and head right into the city. I know this city real good, I been here before for them, but it ain’t the only one they send me to when they need to TCB.

  Do an easy fifty-five into the city and go to the address on the paper. Midtown, two blocks east of dead center, medium-sized Victorian. I can see the area’s starting to get a watchamacallit, like a facelift, the rich ones coming in and fixing up the houses because the magazines and the TV told them it’s time to love old houses and fix them up.

  I think about the other houses all up and down the street of the one I got to go to, what’s in them, what I could do. I sure feel like it, and it would be
a lot less trouble, but I made me a deal of my own free will and I will stick to it as long as they do, Steener and Villanueva and the people behind them. But if they bust it up somehow, if they fuck me, that will be real different, and they will be real sorry.

  I call the house; nobody home. That’s about right. I got to wait, which don’t bother me none, because there’s the flash-movies to watch. I can think on what I want to do after I get through what I have to do, and those things are not so different from each other. What Steener calls “the procedure” I just call a new way to play. Only not so new, because I thought of some of those things all on my own when I was watchamacallit, freelance so to say, and done some of them, kind of, which I guess is what made them take me on for this stuff, instead of letting me take a quick shot in a quiet room and no funeral after.

  So, it gets to be four in the morning and here we come. Somehow, I know as soon as I see the figure coming up the sidewalk across the street that this is the one in the house. I can always tell them, and I don’t know what it is, except maybe it takes a human monster to know an inhuman monster. And I don’t feel nothing except a little nervous about getting into the house, which is always easier than you’d think it would be, but I get nervous on it anyway.

  Figure comes into the light and I see it’s a man, and I see it’s not alone, and then I get pissed, because that fucking Steener, that fucking Villanueva, they didn’t say nothing about no kid. And then I settle some, because I can tell the kid is one, too. Ten, maybe twelve from the way he walks. I take the razor and I give myself a little one just inside my hairline, squeeze the blood out to get it running down my face, and then I get out of the car just as they put their feet on the first step up to the house.

  “Please, you gotta help me,” I call, not too loud, just so they can hear, “they robbed me, they took everything but my clothes, all my ID, my credit cards, my cash—”