Blood Sisters

by Paula Guran

  They walked down the street and she found herself leaning easily into the heat of their bodies, inhaling the sweat and iron scent. It would be easy for her to close her eyes and pretend Mardave was someone else, someone she wanted to be touched by, but she wouldn’t let herself soil her memories of Julian.

  They passed by a store with flat-screens in the window, each one showing different channels. One streamed video from Coldtown—a girl who went by the name Demonia made some kind of deal with one of the stations to show what it was really like behind the gates. She filmed the Eternal Ball, a party that started in 1998 and had gone on ceaselessly ever since. In the background, girls and boys in rubber harnesses swung through the air. They stopped occasionally, opening what looked like a modded hospital tube stuck on the inside of their arms just below the crook of the elbow. They twisted a knob and spilled blood into little paper cups for the partygoers. A boy who looked to be about nine, wearing a string of glowing beads around his neck, gulped down the contents of one of the cups and then licked the paper with a tongue as red as his eyes. The camera angle changed suddenly, veering up, and the viewers saw the domed top of the hall, full of cracked windows through which you could glimpse the stars.

  “I know where they are,” Mardave said. “I can see that building from my apartment.”

  “Aren’t you scared of living so close to the vampires?” she asked, a small smile pulling at the corners of her mouth.

  “We’ll protect you,” said Ben, smiling back at her.

  “We should do what other countries do and blow those corpses sky high,” Mardave said.

  Matilda bit her tongue not to point out that Europe’s vampire hunting led to the highest levels of infection in the world. So many of Belgium’s citizens were vampires that shops barely opened their doors until nightfall. The truce with Coldtown worked. Mostly.

  She didn’t care if Mardave hated vampires. She hated them too.

  When they got to the store, she waited outside to avoid getting carded and lit another cigarette with Julian’s silver lighter—the one she was going to give back to him in thirty-one days. Sitting down on the curb, she let the chill of the pavement deaden the backs of her thighs. Let it freeze her belly and frost her throat with ice that even liquor couldn’t melt.

  Hunger turned her stomach. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten anything solid without throwing it back up. Her mouth hungered for dark, rich feasts; her skin felt tight, like a seed thirsting to bloom. All she could trust herself to eat was smoke.

  When she was a little girl, vampires had been costumes for Halloween. They were the bad guys in movies, plastic fangs and polyester capes. They were Muppets on television, endlessly counting.

  Now she was the one who was counting. Fifty-seven days. Eighty-eight days. Eighty-eight nights.

  “Matilda?”

  She looked up and saw Dante saunter up to her, earbuds dangling out of his ears like he needed a soundtrack for everything he did. He wore a pair of skintight jeans and smoked a cigarette out of one of those long, movie-star holders. He looked pretentious as hell. “I’d almost given up on finding you.”

  “You should have started with the gutter,” she said, gesturing to the wet, clogged tide beneath her feet. “I take my gutter-dwelling very seriously.”

  “Seriously.” He pointed at her with the cigarette holder. “Even your mother thinks you’re dead. Julian’s crying over you.”

  Maltilda looked down and picked at the thread of her jeans. It hurt to think about Julian while waiting for Mardave and Ben. She was disgusted with herself, and she could only guess how disgusted he’d be. “I got Cold,” she said. “One of them bit me.”

  Dante nodded his head.

  That’s what they’d started calling it when the infection kicked in—Cold—because of how cold people’s skin became after they were bitten. And because of the way the poison in their veins caused them to crave heat and blood. One taste of human blood and the infection mutated. It killed the host and then raised it back up again, colder than before. Cold through and through, forever and ever.

  “I didn’t think you’d be alive,” he said.

  She hadn’t thought she’d make it this long either without giving in. But going it alone on the street was better than forcing her mother to choose between chaining her up in the basement or shipping her off to Coldtown. It was better, too, than taking the chance Matilda might get loose from the chains and attack people she loved. Stories like that were in the news all the time; almost as frequent as the ones about people who let vampires into their homes because they seemed so nice and clean-cut.

  “Then what are you doing looking for me?” she asked. Dante had lived down the street from her family for years, but they didn’t hang out. She’d wave to him as she mowed the lawn while he loaded his panel van with DJ equipment. He shouldn’t have been here.

  She looked back at the store window. Mardave and Ben were at the counter with a case of beer and her wine cooler. They were getting change from a clerk.

  “I was hoping you, er, wouldn’t be alive,” Dante said. “You’d be more help if you were dead.”

  She stood up, stumbling slightly. “Well, screw you too.”

  It took eighty-eight days for the venom to sweat out a person’s pores. She only had thirty-seven to go. Thirty-seven days to stay so drunk that she could ignore the buzz in her head that made her want to bite, rend, devour.

  “That came out wrong,” he said, taking a step toward her. Close enough that she felt the warmth of him radiating off him like licking tongues of flame. She shivered. Her veins sang with need.

  “I can’t help you,” said Matilda. “Look, I can barely help myself. Whatever it is, I’m sorry. I can’t. You have to get out of here.”

  “My sister Lydia and your boyfriend Julian are gone,” Dante said. “Together. She’s looking to get bitten. I don’t know what he’s looking for … but he’s going to get hurt.”

  Matilda gaped at him as Mardave and Ben walked out of the store. Ben carried a box on his shoulder and a bag on his arm. “That guy bothering you?” he asked her.

  “No,” she said, then turned to Dante. “You better go.”

  “Wait,” said Dante.

  Matilda’s stomach hurt. She was sobering up. The smell of blood seemed to float up from underneath their skin.

  She reached into Ben’s bag and grabbed a beer. She popped the top, licked off the foam. If she didn’t get a lot drunker, she was going to attack someone.

  “Jesus,” Mardave said. “Slow down. What if someone sees you?” She drank it in huge gulps, right there on the street. Ben laughed, but it wasn’t a good laugh. He was laughing at the drunk. “She’s infected,” Dante said.

  Matilda whirled toward him, chucking the mostly empty can in his direction automatically. “Shut up, asshole.”

  “Feel her skin,” Dante said. “Cold. She ran away from home when it happened, and no one’s seen her since.”

  “I’m cold because it’s cold out,” she said.

  She saw Ben’s evaluation of her change from damaged enough to sleep with strangers to dangerous enough to attack strangers.

  Mardave touched his hand gently to her arm. “Hey,” he said.

  She almost hissed with delight at the press of his hot fingers. She smiled up at him and hoped her eyes weren’t as hungry as her skin. “I really like you.”

  He flinched. “Look, it’s late. Maybe we could meet up another time.” Then he backed away, which made her so angry that she bit the inside of her own cheek.

  Her mouth flooded with the taste of copper and a red haze floated in front of her eyes.

  Fifty-seven days ago, Matilda had been sober. She’d had a boyfriend named Julian, and they would dress up together in her bedroom. He liked to wear skinny ties and glittery eye shadow. She liked to wear vintage rock T-shirts and boots that laced up so high that they would constantly be late because they were busy tying them.

  Matilda and Julian would dres
s up and prowl the streets and party at lockdown clubs that barred the doors from dusk to dawn. Matilda wasn’t particularly careless; she was just careless enough.

  She’d been at a friend’s party. It had been stiflingly hot, and she was mad because Julian and Lydia were doing some dance thing from the musical they were in at school. Matilda just wanted to get some air. She opened a window and climbed out under the bobbing garland of garlic.

  Another girl was already on the lawn. Matilda should have noticed that the girl’s breath didn’t crystallize in the air, but she didn’t.

  “Do you have a light?” the girl had asked.

  Matilda did. She reached for Julian’s lighter when the girl caught her arm and bent her backwards. Matilda’s scream turned into a shocked cry when she felt the girl’s cold mouth against her neck, the girl’s cold fingers holding her off balance.

  Then it was as though someone slid two shards of ice into her skin.

  The spread of vampirism could be traced to one person—Caspar Morales. Films and books and television had started romanticizing vampires, and maybe it was only a matter of time before a vampire started romanticizing himself.

  Crazy, romantic Caspar decided that he wouldn’t kill his victims. He’d just drink a little blood and then move on, city to city. By the time other vampires caught up with him and ripped him to pieces, he’d infected hundreds of people. And those new vampires, with no idea how to prevent the spread, infected thousands.

  When the first outbreak happened in Tokyo, it seemed like a journalist’s prank. Then there was another outbreak in Hong Kong and another in San Francisco.

  The military put up barricades around the area where the infection broke out. That was the way the first Coldtown was founded.

  Matilda’s body twitched involuntarily. She could feel the spasm start in the muscles of her back and move to her face. She wrapped her arms around herself to try and stop it, but her hands were shaking pretty hard. “You want my help, you better get me some booze.”

  “You’re killing yourself,” Dante said, shaking his head.

  “I just need another drink,” she said. “Then I’ll be fine.”

  He shook his head. “You can’t keep going like this. You can’t just stay drunk to avoid your problems. I know, people do. It’s a classic move, even, but I didn’t figure you for fetishizing your own doom.”

  She started laughing. “You don’t understand. When I’m wasted I don’t crave blood. It’s the only thing keeping me human.”

  “What?” He looked at Matilda like he couldn’t quite make sense of her words.

  “Let me spell it out: if you don’t get me some alcohol, I am going to bite you.”

  “Oh.” He fumbled for his wallet. “Oh. Okay.”

  Matilda had spent all the cash she’d brought with her in the first few weeks, so it’d been a long time since she could simply overpay some homeless guy to go into a liquor store and get her a fifth of vodka. She gulped gratefully from the bottle Dante gave her in a nearby alley.

  A few moments later, warmth started to creep up from her belly, and her mouth felt like it was full of needles and Novocain.

  “You okay?” he asked her.

  “Better now,” she said, her words slurring slightly. “But I still don’t understand. Why do you need me to help you find Lydia and Julian?

  “Lydia got obsessed with becoming a vampire,” Dante said, irritably brushing back the stray hair that fell across his face.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “She used to be really scared of vampires. When we were kids, she begged Mom to let her camp in the hallway because she wanted to sleep where there were no windows. But then I guess she started to be fascinated instead. She thinks that human annihilation is coming. She says that we all have to choose sides and she’s already chosen.”

  “I’m not a vampire,” Matilda said.

  Dante gestured irritably with his cigarette holder. The cigarette had long burned out. He didn’t look like his usual contemptuous self; he looked lost. “I know. I thought you would be. And—I don’t know—you’re on the street. Maybe you know more than the video feeds do about where someone might go to get themselves bitten.”

  Matilda thought about lying on the floor of Julian’s parents’ living room. They had been sweaty from dancing and kissed languidly. On the television, a list of missing people flashed. She had closed her eyes and kissed him again.

  She nodded slowly. “I know a couple of places. Have you heard from her at all?”

  He shook his head. “She won’t take any of my calls, but she’s been updating her blog. I’ll show you.”

  He loaded it on his phone. The latest entry was titled: I Need a Vampire. Matilda scrolled down and read. Basically, it was Lydia’s plea to be bitten. She wanted any vampires looking for victims to contact her. In the comments, someone suggested Coldtown and then another person commented in ALL CAPS to say that everyone knew that the vampires in Coldtown were careful to keep their food sources alive.

  It was impossible to know which comments Lydia had read and which ones she believed.

  Runaways went to Coldtown all the time, along with the sick, the sad, and the maudlin. There was supposed to be a constant party, theirs for the price of blood. But once they went inside, humans—even human children, even babies born in Coldtown—weren’t be allowed to leave. The National Guard patrolled the barbed wire–wrapped and garlic-covered walls to make sure that Coldtown stayed contained.

  People said that vampires found ways through the walls to the outside world. Maybe that was just a rumor, although Matilda remembered reading something online about a documentary that proved the truth. She hadn’t seen it.

  But everyone knew there was only one way to get out of Coldtown if you were still human. Your family had to be rich enough to hire a vampire hunter. Vampire hunters got money from the government for each vampire they put in Coldtown, but they could give up the cash reward in favor of a voucher for a single human’s release. One vampire in, one human out.

  There was a popular reality television series about one of the hunters, called Hemlok. Girls hung posters of him on the insides of their lockers, often right next to pictures of the vampires he hunted.

  Most people didn’t have the money to outbid the government for a hunter’s services. Matilda didn’t think that Dante’s family did and knew Julian’s didn’t. Her only chance was to catch Lydia and Julian before they crossed over.

  “What’s with Julian?” Matilda asked. She’d been avoiding the question for hours as they walked through the alleys that grew progressively more empty the closer they got to the gates.

  “What do you mean?” Dante was hunched over against the wind, his long skinny frame offering little protection against the chill. Still, she knew he was warm underneath. Inside.

  “Why did Julian go with her?” She tried to keep the hurt out of her voice. She didn’t think Dante would understand. He DJed at a club in town and was rumored to see a different boy or girl every day of the week. The only person he actually seemed to care about was his sister.

  Dante shrugged slim shoulders. “Maybe he was looking for you.”

  That was the answer she wanted to hear. She smiled and let herself imagine saving Julian right before he could enter Coldtown. He would tell her that he’d been coming to save her and then they’d laugh and she wouldn’t bite him, no matter how warm his skin felt.

  Dante snapped his fingers in front of Matilda and she stumbled.

  “Hey,” she said. “Drunk girl here. No messing with me.”

  He chuckled.

  Melinda and Dante checked all the places she knew, all the places she’d slept on cardboard near runaways and begged for change. Dante had a picture of Lydia in his wallet, but no one who looked at it remembered her.

  Finally, outside a bar, they bumped into a girl who said she’d seen Lydia and Julian. Dante traded her the rest of his pack of cigarettes for her story.

  “They were headed for Co
ldtown,” she said, lighting up. In the flickering flame of her lighter, Melinda noticed the shallow cuts along her wrists. “Said she was tired of waiting.”

  “What about the guy?” Matilda asked. She stared at the girl’s dried garnet scabs. They looked like crusts of sugar, like the lines of salt left on the beach when the tide goes out. She wanted to lick them.

  “He said his girlfriend was a vampire,” said the girl, inhaling deeply. She blew out smoke and then started to cough.

  “When was that?” Dante asked.

  The girl shrugged her shoulders. “Just a couple of hours ago.”

  Dante took out his phone and pressed some buttons. “Load,” he muttered. “Come on, load.”

  “What happened to your arms?” Matilda asked.

  The girl shrugged again. “They bought some blood off me. Said that they might need it inside. They had a real professional set-up too. Sharp razor and one of those glass bowls with the plastic lids.”

  Matilda’s stomach clenched with hunger. She turned against the wall and breathed slowly. She needed a drink.

  “Is something wrong with her?” the girl asked.

  “Matilda,” Dante said, and Matilda half-turned. He was holding out his phone. There was a new entry up on Lydia’s blog, entitled: One-Way Ticket to Coldtown.

  “You should post about it,” Dante said. “On the message boards.”

  Matilda was sitting on the ground, picking at the brick wall to give her fingers something to do. Dante had massively overpaid for another bottle of vodka and was cradling it in a crinkled paper bag.

  She frowned. “Post about what?”

  “About the alcohol. About it helping you keep from turning.”

  “Where would I post about that?”

  Dante twisted off the cap. The heat seemed to radiate off his skin as he swigged from the bottle. “There are forums for people who have to restrain someone for eighty-eight days. They hang out and exchange tips on straps and dealing with the begging for blood. Haven’t you seen them?”

  She shook her head. “I bet sedation’s already a hot topic of discussion. I doubt I’d be telling them anything they don’t already know”