Blood Moon: A New Adult Urban Fantasy Vampire Novel (The Superiors Book 1)

by Lena Hillbrand

  He turned away from the mess hall and followed the corridor towards the other sounds indicating lively activity. The noises of the eating area faded a bit, and the scent of water and mold increased as he made his way towards the shower area. A momentary paranoia crept over him. He’d come alone. What if the hundreds of sapiens surrounding him attacked? He could defend himself well enough, but a group of them could inflict serious injury. Occasionally such incidents did occur, despite the threat of transfer to the blood bank.

  At the end of the corridor two doors stood open, one on either side. Inside, sapiens showered. Shadows filled the rooms. The dim light of evening came through the row of small open windows that ran along the building above the showers. Swarms of naked sapiens washed themselves under the spray of water. The rooms didn’t smell as bad as the eating area, so Draven breathed in, trying to catch a trace of Cali’s scent. Too many other scents, too many other bodies. He glanced at the mold growing around the corners of the room and along the floor, and then turned and went across the hall.

  The long room, more like a hall, had the same arrangements as the other. A few saps noticed him, and they shied away and turned, covering themselves with their night garments. Draven couldn’t help being amused. They showered in a room with hundreds of their own kind, and yet they were shy of him seeing them unclothed, though he’d be the last person interested in their nakedness.

  He savored Cali a second before he saw her. She had come away from the shower dripping water like the rest of them, but she hadn’t seen him. She walked to the bench running along the wall on the opposite side from the showers and took up her dirty day shift and held it out for a moment before finding the inside in the failing light. She turned it inside out and began drying herself. The sapiens around her began whispering and nudging her, and finally she looked up.

  “Oh, hi,” she said. She turned away and finished drying herself before she took up her night shift with its scattering of rips. She kept her back turned while she slipped it over her head. She turned and came to him, pulling her hair out of the neck of her garment on her way. The other sapiens stopped drying themselves to stare at her. Or perhaps him.

  “You’re here early,” Cali said, stopping in front of him and pulling at the hem of her ragged shift. It was worn so thin it didn’t conceal much. Two dark circles with sharp peaks showed through where her nipples pressed against the fabric. Draven looked at the mildew along the base of the wall. Something about her nipples poking up inside her garment struck him as obscene, more so than seeing her naked like the rest of them.

  He cleared his throat. “I wanted to find you before work.”

  “Well, here I am.”

  “Come away then, I would like to eat outside.”

  Cali followed him down the hall. “Can I get something to eat first?” she asked.

  He stopped and looked at her, and then at the darkening sky outside the doors. “No.”

  She paused at the door to the eating area and looked in and then back at Draven. Her shoulders slumped, and she turned to follow him outside. “I have to be at work soon,” Draven said, then cut himself off, wondering why he felt the need to explain himself. She shouldn’t have requested a favor. And he shouldn’t have to tell her the reason for anything he wanted—she should just do it.

  “Okay, well, where are we going? Can we just do it right here?” she asked.

  “No. In the garden.”

  She plodded after him. Once inside the fence, she turned and thrust her wrist up to his mouth.

  He smiled and pulled her hand down. “Let us sit.”

  She began to sit on the ground, in the dirt, with her clean clothes and freshly showered body, but he caught her up in his arms before she had completed the motion. “Come, I will carry you. Are you very tired?”

  “Very,” she said, submitting to his treatment without protest. He found a stack of rolled hoses beside one of the garden beds, and he sat on it, still cradling Cali.

  “Have you been in the garden all day?” Draven asked.

  “Most of the day.”

  “You are sunburned.” Her skin, always unpleasantly warm, now scalded him.

  She smiled a bit. “How do you know what a sunburn is? You’re not even awake during the day.”

  “Because I would get badly sunburned.”

  “How bad?”

  “Very, very badly.”

  “But you’re already tan.”

  Draven smiled. “That is the color of my skin. I am not tan from the sun. I will be swift, and you may go eat.” He put his teeth to her shoulder, but her skin was so hot that a twinge of pain ran up into their roots.

  Cali sighed and leaned her head back against his shoulder. “That feels good.”

  Without breaking the skin, he pulled away a bit to see her face. Though he knew some sapiens grew to enjoy being bitten, even crave it, he thought it a very unnatural reaction, and one he didn’t like. As much as he hated hurting them, he didn’t want them moaning ecstatically, either. “What does?” he asked, still holding her away from him.

  “How cool you are. It feels good on my sunburn.”

  “Oh.” He studied her a few more moments and then pulled her close once more. “Then I will draw from here.” He put his teeth into her and she jerked harder than usual, then stilled and waited while he borrowed life from her.

  The heat of her skin under his mouth made her sap feel cool by comparison. But as he held her, he noticed that the scorching dry heat of her sunburn didn’t hold the same slightly repulsive quality as the usual cloying warmth of sapien bodies. It felt nice, like lying on a hot rock to absorb the warmth after it had lain in the sun all day. He ran his cool hands up and down her arms, wondering how he could have so much contact with a sapien without aversion.

  When he had finished, he took both her arms and held them up. “You have not been closed properly, again. Who does this?”

  “The same one,” Cali said. “He followed me here, the same as you.”

  “Who would do this to an animal? Does he not know it hurts you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you told him?”

  “No. He doesn’t talk to me. I don’t know if he speaks this language.”

  “He has never spoken to you in any language?”

  Cali considered for a moment, looking up at the sky with a frown of concentration. “I don’t think so, no. Actually, you’re the only one who really talks to me.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes. The rest just come and eat and leave.”

  “I see.” Draven thought this over for a bit. He hadn’t seen many Superiors conversing with sapiens, but he assumed the ones who owned livestock did. “Does it bother you that I make you talk to me?”

  “You’re not making me talk to you. You just make me…want to talk to you.”

  “How odd.”

  Cali laughed and he jerked back a bit, still startled to hear that sound from a sap. “What?” she asked, recovering her balance on his lap.

  “I’m not used to hearing you laugh.”

  “Well, I’m not used to hearing you laugh, either. But I like it when you do.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. It makes you seem almost…human.”

  He laughed at this, and so did she, and then they looked at each other. Her laughter always disconcerted him, and he realized how close she was, that she was on his lap and had been for quite some time. His lap felt uncomfortably hot under her, and he had a sudden flash of her pulling on her shift and approaching him without collecting a pair of underpants from the communal basket. He stood abruptly, and neither spoke while he carried her back and deposited her in the doorway of the eating hall. He left, still ruffled by the strange effect she had on him.

  26

  Cali woke when the Superior reached into her bunk and grabbed her feet. She liked to curl up as close to the top of her bunk as she could get, where none of the roaming Superiors would come by and grab her by chance. But the ones
who already knew her and knew where to find her still came.

  When he bit her without saying anything, she knew it must be the Man Who Hurries. The other one always talked to her, and ever since she’d taken him out to the garden, he seemed to have a preference for that. She lay still while the Superior sucked on the back of her leg. He’d bite her any old place, not just in her arm like the Man with Soft Hair. She didn’t mind the leg bites so much, except when he got her right behind the knee, and then the little painful bumps rubbed on everything—the chairs when she sat down, the back of her leg when she squatted or sat on the ground, everything. And the Man with Soft Hair only took the lumps out of her arms, never her legs.

  Cali wondered what would happen if, for once, she kicked one right in the face. It probably wouldn’t hurt—people said Superiors had no feelings, physical or otherwise. She didn’t know if she believed that. It would be awfully sad to never feel anything. But then, they wouldn’t feel sadness either, so it might be okay. Still, this guy had left her so many bites, so many sore spots. Once, she’d taken her hand away from the Man with Soft Hair, and he hadn’t gotten mad. She’d been tired, just stretching, but she’d thought he’d get mad. Maybe she could kick this one in the face and pretend she kicked out in her sleep. It would serve him right.

  Cali gave a big sigh, the kind she’d give in her sleep, and turned onto her side a little. She drew her leg up and made another little sleeping sound. Then she kicked him.

  He must have sensed her foot coming, because he moved away, and even though she’d moved fast, she only grazed his chin. Then—smack!—he slapped her thigh so hard that the sound echoed through the whole long barrack with all the bunks. It sounded like a bone snapping, or a wall snapping in half. But he’d had his hand flat, so just his palm smacked her. Holy sap-crap, it hurt. Her skin burned so bad where he’d hit her that she thought it might peel off.

  Cali bit down on the inside of her cheek and tried to make her stomach stop shaking while he bit her again and finished sucking her blood. She knew she’d done something awfully stupid—she should probably be glad that he’d just given her a little slap. Or a big slap, really, but still. She’d tried to kick a Superior in the face. The thought of it was so incredible she couldn’t believe she’d actually done it. If her leg didn’t sting so bad, she’d have laughed.

  For a long time after he left, she couldn’t go back to sleep. Her leg throbbed. She had cramps. The whole night had turned out pretty bad. At least no other bloodsuckers came to her bed, and she finally got to sleep right before she had to get up again and start the day all over. At breakfast, Poppy asked why Cali had a limp, and when Cali told her, all her sisters looked at her like she’d grown bloodsucker teeth straight out of her head. It had been an awfully brainless thing to do. By the middle of the day, when the cooks brought the food outside and everyone sat around eating, half the people at the Confinement knew why Cali had a limp and the beginning of a hand-shaped bruise on her thigh.

  “You just go on and ignore them,” Mama said, when a couple snarky girls started bothering Cali about it.

  “I am,” Cali said, taking a bite of her corn pudding. The eating room got so hot during the day that no one wanted to go in, especially after the cooking warmed it up even more. In the mornings it was okay, and at night after a cold shower it didn’t seem so bad. By the end of dinner, though, everyone had gotten just about as sweaty as before their showers. Cali knew she was lucky she’d made it back, and she didn’t miss trying to stay up all night at the restaurants, or the constant biting. Still, she’d forgotten how hard Confinement life was. She’d had it easy at the restaurants, only having to clean and do a little gardening in the window boxes at the nice place.

  A few hours later, while she weeded, a soft looking boy with black hair kept looking at her leg. “Is it true that you kicked a bloodsucker in the eye?” he asked, after about the tenth time she caught him staring.

  “No, I just tried.”

  “Wow. That’s really brave.”

  “I wasn’t thinking, that’s all.”

  “I’m Jonathan,” the boy said. “I have a house and everything. All to myself. I built it over there, all by myself. My whole family has houses, and I’d been wanting one for a long time, and I finally got enough stuff to make a house.”

  “That’s nice,” Cali said. She wanted to do her work in peace. Her woman’s days always gave her the worst stomach pains, and sweat had pasted her shift to her back, and she kept having to pull it loose from where it clung to her skin, and she didn’t smell too pretty right then, either. She’d rather people talked to her after she’d showered.

  But that boy went right on talking, telling her about how he’d built his house, all the things he’d found to make it, how big it was, what the inside and outside looked like. He seemed nice and everything, even if he did keep following her to the next row of beans, and kept talking like she had answered. Bragging had always annoyed her, and he bragged a lot. But she figured he was just trying to look good so she’d pay attention to him.

  “How old are you?” he asked after a while. She’d almost stopped paying attention, since he hadn’t required her to say anything.

  “I’m fifteen. Almost sixteen. You?” Age didn’t really matter at the Confinement, not once a girl could have babies. It was just something to talk about.

  “Twenty-six. You got kids?”

  “No. You?”

  “Yeah. I had a girlfriend who lived with me before, and we were going to get married, and that’s why I tried so hard to get the house built. We had two kids, and we were going to get married once I had the house all ready. We even moved in before I’d finished it, because I didn’t want her to have to be in the barracks and get disturbed and wake up the babies. I took real good care of her, and the babies. I’d be a good husband.”

  Men got sent away to work on farms pretty often, so a lot more women lived in the Confinement. If a man wanted a wife, he could be picky. Mostly the men just gave lots of women lots of babies. The Superiors liked it when humans had lots of babies.

  “Uh huh. What happened to her?”

  “Someone bought her and the babies both. So now I have the house to myself. I like it sometimes. It’s quiet and people come over and sleep there if they’re fighting with their family or someone. But I really miss having a girl around. That’s why I made the house, because I wanted a family, and now I’m left with the house and no family. But I figure I’ll find a girl pretty fast. Everyone wants a family, and not everyone can offer a house like I can.”

  “Sounds like it’ll be easy then.” She knew what he was doing, seeing if she was interested. She wasn’t. She didn’t want to end up as that girlfriend of his, or worse, with babies. Poppy went on and on about babies, how much she loved them. The way Cali saw it, that was part of the problem. If you loved a baby and it got taken away, or you did, then what? She’d seen it happen. It was bad. The only way she’d ever want babies was if someone bought her first, and got her and a husband together, and then she could be pretty sure her family would stay together.

  The boy kept talking to her all day, until she got so tired of him she had to escape to the outhouses to avoid him. She used the composting toilet inside the plastic stall. Even though the toilets flushed, the tiny stalls sat in the sun, and the heat and stink inside got awfully bad by the end of the day.

  That evening after her shower, she joined her family at one of the tables in the noisy eating hall. “Hey, did you hear that Patty and Pat are going to make a run for it?” Poppy whispered as soon as Cali sat down.

  She rearranged herself on the bench, scooting forward so the edge wouldn’t dig into on the backs of her knees where Man Who Hurried left his painful bite marks. “Uh, no. Where to?”

  “South America, of course. Where else would they go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So? Aren’t you excited or nothing? They’re taking Leon with them, and they got everything ready, even. Stuff to make the big
escape.” Poppy leaned forward as she talked, and whispered like someone might overhear and tell the Superiors. Which someone actually might, although Cali couldn’t understand why anyone would do something like that. After all, they should all root for each other and try to help each other get out if they could. But for some reason, some people always had to try and ruin the chances of anyone brave enough to make a run for it, and not just overseers, either.”

  “Do you think anyone ever makes it that far?” Cali asked, scraping her corn pudding onto her corn tortilla. Corn, corn, corn. She didn’t see how she hadn’t turned yellow from all that corn. Maybe the helping of soybeans kept her from turning into a corn plant.

  “Course they make it,” Zinnia said, patting her belly. “Sure they do. You know what they say, that way down there, on the other side of the wide water, people get to live free. Buy their own stuff, have their own animals and gardens, everything.”

  “I even heard humans can read down there,” Poppy said. “They just give them books and teach them everything.”

  “Maybe,” Cali said through a mouthful of toasted soybeans. “I doubt it.”

  Her sisters gave her dirty looks. “Why you gotta say that?” Zinnia said. “One day I’m going to take my baby and we’re going to go down there and I’m going to have twenty books, and then I’m going to write you a letter and put it in a book and send it to you.”

  Cali smiled. “That’d be great. Maybe I’ll come, too.”

  “And me and Sandy, too,” Poppy said. “And mama and Gwen and all of us, and all our families…” She kept right on talking, but Cali stopped listening. She thought about how great everyone thought restaurants were, how working in a restaurant meant you could run errands in the city alone, and do things and have things that no one here had. But it was all just another South America, only closer. Probably no one ever made it to South America. Everyone who escaped got sent somewhere a lot closer—the blood bank. And everyone around her knew it, but they’d never say it. If anyone ever made it to South America, she thought they’d be in for a shock. Probably, they’d find a place just like here, maybe even worse.