Books 1–4

by Nancy A. Collins

  Dr. Caron invites me to a weekend retreat hosted at his place in the Valley. I am one of ten patients—five women and five men— who find ourselves in Caron’s strange, rambling mansion. All of us are single and live alone. All of us are either orphaned or estranged from your parents. All of us are people no one will truly miss. But I don’t realize that until the experiments begin.

  Dr. Caron introduces us to a form of drug therapy that was created by he and a quiet, moon-faced man known as Dr. Howell. Each participant is given various dosages, injected directly to the blood stream. Dr. Caron says something about finding a “worthy vessel”. Then all hell breaks loose.

  Three of the subjects die of convulsions within minutes of taking the drug. Two others suffer massive coronaries, while another goes into liver failure. One blinds himself by plunging is thumbs into his eyes. Another patient, screaming like a wounded animal, leaps onto the back of the blinded subject and tears at him with her bare teeth. But I do none of these things. I simply go to sleep. A long, long sleep filled with dreams of half-glimpsed hypodermic syringes and intravenous drips.

  And I awake; I am no longer Lakisha Washington. I am Anise, because my Father tells me that is my name. Which is has it should be. And my Father, knowing I am lonely and need companionship, gives me a mate: Fell. He is beautiful and I love him, as your Father commands. Which is as it should be.

  “Damn you, I said get your hands off her!”

  Fell’s fist smashed into Sonja’s face, knocking her away from Anise and sending her glasses flying across the room. She lay there, dazed, on the floor, blood seeping from her broken nose, as Anise’s persona and memories receded and her own identity returned.

  “What did you do to her?” Fell thundered angrily, pointing to Anise, who was trembling like a malaria victim. She stared at her hands as if she’d never seen them before, refusing to look at Fell.

  Fell delivered a vicious kick to Sonja’s side. She took the blow without complaint. She deserved the pain.

  “Answer me! What did you do?” As he cocked his leg back for another kick, Anise abruptly got to her feet.

  “Leave her alone, Fell! She doesn’t mean us any harm!”

  “She has a funny way of showing it!”

  Anise walked over to where the mirrored sunglasses lay on the floor. She picked them up and handed them to Sonja, who sat huddled on the floor, her upper lip smeared with blood. As Sonja raised her head, Anise flinched at the sight of her blood-filled eyes and over-large pupils.

  “Get used to it, kid,” Sonja hissed, snatching the glasses from her hand. “The eyes are the first thing to mutate once you start drinking blood on a regular basis.”

  “I don’t know if I should thank you for what you did,” Anise said, her hands resting atop the swell of her stomach. “But I remember now.”

  “Self-knowledge is the hardest part,” Sonja grunted. “I know what you must be feeling... thinking…”

  Anise nodded slowly. “It wasn’t all one way. I saw your memories just as you saw mine.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Fell frowned.

  Anise leaned forward, ignoring his question. “What does he want from us?” she whispered.

  Sonja pointed at Anise’s swollen midsection. “That’s more than just a baby you’re carrying around. It’s his ticket to godhood.”

  Anise frowned. “I don’t understand-”

  “Whenever vampires attack humans, they infect them with a supernatural virus that generates drastic mutations in the human’s biochemistry, replacing half of the host’s chromosomes with the vampire’s. It’s not unlike human conception, except that the fetus is an adult corpse. Because of this here is a certain biological fealty, insuring obedience to the Maker is in the blood.”

  Anise’s face crumpled. “Then it’s hopeless to try and fight him.”

  “No, it isn’t!” Sonja replied. “How do you think Morgan came into being? He was Made, just like I described. But he had the force of will to assert his personality over that of his Maker’s. Morgan can only dominate you if you give up and refuse to fight him. You can do it, Anise. I know you have the strength. For the sake of your child, you’ve got to fight him.”

  Sonja was not a hundred percent certain what she’d just said was true, but she was unwilling to accept biochemical predestination, whether natural or supernatural.

  “It all keeps coming back to the baby. Why?”

  “Vampires like Morgan are incapable of conceiving and giving birth. It takes centuries for a vampire to become powerful as he is. Why? Because a Noble is only as powerful as his brood. Since they are born of dead meat, they are often less than perfect, when it comes to their brain power. Think what it would mean to Morgan to have a living vampire, one capable of perfectly replicating itself, without having to worry about quality control. Within a blink of an eye, as vampires judge time, he’ll have an entire army immune to silver and capable of movement during the day! And not a single one of them will possess any bothersome memories of having once been human. No wonder the Renfields hate you: you’re threatening to make them obsolete! Morgan’s out to make himself a god-emperor, Anise. And you’re providing him with his first high priest.”

  “Anise, that’s bullshit and you know it! Our Father would never do anything like that!”

  “Shut up, Fell! Just shut up!” Anise hissed, baring her fangs. Rebuffed, Fell stepped back and looked away. “What do you want me to do?”she asked.

  “Come with me.” Sonja was surprised to hear herself saying the words.

  “You want me to leave?”

  “Not leave: escape!”

  “Where could we go?”

  “Where couldn’t we go? There’s a whole world out there, Anise!” Sonja replied with a laugh. “It won’t be hard to find somewhere safe for you to have the baby. If not here, then in Central or South America.”

  “But Morgan...”

  “Let me worry about Morgan, okay? So, what’s the verdict? Are you with me?”

  With a grunt Anise hoisted herself out of the chair. “I’m with you.”

  “Darling, what’s gotten into you?” Fell asked in amazement. “You’ve never acted like this way before! What did that crazy woman do to you?”

  “She woke me up, Fell!” Anise replied solemnly. “I’m not sleepwalking anymore. I’m finally doing something that’s my idea, not Father’s!”

  “You can’t do this!” Fell shouted, grabbing her roughly by the arm. “I forbid it!”

  Anise jerked her arm free of her husband’s grasp. “Back off, motherfucker!” she snarled with a snap of her teeth.

  The look on Fell’s face was that of a pole-axed young animal, left alive but forever altered. For a moment it seemed as if he would stagger and fall.

  “Come on, if we’re going to leave, we better do it now,” Sonja said, motioning to the secret doorway she’d used earlier.

  “No, there’s another way out,” Anise said, with a shake of her head. “I’m not supposed to know it exists, but I overheard one of the Renfields talking about it. It leads directly to the outside.”

  “Good. If we leave now, we’ll have at least an hour or two of sunlight in our favor.” Sonja shot a sharp look at Fell. “How about you, golden boy? Are you coming with us?”

  Fell opened his mouth as if to speak, then shook his head.

  “I should kill you, you know,” she said sternly.

  Fell lifted his chin and squared his shoulders, refusing to show fear. “So why don’t you?”

  Sonja didn’t answer him. She was still puzzling his question when Anise led her out of the parlor and into the hallway.

  The nucleus of Ghost Trap, when compared to its protective outer layers, was merely yet another large, Victorian mansion filled with antiques. With its antimacassars and overstuffed furniture it looked more like it should belong to someone’s dotty great aunt rather than a vampire lord.

  Anise motioned to a small, narrow door set into the side of a staircase. “This
leads to an underground tunnel that connects to what used be the stables. It’s how Morgan and the Renfields get come in and out.”

  “What are you doing out of your room?”

  Anise gasped as she looked up to see a stern-faced woman with the characteristic wan complexion and pinched face of a Renfield glowering down at her over the staircase banister.

  “I was bored,” she explained, as Sonja disappeared into the shadows. “I wanted to take a walk.”

  “You know you’re not allowed to roam the house unsupervised!” the Renfield scolded as she hurried down the stairs. “Did Dr. Howell tell you to do this?” There was an edge in her voice suggesting she would like nothing better than to accuse the good doctor of something more serious than malpractice.

  “No one told me to do anything! It was my decision to go for a walk.”

  The Renfield frowned as if Anise had suddenly started speaking in Swahili. “No one decides things for themselves in Ghost Trap. Besides, I heard talking to someone. Who was it?”

  “I was talking to the baby, that’s all,” Anise explained, patting her belly.

  The Renfield’s lips peeled back, like those of a rabid dog, displaying a set of yellowed teeth. “You’re a lying little shit.”

  Anise slapped the woman so hard it knocked the Renfield to the floor. The human servant got back to her feet, blood drooling from her mouth.

  “I don’t care if you are his prize broodmare,” the Renfield snarled, her eyes burning with hate. “I’m going to burn your brain for that!”

  “I don’t think so,” Sonja said as she stepped out of the shadows. She grabbed the Renfield by the neck and twisted her wrist. The psychic dropped to the floor like a sack of cement.

  “You killed her!” Anise gasped.

  “I couldn’t risk her raising the alarm,” Sonja grunted, considerably less distraught by the situation. “C’mon. We’re wasting time!” she said as she threw the corpse over her shoulder and opened the door leading to the tunnel.

  “You’re taking her with us?” Anise grimaced.

  “We can’t leave Little Miss Sunshine here lying around for the housekeeper to stumble over,” Sonja pointed out. “I’ve got to stash the stiff somewhere, don’t I?”

  Anise followed Sonja into the space under the stairs, where they wedged the Renfield’s corpse in a corner then descended a short, wooden stairway leading to a dark, brick-lined tunnel. The place smelled of damp earth, spiders and rat piss. At the far end of the tunnel was a series of iron rungs leading to an overhead trapdoor. Sunlight filtered around the cracks, illuminating fungus spores dancing lazily in the air.

  “Okay, up you go, young mother,” Sonja said, gesturing to the ladder.

  Anise placed a hand on the bottom rung, looked up at the dim sunlight, then back at Sonja. “What about Fell?”

  “He had his chance,” she replied evenly.

  “But he doesn’t understand! He’s still asleep, like I was. Maybe if I tried talking to him, maybe then he’d listen and let you wake him you, like you did me.”

  “Anise...”

  “I didn’t ask for this!” Her voice was both angry and frightened, like a child trying to control her sense of betrayal. “All I wanted was to get rid of my nightmares! Now I wake up from a dream and find myself still in the nightmare. Everything is upside down and crazy. Suddenly I’m pregnant and married and I don’t know how it happened or why. For the love of God, I’m a lesbian! But still, Fell’s the father of my child. I can’t just leave him behind, can I?”

  “Anise, if you go back in there, you may never get out again. And even if you do, how are you going to escape the valley? You’re not going to get very far on foot in your condition.”

  “I may have put East Oakland behind me,” Anise replied. “But I still remember how to boost a car.”

  “Very well. Go back and get him, if you can. There’s a little town nearby called El Pájaro. We’ll rendezvous at the motel—it’s the only one, so you can’t miss it. Look for a rented Ford Escort.”

  Anise nodded her understanding. As she turned to go head back down the tunnel, Sonja grabbed her arm one last time. “I warn you—if you fall back under Morgan’s control, I’ll have to kill you. Is that clear?”

  “It’s been a hundred and fifty years since the Emancipation Proclamation,” Anise said gravely. “I have no intention to bring a child of mine into the world as a slave.” She paused, and then flung her arms around Sonja, dragging her into a hasty embrace.

  Sonja returned the hug. “God’s speed, sister,” she whispered. She then watched Anise disappear into the darkness, and then climbed into the sunlight, her eyes frustratingly dry.

  Anise

  No woman can call herself free who does not own or control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

  —Margaret Sanger

  Chapter Fourteen

  Palmer was well into his second pack of cigarettes by the time Sonja re-emerged from the undergrowth. He got up from where he’d been squatting in the shade, the binoculars’ eyepieces capped. He had stopped studying Ghost Trap shortly after Sonja entered the building. He didn’t like the reverberations the house kicked up in his hindbrain. He grinned a welcome to his partner, actually surprised to find himself glad to see her.

  “It’s about time you got back! I was starting to get worried. There’s only an hour or two before it gets dark. So, did you off the bastard?”

  “Get in the car.”

  “You did kill him, didn’t you?” he asked nervously. “I mean, we’re not going to have to worry about some heavyweight bogeyman coming down on our asses after the sun goes down, are we?”

  “We’ll talk about it later, Palmer.”

  “You didn’t do it,” he said flatly, his smile abruptly dissolving.

  “I said we’ll talk about it later!”

  Palmer ground out his smoldering cigarette with a sharp twist of his heel. “I should have known,” he muttered as he crawled behind the wheel. “I should have fuckin’ known.”

  The Parakeet Motel provided the only lodging in El Pájaro, a tiny hamlet of three thousand souls located in the Sonoma foothills. Palmer scowled at the sign fronting the parking lot, which depicted a budgie, its once-bright colors now badly faded, locked within a birdcage fashioned from neon tubing. He looked up as Sonja returned from the registration desk, sliding into the passenger seat next to him. She held up a piece of pink plastic with a key dangling from its end.

  “I told him we were a honeymooning couple and didn’t want to be bothered, so he stuck at the far end, away from the other guests.”

  “So I see,” Palmer commented dryly, scanning the empty gravel parking lot. He put the car into gear.

  The L-shaped motor court was made of pick the color of well-chewed bubble gum and the interior of the room was no better, with pale bisque walls and a carpet looked, and felt, like dropped cotton candy.

  “I feel like I’ve been swallowed by a huge snake,” Palmer groaned as he eyed the worn pink chenille spread covering the queen-size mattress.

  Sonja stared for a long moment at the picture hanging over the bed of a praying child with huge, waifish eyes and a tiny mouth set into a simpering pout before yanking it off the wall and sailing it into a corner. She flopped heavily onto the bed, boots and all, the box springs squealing in protest.

  Palmer was surprised at how tired she looked. Since their lives had become entangled, he had never experienced Sonja as anything less than preternaturally intense. The sight of her sprawled across the bed sparked both a sense of uneasiness and a vague lust in him.

  “I feel so old sometimes,” she said wearily as she slowly rubbed her forehead. “So horribly, horribly old. And I’m not even a hundred yet. I wonder how the truly ancient ones feel, like Pangloss? They must be so very tired. I’ve heard that when they grow weary of continuing, they simply go into a hibernation that can lasts for years, even decades. Sleep: the step
child of Death.” Her voice had a smoky, far-away feel to it. Palmer wondered if she was aware she was speaking aloud.

  He sat next to her on the bed and stared at the worn carpet between his shoes. “Are you going to tell me what happened inside Ghost Trap?”

  “I discovered I’m not alone,” she replied.

  He turned to stare at her in surprise. “What?”

  In a soft, weary voice she told him about Anise and Fell and Morgan’s plan to breed his own race of designer-gene vampires.

  “And you left them there?” he asked in disbelief. “Alive?”

  “You don’t understand, Palmer...”

  “You’re damn right I don’t understand! Why didn’t you kill them?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Wouldn’t, you mean!”

  “No. Couldn’t.”

  Sonja removed her sunglasses, exposing her eyes to him for the first time. There were no whites or cornea, merely blood red dominated by huge pupils that were dilated to maximize even the feeblest light source. They were the eyes of a hybrid, neither human nor vampire. At first he was repulsed by how raw and inhuman they’d looked, but now he could see a perverse beauty in them.

  “I used to think I could reclaim what I once was by killing what I’d become. It hasn’t worked. Maybe it’s time for me to finally start building instead of destroying. I’ve been lonely, Palmer; so terribly lonely.”

  He kissed her without really knowing why, but at the same time was confident the action was his and his alone. She responded quickly, wrapping her arms about him. His hands slipped under her shirt, his fingers tracing the scars left by old wounds. She arched her back and moaned in pleasure, her muscles rippling like those of a great cat. As she stripped away her shirt, he saw that her torso was pale as white opal and covered in scars. As he ran his hands over her body, instead of being repulsed, he found himself fascinated by the complex designs they formed. It was like reading Braille; each scar a story bonded forever to her flesh. She helped him out of his clothes, her fingers tracing, in turn, the scar over his heart. Palmer felt a tremor of apprehension in the back of his mind, as memories of Lola briefly surfaced, then disappeared.