Authors: Garon Whited
Inside myself, I could feel a small piece of him. Like walking on the beach, you get sand in your shoes; a small part of him came away with me forever. It wasn’t something I had to be told. I felt it. I knew it. It was a miniscule piece of what makes up a whole person, less even than one drop of blood to a body. Yet he was both dead and alive; dead because I killed him, alive inside my soul. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to weep. He was dead… but he wasn’t, not really. I’d killed him… and now he would never die, not as long as I lived.
I turned to Sasha, and she looked both surprised and pleased.
“Eric!” she exclaimed, delighted. “You remember!”
I took a few deep breaths—air requirements or no, I needed a few deep breaths. I could smell the exhaust of the cars that had been in the lot. I could smell the dirt at the roots of the tree beside us. I could smell the faint traces of soap in Sasha’s hair—even the leaves of the tree.
I could
see!
To my eyes, it was a though darkness simply ceased to exist. There were light places, and then there were places where there was no light—but the darkness rolled away from my gaze as though afraid. The world was a crisp and sharp black-and-white, with the contrast control twisted up high. Where light fell, things faded into ultra-sharp, vibrant color. I could see the ribs in the leaves of the tree, count the blades of grass peeking up through the cracks in the sidewalk.
All my senses went through the roof. I could hear the whine of alarm systems on idle inside the cars! There was the feeling of tension and energy, tickling me from above; the power lines to the club.
With my tendrils out, I could feel the living energy of the tree next to me, the earthworms in the ground… and the packed mass of humanity inside the building, defended only by thin and fragile concrete and brick.
“My lord?” Sasha asked, voice quivering. She was staring. I suppose that’s fair; I wasn’t looking at anything in particular. Instead, I was looking at
everything
.
I narrowed my focus down, came back from the all-encompassing awareness. It was too much, too quickly. Overwhelmed with awareness, I blocked most of it out by instinct. Eyes can adjust to too-bright light; ears can adjust to loud, constant noise. I adjusted, dimming my senses to something at least tolerable.
I looked at Sasha. She was beautiful and vulnerable and she loved me. She was a dark energy, much like a normal person in negative, which quivered, feared, loved, and hoped. I saw myself through her eyes in a flash of understanding, saw the power and the darkened majesty inherent in us.
I leaned close to her and kissed her.
It was morning, and I had my usual convulsion. Sasha was with me and took hers a lot better. More practice, I suppose. I oozed a nasty, icky sweat into the sheets for a few minutes; she just perspired a bit.
“It does get better, right?” I asked, gasping.
“Over time, my love. Your body will finish purging byproducts of your transformation soon, and you will have only a mild discomfort, as you did on the first morning of your transformation. If you will think back, you will recall that it was hardly noticed and easily passed off as remnants of a hangover?”
“Yes. But the next one was worse.”
“That is correct. The dawn-change is always worse than the night-change, but the first is always mild. The night-change is like dying quietly; the dawn-change is the struggle back to life.”
I shivered a little, despite the heat under the blankets. I don’t much care for the idea of being dead. It makes me nervous. I’m allergic to dying; I break out in screaming. At least, I used to.
“So the whole process takes a while to finish? And gets worse as it goes?”
“Exactly. Now you are done with the initial change. All that is left is to purge your body of some remnants of the process, or so I understand it, and your transformation is reasonably complete. But have a care, I beg you; even so soon as the second day of the metamorphosis, you must be wary of dawn and dusk, and even moreso now.”
I finally untangled some sheets and climbed out of bed, feeling filthy. I don’t know how she managed to cuddle up to me while I was all icky like that.
“What happens if I’m out in the sun when it comes up or goes down?”
“That would be unfortunate,” she said, getting up with me. Together we stripped the bed and piled the covers for later washing. She kept talking while we did so. “If you are caught in the dawn, you will burn to death and be destroyed. If you are caught in the sunset, you will burn to mortal death and lie incapacitated, in misery and pain until the sunrise truly kills you, unless someone rescues you. If so, you will be a nightwalker.”
“A nightwalker?” I asked, as we moved to the bathroom—and the shower.
“A nightwalker, a nightblood, a darksoul. You are a dayblood, a… a vampire that has not died. By day you are little more than mortal, will all their flaws and all their advantages, for the darkness in your blood hides from the Sun. Some things remain; you are stronger, harder. Your fangs remain. Little things such as those. All that draws upon the darkness in your being is gone. But at night, you are a lord of the undead. The power in your blood unfolds and you become a
power
.
“If you die during the day—if you are slain while you are mortal and not
destroyed
—then you will rise that night as a nightwalker. Only then must you will fall into slumber as the sun rises, a corpse, only to rise again at night—and
any
sunlight will burn your flesh like a blowtorch.”
I turned on the hot water and adjusted it. I had already planned on avoiding sunrise and sunset; the nasty convulsions were convincing enough I didn’t want to try experimenting along those lines. Especially since I was familiar with vampire legends. Sunlight bad; darkness good.
“Important safety tip. Thanks.”
Sasha grinned mischievously. “It is my pleasure, my love. Get your back?”
I nodded, and we washed each other; wet, slick, squirmy fun! Later, clean in pore and tooth and nail, if not in thought, Sasha was working on her face, her hair done up in a towel while I finished drying mine with the blower. I was wearing the black robe with the dragons; I liked it a lot.
“Something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I began.
“Hmm?”
“Why is it I suddenly have sharper senses? And I feel even stronger. Is that… well, ‘normal’ probably isn’t the right word for it.”
“You have fed on blood and it has nourished your body—much more thoroughly than the food you eat during the day. Now you have fed on the spirits of men, and that has awoken the power within you.”
“Poetic. What’s it mean?”
She smiled at me and put the mascara away. “What it means? Well. Every vampire has their own strengths. One never knows how the change will affect any given person. We are all very strong, but a few will have the strength to shatter stone or uproot trees. All our senses are sharp, but some of us can hear clouds scrape together. Some possess a strength of spirit to seize a soul and drain it so quickly the victim has no chance to cry out—such as yourself, dear one. These are the ones who can work with the stuff of spirits as a sculptor works with clay.”
“I can reshape someone’s soul?” I asked. The idea of taking someone’s spirit—or soul—and changing it to match what
I
wanted them to be… it made my stomach churn. I’m not really all that happy at killing a man—I wouldn’t have killed even the bastard in the parking lot if I’d known what I was doing—but it sure beats turning someone into a mind-warped zombie. I’d rather kill someone quickly and cleanly than break their brain.
“Perhaps. I do not know your present strengths. In the old days, you could take the energy of your prey and use it for whatever you would. Create fires, draw down lightning, shatter doors… whatever you wish.”
“So you’re saying I can do what? Work magic?”
“You did once, yes. But
you
needed no rituals, no diagrams, and no arcane accoutrements. You once drew a thousand small fragments of energy from a thousand people to fuel a spell.”
I thought about it, distantly, as an abstract problem. I can see now how punchy I had to have been; I can only plead industrial-grade shock and a sharp sense of unreality. The incredible—the impossible—was happening to me at high speed and I had a slight case of subconscious denial, I think. Without that sense of unreality to shield me, I’d have been in a corner somewhere, gibbering quietly.
“Those would help as focusing agents for the direction and efficient transformation of energy,” I mused. “I’ll have to give that some thought…”
She chuckled at me and turned back to her makeup.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“You’ve gone down that road before, my love. You are right, as I understand it.”
“Really? What can you tell me?”
“Alas, nothing. I do not have that power. I am only strong and fast and keen in my senses.”
“You forgot ‘ravishing in beauty and enchanting in charms’.”
“Did I? I suppose I did,” she admitted, pretending to be coy.
I stood behind her and looked at her in the mirror. Kissing the top of her head, I looked at myself and rubbed my jaw.
“You know, I’m going to have to get a razor over here, someday.”
“Bottom drawer, on the right.”
“Woman, do you think of everything?”
“Everything I can.”
I looked in the drawer and found a straight razor. I felt a little queasy; I’ve never liked having sharp objects at my throat. I’m used to an electric, too. Still… I have this hopped-up ability to heal… What the hell.
So I soaped up and tilted my head to shave. I found I was a lot better at it than I had any right to expect; maybe it had something to do with the angularity of my jaw or the boosted senses of a dayblood. Not a nick. And a shave as close as anything I’d ever done.
Sadly, it also got me dragged back to bed. Nothing like a nice, close shave it seems. I spent a goodly chunk of the day there, too.
Okay, all of it. Travis had been quite correct about my physical limitations while “dead,” but I like to think I made up for it during the daylight. I guess I did, because we went out for more lessons that evening.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 15
TH
S
he was right; sunrise came like a nasty swarm of glowing insects crawling in and out of my pores—but I didn’t feel quite so icky afterward. I guess I’m adjusting.
I stretched, as close to catlike as I’ve ever managed, and felt three inches taller as a result. We hunted, last night, after a fashion. Something Sasha had called “the smorgasbord of life.” It involved going out to a club, extending tendrils all around us, and sweeping them, winglike, through masses of people. Or we could hold these invisible nets still and watch little bits of energy siphon away as people walked through. It was like taking a single bite from every plate at a formal dinner. I think the term I want is “replete.”
I felt
grand
. I could have danced and sung, if I could dance and sing. I was as cheerful as a new bride and felt as shiny as a brand-new gold double-eagle. You could have made me poster child for the Happy Campers Association.
Good start to the morning, I thought.
Sasha was nowhere to be seen, so I got up to go looking; I found her in the shower, washing off the morning yuck. Even at its mildest, the morning switch is still like breaking into a fevered sweat. If one has been pretty badly pounded the night before, it can be a lot worse. Sunset isn’t quite as bad—the body is dying, not trying desperately to come back into a living balance.
So we washed. Everyone should have a shower partner. It may not go more quickly, but it’s at least as thorough and certainly more entertaining. Once we were clean again, we ambled down to breakfast. Sasha insisted on cooking and I didn’t argue—her kitchen, her house, her food. And her skill; I can open packages and read directions. That’s about it for me, but I can follow directions really well. It still doesn’t make me a cook.
We ate a good-sized breakfast. It wasn’t as much as I remembered; it was merely a very large breakfast. Big, hungry men who stuff themselves eat about that much. It was odd to watch Sasha’s slender form wolf down eggs and sausages and toast with such gusto, though. Now I know why! The body still needed to have something to use to replace lost mass. The energies we absorb give us supernatural strength and regenerative abilities, the blood stokes the furnaces of our physical forms, but we have to have the materials to run through the forge.
A dayblood that spends a lot of time regenerating needs either a lot of blood on hand that night, or he’ll have hell to pay in the kitchen, later.
After breakfast, we repaired to the library. Sasha introduced me to a selection of manuscripts—some a bit charred around the edges—she had rescued from her lord’s home after the mob tried to burn it. They were his notes on How Stuff Works for daybloods, and a few notes on nightwalkers. Most especially, his notes on magic.
Okay, let’s talk about the magic.
I spent the day reading a crabbed, cramped, nasty handwriting that had an ugly habit of using Old English lettering in a cursive hand. It was enough to make me think longingly of calculus. But I read until my eyes crossed and took a few notes of my own.
Magic. I’m a vampire—now!—and I still have trouble watching magic do things, visible things, things you can watch and go “Wow!” about.
Let’s not go into a lot of theory. Maybe later, if I need to explain to someone, I’ll write more down. The basic idea is that there is energy in everything. All sorts of energy, all sorts of things. It just takes a special sort of interaction between chaos dynamics, the uncertainty principle, quantum theory, and the functions of consciousness. Apparently, most people can’t achieve the necessary brain function; those few who can need to be in an altered state of consciousness called “casting a spell.”
What happened to me? I became a dayblood. This did interesting things to my nervous system and, as Travis noted, my brainwave patterns. I was effectively in a permanently altered state of consciousness—and one apparently ideal for that sort of thing.
For example, while I was leafing through a particularly difficult piece of a folio, the lights came up. I said thank you to Sasha. When she didn’t say anything in return, I looked, but she was nowhere to be seen. Coincidence, right? She just turned the lights on and left?
Okay. Try this. I was twirling my pen in my fingers, like a baton. I dropped it. Just because my reflexes are suddenly insanely fast doesn’t mean I’m more
coordinated!
It clattered across the desk, and I reached for it instinctively.
It jumped into my hand.
Still not believing? It gets better.
I held the pen on the palm of my hand and thought about it. It rose into the air. I held it there. I could feel sweat starting on my brow. I let go of it and it fell back to my hand; I had a slight headache. I had been lifting the physical mass of the pen with just my own little grey cells.
Not bad for a first try.
So I read, and kept reading. I wasn’t sure where Sasha was—she’d said something about dealing with the real world, and I hadn’t insisted she stay. I was distracted by tomes of arcane lore. I’m a reader and always have been.
Whoever this guy had been, I respected him. He was sharper than a serpent’s tooth. There were drawings of things da Vinci might have imagined. He wasn’t an artist by any means, but the lines were there for an airplane wing, a helicopter, and a clip-fed machine gun—complete with brass casings, percussion centerfire primer, and pre-seated lead.
I wondered how the world would have changed if Sasha had let these books loose, back when.
But the things that were new knowledge to me were the works on magic! There were diagrams and words, symbols and foci. He apparently hadn’t believed in anything as esoteric as codes; all of the “spells” were simply instructions and explanations, listed in order. Any idiot with literacy and the proper mind-set could have followed these.
It was mildly frightening, at least until I got to other sections of his notes. The ability to bend one’s brain and actually manipulate magical forces is fairly rare. But the spells themselves were so simple! It brings me back to the blind man metaphor. A telescope is simple on paper—but a man born blind will never invent it. The whole science of astronomy would not exist except for the sense of sight. So it is with magic; the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind is the only one who can see stars—and the blind don’t believe him.
Eventually, though, you know I had to try a spell. Just to see.
I’ve always loved snow. Preferably lots of snow. There’s something to be said for a world locked in white silence, peaceful and serene. So I decided to make it snow. Well… try to. I copied out the notes in longhand so I could read them easily, then walked into the back yard for the first time, whistling as I went.
Wow.
The back yard was a Japanese gardener’s stony dream. Big rocks, small rocks, pebbles, sand… everywhere. From drunken monoliths to precisely-aligned lines of rocks, the place was a rock garden. The space to the right of the door I’d come through was a swimming pool—a shallow one, more of a wading pool and overgrown hot tub—with lots of places to lounge and those fun folding chairs that go with it. I felt I knew why there wasn’t a full-depth pool around. The rock garden had a few small reflecting pools, and one powered fountain—with a goldfish!—and the output flowed down the face of several jumbled-together stones.
I found a nice quiet spot and followed the directions, drawing lines in the sand. That’s all I’m going to say about the process right now.
When I was done, I knew I’d done
something
. I was tired and shaking and hungry again. So I folded up my notes and went inside to eat. I felt weak and I was definitely trembling, as though I had just run a race and given my all to win it. I wondered, offhand, how much effect I could expect. I mean—June! Sure, it wouldn’t snow, but what sort of temperature and precipitation could I reasonably hope for?
I ate heartily—I can assemble a sandwich, boil soup, and so on; I don’t starve in a kitchen—and rested until I felt better. I wondered just how much of that replete feeling I would have tonight as leftovers from the smorgasbord. I suspected it wouldn’t be much. Normally, a whole person, death and all, could support a dayblood like myself for a year or so of living strictly as a human being. The snacking, the little bites from everyone, could pack a dayblood so full he bulged and it wouldn’t last for more than a week. It’s that dying spark, like Sasha said, that has the power to truly satisfy—and cause that overwhelming rush.
Sasha came home while I was—Hmmm. I just realized that I consider this place to be home. Not “Sasha’s house.” Not “that great bloody mansion.” Home. I’ll have to think about that.
Anyway, Sasha came home while I was eating, so I shared with her, feeding her little bits of my own abbreviated meal while she cooked a real one. As the steak began to sizzle, I asked about the blood she kept on hand and she reminded me of the cattle on her property. We can survive on any blood, but the more vital the creature is, the better the blood is. Other than that, it’s just a matter of taste. We need blood just as a sort of super-food. If we’re quiet and don’t do much, we can go without blood for weeks… but won’t like it.
After we ate—I ate again—we retired to the bedroom. There are two things about daybloods and sex I might as well mention here. A woman can be stimulated, even at night—perhaps especially at night, when her senses are heightened even further—to a pitch impossible in mortal women. But a man cannot; the body and the blood do not respond as they should, no matter how much he
wants
them to. During the day, both can have all the bedroom fun they can stand. During the day, you can think of a dayblood as a mostly-mortal person. It’s only at night that his vampiric state becomes obvious.
On the other hand, a woman can never bear children again. After the first night, her body rejects it in a spontaneous abortion. But a man can reproduce with a mortal woman; this does not affect her, nor does it affect the child. Vampirism of this sort requires the transfer of blood, and only blood—and one must drink quite a bit of the infected blood to have a chance of contracting the condition. Blood transfusions, of course, bypass this requirement; a small hypodermic will do fine.
There are other kinds of vampires, though. Some more human-like, some less so.
More of what’s-his-name’s notes. Sorry. Back to my train of thought.
As we lay together, temporarily exhausted, I asked her how her day had gone.
“Oh, well enough, my lord. Lawyers are so tedious. But there are things to sign and things to read, and there are always those who clamor for a moment of one’s time. It is often boring and seldom fun, but is the price one pays for wealth.”
“I suppose so.”
“And your day? How has it gone?”
“It improved a lot about four this afternoon.”
“Oh?”
“You came home.”
She dimpled. “And before that?”
“Pretty good. I spent the day reading your late husband’s notes. Fascinating stuff. I even tried a few small workings, and I can actually levitate a pen if I’m not too tired.”
Sasha’s eyes shone. “I suspected you might. Can you do so for me?”
“I’m too tired—and that’s your fault.”
“Aye, it is,” she agreed, and smiled. So she proceeded to make me even more tired.
About eleven that night, Sasha came downstairs to the library. After the sun went down, I’d had a nice little bout with her in the bedroom, discovering just how well I could play her nervous system when it was strung up tight. She keened in the hypersonic range for several minutes before I let her come down. I also discovered something that wasn’t in the notes; daybloods can apparently feed on each other’s blood simultaneously and it doesn’t seem to have much loss in the circuit. Now that was fun; it was like a constant rush from feeding without the worry of killing someone. I liked that a
lot
more. Sasha tastes good, moreso than a normal human. Maybe that comes with being a vampire.
I was sitting and reading in the dark, enjoying the way light just didn’t seem necessary. With sharper vision than I’d ever had before, the handwriting wasn’t too bad.
“My love?”
“Hmm? Yes, dear?”
“Earlier, you mentioned a few small workings?”
I looked up. She sounded
very
nonchalant.
“I tried a few levitation and telekinetic tricks, and a weather spell. Why?”
“You were trying for what sort of weather? May I ask?”
I stared at her for a long moment, then asked, “Why?”
“Just answer, please.”
“I went for snow. I knew I wouldn’t get it, but it was worth trying for to see how… much… Why are you smiling like that?”
She beckoned, and I followed.
Outside, it was frigidly cold and snowing. Big, thick flakes were falling. It was melting as fast as it hit, but the point was there—it was doing the snowfall equivalent of bucketing down. I couldn’t see twenty feet through it.