Blood Relations - Chapter 21

United States, 1993

Every night for three months, Vicky watched the development of the Asylum with growing interest. A goth club would be the perfect place to recruit pets, and then she wouldn’t have to kill so often. She wasn’t tired of killing, only of running and hiding.

Vicky hadn’t returned directly to the US, because she had no way to afford the trip. The McCulloughs left her with nothing, and once again, she was forced to wander alone.

But Europe had not been the best place to find cash at the time. With the war efforts cranking up, Vicky more often found bullets in steady supply, and unfortunately, she kept collecting them in her body.

With the help of a fleeing kitsune named Jun, she had managed a voyage back to the Netherlands. Unfortunately, they arrived only three months before the blitzkrieg did, and Jun was killed by a German grenade. Vicky managed to escape without getting wounded, but her relief lasted five hours before she was gunned down and had to play dead to convince a platoon of soldiers to move on.

She dragged herself into a safe hiding place, watching the Germans take over Amsterdam. Though she was motivated by revenge rather than patriotism, Vicky fed from the Germans often, taking whatever funds they had to help build enough money to get back to America.

At last, in 1942, she made her return voyage home, and the trip was extra slow for a number of storms that seemingly came out of nowhere. At times, it seemed the gods themselves were working to keep her from getting back. The idea was absurd, but it kept Vicky in check, and she starved for a full two weeks, keeping herself locked in her room to avoid killing any of the other passengers. She was fearful that feeding would make the storm stronger, capsizing the cruise ship in the middle of the ocean.

Returning to New York was not a happy occasion, even if she was grateful to be back on dry land. Her old stomping grounds were no longer familiar, and despite her efforts to search for other vampires, she found no one. She stayed only long enough to collect traveling funds, and then she moved on.

The years after her return to the US were filled with the same patterns. She found a place to linger for two weeks most times, and she’d never spent more than a month in any location. During every hunt, she took money and any other valuables she could from her victims. The scene around each victim could be made to look like a lethal robbery, and she sipped from each victim rather than drain them and leave behind a trail of evidence. Instead of taking only one kill, she often claimed three or four victims in order to fill herself completely.

She favored hunting for drunks near bars and clubs, always telling herself that she did so because they were often flush with cash. But in truth, she was using the alcohol in their blood in a vain effort to numb her pain.

When she didn’t hunt for food, she searched in vain for other vampires. Over the years, she began to develop a bleak thought that she was somehow marked as unclean for taking William as her partner. She thought that perhaps even after time passed, the halfling’s scent still marked her out as a traitor to her people, and the other vampires were avoiding her.

But she wasn’t searching so much as wandering aimlessly, and many times, she missed chances to meet other vampires because they were wondering aimlessly too. They were just as alone and frightened as she was, and each of them harbored a fear that somehow, they might have been abandoned by their parents because they weren’t strong enough to survive.

The wandering gypsy path she took was a safe life, but it was dull and lonely too. No matter how lonely she felt, Vicky couldn’t allow herself to think of missing William. The thought of his face filled her with dread, and caused her to cast nervous glances over her shoulder each time, as if someone from the McCullough clan might jump out to attack her again.

During her travels, Vicky also found America to be deeply prejudiced. Anyone who looked too different was snubbed, and renting an apartment or a hotel room with her looks was almost impossible. Instead, Vicky rented storage rooms wherever she moved. The only thing she kept in it was an oversized coffin that locked from the inside. The coffin and the Packard Hearse she drove between cities were both ironic gifts for herself. She bought them in grudging acceptance of the human misconceptions developed about her people.

She never recruited pets, nor did she seek out any of the people she ran across with exotic scents.

Her reasons for hiding seemed validated when she met the berserker in California. He had seemed like such a nice man until he chased her down and beat her within an inch of her life. The only reason he gave up was because he was shot by a police officer, and he ran only after being wounded three times.

Vicky almost felt bad for having to drain the cop, but her alternative was laying in a broken heap and waiting for his backup to arrive. As a parting gift, the cop put two slugs in her chest. Vicky wasn’t sure if she was happy about surviving during the week it took her to cough up the bullets.

Just over fifty years of running ended in 1990, in Tucson. It was there that Vicky decided she would stay and set down roots to declare the city as her turf. Her claim was easy to make, since she was the only vampire in Tucson.

The last vampire coven to inhabit the city had been killed in 1975 by a group of self-proclaimed witch hunters, who were secretly funded by the Southern Baptist church. The witch hunters had long before moved on to other targets, so the city was free from threats, both from competing blood drinkers, and from humans.

Yet, even with the lack of competition, Vicky began to diet, spacing out her meals to once every three days, and she switched the weapons she used to make every victim seem like a random killing. Her diet included only drinking partially from her one victim, and so she had shed most of her muscle mass in the process.

Vicky alternated her hunting areas throughout the city, and in hindsight, she was amazed that she hadn’t run into Ellen before opening night at the Asylum.

Vicky was truly dressed to kill in a fashionable sense, a tight lycra top hugging her chest, and a short black skirt showing of most of her long longs. The calf length spiked heel boots she wore brought her height to over seven feet, and she towered above everyone else in the club, unable to help from attracting attention.

She became an instant celebrity, and she gathered phone numbers from a dozen people within the first hour. They all wanted to know what it was like to be fed from.

Ellen arrived after midnight, and she stood out like a neon light in the darkness. She wore a red T-shirt with a white circle and a yellow lightning bolt silk-screened on her chest, a rumpled black skirt that fell to her ankles, and a pair of brown sandals. Over her right shoulder hung the strap to a multicolored backpack. In her outfit, Ellen would have looked more at home at a rave than she did wandering through the monochrome crowd of club patrons.

Her reddish-blonde hair was wavy and unkempt, but it was also clean, scented only with a residue of floral shampoo. She wore no perfume or makeup, nothing to mask her natural odor. Yet, even without cosmetics, she was paler than some of the patrons in the club.

Vicky knew she was a halfling, and she did exactly what she’d been commanded to do, so many decades before. She dropped her eyes and began to make excuses that she needed to leave.

Ellen blocked her exit, a soft smile playing on her lips as she introduced herself. “Hi, I’m Ellen McCullough.”

Vicky reacted like she’d been tapped with a live wire, her body stiffening in terror. Vicky was too scared to hide her thoughts, and Ellen’s smiled faded as she got the vampire’s full history in a flashback. She knew everything before Vicky could even take a step back.

When she did, Ellen raised her hand. Wait, she sent her thought, along with an impulse, Calm down.

Vicky did, but she still glanced away from Ellen. “I need to leave.”

“No, it’s all right, Vicky. I’m...I’m a refugee, and our family doesn’t hunt for refugees anymore. It...it’s one of the few courtesies the bastards offer us, but you don’t need to be afraid of me, or of them.”

She reached out to take Vicky’s hand and sent, Let’s go find a table to talk.

It wasn’t a command, but Vicky let Ellen lead her through the crowd to a booth.

They sat across the table from each other. Vicky’s eyes wandered down to the silver chain around Ellen’s neck, then to the silver cross which hung from it. Ellen offered her an apologetic smile. She was already aware of Vicky’s allergies to silver, and she reached up to unclasp the necklace and slip it into her bag.

Ellen didn’t talk. Instead she sent her memories to Vicky, detailing the abuse she’d suffered at the hands of the family elders until she chose to run away.

Their extreme methods of child rearing were meant to indoctrinate Ellen, and she might have become a willing believer in the family’s values were it not for her witnessing a cull of the magi when she was thirteen. Twenty men were put down, the mind-wiped slaves dying without so much as a whimper before they were stacked in a furnace and blazed down to bones and ash. Ellen was there to see the men killed. She saw their bodies loaded into the furnace, and she watched her aunts and uncles patiently grinding the bones into dust in huge copper pestles.

The ash and powdered bones were scattered in the desert, and no trace was left of the men. It was like they never existed.

Six months later, Ellen was pushed into the cell of a newly abducted slave. His face was covered by a hood, but it didn’t matter what he looked like. He was already erased, a mind-wiped puppet who was being controlled by one of her uncles.

Ellen had always suspected it was her uncle, Duncan, who controlled the mage slave that raped her, but she couldn’t be sure.

During her pregnancy, she made plans to flee with her child. She was even more committed to the idea of leaving if she had a son, as male hybrids were eventually made into slaves, and they were culled just like the magi. That she had a daughter did not ease her nerves, but she never had the chance to see her plans through. Ellen’s daughter was taken from the home while Ellen was still recovering from labor. She’d never even been allowed to know her daughter’s name.

For adding to the gene pool, the family “rewarded” her with a partner, a cousin, ten times removed, named Alexander. Ellen was fond of him, but the family’s choice of partners ended up being a mistake on their part. Alexander encouraged Ellen to leave, and at the age of sixteen, she took his advice.

She had been on her own ever since then, and like Vicky, she was weary of being alone. Vicky could understand her feelings, and she could relate to them. That did not prevent her from feeling hesitant at forming a friendship with the halfling.

For one thing, Ellen’s memories confirmed that the leaders of the McCullough family were just as sadistic as they’d always been. But the other problem was, Vicky knew enough about halflings to understand that when they got lonely, they looked for someone to cuddle with.

Vicky knew Ellen was craving physical contact, and the intense look of longing in the halfling’s silver eyes made Vicky feel uneasy.

But she couldn’t leave. Already she was enchanted by Ellen. It was more than just her scent. It was the ease with which Ellen accepted Vicky, and the small courtesies she made, like taking off the offending silver necklace.

Ellen convinced Vicky to try something bold that night, a public feeding. In any other place, Vicky would have started a riot. But the patrons of the club crowded the table to watch Vicky work with a package of razor blades one of the patrons was carrying.

Ellen located the man with the blades by scanning the thoughts of the patrons, and she subtly influenced the crowd’s interest, turning the feeding into a spectacle for a morbid audience.

Vicky overfed that night, and when she had to turn away the next volunteer, the slip of a woman whined with heartbreaking disappointment.

Vicky laughed and said, “Come back tomorrow night, and you can be first in line.”

Ellen walked out of the club with Vicky, and her slender hand slipped into Vicky’s before she looked up and smiled. “Would you like to come back to my place for a nightcap?”

Vicky’s heart gave her away when it started pounding. Of course she wanted to. But the old conditioning, drilled into her over five decades before, was still too powerful. Vicky sighed and looked down at the sidewalk. “Maybe some other time.”