Blood Rules (9 page)

“Ah, another one bites the dust,” the little man said as he leaned heavily on his cane with one hand and reached for Mariah's fingers with the other, as if to shake her hand in an official greeting during which he'd introduce himself.

But it didn't quite turn out that way as the man touched her fingers and closed his eyes. Immediately, he jerked back from her, then let go of her hand. But, as if sorely determined, he grabbed her fingers again.

This time it was Mariah who quickly let go.

Gabriel felt confusion swirling in her, and he couldn't push it out of himself, either, because the little man was smiling, as if he had indeed come across a long-lost pal.

Who
was
this guy, and what'd happened when he'd touched Mariah?

“You've had lots of blood in your life, haven't you?” the man asked her.

Time to go. “We've all seen blood. Michelle, let's turn in.”

“No, don't.” The little guy held his hand out to Gabriel now, those cloudy eyes making him look like a half-blind sage.

“Michelle?” Gabriel said again.

But Mariah hadn't moved.

The little man said, “Michelle isn't your name. I don't know much more than that, because you do a good job of blocking, so all I understood about you for now was the blood and how it covered you and the people you loved. You're looking for . . . something. Can't quite put my finger on it, though. It'll probably take a minute. . . .”

Crap. Now Gabriel knew exactly what was going on.

They'd run into a rogue psychic.

The government had driven them out, probably fearing that psychics could feel and see things that they didn't want made public.

As if noticing that Gabriel had hit the mental jackpot, the little old man smiled. “I knew you two would be introducing yourselves before I died, and let me tell you, time was getting short. I was starting to think I was wrong and my clairvoyance was on the outs, right along with a lot of other parts of the old body.”

“Your clairvoyance must be mistaken.”

The little man started talking in earnest. “I can help you . . . for a small price, of course. I'll put you on your path.”

“I—”

But the man beat Gabriel to the punch. “If you can't trust someone who's been in this camp ever since the government ran him out of house and home, who you gonna call?”

Mariah looked into Gabriel's eyes.
What should we do?

No answers there. As for trusting this so-called psychic, he'd only made a fairly vague guess about Mariah's past and their present—after all, who hadn't suffered in this life? Who wasn't searching for something more? The guy hadn't even guessed that Gabriel was a vampire and Mariah was a werewolf.

Maybe he was a good con man and they could still leave unscathed.

“Come on,” the little man said. “Help a fella out. Since my beans were stolen, I could use something substantial to eat. Haven't had much but root juice for the past couple of days, and with all these people coming from the east, the salvaging has been a tough haul lately.”

Mariah seemed pained by his confession, and the little man hitched onto her sympathy.

“You really think a put-aside psychic and an old man to boot is gonna have any bad-guy connections? Please.”

And that was true enough—people like this man and the oldster were usually sent to pounds in the hubs, where they were considered to be next to useless.

“If you're really a psychic,” Gabriel asked, “why don't you know where your beans are?”

“If I had the ability to control the information I received, I'd be water rich.” The little man coughed, and it seemed to rack his whole body before he dove right back into talking. “But I
can
use touch”—he motioned toward Mariah's hand—“and focus my thoughts on getting a reading. I'm an excellent conduit for prophecies every once in a while, too, just like when I saw that you'd be coming here. I saw the change of the world right before the mosquito epidemic hit. No one listened to me, but back in my younger years, my talents put some real major evils to justice. . . .”

A wistful smile tugged at his mouth. Then he coughed again.

Gabriel and Mariah locked gazes once more, and he communicated with her, mind-to-mind, careful not to be obvious about it.

Maybe he's already got our number,
he thought.

He could feel the rise of desperation in the rush of Mariah's blood, and it mocked his own need.

So he made a decision.
No guts, no cure.

She smiled, as if she'd been praying he'd think this, and the psychic seemed to feel their commitment, holding back the flap of his tepee and inviting them inside while Gabriel took the long way around the campfire.

He stepped into the tent, tugging down his face mask, and he
really
smelled the opium. But it wasn't in smoke form. The drug wouldn't have any effect on him as a vampire. However, the more humanly inclined Mariah might be susceptible to it if the old man slipped it into a drink or food.

Gabriel turned that over in his mind for a second. Would opium mellow her out? Could it even be a type of cure?

But that was doubtful, because even the feyweed back in the Badlands hadn't done anything to help. Why would opium?

The tepee's flap stayed partway open, lending a smoky angle of light to the area, almost like colorless neon, lazy and foreboding. The psychic brushed by Gabriel, and he could've sworn that the little old man made contact with his coat for a second too long.

I can use touch,
the psychic had told them....

Laughing to himself, the man plopped down near what looked to be an entrance to a small bed dug under the ground. He gestured for his guests to hunker down, too.

“I can't read you,” he said to Gabriel.

Gabriel minded his breathing, which he needed to keep steady if he was to portray a convincing human. He rested his gaze on an open canteen next to the old man's blankets. It became obvious where the opium smell had originated from. The raw scent of it was mixed with stemorick root juice.

Maybe the little old man took the drug because of the physical pain of aging.

As he motioned for Mariah to extend her hand to him again, then grasped her fingers, Gabriel corrected his assumption about the drugs. Maybe they were a way for the psychic to shut off his own abilities when he didn't want them.

They all seemed to have a way of doing that somehow.

This time, the little man didn't let go of her. “Ah.”

Mariah leaned forward. “What?”

“My beans.” The old man chuckled. “I just put two and two together to come up with the fact that an ex–small business owner filched 'em. He's got a kid, though, so I just might let the issue drop because you and Mariah, here, can hunt for me instead. I see quite a bit of sand-rabbit in my future.”

Gabriel frowned at him. The psychic had gotten Mariah's name. What else had he intuited?

The man laughed again, reminding Gabriel of the oldster's cackling wheeze. But, unlike the oldster's laugh, this ended on a serious sigh.

“I'm telling you two now,” he said in that tinny old voice, “you better be careful about what you're looking for.”

“Why?” Mariah asked.

“Because you'll find a change for you, all right . . . and everything that comes with it, too.”

Mariah's heartbeat joyfully blipped inside Gabriel, and pounding blood rushed every part of his body. The scent of her wove through him, heady as a summer's day back when there used to be a real summer. Happiness was bringing out the best in her, and it sent his hunger to rising before he quelled it.

The psychic said, “You want to go ahead and tell me why you'd need a cure? You look robust enough.”

If only the man knew. “It's more of an emotional thing. Did you get any feel for where we should be headed?”

“If I told you ‘east,' that'd be a real ‘no shit, Sherlock' moment, wouldn't it?”

“It probably would.”

At this turn of events, Mariah's desperation lanced through her happiness and traveled on to Gabriel. She was impatient, and she offered her hand to the psychic again.

“Can't you read any more than that?”

Gabriel wanted to snatch her back. What if she offered too much?

But the little guy didn't take her hand. He merely stared at her with those semiwhite eyes. “A long time ago, I would've had a gun to your head by now, Mariah. There would've been silver bullets in it, too.”

The meaning of that dawned on Gabriel.
Shit.

By some miracle, Mariah hadn't gone and lost control yet, though her breathing was coming faster. “You know about . . . me?”

She hadn't given Gabriel away, and, through the imprint, he warmed at that. She didn't want to put him in danger.

“I'm not stupid,” the psychic said. “The world has altered, and somehow, some way, it was us humans who became the bad guys. Your kind could've taken over at any time, but you didn't. Now it's too late, for both werewolves . . . and vampires.”

The little man glanced at Gabriel, emphasizing that he knew his monsters.

“Don't freak out,” he added in that faded old voice, lowering his volume. “I'm not gonna hurt you or turn you in. I've known a few good vamps and even were-creatures in my time. That was before the Shredders came along and didn't differentiate between good and bad. . . .” He shook his head, then shrugged, as if the past was the past and there was no getting around that. “Besides, as I said, I saw you two coming, and I've been prepared. It's been a long, long time since I met one of your sort. Heck, I even forgot that I can't read vampires until I tried with Gabriel.” So he'd gotten Gabriel's name from Mariah's touch, too. “And in all that waiting time, a million questions came to me.”

“Like . . . what?” Gabriel asked.

“Well, it'd be sweet to know what happens when weres and vampires travel together.”

“It's a long story,” Gabriel said. “Maybe you can read it off Mariah's skin while I quietly hunt for those sand-rabbits.”

The man seemed satisfied by that. “I'm not sure anyone really knows the dynamics between your two kinds, but
you
seem to tolerate each other.”

“Has it always been that way?” Gabriel asked. He'd often wondered why he and the were-community hadn't hated each other on sight. It would've been real helpful in identifying their monster status.

“Heck if I know how it used to be,” the psychic said. “I ran into way more vampires than were-creatures in my travels. But I'll tell you this—I've heard rumors about places in some hubs where you could find history.”

Gabriel was curious about what this man had been, once upon a time, but he wasn't about to cut the psychic off when it sounded as if he might have a lead.

“Places?” Mariah asked, because the word had seemed ominous.

“Asylums.” The little man pointed outside. “They started popping up quietly, almost like they were evolving ghost stories. The official word is that asylums are facilities for the humans who came down with lycanthropy and other mental afflictions caused by world change.”

After things had gotten intense in the world, people had contracted more head maladies than ever, and lycanthropy was one of them. Supposedly, it was based on a depression that resulted in psychosis. Supposedly.

“You heard me right,” the psychic added, “asylums are out there. Maybe there'd be a cure in one of them.” He grabbed his canteen, as if thinking about taking a hit of the opium-laced juice. He toasted them with it. “I used to get real bad reception whenever I was on meds. Now I just take a sip or two of my jungle juice every so often, to make the creaks shut up. Know what I mean?”

Then, just like that, he smiled a devilish smile, as if he'd been waiting to sling another curveball their way.

He set the canteen back down, obviously changing his mind about taking a drink. “Here's where I prove just how awesome I really am.”

“Really,” Gabriel said.

“Yup. There was a name that kept floating into my mind along with the knowledge you guys would come around here someday. She can help you. I can feel it.” He put some drama into his presentation of the name. “Taraline.”

“What?” Mariah asked.

“Is she a fellow monster,” Gabriel asked, “or another psychic?”

“Neither one.” His words all but spilled out, maybe because he'd been waiting for them to come around so long and he was eager to show off. “I've intuited a few superficial things about her, like how she used to live in GBVille, which isn't too far away. And she caught a skin disease before she had to leave the hub.”

Gabriel lowered his head. Diseased people weren't technically monsters, but most humans treated them like it. He'd even done his share of avoiding them after the mosquito epidemic had left so many scarred. They'd ended up leaving the hubs to find new homes, knowing they weren't wanted.

The psychic said, “The only other piece of information I know is that she's in a necropolis now, and I suspect it's the nearest one. That's probably how I've gotten vibrations from her. I'll be headed there, too, when the time is right. No decent human would leave themselves to die in a camp where their beans can be snatched up like so much trick-or-treat.”

Mariah asked, “Where is she in the necropolis?”

“Anyone there who's still left moving should be able to tell you. I know she speaks Old American, too, so you should be able to chatter with her just fine.”