Blood Vivicanti (9780989878579) (3 page)

Wyn saw me see him. He
grinned. It made his brown eyes twinkle even more.

Even though he was
fortyish, he still had a boyish charm. His sonorous voice resounded
in the library, a total contrast to the silence.

“
You remember me.” It
wasn’t a question.

I did remember him and I
touched the spot where he’d pierced my neck with his tongue. No
wound.

His venom had healed my
bone and muscle and flesh because, you see, our venom is a salve
for wounds on the outside as it is also an aphrodisiac for scars on
the inside.

Once we pierce you, we will
heal you – in more ways than one.

Wyn closed his book, stood,
and strode toward me. He moved like a rushing river.

“
Your photographic memory
is unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” he said. “You aren’t like
anyone I’ve ever known,” he said. “You are beautiful,” he said. He
spoke in melody. His words were honey.

Did I trust him
then?

I don’t trust him now. Wyn
is like a cat: Opportunistic. He comes to you when he wants
petting. He purrs when you’re giving him attention. He runs off
when he needs you no more.

Thankfully he’s stopped
leaping on my keyboard while I type.

My new sense of smell
detected much about him. Where he’d been. What he’d interacted
with. His scent wasn’t untrustworthy.

My new sense of sight
espied much more in the manner of his movement. I could almost see
atoms scattering with the wave of his hand. Wyn told me
who
he was by
demonstrating
how
he was.

And how he was was who I
wanted to be.

Wyn had been one of those
youths who enjoyed role-playing games, the board games and the
video games, such as
Dungeons &
Dragons
and
World
of Warcraft
. He watched
Star Trek
to appreciate
logic and literature, and art and music and hope for the future. He
watched
Star Wars
to consider a power greater than himself. Few people had
accepted him and many had rejected him. From the get-go, he and I
had much in common.

But he was also very
handsome, for an older man. “Solo taught me swagger,” he once
confessed.

I knew he got his boyish
grin from somewhere.

Wyn had graduated
valedictorian from the University of Oxford.

He gave a commencement
speech that was virtually misunderstood. Few got it because few got
him.

One part was a quote, not
of Polonius, but from the next best comic relief: “A lot of
citizens were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought
they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong planet,
that some terrible mistake had been made.”

Wyn’s Alma Mater sent him
no more invitations.

He is the most brilliant
person I’ve ever known.

His life is suffused with
quantifiable data. Qualitative data baffles him. Other people’s
feelings are as perplexing to him as dark energy.

For him, feeling empathy is
akin to working sorcery.

He seeks out the
complexities of life. He wrestles with problems to simplify them
for others. He doesn’t want other people to understand him: He
wants other people to better understand their
self
.

In this way he is
completely opposite of me. You can imagine that he was a breath of
fresh air for me when we met. He helped me see my life from the
inside out. I’d been so entangled in my own problems that I’d never
even had a second-thought about making other people’s lives
better.

Altruism
was a word I could define intellectually. Not
vocationally.

I came to understand Wyn
better in time. Yes, he did want to make me a Blood Vivicanti
because of my photographic memory. But he also made me more like
himself because I was already very much like him: We both suffered
the tragic fate of perpetually feeling alone and lonely in a large
group. He didn’t make me merely because he needed me. He didn’t
need me: He wanted me. He made me a Blood Vivicanti because he
glimpsed his own loneliness in mine.

It felt good to be wanted
by someone.

But, yes, Wyn did also
want my photographic memory to perfect the Blood Vivicanti. He
hoped to bottle my ability. He hoped to fit it into his formula. He
would have liked all Blood Vivicanti to have a photographic memory
too. He was tired of losing his Blood Memories.

Yet my ability is one
puzzle he could never figure out. He wrestled with the problem of
my being.

That made two of
us.

Let me put it this way: I
didn’t distrust him. That’s saying a lot. All my life I never
learned to trust anyone. I had learned to distrust almost
everyone.

Choosing not to distrust
Wyn was a big step for me.

Wyn led me from the
library. He showed me around his mansion. It was my house now, he
told me. I was welcomed to stay there as long as I
liked.

Did I want to leave? I
wanted to understand myself better. Always have. Staying with Wyn
would show me much, not about who I was. He would show me more
about how I should be.

He showed me the mansion’s
solarium and the scullery, the arboretum, the wine cellar, the
kitchen, and more and more rooms, including Game Room Three, which
was palatial and immature.

I loved it! I’d never been
in a house with so much space. It was an introvert’s paradise. So,
no, I didn’t want to leave.

Would you?

Wyn talked while we
walked. I listened. I am a good listener. He explained much. He
could explain much well.

That was when I heard those
two words spoken aloud for the first time.

“
Blood
Vivicanti.”

Wyn had thought of the
name. He could read ancient Latin and Greek.
Vivicanti
was a new word from a dead
language.

Wyn led me back to the
library.

He led me through its tall
stacks. He showed me vast sections of fiction and nonfiction. His
library seemed as large as the Library of Alexandria. It seemed as
grand as the library in Disney’s cartoon movie,
Beauty and the Beast
.

It wasn’t the Elysian
Fields, but it was far from Gehenna. In fact, you could say that it
was a way station for lost souls like me.

Wyn was a collector of
first editions. He loved the scent of 19th century books. He used
to have a signed first edition of Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
. Wyn would snatch
it from the shelf not only to read. He’d place his nose in the
center of the book and he’d inhale the good scent of page and ink
and the hand that had penned the sad tale of Marley’s
Ghost.

Books were Wyn’s
romance.

My Blood Vivicanti eyes saw
much of the library. One bookcase was a tad askew. No human eyes
would have noticed. Wyn led me to it.

He tipped out a book from
one of its shelves. The bookcase swiveled open. It was a
doorway.

Inside it looked like a
dark broom cupboard, but the floor was missing, and ahead were two
fire poles that went down into darkness, far below.

Wyn smirked at me and
cocked his eyebrow. “Never pass up a good cliché.”

He winked.

Then he leaped onto one of
the poles and slid down, yahooing like a kid.

The slide down the pole was
farther than I expected. My fall from the cliff had felt
shorter.

My feet touched down on a
soft pad. I looked around.

Behind me and beside me
were rock walls.

Ahead was a massive cave.
Stalactites hung from the ceiling. Stalagmites rose up from the
ground. Filling the air was the rushing sound of a waterfall. All
around was the scent of smooth river stones.

Beneath the mansion Wyn had
a batcave.

Computer stations were
everywhere. Most were embedded into the walls. Each operated
independent programs.

In the center was a
laboratory. Encircling it was a large computer terminal, full of
buttons and switches and monitors and blinking lights.

The floor was covered in
large metallic plates.

Robotic creatures scurried
every which way, some on wheels, some on legs, some
hovering.

This big boy’s batcave
appeared to be a hybridization of a cave, a medieval castle, and an
Apple computer store.

Above the laboratory in the
middle was a massive holographic image. The hologram was of
me.

The Red Man – the sight and
smell of the cave reminded me of him. I still wasn’t sure if I’d
dreamed him.

I looked for him. He wasn’t
there.

Wyn didn’t know I knew
about him. He never hid the fact that he makes the Blood Vivicanti
through science. But the Red Man was the only secret he’d tried to
keep from us.

Wyn was like Dr.
Frankenstein remaking humanity in his own image and likeness. You
could call him the Neo-Modern Prometheus. And you could say that
the Blood Vivicanti were his monster, although we were never a
patchwork of flesh, more like a patchwork of psychoses.

Often I feel like a
monstrous patchwork of disorders, since, while I don’t do eloquent
speeches like Frankenstein’s monster, I am very capable of becoming
a different kind of demon, one more ruinous.

Two others were in the cave
also. They were standing at the middle computer station, just
beneath my hologram. They appeared to be arguing.

I assumed they were human,
and I was mistaken. One was the boy I’d seen in the MISSING posters
at the Academy. I could never have mistaken his muscular features,
his wide mouth and soft lips, his mussed blonde hair.

I exhaled.
“Theo…”

He could hear me. He
glanced at me. He could see my porcelain white cheeks blush. A
coppery scent emanated from him. It was the scent of
blood.

Theo was a Blood
Vivicanti.

There were only three of
us at that time.

Wyn experimented on himself
to become the first Blood Vivicanti.

He made Theo next. Theo was
the perfection of his science experiment.

And then Wyn made me last.
And I added perfection upon perfection.

The three of us were the
only Blood Vivicanti in the whole world. We were alone and happy,
like a little tribe lost in the woods.

And we had one common bond
too: Flowing through our veins was the Red Man’s blood. Our blood
glowed like violets on a clear summer day.

The other person beside
Theo was an older woman. She was Wyn’s housekeeper. He called her,
“Ms. Crystobal.”

But even to this day I
doubt that was her real name.

She looked like a woman in
her fifties. She was taller than me but shorter than Wyn. Her thin
figure was deceptive. She always wore the same black uniform. Her
black hair was tied back in a bun. Her mouth was always tightly
pursed. Her eyes were always narrowed as if scrutinizing
you.

I thought she was angry
with me when I met her. Again, I was mistaken: She was incapable of
feeling human emotion. Ms. Crystobal wasn’t a Blood Vivicanti and
we all assumed she was from our planet. She hid her true nature
well.

At any moment she could
have hurtled a Franklin stove across the cave like a
meteor.

Theo didn’t know about the
Red Man.

Ms. Crystobal did. But Wyn
didn’t know she knew. She knew much more than she led
on.

Wyn approached her and
Theo. Ms. Crystobal explained that Theo had not eaten real food in
a week. Theo laughed. He acted like I wasn’t there anymore. Such a
boy.

“
This is an experiment,” he
explained. “We have to know how long a Blood Vivicanti can go
without food.”