Generation V (6 page)

But for the woman herself who wields so much power, it’s easy to underestimate her. At first.

I opened the door and entered a room that was all things pink and frilly, with spindly-legged chairs and a preponderance of mother-of-pearl gilding any available surface. Madeline sat in the middle of it, a tiny woman with a Barbara Bush hairstyle, pink fluffy slippers and matching bathrobe over a standard little old lady dress, cornflower blue eyes, and a face so wrinkled that she made the Dalai Lama look like a third grader. It was a perfect illusion of innocence until she set down her Sèvres teacup and gave me a smile that showed off a perfect mouth of teeth—and a set of fangs that a tiger would be jealous of.

Madeline’s fangs are another sign of age. Chivalry and Prudence have fangs, but they retract so that both of them pass through the human world normally enough that they could probably sit in a dentist’s chair and just get a lecture on flossing. When they do emerge, their fangs are thin and sharp, designed to make surgically precise punctures on their victim to get the blood flowing, but not leave large marks behind. I don’t even have fangs at all, just the human incisors that are basically vampire baby teeth. But Madeline’s fangs are fixed in place like a cat’s, and are the size and sharpness for ripping and tearing.

“Darling,” Madeline said, taking off the large grandma glasses that she doesn’t need, but likes to wear for effect. “What an unexpected pleasure.” Her voice is another giveaway. It’s low and sweet, with some age showing in her pauses, but it sets every instinct in you on edge. I’ve known Madeline my entire life, yet listening to her still
makes all the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and I hate turning my back on her.

The knowledge that at some point I’ll start the transition that will make me a full vampire like my siblings and Mother makes me dread every birthday and routinely check my teeth in the mirror. Because popular vampire lore is wrong in another key aspect: vampires do age, and we aren’t immortal. Each of us will eventually succumb and die of old age, a thought that is not as comforting as it should be, given that every person in my graduating high school class as well as their great-grandchildren will be dust in the ground before I’m even ready for vampire AARP, but even for us, Madeline is very old.

“It’s not a surprise if you send people to get me, Mother,” I said. Sometimes I wonder what a psychiatrist would make of my relationship with my mother. If I could go to a psychiatrist, of course, and tell him everything about my life without his immediately throwing me into an insane asylum. Or, worse, believing me.

She just gave me a grandmotherly smile, completely ruined by the fangs that rested against her bright coral lipstick. “But it is still a surprise. After all, you could’ve refused to visit. And yet here you are, my darling baby. Youngest of my little sparrows, hopping home into the nest. Isn’t that lovely?”

I hate coming home.

Before I could come up with a suitably smart-ass response, Madeline had breezed the conversation forward. There’s a great French expression that I learned during a foreign film class called
l’esprit de l’escalier
, which basically means “staircase wit.” It refers to when you think
of a great comeback line, but it’s too late to deliver it. I experience that a lot around my mother.

Madeline’s sweet smile of fang never wavered. “We have exciting things to speak of, darling. But first, let’s get this out of the way.” And she rolled back her sleeve, exposing her pale wrist. Her wrist isn’t smooth—there are liver spots, and the skin has lost elasticity as she’s aged, leaving it to hang droopily, bumping here and there with the long veins that have darkened from the blue you’ll see in very fair-skinned people to almost a lavender. Against the sticklike skinniness of her arm, her wrist bone is a disproportionately huge bulge. In a movement too fast for me to see, she slashed her wrist with one of her nails, creating a small cut that sluggishly oozed blood. Her blood was thicker than a human’s, and darker. It didn’t move correctly either. There was no dribbling, because it was coagulating too fast.

I was so hungry.

I was crawling toward her wrist, even though I didn’t even remember dropping to my knees. There was no control anymore, no holding back, and I locked my mouth around her wrist and sucked as hard as I could. It was like trying to drink a thick milkshake, and I struggled to get the blood in my mouth. It was like fire on my tongue, and I could feel each individual drop as it went down my throat and into me. Then it was finally flowing faster, and I could hear myself making small whimpers, like a young animal nursing. I could feel her skeletal fingers running through my hair as she petted me with her free hand, encouraging me to drink more. My eyes weren’t closed, but the room seemed dark, with nothing existing except my mouth and the blood that I needed more of. I wasn’t
aware of my knees against the carpet, or my hands clutching at her arm, but somewhere in the distance I could hear heartbeats that I know didn’t belong to my family—these were human heartbeats, too delicate to be ours, and I wanted to be closer to them, to feel them speed up when I got closer, and then to make them stop—

And then I was aware of myself again, of how desperately I was drinking, of how I’d pressed myself up against Madeline’s legs. Of how I must’ve looked. All I wanted was more and more of her blood, but I forced myself to swallow what was left in my mouth and pull back. The slice on her wrist began to close even as I watched, and the remaining blood didn’t stain the surface like mine would, but instead pulled back inside the closing wound, leaving her skin unmarked. I turned away from it, awkwardly pulling back from her and standing up. I caught a glimpse of myself in a large antique mirror. My hair looked like I had gotten caught in a cyclone, my hazel eyes were lost in the size of my pupils, and there was still one drop of blood left on my lip. It took every piece of control I had not to lick it up. Instead I grabbed a napkin from Madeline’s table and wiped it off. I mourned its loss even as I dropped the napkin down onto Madeline’s tea tray.

Madeline laughed at me, a dry cackle that sounded like the rustling of autumn leaves.

“Foolish little darling,” she said. “What do you gain by drinking less than your fill? If you imagine that by drinking one less drop you can put off your transition, I assure you that you cannot. As for why you would want to, I cannot even imagine.”

“What’s wrong with wanting to stay the way I am? To stay human?” I was still bent over, my hands resting on the back of one of her Louis XIV chairs. I was breathing deeply, and I could feel every vein in my body shivering. I was like a parched daisy that had just been drenched in water, and I hated how happy my body was.

Madeline scoffed in disgust. “I cannot even fathom the state of your mind sufficiently to begin debating such a ridiculous concept. Besides.” And here she picked up a cream envelope from beside her tea set and shook it. “There are more important things to discuss than your infantile existential crisis.”

“Your mail is more important than my crisis?”

“Infinitely.” Her blue eyes glowed like stained glass windows on a sunny day. “I will require your presence tomorrow night.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“I have a date,” I lied.

“Really, dear, this is childish.”

“I have to wash my hair.”

“You’ll be interested in this.” She wiggled the envelope invitingly.

I eyed the envelope. It was expensive, and there was a wax seal on it. I wished that I could just storm out of the house, but now I was curious. “Why would I be interested?”

“Because we are to have company. A scion of the Naples nest has requested visitation into my territory. Here is your opportunity, darling, to have that question that you have always asked yourself answered.”

“What question?”

Madeline leaned forward and her ever-present smile
became unfriendly. “Whether other vampires are like us. Whether I am better or worse than the others of our kind. Whether your destiny is truly tied in blood, or whether others walk different paths.”

A long moment passed, and I knew that I was caught. Madeline knew me too well, and knew all the things that haunted me at night.

“Naples in Florida?” I asked, goading her a little.

“Italy,” she said blandly, not rising to the bait. “He is a descendent of a nest mate of one of my blood siblings. The vampires of the Old World are forced to cast their eyes to the New, and they have dispatched an emissary that hospitality dictates I must welcome.”

“Why are they interested in you?”

“Because, darling, their numbers have dwindled. Few of our young are born, and fewer still survive infancy. Some old ones die with no heir to claim their territories, leaving them in dispute between their neighbors. More perish in those conflicts who cannot be replaced. And yet I sit in a young land with many healthy offspring.” Her smile widened. “Their emissary wishes to learn my secret.”

“Do you have a secret?”

“Of course, my darling.”

“Will you tell it to him?”

“Perhaps.” She laughed. “Though it is unlikely to do him any good. So tomorrow you will return and meet someone who is so distantly related to you that he cannot in any honesty claim a kin tie. I hope that this will be an illuminating experience for you and that”—here she swept a sharp eye over my clothing—“you will endeavor to launder your clothing before you come. There is a stain on your trousers.”

My cheeks heated even as I automatically stepped in to help her get out of her chair. I’m never sure how many of these moments of fragility are acts and how many are the actual weaknesses of her age. I once tried to test that theory and she fell over, leading to a horrible lecture from Chivalry, and the headache of wondering whether she fell over to trick me or fell over because she fell over.

“Now help me downstairs,” she said as I handed her her cane, which was silver with a top knob inlaid with mother-of-pearl. “The cook has made beef bourguignonne.”

My vegetarianism has been a hard sell in this house.

Madeline’s blood left a
certain spring in my step on the drive home, despite my best efforts to ignore it. The enhanced sense of hearing and the rush of predatory instincts had faded almost as soon as I stopped drinking, thankfully, but I was still nervous that it might return. I wouldn’t need to drink human blood until I fully transitioned into a vampire, an event that no one seemed interested in giving me a general estimate on. Prudence rarely deigned to talk to me at all, and Chivalry would only admit that he’d been a lot younger than me when it happened for him. Madeline would just give a very unhelpful cackle. But if I could put it off forever, I would.

Back at home, I staked out space on the sofa and waited for Larry to get home. This wasn’t an aftereffect of the blood—this was an aftereffect of my last credit card bill’s minimum payment nearly clearing out my checking account. I needed this month’s rent payment, and preferably all the money he owed me on top of it. Unlike with a lot of down-and-out postgraduate film students, the option of selling plasma and semen was cruelly withheld from me. The latter was sterile and useless, and the former was not exactly a substance that I could offer the Red
Cross with any ethical comfort. After all, a pint of Fort-positive would probably kill anyone who needed a transfusion. I have enough self-loathing in my headspace without asking for extra helpings.

I did manage to confront Larry, but I didn’t even get a satisfactory fight out of it. He was accompanied by an extremely drunk college undergrad, which gave Larry the frustrating high ground of accusing me of being a poor host to our visitor. I didn’t get a dime out of him, and even his empty promises were beginning to sound halfhearted. All I did get was the opportunity to prove my exemplary hosting abilities by cleaning his date’s vomit off the sofa before I went to bed. By that time it was clear that she was feeling well enough to engage in amorous activities with Larry, and I took the precaution of hiding my toothbrush and locking the door to my bedroom. The last time Larry had romanced a drunken eighteen-year-old, she had gone to the bathroom, gotten confused, and tucked herself into my bed. Having just pulled a double shift, I was dead to the world and didn’t wake up, leading the extremely awkward morning-after discussion where I explained to the confused maiden that while she and I
had
technically just slept together, I wasn’t the person she had had sex with. I did my best to turn it into a teachable moment.

At work the next day, I wasn’t even able to muster the illusion of being a productive employee, much to Jeanine’s frustration. But even when she was yelling directly in my ear, all I could think about was that tonight I was going to meet a new vampire, and maybe even get the opportunity to get real answers to my most pressing questions. I went onto autopilot, pouring coffee and taking money while my brain was miles away.

It wasn’t until I heard a familiar voice that had been sanded down by cheap booze and two decades of unfiltered cigarettes that I blinked and came out of my fog. The grinning man in his midforties with salt-and-pepper hair who I’d just made change for was Matt McMahon. I apologized, and he laughed, but I felt like absolute shit. Not that that is an unusual state of existence for me.

Matt was my foster father’s old partner. When Brian and Jill were murdered, Matt devoted himself to finding the killer. Given Madeline’s influence in Providence politics, Matt almost immediately found himself stonewalled in the investigation. The police did eventually pin the crime on a homeless man, but Matt never believed it. He was a good enough cop to see all the holes in the story, and be suspicious when the homeless man died of a massive heart attack the same night he delivered his confession. For everyone else the case was closed, but Matt refused to let it rest. He was finally told that he had to either abandon the case or find a new line of work. He turned in his badge and became a private detective.

The one thing Matt had never questioned was my story. Under strict orders from Madeline, I told everyone that I’d been in my room when Jill was attacked, and had hidden under my bed while everything happened. I had only come out when all the noises stopped, and that’s when I found them. I hated lying to Matt, but I did it because now I knew the consequences for telling the truth. Seeing him run down every false lead that he rustled up was better than going to his funeral.