HORROR THRILLERS-A Box Set of Horror Novels (56 page)

Carolyn caught the
pleading look and said to Cheyenne, "She got it for her
birthday."

"That's not
till June. An early birthday present! Anyway, that's seriously cool,
Dell. I know you always wanted a horse."

Dell melted,
remembering how Cheyenne cared for her and had been her friend for so
long. They'd shared everything until now. "I can go another
time," she said, holding up the keys.

"Not on your
life. Go on, I'll see you at school. Nice to see you, Carolyn. Call
me, Dell, okay?" Cheyenne waved and turned back the way she'd
come.

Dell looked at her
cousin. "Thanks. I got tongue-tied."

"No problem. I
guess I'll go back home, too. Cheyenne's right, you should ride the
horse before it gets too late in the evening."

Dell hugged her and
opened the car door. She saw Carolyn leaving and called out, "Tell
Aunt Celia I'll come over to visit this week."

"Okay. See
you."

Dell sat in the car
a moment, noting that her earlier anger and frustration had leaked
away. She started the car and backed onto the street. She had thought
she would never be able to live as a Natural, interacting with humans
and behaving the way they did. Not when she felt so much anger. So
much envy. But as long as she had friends and family who loved her,
she might make it.

It was all so new.
Before the change, she'd never felt so much anger and never been
envious of anyone. Her whole personality was evolving and not for the
best, she thought. She was letting the fury overcome and take away
the hurt. It was all she knew to do.

The tires squealed
and as she punched the accelerator. Riding could help. She would take
Lightning on the riding path and be alone. She only wanted to forget
all the things in the world she was going to miss now. Most of all
she wanted to forget Ryan was going out with Lori on Saturday night.

~*~

Rebuffed by Dell,
Ryan stopped a girl named Lori and asked her out for Saturday night.
He picked her at random, liking the way she looked. Although she was
not as pretty as Dell, she was no dog. She accepted, but suggested he
might like to accompany her tonight to a party with her friends.
"Loden's friends," she amended.

"Who's Loden?"

"You'll see."
She smiled. "You'll like our friends." There was an
intriguing twinkle in her eye. The rest of the day Ryan wondered if
he would.

Like Loden's
friends, that is. Lori's friends. He knew who they were. The kids who
were into heavy metal, gothic literature, body piercing, and thumbing
their noses at society. But Lori herself was pretty cute. She was as
perky as a cheerleader in Halloween drag. She was no Dell, that was
true. But Dell had made it obvious she wasn't interested. It had cut
him deeper than he thought it might. Damnit.

Well, Lori was
going to show him a good time, introduce him to some people. She'd
help occupy his time, help him fit into the new school, at least with
the cult. He wasn't a jock, he had no aspirations as an academic,
where else was he to fit anyway? He was really sort of a country boy,
a ranch hand, used to hauling hay and cleaning horse stalls on his
grandfather's land. The ranch boys didn't have a group, though, so
that left him on his own.

It worried him that
he might not fit in with Lori's group either. What did he know about
Dracula and body-piercing and tattoos and drinking blood? Nothing,
nada. Maybe Lori would instruct him. He really was looking for
something besides a girlfriend, and why not what a cult had to offer?
At least he'd check it out; no harm in that. No harm at all.

That night at the
party he had a chance to reassess his own idea of "harm."
First, he wasn't exactly accepted on sight. The other people in the
house, which was apparently given over for the night to the younger
generation with no parent present, rigorously ignored him. Lori said,
noticing his discomfort, "Don't worry about it. They'll come
around."

"Which one's
Loden?"

"Oh, he's not
here yet. He doesn't own a watch, doesn't go by time. No telling when
he might show up. If he does." She shrugged.

Maybe the others
would come around. Maybe he should have made a concerted effort to
dress in black clothes and move his body as if it were mired in
molasses. It seemed the people in the house were drugged on something
that slowed them to a crawl. Quaaludes, pot, something. Their eyes
were dull and their gestures small. They seemed unsteady, but
mannered in the way people were when having to be careful where they
put their feet in case they might stumble. At one point he was
offered a hit off a monster joint and declined. Another faux pas,
evidently, because after that no one made the slightest attempt to
engage him in conversation.

Lori sat beside him
on the sofa. He tried to ask her about the scene they were stuck in,
but she evaded him. Instead, she talked about school, her plans to go
to Europe and stay in hostels after graduation, and how cool it was
not to have to "perform" at a party like this, how it was
just enough to "be."

He had to admit he
just didn't get it. He really didn't get it when the first
bloodletting began. Lori touched him on the arm to direct his
attention. He'd been daydreaming, idly munching potato chips from a
bowl in his lap, wondering if there was anything good on TV. He'd
seen one in the family room. When he turned at Lori's touch, he saw a
skinny young man slip his black turtleneck over his head. He brought
a pocketknife from his pocket and opened the blade. Ryan saw
lamplight shine off the blade and it made him shiver deep inside. Oh,
man. Oh, man.

A girl, his girl,
Ryan guessed, was kneeling at the boy's feet. Without preamble, and
before the crowd gathered so that Ryan could not see what was
happening, the knife was making five quick slits in the boy's upper
arm. They weren't deep, but blood welled immediately. As soon as he'd
cut himself, he wiped the blade on his jeans, folded it shut, and
slipped it into his pocket. Then he bent over the girl on the floor,
thrusting out his arm to her. She bowed her head and began to lick at
the blood, a look of ecstasy on her face.

"Oh, Christ,"
Ryan said, grimacing.

"He's been
tested," Lori said, thinking his disgust might be at the thought
of the girl getting AIDS.

"You do that
sort of thing, too?"

"Sure."
She glanced meaningfully at his arm. "When I feel like it,"
she added.

Ryan watched the
couple giving and receiving blood and felt a catch at the back of his
throat. He had seen a lot of things; it wasn't as if he was so
straight he was a Republican or something. But licking and sucking at
bloody wounds was way beyond anything he'd witnessed before. No
wonder they were all so lethargic, he thought. Maybe they weren't
drugged out of their skulls, after all. Maybe they were depressed and
weak from giving blood. Never mind AIDS—not that testing
protected them, since the tests didn't always detect HIV in the early
stages. But hadn't they ever heard of anemia? And whatever godawful
thing might be in someone else's blood?

He laughed to
himself, and Lori looked at him with dark eyes outlined in black
eyeliner pencil.

"Most people
who see this for the first time have a squeamish reaction," she
said, as if to forgive him.

"But what's
the philosophy behind the ritual? I mean, I know they're not doing it
because they're . . . well, hungry."

She smiled and
shook her head. "No, they're not hungry in the way you mean.
There's no, uh, philosophy. It's like a way of life. A lifestyle.
We're intimate when we share blood. We're brothers and sisters. It's
a way to distinguish us from the rest, the normals. And, believe it
or not, it's an incredible turn-on."

"Oh, it is, is
it?"

Lori and Ryan
turned at the interruption and saw Dell standing nearby, hands on her
hips. She was scowling.

"Hey, Dell.
What's up?" Lori said.

Ryan noticed Lori
hadn't missed a beat.

"I know I
shouldn't be here," Dell said to Ryan, ignoring Lori's greeting.
"I wasn't invited." This she directed at Lori. "But I
heard there was a party, Loden was throwing a party." She looked
around and saw couples beginning to get into the bloodletting
business. Ryan saw her look quickly away again.

He started to stand
up to offer his seat to Dell. "Want to sit down?"

"Not on your
life," she said, anger in her voice spiraling close to the
surface. She faced Lori. "What made you bring him here?"

"Hey, he
wanted to come." She tugged on Ryan's hand and made him sit down
again.

"What's the
point of all this crap?" Dell asked, angrier now.

"Call it crap
if you want, but maybe you ought to wait until you're invited
somewhere before you begin calling names." Lori was blowing her
cool. Ryan didn't know what to say. He was really surprised to see
Dell and more surprised to see her so angry. He saw some couples
close to them move away and some people were beginning, to leave.
Others, couples involved too deeply in their blood rituals, hadn't
yet noticed Dell on the scene.

"You think
this makes you a vampire?" Dell asked. "Why do any of you
think you know what the hell you're doing?"

"You don't
know what we know," Lori said.

"I know this.
I know this kind of thing is crazy as hell. This no more makes you a
vampire than wearing a jeweled crown makes Miss America the Queen of
England." Dell turned to Ryan, her cheeks flushed. He saw the
pupils of her eyes were dilated so that her eyes were extremely dark
and intense. "Is this really what you want?"

Ryan realized
suddenly why she was so angry. She liked him. Liked him enough to
show up at Loden's party and make a scene on his behalf. He said,
"I'm not sure what I want, Dell."

She threw her head
back in exasperation. "Well, you'd better make up your mind."

"Who says it's
up to you?" Lori asked.

Again Dell ignored
her. She said to Ryan, "About Saturday night. . ."

He nodded, almost
afraid to breathe until she finished.

"We'll go
somewhere together, like you said. Somewhere there's no blood
dripping all over the place." With that she turned and left the
room.

"Whoa, boy,"
Lori said, shaking her head. "A little overwhelming, isn't she?"

Although Lori was
right in a way, Ryan didn't like to hear criticism of Dell. "She's
just worried, I guess."

"None of her
business. As far as I can tell, you're a big boy."

Maybe so, Ryan
thought, but he was glad Dell had let him know how much she cared. If
she hadn't cared, she wouldn't have walked into the middle of a cult
party and said the things she'd said. He thought her brave, and the
logic she'd employed was impeccable.

As the night wore
on, the thought of cutting himself and watching Lori drink from him
was more distasteful in his mind than some little kid playing in his
own excrement. Not only was it unsanitary, but it was such a taboo,
almost as bad as cannibalism. It certainly wouldn't turn him on. He
had to be missing something integral to the notion.

He kept silent and
didn't share his doubts. He continued watching the couple and then
other couples as they followed suit with blades and bloodletting.
Soon, half the people at the party were down on their knees taking
blood and the other half stood, giving blood.

"I think I'm
going to have to leave," he whispered to Lori. She hadn't moved
in long minutes, frozen in place by what was going on.

"Okay,"
she said, reacting slowly as if waking from a trance. "You'll
get used to this later. Forget what Dell said. Most of the time we
don't bring first dates to this kind of party, but I knew you'd be
cool."

He was cool, all
right. He was cold as a corpse. All he wanted to do was get the scent
of blood out of his nostrils. He thought he was going to gag and that
wouldn't make his date happy. He stood and Lori with him. She said
good-bye to a few people and they left the house. Outside, in the
fresh air, Ryan took a deep cleansing breath. "Maybe we should
have worked our way up to this," he said.

"It's what
Dell said, isn't it?"

"Not really."

She linked her arm
in his as they walked to the car. "I hope I didn't scare you
away. Not everyone does this. It's not like you have to or anything.
It's more like you want to once you realize how close it can bring
two people. Or a group of people. We're like family. We'd do anything
for one another."