Suck It Up and Die (28 page)

Rachel began the event with her first attempt at an unmixed metaphor. “Now I know what it feels like to be in that race where you drive a dogsled across Alaska.”

“The Iditarod?” one of the reporters shouted.

“Right, Iditarod,” Rachel echoed, still laser-focused on her metaphor. “Anyway, there we Leaguers were, racing toward the finish line of the VRA, when all of a sudden the huskies pulling our sled turned on us like a pack of wild dogs.”

“Ms. Capilarus,” a reporter asked, “are you calling the members of Congress who’ve switched their vote dogs?”

The pride Rachel felt for her purebred metaphor popped in her face like a bubble-gum bubble. She fluttered
her hands. “Did I call anyone a dog? And even if I did, why is that an insult? I know dogs who are more respectable than some people.”

Penny stepped to the microphones and saved the floundering Rachel. “What my good friend is trying to say is that there are members of Congress who have done a total brain-wipe on the three hundred seventy–plus days that Leaguers have been model citizens simply because of one night in which a few Leaguers behaved badly. We certainly condemn their behavior and any conduct that makes Lifers fear that Leaguers are a bloodlust brotherhood bent on conquering America from within. But we’re not here to just talk the talk, we’re here to walk the walk.”

Rachel jumped back to the mikes. “We’re here to put our money where our mouth is! You know the lawsuit the other treasure-hunting companies slapped on Diamond Sky and the company that used a Leaguer from
The Shadow
to find a multimillion-dollar treasure in the Hudson? Well! We settled out of court, and the company is donating the twenty-seven million to clean up the river!”

Some of the reporters were impressed, but Drake Sanders cut in with journalistic cynicism. “So this is the bone you’re throwing to the dogs—I mean, members of Congress who turned on you?”

Penny pushed forward. “We think of it as an olive branch.”

“Not only that,” Rachel bubbled, “we speak softly and carry a big olive branch!”

While the reporters parsed Rachel’s latest malaprop, she waved someone to the podium. Portia stepped up as Penny wrapped a motherly arm around her.

“As you all know,” Rachel told the room, “this is
Portia, Penny’s daughter and an award-winning filmmaker. She’s got an announcement to make too.” Rachel backed up as Portia stepped to the bristle of mikes.

The room hushed in suspense.

Portia shooed away the butterflies in her stomach and lifted the three-by-five cards in her hand. “Some footage was shot last night in the Tasting Room. It seems everyone has seen it. While there is no disputing what happens in the film—it wasn’t staged, faked, or computer generated in any way—there are details the public should know before they pass judgment on every Leaguer in America.”

She checked her cards. “Fact number one: Becky-Dell Wallace lied about who shot the film. It wasn’t someone whose name she’s withholding because they’re a minor. It was shot by me and my cameraman; we’re not minors, we’re both eighteen.”

A reporter shouted over the hubbub, “Who’s your cameraman?”

“I can only reveal that if I get his permission,” she answered. “Right now his parents have put him in lockdown and I can’t reach him.” She continued her statement. “The reason Congresswoman Wallace lied about us being minors was in the hope we would be too embarrassed to come forward. Ms. Wallace was counting on our humiliation to hide some inconvenient truths about how this footage came to be.”

She forged on. “Fact number two: The invitations to the Tasting Room that Zoë Zotz, my cameraman, and I received came from Ikor DeThanatos. He wanted us there for a reason. He hoped we’d try to shoot it, we did, and then he stole our hidden camera and the footage we shot so it could be shown to the world.”

“But why didn’t he just shoot it himself?” a reporter asked. “Why did he have to trick you into doing it?”

“You don’t understand how he thinks. He holds a major grudge against me and Morning for almost destroying him a year ago.” She went back to her cards. “Fact number three: Ms. Wallace lied again about receiving the footage from WikiLeaks. She received it directly from DeThanatos.”

She waited for the bombshell to reverberate through the room and ignored the flurry of questions. “Fact number four: While Ms. Wallace rails against Leaguers, she’s in bed with one. She collaborated with DeThanatos to deliver a major blow to the Leaguer cause.”

Portia ignored another salvo of questions. “Fact number five: DeThanatos is not a Leaguer. While he’s registered with the BVA, no one ever bothered to check his records at Leaguer Academy. I did. There’s no record of him attending the school or becoming a Leaguer. Fact is, he’s a Loner. And everything he has done, from creating an online dating service promoting Leaguer-Lifer consensual bloodlust to founding the Take Back the Bite movement, has been a plot to destroy the Leaguer movement. Seeing how Becky-Dell Wallace wants the same thing, it’s no surprise they’ve been working together.”

She raised her voice over the growing clamor. “The truth is, the congresswoman has been, and will continue, collaborating with the darkest kind of vampire, a Loner, till the two of them have not only driven a stake in the Leaguer movement, but driven every Leaguer back into the bad old days of human bloodlust.”

Within the hour, Becky-Dell hit the airways and admitted that it was DeThanatos who had delivered the footage to the offices of the MOP headquarters in New York. “But,” she scolded the media, “hell will freeze over before I collaborate with a vampire. If I am guilty of anything,” she proclaimed, “it’s participating in the American tradition of accepting help from ‘the enemy of my enemy’ to stop bloodthirsty terrorists from roaming the land.”

Only a handful of MOPers were so incensed by her admission that they accused her of being “in league with the devil.” After burning their MOP membership cards, they joined a rival anti-vampire organization: IMPALE, short for International Mamas and Papas Against Leaguer Equality.

Morning stayed in his room, glued to his computer, watching the Leaguer and anti-Leaguer forces lob pixel missiles at each other. While he had tried not to get caught up in the suspense of whether Congress would vote the VRA up or down that evening, he now had two additional reasons to follow the story. One, Portia was part of it. Two, his mind was being invaded with strange new thoughts—
misgivings
, actually—about the Vampire Rights Act.
If
, he wondered,
the VRA passes, now or in the future, and if I revert to being mortal, and if Portia and I get married and have kids, would I want one of their teachers to be a vampire? One of their coaches? Would I want my daughter to date a vampire? Especially when I know how easy it is to tumble into bloodlust?
These vexing questions, never entertained before, made him realize that as hatemongering as Becky-Dell
was, she was the tip of an iceberg of fear that was real and understandable.

His conflicted thoughts were interrupted by the website he had opened on his computer. It was announcing an address by the president of the United States.

Morning’s screen filled with the president seated at his desk in the Oval Office. He looked somber, drawn, as if he had been the one who had visited the Tasting Room and had awoken that next day down a pint.

Despite his strained look, the president spoke in his measured and calm tone. “My fellow Americans, both Lifers and Leaguers, it is my desire and duty to speak to you about the latest twenty-four-hour news cycle, and the film clip that kicked it off.
Where
this clip came from, and
who
delivered it to
whom
, are details for historians to sort out. What’s vital is what the film shows us. It is simply this: despite the great strides Leaguers have made in their quest to conquer their darkest urge, it is clear they have not vanquished this inner darkness. For this reason, I am sadly withdrawing my support for the Vampire Rights Act. And I assure you, I will not support full equality for our Leaguer brothers and sisters until the day, and the night, that Leaguer vampires understand one thing above all: the
freedom
Americans have bled and died for for two and a half centuries will never be pronounced ‘feed ’em.’ ”

Without displaying the slightest hint of humor or shame for such a horrendous play on words, the shot faded to black.

Morning gawked at the screen and shuddered.

The president’s address was the last nail in the coffin for the VRA. That evening, the bill was crushed by overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate. With
a national election less than a month away, no politician wanted to be called a vampire hugger.

Becky-Dell’s victory speech on the Capitol steps was brief. “Tonight, we celebrate a great triumph,” she announced to her anti-Leaguer constituents. “We have slain the VRA! We have killed what I’ve always called ‘the bill of swill’!”