Helen talked. The others had their moments of staring at me like food. You shouldn't keep prisoners dangerously close to running out of that house—wandering around it like a strange cold asylum. I had seen little of Jon Icarus. Better to be out than locked up—listening, and trying to avoid attention.
Someone played piano music. Something that sounded like it ought to have had trumpets, precise and old-fashioned and militaristic. Then a change: something that soared, a familiar pattern—churches. Allow me to praise thee; against thy enemies give strength, that part just there was how the words went; it was a long time since...
Antony. He was the one who played.
Every so often the concrete floor shook itself like an earthquake. The one with the beard—Killigan—and Bodhi armwrestled, bracing themselves against each other in the middle of the wide room beyond the pitted, scratched ping-pong table. They had done so for what felt like hours. Killigan wasn't too much taller than her, though heavily built; but she easily kept him back.
This door was unlocked, blocked by a large smooth sofa; and they were not paying attention to anything else. The music broke off suddenly and I glanced back, but neither of them moved. I turned the doorknob open—yet Veronica and Antony saw, descending stairs together.
She looked as if she'd smelt something unpleasant—or had, or the reverse. Antony walked with a lot of dignity for one who'd been dismembered days—I hoped it was days and not weeks—ago, a stiff-collared white shirt tucked above his thick sweater.
"Don't make a nuisance of yourself. Go back in there. The most inept attempt at escaping one of our kind I have seen, if that was meant—" he directed to Veronica.
"Your latest toy, Bodhi, is a scarecrow even for you," Veronica aimed at her sister—something like that.
Bodhi leaned back as if Killigan was winning. Then suddenly and fluidly her arms curved around, close to her body, and she'd flung the other vampire over her head crashing to the floor. I felt it move. Killigan took the fall in a roll and glared at her.
"Fancy bag-of-tricks for you to pull for a catfight." He watched the two of them, an odd grin spreading across his face.
Bodhi took up a karate-like stance and beckoned to Antony. She looked as fresh as if she'd never fought at all. "Still want to get a rematch on? I beat you running around the woods crazy, and taking the head of the one behind it wasn't nearly enough exercise."
"I look forward to defeating you in fair combat at any time outside, Bodhi." Antony folded his arms. "If you must know, Veronica wished to tell you to stop shaking the house with your childish games." His girlfriend waited beside him, letting him give out her instructions. "Or are you showing the human the meaning of our strength?" Antony asked. There was anger as he watched me. Perhaps he resented that sight of his head in the porcelain bowl like an olive stuck in vinegar, eyes rolling and that pale liquid running away from his neck. If I'd a cigarette lighter to throw back then—
"A waste of time," Veronica said, "the feeble-minded are worthless to us." She looked at me, and I could ignore her beauty by cataloguing the inhuman notes in it: the lack of blood underlying her polished dark brown features, the wine-red skirt that clung too cleanly pressed to her long legs, the braids in her hair smooth as if carved out of stone.
"Bodhi says that neither of you have a power," I said. More Alora who told of it—but Bodhi herself liked her skills, and she warred with Veronica. Antony's back was set against the door, and the way he blocked it did not change as he knotted his forehead together.
"Learn your place. Insolence in a human is unwise," he barked. Bodhi raised her dark eyebrows.
"Oh, Ronnie, aren't you worried about competition?"
"No. His only value lies until Jon discovers his secret, and that is nothing." Veronica lowered her black eyelashes over her topaz eyes, dramatic in her flawless face. Her teeth were perfectly white and aligned. She did not tilt up her head when she spoke directly to me.
"My sister ought to ask you," she said, softly and deliberately, "how it feels to lose half your mind over missing someone, and yet know it was they who fucked you up so badly that you can't live without them." The profanity was unusual coming from her—the words echoed against the walls.
I didn't answer.
Ms Enn probably wished she could do as much with one single sentence— I tried to gather back thoughts and know that they couldn't read me. Not really—
Veronica slowly smiled, as if she took illumination from the room rather than gave it.
I'd never seen Veronica fight—didn't particularly want to—but she could use words alone like a knife. The four figures stood heavy as stone statues, cut out of the air.
"Ronnie thinks she's a shrink," Bodhi said.
Veronica examined her clear clean nails. "A more intriguing hobby than greasemonkey, dear. We can be creatures of civilisation if we choose."
Bodhi challenged, and perhaps you could have mapped it onto wild animals wrestling for position. "Anything you do, I do it better."
"Dear, if you studied anything more sophisticated than your crude reading you would soon understand," Veronica said, with an infinitesmal shrug of her right shoulder. "If only you had more than the attention span and intellectual capacity of a narcoleptic goldfish..."
"You come closer, dear, and I'll cram that stick so far up your aristocratic ass that it'll fuck up your—"
Then Antony stepped forward—probably the heaviest out of all of them, unpredictable anger in him. I'd stepped back away from him to the opposite wall. His glare was at her this time. "Bodhi, you will either apologise or recuse yourself from the conversation."
"Make me," she hissed.
"Now, children." Veronica staying above the fray—flattered by it, perhaps—
Bodhi snatched up one of the bats on the table, spinning it quickly in her hands, a small piece of plywood you'd think could do nothing to them. Antony picked up the same. And, brother and sister, playing a game with a small piece of plastic flying at ridiculous blurring speeds possibly impossible for a car—
Not a safe place to wait in as a human. I ducked the games they played.
Killigan kept quiet; he had done most times I'd seen him. "...and you can manipulate people's emotions. Happiness. Anger. Melancholy," I said. Alora spoke of it; people should feel what he wanted them to feel, if they were normal humans or vampires or wolves. I felt nothing. Killigan Frazer looked at me.
"A girly gift. I like not to use it when I can hunt between my own hands and snap the neckbones in two." The expression in his dark yellow eyes was oddly flat, and I did not move at all to show fear or flight. Humans who speak like that are a sign of danger. Antony and Bodhi seemed to hit something invisible that lay between them, now, taking odd care with scraps of plywood and plastic to keep their game.
"Yet brought Bodhi to bay with it, I did," he boasted. "And the little lass prefers I keep her happy. You'd best not show her disrespect." Granite-like knuckles cracked in his hands and it was plain he had no interest in talking.
The game ended and I heard Antony leave. I waited, listening. Then Bodhi dropped down behind the sofa, not seeming tired at all.
"Antony's got muscle—I've got skill." She smiled; a human would have been flushed and pink-cheeked. Time had passed; surely at least an hour at their match. It wouldn't matter to the unalive.
"He's not stronger than you?" Bodhi hovered like a guard.
"He's the only one of us who lifts more than me, if it's a good day for him. But I'm much faster. Fetching Ronnie's bags and polishing the degrees on her wall doesn't give you training. Why do you want to know?" Her mouth turned down in a curious pout.
"Allowed to be curious. Your sister was wrong, too," I said, which made her look. "Goldfish have memory for months, and pretty good sight. So said one of the textbooks..."
"Fuck those, I read Craterface's mind to pass exams." Bodhi half-smiled. "And it's always the same, over and over again—fake being a kid to blend in longer—"
She did whatever she wanted whenever she wanted. Yet there was her cold brother behind her.
She must have caught me watching the color of her eyes. "You'd be surprised how long human blood stays in us, if we're not cut apart. Strengthens us. Takes longer to get rid of than cougar or bear or anything else. The red wins out."
"I don't want to challenge your self-control. I should go."
That was stupid to say. She came to almost touch, leaning close, her lips parting over her teeth.
"What's the point of not challenging it?" Of course that was her. Growing bored.
"Maybe you could challenge it from about five feet away?"
It surprised me that she backed off, still watching.
"Are there going to be more vampires coming for what Jon and Helen did to them once? Or something you did? Or was it just an unusually busy weekend?" Helen had said something she probably thought was reassuring when she was willing to answer that; Bodhi would be different.
"Don't worry about me," she said. "I finish all I hunt. But my brother likes to see his results—"
Something not to look forward to.
"It's unlikely," Bodhi said. "Too bad." It was almost a civil conversation. And she continued it with a change of subject. "Ronnie thinks she understands you. Not that she thinks there's much to understand."
Bodhi would notice even small winces from that. I would not give Veronica Stuart more to learn from; like Imogen Winthrop she could do a lot with what she saw. And if Imogen were here, she'd be shocked—she'd want more—she'd see the things she could do, even here.
"You don't know me. None of you know anything about me, not really. If Per—the ghost—hadn't interfered—" There was an outside world still turning, but thinking of it would be useless as envy. "It's only blood. Or smelling funny."
"Shower more," she said flippantly. "I didn't kill you when I could have—I hate having to do things.
"But isn't blood not an only, even for humans?" Bodhi asked. The way she was poised—a gymnast's untiring squat, her thighs open, about to spring on something—filled the space she took completely. For a vampire she was vivid and demanding. And, no doubt, hungry.
"We moved past blood being life. Neurons are life," I told her. There was a line about the estrie and animal-eating—For the life of the animal is in the blood. A decapitated head being waved with gory locks—a pool of blood on the road coagulating into crystals in sunlight—words and pictures too easily came in a torrent. "People give blood all the time and it doesn't damage them. People who get blood don't—feel anything about what the other person was like. You do...if you read what's in their heads." And be made to go mad.
Adelaide had been wrong: she drugged the woman's blood to set Bodhi's trap, but what was wrong in me lay in my brain. I would not call that luck.
"Blood tells. The—" Bodhi frowned, leaning her head toward me, listing things—stealing from her sister. "Blood will have blood. Blood calls. It's a fire in the back of your throat that never goes away. Don't you have the same blood as your parents? Isn't that why your mom likes you—if she does like you."
"She raised me." It was clear from a glance. Most people who saw us thought we were mother and son, or occasionally sister and brother. The way my mind spiraled to follow her ill was also the same. Alike.
Bodhi shrugged her shoulders, almost lecturing now. "You probably get it from your dad. His head's kinda opaque to me. I thought he was just slow-witted at first, you know, typical small-town police chief with no brain. But maybe it's the same kind of thing going on with you. He still thinks of me as just a kid." She scowled. "And don't you think it's fucked up that he really hasn't gotten over your mom? He looks at you and thinks about her—
"I wonder what your mom would be like?"
I could feel the anger easily come, squeezing into closed red hands. "You stay away from her. She's in a place you can't get to."
"You miss her that much? Ronnie was right? That's—um—sad—in the pathetic sense—"
"You even remember yours?" She didn't care about anything, couldn't—
It made her stop taunting for a second. "Of course not. We forget what we were and move on to this—for all I know they were dead before we changed. Jon doesn't care either. The names of our families and the squat dead place in nowhere the time we were human. It's nothing. You'd not want to remember either."
"You don't think it matters."
"Nope," Bodhi said, and she launched herself at my left wrist—pulling, but not biting. She let me go to walk with her back to the sealed room.
She had talked a bit like this on the rooftop with wind in her hair. Talked like people—and they were not. She could unlock the door when she chose. They hadn't forgotten that yet. Something red danced behind my eyes and in the darkness I saw only the inhuman faces watching and waiting. Alora smiled, asking to be made happy like a human grasping at valium.
And then Helen came and sat beside me, listening and pretending consolation, quiet and restrained and telling her lies to herself. She brought light with her.
It meant nothing. Long smooth light-colored hair and a gentle voice and a slim tall shape and the odd glamor—it had no meaning. It might have been easier to sit with her than be alone locked in the dark. She was calm, and I did not know if the unnatural level softness in her came from the same source as Alora's happiness.
She talked of her garden outside. Her evergreen grapetail, her orange honeysuckle grown for the hummingbirds, her cold-blown ferns and their strong scent. Listening to the tone and not the words was almost pleasant; listening and trying not to think of where and what she was could be lived with. Sometimes she would put a cold arm around my shoulders as if to be a comfort. She stopped when I leaned away.
"The last time I saw my mother..." I began, and Helen listened. "She was sad and I didn't know why. There's been nothing I can do for her—or that I know how to do. I don't know how they're treating her far away there. All I could do was sit with her. And she still needs me."
She'd probably not know about this. I did not think Gordon would tell her. Everything I said was true, and perhaps Helen heard that in my voice.
"She was worried and I left her," I said.
"Were you worried for other reasons? About events at school?" Helen interrogated, following the thread on.
Worried about them, she meant. "No. Yes. Somewhat."
"Then perhaps her concern was only for you," Helen said.
That one—Helen lacked Veronica's ability to get under your skin. Mom would have minded if I'd let her know, but I didn't do that to her.
"Do you think that your father is not caring for her?" she said. The beige voice was like a stream with no life in it, and because it was easy and soft it slipped onward. "I know that your relations with him must have seemed...strained."
It was a stupid question and what I said told her as much.
"I do not know the circumstances. I apologise. But I will tell you that I have noticed you have not asked about your father in recent days. He is worried..."
What happened outside did not matter—except if they needed to hide all the evidence of their nature.
"I happen to know I'm still alive."
"I have also heard him defending you," Helen said. "You have a human life to live."
That you are stopping short, I thought, and tried not to notice the coldness of her hands.
"I miss my mother." She listened. Helen's right arm stayed resting across my back, almost as gentle as her voice.
And so I asked of her human life.
—
A/N: Reference is made to a prayer I didn't write. There's a YouTube version that's very good ('Palestrina Ave Regina Caelorum').