Once again, Mitchell and Herrick belong to BBC and Toby Whithouse. I'm just borrowing them.
Once you've become a vampire, you can't see your own face anymore. I haven't seen my own face in over 50 years, except when I catch a distorted glimpse of myself reflected in people's eyes.
Because we can't see ourselves, to be safe, we copy the people around us. One thing we've found, in every decade, on every continent, is that it's always better to be overdressed than underdressed. You can get away with a lot more if you're wearing a nice suit.
By the way, nice suits are one reason why it's almost always better to feed naked.
Herrick tells the girls we're A & R men for a record company. He says we've seen the opening act and have concluded they have no future with our label, so we've no problem with leaving before the headliner. As we all walk to the car, I see him swallow a couple of purple hearts. He's not planning on sleeping tonight.
The prospect of spending so much time in a car with these girls makes me uneasy. For the most part we like to travel alone, so we don't have to hide what we are or speak indirectly. Spend too much time with humans and we are bound to slip up at some point. I mentally review my standard small talk gambits. To get people to trust you, you don't need to say much, you just need to get them to talk. Then, when I succeed in getting someone talking, I've found it's better for my own health if I don't actually listen.
Herrick takes the wheel like a cheerful bus driver. I sit in the passenger seat. The girls are in the back. They immediately light up a spliff. I take a hit when offered but Herrick declines. He likes to keep both hands on the wheel, which is good. Between the blood, the wine, and everything else, we're already plenty lit.
I watch the girls in the mirror. They don't notice I'm not in it. I'm glad it's dark.
We always sense the heat of blood and the sound of breathing; now the chemical-spiked blood shows me the drift and flutter of the impulses that make people feel and move. If I focus on them, pale swirls surround each girl's body, like another skin. Each movement leaves a vague glowing wake. Jenna's colors are almost soothing: there are smooth curves tracing her outline in gentle blues and greens. Stephanie's are all jagged lines of orange, black, and yellow. The layer of space surrounding Herrick and me is flat, black, and magnetic, drawing their glow toward us like water toward a drain. I blink away the extra visual information.
Since I didn't actually hear the story that they told Herrick, I ask what happened. "Jenna went to meet Robbie right after the set and found him with his pants around his ankles and some slag plating him." No new information there.
"Not what you were expecting?" I hold back a smile. In the closed space of the car, their human presence is very strong. I can feel their warmth and hear their breathing. They smell good, like flowers and smoke and body heat. I try to relax into the moment. This could be a fun night.
Jenna hasn't gotten over her outrage. "He said we were steady, it didn't occur to me that we were steady except when he didn't feel like it." She brushes her thick fringe out of her eyes, twists her long hair and pins it at the back of her head. "I was sure he'd be different. He's just a bass player. It's not like there are women falling all over him. Anyway, he told me that he wasn't interested in other girls, and that he loved me."
She must have noticed me smirk a little at that. "And before you say anything," she says, "I don't want to know what a man thinks about it. You can keep it to yourself."
I feel my smile widen and I hold up my hands in a gesture of mock defeat. "I wasn't going to say a thing! Promise!"
Stephanie says to her, "Listen, I've been around long enough to know - it's nothing personal. He'll take his opportunities where he finds them. It's part of his nature. They're all like that. The thoughts aren't coming from the brain, if you get my meaning."
"No shit," says Jenna. "It would be different if he were straight with me from the beginning. I've got no problem with being casual and getting your rocks off. What gets me steamed is that he made me think it was something different. I won't forgive him for that."
It's clear they've been over this already. They don't want advice. This is just girl talk. Sometimes it's not really the words they're paying attention to, it's the reassurance and friendship of hearing one another's voices. They murmur back and forth for awhile. Jenna has put her head in Stephanie's lap. They are both falling asleep. Their colors blur and soften.
The landscape is flying by, streetlights now drawing solid white lines in the corners of my vision. Soon we are out of the city. Herrick is doing 70, slowing down only to lurch the car through roundabouts, tires squealing. We have a few close calls with other cars and one, in the countryside, with a stationary cow. I'm glad the girls are sleeping. I don't expect we will drive all the way to London, and I wonder when he'll decide to stop.
"Seems a shame to wake them, don't you think, Mitchell?" His eyes are glittering dangerously. What's he got up his sleeve?
"Where the hell are we going? What's the plan here?"
"Plan? We're going to London!" he says, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. "We've been in a bit of a rut, and I thought we could do with a change of scenery."
Okay, it's not that surprising. It wouldn't do to have too many suspicious deaths in Bristol. We often make forays out of town to spread out the damage and keep things interesting. But really, we could stop at any place that's a reasonable distance away. London is quite a long trip.
In Bristol, we are organized to maintain calm, cover our tracks, and help out those of us in need. It works well - newcomers serve on the cleanup crew to learn how to handle the details of this life, then they may rotate through other jobs like handling finances or real estate or supplies, or running the barbershop, or they may become free agents who check in only occassionally. We have liasons to local government and police to help us stay out of the public eye. It's worked this way for several centuries now, and with limited recruiting there are enough resources to support everyone.
Herrick is ambitious and he fancies himself a scientific thinker. He has theories about how vampires are the next step in the evolutionary chain. His hope is to inspire the Bristol organization into coming out from hiding to take over human society. I think it's daft. We need to be careful not to screw up the well-oiled machinery we have, not make half-witted attempts at world domination.
I'm still his soldier and his heir, though, so here I am, doing his bidding, even when it's irrational. I've begun to resent it more and more.
It wasn't always like this. We were close mates for decades. He liked that my blood tolerance was high, even at the beginning - by the time we met I had seen far worse things in combat than a ripped-out throat or mangled arm. It was fun and exciting - the scouting missions, the tactical challenges, always undercover, with a great rewarding feed at the end of each foray. And it was all a big bloody game - we would stow away on boats and trains, forge papers and change costumes, chat up the locals, enjoy what each place had to offer, and take what we wanted.
It hasn't been fun and exciting for a long time now. For one thing, it's just too easy. Predictable. Fish in a barrel.
That's not all of it, though.
We had a dry spell. We were in America in the 40s, heading for the west coast, riding freight trains, feeding on tramps and drifters. We'd no idea of the vastness of the distances, or the sparseness of the population in the middle of the country. There was a long, hungry week, I think it was in the Rocky Mountains between Denver and Salt Lake City, where the locomotive broke down, and we didn't find a single person who was not essential to getting the train moving again. We'd already killed all the other stowaways on board.
While we waited for the train to be repaired, we stayed on a rock ledge overlooking a valley lined with narrow pine trees. We had neither food nor water. The sky in that thin air was so blue it was nearly violet. In the daytime the sun was blinding.
I sat for days beside the scrub pines and sagebrush, keeping my eyes covered from the sun. With nothing to see, wave after wave of memories spooled across my vision, first the recent ones, then backward in time, earlier and earlier.
A red-haired whore in the flophouse behind the train station in Pittsburgh, the seams of her stockings crooked. Working my way from her mouth to her neck to feed at the climax of a fuck. Smell of animal fear and lilacs. Rush of euphoria. Her skin turning from pink to white to grayish almost-blue. She told me she was from Ohio.
Wood smoke scent of the hair of a lad in a tent as I hold him down. I jam his handkerchief into his mouth to stop him screaming. A worn hole in the sole of his boot. His bedroll, too soaked with stiffened blood to wrap tidily around his corpse.
A pretty freckled girl wild-eyed with despair, scratching at my face while I laugh at the futility. Drinking deeply from the pulse point where the leg joins the body. The blood under her fingernails turning dry and brown while she dies.
Pressing my forearm across a Scotsman's throat for long minutes as I stare blackly into his eyes so he knows which fucking Mick killed him before he loses consciousness. A smell of shit. Blood reeking of whiskey.
Herrick, naked, with a face like a gargoyle, tongue lapping at a fair girl's neck that he's punctured in a thousand places, her pale blond hair sticking to his cheeks and forehead with the blood as he moves to and fro.
A tinted photograph falling out of a man's wallet of a smiling dark-eyed baby in a sailor suit.
Offers of cash and pleas for mercy, answered with murder. A collection of razor blades in my valise. Countless shopgirls in countless alleyways. Servants, bus drivers, grannies, derelicts, couples on holiday.
My best friend, poisoned by my hand, slowly wasting away while I pretended to be helping him. Me, weeping beside his drained body, then feeling my strength return and then the heat in my face and then the sorrow evaporating like a bad dream.
After reliving every atrocity I'd ever committed, there I was, delirious, the sound of splintering bones and the wails of the dying echoing in my ears.
I would fall asleep, and my dreams would hold the same memories, only now I was the victim. I would see the monster, dripping with blood, and a reflection of my face in his empty black eyes. Herrick would be there too, inflicting damage, at first seeming harmless and then, without warning, turning murderous and demonic.
In the dreams, I would be suffocated, poisoned, tortured, violated, ridiculed. I would be ambushed in doorways. I would be held down, bound, gagged. I would have my throat ripped out. I would bleed from a thousand wounds and thrash in despair and lose control of my bodily functions. I would be fucked and killed. I would beg for mercy and get none.
Then I would wake up and I was again the vampire, and the ghastly film of my history would run backward once more, latest kills to earliest, ending finally in bottomless, wordless horror.
I've never been so frightened.
I don't know what Herrick was thinking during that time. If he noticed my distress, he didn't say anything about it. He was nearly silent, and his expression was distant and furious. Occasionally, when I had lucid moments, I'd hear him mutter with what sounded like deep satisfaction, his eyes closed and brow furrowed. It seemed to me he was reliving all his kills and enjoying them. Some of us are meant for this life.
When we finally got to the first sizable town, we drank until we couldn't hold any more. I was sick inside, but my body glowed with life.
Blood remains the only thing that can hold the terror at bay. Maybe if I held out long enough it would subside. I still don't know.