Kissing Carrion Read online

  Waste of time, unless the geek in question was even squarer than he look from where she stood. Which was—well—

  —always possible.

  Another sip, tiny hemoglobin hit sparking bright across her palate and up behind her eyes, making her already-pixilated pupils go click, bang, zoom. And starting to smile in spite of herself, with a brief black-light flash of teeth; studying her mark a little more closely from across the crowd room, and seeing a big, black man in a big, black, button-down suit, too-careful attempts at “hipness” screaming out from his mini-dreaded scalp on down. Straightening those press conference-ready little steel-rimmed specs as he repeated, slowly:

  “So . . . she’s ‘hot’. For me.”

  Weighing the word, with its single unlikely syllable, as carefully as if it were some unfamiliar new scientific term. While Flynn laughed out loud like the big, sloppy-cute dolt he still was, almost forty years after Elder’d sucked him to death on the woodsmoke-scented Malibu sands. And assured Mr. Suit right on back, with a twinkle in his red-tinged eyes—

  “Oh yeah, seriously. And Elder? She, I mean, she’s . . . ”

  . . . the fuckin’ living end.

  Later, in Elder’s private elevator—Tank-bound, with the scientist (his name had proved to be Darnell) still playing it strictly on the wide-eyed tip: Poor, boring, office-bred me, cut hopelessly adrift against the likes of exotic, downtown-dangerous you. Unlucky for him, in context, that it was only a stance; his self-delusion meant the shock of being turned would be severe, no matter how Elder chose to do it—fast or slow, sidelong or straight-on. Gentle, reassuring. Or, maybe—

  —not.

  “I don’t suppose I’m up to the kind of conversation you’re used to,” Scientist Darnell allowed. To which Elder replied, without pretense at preamble:

  “Actually, I was hoping you could enlighten me about something. You’re going to be using string theory on the new G-Class Interplanetary, right?”

  “ . . . right.”

  “And how does that work, exactly?”

  Darnell double-took; Elder just watched, waiting. Then started her smile sharpening, just a bit, as she saw him really see her for the first real time—assess her the way he’d judge any other unknown quantity, plunge past the “obvious” distractions of her pale, fragile, human veneer to solve for x. And get the barest hint, here and there, of some far older, less recognizable equation.

  “That . . . would take a really long time to explain,” he said, at last.

  The elevator touched ground, clicked in. Elder leaned to key her access code, pumping out a whiff of vampire perfume to make Darnell shiver: Morgue-cold, pheremone-choked. A black rose’s poisoned pollen.

  “Really,” she repeated. And showed him her fangs.

  Tightness in the chest. Tightness at the fly. And Elder’s glacial meltwater gaze, suddenly impossible to elude. Her little hand on his, claws sliding flick-quick to puncture his pulse on one bright flash of pain, one hot gout painting both their palms arterial red as he shuddered and jerked ridiculously in place, too caught even to gasp.

  Six feet plus of gym-sleek bulk, all straining muscle and hammering, hemorrhaging tissue. But Elder already had him bent back over her knee by the throat, off-center-helpless as a child: Draining him quick and hard, and watching the Tank’s apparently “empty” dance-floor fill up with gyrating bodies through his dimming eyes as the change took effect, rocketing him irreversibly towards immortality. And feeling the Tank’s sound-system set her solar plexus spinning like some B-Movie mad scientist’s hoary Hypno-Wheel, a different beat spiraling outward through every knotted, venom-flooded limb—while three centuries’ worth of musical interplay clicked simultaneously by inside her head, lines piled one upon the other, like archaeological layers—

  She’s sold her rod, she’s sold her reel

  She’s sold her only spinning-wheel

  To buy her lad a sword of steel—

  Her Johnny, who’s gone for a soldier . . .

  O believe me, if all those endearing young charms

  That I gaze on so fondly today

  Were to melt in an hour and fleet in my arms . . .

  Gimme a pigsfoot and a bottle of beer

  Get me gay, I don’t care

  Get all your razors and your guns

  We gonna be wrasslin when the wagon comes . . .

  It’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it

  Any old way you choose it . . .

  No matter where you come from, no matter what you done

  You got six million ways to die, choose one . . .

  Surrounded by a circle of its sniggering soon-to-be peers, Scientist Darnell’s dry husk folded up on itself like an old cocoon; his pulse slowed, stuttered, stopped. The younglings around him high-fived each other, cheered, and threw in at the bar to buy him a worthwhile first post-death drink, whenever his reborn cells chose to wake him back the fuck up.

  Out on the Tank floor, meanwhile, Elder spun and sang, chin-slick with the last of Darnell’s blood. Her mind returning, automatically—as it usually did, in such ecstatic moments—to the “secret” plan which had dictated his forcible conversion in the first place: Not exactly inaccessible to whoever wanted to hear about its particulars for quite some time now, though she did like to think it still both complex and unique . . .

  . . . and Eudo’s reaction alone, when she’d first explained it to him, had been more than enough to confirm that impression.

  * * *

  “Flynn’s in with some half-closeted vamp fetishist down at NASA,” she’d told him, as they sat together in Eudo’s idling car—shield discreetly up, muffling their voices from the Familiar chauffeur’s prying, half-mortal ears. “According to him, they’re gearing up to build themselves a Terrestrial Planet-Finder space telescope sometime during the next fifteen years, and launch it into Jupiter’s orbit. It’ll locate G-Class planets—that’s Earth-sized worlds, with oxygen in their atmospheres—and then send pre-loaded probes on reconnaissance planetfalls, to scout ’em out.”

  “And so?”

  “And so, I’m gonna be on one of those probes, when the Planet-Finder fires it off. A hundred and twenty extra pounds of weight, all wrapped up in an information-gathering marker pod strapped to the undercarriage. They fit me with a softwire package that relays a fake telemetry back to Mission Control on Earth, I put myself into hibernation for most of the journey . . .”

  “What is this science fiction nonsense?”

  “It’s progress, you fuckin’ relic. Evolution.”

  “An elaborate and expensive way to commit suicide.”

  Elder snorted, twirling her cane impatiently; thought about how fast the blade inside would razor that sneer from Eudo’s ex-monk face, if only she’d let herself let it. Then stepped down hard on that particular impulse, and snapped back—

  “Way I see it, sport, we’re all dead already. So who gives a big, fat, staving-off-creeping-mortification-of-the-flesh-through-drinking-hot-fresh-human-blood fuh—”

  Breaking in, dismissively: “I know how it is that you ‘see it’, Elder.”

  “Oh, I’m very sure that you think you do.”

  Eudo half-turned, favoring her with that look—the same one whose merest lowering hint had once been enough to pin her to her seat with fear and embarrassment, turn her insides to flame and her knees to water, render her instantly and automatically desperate to fall at his feet and do whatever it might take to make him happy again. But it’d been a good two hundred years since she’d felt either any of the above, or any need to conceal her feelings on the subject from the man-shaped thing who’d made and trained her: Her demon lover, her awful father. Her former master, still fuming over the mere fact of his pretty plaything’s self-emancipation, even though it’d been years on years on years since the lack of his approval had had even the slightest possible
effect on anything she did, or didn’t do.

  “They think it’ll take about a century to reach full colonization,” Elder continued, “patiently.” “’Cause they’d need a compact power-source like an antimatter engine, and that takes a real conceptual breakthrough; hard to concentrate on, when you’re still havin’ to worry about petty little stuff like death and taxes. So Flynn brings Mr. Man by, I turn him and throw him back . . . this time next year, half of NASA’s gonna be working 24/7 to find the next potential Earth.2, on nothing but a liquid diet.”

  “The Clave would never approve such a venture.”

  “Like I need their approval. For anything.”

  “Elder . . . ” he began, then paused. And began again a moment after, with a strange—almost new, somehow—note in his voice: “This world is all we have, child. We must either live in it as it is, or change what little we can—and live with the consequences of those changes, afterward. There’s nothing more to do, however much we may . . . occasionally . . . wish there were.”

  And there was the Clave’s party line, in a proverbial nutshell: Traditionalist, exclusionist, literally conservative. All about having to preserve the vampire world’s “ancient, secret culture” at all and any cost, while conveniently forgetting that none of them actually had a culture to preserve, per se—just a bunch of fairly disgusting personal habits they’d somehow raised, over the millennia, to the status of (un)Holy Writ.

  A calcified nightside parody of social structure run by those who deified the past to the point of glossing over how bad it had really been, back when they were still numerous enough to be feared, or their prey still knew enough to remember how to kill them. How they’d frozen stiff under the iron earth in cheap coffins, been poisoned like rats, hunted down and herded screaming from their catacombs to explode in the sunlight, tortured and scarred and burned at the fucking stake . . .

  No, you’ve somehow skipped right on over all that, she thought. Because you don’t change, even living forever. You just—endure.

  But those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. As you, Eudo—should definitely know.

  “So dixit me, magistere,” she asked, her tone kept strictly conversational. “The world did turn out to be flat after all, right? And that Don Cristobal de Colon guy . . . he just fall off the edge, or what?”

  Man, where was I born, anyway?

  A thousand years of ebb and flow, empire-rise and -set, with nothing happening that hadn’t already happened a million times before. And then, three hundred years back—just around the time of Elder’s own Re-birth, strange to say—a critical mass of ideas, exploding outward. So many new devices. Curiosity like a viral cluster, an ever-spreading plague, increasing exponentially.

  Three hundred years of change, of nearly constant forward motion. But if studying history had taught her anything, it was that momentum always peaked and dropped, the same way that milk left to sit always curdled. That people always forgot how good they had it, comparatively speaking, because the most recent generation—these twentieth- to twenty-first-century vampires, for example, with their routinely endless, intrinsic sense of entitlement—rarely understood exactly what drawbacks they’d been lucky to avoid having to deal with, in the first place.

  “You grew up with television, Flynn,” she’d snarled at him, once, when his various inanities finally grew too immediate to ignore. “You grew up with indoor heating, refrigeration, medical care, the Bomb. When I was alive, there weren’t even roads. I went barefoot for seventeen years. Couldn’t read. Didn’t know there were continents. I wanted to take a crap, I’d up my skirts and squat in the streets. I never saw myself in a mirror, ‘till after I was already dead.”

  And Flynn had nodded, lip pooched out, trying his level best to understand. Even though his best would never be good enough, no matter how much of his supposedly eternal life he spent trying to upgrade it.

  But: That look, or its near cousin. The new note peeling away in a repressed, teeth-grinding growl, like old skin shedding. Eudo, struggling for control he’d lost long before this conversation started—but soldiering gamely on, nevertheless. As though he still had . . . faith . . . that he could eventually make her see things his way.

  “If you threaten everything we’ve struggled so long to build, the Clave will be forced to intervene. Your cadre will suffer—not that you care, I suppose. But you . . . ” A pause. “They can have you exiled. Or even killed.”

  A shrug. “They can try.”

  Eudo stared down, studying the floor. Then said, quieter:

  “I loved you, Elder. Does that mean nothing?”

  To which Elder laughed out loud, right in his downcast face. And returned, with total simplicity—

  “Doesn’t it?”

  * * *

  Poor Eudo, still mourning the cold and sudden undeath of his long-lost dream-dolly. Because it had all been just so much easier, back then, hadn’t it? So much more . . . fun.

  Though—not quite for both of them, as Elder recalled.

  (But then again, she certainly did still like to play with her toys, whenever there was nothing better to do.)

  Still, it was only natural—as natural as anything vampiric could claim itself: Time-tested, the proven formula. Youngling to ancient, they’d all been in the same position, once or twice upon an age. Eudo too. Someone had probably dressed him up, steered him ‘round, told him where to go and made him say thank you for the privilege; back before the Crusades, before the Flood. Perhaps he’d “loved” that person, too. Or told himself he did.

  Always assuming, that was—

  —he’d actually had any choice in the matter.

  Truth was, though . . . the truth was, this had been what Eudo had seen in her eyes, that day. The prescient shadow of this same impossible ambition glowing like lingering atomic residue, like a skeleton of dead light. Stars in her eyes, deep-buried, waiting to burn up and flare anew.

  And wondering, at the same time—was it really so very hard to understand, the idea that she just wanted to go as far as she could possibly go? To pit herself against the void like an exercise in sheer willpower, the same way that all these dead bodies around her kept on acting as though they were still alive: Dancing, flirting, fucking, killing, just because they wanted to. Because . . . they could.

  Hunger, after all, could only take you so far, no further. And there were so many appetites to choose from, once you allowed yourself to think outside the biosphere’s blue and fragile box—hungers which might prove to extend far beyond the agreed-upon version of reality, beyond the basic reach of flesh and blood itself.

  Things were born in chaos, and they ended in chaos. And the only thing between chaos and chaos was velocity. So the only reason to go backwards, in Elder’s eyes—

  —was because you’d already reached the end.

  Of everything.

  * * *

  Fast-forward: Fast, faster, fastest. And then it was 2020 or thereabouts, yet more years having passed the same way they always did, quick as insects—hatching and molting, metamorphosing, mating and laying and dying in a single blink of that long-ago swollen Malibu moon. Three o’clock A.M. in what still stood of anti-pollution activist-bombed downtown Toronto, with Ulrike, Flynn and Elder marching straight into the fabled silk-hung heart of the Empress’ Noodle house itself, where Grandmother Yau Yan-er was rumored to be hosting a members-only Clave meeting somewhere upstairs. But since her restaurant had been traditionally recognized as neutral ground since the turn of the (last) century, the Dragon-born Lady could well afford to do exactly what she obviously chose to, instead: Make herself conspicuous by her absence, lurking in the opium-scented shadows with her thousand-year-old hands deep inside her brocade sleeves, while Elder used the quote-unquote “anonymous” invitation she’d received earlier that evening—a strangely familiar Mandarin chop, imprinted in scrupulously virus-clean blood on a gil
t-edged piece of silk-thread parchment—to get by that persistent knot of ghosts guarding the banquet room’s lacquer-red front door.

  The sound of her cane against the inlaid parquet floor caught Eudo in mid-rant; he turned, wholly taken aback by such effrontery. Projecting, even from this distance—

  Iesu Christo, these AMERICANS. So uncompromising. So insolent. So damned, damnably . . . proactive.

  Yeah, well. Welcome to the New World, Fossil-Man.

  To Elder’s own mild surprise, fifteen years of monitoring and vague, threat-laden menace had elapsed before Eudo’s Familiars finally took direct action. They’d started at the top, naturally enough; begun with Darnell, oldest of her NASA moles, whose ashes were (even now) blowing free in the lingering compression vortex created when his lab had gone up in smoke. But the rest of the team had already scattered according to drill, vowing to join Elder later—assuming, always, that she actually survived this meeting—at their alternate launch-site. A resentful bunch even by most vampire youngling standards, though gradually won over by the one-two combination suckerpunch of Darnell’s infectious enthusiasm and Elder’s undeniable logic: Having a “live” viewer on board the probe would be invaluable, in terms of potential information-gathering . . . especially one for whom the idea of a life-support system, under most circumstances, was a strictly optional luxury.

  Flynn took west flank position, Ulrike the east. Elder leant on her cane between them, smiling a bit at the thought of how the red-tinged light of the paper lanterns must be making interesting patterns on her sleek, bald, shaved-for-liftoff scalp.

  “Gentlemen, ladies,” she said, bowing slightly. Then: “Eudo.”

  “You see?” Eudo demanded, of no one in particular. “She has no respect, no loyalty . . . ”

  “Not for you, no.”

  Stung, Eudo managed what looked like a legitimate blush; must’ve really fed well, to be able to pull that off.

  “ . . . she . . . ” He began again, with slightly shakier momentum. “Surely you can see how she doesn’t think she owes—us—”